Heh! I love it.

Labels: art, blogs, evolution, history, humor, websites

My post on Silver Spring geologizing caught the eye of NOVA Geoblog reader and geocacher James R., who was inspired to initiate a new geocache site on Northwest Branch. You can check out James' work here. ...And you can check out the rocks by visiting the site in person!

Labels: geomorphology, maryland, piedmont, rivers, websites

After yesterday's post on a new feature I found on the USGS earthquakes site, reader Tony Edger asks, "After exploring the USGS website and elsewhere without much success, I am hoping you might steer me to a description of how to read a seismicity cross section. " He was referring to these images:

So here's how this works: the top image is a map. It gives you a "bird's eye" perspective on earthquake locations at the subduction zone near Samoa. It shows you the epicenters (location on the earth's surface above a quake's actual location, called its "focus" or "hypocenter") of many earthquakes, along with Tuesday's big quake, shown with a star. The thick red line is the position of the trench, a bathymetric expression of the subduction zone. The epicenters are color-coded for their depth. Orange and yellow are shallow; green and blue are medium depth; and purple and red are the deepest. Notice that they make a sort of "rainbow" pattern, with the shallowest quakes in the east, and the deepest quakes in the west. This is "looking down" on the subducting slab: it's like we're able to "see" the subducting slab as it descends into the mantle.

The lower image is the cross-section. It gives you a "gopher's eye" perspective on the same data. A cross section is drawn along the line A-A' on the map. This is conceptually slicing the Earth open along that line, then removing half, and looking sideways at the remaining half. Note that the A-A' line is now along the top of the figure, representing the surface of the earth. Along the horizontal axis is horizontal distance, measured in kilometers. Along the vertical axis is depth, also measured in kilometers. The two axes are not drawn to exactly the same scale, but pretty close. In other words, 100 km of horizontal distance is approximately equal to 100 km of vertical distance (depth). The same data are plotted, or at least the subset of the map's data which happen to fall on that particular line, A-A'.

With this new perspective, a side-view, what do we see? Well, there's the star, which shows the depth of the quake that triggered all this discussion, and a whole bunch of other (historical) earthquakes. Now, instead of the epicenter being plotted, we're getting a more robust sense of the hypocenter (or focus). Note that the earthquakes are being generated in a big swath, starting at the surface in the northeast, and dipping down deeper and deeper to the southwest. This line of seismic activity reflects the jerking passage of the subducted slab of oceanic lithosphere. As it plunges down, it generates lots of shaking. This zone of seismicity was first described (independently) by two scientists, Kiyoo Wadati and Hugo Benioff: in their honor, it is referred to as the Wadati-Benioff zone. (Wikipedia has more) Their realization is our gain: we can "see" the subducted plate diving at an angle of 30 to 40 degrees. That's what's so cool about this:

Something that no human will ever directly observe is "visible" to us because we can pinpoint the three-dimensional location of thousands of earthquakes. These bumps and jolts reveal the position of the bumper and jolter: the subducting plate!

Labels: analogies, art, earthquakes, plate tectonics, websites

Perusing the USGS page on yesterday's magnitude ~8 earthquake in Samoa, I found a new feature that I had not previously seen on these earthquake data pages: a cross-section! Check it:

The star gives the location of yesterday's temblor some regional context. This is a super-cool visualization of a subduction zone (in this case, the Pacific Plate subducting beneath the Indo-Australian Plate). I'll be using this image in my upcoming "earthquakes" lecture in Physical Geology. What a beautiful way of visualizing the plunge of a slab of oceanic lithosphere!

