Thermochronologists for Obama

The wait is over. All across the country, undecided voters have been waiting by their televisions, constantly checking email, listening non-stop to NPR, just to learn which presidential candidate has earned the Apparent Dip seal of approval. I know how much sway my choice has, believe me, as the author of the world's leading thermochronology themed blog...well, let's just say the responsibility has weighed heavily on my (figurative) shoulders.

Apparent Dip is officially endorsing the Obama/Biden ticket. No big surprise perhaps. As someone who reads books, did well in school, and grew up in California, I obviously don't belong to the "real America" I've heard so much about at GOP rallies. I grew up in a decent sized city, which means I lack "small town values" and therefore hate my neighbors, can't stand families, am allergic to hard work, do nothing worthwhile, am a communist, cavort with terrorists, and of course, want America to fail. I am also an elitist because I think issues are complicated and can't always be summed up as one-liners, oh, and I also enjoy reading and non-motorized outdoor activities, which means I am a whiny liberal tree-hugger. Oh, and I don't believe that the term "mothers health" should be put in air quotes or muttered in a snide tone. I care a great deal about my mother's health, and don't consider that an extreme position.

On the issues, well, this seems to be a no brainer. I can't think of a single thing that has gone well in the Bush administration, and McCain agreed with Bush 90% of the time. Right now, the university I work at has a football team that has had a rough few years. Really rough, no bowl games, no winning seasons, no big crowds, embarrassing losses, you know what I mean. Much of the blame is laid at the feet of the coach. Would a fan of this team want to replace the coach with someone who thought he did 90% of everything right? Of course not.

Add to this the fact that for the first time in my life, I have been inspired by a politician. Now, I don't agree with everything Obama is proposing, and I understand the realities of politics, I know many of his plans will be difficult to enact. They always are. What gives me hope though, is that Obama recognizes and acknowledges that issues are complicated. Obama has even spoken about what a huge problem anti-intellectualism is in America today. Seriously, a politician who isn't pretending to be a doofus. A politician who thinks it is important to be more than a guy "you can have a beer with." You know what guys who you can have a beer with are good for? Having a beer with.

On a serious thermochronology note, McCain and Palin have both made offensively ignorant and anti-scientific statements recently. They both love to rail against government spending on research, even when it is obvious that they have no idea what the research is really for. Remember Palin's rant about fruit fly funding? I'm no geneticist, but anyone who has stayed awake through a college biology course knows the importance of fruit flies in genetics research. And guess what, the research Palin was slamming actually is involved with treating children's autism. In one of the debates, McCain brought up DNA research on grizzly bears as a waste of money. Turns out that is the most effective way to understand their population and therefore enforce the endangered species act. But hey, who cares? This also came up a few years ago, when I heard McCain ranting about funding to study "cow farts." The research was actually about methane, a potent greenhouse gas, much of which happens to come from cows. But hey, as long as you can reduce serious science down to a funny one-liner, it must be a waste of money. Not a good use of funds like the Iraq war. To be fair, I don't expect McCain and Palin to know all the science. I do, however, expect them to consult with scientists on scientific issues, which from their statements they apparently do not. And to boot, Palin is a proponent of teaching creationism (excuse me, I mean incompetent design) in public schools, a sure fire way to undermine science. If someone wanted to destroy America's ability to compete scientifically in the future I believe they'd favor the same programs.

I could go on, and it would become more rantish. Long story short, the world's leading thermochronology blog is officially endorsing the Obama/Biden ticket for the 2008 presidential election. I care too much about the future of the country, despite my status as a fake american elitist. Don't forget to vote!

Brian Greene in the NY Times

The better half and I just returned from vacation this week (contrary to the comment I recently received, the blog break has not been NSF-induced, but rather from an incredible week + vacationing.) I am adjusting to the time and lifestyle change fine, and spent most of the weekend getting back on track (including a few visits to a lab undergoing a bakeout). This morning I ran across this article in the NY Times by Brian Greene (physicist and author of many popular science books.) It starts with a description of a letter he received from a soldier stationed in Iraq, the kind of letter anyone who fancies themselves a writer must be thrilled to receive. He then spends some time discussing the status of science education in the US. As a scientist who is interested in science education, I thought it was worth linking to.

My only beef is that when discussing the issue of science education Green writes:

It’s much the same story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.

You might notice that once again geology and/or earth science is not given a place on the list of important sciences. I am sure Greene has no problem with geology, that is not what I mean, I just think it is sad how often the "important" sciences are listed off with nary a mention of the science that studies the planet we live on. Other than that, the article is worth a read. He makes the point that science education is "unassailably vertical [paraphrased]" and too often focuses on teaching skills and forgets to involve the grand ideas, the things that might inspire students to want to learn the skills. Or as he writes:

Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”

This is the second time I've blogged about a prominent scientist somehow appearing in the NY Times and forgetting to include geology as an important science. The first time is here, in an article that quotes nobel laureate Leon Lederman.

Mass Transit

I saw this article in the New York Times today, and thought I'd mention it as a kind of part 2 of my commentary on high gas prices (see my post from a year ago here, although prices have continued to rise I don't think my sentiments have changed a ton). I'll let you read the article yourselves, but the basic synopsis is that with gas prices at all time highs, public transit systems are seeing record breaking ridership. It appears we might be near the "tipping point" where prices are high enough to convince people to train, bus, bike, or walk-it. Of course biking and walking won't show up in these statistics, but you get the point.

The article contained one thing I'd like to quote:

The increase in transit use coincides with other signs that American motorists are beginning to change their driving habits, including buying smaller vehicles. The Energy Department recently predicted that Americans would consume slightly less gasoline this year than last — for the first yearly decline since 1991. [emphasis added]

Think about this. In 1991, I didn't have an email address. I couldn't even type very well. I listened to mix tapes on a Sony walkman (90-minute Maxell XLII tapes of course). MTV still played music, and we would see the release of both Ten and Nevermind that year. Kurt Cobain has now been gone more than a decade, and we have iPods, blogs, the interwebs, and instead of walking to my local record store I download albums from iTunes. But with all of those amazing technological advancements we came up with nothing to make our transportation-related energy use more efficient. In fact, we just kept using more and more. Just think if transportation saw the same step increase in technology that the walkman did. As tough as high oil prices can be for people, how many decades have people been making rational arguments for higher fuel economy, increased public transportation, and decreased dependence on fossil fuels? Just for argument sake, let's say since the late 1970's. And what have we done? If we would have heeded those warnings back then, when gas was $1.25 a gallon, perhaps it never would have reached this point.

Oh, and even with a cheap-o 9 year old car I still pay less for gas now that a medium-sized SUV driver did in 2000.

UPDATE, thought I'd add this clip from the 1999 Simpsons season.

