ideas, writings, and musings
After purchasing the Horror Freight, I mean Harbor Freight, benchtop Drill Press a few months ago for around 50 dollars, I’ve been figuring out how to use it and which jobs it’s best suited for. As it is my first drill press I don’t have much to compare it against, but so far I have…
As anyone who has been in my workshop knows, it’s very much a chaotic mashup of impulse purchases and salvaged odds-and-ends. Whether it’s the old pantry door that is now serving as a table or the welded together rack for my tool cases, my shop is full of character (and lots of left-overs). This weekend…
Living on a ship for three weeks means that you pick up a few tidbits of knowledge such as the difference between tieing a bend and a hitch, but a term that is rather unique to sailing on National Science Foundation (NSF) vessels is Seahab. All research vessels control the supply of alcohol on board,…
Since scientific outreach is an important aspect for many scientific projects, we’re doing our best to provide an open record of some of the things we do and the reasoning behind them. So before I direct you to the site, spoiler alert, there is engaging science ahead: CCE 2016 RAPID Blog.
All professionals accept that there will be occasions when work gets in the way of sleep and that odd hours me be required to get the job done. Generally this interruption in sleep is temporary and isolated to project deadlines or mission critical tasks, but for scientists aboard research vessels this may be a de…
To commemorate my first cruise, as well as organizing the next set of articles by theme, there will be a new series of posts titled “Call me Ishmael” dealing with the 2016 CCE RAPID cruise. This cruise, CCE-P1604 to be precise, has been chock full of new experiences which may be beneficial for my own…
Update: See update section following the article for the latest. I recently described in general terms a new method that I’m developing which uses Yttrium to estimate the carbon export from the ocean’s photic zone, so today I saw it fitting to rant about an issue I’m currently facing. Assuming that you have either read…
An ongoing topic of research in Oceanography involves the cycling and sequestration of carbon within the world’s oceans. While it should be no surprise that such a topic is the focus of many labs, including my own, it may be hard to believe that scientists are still grappling with how to best measure the exchange…
So as many of you know, most of my work to date has been on the California Current ecosystem and, in particular, on modeling the ecosystem there. In just a few short days I’ll be heading out from the Scripps pier for a 22 day cruise. The goal for the cruise is to measure the…
A few weeks (perhaps months) ago I introduced the side project that I am involved with (here) whereby our aim is to develop a hydrographic model for Apalachicola Bay, Fl. Today I wanted to provide an update for that project while also sharing some interesting problems that we’ve had to work around. To see the…
I’m pretty sure I have never written anything that would be classified as self help; and while that section of the bookstore always repels me, the ideas and promises suggested are always quite appealing. For example, who wouldn’t want a “4 Hour Work Week” (link) or to know the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (Amazon)? It…
While on a run yesterday in my new Xero brand running sandals[1], I found myself thinking about the proposal I have to write for marine geochemistry. Since I have read a fairly comprehensive assortment of water column particle flux papers, I figure it might be a good fit for this proposal. Vertical carbon flux, which…
Since starting on my kitchen remodel project last month, I’ve been uncertain about what to do with the floors. Currently the floors are simple, glued-down vinyl, which has worked great and makes a lot of sense over a slab foundation, but my kitchen deserves something a bit better. Initially I figured tile would be the…
While it scarcely seems possible, it was just a year ago that I moved into my first house and started my graduate school career. If the passage of life, and the measure of that life, is to be defined by the events within it, then for the past year I have done a lot of…
[NB: The first entry in this series was published here, Introduction to Sediment Traps, which covers the motivation, use and issues of sediment traps.] Although validation of the data was lacking, sediment traps (or sedimentation traps as they were once called) were being used by the 1970s in the study of lakes (Davison et al., 1982;…
[NB: The second entry in this series was published here, Sediment Traps: Historical Trends and the Promise of Innovation, which covers some of the history and development of sediment traps as well as my own hopes for the field moving forward.] The biological carbon pump (BCP) is the mechanism whereby marine, biological systems sequester atmospheric carbon into…
After a recent conversation with a friend about photography and digital images, there seems to be many unanswered questions out there regarding the wide variety of image formats which have become commonplace in our lives. A few months ago I wrote a short article on HDR Photography (link) since so many people were asking questions…
Here are photos from my latest project. It is still a work in progress; new article will be posted when completed.
At the onset of the semester, myself along with Taylor, Xu and Erick committed to setting up and running a 3d hydrographic model of Apalachicola Bay. Since the primary goal of these weekly meetings was to learn how to take a modelling project from start to finish, we needed to be deliberate about our choice…
Ever since setting up my workshop last month, I’ve been working on making the space as versatile and organized as possible–a bit of a trial and error process. One step in the right direction was setting up a ventilation system so that the fumes and dust created by the various projects would be taken care…
This essay is taken nearly verbatim from notes on the subject taken during a seminar at Boston College and later compiled into essay form. All information was presented by Dr. Fukuyama with additional content and context provided by me. Fukuyama is perhaps best known for his influential textbook, The End of History and the Last…
Over the past two weeks I’ve been running around town either before or after work in the hope of negotiating a fair price for some granite countertops in my latest kitchen remodel. Since I’ve found the experience frustrating and painstaking, I wanted to share my experience with the local businesses in case anyone finds themselves…
In the field of oceanography, statistical analysis of complex data is a fundamental skill that often calls for mathematics beyond the training of the student. Here I would like to walk through some simple linear algebra and connect it to a well-used yet poorly understood statistical analysis technique. Eigenpairs Given a linear transformation (e.g. ),…
As the title hints, this will be a post about a recipe I created over this past weekend. On Saturday I was hosting a BBQ to celebrate the end of the fall semester and because I wanted to show friends around my place. While I may be able to get by on a charcoal grill,…
Darwin’s On the Origins of Species provided a vivid and practical mechanism to explain how variations within a species can be selected for. This mechanism became known as natural selection or, perhaps less accurately, survival of the fittest. Although Darwin’s natural selection mechanism was not novel—Malthus described a similar mechanism as actively limiting a population’s…
Over the years I have certainly been the recipient of plenty of concern regarding the sometimes dangerous recreation I pursue, yet I’m always confident because I have a plan. Now there is always risk–a tree could fall and kill me or a poisonous snake could catch me at a bad time–but risk is only dangerous is…
Update 10/13/15 – Minor improvements to code and an update to the latest findings. CTD data (conductivity, temperature and depth) from a YSI provides a quick and methodologically simple way to estimate the current water column state by, literally, dropping an instrument off the side of a boat. During each deployment the YSI records the…
On a day to day basis, I use the R programing language more than any other language (e.g Python, Java, Fortran, Matlab…), and there is a good reason for it: R excels at the sort of work I do. It has been extremely well suited to my modeling work, especially when going to analyze the…
I’m not sure about you, but I have always struggled with keeping all of my digital files organized and readily available. Often times it feels as if sorting and organizing physical copies would be much easier, but alas! that’s not a realistic option. Instead I always end up resorting these files into a bunch of…
Taylor and myself have traditionally spent a fair bit of time outside of lectures and meetings going over material that we find interesting, confusing or useful. Often these topics would push one of us into delving more deeply into the literature or logic of the problem and then sharing the insight and answer with the…