cossatot

24 ms·

211.
by cossatot 7y ago
These belts are created (at least mostly) by Earth's magnetic field capturing or deflecting incident radiation, which therefore shields Earth's surface from the radiation and (I believe) protects life. Earth's magnetic field
212.
Tyler Cowen's Conversation with Neal Stephenson(medium.com)
7 points by cossatot 7y ago|1 comments
213.
by cossatot 7y ago
Some people will never care, and that's fine. They will care about other stuff that I don't but is still necessary to make the world function.
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by cossatot 7y ago
Good list. A lot of folks go into environmental remediation as well. Unfortunately in practice a lot of this is 'helping companies pollute to the maximum extent allowed by law' but it's better than nothing.
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by cossatot 7y ago
As for the current holy grail of geology... I'm not sure that there is one. Researchers in every subdiscipline have their own, and plate tectonics has tied everything together enough that there aren't as many huge overarching que
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by cossatot 7y ago
A postdoc! And then... I did some energy consulting, tried to be an independent research scientist but got pushed around too much by NSF, and now work as a seismic hazard modeler for a nonprofit[1]. Seismic hazard and the related science h
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by cossatot 7y ago
Some possibly interesting stuff about topography on the 660 km 'boundary': The 660 km boundary (aka the 660 km discontinuity) is primarily* a mineralogical phase transition in the mid-Mantle. What that means is that the bulk geoc
218.
by cossatot 7y ago
In my experience teaching geology, many people are fundamentally uninterested in rocks; they're mundane, pretty static, boring, etc. Many people are also not particularly spatially-inclined so maps aren't interesting. I think th
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by cossatot 7y ago
Close, but not exactly. Today's earthquake was a strike-slip earthquake, where two parts of the crust slide laterally by each other on a fault plane inclined close to vertically in the crust. The fault is probably oriented NW-SE [1]
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by cossatot 7y ago
There are earthquakes, and then there is the ground shaking that results from earthquakes. The magnitude scale that is most used is an expression of the total energy release in the earthquake is called the 'moment magnitude' or &#
221.
by cossatot 7y ago
That may have been for another, smaller quake (one of the larger aftershocks of yesterday's 6.4 event). It looks like there was a 4.6 aftershock which may have triggered the email (the email system is automated). https://ea
222.
by cossatot 7y ago
These are surface waves, which have a much greater amplitude on the earth's surface than P-waves (which are faster). It's pretty unlikely that anyone can feel P-waves unless they are fairly close to the epicenter. P-waves are als
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by cossatot 7y ago
What is also quite fascinating to me is that many of the Cherokee of the time considered writing to be a form of witchcraft. Sequoyah allegedly [e.g., 1] decided that it was not based on his observations of white men, but his initial trial
224.
by cossatot 7y ago
This is really cool, and I'm heartened that you've formed a business around this. What kind of projection do you use? DO you select the displayed stars from the zillions in that azimuth by their distance to Earth, or brightness
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by cossatot 7y ago
No need to call anyone delusional.
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by cossatot 7y ago
The Ozark balds exist primarily because the tops of hills in the White River Valley have very little soil, as they're made up of dolomitic limestone that dissolves in rain water instead of breaking down into clays. The scant soil that
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Neural net would like to deliver these petitions(aiweirdness.com)
2 points by cossatot 7y ago|0 comments
228.
by cossatot 7y ago
I'm reading Minter's Junkyard Planet right now, whic is primarily about the global recycling trade. It's quite interesting, though a little too first-person/anecdotal. nonetheless it's thorough enough to give a g
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by cossatot 7y ago
The canonical paper on this topic is Edmund Schulman's classic "Longevity under Adversity in Conifers" (1954)[1] When I worked in a tree-ring dating lab, we always sought out the harshest local environments in a region and th
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Science, Small Groups and Stochasticity(eighteenthelephant.com)
3 points by cossatot 8y ago|0 comments
231.
by cossatot 8y ago
Find a problem that you are interested in and have the capacity to make progress and enjoy at least most of the grind (and it will be a grind). If you choose something simply because it's a big problem but not something you have a na
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by cossatot 8y ago
This is great. Is any of it available? I've spent a lot of my winter break working on fitting splines to my hand-drawn chines and then make developable surfaces out of them for stitch and glue kayak building. I'm still in the ha
233.
by cossatot 8y ago
I'll agree with Yaa101 that a big part of the story is the picking of low-hanging fruit, or to put it less metaphorically, that in the first 100 years of institutionalized science (let's say 1850-1950 without getting caught up in
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by cossatot 8y ago
The town has its merits. The arts--especially museums--are quite good, as is a lot of the downtown architecture and housing in midtown ( gorgeous houses). It is an oil town after all. With that also comes its fair share of conspicuous cons
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by cossatot 8y ago
(Assuming that the author posted the page) What is the license for the code samples? I seem to remember that the code in Numerical Recipes, which is stated as a similar book to some degree, is actually fairly restrictive [0]. [0]: http:&#
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by cossatot 8y ago
"The clear implication was that as a black girl she could never become an engineer, let alone have anything to do with such a vessel." "It would have normally taken two years to produce a rough design of a ship on paper, but
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by cossatot 8y ago
I love this album. It's got my vote for the single best piece of art made in the 1990s. I don't know of anything else that has the range of content (going from swagger to fun party music to exploring the depths of the "black
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by cossatot 8y ago
I think that the filters you mention are an important mechanism here. These continuous variables like IQ or test scores get mapped onto binary ones (filters/gates) as you make it, or don't, into schools or jobs or other opportunit
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How Traditional Publishing Works(scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
1 points by cossatot 8y ago|0 comments
240.
by cossatot 8y ago
I think a lot of us scientists wouldn't view any discipline not fundamentally based in collecting and interpreting observations as a science at all, much less an ur-science.

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