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billion-year-old carbon
First day of class report: Every so often I wonder if I'm being unduly harsh when I complain, as is tradition, about school food. No more. Today, as my morning class is actually within the same county as a dining hall for once, I stopped to get a hot breakfast. At first, I though the dark specks in my oatmeal were bran, but I began to find it suspicious that they all had two identical little projections, like antennae. Eventually I dug out fifteen dead insects and one segmented larva-like thing before I got bored and quit. Normally, I don't object to a little supplemental protein with my meals, but with the prices they charge they could at least make an *effort*! Besides, there are a lot of vegetarians on campus.
My first class was a writing class. Specifically, a class in the PWP. You can imagine my amusement when I first saw that acronym all over the syllabus. Professor Apynys-rhymes-with-Japanese seems *interesting*; it may not be too painful a class. My second class was geology-- Sedimentation and Stratigraphy. Got to a typically great start when the instructor had the wrong room on the syllabus and was therefore unable to unlock the room; we ended up starting twenty minutes late. Sed/Strat is supposed to be a very fun class; lots of fieldwork and concrete information. The prof warned us that to do well in the class we'd have to be dropping a *lot* of acid. And he's supposed to be the less freaky of the two guys co-teaching it. Ah, I love geology.
Then school closed early due to icy conditions (which you don't get up there in the frozen North, so shut yer yap, whiners. q-:) so I didn't get a chance to take care of arguing with red tape. Darn.
Oh, and one thing learning geology does, it gives you a sense of scale. I watched "Closure" last night and Mulder kept mooning about billions-of--years-old starlight and it just felt *wrong* to me, so I did some quick calculations, and yup, he was wrong. The oldest light you're likely to see with bare eyes-- even if you aren't in the Land of Light Pollution-- is probably in the range of the Andromeda Galaxy, only 13 million years old. Before you get much beyond the Local Group, even if you could see such very dim specks, it's all been redshifted well beyond the visual range, and soon you get into cosmic background radiation. Mulder's been to Arecibo, he should know this, darnit! The whole universe is less than 15 billion years at last count, remember! That's not all that old, really. Less than three years for every human being currently alive. Substantially less than the total number of lj posts ever made. About how many operations your Pentium 4 performs in five seconds. Not very long at all, really. People talk about the vast time scales geologists work with, but I've been perpetually surprised by how very puny they are, compared with the numbers other sciences get into. But geology is *real*.
My first class was a writing class. Specifically, a class in the PWP. You can imagine my amusement when I first saw that acronym all over the syllabus. Professor Apynys-rhymes-with-Japanese seems *interesting*; it may not be too painful a class. My second class was geology-- Sedimentation and Stratigraphy. Got to a typically great start when the instructor had the wrong room on the syllabus and was therefore unable to unlock the room; we ended up starting twenty minutes late. Sed/Strat is supposed to be a very fun class; lots of fieldwork and concrete information. The prof warned us that to do well in the class we'd have to be dropping a *lot* of acid. And he's supposed to be the less freaky of the two guys co-teaching it. Ah, I love geology.
Then school closed early due to icy conditions (which you don't get up there in the frozen North, so shut yer yap, whiners. q-:) so I didn't get a chance to take care of arguing with red tape. Darn.
Oh, and one thing learning geology does, it gives you a sense of scale. I watched "Closure" last night and Mulder kept mooning about billions-of--years-old starlight and it just felt *wrong* to me, so I did some quick calculations, and yup, he was wrong. The oldest light you're likely to see with bare eyes-- even if you aren't in the Land of Light Pollution-- is probably in the range of the Andromeda Galaxy, only 13 million years old. Before you get much beyond the Local Group, even if you could see such very dim specks, it's all been redshifted well beyond the visual range, and soon you get into cosmic background radiation. Mulder's been to Arecibo, he should know this, darnit! The whole universe is less than 15 billion years at last count, remember! That's not all that old, really. Less than three years for every human being currently alive. Substantially less than the total number of lj posts ever made. About how many operations your Pentium 4 performs in five seconds. Not very long at all, really. People talk about the vast time scales geologists work with, but I've been perpetually surprised by how very puny they are, compared with the numbers other sciences get into. But geology is *real*.