The Omnivore's Dilemma - Review

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is a book about food. That might sound simple, but when I say "about food" I mean about all aspects of food: production, consumption, evolution, emotion, health, community, enviroment, and philosophy. What Pollan set out to do was to describe the creation of 4 different meals. This would take him to restaurants, grocery stores, feedlots, farms, and hidden mushroom gathering sites in the Sierra Nevada, all the while discussing the importance of the food gathering activity in social, economic, political, and environmental terms. His four meals all centered around different aspects of American food culture, and can be thought of as:

1. Industrial - A fast food dinner bought in a drive through and eaten while cruising in a car.
2. Industrial Organic - Organic food bought at a local Whole Paycheck and cooked at home, with ingredients from all over the world, but each grown "organically."
3. Local - After a week's stay at a farm in Virginia, Pollan cooked another meal using only local ingredients (things grown and produced within a defined geographic area).
4. Hunted and Gathered - A meal, once again cooked by Pollan, with food he hunted and gathered within a days drive of his home in Berkeley, California.

If you don't want to read the whole post, in short, it is an excellent book, is now in paperback, and will be thought provoking to anyone who eats food on a regular basis.

Before I go on much further, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a vegetarian. I have been for about 13 years now, and started reading the book with more than a decade's worth of thought on food (specifically meat and meat production) swirling in my head. Just so you don't think I am a completely unreliable food critic, however, I must also admit that I am a vegetarian who thinks many other vegetarians are incredibly annoying (almost as bad as the people who try to convince me to eat meat or otherwise say idiotic and derogatory things about veggos.) I believe there are a lot of excellent reasons to be a vegetarian, and I get annoyed by people who make up completely new (and usually groundless and/or non-sensical) reasons. For example, claims that meat is inherently unhealthy or that humans cannot properly digest meat really burn me up. Add that to how inundated vegetarian grocery stores and magazines are with all kinds of shark-cartilage-plant-extract-dietary-supplement-snake-oil-nonsense and you can see why anyone might get a little ticked off. Why make up B.S? Why not just stick to the obvious and well proven facts? Why not have an intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of all aspects of food production and consumption? A-Ha! You thought I was digressing, but I just brought us right back to Dilemma.

The first meal Pollan describes is the ultimate in modern industrial fast food. To see where the food comes from, Pollan visits a feedlot where a calf he "bought" is spending it's last days getting fattened up on corn and antibiotics. He also visits some large scale industrial farms in the lower midwest. A large part of the first part of the book deals with the central role that corn plays in our modern industrial food production. Corn, or some corn byproduct, has worked it's way into almost every processed food item that we eat, including most of the beef sold in the US. This last fact is no small feat, especially considering that cows don't naturally eat corn, and in fact cannot digest corn well without help. Corn has the advantage of getting cows fat quickly and adding "marbling" to the beef, but only with the help of drugs and vets. Most feedlot stays are relatively short, so the goal seems to be to pump them full of anything that can get them to the slaughterhouse fat. ****This by the way has stuck in my head. You always hear about "corn-fed" beef like it is some mark of authenticity. Cows don't eat corn! They eat grass! Corn-fed beef is a relatively new invention that requires a veterinary staff armed with drugs to implement. Why did that surprise me?****As one could expect, there aren't many positive sides to the industrial meal, the production and consumption of the food is filled with huge wastes of money and energy, disgraceful animal living conditions, exploitation of labor, absurd government subsidy structures, and consumers inhaling unhealthy food with little connection at all to it's source.

The first part of the book was really not clicking with me. These were arguments I have read and heard many times, and were some of the reasons I swore off meat in the first place. I am beyond the time in my life where I want to read affirmations of my own thoughts, and put the book down for a while. Fortunately I picked it up again, because the stories surrounding the last three meals are fascinating. One aspect of the first section I do want to mention though is his discussion of "reductionist nutrition." Basically, the idea that we know all of the essential fundamentals we need to eat, and if we synthetically fortify foods with these basic building blocks then we will have healthy diets. This is a dangerous way to think, every year there are new things we never knew we couldn't live without, lycopene, antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, the list goes on. The antithesis to reductionist nutrition is eating a variety of fresh foods, what we have evolved eating. I think this discussion especially struck a chord with me because I was also reading (at the time) Apsley Cherry-Garrard's amazing The Worst Journey in the World, a chronicle of Robert Falcon Scott's fatal attempt to reach the south pole. This relates because Cherry-Garrard spends a lot of time on the various diets they experimented with for polar travel, all different combinations of fat, sugar, and protein. This was well before people knew about the importance of vitamins, let alone omega-3 fatty acids. Anyone who thinks they've nailed down what a healthy diet needs (in a reductionist sense) should read these accounts and gain some perspective. These explorers, at the time, were on the cutting edge of understanding what a body needs to survive, and they were missing huge parts (with deadly consequences.) Back to the book...

The second meal, industrial organic, deals a great deal with the arguments for and against organic food. For example, is it better to eat a "conventional" apple from a farm down the road, or an organic one flown in from New Zealand? And just what is "organic," or "free range" anyhow? This section of the book really made me scratch my head. I don't want to just repeat his points, but man, "organic" farms sure can look a lot like conventional farms....

The third meal was the most interesting to read about. Pollan spent a week working on Polyface Farm, a self contained grass farm run by a man named Joe Salatin that raises cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits....and I think that is it..... The idea is that instead of importing nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers (or corn grown with said petrochemicals), Salatin uses a very well planned and intricate system of animal rotation to raise everything using only his own forest and pasture land. This system fascinated me; allegedly grass grows better if it is nibbled on (but not overgrazed), and with this system Salatin (and his father) have turned an overgrazed wasteland of a farm into a very efficient and productive plot of pasture and forest. Salatin's system is absolutely fascinating, and I'd recommend the book just based on this section alone. It has even made me hunt down a local grass farmer who I know by my eggs from (saturday farmers market). I think what got me thinking the most in this section was the interplay of meat, vegetarianism, organic, and local food. My default preference has always been organic vegetarian, but is that always the "best choice." All organic produce requires animal derived fertilizer, and after the industrial organic section I am now putting more favor on local food. Anyways, those are my dilemnas, the point is that the workings of Polyface Farms and the whole grass farmer idea has made me think more about food and farming than anything I've read in the past decade. No, it hasn't converted me, I'm just saying, it's worth the read.

The final meal was about as close as one could come to the who hunter-gatherer model. Pollan hunted mushrooms, wild pigs, and random greens and fruits to make a dinner focused on things that he "found" himself. I wasn't expecting much from this meal, but once again Pollan does an excellent job of integrating so many aspects of the experience, hunting, foraging, etc., that you get sucked in.

