Posts treating: "words"
Thursday, 30 June 2016
The sun was almost sinking into the sea, since the coast is oriented a bit too much towards the south. I'm in Southern California for family matters (of a happier kind), and had the opportunity to watch the sunset from out on Balboa Pier. It's always fascinating to watch waves from the back side, and they were particularly rough tonight. It was beautiful. I can't help but hear the words of
May 31 2016: Today was an exciting day for the School of Rock participant because it involved the two words that every student lives for during a school year: FIELD TRIP. Yes, we were stepping out of the classroom and into the field for a day of hiking and exploring the geology of Cape Town.
read
So I came up with this challenge for myself and possibly others. Write a story in 100 words or less. Make it meaningful and concise. Some writers like to take their time and write a lot, but I personally like it when things are concise, yet meaningful at the same time. Here we go.
A hungry
Carnoferox and I would like to announce that we are holding a writing contest. Your entry has to be a blog post and a Who vs. Who scenario. Remember that only dinosaurs who were contemporaries (lived in the same time and place) are eligible to fight. Your entry has to be at least 400 words,
Around hydrothermal vents, many animals have evolved specific relationships with bacteria that use the chemicals in venting fluid to make sugar, providing them with the nutrition the animals need to survive (as mentioned in the previous blog). These bacteria are often actually found inside the animals’ cells. In other words, the animals are essentially farming their own food inside their
I just finished an interesting book with a provocative title. How to Clone a Mammoth, by Beth Shapiro, is a readable, sober assessment of de-extinction, the idea of bringing back extinct species through a variety of techniques. She defines very clearly at the outset that the purpose of de-extinction is ecological – to restore critical / desired organism/organism or organism/abiotic environment interactions in ecosystems. It is, in other words, a
The team aboard the JOIDES Resolution just finished at their first coring site off southern Africa. The first results? "Awesome." Sidney Hemming describes the process in words and
Cambriangirl - Science! Geology! Writing! [2015-11-15 16:45:00]
recommend this post
(634 visits)
I’m fifteen days into NaNoWriMo, and have written twenty one thousand words. That’s a world record for me, although I won’t hide that I’m jealous of people who have already broken fifty thousand. Yes, I am a little bit behind target, but I’ve had a rather demoralising experience. Not because of any incidents in real
A lovely passage from the 19th century astronomer John Herschel's letter to geologist Charles Lyell quoted in Darwin: The Life Of A Tormented Evolutionist:
Words are to the Anthropologist what rolled pebbles are to the Geologist- Battered relics of past ages often containing within them indelible records capable of intelligible interpretation- and when we see what amounts of change 2000
I wish I could put words together this well. Frank Bruni’s California,Camelot and Vaccines in the NY Times today is worth the price of a Times subscription by itself. A snapshot below, but read it
Seen on the door to the Hawaii Volcano Observatory Library on my last
A few days ago I saw an announcement about what3words, a new startup which claims to have invented the simplest way to communicate a location. This statement forced me to have a closer look into their new coordinate system, because to communicate a location systematically with words isn’t easy. In order to organize venues or other meeting places, we’re often talking about locations and geographic places. A popular way is it to announce street corners to define meant places. the idea [...]
Any researcher can attest to the fact that a scientific figure is worth more than a thousand words. Rarely do we take a step back to consider the inherent artistry in the figures created to convey the
It seems like nearly every year a new book, film, or television program comes out featuring the long-dead seaway that covered most of the central part of North America back in the late Cretaceous. Invariably they have cameos featuring Xiphactinus, Cretoxyrhina, Protosphyraena, and even the "bait fish" Gillicus and Enchodus. They have mosasaurs, pterosaurs and even sea turtles. If you didn't follow the science closely, you'd understandably figure that's about all that lived in that shallow [...]
"We are stuck" are the words that nobody on a scientific drilling expedition ever wants to hear but this is what happened to us today as we were trying to reenter our hole. It seems that the unstable sands collapsed in and trapped our pipe on the way back to the bottom of the hole.
read
Image by Arthur Anker
AMPHIPODS! What are they? Small, very diverse crustaceans that occur all over the world in marine, freshwater and even terrestrial habitats. They are distinctive in that their bodies are laterally compressed, in other words, their bodies are "taller" than they are wide.
There's a bewildering diversity of them with over 9500 species known.
Most of them are pretty tiny
I’ve decided to bring back the long-lost “Geology Word of the Week” posts in 2015. For those of you who don’t know, for a few years I regularly posted about a geological word every week. These posts included a brief definition (written by me) of the word and then some additional information and pictures. However, starting in 2012 I stopped posting these words regularly. I was quite busy in 2012 because
I have epilepsy. For most of the last four years, that has been characterized by sudden, brief bouts of intense depression and the temporary inability to speak (or even to recall words and names in my head). If I was in mid-sentence, I would be unable to finish it. Needless to say, this posed problems for
Blogging has certainly given me some perspective on life at newspapers or internet news services. The title of a piece is all you've got to convince people to click through. I am constantly irritated beyond words at the clickbait out there: "She thought no one was looking. You won't believe what happened next". That kind of thing. And yet I couldn't help it. How many ways can you say a
I came across this interesting article the other day: Pop Culture Mentions Of Global Warming Have Plummeted Since 2007which leads people to a program where users are able to put in a set of words and see how many times they have been mentioned in movies (and in various other mediums) in the past 100 years (or so). This got me thinking about how references to geology and paleontology have varied through time. The following graphs are made with a 2 year rolling average of the points, [...]