Geoverse

I was getting tired of crouching behind my laptop screen at home with a view angle of nothing. So I did what any workplace assessment would recommend: get a proper lcd screen. Of course I took the liberty of filling in the technical details myself so I went and got a 24″ monitor and hooked it up to my laptop. It works like a treat! The widescreen is amazing too! Fast, huge, clear, and can be rotated. I now work at a desktop resolution of 1920*1200. Unfortunately my games have a hard time at that resolution but luckily this monitor also supports lower resolutions with the small disappointment that the screen quality is lower but this is normal for lcd screens. Here is a small pic of what it looks like:

It’s the BenQ FP241W with a sweet 3 year warranty. Bring on the home theatre experience! 😛

*I also got a cordless keyboard of course so I can close the lid of my laptop.

Not much is going on other than that i’m freezing my arse off in the house. They say it’ll get even colder so im going to get a heater soon. But nevermind that. Last week I took a break from my research project by attending a 3-day workshop on communicating science. We practised how to hold presentations about your research and how to write a newspaper article in laymans terms. I know I know that there are science journalists who do this for a living, but just imagine that as a scientist you often get asked yourself to explain your research. To one of these journalists for example. How would you fare? Well let me tell you the absolute truth. You’d do miserably! That much have I learned at this workshop. Science is littered with terminology the simple mind has never heard of. You’d describe processes that they cannot relate to in every day life. How do you expect to sell science to the general public if they cannot understand a word you are saying in the first place? So that’s what this workshop focused on. It took me two long nights to finally get my research in words that most people (“a well read 12 year old”) could understand, nevermind that it’s not exactly what my research is dealing with. So below is my latest version of a news article about my research. It’s by far not finished before it would be something that could be entered in a news paper. The other thing at the workshop was giving presentations. That was nerve racking! Even though they had to be short, the amount of attention to detail is immense. How do you stand? What do you do with your hands? Do you look at the audience? Do you engage them? How’s your voice? No uhms, or ah’s? Loud and clear? Not too fast? Do you include pauzes? etc etc. Definitely things to look for when giving a presentation next time be it to a general audience or your science group.
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The Earth is a hard boiled egg

CANBERRA: Scientists at the Research School of Earth Sciences at ANU
hope to prove that the Earth’s mantle is actually solid. The previous
Earth model represented an unboiled egg with a liquid interior.
However, new evidence points at the Earth to be just like a hard boiled
egg with a shell called the crust, the solid eggwhite is the mantle and
the yellow yolk in the centre represents the core.

We know that sound travels differently through different materials. In
Western movies it is often observed that the cowboy puts his ear to the
ground to hear his approaching enemies on horses long before he can hear
them otherwise. Sound travels faster through rocks (a solid) than
through a liquid. This phenomenon supported the previous Earth model
with slower sound waves in the molten liquid mantle.

However, this may prove to be incorrect using new laboratory studies
where rocks sampled from volcanoes are exposed to high temperatures and
pressures and the speed of sound is measured within them. According to
Mr. Farla, the lead scientist “these rocks are not molten but contain
varying amounts of tiny cracks, smaller than the diameter of a hair or
even smaller than a blood cell. These micro-cracks can theoretically be
responsible for slowing down sound waves.”

To understand how micro-cracks in rocks slow down sound waves imagine a
crack as a long piece of string with foam cups attached on either end.
One person talks into the cup and the other person far away holds the
cup to his ear and listens. When the string is tight and straight it is
possible to hear what is said in the cup as sound travels as vibrations
in the string. But when the string is slack this wont work because the
vibrations die out before they reach the other end.

If this theory proves correct then our understanding of the structure
of the interior of the Earth will be greatly improved. The application
of such knowledge includes mapping, better understanding of continental
drift and discovering geologically active planets and moons, which in
theory would be able to support life just like on earth.

Several weeks ago I have been on a bushwalk trip for a weekend. We drove into Tidbinbilla national park and we set out on a walk up a ridge as aim to climb the highest mountain in the region of about 1650m. We started at 800m. It was a relatively easy walk to reach the saddle point of the ridge as we walked over a firetrail. From thereon we made our way through the shrubs from hilltop to hilltop until we finally made it just below mount Tidbinbilla. There we set up camp and me and a mate went to get water from a stream in a valley on the otherside of the ridge. I was pretty exhausted by then and it was getting dark too. Finally we did find a trickle of water and filled the bottles and platypuses. We made it back up to the camp just when night set. We then set off to hike up the mountain with our torches which only took about 15 minutes. It was very cold especially on the mountaintop because of the chilly wind. The view was spectacular though as we could see the whole of Canberra at night with all the lights. On the otherside was nothing but wilderness and mountains and no lights. Canberra really seemed like an oasis in the desert. After taking some pictures and generally having a good time we decided to head down again back to camp. We were freezing our arses off too! With the gas stoves we prepared a couple of simple meals and pretty much after that dove into our sleeping bags under the nightsky. We did have a big piece of plastic covering us which turned out to be quite a nuisance rather than a means to provide shelter. The wind picked up during the night and it came down on us several times and each time we had to fix it again. It was pretty moist too so our sleeping bags got pretty damp too. Despite temperatures did not drop below zero degrees celcius, it was dang cold! I did get some sleep though. We woke up the next day with sunrise which was like 6 am! and packed our stuff and moved out again for the second part of the bushwalk. This time it was more rockier and less scrubbery but still we had to wade through many new shoots of Eucalypt trees. These have grown as a response to the bushfire from 2003 which destroyed the whole park and beyond. It was a good descend and we made it down by one o’clock in the afternoon. We were then picked up and drove back to Canberra. Below are some pics of the adventure.

And _HERE_ and _HERE_ are some with me on it. (I’m pointing to Canberra in the first one)

Overall it was a great experience and i’m sure going to do this kind of bushwalking again when spring comes.

Here’s a small update with all that’s been keeping me busy since my last post. I’ve been putting my PhD project to one side for the last week so I could spend some time on rewriting my masters thesis into a GRL paper. I’ve been using LyX and the result is incredible! It’s also so easy to use with making references and inserting figure and tables in a very professional way! Sweet as aye. The first version is now finished and sent off to my former supervisor in Utrecht. I have a good feeling about my first publication that this will be it.

Other than work, I have checking out some pubs Canberra has to offer. There is a really good one called the Phoenix. Last thursday after a seminar dinner I went with some friends to this place and had a couple of drinks and good laughs. Kilkenny is a beer that I can certainly recommend! Now that many PhD students are completing their research many nights like these will follow to celebrate a successful conclusion to their 3 – 4 year research. Brilliant! I say :-). Last night I went with some people to a steak house/pizzeria. The steaks are awesome! Normally I’d rarely eat steaks (back in NL) but here the temptation is too good! Steaks are relatively cheap too in the supermarket. Later that evening we went to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At world’s end in the cinema. It was pretty much alright, a bit better than the second one but the original first one still rules. If you like comedy and action and some adventure, you certainly mustn’t miss out on this one! Prepare yourself for a long watch though. It lasts for 3 hours! That was actually one of the flaws. If it was shorter, i might have been even better. I’d give it 8/10.

Maybe next week we’ll go and see Shrek the third! I heard it was quite good!

I booked a flight to Melbourne in the weekend of 23 – 24 June for some sightseeing. It would be a good opportunity to get out of Canberra for a bit.

Next week I’ll be starting new experiments on a side project on the annealing kinetics of dislocations in synthetic Fo90.