Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of December 13th, 2009

  • I love going to bed tired, and waking up refreshed. However, that's not what just happened. #
  • I have to choose between spending half an hour biking or 30 minutes waiting for the bus, in snowy, icy -10°C. #
  • Enraged by how the financial "services" industry treats the people who trust it with their savings. Like marks at a traveling carnival. #
  • Phantom winds rushing down from the mountains with no warning, shaking the house, setting off windchimes in all directions. #
  • Ah well. So much for managing upwards. #
  • Funny, I didn't see anybody else out cycling on the Bear Creek Path tonight. At midnight. In -10°C weather. Bonus: frostnip. #
  • Rainy SF day w/ Sally. Pie for breakfast, then worms & compost, laundry & coffee, finance & tech consulting. Now time for dinner & a movie. #
  • Bus driver made fun of me for chasing the bus (they come every 5 min) and I discovered timed BART transfers. Good mass transit is great. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of December 6th, 2009

  • I am reminded of Plutarch's dialog between Pyrrhus and Cineas on the eve of their invasion of Italy. #
  • Is it me, or did the Google Toolbar just get real uppity? #
  • Cormac McCarty joined the Santa Fe Institute at the invitation of Murray Gell-Mann. Who would have guessed? #
  • Full moon light on fresh fallen snow. #
  • I'm gonna go waaay out on a limb here and bet that my dissertation gets rejected for some kind of formatting minutia. #
  • Grad school sez: "Your submission is complete". #
  • Alas, submission does not actually appear to be complete. #
  • In theory, I could be stoned out of my gourd on mescaline from now to Dec. 18th, and still get a PhD. But I should ask my attorney, Raoul. #
  • It would be great if every time the government wanted to have a war, it had to levy a special transparently itemized tax to pay for it. #
  • Currently hating my phone. iSync Plugins from Nova Media is borken. So now I have no contacts. Great. And I *paid* for this software. #
  • Somebody should start a customer owned health insurance company, modeled after Vanguard's ownership structure. #
  • I am weak and foolish. Having lost all the contacts in my phone, I am lusting with no real justification for an iPhone or a Droid. #
  • I'm older than I've ever been. And now I'm even older. Let the catharsis begin: http://bit.ly/8oU0GH #
  • Looking forward to a few more days of the swirling crystalline white stuff. #
  • Once again, disappointed by AT&T. No iPhone upgrade for me. #
  • Registered for a climate change science/media communication workshop at #AGU09 w/ Matt Nisbet: http://bit.ly/7NCqVU #
  • Somehow @gregmortenson (http://ikat.org) manages to educate 22,000 students each year for the annual cost of 5 US soldiers in Afghanistan. #
  • in SF 12/11-12/20 for #AGU09. I could probably linger for a month and not see everyone I know, so call/email if you want to hang out. #
Categories
journal

I’m older than I’ve ever been

In class Peter Goldreich once said “You don’t get smarter in grad school. You just get older.”  I don’t know if I agree entirely, but there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere.  It is a strange kind of scientific hazing ritual.  An induction and an indoctrination.  Highly skilled and intelligent people, doing difficult technical work, for years, earning something close to minimum wage.  Why?  Is it for a chance to play in the tenure-track tournament, with the odds stacked 10 to 1 against you?  If you win, you can study anything you like (as long as there’s funding…).  Is it because we think having a PhD will get us somebody’s respect?  Whose?  Our parents?  Our advisors?  Society at large?  It’s certainly not because we’re seeking power or riches.  That way lies law school, or the dreaded MBA.  Is it because we don’t know how to do anything else?  Because our self esteem has been so entangled with school for so long?  Because we are a people addicted to understanding?  What fraction of PhD students finish feeling good about themselves, or in love with their research?  Or even learning in general?