Labels: art, earthquakes, plate tectonics, websites

This is a new, useful tool: an online map that can guide you to rough information about local geology, and then to detailed geologic maps. The National Geologic Map Database appears to be a joint project between the USGS and the Association of American State Geologists. Here's what it looks like when you go to the website:




You can then close the little "About" information tab in the lower right:



Next, grab the screen and scroll to an area that you're interested in:



Double-click or use the "zoom" lever at upper left to zoom in:



Open the "Map Unit Info" tab to select individual map units and learn more about them:



After you do that, clicking anywhere in the map will bring up information about the rock units generally found in that area:



If you need more information, hover over the rock unit name in the "Map Unit Info" tab:



Close the "Map Unit Info" tab and open the "Map List" tab to get a list of all the USGS geologic maps available in your field of view:



Click on one of them to open up a red "footprint" on the map showing the area it covers:



An additional window will pop up with information about the map. Click on the number "2" in this new window to open the map itself:



It opens in a new tab, and is initially quite zoomed-out:



But you can zoom in, of course:



In fact, you can zoom in really far, until you start seeing pixels:



There are some design flaws in the interface, but overall, I think I'm willing to overlook them so I can get access to this sort of information. It strikes me as very, very useful: a rich dataset, waiting to be mined.

Labels: geology, maps, websites

After a post the other day, Michael wrote in to ask for clarification of "Pumpelly's Rule."

AGI defines Pumpelly's Rule thusly*: "The generalization that the axes and axial surfaces of minor folds of an area are congruent with those of the major fold structures of the same phase of deformation."

We saw some of this same idea expressed in yesterday's annotated photo series featuring parasitic folds on larger folded (and boudinaged) quartz veins. There were bigger folds there, and then those bigger folds were decorated with little parasitic folds. The idea behind Pumpelly's Rule is that you could get a sense of what the big folds are doing by looking at the little folds. But even more revealing than parasitic folds at the hinge area of a larger fold are the little folds that you sometimes see on the limbs of bigger folds.

Depending on the sense of the asymmetry of these folds, we call them either "S" or "Z" folds. The parasitic folds are more symmetrical towards the apex of the fold, but more asymmetrial along the limbs. Check out this diagram to see how small S-folds and Z-folds relate to the larger structure of the main fold. Blue arrows indicate the relative sense of shear on each limb of the main fold:


Pumpelly's Rule suggests that we don't need to see the whole picture to understand what's going on. Simply seeing the areas of the diagram highlighted in red are enough to give a sense of the bigger picture.

So how does that relate to this photo, which prompted the question?


Behind me in the photo, you can see an outcrop of the Cretaceous-aged Thermopolis Shale, exposed on Bridger Canyon Road, in the southern part of the Bridger Range, Montana. It has some sandstone layers in it. These sandstone layers, with their high color contrast against the surrounding black shale, record a series of lovely S-folds. The strata here dip moderately to the west. The S-folds relate the sense of shear on the larger structure of the Bridgers: they suggest that the bedding here is overturned, and that you're looking at the eastern side of a big north-south-striking anticline. In the southern Bridgers, therefore, the overall structure is an overturned anticline. Hiking west & uphill confirms this interpretation stratigraphically: as you go up, you go "back in time," encountering older and older strata: from the Thermopolis into the Kootenai, into Jurassic formations like the Morrison, the Swift, and the Rierdon.



Moral of the story: small observations can have large implications.

Raphael Pumpelly made this observation in 1894, presumably during his tenure as the head of the USGS New England Branch. Pumpelly sounds like he was an interesting guy, leading expeditions in Asia when that was a seriously sketchy prospect. In addition to his Rule, he is honored with a mineral named after him, pumpellyite.

* If you don't have a copy of AGI's Dictionary of Geological Terms, a good resource for looking things up online is this Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms sponsored by Hacettepe University in Turkey.

Labels: cretaceous, history, jurassic, montana, mountains, structure, websites

Bill McKibben on political conservatives and climate change. (Orion) - This addresses what I see as a fundamental contradiction in modern political discourse: the fact that a lot of "conservatives" aren't into conserving natural systems. It bugs me & McKibben both.

Weather vs. climate (Surprising Science, a Smithsonian blog)

The new Wooster Geologists blog, featuring some awesome imagery of the Canadian Rockies.