What I ended up really liking about this book was Pollan's sense of even-handedness. When he talks about killing animals, either in a slaughterhouse, on Salatin's farm (he participated in the processing of the chickens), or in the forest of northern California, he uses intelligence without sounding removed, and emotion without sounding sappy. That is a tough balance to strike, and it is easy to slip down either side (either to reaffirm your choice to not eat meat or convince yourself it is OK to). He even nailed on the head one of the hardest parts of being a vegetarian, that is feeling like an inconvenience when friends invite you for meals, feeling like a constant problem, or just a rude and unappreciative guest. When he discussed organic versus local there wasn't always a clear winner, there are pros and cons. In the end, the book isn't so much about what you should do, but more about how you should think about food. I think it has something to offer everyone, and I can't recommend it enough. As a warning, the first part where he keeps talking about corn, that can get a little repetitive, but power on through and trust me it is worth it.

Pollan is an excellent writer, and I just want to end this with a few quotes. First, some of his thoughts on the meals he hunted and foraged:

Perhaps the perfect meal is one that's been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted. The reason I didn't open a can of stock was because stock doesn't come from a can; it comes from the bones of animals. As the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a packet but from the air we breathe. The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as the meadows. If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore's Thanksgiving. (pp. 409-410)

And finally to wrap things up

This is not the way I want to eat every day. I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food. But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a manner of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we chose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world. (pg. 411)

I'm sorry, I must have missed it when you said "and geology"

I was reading two articles on the New York Times Science section today (in 12 minute bursts, keeping in time with the machine I am running). I had first thought of posting about the intersection of the two. The first article was about a creationist film crew that allegedly tricked actual scientists into taped interviews. The interviews were done by entertainer, eye-drop enthusiast, and noted blowhard Ben Stein*. The scientists involved are now raising a ruckus, although I am not sure why they'd agree to be interviewed for a project they didn't know much about. The second article was talking about when Sputnik was launched, and how it made the US realize how behind it was in preparing future generations of scientists. This led to a big push to improve American science education back in the middle of last century. Unfortunately, we have once again seen American students fall behind much of the world in science education. As a country, this threatens our competitiveness, and I thought the first article did a decent job highlighting just how bad our national science education is. The ID crowd is just one symptom of a broken system of science education, and in my opinion their attempt to include supernatural powers in the definition of science is an enormous threat to the U.S. (for more on my feelings, check out my very first post or a letter to the editor I wrote.)

OK, so I was getting all riled up about this, but then as I finished the second article, I came across this

Some experts on science education also point to the typical sequence of high school science instruction: biology, chemistry and then physics. It would make more sense in reverse, these people say, because the principles of physics underlie chemistry, which is crucial for an understanding of biology.

Perhaps the leading champion of this “physics first” approach is Leon M. Lederman, a particle physicist, Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab whose focus lately has been on improving science and math education. He said the current biology-chemistry-physics sequence dates from the late 19th century, when “we didn’t know enough” and biology was considered a “descriptive” subject.

In fact, Dr. Lederman said, “biology is the most complicated of all subjects, and it is based on chemistry and physics.” And, he added, “there is nothing in chemistry, no fact of chemistry or process of chemistry that if you ask ‘Why does this happen?’ you don’t go back to physics.”

While I don't disagree with the premise of teaching physics first, where the hell is geology? Seriously, we want to build up to inclusive and interdisciplinary sciences that are important for the problems of the world, and no one mentions geology? For f@#k's sake! I am sure we can all post for years about why geology or even the generic earth science are not considered important disciplines (even by Nobel Laureates, and in the same article that worries about global warming), but what this makes me most frustrated about is our inability as geoscientists to sell the significance of our work. As Lederman points out, biology used to be thought of as a descriptive science, so it came first. Is that the problem with geology? Are we thought of as describers of rocks and finders of oil? I've heard this before, that geologists are seen mainly as suppliers of products (minerals and oil), and not as scientists. OK, time for Thermochronic to get some air...

*By the way, Stein is apparently trained as an economist, where did he pick up his scientific background? What makes him qualified to comment on the subject at all? What's next, Ben Stein tells you how to treat Alzheimers? Ben Stein debunking the myths, cigarettes are good for you? Ben Stein talks about the pros and cons of Pfeiffer and Varian roughing pumps? Shouldn't you actually have some expertise in a subject before you spout off strong opinions? Should I be telling Loose Baggy Monster about literature or history? Perhaps I can be called upon to give my opinion on the effect of American corn subsidies on foreign currency markets? Hell, I have a Ph.D., somebody get me a camera! Stein discussing the biological sciences must look a lot like the panelists on the video below


Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

The Tenure Itch

I've had two really interesting discussions in the past week with friends from grad school; first, it was a visit from ..Or Something and his girlfriend Dr. Friday Glasses, and then last night on the phone with a friend we will call Professor rgh. (Neither of the two nicknames have been agreed to by the parties involved, they are simply my suggestions). These were also augmented with lengthy discussion with Mrs. Apparent-Dip-But-With-A-Different-Last-Name, usually during a time when we should have been packing for our upcoming move. ..Or Something, Prof. rgh, and I are all at various stages of the whole academic job process, either in the process of finishing the Ph.D., as a post doc, or as a full blown Assistant Professor. We have also all observed different aspects of many job searches in different departments, and even a very sketchy case of tenure denial.

The aspect of these conversations that has stuck in hy head the most revolves around the value given to junior faculty, or potential junior faculty. Many institutions, at least those I have been associated with, are very keen to focus their hiring on senior faculty, in short, buying faculty who have earned tenure at another institution. Although some faculty searches are restricted to junior faculty (only hiring at the assistant professor, or pre-tenure level), my view now is that these are more the exception than the rule. I fully understand why some departments would want to attract and hire big wigs every once in a while, but as the regular way to replace retiring faculty or fill new positions I think it is a bad idea.

What is even worse, I feel, is that on the odd chance that junior faculty are hired, their chance at tenure seems almost comical. I wonder how many of the current faculty would have earned tenure with such requirements. I am not sure what is worse, not offering the positions in the first place, or setting the tenure bar far higher than could be expected, or is even possible.

