Life is wonderful

After a nice lunch with the geobloggers I met with an old friend of mine who works in the area for desert, and returned to the internet to find a kind letter from the colleague whose poster I managed to temporarily misplace assuring me that it is only a poster, and requesting that I bring it back to Italy if possible to hang in the department. I believe that I’ll ask to store it with a friend here in SF while I do my Alaskan adventures and pick it back up on my way back to Italy. Unless I decide to post it back, along with mine.

It was very interesting to hear what each of us bloggers had to say by way of introduction, and amusing to note that we were all long winded enough that the lunch went longer than scheduled.

how nice it is to enjoy a morning with no crises needing to be solved

Today, the third day of the AGU meeting is a nice, mellow day for me. I have no crises I need to solve, and the schedule of talks/posters I wanted to see happens to list only posters for today, so no time constraints this morning. As a result, in addition to going to look at the posters I’d added to my schedule, I also made time to go look at the Exhibits. I picked up a couple of free AGU colouring books as gifts for my nieces, and thumbed through a few books I choose not to add to my already over-full luggage. Possibly the most interesting exhibit, to my eye, was the one with the large (~ 1 m diameter) globe which is a 3-D movie screen playing an animation of Earth’s tectonic history. I have longed to see such a thing ever since the first time I saw an animation of plate tectonics in action. To me one can have continents moving about on a flat screen as much as one likes, but it is not until one curves the screen into a globe that the spatial relationships are really accurate. How delightful that someone has done it. I spoke briefly with the man at the booth, who said that museums often purchase their technology simply so that they can display that particular graphic. I believe him. Alas, if museums are his target market, I somehow doubt that many universities will bother investing in his globe for their undergraduate classes at this time. I didn’t ask what they sell for, but it looked like the price would probably exceed typical budgets.

I am very much looking forward to the geoblogger’s lunch today, and have arranged to meet a friend who works in the city for desert afterwards (good thing my plan for the day is posters only!)

Attending AGU in December

While others in the geoblogsphere are still posting about their adventures at GSA in Portland, I’ve just booked my flights for AGU in December. Anyone else planning on attending that one? It would be nice to make it to one of the geoblogger meet-ups instead of reading about them from the far side of the planet…