Category: Where Was I?

A shocking, thrilling, bladder-voidingly astonishing series of illustrated narratives, describing places I’ve been and things I’ve noticed while there.

I can has graduation?

The last undergraduate final is over.

Everything it taken care of save for one overdue library book, which I intend to take care of tomorrow.

All the other fees are paid. All the paperwork is done. I’m pretty sure I got well above the F– that was the minimum I needed on the Philosophy final to achieve the minimum passing grade. In fact, my only current stress about my grades is whether or not I managed to end out my last undergraduate semester with a 4.0 or not.

I FEEL BETTER THAN JAMES BROWN! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let the wild, uncontrollable drunken orgiastic celebration begin!

After my nap…

I’m having too much fun with this.

I finally managed to get Hugin to work, as you can see from the picture of the Dead Fish Museum above.

Okay, it’s the visitor’s center at the Fossil Butte National Monument, but it really is a museum of dead fish. And other fossils. If you click the image to get to the Panoramio page, you can even see where it is on the map: in fact if you zoom in, the building itself is visible in the aerial photo imagery.

Between digiKam’s ability to handle geocorrelation with tracks from my GPS, Panoramio’s support for geolocation and mapping (and connection to Google Earth…), playing with High Dynamic Range digital photography, and now panoramas, I’m beginning to develop an increased urge to travel around and take pictures again…

Nerd Photography in the Big Room

Readers may have noticed by now that I have a cheap but serviceable digital camera that I’ve been using to take pictures which occasionally show up here on the blog. (Hey, there’s another thing that the External Deliverer, in Its benevolence, might bring me: a nicer digital camera.)

I’ve been playing with geolocation for a while now. Just recently, I started also doing some crude playing with High Dynamic Range digital photography. It’s obviously going to take me some work to get it figured out and get better results, but what I’m getting so far doesn’t look too bad, at least in my own opinion. Kind of surreal, like Mars Rover pictures…

I’ve discovered that my Handy-Dandy Linux box has access to a couple of tools that make these easy.

I noticed a few days ago that digiKam is actually able to read .gpx format files downloaded from my GPS and then correlate the track from the GPS with the timestamps on the photos automatically, so in what little spare time I have I’ve been going back through my archives of GPS tracks and timestamped photos and trying to find as many to correlate as I can. I managed to get geolocation tagged into pictures from as long ago as three years or so. I also tagged this more recent one. I saw this place half a decade ago and had been wondering if it was still there. Last week we finally had a chance to visit and sure enough, it was there. If you were wondering where one could go to learn to do the Squirrel Dance, here it is.

Landscape and Sign:Don't Trespass on the 'I'

Today after classes I trudged up to the top of the hill at one corner of the campus with my trusty GPS in hand and took a few pictures, as you can tell. Since Google Earth seems to get most of it’s photos from Panoramio, I’ve started uploading them there. I may also get around to uploading them to flickr one of these days, too. I kind of need some pleasant distraction – I’m starting to hit the “Am I there yet???” phase of the semester. Just another week-and-a-half of classes, then finals, then I’m finally done. At least with the undergraduate stuff.

If you’re bored, there are a couple of additional pictures on the Panoramio site, here. You can also get the ICBM address there, and a .kml file for Google Earth so my pictures will pop up if you happen to run past an area where one of them is while you’re browsing the globe.

Superman is Homeless!

Two weeks of midterms, and now it’s finally Thanksgiving Break week.

In honor of this celebration of my second most favorite deadly sin, I was going to do a food post, but I’ll save that for later.

Instead, I want to share a shocking and surprising fact that I’ve discovered: People are Stupid.

Actually, that’s not true, it’s really more like “People are Lazy, and Thinking is Work”, but “people are stupid” is easier to say.

Today’s illustration of this principle includes a visit to the former town of “Metropolis, Nevada” (link goes to Google Maps image, centered in front of the hotel. Should pop up in a new window.).

Composite image of the ruins of the Metropolis Hotel

Yes, evidently a bunch of developers from New York thought it’d be a great idea to build a big city in the barren deserts of Northeastern Nevada. This is where the “stupid” comes in.

Check out that map, zoom out and look around. What do you see? Yes, that’s right: sand, sagebrush, and dead grass.

There’s something downright appalling about the way people in the Western United States (where I’ve lived, in various places, for the last couple of decades) romanticize living in the middle of a desert, while at the same time trying desperately to pretend that they’re NOT living in a desert.

Here’s the story of Metropolis, as I understand it, in short form: Bunch of New York developers decide to build a big city for Mormon settlers. In order to pretend they’re not living in a desert, they figure they’ll just dam a spot on the small river to the northeast somewhere so that can stop enough water to keep themselves running.