I've heard many arguments for hiring senior faculty whenever possible, but all of the points completely devalue what junior faculty bring to a department and ignore the role senior faculty play in the development of young scientists. For example:

1. Senior faculty typically are more proven at bringing in large research grants, and are therefore a better economic decision for a department. You cannot compare someone who has been a faculty member writing grants for 20 years with someone fresh out of graduate school. What you have to do is try to predict what the young person will be like in 20 years. Although the senior faculty may bring in more, or publish more, or have more accolades, they will also contribute to the department for 20 fewer years. Departments should be interested in the integrated contributions, not the present rate.
2. Junior faculty are risky to hire. In some ways this is true, you have less information to base your decision on with younger hires, they are risky, but cheap-risky. If the don't work out, there is a built in way to not keep them around, called the tenure process (which I still think is abused, but more on that later). Senior faculty, on the other hand, are typically brought in already tenured. Their start-up packages and salaries are often many times larger than what a junior candidate would expect, and if they don't work out, you are hosed. What can you do? Unless they kill someone they can't be fired, and you spent an absurd amount to bring them over. I have seen senior faculty get hired, be given an absurd amount of start-up money, and then become what I consider dead weight. They have no interest in performing any of the boring and annoying but essential aspects of being a professor (you know, teaching, advising students, collaborating, etc..). This is not true for all, I know plenty who have continued to be productive and valuable members of a department, so let's move on to point #3.
3. Hiring high profile faculty is a good way to make a department more respected and competitive. This may be true, but it is often a false and ephemeral way to improve a department. When I think about what departments are really solid, I always associate the department with certain faculty. These professors made their name at the university, and they are the reasons departments gain a certain stature. If they move to another university later in their career, I don't necessarily transfer their accomplishments to their new campus. I think the best way to improve a department in a long term sense is to let faculty develop and prove themselves. I call this the Michael Jordan rule. When I say Michael Jordan, most people think Chicago Bulls. Who associates him with the Washington Wizards (or even better the Birmingham Barons)? Maybe a scattering of Wizards fans who hoped he'd spark the team, but I think it is safe to say that 99% of folks who know of Jordan associated him with the Bulls. It is where he made his name. Seriously improving a department takes time and investment, end of story.
   

What I think is really tragic about these reasons (all of which I have heard) is that they completely ignore the role senior faculty have in mentoring and developing younger faculty, as well as all of the positives young faculty bring to a school. Many of the assistant professors I have interacted with are exceptionally motivated. They are hungry to prove their worth and make a name for themselves, and they have a serious interest in what the department will be like in 20 or 30 years. These are all great things.

In addition, when faculty searches are restricted (officially or not) to senior faculty, you might as well throw any hope for diversity out the window. Earth science departments (at least in the US) have a tough time attracting students, or making a case for increased university and/or government funding; homogenous departments of old white dudes do not help the matter (although in interest of full disclosure I hope one day to be an old white dude in a department).

And then there is tenure. Even when a department hires an assistant professor, how many actually have a realistic shot at tenure? For some disciplines in some schools, junior faculty positions are little more than 6-year post-docs. I am sure plenty of us have seen exceptional junior faculty denied tenure. Are the bars set unreasonably high? Would present senior faculty have received tenure with those expectations? Is denying tenure to solid and productive faculty a way to try to boost the image of the depatment? I know there are plenty of factors that I, as a student or post-doc, are not privy to, but in my conversations I keep getting the sense that another big factor is an overinflated memory of what their tenure packages looked like 20 or 30 years ago. I've been looking for statistics on the average age of faculty when they receive tenure, but haven't found anything too useful yet.

Just as it is the role of faculty to help guide the development of students, I believe it is the job of senior faculty to guide the development of junior faculty. This creates productive, stable, and competitive departments. It is also a positive feedback loop, departments that help develop faculty create excellent senior faculty who in turn help guide the next generation of scientists.

Again, I am not always against the hiring of senior faculty, and I understand why that is sometimes a good idea. But it can't be the norm. Geology will need geologists in the future, so it is the professional duty of anyone who thinks geology is important to help foster that new generation.

I'd be interested in your thoughts; I'd especially be interested if anyone knows sources for relevant statistics on hiring and the like. Or, if you have been involved in more faculty searches than I, I'd be interested in the perspective.

Communicating Science

Mrs. ADBWADLN directed me to this article by Chris Mooney written for Seed Magazine. The article discusses some of the hurdles faced in communicating science to the public, focusing on the climate change debate, but applicable to a great deal more. In short he discusses the disconnect between scientists and what the general public believes, pointing out some of the misconceptions that make their way into media and political discussions

But I wonder if the scientific community as a whole can truly continue to passively accept the ongoing translational failures that seem to ensue on virtually every occasion that scientific information enters the political and public arena.

Worth the read.

Related Cartoon

I thought I'd link to this cartoon (from of my favorite political cartoonists Ann Telnaes) that relates to a recent post of mine

Foray into Politics marking an important anniversary

Disclaimer: I in no way pretend to be a historian or expert on war, politics, Haggar Slacks, or international relations. Geology posts will resume soon.

I was inspired today after reading ...Or Something and this post. I tend not to be too political on my blog, but seeing as today is a very important anniversary for my country, I wanted to get this out. First, some background.

Separating minerals for geochronologic analysis is a rather long and tedious process. There are many different steps, non of which are particularly difficult, but screwing them up can mean the complete loss of months of time and thousands of research dollars. Therefore, I can't juggle mineral separation with any activity that requires my eyes or hands, I have to keep those free for the task at hand. To keep myself entertained, I usually turn on my iPod and listen to music, a book on "tape", or, more recently, a podcast.

A few months ago I was "floating kspars" and listening to an American Radioworks Episode about the recently released audio tape collection of presidential phone calls and oval office conversations. I was struck by some of Lyndon Johnson's conversations, especially those that related to the Viet Nam War (although, for a true laugh I recommend his call to the Haggar clothing company requesting some custom made slacks, seriously, some of the funniest stuff I've ever heard). Back to Viet Nam. In particular I was struck by a conversation he had with Senator Eugene McCarthy (Democratic Representative from Minnesota) about the Viet Nam War. This conversation took place on February 1, 1966 (transcript and recording can be found here, more conversations from Johnson and other presidents are here or downloaded here including the aforementioned Haggar Slacks call).

President Johnson : What they [subscribers to the Walter Lippman - J. William Fulbright argument] really think is we oughtn't to be there [in Viet Nam] and we ought to get out. Well, I know we oughtn't to be there, but I can't get out. I just can't be the architect of surrender....I'm willing to do nearly anything a human can do, if I can do it with any honor at all.

As I said earlier, this conversation took place on February 1, 1966. This was the beginning of the escalation in Viet Nam, and just before the deadliest years of the war. According to the National Archives, as of 2/1/1966, there had been 2,670 American deaths in the Viet Nam War, less than 5% of the eventual total of 58,193. Hindsight is 20/20, but if Johnson could have looked ahead at the 55,523 more soldiers who would die before the U.S. got out of the war, you have to wonder if his definitions of honor and surrender would have changed. And why is the focus on honor anyways, shouldn't it be on doing the right thing and saving innocent lives? So when I hear talk of surrender now with Iraq, this is what I think of, I think of the 55,523 kids who could have been saved if someone would have had the guts and foresight not to think of their re-election, or even their short term legacy, but of the long term consequences of saving face. To realize that these are real lives, real people who will pay the price for their political ambitions.

I know that playing the "what if" game with history is dangerous and pretty fruitless. It is easy for me to look back and tell people what they should have done, years before I was even born. I just hope that in 41 years someone isn't writing the same blog entry about Iraq.

