texture short course, day one

Back at the beginning of the summer I saw an ad for a workshop on texture analysis to be held in Tromsø in October open to students and researchers. It sounded interesting, so I sent them a note asking if it was open to researchers who are between contracts, and they said that it was, and (more importantly given the "between contracts" part, the only course fee would be to cover the copying expenses. When I got the job offer for the position I will start on 1 Nov. I asked if he thought I should attend the workshop, or if my time would be better spent staying home and reading literature directly relevant to the project. After looking over the flyer for the course he said that he thought I should go.

It turns out that the most efficient way to get to Tromsø from Luleå is to drive—they have no train this far north, so one would have to switch to a bus part way there, and flights go south to Stockholm and then west to Oslo or Trondheim before heading back north again. Therefore I checked with a friend of mine who is a graduate student with a flexible schedule, and he thought a road trip sounded like a good idea (besides, going away for a week might actually get him to do some writing). We had a nice drive up on Sunday—left Luleå just after 08:00, and arrived at our B&B (located 15 minute walk from the Uni) just after 18:00. (I, of course, forgot to take out the camera once during the drive, since I was so busy gazing out the window at the lovely mountains once we got close to the Norwegian border).

The course is divided into two sections—the first two days we are learning how to use the programs they use here to convert a series of rotated photos of thin sections into data showing the orientation of the crystallographic axes. The technique works only on uniaxial minerals, such as quartz or calcite (or ice), but since these often occur in units which have been deformed it is a useful tool.

It was very enjoyable to be back in a classroom again after a longish break, though a bit of a challenge to keep up with the exercise—the program we are using runs only on MacOS, and I haven't really needed to use Apple computers since my class in programing Basic on an AppleIIe back in highschool. Apple products have changed a bit since then, and while there are similarities in the handling between Apple and PC there are just enough differences that I found myself pushing the wrong button more than once and then frantically trying to undo that and get back to where I was meant to be before the teacher had gotten so far ahead that I couldn't catch up. Sometimes I managed it, sometimes I was the voice saying "wait, what folder was that?".

Fortunately, she was very patient when we got lost, and would back up and explain the steps we hadn't caught so that we could go on to the next step. I think we all managed to convert the raw data into the correct formats and align the stacks of images properly. Tomorrow we get to actually process that data into the sorts of final images that wind up in publications…

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!)

nano particles

About five years ago, I read the book The Diamond Age. This was my first introduction to the concept of “nanotechnology”, and, I must confess, that I paid it scant attention. There being complicating factors in my life at the time (having just lost my beloved step-father to cancer), I accepted the work of fiction as a distraction from the world around me, letting the wonders of that world exist solely in that world, and not making time to consider to what level, if any, such technology might exist in the real world. Nor did I put any thought into just how small “nano” might be.

Today’s mail brought me the latest issue of Elements Magazine. which focuses upon nanogeoscience, with articles on the history of our understanding of the nano scale and how technology is being applied to study things that small, of the changes in behaviour of minerals and elements at the nano scale (16% of a 10 nm cube’s atoms are near the surface of the cube, which can have profound effects upon the way that cube participates in chemical reactions when compared to a 10 μm or even 10 mm cube), and more.

But how small is a nano particle? “Nano” as a prefix in the metric scale means 10^-9, so 1 nm is 1000 times smaller than a micrometer (μm), which is 1000 times smaller than a millimeter (mm), which is a thousand times smaller than a meter (m). The example given in the article to help us understand what this really means was to compare our planet, Earth, to a standard light-bulb. Apparently Earth is about as much larger than a light-bulb as the light-bulb is larger than a single nanometer.

One of my favorite “toys”, I’ve been privileged to play with as part of my PhD research is the electron microprobe, which lets me see some amazing detail in the crystals in my rock samples. With this tool I may analyze the composition of minerals which are (so I thought) quite small—so long as they are at least 10 μm wide I can be reasonably confidant of analyzing that mineral and not the neighbouring ones. Other scientists out there are using different technology to look at things so much smaller than my tiny minerals that the scale bars in some of the photos accompanying the articles are only 20 nm long.

