junk food...

...is the same the world over. for some unknown reason i decided to get a hot-dog last night from the local 7-11. yuck. i've never been a really huge fan of hot-dogs, but every once in a while i just get that craving for something that reminds me of summers when i was ten years old. rest-assured, the taiwanese have not quite mastered the "art" of the american hot-dog. i can't say if there were too many preservatives or not enough, if the meat mixture had too many pig snouts or not enough, but something was quite amiss. i won't be buying any more of those.

my latest field excursion was supposed to take place this past weekend, but due to dangerous conditions (heavy rain raising the water levels in the peikanghsi valley) i opted to wait it out. now i'll be going back down as soon as the conditions allow access to the riverbed, where i need to fill in some data-gaps in order to complete my initial cross-section through the area.

from the data i've compiled already, it appears that the high terrace surface deformation doesn't really follow from the deformation pattern of the rocks immediately below them in the valley, so i need to start looking for some other less obvious cause. i have a few in mind, and one hypothesis i particularly like (involving some exciting new models from very new research on the internal deformation of critical coulomb wedges under conditions of steady-state erosion) but i don't yet have enough information to prove anything. i'm sure, in fact, that even if i can come up with some convincing "proof", it will be months before i can pull it all together. i keep forgetting that i'll be taking the next 4-plus years to work all this out. ahhhh.... grad school.

~t