If you are interested, this conversation is on tape WH6602.01 9602, the part I highlighted starts at about the 1:28 mark (you can download the .mp3 from here).

Follow Up to the Last Post - Cheap Food

To follow up on the last post with something related, I offer this article. It describes how the governer of Oregon has decided to try to live on food stamps for a week. I know nothing about the governor of Oregon but I am a big fan of experiments like this. A week isn't a terribly long amount of time, but so many people in charge have absolutely no idea what life is like for the average American (let alone the average citizen of the world, that is of course a completely different story). The total budget for a weeks worth of food (if you are on food stamps) is $21.00, which makes my occasional trips to the Wegmans olive bar seem completely extravagant.
This is kind of interesting, after the shootings at Virginia Tech last week I had thought about blogging about my experience working in the mental health field, specifically my frustrations. I decided not to, but now thinking about the price of food my experience at this job comes up again. During the year after college and before graduate school, I worked as a counselor at a residential treatment facility (read: group home) for severely emotionally disturbed teenagers. It was a definite change of pace for me. An odd job, the average work day could be spent restraining 200lb violent 17 year olds for a few hours and watching against suicide attempts, or I could spend all day playing football and bar-b-qing. Anyways, where does food come in? Well, seeing as we were contracted by the State, we had to provide a set diet for the kids. Every two weeks we got menus, and then had to do the grocery shopping and cooking for the group. We would get in trouble if we strayed too far form the set diets. Technically the kids were supposed to help with the cooking but with the frequency of problems they were usually kept off limits from any kind of cooking implement. It turned out that of the counselors working during my shift, I was the only one who was much of a cook at all. As such, I got very familiar with the official state recommended diet for 11-7 year old boys. The food we had to provide was amazingly unhealthy, very meat, cheese, and starch heavy dishes, very few fresh vegetables (save for iceberg lettuce "salads"), and almost no fruit. A typical weekend breakfast would include either pancakes or french toast, scrambled eggs, sausage or bacon, regular toast, and occasionally a banana. Follow this with a grilled "cheese" and french fry lunch, and cheese burgers, tater tots, canned corn, chip and salsa dinner. What made this worse was that the budget we were give to shop with was just appalling, so that even when a decent cook like myself was around, there was no way to afford anything of any quality at all. Mushy apples (the kind you buy in the 10lb bags), fake cheese, kleenex style bread, etc. And they wondered why the kids always gained weight; add the food to the fact that many of their medications sapped their energy, easy path to obesity. On the upside, I did learn to cook a mean pot roast (quite an accomplishment for a vegetarian), and my french toast was pretty solid. But still, with all of the money spent trying to address the kid's many mental issues, I was always amazed at how little attention was paid to their physical health. And, since we were their legal guardians, what kind of life lessons were we really teaching? OK, this has turned into a ramble, good night.

Land Use, Veggies, Food, and Farm Subsidies

THM pointed out this article in the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan. Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma (in addition to lots of other things), and this article is on a similar topic. The article is primarily about the economy of nutrition and the effects that the farm bill has on the price and production of food. At it's heart this is also a land use issue, and therefore appropriate for posting on an earth science blog. I'll do a proper review of The Omnivore's Dilemma at some point in the future, but as for now you'll have to settle for the links.

NCSE Web Resources

The National Center for Science Education is now offering free access to a variety of digital resources dealing with recent evolution related trials and general evolution and science promotion. I haven't checked out the files myself [yet] but the NCSE has a good track record, so I thought that shouldn't stop me from advertising.

To see the archives click here.

Global Climate Energy Project, Big Oil, and Big Benefactors

I read this article today about a recent decision by a major benefactor of Stanford University to withdraw a $2.5 million dollar gift to the university because Stanford recently accepted a $100 million dollar gift from ExxonMobil. The ExxonMobil gift was part of a combined $250 million dollar grant from a variety of of donors to create a new research institute at Stanford called the Global Climate and Energy Project. This institute will bring together scientists from a wide variety of disciplines to look for ways to "meet future energy needs without worsening global warming." Included in the article is this quote.

“Exxon Mobil is trying to greenwash itself, and it’s using Stanford as its brush,” Yusef Robb, who has worked with Bing on climate issues, told The Mercury News. “We think that people who give to Stanford do so because they want to help the future leaders of this nation, not because they want to advance the agenda of ExxonMobil.”

I am by no means a fan of ExxonMobil in the political or environmental sense, I am sure they, like most any other company in the world, make decisions based on short term profits and not on some sun-shiney moralistic ideal. But I think Bing's logic is twisted for a few big reasons.

1. I don't see the problem with a company trying to "greenwash" it's image. I don't believe companies can be moral or immoral, they can just do good things or bad things. ExxonMobil has plenty of bad company points, as I have already blogged about (and then some for sure), but why should that stop them from doing something good? Giving money to research aimed at developing energy alternatives seems like a good thing (as long as there are no strings attached, see point #3.)
   
2. I am sure the Bing family has in the past had plenty of money invested with oil companies (perhaps without them even knowing about it.) Most banks and mutual funds and things of that sort do. So why would it be OK to have investments that use companies like ExxonMobil to make money, but not want anyone else to benefit. Bing could of course only have "socially responsible" investments. I don't know all that much about him, other than what I can find on imdb.com and related entertainment sites, so if Mr. Bing does only have socially responsible investments, flies commercial airlines (so as not to waste energy with private planes), takes public transportation as often as possible and drives a hybrid when he can't, lives in a modest home complete with native fauna in the garden and of course, no swimming pool (I am guessing he lives in Southern California since he is a Hollywood dude), a nice compost pile where he can put the scraps from his locally grown vegetarian cooking, then I will perhaps agree with his decision.
3. This institute could be very important. It makes sense that energy companies want to invest in the future of energy, but isn't this something we all have a vested interest in. It states explicitly that Stanford University will own any and all patents produced by the institute, so they won't directly make money from this.
4. The gift he is rescinding was a general gift to the university; the gift he is complaining about is building a new institute. So, the general student population will be hurt, but those involved in the institute won't.
5. I think oil companies are easy targets to complain about. Truth is, like almost all large companies, they do some pretty bad stuff. I have no problem passing laws that regulate oil companies or the use and/or acquisition of energy, but I also think that the first place we need to look is at our energy use. If there wasn't such an absurd demand for oil, then oil companies would just be another podunk company, it is our use that gives them the power they have. Another example, I think, is Ted Turner. I again agree with him on most things, but he flies around the world in a private jet, perhaps the most energy inefficient mode of transportation known to man (well, except for perhaps spotted owl powered space shuttles or other monstrosities). Fly first class if you must, mingle with the dregs of society and enjoy the average in-flight movie; a small price to pay for your planet. Hell, they could even afford those super sweet Bose noise cancelling headphones, those would make even coach seats bearable. This kind of reminds me of people who drive SUV's to Whole Foods so they can buy organic arugula.
   
