Happy Birthday G.K. Gilbert (1843-1918)

Hiatus

Hurricane Deck

Posts have been sparse since December. I haven't even finished going through my notes from AGU for posts! I have a bunch of half-finished posts that will have to wait.

This semester is especially busy for me. See, I have my qualifying exam coming up and all my efforts will be focused on slaying that task. I will find time to go to the rock gym on the weekends. There's a slim chance I'll write some posts based on my thesis research if it helps me get my mind around it / practice explaining it. In any case, you'll hear from me in late April / May.

Cheers,
Tim

Live from #AGU12 Day 2

I started day two of AGU with a talk by Robert Simmon (@rsimmon) on art, aesthetics, design, and data visualization and communication with the public. He featured some of Earth Observatory's most popular photos / infographics and walked us through why they work. He continued to emphasize thinking about how the audience's brain and eyes will look at the data presented. Poorly displayed data is a problem in science. I would like to cover design more, so I'm going to save my comments for a future post.

Heather Savage gave a talk about frictional heating of organics in the core recovered by the JFAST expedition. We can't tell if the heating is from the Tohuku earthquake, but the rocks were certainly heated.

The highlight of the day was James Cameron's talk discussing his deep sea dive.

He gave a great talk discussing the design, engineering, and building of the submersible. Then he talked about  some of his experiences on the dive. There was great video to go along with his talk. James is definitely a scientist, he had a complete understanding of what he was talking about and was very good at conveying that information.

Another fantastic talk was by Ross Stein on global earthquake hazard awareness. That was one of the best talks I've ever heard. Ross is a great story teller.

The afternoon held some blogger talks. Chris Rowan (@Allochthonous) convinced us all to get twitter accounts.

I popped over to the geothermal talks to see some awesome 3D data visualization in the UC Davis KECKCave.

Live from #AGU12 Day 1

Okay, so not quite "live". Today was a bit hectic. I was presenting my poster in the afternoon, and met with visiting family in the morning (I can't believe I haven't seen them for 11 months!). I still managed to see a few talks. Cecilia Cheung spoke about the effects of grainsize distribution on compaction band development. A heterogeneous grainsize inhibits compaction banding. I then bounced over to a different room to catch M Doane discuss the affects of talc content on fault friction and style. An increasing talc content creates a diffuse anastimosing shear network. 

I missed the much-hype curiosity announcement. Sounds like the data is solid and awesome, but no huge discoveries.

My poster session was a lot of fun. I got some good feedback and am looking forward to thinking more on my ideas. Time for some more beer!

AGU Fall Meeting Just around the corner!

Corona Heights Fault from tsherry on Vimeo.


WOWZERS?! This has been a hell of a past few weeks getting my poster together for the annual AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

I've finally got my poster done. Check it out on AGU ePosters.

I'll be presenting my work from Summer mapping in Namibia. Come find me Monday afternoon in T13E: Earthquake deformation: Integrating Observations and Mechanisms II in Moscone South.

My research group is planning on heading out to the Corona fault in the Castro district look look at an awesome anastimosing fault surface with slicken lines so smooth you can see your reflection. I think there will also be a blogger meet up at some point?

Other goals for my return to California:

• Catch up with friends
• Become supersatruated with the best IPAs (and beer in general) in the World
• Eat so many lengua tacos and so many carnitas burritos.