Geoverse

…and a happy new year to everyone! 😀

I’ll be heading to Sydney on the 31st to celebrate new year with one of my housemates. Maybe you’ll see me on the telly packed between millions of people ha ha. The fireworks and the beer should be good. 😛 We’re going to crash through the night because all accomodation has been booked full months in ahead. I’ll have my mobile with me, but I don’t know if I will be able to send any messages. We’ll be back on the bus to Canberra the next morning.

In the meantime my supervisors gave me some presents as well… a deadline for a paper for a conference, a deadline for a poster of my research, a deadline for the midterm examination, a deadline for processing results of recent experiments. Hurrah! >_< So yeah I’ll take this weekend off but I think I can really use the upcoming week to start getting things done.

Today the weather is just awful too. Rain, wind, more rain, thunder… I took some pics and videos with my camera. It’s been rainy lately (see prev post) on and off which kinda sucks… Just go to my picasa web album on the sidebar on the right to see the photos >>>>

Also you’ll find some photos there of a xmas football match of staff vs students. It was great fun. I decided to be goalie in the second half when my Chinese officemate Qing came around with his camera. These are his photos. I blocked every ball in the second round which allowed us to forgo shame and we tied with the staff 4-4. After the match we had a delicious BBQ with plenty of drinks. It was also raining that day a bit but the tarp saved the BBQ 🙂

Again the best of holidays to everyone! Expect another post here before new year. Cheers all!

I recently bought the game Supreme Commander with 50% discount so I thought “Why the heck not!” 🙂 The game is a Real Time Strategy game, a genre I truely exhausted when playing Empire Earth. Keeping the economy running during gameplay is a huge effort in Empire Earth since you can harvest wood, gold, iron, stone and there is farming. Supcom is different. You only have to worry about energy and mass. I only takes a minute to get your economy set up and you can already focus on building an army. Also if you do run out of mass and/or energy your production slows but doesn’t halt. Much better imo. Creating and expanding your sphere of influence by creating bases is pretty straightforward as well as commanding your army. The one difference is though that your army can be MASSIVE! There is no upper limit. As a result you’re looking at the world at a zoomed out level more than zoomed in and every unit becomes an icon since otherwise you would not even see your units so small they become! While the more advanced units are somewhat bigger like your commander, the basic units are tiny which is a shame. Realistic but less interesting. You can create naval units, land and air based units. Especially areal units I find i can only handle in icon mode since they are so hard to keep track of. Also when managing a huge army, the units are equally spaced from each other instead just cluttered into one area. I find this annoying because then the units at the back of the formation do not joint the fight until later when the units in the front have already been destroyed. It kind of ruins the strategy of a surge attack because everything is moving too slow. Once the fight really sets off though, the war is amazing to behold and the special effects rule. It also kills the framerate so zooming out a little is better. The game is pretty demanding so I cannot play it on my laptop at a higher resolution than 1024*768, but for some reason I can have everything on high and 2x AA. Modern games really seem to suffer on my laptop only when increasing the resolution of the game but not when increasing the texture details etc. I’m currently trying out all three factions in the game Supcom but I think I’ll do the 3rd faction first. The three factions are: humans, cyborgs and humans following”The way” set out by an extinct alien race (annihilated by the humans in the first place which strikes me as somewhat funny).

I’ve just handed in my annual plan and thesis proposal review with signatures and all. So overall i’m making good progress which is always nice to hear. I also carried out my first real experiment that lasted for about a week. The deformed olivine specimen was finally loaded into the seismic wave attenuation apparatus and all the gas leaks were fixed.

The experiment consisted of numerous runs starting at the highest temperature of 1100C and ramping down by 25C with every new set of experimental runs. Basically the first run takes 5 hours or 9 hours depending on the time of the day. A 9 hour run is more thorough. This is the forced torsional oscillation run whereby the olivine specimen gets twisted on the micrometer scale at fixed seismic frequencies. If the specimen is fully elastic, an immediate response is recorded at the displacement transducers. However, under higher temperatures there is a visco-elastic component and therefore the material exhibits a phaselag and a change in the shear modulus over longer timescales.

In addition, microcreep test runs were performed for 10,000s and later 5,000s. These tests show in more detail at what temperature olivine becomes elastic in response. They also provide a check on the creep function fitted to the data during data processing.

All in all, it was pretty intensive. Before and after each experiment run I had to do calibrations. I had to come in at 8 am, keep an eye on the experiments/start new ones and each evening I had to come in to get an overnight experiment going. So that meant staying in the lab until midnight! As a result I was a bit sad that I couldn’t stay long at a farewell party of a graduating phd student at RSES.

Anyways, I now have to way clear to process the data from this other side project i’ve been working on, on dislocation annealing kinetics in synth olivine. Then from there I can write a draft paper maybe by the end of this year but that depends on me working through the Christmas holidays.

Typical isn’t it. Dutch bloke comes to Oz and what happens? La Nina establises itself over the Pacific and it starts raining with rainfall above average. At least it’s good for the plants and farmers I guess, but it does dampen my excitement for endless days of sunshine. There is nothing more I dislike than getting wet on my bike whilst cycling from home to the uni and back. Anyways some storms are interesting with heaps of lightning and hail although here no hail has fallen yet. Probably too soon in the summer. If you feel like reading about Australian weather predictions go here.