6. Stanford, I am sure, has had investments in ExxonMobil for a long time, as does anyone, or anything, with a diversified investment portfolio (see point #1). Why is it an issue now? Why doesn't Bing work with Stanford to create a socially responsible investment portfolio, or encourage Stanford to use it's shareholder clout to help redirect wayward corporations?
7. Let's pretend that every major oil company in the world except ExxonMobil had contributed to the institute, my bet is that people would then complain about how ExxonMobil isn't doing enough to help find energy alternatives.
8. Does his action help solve a problem, or is it simply a publicity stunt? If the end goal is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and reduce the production of greenhouse gases, does this help, hinder, or do nothing? Would he rather take away $100 million dollars from the institute, would that solve the problem?
   

I have no problem with Mr. Bing's positions or politics, I just think this is an odd reaction. Perhaps he could direct the gift into something that directly counteracts what he dislikes about ExxonMobil. Maybe create his own institute, one that develops oil company free investment plans. This isn't the first time a major benefactor has broken a promise of support to Stanford, and I don't think in either case the decision made much sense.

I am, however, excited to see that Steve Bing is producing a film version of Beowulf, which ranks as my #1 all time solo--road- trip book-on-tape. It got me to and from Seattle many times.

Peak Oil and Biophysical Economics

I recently had the chance to see Charlie Hall (from SUNY-ESF) give a lecture on Peak Oil. I think like many geologists I've either seen and/or read quite a bit about the concept of peak oil recently, so the material itself wasn't entirely new, but Dr. Hall also introduced an idea I was not familiar with, but have had in my head since the talk. I'll get to that in a second, first, for the uninitiated:

The figures I am using are all from the wikipedia Peak Oil page, just a disclaimer

Peak Oil is an idea first developed by one of this century's great geologists, M. King Hubbert. He introduced his theory in the late 1950's as a way of predicting future oil supplies. The idea is fairly simple, and is based on the fact that oil is a non-renewable resource, and there is consequently a finite supply of oil in the world. Oil production will follow a bell shaped curve. As the demand for oil increases, oil companies increase their supply as much as they can; pumping fields at full capacity and discovering new reserves. Demand continues to increase, but fields begin to dry up, and new fields just don't exist, so production declines. Whatever the exact shape of the curve, the logic is pretty plain, the integrated area under the curve is equal to the total amount of recoverable petroleum reserves in the world. This is Peak Oil, the idea that there will (or has been) a peak in oil production, and that at some point production will decrease, about as rapidly as it initially increased. This model works very well for individual oil fields, or even national reserves

The red curve shows US oil production versus time, with a peak in 1970, and a slight secondary bump thanks to the north slope of Alaska. World oil is in blue.
This is the theoretical production curve (red) and actual data for Norwegian production. I don't want to argue the specifics of the model; whether or not the curves are symmetric, how much technology can help (answer jack squat), when the peak is, etc.. There are some truths that you just can't get around, namely that the amount of oil in the world is finite. and that at some point we will be using more than we can extract, and production rates will decline.

Arguments against peak oil seem to follow the lines of "the market solves everything." As supply decreases, price increases, and demand decreases, thank god for the market, it will save us all. Oil will get expensive, and some budding entrepreneur will devise some amazing technology that will save the world! At some level I suppose that is true; if there are humans around in 500 years, they will undoubtedly not be using oil as their primary energy source (they will of course be using flux capacitors). Whether or not it happens isn't the problem, but instead what happens during the transition. Dismissing peak oil with some dreamy ode to market forces ignores how nasty things can get in the face of scarce resources. Technology will find alternatives, but when? Do we decide now to solve the problem before it gets too hairy, or do we wait until something resembling this happens? Hell, remember when stores would run out of Beanie Babies and all hell would break lose? I think oil might be worse.

This brings me to biophysical economics. The term, as used by Charlie Hall, refers to an economic theory that does not violate the laws of nature, especially trivial little ideas like thermodynamics. This is of course a major problem with simple supply and demand, it assumes that supply is only limited by something like factory output. For example, no matter how much the price of oil increases, the supply cannot, and any reasonable replacement would take much longer to develop than the oil would last. Economic theory rooted in physical realities, I like it.

I am less an economist than I am a petroleum geologist (not much), so this post is really not in my wheelhouse. This has sparked my interest though. Are there any more econ-minded folks out there who know about biophysical economics, or any economic theory that explicity takes into account the laws of nature? Any notable economists who consider the natural world, or economics programs that require some line of study like this?

Lake Tahoe and the evil 1098-T

Today I've been thinking quite a bit about Lake Tahoe. Why? Well, because I did my taxes. Let me explain. This post will begin largely as a rant about 1098-T forms, and the absurdity they represent. 1098-T forms are what you get when an educational institution gives you fellowship or scholarship money. For most of my graduate career, somewhere around half of the money I made came in the form of one of these things. In the last few years, it was almost all of the cashola. Because the money was given in order to facilitate research, it was untaxable. Money I made as an hourly employee TA-ing, or RA-ing, or whatever-ing, was taxed, BWRU paid payroll taxes on that salary, taxes were deducted from my paycheck, and I'd receive a W-2 at the end of the year. Easy. It was even decided in a few tax court cases that if you were a student pursuing a degree, then money given in the form of fellowships and scholarships was intended to further your education, and therefore not taxable income. This all changed a few years ago (from what I can gather, although the exact timing is difficult for my non-accountant brain to figure out, perhaps if the DZA is reading he can contribute his mad skillz). Now it doesn't matter at all what the money was given for, it all depends now on how it is spent, and the list of what is a "qualified education expense", and therefore non-taxable, is exceedingly short. All of the money you are given, except that spent on tuition and items required for attendance counts as taxable income. Items required for attendance includes things like books required for a class and certain fees, but absolutely nothing else. If you use your fellowship to buy a laptop, or do field research, or attend a meeting, maybe buy lab supplies, thesis paper, safety glasses, sample bags, field books, a hand lens and brunton compass... none of that counts as "qualified educational expenses." Room and board? no way. So, if you received 27,000 in fellowship money, and out of that was paid 9,000 in tuition and you bought no required textbooks, you must, at the end of the year, pay taxes on the remaining 18,000. That's right, you owe something over a grand. I'll pause here if you need to change your newly soiled pants.