The Thesis Cell
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of November 29th, 2009

  • It takes about as much energy to make a disposable aluminum roasting pan as it does to roast a turkey. #
  • making a chipotle quinoa stuffing for the 10kg bird in the oven, which only cost $6.88. Ah, loss-leaders, how do I love thee. #
  • Craig Venter reminds me a little of Hunter S. Thompson. A gonzo scientist. Oh yeah? F**k you. I'm gonna sequence myself anyway. #
  • The lower half of my face is covered with a paste of henna, lemon juice, and sugar, and my head is wrapped in plastic bags and tape. #
  • Arrrr, redbeard be bikin' down to the Museum of Natural History to learn about Genghis Khan, pirate king o' the central Asian steppes. #
  • The natural history museum was further away than expected… and the night a bit colder, and the bike routes could really be signed better. #
  • Going to climb Mt. Falcon in the late November sun. #
  • Just watched "Sleep Dealer". We need more thoughtful near-future sci-fi from the developing world. #
  • I'm thankful that I'm still interested in learning new and difficult things, despite my excessive schooling. #
  • Judge if you want. We are all going to die. I intend to deserve it. #
  • Happy Buy Nothing Day! Do your part to help ensure the so-called global "economy" remains in shambles. Yeah, Dubai, that means you, too. #
  • very sad to realize that the last 7 years of my life have been pretty much a complete waste. #
  • Things could be worse. Things can always be worse. However, I'm starting to wonder whether or not they can ever be better. #
  • Why does it always seem like I've got 7 +/- 2 things to do? #
  • Found a middle-eastern grocery in Denver near the Platte River bike trail. Also, I need some more pants. #
  • Got some tasty olives, some pants, and a 42 mile bike ride. #
  • English is wonderfully flexible. I'm going to try using xor when I mean exclusive or, and just plain 'or' for the and/or case. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of November 22nd, 2009

  • Adopted Uighur little sister conscientiously morning-stomping on my bedroom ceiling, not realizing I've actually been up since 3:30am. #
  • If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. cf.: graduate school http://bit.ly/1LgMaA #
  • Thesis beard is beginning to impinge on the lower portion of my peripheral vision. Must mean I'm almost done. #
  • Feeling inexplicably calm looking forward to Friday. Fixing those errors helped. I guess mostly I just feel like the die is already cast. #
  • Trying to get a whole PhD into one 45 minute talk is just as ridiculous as trying to get a whole paper into a 10 minute AGU talk. #
  • In 24 hours I'll either have a PhD, or be a raving unemployed homeless person. Or maybe both. #
  • Finished making my presentation a whole 3 hours early. I could even like, practice it. Or revise it. Or something. #
  • The only question now is, who wants to play Doctor? #
  • Checked out a new diving location, in the natural refrigerator that is Colorado November. Got 20lbs of fresh produce, mostly greens. #
  • Defended PhD wearing Hunter S. Thompson's Gonzo Fist emblem. Gonna read his Fear and Loathing on the 1972 Campaign Trail now. #
  • I love libraries: Energy at the Crossroads, Intro to Bioinformatics Algorithms, Ghost Wars, Biological Networks, Sleeping w/ the Devil, etc. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of November 15th, 2009

  • Ahhhh. The thesis draft is really done. Now on to fixing known errors, reading background papers, and making a talk. But first, a nap. #
  • Silly me. I thought *writing* the thesis would be the hard part. Never offer to give someone a 136 page hardcopy of anything. #
  • I can't remember the last day I didn't drink any coffee. #
  • Rode 30 miles in a warm November sun to turn in the paper copies of my thesis. BIkes make me happy. #
  • Mark Twain's "War Prayer": http://bit.ly/3z901Y #
  • Getting plenty of sleep is soooo nice. Being woken up in the middle of a dream fight scene with Ed Norton & a fireplace poker, not so much. #
  • Having my new prescription spex makes me wish I had Rx sunglasses. #
  • Sometimes it is surprisingly difficult just to remember to breathe. #
  • Ahh, fixed my sign error. Nice consistent story, both techniques playing well together. Everyone lives happily ever after now, right? #
  • I see no way to differentiate the 9/11 prosecutions from show trials. #
  • Anybody have a favorite bioinformatics text, good for someone with more background on the info side than the bio? #
  • I just applied to the Personal Genome Project. They probably have enough young white males already though: http://www.personalgenomes.org #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of November 8th, 2009

