jofer

56 ms·

511.
by jofer 12y ago
It would be sheltered from gamma radiation. Even a few tens of centimeters of water is enough. (Phytoplankton is dispersed throughout the upper 50 meters or so, though it's concentrated closer to the surface.) UVB from sunlight after t
512.
by jofer 12y ago
Sure! They're tied to the shallow marine ecosystem. Most marine productivity is within the photoic zone, as well. Marine ecosystems are typically not tightly tied to land life, though. (Sediment input, etc, is a different story, but w
513.
by jofer 12y ago
When we talk about mass extinctions, we're mostly talking about marine life. Mass extinctions are dominated by a reduction in marine biodiversity, simply because that's what dominates the fossil record. (Beyond that, there's
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Working from Home: How Well It Works(slate.com)
2 points by jofer 12y ago|0 comments
515.
by jofer 12y ago
Salary fairy seems like a very interesting concept! However, after going through and guessing salaries, the "crowd predictions" are absurdly low for my location and industry. I saw a few profiles of people at my employer in relate
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by jofer 12y ago
Exploration. I'm a geologist, rather than a petroleum engineer. It's a different culture than development or production. (Though there are crunch periods in those, as well. Plenty of situations where you're on-call 24/7
517.
by jofer 12y ago
It's not the equivalent, as you're still required to work the same number of total hours. (You work 9-hour days -- 7-5 instead of 8-5.) The main problem is the culture of working through those Fridays off and many weekends. You m
518.
by jofer 12y ago
Unfortunately, I'm not a software engineer. I could fairly easily switch jobs, but the choices are all other major oil companies. The work environment is essentially identical at all of them. Supposedly, we have lots of nice perks lik
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by jofer 12y ago
I very, very dearly wish my employer would let me take unpaid leave or purchase vacation... Supposedly we can take two weeks unpaid once every three years, but I've never heard of anyone who was allowed to do it. Honestly, it would be
520.
by jofer 12y ago
IRIS is the consortium that runs most of the networks in the US. A decent start (though mostly qualitative) is PASSCAL's instrumentation page: http://www.passcal.nmt.edu/content/instrumentation Basically, nothing
521.
by jofer 12y ago
Just in case folks are wondering why funding for seismometer networks has fallen off a cliff, it's not what you might think. It's due to the end of the cold war. From the 50's to the 80's there was a significant amount
522.
by jofer 12y ago
Depends heavily on how you store them. Germination rates drop over time. Storing seeds improperly will increase that rate (i.e. even fewer seeds will sprout after a give time). You'll more-or-less always get a few to sprout, but you c
523.
by jofer 12y ago
Hey, another geo! I'm guessing you're at New Mexico Tech? (Basing that on the San Lorenzo Unconformity outcrop shown on climbshare... At any rate, you've clearly been out there, even if you're not at NMT.) On a side no
524.
by jofer 12y ago
As someone who does need to travel on the cross streets fairly often, the downside of this is that the non major streets have lights that are _really_ poorly timed. I realize why they do it, and it is optimizing for the majority use case, b
525.
by jofer 12y ago
Mostly KDE itegration and support for a really broad array of formats. Most people probably don't use it as such, but it's more of a general document viewer. (For example, you can actually open Microsoft .ppt files with it.) It&
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by jofer 12y ago
> "Latitudes and longitudes are unambiguous..." This is a tangent, but actually, they're not. There have been (oil) wells fail because someone gave a lat/long without specifying the datum, and someone else assumed it
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by jofer 12y ago
That's exactly how it's done, for what it worth (though you use 3D cartesian coordinates instead of spherical coordinates). Treat each point on the sphere as a 3D unit vector, weight as appropriate, and the center of mass is the s
528.
by jofer 12y ago
There certainly is a big supply/demand imbalance, but undergrad geology enrollments are actually way up. All geoscience departments I know have have dramatically increased in size in the past 10 years or so. (e.g. where I went to und
529.
by jofer 12y ago
It doesn't dissuade from your point at all, but as a geologist in the oil industry, it's rare to see a geologist in upper management. (One big exception: Tony Hayward, who's was also one of the few energy-industry CEOs to hav
530.
by jofer 12y ago
Interestingly, at least for the cities in the southeast where I've lived, these maps are amazingly good proxies for gentrification. For example, have a look at Houston, TX or Memphis, TN. In the Midwest, the trend is much less clear.
531.
by jofer 13y ago
It's probably very spatially variable, but beyond that, I'm out of my depth. Ocean circulation plays a large role in regional (and global) variations in climate. If nothing else, the changes in the shape of the ocean basins over t
532.
by jofer 13y ago
It's also worth putting this in a bit of geologic perspective. The article mentions this, but doesn't explain it. The Eocene is just before the earth went into a period of "icehouse" climate (that's still going on)
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by jofer 13y ago
I completely agree, but from personal experience, it's _very_ hard to get a job that allows you to actually write code when you wind up in the sort of role you're describing. At least for me, there has always been a strict firewal
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by jofer 13y ago
You're right, Seattle would be sheltered from the brunt of a tsunami caused by a subduction zone earthquake. (More so than I realized until I looked up the predicted inundation maps. I'd forgotten how large Puget Sound is!) A larg
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by jofer 13y ago
What's interesting is that everyone's very aware of the seismic hazard along the San Andreas, but many people aren't aware of the much larger (but much less frequent) hazard in the Seattle/Portland area. The San Andreas
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by jofer 13y ago
Cloud cover makes that impossible.
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by jofer 13y ago
Similarly, this NPR article discusses that a bit: http://www.npr.org/2014/03/15/290283283/why-you-wont-win-war...
538.
by jofer 13y ago
With regards to regressions, have you tried statsmodels?
539.
by jofer 13y ago
Python is quite good for this, actually. Julia is fantastic, but the toolchain isn't as mature. (E.g GIS functionality is more or less absent in julia, as far as I know.) To be fair, R is also fantastic for a lot of it. At any rate, ha
540.
by jofer 13y ago
On a related note: Chattanooga's local electric cooperative is deploying fiber throughout the city. They currently offer gigabit speeds for ~$70/mo. Have a look at: http://chattanoogagig.com/ It's (EPB) comm

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