I am no anarchist, and truth is I have no problem paying taxes, but the logic of this defies me. The university pays me in a way that they do not have to pay payroll taxes; no social security, no medicare, no disability, nothing. But then I have to act like an employee and pay taxes on the money, even though I get none of the benefits of being an employee (my social security pay-ins, for example, stagnate when I am on fellowship). It also astounds me that if I use the money for research related expenses, I still have to pay taxes on it, because none of them count as "qualified tuition expenses." Even though I was getting paid this way I was still officially a TA and/or RA, so how does BWRU get away with it? And how hard would it be for them to send a form letter to every student on fellowship telling them that they should pay estimated taxes or else expect to owe a few grand come April? Of course if I was loaded and owned a house then I could deduct the expenses as business related, but seriously, own a house? Pay mortgage? Qualify for a loan? What burns me up even more is that the focus of what is a qualified tuition expense really has nothing to do with the bulk of most graduate careers. Even in class-intense fields, you are usually done taking classes, at least for credit, by the third year. So, after that, during all of your research, you can deduct jack squat.

So this got me thinking about Lake Tahoe, South Lake Tahoe specifically, poor man's Vegas, a place a geologist like me could make my fortune! But I hate Vegas, and casinos, so let me forget the ginormous check I have to write the government to help fund this, and focus on the nice part of Tahoe. The geology, the scenery, the skiing, the hiking, the fact that if I hid in the forest the IRS could never find me...

Lake Tahoe sits astride the California-Nevada border at the crest of the Sierra Nevada. It is a very large and deep lake (roughly 500m maximum depth, that's the 12th deepest freshwater lake in the world), and is considered by many to be the westernmost basin and range graben. The lake is deep because there are active normal faults cutting through the middle and sides of the lake, separating the Carson Range to the east (Basin and Range) from the Sierra Nevada. These faults downdrop the block that makes up the bottom of the lake, thus creating an enormous bowl that holds water, and is therefore a lake.

figure from Garner et al (2000), GSA Bulletin v. 112, n. 5, p. 736-746

The following pictures are from the summer of 2005, and were taken at the southern end of the lake in Emerald Bay. If any of you are realizing for the first time that you somehow have to come up with a few grand because of how you were paid, well, at least these pictures are free. Actually, considering I am on the hook for about a month's wages, if anyone wants to purchase the original photos for some absurd price....

Letter to the Editor

Yesterday I wrote and submitted a letter to the editor of the student paper here at ESRU in response to another letter written by an undergraduate discussing intelligent design. My thoughts on the matter are best summer up in this post, but I thought I'd post the original version of my letter nonetheless. I had to shorten the final submission to 250 words, yes, 250 words out of a 12 page paper. I will have less room than a Dominoes ad, but that's the rule! Doesn't matter how many letters are submitted. Anyways, here is the original version, with names omitted to protect the innocent.

In his recent letter to the editor entitled “Consider Creationism without bias,” Mr. Snuffleupagus confuses intelligent design, creationism, evolution, and a belief in God. Believing in God and evolution are not mutually exclusive, just as supporting the teaching of intelligent design is not a pre-requisite for people of faith. The reason intelligent design should not be taught in a scientific setting is because of how drastically it changes the definition of science. For hundreds of years, the scientific method has been applied in roughly the same way, creating testable hypothesis, conducting experiments, and refining those hypotheses. Inherent in this is the assumption that there are natural laws that govern the world. What intelligent design does is enter supernatural forces into the mix, something that by definition does not follow natural laws and is therefore untestable. It is one thing to push for supernatural explanations in branches of science most people consider esoteric, but the true test for intelligent design is whether or not you would accept supernatural explanations in all branches of science. Would you accept them from your doctor? Would you accept them from the building engineers or FDA food inspectors? How about physicists who handle nuclear waste, or forensic scientists providing evidence in a murder trial? Of course not, if you went to a doctor deathly ill and they came back with a supernatural diagnosis, you’d find another doctor, one who would run tests and perform experiments until they determined what was wrong using the scientific method. If the engineer’s assessment of the structural stability of your new office building was based on supernatural forces, you’d find another engineer. If you will not accept supernatural explanations in branches of science that directly affect your life, then you cannot accept supernatural explanations in any branch of science.

Please do not confuse evolution with atheism, or intelligent design with science. Evolution, like gravity or plate tectonics or electromagnetism, is a scientific theory; one that has been tested and refined thousands of times and is still the topic of very intense study. Intelligent design is not science, because it profoundly changes the meaning of science and of the scientific method in a way that is potentially very harmful. Belief in science does not preclude belief in a higher power.

Thermochronic
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Earth Sciences

Mississippi House Bill 625 Dies!

Woo-hoo! The Mississippi House bill (#625) I blogged about here officially died in committee on January 31st. This bill would have required Incompetent Design to be taught in public schools along with evolution. This bill said nothing of the flying spaghetti monster, probably an oversight by the bill's author, Mike Lott.

Anybody need $10,000?

I am by no means an expert when it comes to climate change, so I will leave the more technical posts for my fellow geoblogofolks (see the sidebar). What I would like to point out is something Mrs. Apparent-Dip-but-with-a-different-last-name (mad props) told me about and was reported on CNN Money. Turns out that in response to the IPCC report, ExxonMobil has offered some climate scientists $10,000 for critiques of the conclusions (which, for the bajillionth time in the past decade state very clearly that humans are causing climate change). Now of course oil industry funding in the earth sciences is nothing new, after all, geologists do plenty of oil finding. What I think is unique in this case, and disturbing, is the predetermination of the outcome. I know plenty of people doing industry funded studies, I am sure it is common in other branches of science as well, but when is that conditional on the outcome. Sounds very wild west to me, "Look, there's a bounty on that thar climate report! Wanted, dead or alive!" But, on the plus side, if funding is tight, perhaps I can convince them that apatite (U-Th)/He thermochronology proves the earth is cooling, out of control cooling, my latest data says we are heading to runaway global cooling, straight into snowball earth! OK, it doesn't, but 10 grand could set me up at a sweet hotel for GSA. This is disappointing news considering recent good signs from the same company.

San Francisco, the city that waits to die!

This post is intended to honor one of the great geology films of all time. Really a classic. It is amazing how many people I know who at some time in their career have seen this film, but yet how little information exists about it. I actually think that Apparent Dip will become the most informative site relating to this film, at least that I can find. The movie is a BBC documentary from 1971 called "San Francisco, the city that waits to die." I first saw this in college, it was brought out during the last lab of my intro course. I remember the impression I got at the time was kind of patronizing, "oh look how silly those old geologists were, how much smarter we are now." Truth is, over the last 10 years or so I have watched this film dozens of times, and every time I do I get a greater appreciation for it.