Some advice about finding the right geology grad program for you (from Christie at the Cape)

Labels: climate change, global warming, politics, websites

Very cool!

Here's my favorite... Or maybe this one? ...Or potentially this one? No, no: definitely this one.
Actually, this is pretty cool too. Sigh... too many to choose from. Too hard to pick just one fave...

Hat tip to Lee Allison!

Labels: structure, tech, websites

Working through my RSS feed from the past week when I was out of town: Sheesh, it sure builds up if you don't stay on top of it! A couple of notable items to share:

The geography of tapirs, from the Why Evolution Is True blog.

The declining emphasis on literacy in our society, from Alternet.

Women geoscientists who read and/or write blogs: complete this survey!, from Kim.

Outcropedia, a new web project to catalog and share key outcrops.

Climate change graph jam, from Tamino. (With follow-ups from Lockwood)

Skeptics & athiests visit the Creation Museum. (ABC News)

Labels: blogs, evolution, graphics, humor, maps, politics, websites

Following on this morning's video from Jason, here are a few more Rockies class final projects:

Ringing Rocks (Bob)
Lewis & Clark Caverns (Charlie)
Gros Ventre Landslide (Chris)

Labels: montana, nova, teaching, websites, wyoming

The June edition of the geoblog carnival The Accretionary Wedge is now live and ready for you to read. Where would geologist bloggers go if they had a time machine? Find out here!

Labels: blogs, geologic time, geology, websites

Just found out about a cool website with animations describing lots of geologic processes and products. The site is hosted by the University of Tromso, Norway, and most animations are available in both English and Norwegian. Check it out!

Hat tip to Pete Berquist for this link!

Labels: art, geology, teaching, websites

An impressive talk, and the film he alludes to was released yesterday, for free.

The movie HOME is available now, for free download. Enjoy!

Labels: environmental, meetings, movies, websites

...Doggone it. There are other rock stars out there.

Labels: geologists, science and society, websites

This weekend, I discovered a series on YouTube that debunks the claims of climate change denialists with reason and evidence (imagine that). I've watched three of the videos so far (average length ~6 minutes) and found them to be accurate and effective. If you're interested, click on over to start watching.

Labels: climate change, websites

A computational search engine? Holy cow.

You have got to check this out. (Wait for it to load, then watch the introductory video.) This appears to be a vision of the future for folks who are interested in data.

Hat tip to Babak for this alert.

Labels: tech, websites

Former student Stef sent me links to these videos over the weekend. It's a three-part series of Jake Lowenstern, the scientist-in-charge at Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, talking about Yellowstone and the work his team does there.

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:


Thanks Stef!

Labels: volcano, websites, yellowstone

NASA's Earth Observatory runs an invaluable public service with its "Image of the Day" series. Now they've got a decade's worth of images, and they want to know which of 50 finalists you think is the best. Go and vote (so hard to choose!), and on April 29, they will reveal the winner.

My personal choice? I'll bet you think it looks familiar... It's this one:

Labels: contest, satellite imagery, websites

Yesterday, e-mailing the link to Cornell professor Rick Allmendinger's stereonet software to my Structural Geology students, I stumbled across Dr. Allmendinger's excellent collection of photos online. There are some spectacular shots there; worth spending a few minutes ogling-time. Here's my favorite.

Labels: art, structure, websites

Follow-up to an earlier "you must see this" post.

Labels: websites

The Geological Society of Washington now has a Wikipedia page, thanks to society historian Jeff Grossman (USGS). Check it out; add to it.

Labels: gsw, websites

While completing an Amazon impluse buy triggered by the "Climate Sale" post at The Way Things Break, I noticed a clever book cover:

Whoever designed that deserves a bonus. Pretty clever.

Labels: art, blogs, books, climate change, global warming, websites

The perpetually-interesting site Oddee hosted a series of satellite images of the Earth today, including this one from April of last year. Somehow I missed it then...

