upcoming 'stache party...

alright...

i mentioned previously that i am rockin' a handlebar mustache in preparation for an upcoming party... i still have a little over two weeks to go, but i think i am already in decent shape. i was told by a few people in geomorphology seminar this morning that they had to avoid looking at me so they wouldn't crack up. i got thumbs-up from others. so far i haven't gotten any scornful looks, though i had one comment on time-travel. decide for yourself. now i'm stuck with it until the party, but a majority of that time will be spent driving around the southwest for a tectonics trip.



~t

morgan spurlock is my idol...

for so many reasons. 'supersize me' was one of the best directed, shot, and edited films i've seen in the last several years. his tv series, '30 days', was just as interesting and it's a pity it wasn't more widely viewed. his general view of learning and, perhaps more importantly, educating the masses through his empirical experiences (he once spent thirty days in jail, just to learn about the failures of the system) is genius.

at the moment however, he is my idol because i have chosen to model my moustache after his... in preparation for an upcoming moustache party in april. this is something that has been poorly planned to date, but there are at least a roomful of people who received advanced warning of this event... so we will be ready for whatever form it takes come april first. I missed the chance to participate in the last one i was invited to (in undergrad at cornell, some four years ago) so i've jumped at the opportunity to be a part of this one.

~t

cripes!

not crepes... cripes! i just posted my audi on craigslist a few hours ago advertising it for sale: for about 1400 less than its blue book value due to a few problems. i've already had about 5 people email me in that time all offering to buy it by monday!! obviously, selling the car will not be a problem, but jeez... didn't think i would have such an easy time of it. this is good news though, because it means that i can get right on the few small plans i've hatched for the new golf. i've also already enlisted the help of my roommates in these mods, since they are interested in learning about how to soup ("sup'", "soop"?) up a car. mods will include an all new performance suspension setup and new performance brakes... for now. perhaps a new exhaust too since the current one only has a few thousand miles left in it (but not one of those stupid "ricer" getups that sound like a tin-can full of bees - been there, done that).

also, off to pueblo, co, tomorrow morning at first light to go mountain biking with a few guys... should be fun. st patty's day on fat tires!! i will resist the urge to fill my camelbak with guinness.

~t

financial responsibility

several years ago now, i had a real job. i was an environmental consultant for an international consulting company... working for clients like the military, navy, nestle... you know, that sort of thing. coming straight from a psuedo-job at my undergrad alma mater, i thought i was rolling in dough with my moderate salary. within a month i had agreed to finance a 25000 dollar suv. well, i ended up leaving that job to go back to school, and took a huge pay cut in the process. my suv was now above my financial means, so i traded it out for something (slightly) cheaper, but still quite nice. for the last two years, i've been driving an audi a4... all leather, v6, heated seats... mmmm. anyway, i finally got my act together and made the move to a car i can actually afford. afford to own, maintain, fuel, and afford to drive given the fact that i'm a geologist and supposed to be among the ranks of people most conscious about the dire state of our planet. i ended up going for a little red vw golf: awesome gas mileage, cheap to maintain (not to mention the fact that i can pretty much do all the work myself) and lets not forget, really fun to drive.

before:


now:


soon? (i love photoshop):


~t

told you i broke it...

yeah... flip flops and mountain bikes were never really meant to go together as i reaffirmed today while wiping out, very publicly, in the middle of a crowded sidewalk on campus. i ripped all the skin off the tip of my left big toe, and broke the middle toe on the same foot. the long winter and persistant snow cover have given way to dust on the sidewalks and streets which has yet to get washed away by spring rains. i've broken many of my toes over the years, some of them more than once, and i'm quite used to the sensation by now... i can usually tell immediately when it happens. at first it's a dull pain, followed by swelling and shooting pains when flexed, then the toe turns purple at the break and goes stiff.

today i exacerbated the break by participating in our departments first intramural ultimate frisbee game, which took place about an hour after my crash. hey, it's a toe, it's broken, all you can do is implement the buddy system by taping the toe in question to a neighbor. running on it for an hour might not help, per se, but it won't exactly damage it more than it already has been.

anyway... we won our game, and here's the proof of broken-ness.