Now, plunking down in the middle of the desert and pretending there’s nothing odd about building a large water-demanding city in it is a time-honored tradition of the American West, so why didn’t it work here?

Apparently, it’s because somewhere in the Lovelock, Nevada area a bunch of people said “Hey! We were here using that river’s water to pretend we’re not living in a desert first, so you can’t take it away from us by damming the river up there! So there!”. And the courts agreed.

You might think the teachers at the local school would be educated enough to know that “desert” means “lack of water”. I went over to ask about this, but…:

The ruins that once was the Metropolis, NV high school.

I guess school’s out for the moment. I wonder what their sports mascot was. “The Metropolis Dustbunnies?”

I was reminded of all of this by a recent story that was going around about some developer who thinks it’d be a great idea to build a 100,000,000 gallon-per-year water park in Mesa, Arizona. Which, for those unfamiliar with the area, is a desert just like Metropolis, only substantially hotter.

He’s not the first one though. Palmdale, California – out on the edge of the ‘Los Angeles area’ of California, appears to have the aptly-named DryTown Water Park. Palmdale is in the area of the Mojave desert. I have no idea how much water it uses up. I’m certain there are numerous others in the Los Angeles area alone.

It’s something to think about if you find yourself wondering why the Los Angeles area continually induces the shunting of water from other parts of the country to itself, like a cancerous tumor inducing blood-vessels to form in order to feed its own growth.

It’s probably obvious that I’m tired of living in deserts…

#1 on Google!

Over on scienceblogs.com’s The World’s Fair, the author has started an amusing meme.

It goes like this: the challenge is to find 5 sets of search terms for which your own blog or site is the #1 hit on a Google search. Note that it is acceptable to quote specific phrases but of course it’s more impressive if you don’t. Here are 8 that (as I type this) for which this blog is the #1 hit (links go to the blog address that is the hit):

There was at least one other which I’m having trouble remembering at the moment. Perhaps I’ll update later if I remember what it was.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Park

Here’s a brief interlude for my new readers. Members of my immediate family have seen this before elsewhere, but what the heck, I may as well share with you all.

Related to my recent posts about this year’s field-trip to Yellowstone National Park, I am reminded of a trip my wife and I took last year to Norris Geyser Basin in the same park.

I’ve heard of “communing with nature”, when the natural world seems to speak to you and put you at ease. Well, on this occasion it didn’t just seem to be speaking to me, and it hardly put me at ease. The conversation between me and the park went something like as follows that day. (Forgive all the scrolling, it WAS a several-hour conversation after all. If it bugs you, feel free to say so in the comments…)

Sign:No Restroom in Geyser Basin

Well, okay, I don’t smoke, I didn’t bring a bicycle, we left the dog at home. And I guess we can hold it until later. It’s a small price to pay to go out to nice, happy, peaceful trails, away from, for example, all the annoying road construction.Traffic cone, in the middle of the trailWow! Look at that! Do I spy the Fruiting Body of the rare Yellowstone Giant Orange Holewarning Mushroom?!?!?No, wait…that’s just a traffic cone over a hole in the trail! What the heck? I thought I was getting away from road construction!

Well. Maybe things will get more natural-looking once we get a chance to walk off into the wilderness. Maybe the map’ll show where we can go.

Map of Norris Geyser Basin, with Warning to Stay On Designated Trails
Ah, look at all the lovely trails. Plenty of space to roam around in.
What? I can’t leave the trails?
sign:Stay On Designated Trails

Can’t I take a mere step or two off? Just a little bit???

Sign:Stay on TrailSign:Stay On WalkYeah, yeah, whatever. What are you going to do if I don’t – have me arrested?

 

Sign:Unlawful to Leave Walkway
What kind of criminal act could possibly be involved with just leaving the silly walkway? Littering? Vandalism?
Sign:It is UNLAWFUL and UNSAFE to: Leave the walkway in thermal areas or throw objects into or deface thermal features

Oh, come on! Look, there’s a beautiful green pool over there, full of no doubt fascinating little animalcules. Can’t I just go over and take a little look?

Sign:Keep Off - Thermal Area
“Thermal Area”? What the heck is that supposed to mean? It’s a little windy and chilly today, maybe I want to be warmed up a little. So, why not? What’s so bad about a “Thermal” area?

Sign:Hazardous Ground - Thin Crust - Boiling Water

What’s that supposed to mean?

