Oh it was so cool today, I was talking to my professor about how we're going to try to use inverse theory to figure out the shapes of magnetized blocks along the East Pacific spreading center.

Technical paragraph:::: It's an interesting process, because the topography on the sea floor affects the shape of the magnetic anomalies (if a mountain range gets built, it brings the magnetized part of the earth's crust closer to your sensor, so you record it as being stronger, even though it's only closer. So you have to take that into account when you're doing your calculations. But then the questions is, "how do we translate the ocean floor, with all of its random hills and mountains and ridges, into a mathematical equation?" It's pretty cool, you do a Fourier transform. This consists of taking a whole bunch of sine equations (think about this like you would a slinky held between two people. If you move up and down very slowly, you get one large U- that's the lowest order of wave. Then if you move the slinky a little faster you get an S lying on its side. This is a higher order. You can keep going until you get one and a half S's, maybe even two, if the slinky is long enough and you are good at it. Theoretically you can have as many S's as you want. If you look at pictures of them all lined up, you'll see that the peaks and troughs of the lines don't really line up. So if you added them all together, you'd get this kind of uneven look, like a heart beat or something.) So what you end up doing is that you add all of the different orders of curve together, and you weight each of them differently (because frequencies that seem to match a lot of your ridges or peaks should be given more importance in describing them mathematically) until you come up with a mathmatical equation that makes all these sine and cosine curves added together match what your random-looking topography looks like. :::end technical paragraph

Anyway, he was lamenting that we don't have any interactive software where we could sit there and pick out where we thought the boundaries between the blocks were and know immediately their latitudes and longitudes. I said, "Why don't you put them into ArcMap?" He doesn't ever use ArcMap for anything. I say I think it's possible. Haha, he says maybe my skills will be useful in this project. Haha! I have skills, who knew? Geomorphologists who stare at pictures all day! When Don asked if I could make pretty diagrams and I said that I could, his eyes lit up like it was Christmas.
And so it's late afternoon already but I get Robert to ssh into his computer and transfer the data, which consist of latitude and longitudes associated with different depths below sea level, which I sftp onto my windows machine. Then I get it all into ArcMap with the help of Caleb and Jay and I project the bathymetry. Then I decided to put it into 3-D, just for fun.

Then I fly through the 3-D virtual ocean floor that I've just made and take screen captures which I send as simple files to Don, with the message, "Look, Don, the sea-floor."

He sends me back only a set of four huge red exclamation marks.

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When an ocean current runs into an island, the water that would normally flow where the island is must some how flow around it. This causes vorticies where the force that is applied by the current to the front of the island shears off to the side of it somewhat turbulently. This causes a pattern of vorticies where there is a long vortex on one side of the island and a short one on the other. This pattern switches back and forth so that sometimes one side of the island has the long vortex and sometimes the other side does. You can actually sometimes see these vorticies in satellite photos.

You know when it's windy and the electrical wires start singing? wherrrr whoooooo wheeee... this is the exact same effect: the wind is alternating sides of the wire and the vortex pattern is oscillating.

So, if you think about it, if you could record the frequency of oscillation of the vorticies caused by the island, you could speed them up to an audible frequency, and you could hear the island singing.

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So today was an Alanis Morissette day. What is an Alanis Morissette day, you ask? You shouldn't have to ask. I'm assuming that most of you just know. But for the uninitiated, an Alanis Morissette day usually follows the kind of day I had yesterday (i.e. a I HATE GRADUATE SCHOOL & MUST FILL AN ENTRY WITH SWEARING AND THEN LOCK IT kind of day). It involves doing something for yourself (in my case I took myself out to lunch), and then locking yourself in a quiet, lonesome location (in my case the 8th floor of the science library), and singing Alanis Morisette very forcefully under your breath while you make contorted and emotion-filled angry faces and try and get your life under control.

For Alanis Morisette Day is not a Pity-Day, oh no. It is an Angry Day, but the anger boils with purpose and self-empowerment. Alanis Morisette (we're talking the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie here, but I suppose the Jagged Little Pill could work too if you're into what's hip (or used to be hip like ten years ago)) is the perfect music for stalking around the library in the darkness searching for obscure titles. It is the "let's pull ourselves out of our state of panic by the bootstraps and do something about our life!" But do not make the mistake that this music is anything like "inspirational", oh no, far from it. This music is about buying and selling this place, this music is about having as much rage as you have, this music is about doing all kinds of crazy-ass shit and then having the audacity to ask "are you still mad?"