The image, originally from NASA's Earth Observatory (one of the finest websites I know of for those interested in Earth science), shows a collection of volcanoes in the western Arabian Peninsula. A large version of the image (unlabeled) is here.

The most spectacular thing about this image is the color contrast between the volcanoes on the left versus the volcanoes on the right. This spectacular contrast is indicative of the rock types involved in each volcano. On the left, felsic lava was erupting, which cooled into the extrusive rock rhyolite. On the right, mafic lava was erupting, which cooled into the extrusive rock basalt. Mafic igneous rocks like basalt have a higher proportion of the elements iron, magnesium, and calcium as compared to elements like silicon, potassium, and sodium. Felsic igneous rocks are, in a sense, distillates of mafic source rocks: they are made of minerals that are more easily melted.

Also worth noting is the way the basalt overlaps the rhyolite between Jabal Bayda' and Jabal Abyad tells us that the rhyolite came first, and the basalt came second, an example of relative dating. And these insights can be gleaned from space... or more accurately, from our computer screens, depicting an image from space. That's pretty incredible, when you think about it.

FYI, here's what NASA's William Stefanov wrote as the caption for this exceptional image:

The western half of the Arabian Peninsula contains not only large expanses of sand and gravel, but extensive lava fields known as haraat (harrat for a named field). One such field is the 14,000-square-kilometer Harrat Khaybar, located approximately 137 kilometers to the northeast of the city of Al Madinah (Medina). The volcanic field was formed by eruptions along a 100-kilometer, north-south vent system over the past 5 million years. The most recent recorded eruption took place between 600-700 AD.

Harrat Khaybar contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this astronaut photograph. Jabal ("mountain" in Arabic) al Qidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows. Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite. While the 322-meter high Jabal al Qidr exhibits the textbook cone shape of a stratovolcano, Jabal Abyad is a lava dome; a rounded mass of thicker, more solidified lava flows. To the west (image top center) is the impressive Jabal Bayda'. This symmetric structure is a tuff cone, formed by eruption of lava in the presence of water. The combination produces wet, sticky pyroclastic deposits that can build a steep cone structure, particularly if the deposits consolidate quickly.

White deposits visible in the crater of Jabal Bayda' and two other locations to the south are sand and silt that accumulate in shallow, protected depressions. The tuff cones in the Harrat Khaybar suggest that the local climate was much wetter during some periods of volcanic activity. Today, however, the regional climate is hyperarid - little to no yearly precipitation - leading to an almost total lack of vegetation.

Labels: basalt, blogs, igneous, middle east, satellite imagery, volcano, websites

A high-definition eruption video is giving clues to how volcanoes work, as reported by WIRED magazine staff attending last week's AGU meeting. Turns out WIRED actually had a big AGU coverage site, which I only just noticed. Some good stuff there, though. Check it out.

Labels: agu, meetings, movies, volcano, websites

A quick shout out to Barbara at Kona, Hawai'i-based Guavabee for her recent accolades for NOVA Geoblog!

Labels: blogs, websites

Got a note yesterday from the website Regator.com, saying that they like NOVA Geoblog.

I've never heard of Regator before. Anybody else in the geoblogosphere getting such a note? There are several of us featured on their website under "geology": Lounge of the Lab Lemming, Hypo-theses, Harmonic Tremors, Andrew's Geology Blog at About.com, Olelog, Looking for Detachment, All My Faults Are Stress-Related, Magma Cum Laude, Oakland Geology, Arizona Geology, and Highly Allochthonous. (my apologies if I missed anyone)

Labels: blogs, geologists, websites

Recommendation: Check out today's ensemble of cool photos of Bolivia from the quirky site Oddee.com.

Labels: salt, south america, websites

Just got this on my RSS feed: a nice tutorial on sinkholes, from the website How Stuff Works.