  • A good holy book is like a good horoscope: given the right cues and context, it can mean whatever you, or your dear leader, need it to mean. #
  • Anybody interested in going to the CO Environmental Film Festival, Fri or Sat night in Golden? Help me celebrate turning my thesis in! #
  • Road raging anti-cyclist Dr. Thompson of Mandeville Canyon guilty on all 7 counts, & held w/o bail pending sentencing: http://bit.ly/3AWHVB #
  • Yet again I find the problem I'm working on has already been considered, and deemed difficult, for >100yrs. Thanks, Richard Dedekind. #
  • I do have to wonder what greens will turn to next year if COP15 flops, as seems likely. Just how dark are we? http://endciv.com #
  • I think @longnow should host a debate between @AlexSteffen and Derrick Jensen. Or maybe it should be a gladiatorial death match… #
  • Tired. Irish cream and milk. Steamy shower. No more graphs tonight please. #
  • I'm obviously not going to be doing any sleeping any time soon. #
  • This is not going to be a disaster. This is not going to be a disaster. This is not going to be a disaster. This is going to be a disaster. #
  • Four hours of sleep, but then I took a shower, so I can't be tired, right? #
  • Why am I such a loser sometimes. #
  • Regained perspective over dinner. At least I'm not going to be deported in January. Making a thesis triage list helped too. #
  • wooziness setting in. brain shutting down involuntarily. #
  • Even this is not in my written up yet! #
  • Gorgeous warm autumn day in Boulder. Too bad my thesis is not about looking out the library window at girls as they walk and bike past. #
  • Now if only it were a week ago, I'd only be half a day behind schedule. #
  • I feel like science is this beautiful thing, and I'm puking all over it. Thank goodness I usually feel better after puking. #
  • 50% of all US food is thrown away. Producing that waste requires 30% of all US water, or as much as all non-agricultural water use combined. #
  • If 1% of the food LA grocery stores send to landfills was rescued it would feed every hungry person in LA. Go see Dive! http://bit.ly/1MNsFr #
  • Am I being neurotic, or does my thesis really suck? Hard to decide. I guess that's what the defense is for. Here's hoping for neurotic. #
Categories
journal

Doctoral Leaflet

It seems a bit of Vaudeville is still lingering around the Academe…

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
of
THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER


DISSERTATION DEFENSE
of

Zane A. Selvans

FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY


Date/Time: 2:30pm, Friday, 20th November, 2009
Bldg./Rm: Benson Earth Sciences (BESC) 380

Examining Committee Members:

  • Karl Mueller
  • John Wahr
  • Robert Pappalardo
  • Bruce Jakosky
  • John Spencer

OUTLINE OF STUDIES

Major Field: Geological Sciences

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

A descendant of Dust Bowl migrants, Zane grew up near Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He left as soon as humanly possible, and got his BS in Computer Science at the Caltech in Pasadena. After a brief stint working in Silicon Valley (which unfortunately did not result in any kind of dot-com stock option fortune), he returned to Caltech via sea kayak to work with Mars Global Surveyor data, mapping Mars’ south polar layered deposits. While he has been a student at CU Boulder since the fall of 2002 you may not have seen much of him lately, because in early 2006 his wife and advisor both moved to Caltech/JPL, and like a long period comet, he slid back down into that place’s deep potential well to be with them. Next year, Zane intends to spend a lot of time on his bicycle.

THESIS

Time, Tides and Tectonics on Icy Satellites
Faculty Advisor: Karl Mueller

ABSTRACT

In the outer solar system, we cannot directly use the radiometric dating techniques widely applied in terrestrial geology. We also lack the detailed understanding of the correspondence between crater size-frequency distributions and absolute ages that the radiometric dating of lunar samples has given us in the inner solar system. Additionally, many geologically interesting surfaces on the icy satellites are insufficiently cratered to allow us to infer precise relative ages. Thus it is desirable to find other ways to construct geological chronologies that function well in the outer solar system. In this work I develop two techniques.