 

Sign:Dangerous Ground -with illustration of kid falling into ground and getting broiled-
Children are prone to explode out of the ground unexpectedly?Walkway shown crossing the top of the steaming opening of Green Dragon SpringWhat the heck? Is Green Dragon Spring actually devouring the ground under that walkway?!?! Oh! I get it – you’re saying the park itself can swallow you up and and cook you?
So everything here is flaming hot death, then, right?

Sign:Warning: Trail My Be Icy

Is there no end to the dangers this place threatens innocent visitors with? Can there possibly be anything else this park can do to us?!?!?

 

Solfatara: Very Dangerous Landscape spewing Sulfuric Acid Gas!
“Thin Crust”? “Boiling Water”? Broiled flesh cooked in acid? Ice?
Is this a park, or the kitchen at a Chinese restaurant? Is this how “Hot and Sour Soup” is made?!?!? Is there nothing that can stand in this realm of violent burning chemical death without fear!?!?!?
Fearless Geyser

But what of us poor, fragile fleshy people? We aren’t safe here!That does it! I’m getting out of here! No more of these horrible Killer Thermal Death Areas of Doom for me! I think maybe I’ll just go look at the nice cuddly animals that Yellowstone is also famous for.
Sign: Caution - Wild Animals are Unpredictable and Dangerous!
This whole friggin’ place wants to gore, dismember, maul, cook, devour, and digest me! That does it. No more of this dangerous stuff for me – I think I’ll just go read a nice book for a while…
Bookstore:Closed
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo!!!!!!

Yatta! I Fail to Reject the Null-Scholarship!

(Oops, got so excited I got carried away with the title. Fixed now.)

I am thrilled to notice this morning that I am in the running for the College Blogging Scholarship, honestly, if this even attracts a larger population of active readers, I’ll consider that alone an excellent “Runner-Up” prize.

Not that the scholarship money wouldn’t be much appreciated…but more about that later.

For the moment though: Hello, current and new readers, to the internet’s self-proclaimed foremost authority on Expired JellO, among other things. I suppose that since I’m asking people to vote for me, I should probably give a quick description of myself and this blog. I’ll keep it short for the moment:

My actual name is Sean Clark; the explanation for the “Epicanis” handle deserves a post of its own. I am a “non-traditional” student at Idaho State University, working on finishing my long-overdue B.S. in Microbiology. This is actually the 5th college institution I’ve attended. It’s not that I’ve been kicked out of the others or anything, just that I keep having to move and start over. I’m finally in one place here long enough to actually finish the degree. Where I end up doing my graduate work depends on where (and if) we end up moving next year – I’ll post about this if anybody’s interested.

My primary interest is in “applied” microbiology, particularly non-medical biotechnology. I’ve been convinced for many years that non-medical applications of microbial biotechnology are underappreciated and somewhat neglected, and I’d rather people not have to get sick before they can benefit from whatever I might come up with…

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton agrees with me (“we should increase investments in non-health applications of bio-technology” – see paragraph 23). Whether that helps or harms my position no doubt depends on your political opinions, but still, I appreciate that someone with some kind of official authority agrees with me. And, hey, maybe this means I’ll be able to find a decent job during or after graduate school. Anybody think the Office of Technology Assessment will be hiring again soon?…

This blog itself is primarily concerned with sharing some of my education, and science in particular, as an exercise in communicating science. I, for one, think I’ve gotten better as the blog has progressed.

A couple of important points: This is a blog, not a magazine: participation is encouraged. If nothing else, the voting for the scholarship looks like it goes on for a couple of weeks, so if you are thinking to yourself “Gosh, I’d vote for you, but you don’t talk enough about X” or “you talk too much about Y” or “I hate the background color of the webpage” or whatever, now’s your chance to speak up. You do not need to be logged in to comment (but I do screen comments, so spammers: you’re wasting both your time and mine), so please do. Also consider subscribing to the RSS feed, found in the upper-right area of the page.

I try to update at least a couple of times each week, though lately I’ve managed to maintain a nearly daily pace. Participation helps here, as comments from readers helps me come up with additional topics to post on. I’m getting a lot of enjoyment out of blogging, so I’ll post as often as I reasonably can…

One last quick note on using this blog: I try to put title tags on most special bits of posts, like images and links. And…bits of text like this, which you might think of as “inline footnotes”. If you hover over anything with that thick-dotted-underline, you should see some additional information. As of a week or two ago, if you click on them, the entire extra text will pop up in a separate box where you can read it all, assuming you don’t have javascript turned off. I haven’t yet gotten around to going back and doing this to the previous bits like this, but I will eventually.

