Yesterday was the day we talked about dinosaurs and pterosaurs in Historical Geology. Accordingly, I dressed for the occasion:

(That is not me, by the way.) The t-shirt is by the very cool company Squidfire. I recommend you check out this design and their many other cool images on cool clothing at their website. Lily bought me this one - a gift much appreciated!

Labels: dinosaurs, fossils, gear, teaching

Last night, I took a group of Honors students to the United States Geological Survey's National Center in Reston, Virginia, for a public lecture by Bruce Molnia about Alaska's disappearing glaciers. The talk was all well & good, but a nice little surprise came afterwards, when Jared noticed a display in the lobby of the Dallas Peck Memorial Auditorium:

That's the classic "ancient Chinese seismograph" featured in so many introductory geology textbooks as the lead-in to their chapters on earthquakes and seismology. Pretty cool to see it in the flesh brass.

The way it works is that each of the little dragon heads projecting off the urn had a little brass ball in its mouth. If it got shaken by an earthquake, that little brass ball would pop out and into the waiting mouth of the little brass frog down below. The frogs aligned with the wave propogation direction would be the ones to be "fed." This implication of the temblor's source direction would allow authorities to direct scouts and relief operations to the appropriate corner of the dynasty.

Neat!

Labels: alaska, earthquakes, gear, glaciation, nova, rept, teaching

Over the summer the rest of the geology department and I moved into our new home, the Shuler Building (CS) on the Annandale campus of NOVA. As part of our refurbishment, I got a nice new display case which is prominently displayed in the hallway of the second floor of CS, just down from our lab. For its inaugural display, I put together a collection of photos and samples from this summer's Rockies course. I think it looks pretty good:



If you're on campus, stop by and check it out!

Labels: gear, geology, montana, nova, teaching

Coyote Crossing alerted me to this awesome-looking application for the iPhone: a field guide to the birds of North America. On my way back home to the apartment last night, I parked my car in Mt. Pleasant and was walking up the hill to my building, when I saw two of my neighbors pointing a flashlight into the woods (yes, we have woods in DC). "What have you got?" I asked. It was an owl, and they obligingly pointed it out to me. I identified it as a barred owl, and explained the field marks that would allow them to distinguish it from our other big eastern owl, the great horned owl. As we talked, the barred owl flushed and silently swooped through the tree branches and into the darkness. Anyhow, if my neighbors had the iBird Explorer Plus, they wouldn't have needed to rely on an ex-ornithologist walking by at that moment. Pretty cool!

Labels: birdies, dc, gear, tech

My mom recently had her attic renovated, which meant that I had to go up there and remove all the stuff I'd stashed up there when it was just free storage. Rummaging through that memorobilia this week, I found my old boy scout merit badge sash.

It's pictured here, both front and back.

The merit badges are the little circular patches on the front side. As you can see, I earned 28 of those puppies before I got my Eagle Scout award and retired from scouting. They are: swimming, cooking, leatherwork, canoing, mammal study, citizenship in the community, lifesaving, rowing, reptile study, basketry, nature study, environmental awareness (now apparently called environmental science), pioneering, citizenship in the nation, fire safety, first aid, wilderness survival, camping, art, pottery, citizenship in the world, personal management, communications, orienteering, woodworking, soil and water conservation, personal management, and forestry. (Notice that geology is missing...)

On the back of the sash, you can see patches from the Goshen Scout Camps in Virginia, the Philmont axe, the Arrow of Light (the only cub scout award that can be worn on the boy scout uniform), a patch showing that I swam a mile, an Order of the Arrow lodge patch, another commemorative patch from Philmont Scout Ranch, and my Boy Scouts of America Lifeguard patch.

Scouting was really good to me. It gave me a lot of confidence in my skills as an outdoorsman, and gave me a lot of great experiences in nature and in society. I doubt I'd be who I am today without thos formative experiences. Though I don't agree with everything that the BSA stands for today, I think that on the balance they do a great service for our communities and our boys.

Any other scouts out there? Any of you earn the geology merit badge?

Labels: action, art, gear

I've had a trusty pair of Nalgene water bottles for many years. One of the things I do is collect stickers when I travel, and then slap them on the outside of these water bottles. Here, for example, is one side of the two bottles:


Here's the other side:


The full record of stickers is:

Recreation and Parks program at NOVA
Wilderness Medical Associates (the group that trained me in WFA last May)
Northern Arizona University Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation
Yellowstone National Park
Sport Rock, a climbing gym in Alexandria, Virginia
Mammoth Cave National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park
Gimme! Coffee, Ithaca, New York
Apple computer
Red Cross' "Give Blood" campaign (I cut up this sticker & distributed its bits across the bottles)
Alaska flag (from the ferry through the Inside Passage)
Pickle Barrel sandwich shop, Bozeman, Montana
Vieques, Puerto Rico
"Certified Organic" from a bunch of bananas
The Red Hand of Ulster (from my time in Northern Ireland)
Puri Saron, a resort in Lombok, Indonesia (I didn't actually go to this one; my friend Kenny did.)
British flag
State Farm Insurance (reflective!)
Mauna Kea observatories (Hawai'i)
KZMU public radio in Moab, Utah
Thyangboche Monastery, Nepal (I didn't go to this one, either. Thanks Kenny!)
"MtP" in an oval: Mt. Pleasant, a DC neighborhood I used to live in, just north of my current digs

There's a lot of personal history there, a sort of visual record of the places I've been. Trouble is, apparently the water bottles themselves were poisoning me. At least that's what they started saying last year; specifically that water bottles containing a substance called Bisphenol A (commonly referred to as "BPA") were not to be trusted. Though I haven't read the studies, they are reported to have found a significant correlation between high levels of BPA and heart disease, diabetes, and high levels of some liver enzymes. Plus, people keep nagging me about giving up my old water bottles, and I'm getting tired of inventing excuses for continuing to drink out of them. So yesterday, I officially retired my old sticker-covered bottles, and bought two new (BPA-free) Nalgenes instead:


You'll notice that I switched color schemes and mouth types (the new bottles have a narrow mouth). And you'll also notice that I've put my first sticker in place on the new bottles: from the Tambopaxi Lodge in Cotopaxi National Park in Ecuador, where I stayed for two nights the week before last. (If you're ever in Cotopaxi, you must stay there: It's really excellent.)

Background fabric for all images is a new tablecloth I bought at a craft market in Quito (for $2).

The old bottles will be hung above the mantle of the library hearth at the Bentley Estate, in commemoration of their usefulness and long history.

Labels: art, ecuador, gear, travel

Labels: gear, tech, tourism, travel