The only part of the movie that I still think is a little absurd is the tone with which it is narrated (by Paul Vaughan). Basically, Americans are idiots, look how stupid they are, man, no one else in the world is as stupid as those bloody Americans. Although the tone is kind of annoying, what gets me about this film is that I can imagine, 30 years from now, watching something similar but this time dealing with global warming. Scientist after scientist is trotted out and basically says "we know it is dangerous, we know we put buildings where we shouldn't, we know many of the buildings aren't safe, but there isn't much we can do about it." Politics and real estate dollars rule. Some notables that make appearances include

Louis C. Pakiser, the first director of the U.S.G.S. earthquake center at Menlo Park and 1996 recipient of the Geological Society of America Distinguished Service Award


CalTech Geophysicist Clarence Allen



Geothechnical engineer, Cal Professor, and alleged outstanding soccer player Harry Seed. Here he is demonatrating liquefaction. If you look closely, you can see a small yellow house perched on a column of wet sand, that is then shook until the house sinks. Incidentaly, this house is roughly the same size as my last apartment in California.


CalTech Professor Emeritus George Housner, one of the original earthquake engineers (distinct from the O.G.'s)


David Evans, one of, if not the first person to demonstrate the relationship between pore fluid pressure and induced seismicity (see Evans, D.M. (1969), Fluid Pressure and Earthquakes, Eos, Transaction, Amer. Geophys. Union, 50, 5, p. 387-388.)



And who demonstrates the famous beer can experiment



and Darrell Wood (sp?), sitting in front of "one of the largest computers in the world," at Stanford's linear accelerator.



There are a few fantastic statements about earthquake prediction, guaranteed to bring some chuckles, including, "if the [next] San Francisco earthquake does not occur within the next 5 years it is my opinion that we will be able to predict it." I remember actually being kind of struck by some of footage. I remember especially the discussion of the numerous buildings, including schools, hospitals, and police stations, that sit right above the Hayward fault. Like the home of the second best college football team in the bay area (below)


Or my favorite, an old school for the deaf in Berkeley, which is now the Clark Kerr campus (where at the time I first saw this film I had a friend living)


Also footage of the creeping part of the fault system in Hollister


And footage of a USGS led project to monitor slip across a strand of the fault by using geodolites. The footage below is from Mount Diablo where they were making measurements




Perhaps the oddest thing though is the soundtrack for the movie. It is "California Earthquake" by Mama Cass. The full on song blares in the beginning and end of the movie, when the motorcycles are cruising all over the place, over the bay bridge, through the streets of the city, catching major air... I am not sure what the connection is between the motorcycles, Mama Cass, and earthquakes. During the more reflective parts of the film, we are treated with a tuned down instrumental version of the song. Truth is, without this soundtrack, I don't think the movies would really have stuck in my head, it would have just been a normal old boring class film strip. Well, except for the predictions about predicting earthquakes and the narrators apparent excitement about the prospect of using nuclear weapons to trigger earthquakes. Fortunately none of the geologists interviewed supported the idea of intentionally triggering earthquakes with H-bombs.



This movie was released in 1971, filmed in 1970. This is really at the beginning of the acceptance of plate tectonics as a field. Tectonics is referred to at a few points in the film, mainly the ideas of plates, but it certainly doesn't play a large role, and there are some definite factual errors. But really, for the state of the field, the information isn't really that bad. I also am thankful that no one is asking me on tape to make predictions, because my track record....well, err..

Prof. Advisor "Hey Thermo, when is this alleged lab you've been building going to be up and running?"
PhD Candidate Thermochronic, "Well, assuming that turbo pump is ready for me to pick up Friday, I'll be pumping out data by spring of 2002, easy."

Is this movie standard fare at other schools? I see it in many library holdings, small liberal arts school had a copy, is it pervasive? Am I crazy to think with a better editor and less annoying soundtrack this movie might be excellent?

The "CSI Effect"

In a slightly related post, the New York Times has an interesting article this morning about a man who was wrongly convicted of "stabbing, beating, biting and strangling a social worker in upstate New York." The case revolved largely around bite mark evidence, with a local dentist acting as an expert witness, testifying that the teeth marks on the victim matched the accused perfectly. DNA evidence has overturned many cases (as it did with this one), so that isn't really new. What interests me about this story though is what it says about the perceptions of science in society. Even though most people do not make a living using science, it has real world consequences

Lawyers, for their part, are taking steps to counter what they call the “C.S.I. effect,” when juries become overly impressed by forensic evidence. During jury selection, it is not uncommon for them to ask potential jurors about their television-watching preferences to weed out those who seem unable to separate fact from fiction.

Mrs. Dip-with-a-different-last-name pointed this article out to me last week, which I think is similar in theme. What I really find interesting about this is not that his research is controversial, but how quickly a bastardized version of his research was spread throughout the blogosphere and traditional media. In both of these cases, incorrect versions of science led to serious misunderstandings.

I tend to blame us scientists for this gulf in public understanding. True, most people could spend more time understanding the basics of the world they live in, but that is easy for us to say, it is how we make a living. I get to spend all day thinking about science, and expecting people to become experts would be like expecting me to become an expert in anything else, auto maintenance, plumbing, baking, computer programming....If I instead think of science as something I'd have to learn about after a long day of work, like any of my other hobbies or any other important aspect of life, it seems daunting. This is one of the reasons I think that science blogs can be important, I think we as a community need to become better about getting our messages across. Political junkies have really excelled at using the internet, and blogs in particular, for this purpose. Who knows, perhaps it wouldn't be so easy to cut earth science programs, or to cut funding to the USGS if we were better at getting our messages across? As I mentioned in my first post, we must make a connection between science and everyday life.

This is why public outreach is so important. There are many simple things we can do.

1. Let's support high school teachers and students. After all, this is where most people get the majority of their exposure to science, and their high school science courses will largely determine how they approach science for the rest of their lives. Supporting high school science can be as simple as visiting classrooms, judging science fairs, tutoring, etc., or as involved as providing research experience to students over the summer (one professor in my graduate department was especially good at this). As even easier way is to support the friends and colleagues of ours who decide to teach high school science. It seems a rather thankless task, very hard work that I don't think gets enough respect from the professional science community.

2. Let's support undergraduate survey courses and the people that teach them. Same reasons as above, that is the only chance to introduce earth science to most people. These are future voters, politicians, jurors, etc., we can't waste those chances.

3. Be a salesperson. I don't know how Physicists do it, they must be the best sales people in the world. Somehow they can convince governments to spend tens of billions of dollars on such boondoggles as particle colliders. Seriously, this astounds me. Not that I don't find the science interesting, in a perfect world with unlimited resources I would say go for it. But we all know that competition for funding is tight, yet somehow these projects get funded. Earth Science is very relevant (well, maybe not thermochronology, but you get my point), and we need to sell it that way.

4. Let's all refrain from blaming the public every time science is misused. At least in my opinion, the shortcoming is mainly ours. We are fortunate to be able to spend our lives doing jobs that interest us, and the extra effort it would take to share some of that knowledge really isn't that much.

5. We need to find a Carl Sagan of geology, someone who can take the message to the public. And, when we find him or her, we need to not disparage their work (as happened to Carl Sagan, and to many academics who try to become popular).

There will be more rules, I am sure.