Another comic!

Man, I promise, i'm just really busy. It's not like I ONLY sit around lookin' at internet comics all day or anything...just got a lot on my plate, alright? DON'T JUDGE ME!



Anyway, the comic below is from Big Fat Whale, purveyor of transgressive snark since 1324, with a royal charter from King Edward II himself! Enjoy!

Climate Change Deniers are Idiots

The title pretty much sums up my definitive policy statement on climate change deniers. Emily Flake, of the completely rad LuLu Eightball comic strip, explores the intricacies of various "reasons" for actively denying reality. I snagged it, from the interwebs, and reproduce it for you below. ENJOY!

Pretty accurate, really.

The Return of Sunday Sed Structures!

A substantial hiatus between "Sunday Sed Structures", perhaps, but seeing as how I'm a fan of the ol' Sed/Strat side of things, I reckon it's perfectly acceptably for me to engage in hiatuses of all sorts (as well as terrible pun-based stratigraphy humor). Below is a picture from the Holiest of Holies, The Book Cliffs!

A pretty big piece of float, perhaps, but it illustrates the elusive and complex 3-Dimensional nature of bedforms rather nicely, I think. On the right-hand face of the boulder, you can see the more traditional trough cross-stratification, oriented roughly parallel to flow. On the left-hand face, you can see the troughs themselves; this view is roughly perpendicular to flow, and preserves the scoop-like trough that is the cross-stratification's namesake. Just goes to show you that when dealing with trough cross-stratification and paleocurrent orientation, you gotta be careful, and TRY to find some nice 3-D (or, more likely, the good ol' 2-and-a-half-D) exposure.

Geophysics and Auto-Tuning

Despite the common perception that Auto-Tune is an insidious font of evil, born in blackest night by the dreaded Audiomages of Sauron the Great, it can OCCASIONALLY be used to produce some pretty nifty stuff, I GUESS. I'm sure everyone has already encountered the "Symphony of Science" and it's (pretty fun, actually) Auto-tuned Carl Sagan (and others) videos.

But do you know whence Auto-Tune actually sprang? Andy Hildebrand is the name of the inventor, and he worked for Exxon as an engineer, specializing in seimsic data processing. He's also one of the founders of Landmark Graphics, which is all geophysicsy too. Apparently, Dr. Hildebrand recognized that his digital signal processing mojo could also be employed to detect, analyze, and "correct" pitch, undoubtedly saving the careers of many-a-terrible pop singer today (thanks?). Here's the wiki page for Auto-Tune, and here's a Nova Science Now Q&A with Dr. Hildebrand himself.

And it's all thanks to geophysics!