~t

little green men... sort of

i just ran across this article on the bbc website... check out: the story.

i tend to agree with kristi curry-rogers though... this seems a little far-fetched. it's also interesting to point out that statistically (ok, ok, only based on a couple of data points, so not really) that this planet is potentially overdue for some type of "ele" or extinction level event or large meteorite/planetoid impact. the physics involved in the fallout of such an event are awesome to say the least... people wonder why it's so hard to find fossil evidence of dinosaurs killed in the K/T boundary event, but when you realize that the ensueing global firestorm responsible for the planet-wide iridium rich clay marker layer essentially cremated/carbonized all life at the surface, it kind of makes sense.

back to reading about the physics of rainsplash driven downslope sediment grain transport... yay!

~t

motivation

ha. i hate to admit it, but i feel like i have forgotten what motivation feels like for the last several months. i also seem to think that i've spent an inordinate amount of time during that period just doing whatever i wanted, whether it was biking, snowboarding, just sitting around on my ass, or otherwise avoiding a lot of work. not that i haven't done any work recently, i just haven't done what i really should have been doing. case in point; yesterday was terrible, weather-wise. it was rainy, with freezing slush/snow and fog in the mountains. a perfect day for doing work, but instead i went snowboarding. i was soaked, cold, tired and just felt sort of blah for the rest of the evening.

this morning it is beautiful out; today will be sunny and warm and perfectly spring-like... but in an uncharacteristically responsible move, i'm going to my office to get something done. i just woke up motivated today, for the first time in a while, feeling like i actually want to get something done. instead of reading papers for my classes, and writing abstracts of presentations, i'll be playing (and it does feel like playing to me) with my pencils and protractors to finish restoring (palinspatically) one of the cross sections through the taiwanese foreland. work can actually be fun, if you're doing what fascinates you. i've spent months thinking about this reseach project, visualizing the finished prodect in my head, working out the potential for animations that would be jaw-dropping even to an audience of my professors... 3D frameworks of stratigraphy deforming backwards in time, literally deconstructing the western half of taiwan, illustrating the dynamics of the arc-continent collision over the last 2-3 million years in a seamless time regression series. how f%$#ing cool would that be?! ...heh, now i just have to do it.

~t

you learn something new everyday

wow... check out: http://www.annielondonderry.com/

this story is about the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world... in 1894! that qualifies annie londonderry (the surname she took as part of a contract with a spring water company who sponsored her) as super hard-core in my mind. not only did she manage to ride a bike around the world, she did it on a fixed gear (single speed, no brakes, no freewheel), with a single change of clothes and a pearl-handled revolver, capturing images of her travels on glass slides, raising money ($5000 in 1894 dollars!!!!) and lecturing about her travels to americans along her return from california (and all points west of it) to massachusetts in 1895.

check it out, it's pretty amazing.

~t

order in chaos

the study of geomorphology is crazy. one of the papers we went over in seminar this morning (Lawrence, J. P., and B. T. Werner, Fracture networks in frozen ground, J. Geophys. Res., 106, 8599-8613, 2001) describes the authors' attempts to boil a fairly complex and not-well-understood permafrost ground pattern, resulting from frost heaving and cracking, into a simple (well, ok... not so simple) computational model. essentially they, and many other geomorphologists, describe what appear as chaotic and random patterns in nature with mathematical equations that (at least in models) produce the observed patterns, to a first order approximation. it's publications like these that make me wish i had a stronger mathematical background. i can understand them when i read them, but as soon as i try to produce something like this myself i am utterly at a loss. ...so instead i run back to my protractors and rulers and colored pencils and start drawing structural cross sections. i suppose (actually, i know) that some people are completely befuddled by things like stereographic projections and palinspatic base maps (my bread and butter), but i still experience math-envy on a regular basis.

referring to a different sort of chaos... i suggest folks check out this site. particularly with the recent snows in colorado, lots of people have been parking like morons. bad parking skills is one of my pet peeves about americans... if you've ever been to europe, you know what i'm talking about. i've seen spanish drivers who could park a dumptruck in a spot designed for a smart-car and still have room to spare on either end. i myself have been complemented on my parallel parking skills in the past... one of my passengers looked over at me when i had finished parking in less than ten seconds and said, "you really are from new york, aren't you?!" well, i wish i could say all new yorkers, or all city dwellers, can park well - it's just not true. the site has some great diagrams of classic parking infractions (my favorite is the, "you call that a compact?" one) and tips on how not to park like an as$#0le.

