Archive for July, 2009

Freeman Dyson, Your Genes, and Fried Chicken

0
2 years ago
by abarna in

Last Tuesday I went to see a “discussion” with Freeman Dyson, a rather well known theoretical physicist. While there he talked about a whole range of subjects from nuclear physics to global warming, from quantum consciousness to religion and science. He had some interesting and often controversial ideas. Being the University of California, San Diego, I would imagine that the free exchange of ideas, especially the most controversial ones, would be highly encouraged. After sixty minutes of formal interview, there was a half hour period of open questions from the audience, then we were released to the courtyard for both refreshments and discussion. Very enlightening indeed. The recording that was made should be available for viewing sometime late August.

The internet keeps no secrets, and utilizing trial and error and crowdsourcing, the secret eleven herbs and spices was reportedly discovered. Even if they are not what is actually on the recipe, the results were still tasty good.
Mixing the herbs and spices…

Making sure the oil is the proper temperature…

The chicken ready to go..

the end results…

The final meal, if we keep eating like this we are going to die early…

Till next time…
-Andrew

Office Cleaning and Strangeness in the Ocean

0
2 years ago
by abarna in

Yesterday was Isaacs Hall Clean the Student Office Day. So actual work stopped and the office was cleaned out.

It turned more into archeology than cleaning as various relics of past science programs were discovered (WOCE).

Finding a stud to mount the surf board rack on…

In other news, there have been strange happenings off the coast of La Jolla. This rather melodramatic video can shed some light as to just some of the strangeness happening off the coast.

Just today there were strange green strips in the ocean just off the coast of Scripps, looking much like an algal bloom, a rare, but not unheard of event for the coast of La Jolla. Even the normally steady sea bottom water temperature is fluctuating by almost 5°C. This is not stopping me from enjoying the surf when it is up.

6 weeks…
-Andrew

JOIDES Resolution

0
2 years ago
by abarna in

A week or so ago I had the opportunity to take a tour of the drillship JOIDES Resolution. JOIDES means Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling. The ship had recently been renovated.

Here you can see powerful presses used to extract water from the core samples. We were told that the water samples are then analyzed looking for hydrocarbons. Should the ship breach an underground reserve of natural gas or petroleum there would be immense damage done.

This is the drilling floor, the red platform retracts to reveal the moon pool, the white column is where the drill shaft would be lowered.

This is the core receiving deck, the cores are about 9 meters long when extracted this is where they are cut to a manageable size.

Some core samples…

These monitors display data about each later in a core sample at actual size.

This device is a superconducting rock magnetometer used to measure the direction of the magnetic fields in the rock. This data can be used to determine age of the rock and provide insight to the periodic magnetic pole reversal that occurs.

That’s all for now…
-Andrew

Go to Top