So, again, welcome. Comments, questions, and suggestions will help me improve the blog, and are therefore strongly encouraged. Oh, yes, and please vote for me. Otherwise, I’m going to have to resort to selling blood plasma and begging outside of scientific conferences. Thanks.

Environmental Chemistry Field Trip – Day 1, part 3

Overview of Narrow Gauge Spring
Our final destination of the day was Narrow Gauge Spring, which is on the backside of the Mammoth Terraces area. Apparently, there’s only one other place in the entire world – somewhere in China – that has exactly the same kind of conditions as this place.

The process of making this kind of formation requires rainwater, healthy microbe-supporting soil, limestone, and heat. It goes something like this: rainwater seeps down through the soil, where lots of healthy microbial activity uses up the oxygen in it and excretes plenty of extra carbon dioxide into it, making it more acidic. The water sinks into the ground and runs into the limestone, which is Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3). Calcium Carbonate doesn’t dissolve well in plain water at all, but there are two things that make it dissolve better: acid and heat. The heat from the magma under the park and the acidity of the water combine to dissolve a whole lot of the limestone. Then, somewhere, the heated water gets forced back up to the surface through a crack.

Where the water comes back in contact with the air, it can let off the extra carbon dioxide and heat. This doesn’t happen very fast in a deep pool, since this can only happen in a thin area near the top. Where the water overflows, though, it’s very shallow, and the carbon dioxide and heat can escape very quickly into the air. This makes the water suddenly become less acidic and less hot, and all that extra calcium carbonate can no longer stay dissolved. It crystallizes, making a hard calcium carbonate “shell” along the edge of the pool. The edge can end up growing some much over time that it forms an overhang with stalactite-like formations underneath it:

Another view of Narrow Gauge Spring

You can just make out an overhanging area in the upper-left of the photograph.

It was fun taking measurements of the water here. Water freshly removed from a pool initially showed up off the scale on our “Total Dissolved Solids” meters, but if you waited a few seconds the reading would drop down to where the meters could read it, and keep falling. Out of the pool, the water was cooling off quickly enough that the extra dissolved Calcium Carbonate was un-dissolving out of the water in tiny bits even as we stood there.

The water appeared to be about 56°C at the top of the pool where it was initially emerging. If you want an idea of not only that I am a nerd but what kind of nerd I am, I will mention that I think of this as “stewpot temperature”, and often wonder if there is any useful or tasty effects to be discovered in the microbial processes done by thermophilic microbes that live in these conditions. I’ll find out one of these days…

Oh, and a couple of bits of trivia about the Apollinaris Spring area from a couple of posts ago. Firstly, it was apparently named after a spring in Germany with the same name. Secondly, we briefly discussed the chemistry of carbon dioxide in water in class this week, and it turns out that the pH of 5.9 that Apollinaris Spring has is probably more basic than plain distilled water would be.

Now, anyone who’s had basic chemistry is probably a little baffled by this – after all, isn’t a pH of 7 that of pure water by definition? The answer is yes, but we’re not talking about pure water, we’re talking about water exposed to the air, where carbon dioxide can dissolve into the water. Working through the mathematics involved showed that distilled water should end up with a pH of about 5.6-5.7, at least at “standard temperature and pressure” (roughly sea-level air pressure and a temperature of around 72°F.). I have a suspicion as to why the Apollinaris Spring water seems less acidic than I might have expected, though.

They actually took our Apollinaris Spring water and ran it through an analytical instrument of some kind (I wasn’t there for it, but the description of the results made it sound like it was a “liquid chromatography” type of device). They found NO nitrates or nitrites in it. Since we’re talking about spring water percolating through healthy soil, I would have expected some nitrogen. I noticed, though, that although they checked for nitrite and nitrate, they didn’t check for reduced nitrogen – that is, ammonia.

I managed to score a tiny vial of the water during lab last Wednesday. When I get a chance to hit the pet store for some ammonia testing supplies, I’ll check that. If it’s there, it might explain the possibly slightly higher than expected pH. Similar to what happens to carbon dioxide and water, when ammonia (NH3) is dissolved into water(H2O), there tends to be some recombination of the atoms to make “ammonium hydroxide” (NH4OH), which is basic.

I don’t know if that’s what’s going on, but I intend to check.

There’s one more post worth of Field Trip stuff, and then I’ll be back onto other topics. Here’s a hint of what might come up, though: can anybody tell me what the effective pore size of pectin and cornstarch gels might be?…

Environmental Chemistry Field Trip – Day 1, Part 3

There were two more stops on the first day of the field trip. After Appolinaris Spring, we stopped off at the “Sheepeater Cliffs”, named after the local natives’ use of mountain-goats for food. I did get a picture of the small cliff, but who cares. You’ve seen one columnar basalt formation, you’ve seen them all, right?