The first compares the linear tectonic features covering Jupiter’s moon Europa to modeled tensile fractures resulting from tidal stresses due to the non-synchronous rotation (NSR) of the satellite’s decoupled, icy, lithospheric shell. The amount of shell rotation required to align a feature with the stress field resulting from NSR is used as a proxy for time. This translation is potentially convolved with a phase lag between the tidal potential and the stresses it induces, resulting from the shell’s partially viscous response to the NSR forcing. The geography of individual lineaments is found to be no more consistent with NSR stresses than chance would predict, however, the ensemble of global lineaments displays a non-uniform apparent rate of lineament formation throughout the time period recorded by the surface. This non-uniformity may be explained either by steady state fracture formation, activity, quiescence and erasure, or by a transient episode of tectonics.

The second technique encodes the myriad superposition relationships evident between Europa’s tectonic features as a directed graph enabling algorithmic analysis. The observed superposition relationships are generally insufficient to construct complete stratigraphic stacks, but we can calculate the degree to which they corroborate or contradict another hypothesized order of formation. We find that they tend to corroborate the hypothesis that the lineaments are tensile fractures due to NSR stresses.

Together these results offer cautious support for the idea that Europa’s shell rotates independently of its silicate interior, and demonstrate techniques useful in comparing tectonic features on other icy satellites to hypothesized mechanisms of formation.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of November 1st, 2009

  • Having sampled all of the options, I can say there really is something special about getting up with the sun. #
  • I have a hard time imagining a modern day Smaug curled up on a pile of mutual funds, futures contracts, ETFs and CDOs. #
  • It's surreal to see photos of someone I biked across Europe with in 1994, in the Guatemalan city I studied Spanish in 2005. Ah, technology. #
  • 6-12" of snow last night, another 24-36" predicted. Glad my commute is currently about 1 meter. #
  • AUGH. It's time for good enough to be. #
  • Snow still falling. Zane still freaking out. #
  • Going to sleep. Hopefully fewer dreams tonight about my thesis, and more about, well, just about anything else would be fine. #
  • Having trouble maintaining momentum. Or maybe it's momenergy. #
  • This weekend I finish writing up the GSNs, next week I try to get the whole pile-o-crap tied together. Maybe what I need is a rug… #
  • I probably shouldn't be cursing at the computer this much at this late date. #
  • In my own personal hell, I will be plagued by an eternity of mysterious algebraic sign errors. #
  • Stomatopod eyes are beyond awesome: 12 color channels, IR to UV, polarizing (full Stokes parameters) and *each* eye has trinocular vision. #
Categories
tweets

Tweets for the week of October 25th, 2009

  • Harvard just paid $500M to get out of an interest rate swap. I wonder how Caltech's parking structure CEFA bond swaps are doing. #
  • Pi Time! #
  • Starting to write up the chapter on geographic superposition networks. Should have lots of pretty plots. #
  • Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy Zane, he wants a drink of coffee, so he waits and waits and waits and waits and waits for it to rain. #
  • Am I really going to be done in a month? The idea seems almost surreal. #
  • I'll probably never really get used to snow. That's okay though. It's more fun for it always to seem like magic. #
  • Sometimes de-bugging seems to turn into re-bugging. #
  • Sliding forward in time, I'm phase shifted by pi. #
  • The lights and the computer and I (~350W total) can keep this basement room plenty warm, just about until it starts snowing outside. #
  • somehow I imagine that getting old, mentally, will feel a lot like staying up for too long. #
  • I'm going to reward myself for all this hard work by getting the mail and going to the bathroom. Ahh, luxury. #
  • 21 hrs up, 2 hrs down, 4 hrs up, 6 hrs down. Six lousy hours? That's all I can muster? Are you kidding?!? #
  • Texas emits more CO2 than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. #
  • Apparently in Denmark "going postal" has a slightly different meaning… http://bit.ly/293rNM #
  • You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole. #
  • Running lineament statistics. Making coffee. Wearing a silly hat. Wishing my redheaded niece a happy birthday. #
  • Holy crap, I made something that actually looks Gaussian. Best. Distribution. Evar. #
  • OMFG, I have conclusive support of NSR from the GSNs. #
  • Colorado Bohemian Foundation http://bit.ly/3oLQhr is matching donations to the Central Asia Institute http://bit.ly/2BWwdM up to $500k #
  • Being emotionally bound to the outcome of a research problem is much simpler than being attached to people. It's also really lame. #