~t

professorial

today is a sweater-vest day. i decided that this monday would be as good a day as any other to pull the grey polo out of the closet... i never have any real reason to wear a sweater-vest (is there any such thing?) but every once in a while i like to pay homage to the institution of academia and especially to my professors from my undergraduate days at cornell. it would be a statistical certainty that at least one sweater-vest was present in the geology building there at all times. one professor in particular was famous for sprouting his white chest hair out of the neck of the sweater-vest he wore more often than not. sometimes, during department colloquia for example, there were as many as five or six sweater-vests to be seen. hence, i associate them with the ideals of academia: the pursuit of knowledge, hard work, learning... logic follows that obviously if i wear one, i will work harder and learn more (heh, if only).

i do like the ideas of nostalgia and custom though, so occasionally i assume the uniform of my professors as an offering to academic pursuits... only without the chest hair.

~t

eco-guerrilla rap

some of the guys i went to highschool with are now rapping about the sad state of affairs in the world. check out their new video below, "it's a disgrace" (cypher:dissident). way to rep the 607 guys, keep it up!



~t

snow!

...again! this morning i got up and swept a dusting of flakes off my car. i drove in to make my 8am seminar and then i moved my car from the parking lot after seminar (1 hour) at which point my car (and everything else in boulder) had accumulated several new inches of snow. it just won't stop snowing here... there'll be something like 6-8 new inches in town over the course of the day. everytime it warms up a little, and the snow melts, i think it's about to be road-biking season again; i start fantasizing about getting back out on my titus and putting in some early season miles, only to have my hopes crushed by the weight of a foot of snow. i'm going snowboarding.

~t

anonymous code tip

someone left me an anonymous coding tip, regarding my xml/css post about changing the header background image. (who was that?)

thanks for the tip, but i already tried it. i tried a bunch of things. the problem is that the header is blocked into separate frames early in the code, and the background attributes are defined in that section. I can't combine the frames, because they call different references, etc, etc. the easiest thing to do would be to delete the whole section and recode a new title block that was one cell, throw in the background and just format the text with a simple line break. maybe i'll get to it sometime, but for now i should be working.

~t

astralwerks remixes

the music label 'astralwerks', longtime supporters and developers of electronica worldwide, have a website that is chock-full of remixes of tracks from artists they represent. download realplayer to hear them, some are pretty cool.

listen

~t

knowledge out the ears

it's a corny and somewhat obscure sci-fi reference, but my wet-wired memory is overloaded and i'm starting to experience leakage. while i try to absorb as much as possible on western u.s. neogene tectonics, i am still thinking about moab. below are two more pics of me taken by a guy we met up with out there. i'm also kind of sick... my last two weeks of fun and travel have finally caught up with me so now i'm looking forward to a weekend at home, not just working on this project but also recuperating.




~t

pothole arch

ok... so this is a small article about the incredible trail we rode over the weekend... with some quality comments on the consequences of mountainbiking's ever growing popularity.

read the article

in my own version, i would describe the trail a little more; it was described to me by someone who had never ridden it and had heard about it from someone else themselves. we found it (quite easily... perhaps a little too easily) this last weekend and i would have to say for how short the trail is, it's one of the most enjoyable single-tracks i've ever ridden. the spur (an out-and-back) forks off from a major jeep trail in moab and right off the bat throws some technical not-too-challenging singletrack at you... leading along a narrow ledge of sandstone that's maybe 3-5 feet off the ground. it spills over a small rock drop into a sandy wash that transitions into slickrock. this type of trade off, trail to slickrock and back, happens throughout the ride. slickrock sections of the trail are not marked, and sometimes finding where the trail picks up again can be a little challenging. the "established" trail sections are thin ribbons about a foot wide cutting a path through cryptobiotic soils, so staying on the trails is a must. it's obvious that the trail has been created or at least improved by bikers... just about every feature of the trail allows you to play; moderate technical drops will lead onto wavy slickrock , small jumps have been engineered into the trial and even the step-up sections of the trail can be ridden smoothly as an air in some spots. the last sandstone bowl before reaching the end of the out-and-back is a perfect session playground, allowing committed riders to get some hang-time on a wall ride that is magazine photo-shoot worthy. I myself topped out at around 10 feet (not too bad for the first real ride of the season), but while we were there, some guy on an 8-inch travel downhill bike was getting insanely high on the wall (about 20-25 feet) after dropping into the bowl from the top of an adjacent dome.

we only rode the relatively well established section of the trail, but for those who are really gung-ho, i believe it's possible to continue the ride out past the turnaround... and seeing a few tire-trails in the distance confirm my suspicions. the continuation requires riders to navigate slickrock bowls and ridges with heavy consequences (i.e. if you fell, you would be very lucky not to break something, or even die). while we were there, it was getting late in the day and we were already tired, but perhaps next time i will push a little further into the trail, which is alledgedly a loop if you can find the way around.