Oh, well, in case you haven’t seen even one yet, here’s one:

Columnar Basalt Formation: Sheepeater Cliffs, Yellowstone National Park

It’s actually kind of interesting – despite the fact that Yellowstone is essentially one gigantic crater left by a volcano explosion, lava doesn’t seem to be a common feature at all. The reason seems to be that the volcanic explosion was an explosion of steam, not melted rocks. Put simply, water seeps down into the ground and gets trapped on top of magma, which is naturally extremely hot. The water can’t boil away as steam, though, because it’s trapped under all that rock, which keeps the pressure high enough that it stays liquid even when it’s superheated. Then, one day (about 600,000 years ago, if I remember correctly) somewhere a crack opened up enough to start letting the water flow out. When it got out from under all the rocks, the reduction of pressure let the superhot water suddenly explode into a cloud of steam. As the water shot out as steam, it let off some of the pressure on the water still trapped underground, which could then also explode into steam….and the whole area got flung into the air on the exploding, superhot steam. Kind of like the way a perfectly innocent looking bottle of heavily carbonated beverage can suddenly erupt in a spray of bubbles if you open it too suddenly.

Or at least, that’s my I’m-not-a-Geologist understanding of the process. The point is, melted rocks aren’t really a big part of the park area’s surface, so it’s interesting to see the basalt cliffs here. The giant hexagonal columns are actually huge crystals of that formed as the melted rock solidified.

This was just a brief stop, though. We piled back into the field-trip vehicles and headed for the Mammoth area of the park. I was originally going to cram that stop into this post, too, but I’m still editing it down to make it less pedantic. Unless my Vast Horde of Loyal Readers would LIKE pedantic…

Incidentally, the College Blogging Scholarship submissions are done as of midnight tonight. Or midnight tomorrow morning, depending on whether you think of midnight as the end or beginning of a day. Finalists get announced on Monday. Here’s hoping I’ll be one of them. That also means that if anyone has any suggestions or comments about how I’m running the blog, the topics I’m picking, and so on, now would be a good time to speak up…

Meanwhile, a couple more posts on the field trip coming up (possibly another one later today) and then I’ll move on to other topics.

Environmental Chemistry Field Trip – Day 1, part 2

Our next stop was Appolinaris Spring, which seems to be an uncommon thing in Yellowstone National Park: ordinary springwater. No sulfuric acid, no steam, just plain old water that sinks into the ground and then comes back up later. For most of the park’s history, it seems like this used to be a popular place to stop to get a drink of water.

water emerging from small copper pipes
Although the signs around the spring now all suggest that you really shouldn’t drink it, at least not without filtering it first, I’m kind of kicking myself now for not having tasted it. Perhaps I’ll have to go back on my own time and try it.

Our on-site tests showed a pH of 5.9 (slightly acidic: milk is normally around 6.8 or so, Root Beer somewhere around a more acidic 4.0, cola beverages around 3.0, for reference…), relatively low TDS of about 100ppm, coming out of the ground cool (about 7°C, or 43°F), with very little dissolved Oxygen (about 6.0ppm) and faintly carbonated (300ppm CO2). It reportedly didn’t taste too good, but having foolishly missed out on tasting it, I don’t know why.

There were hints that perhaps contamination from surface water – like rain trickling through bison poo – but quite some time ago they sealed the spring up to protect it from that kind of thing. This is the actual spring now:

Appolinaris Spring is a concrete box in the ground with locked metal tops...
Even so, the signs still try to discourage people from drinking the water coming from the pipes that lead out of the spring, which I take to be the park service covering themselves just in case someone claims to get sick from it. (“Hey, we TOLD you not to drink it!”).

Appolinaris: This spring water has been used by visitors since early days of the park. However modern water tests show periodic contamination. Park waters, even though clear and running are subject to pollution by wildlife. As with all untreated water, purify before drinking.
Periodic pollution by wildlife? What the…

The northern end of a south-bound bisonOh, right. Natural bottled-spring-water flavor. Hey, it’s natural, it’s got to be good for you, right?

And to end this post on a complete and totally baffling non-sequitur: the student lounge I’m sitting in right now has a television constantly tuned to some cheesy mass-media channel. Today it’s “E!®”. I overheard something on it just now that made me sit up and take notice: Evidently “Leprechaun” made a profit. Wow.

One never knows what kind of amazing things one might learn at college…