I have heard it said that any technology which is sufficiently advanced appears to be magic to those who do not understand it. When I read that work of fiction all those years ago, I accepted the descriptions of the “nanotechnology” as the “magic” inherent to that world, and thought nothing more about it. Reading the articles today which tie the concepts of nanotechnology with the geosciences and the minerals with which I’m interacting on a daily basis somehow brings it home to me in ways that I wasn’t ready to think about five years ago. You can bet that I shall be paying attention the next time I encounter the concept, be it in fiction, on line, or even in the local newspaper.

Ah, the joys of a high-tech existence!

I have, on many occasions, rejoiced about the improvements in technology which occurred during my time off between completing my Master’s and commencing my PhD project. Remembering the joys of working on illustrations for my thesis for the Master’s using CorelDraw version 6 on a Pentium 75 computer, and how I got to the point where I would happily make several edits to a line in a drawing while the screen was still (slowly!) re-drawing the line from the first edit, confidant that even though I couldn’t see what I was doing, the changes would, eventually, catch up with me and (usually) the result would be what I’d intended them to be. Ah the fun in those days, when it was essential to have my printer both plugged into the computer *and* turned on *before* I started the computer if I wished to print something from CorelDraw—if not the program would crash. These days my computer has 2 gigs of RAM (which, I’m betting is not something to brag about anymore!), and I’m running CorelDrawX3, which easily keeps up with the edits I’m making, as I make them, and, should I wish to print it has no complaints with my just plugging in a printer in the middle of other tasks and telling it to do so.
When I did my Master’s all of my maps were done by first scanning in a topographic map, then tracing it into CorelDraw so that I could change the size without distorting it, and then adding in my sample locations by hand by looking at my field map and making a corresponding mark onto the map on the screen. These days I use ArcMap for my sample collection maps—what a joy it is to take the GPS coordinates recorded in the field, type them up, import the list into ArcMap, and with the push of a couple of buttons they show up on the map, in exactly the location I expected them to be. Add a layer from the published maps showing the geology of the region, and it is good to go! (Or, if needed, create my own layer showing my interpretation of the distribution of rock types—slightly more effort, but ever so much easier than drawing it by hand on paper, or in CorelDraw.) And if I wish to know how far apart two samples were collected I can use the handy measuring tool within the program to look it up in a few seconds.
But today’s high-tech advantages come with a price. ArcMap, in particular is not freely available. My university has a very specific, limited number of users at once, license for that program. This means that even though it is installed upon my personal computer, it is necessary for me to connect via the internet to the geology department’s computer (I, like many other graduate students these days, work from home) so that the program can access its license and check to be certain that not too many of us are trying to use it simultaneously. This was all well and fine at my old house, where we had a broad-band, reliable, internet connection. I tended to make that connection in the morning, and leave it on all day (it also being necessary to download my university e-mail or to access other things on the geology departments shared hard drive), and unless something happened to disconnect me whilst I was using it, I tended to forget that ArcMap actually required the connection.
Alas, with our recent budget-saving move to the home of my partner’s parents we’ve entered the world of unreliable, low-speed, satellite internet connection. It took nearly a week of being here before we even managed to get the router communicating with the modem to permit more than one computer in the house access to the internet at once, and now that we’ve got that working, the connection is still not reliable enough to keep my remote connection to the geology department engaged sufficiently for ArcMap to open. I didn’t realize just how often I use that program, until I couldn’t! We are currently attempting to obtain a reliable, high-speed, internet connection for the house. But we are located fully 25 minutes drive away from the capitol city of this state, in a country neighborhood where each house has six or more acres of fields, vineyards, and/or horse paddocks to call its own, and the phone company is proving less than helpful in providing the connection to such a “distant” location. Perhaps in the New Year I’ll get the reliable connection I need. In the mean time, I think I’ll go pick some raspberries from the garden and rejoice that not everything in my life requires technology.