Anyway... enough dreaming about secret trails. be aware of conditions (don't ride if it's muddy!! you will destroy the trail before the season even begins) and be aware of riding in sensitive (access-wise/biota-wise) areas; respect the trails and the issues of riding in undeveloped areas.

...and for god's sake, if you find this secret trail in moab, ride it like you mean it, but don't publish your gps tracks (mine are safely stored for future reference, but you won't see them on this blog, that's for sure).



~t

dissociation from dream-state

im sitting in the coffee shop located in the north wing of the new atlas building on boulder campus. typing on my somewhat discolored ibook, the pristine white smeared with the oils from my skin, im looking down at a pile of papers on seismicity in the sub-andean belt of peru and equador, another stack on chemical weathering and karstic geomorphology and a third heap (rapidly growing) on neogene tectonics of the western united states.

a couple days ago i was on two wheels carving a high sweeping line across the nearly vertical walls of wind and water carved slickrock bowls under the utah sun. the broad and blindingly white peaks of the la sals mountains lent an eye-popping backdrop to this already surreal landscape. two days spent in the desert, bounded by long drives through the night on snowy roads winding over the rockies, have made me feel as though i've been asleep for a long time. this morning (a full recovery day later) i feel as though im finally waking up from this dream. even blogging in this coffee shop reminds me vividly of spending time in taipei's many starbucks locations, blogging furiously back when i felt i had a lot to write about. the last few weeks have felt odd in general, with what seems like the majority of my energy having been spent on friends and adventures, giving me a slight tickle of guilt over not spending all my free time in the office knocking out figures. my gradual emergence from the weekend has left me groggy and disoriented at the moment... indecisive about what work to attack first... unsure where my dreams of the weekend stop and the reality of my work-week begins. wake-up!



~t

what a weekend!

phew! this weekend was a lot of fun, but i'm looking forward to just sitting in my office for a while and getting some much needed work done. i've been trying to get my schedule into a groove for the last couple of weeks, and it's just starting to firm up... but the last few days were sort of a last laugh in the face of academia for a little while. one of my friends from back home came to visit over the weekend, which entailed going for a couple of short bike rides, ice climbing, snowboarding and drinking beer at local breweries. i got close to zero work done over the last four days. my buddy left first thing this morning, i went to seminar for two hours and then took a break for ice climbing in the middle of the day. the ice in boulder canyon was brittle today, after last night's cold temps refroze the top few inches of previously old and rotten ice. my belayer was dodging sizable chunks of ice falling from 40 feet, knocked off by my axes as i worked my way up the renewed blue ice. the fog in the canyon had frozen to the windward surfaces of all the trees... lending a captivating effect to the sunlit branches and twigs; illuminating them as if they were coated with reflective glitter. unfortunately i didn't bring a camera or even my cell phone, so you'll just have to believe me.

listening to deepmix.ru radio online - good dj set today. cranking through some illustrator files of the taiwanese foreland thrust systems now... lots more of that throughout the rest of the week........

~t

~t

breaking

so i used to break, back in the day. i used to practice a few times a week in a dance studio with a crew and randomly start breaking with crews i'd see practicing or performing. i threw down with some local kids in bali. i spent an evening with a crew breaking in bostons market square. i'd regularly participate in circles at dj-clubs back in ny. i am so (soooooo) out of practice. break-dancing is such an amazing form of dance, it was natural for me to get into after my interest in electronica and hip-hop, and martial arts (kung fu and capoeira). most of my friends who were breakers were also versed in some kind of martial art. the dynamic and interactive nature of this form of dance transcends cultural and language barriers all over the world. i hear tell there is a group in boulder, but i have yet to really track them down.

anyway, i was messing around with the imovie software on my mac trying to cut up an old clip (unfortunately not old enough, this is still me out of practice) into a short demo, and ended up posting this on the web, but i'll re-post it here...



~t