Labels: caves, florida, geology, websites

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned AGI's Image Bank, and to illustrate it I picked three photos by Marli Miller (at the University of Oregon). Dr. Miller has written me and shared a link to a website she has put together to share high-resolution images of geological features and processes. Educators have permission to download the photos for teaching (non-commercial) use. And everyone can benefit from visiting to check out the many gorgeous images there.

Labels: art, teaching, websites

Four years ago, this website gave me some solace in looking at the breakdown between "red" and "blue" states. Now the author, Mark Newman, has performed some similar cartography on the 2008 presidential election results.

Labels: maps, politics, websites

My friend Mark Tyra (a College Park geology master, like myself) just alerted me to a cool site which explores the presence of meteorites preserved in Ordovician limestones in Sweden. Check it out!

Labels: limestone, meteors, sweden, websites

Several years ago, (former) NOVA student Theresa R. put together a nice little webpage with rock and mineral photos. My favorite part is a "gray rock quiz" at the end. Check it out and see how well you do!

Labels: igneous, metamorphism, minerals, nova, sediment, websites

Browsing through the October issue of EARTH magazine, I noticed an advertisement (p. 62) for a service offered by AGI (the nonprofit which publishes EARTH): they maintain an online image bank with 6000 images of earth science stuff. Pretty cool. While the website interface is a bit clunky, there are some real gems there. In the structure category, here's a few that caught my eye (all three by Marli Miller at the University of Oregon):

Labels: art, geology, structure, websites

A colleague mentioned this website to me yesterday: Voting America.

Maintained by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond (Virginia), the website makes us of so-called "cinematic maps" which show how geopolitical data have changed over time for the lower 48 United States.

The different maps tell stories over time; I think it's a cool display of interesting information. However, a major omission is the exclusion of Alaska and Hawaii as contributing U.S. states. Check it out; let me know what you think.

Thanks Judith G. for alerting me to it!

Labels: maps, politics, virginia, websites

The coolest research website you haven't seen is on Whitney Hagadorn's page at Amherst.

With undergraduate student Martha Buck, he's taken pyritized trilobite fossils from the upper Ordovician Frankfort Shale ("Beecher's Trilobite Beds") near Rome, New York, and X-rayed them. A series of X-ray images taken at different angles have been spliced together into a movie, which gives a real sense of the three-dimensional nature of the fossil, as well as insight into the finer details of its anatomy like legs and antennae, which don't often fossilize:

This is Triarthrus eatoni. You can replay the movie by refreshing the page on your Internet browser. The full suite of images is available on this page. Check it out!

Labels: fossils, ordovician, websites

I spent a fair bit of today updating the "Scientific Illustrations" page on my NOVA website. I'll be adding a few more images there in the next week or so, including another commissioned set, but I figured I'd mention it here now, since I've practically gone cross-eyed working on it all day.

Labels: art, nova, websites

This is pretty cool: The Periodic Table of Videos.
Thanks to Alan W. for the link!

Labels: websites

Last night I attended my first meeting of the Potomac Geophysical Society (PGS). The PGS meets on Thursday nights, and I usually can't make it because I teach on Thursday nights. (I do however attend meetings of the Geological Society of Washington quite regularly, but those are on Wednesday nights.) Now that the semester is over, I was able to make it to the final PGS meeting of the spring.

The meeting was held at Fort Meyer Officer's Club. It's on a military base adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, and before entering, my Prius had to be searched for bombs (as did all other civilian vehicles). The Officer's Club was about what you would expect, I guess -- kind of 1950's decor, elegant once. I noticed they had compact fluorescent light bulbs in all the sockets, which pleased me. PGS meetings consist of: (1) beer downstairs in the lounge, (2) dinner upstairs in the "Campaign Room," (3) business details, and (4) a talk by a guest speaker.

Last night's speaker was Bill Burton, from the USGS's volcano hazards and monitoring program. Bill's office will be launching a comprehensive new volcano website later this year, and he gave us a brief preview of its features in last night's talk. If you'd like a look for yourself, they have a beta version of the site online now.