If I am hardened I'll have no fear of further abandonment
If I am famous then maybe I'll feel good in this skin
If I am cultured my words will somehow garner respect

If I am masculine I will be taken more seriously
If I take a break it would make me irresponsible
If I need assistance then I must be incapable

If I accumulate knowledge
I'll be impenetrable
If I am aloof no one will know
when they strike a nerve
If I keep my mouth shut the boat
will not have to be rocked
If I am vulnerable I will be
trampled upon

too close to home, Alanis Morissette! Please stop reading my mind, Alanis Morissette!!!

Oh Alanis Morissette, there will always be a time and season for your angry phrases and your songs that call up emotions but don't actually make any sense when you read the lyrics... and your baffling choice of point of view that makes us wonder if you are a 45-year-old man. Always.

My last one of these days was almost precisely a year ago, Spring Break senior year when I was writing pretty much my entire thesis at once. The libraries may change, but the endless pursuit of boring, pointless knowledge and the pure, animal, unrhyming rage of Alanis Morissette stays the same evermore!!!

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You can pour your soul out singing a song you believe in
that tomorrow they’ll forget you ever sang

Sing it anyway, sing it anyway

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http://www.deviantart.com/view/45249848/?qo=14&q=by%3Ajohnsu&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps&offset=100

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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I went out to the beach to find him.

He was very drunk, planted in the sand, looking out at the black space that was the sea. He was crying.

I came and lay against him in the cool sand. "Hey" I said. He told me that he didn't want to leave this place, that everyone he loved was here. We lay in silence for a long while.

I told him not to stay out too late and that I loved him. I kissed his cheek and went inside.


He was right, you know.

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I've been spending the weekend so far engaged in a combination of surfing deviantart and relentless self-improvement, falling under the titles of LVS and Project FG. Luckily or unluckily I don't know, but I went into the office today (to print out a picture off google so I could use it as a reference for my planned drawing of St. Sebastian being tended by the widow) and I ran into Jim and Lionel and Anne as they were leaving. I always have mixed feelings about running into the boss at work on the weekend. 1. He knows you're putting in the extra effort 2. he probably thinks you have no life. And when your grad school advisor gets worried about you because he thinks you have no life... that's just really depressing. I mean, what's worse- having no life, or being caught at having no life? But you can't really assure him that you're not coming into work to actually do work, but to actually use the printing facilities for your own personal diversion, either. So you let the moment awkwardly pass, which it did.

So anyway, I printed the picture and spent the rest of the day in the library, working on LVS and Project FG... never got around to drawing St. Sebastian, I'll have to do that tomorrow or something. As part of the regimen for strict self-improvement I decided that since I was working on the 11th floor and the whole library is empty because of Spring Break and the elevator ride was really long, that I should dance like a crazy person during the whole duration of every elevator ride that I had to take. So I did. It's been working out really well for me.

I've been googling all of the symptoms I had during my recent illness, and it kept coming up over and over again: leukemia leukemia leukemia. Ok, ok, leukemia, blah blah blah, what do I really have?
So I was reading about the signs they look for and the tests they do to see whether or not you actually have leukemia. I realized that all the tests that they made me do last week were all to figure out if I had leukemia. The conversations they'd been having about the pinprick spots on my legs and my fever and my weight loss and everything (using really technical words so the conversation would take place above my head)... all of the terminology showed up here!

So THAT's why it was so important that they found my platelet levels to be so incredibly high and healthy! So THAT's why they had three doctors come in and look at me. And THAT's why they were so concerned about the reason for my weight loss. And I thought they were just worried that I had an eating disorder or something. Luckily I passed all of their important tests, and whatever I had last week will hopefully fade forever into the past.

Though, that's certainly enough to
FREAK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU, DON'T YOU THINK?

I wish doctors would be more transparent with you, ya know? But you kind of see why they aren't sometimes.

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