Labels: gsw, meetings, pgs, volcano, websites

I've got a first draft of a book about "Geology Along the C&O Canal" sitting on my computer, and I decided to feed that text into the "Tag Crowd" generator. Why? Because every other geology blogger on the face of the Earth is doing it today, and I don't want to be left out. Also because it's more fun than grading my 47th Billy Goat Trail geology paper...

Labels: blogs, websites

You no longer have to trek over to Cambridge University in order to sift through Charles Darwin's notes and papers. Now, it's all online, for anyone to access. The papers are all scanned in, so you can see his actual handwriting, sketches, etc. The image above, for instance, is the first written instance of Darwin's questioning the orthodoxy that species are stable (unchanging) entities over time. If species aren't stable over time, that means they can change over time, and those three words can be condensed into one word: evolution.

Also, NPR did a piece on the material being made web-accessible.

Labels: evolution, websites

Here's a cool website that shows different maps of the world based on different data.

For instance, countries scaled to their population sizes:

Or here's the number of preventable deaths per country:

Build your own, or let me know if you find any other interesting ones...

Thanks to Anastassia for tipping me off on this one!

Labels: maps, websites

I just got an e-mail from Alan Watson, of Belfast, who read my article in Geotimes about geological travels in Northern Ireland. (This was one of my first topics on this blog, so newcomers may be interested in revisiting some of those old posts in the December and January archives.)

Anyhow, Alan clued me in to a new series from the BBC called "Blueprint," wherein they examine the natural history of the Emerald Isle. There's a cool interactive aspect to the website where you get a map of Ireland and a choice between "Plants/Animals," "Humans," and "Land." Choose "Land" and then select what you want to learn more about. Then you get a series of images, conversations, or videos about different aspects of Northern Ireland's geologic history. It's pretty cool -- there's a really enthusiastic dude (William Crawley) talking about the eruption of the Giant's Causeway, and also examinations of "the Chalk," graptolites, and granite gneiss. They even mention the Iapetus Ocean! (Which was a big focus of the field trip I led today!)

Labels: chalk, giants causeway, northern ireland, websites

What would it look like if Napolean Dynamite designed a website to promote energy conservation by switching out lightbulbs? Maybe something like the "Unscrew America" website. The navigation is a bit of a head-spinner, though. Take your Dramamine before you start moving that mouse around.

Labels: energy, environmental, websites

On an odd day, a post about an odd place:

Reading David Byrne's blog last week, I was alerted to the existence of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. When I went to this museum's website, I found a phantasmagoria of odd objects and pseudoscientific farce. It's not supposed to be real; it's supposed to be art. But... why "Jurassic?" Like a lot of McSweeney's works, it seems a little too clever for me to "get." Though not a geologist, Byrne seemed similarly perplexed: "the mixture of the real ... and the imaginary... is a bit of a head twister at first."

Labels: art, museums, websites

National Geographic has an article online about a cool new fossil from Spitsbergen, Svalbard (the Arctic island achipelago belonging to Norway). It's a plesiosaur, a marine reptile from the Jurassic period of geologic time. The front flipper is almost ten feet (3 m) long! The online article includes a picture gallery (the site, the fossils, and National Geographic's beautiful reconstructions).

Labels: fossils, norway, websites

A cool feature from Google Maps allows users to create individualized maps with content centered on specific locations. They call them "My Maps." This maps are then viewable in any HTML browser. Check out the "Earth As Art" demonstration map, or this "Oral Histories of Route 66" map for examples of the kind of stuff that you can do with "My Maps." You can also watch the video about how to create them.

It occurs to me that My Maps might be a good way to share geologic knowledge about outcrop locations. One thing that I found frustrating and limiting in my first few years of teaching was that there was no good single source to go to find out about relevant outcrops. It took time and experience to find out where the cool rocks were. Is it a good idea to put this information online in a publicly-accessible format so beginning instructors and interested students/amateurs can visit interesting outcrops? (I sure would have appreciated it four years ago!) Or does that run the risk of letting rockhounds and less-than-ethical geovandals onto previously-secret locations? Is there a benefit to the ancient barriers in outcrop-information flow? Is it better to pass this information on from wise elder to trusted neophyte?

Labels: google, maps, teaching, tech, websites

Today my piece for Geotimes on geological travels in Northern Ireland went up on their website. You can check it out here.

Labels: northern ireland, websites

The Maine Geological Survey maintains a terrific website with lots of information about the state's umpteen gazillion geological locales.

I feel like you could run a virtual field trip to Maine with the wealth of quality information and and images they have on this site. It's all well illustrated with lots of photos of structures and geologic contacts.

Learn more about the granite dikes at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse.

Or learn about where to find pillow basalts.

Or check out the giant purple crystals at Mount Apatite.

Or check out the distinctive dark feldspars of Maine's only "shonkinite".

It's all there, plus much, much more! Enjoy.

Labels: geology, maine, websites

I got an e-mail the other day from NOVA's VP for Instructional & Information Technology. He informed the faculty that later this month we'll have the option of putting our lectures & course materials up on iTunes, as part of something called iTunes U. Thomas Nelson Community College, another community college in Virginia, is already participating, as are a great many 4-year universities, including Ivy Leaguers.

I like this idea, but wonder how much time it's going to take. In general, I am super-duper excited over the advent of increased sharing online, and the decline of barriers to sharing. One of my pet peeves has been academic journals. Many are published by huge publishing companies like Elsevier, who make money off of them. For many years, scientists (and other scholars) who wanted to publish their research were forced to give up the copyright to their work and turn it over to one of these companies. Other scientists (or other scholars) who wanted to read about the research then had to pay OUTRAGEOUS subscription fees for these journals. I'm talking thousands of dollars a year -- far beyond the means of anyone who doesn't have a massive academic bureaucracy backing them up. To me, this seems massively unjust. It's the scientists who produce and consume the research; and publishing companies appear to make crazy profits off of all that stressful labor by others. ...Reminds me of slavery!

However, the Internet has the potential to change all that. With the net, anyone can publish their research online, and someone else on the other side of the world can access it 2 seconds later. With this, of course, comes the potential for lousy scholarship and fakery in research. At least that's the line touted by Elsevier and their ilk. Peer review is still essential, and it's going to be cool to see which journals get on board with the new reality. One I checked out recently is PLoS One. (They had a research article on really cool jellyfish fossils from the Cambrian, which is how I found out about them.) Somewhat more basic is the Journal of the Virtual Explorer, where my thesis advisor and some colleagues published an article (about kink banding) in 2004.

And while you're talking about the distribution of online information, it would be remiss not to mention Wikipedia. Wikipedia is HUGE among my students. I frequently use it myself as a handy reference. But handy doesn't mean accurate. Because anyone can edit the entries on Wikipedia, it's not guaranteed to be peer reviewed. A competitor, Citizendium, hopes to out-wiki Wikipedia with fully-refereed articles written by identifiable authors. WIRED explored their competing styles in their recent "Geekipedia."

More information about the iTunes U / online lecture phenomenon is available in a Washington Post article from the end of December.

Labels: teaching, tech, websites

The Smithsonian's department of paleobiology has a webpage devoted to displaying some art that was used in some old scientific papers on fossils. There's a beautiful variety of images there, like this frontal view of a Triceratops skull that was used to prepare a lithograph, which then appeared in a paper by legendary paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh (archnemesis of Edward Drinker Cope). Check out the full variety of art here.

Labels: art, fossils, smithsonian, websites

The "Astronomy Picture of the Day" web site showcases a different image of the Cosmos every day. Nice! I've got it on my RSS feed, so everyday when I log into my Google account, I've got an image like this one greeting me. Clicking on the image takes you to a larger version and a more detailed description of the pic.

Labels: astronomy, websites