- It takes about as much energy to make a disposable aluminum roasting pan as it does to roast a turkey. #
- making a chipotle quinoa stuffing for the 10kg bird in the oven, which only cost $6.88. Ah, loss-leaders, how do I love thee. #
- Craig Venter reminds me a little of Hunter S. Thompson. A gonzo scientist. Oh yeah? F**k you. I'm gonna sequence myself anyway. #
- The lower half of my face is covered with a paste of henna, lemon juice, and sugar, and my head is wrapped in plastic bags and tape. #
- Arrrr, redbeard be bikin' down to the Museum of Natural History to learn about Genghis Khan, pirate king o' the central Asian steppes. #
- The natural history museum was further away than expected… and the night a bit colder, and the bike routes could really be signed better. #
- Going to climb Mt. Falcon in the late November sun. #
- Just watched "Sleep Dealer". We need more thoughtful near-future sci-fi from the developing world. #
- I'm thankful that I'm still interested in learning new and difficult things, despite my excessive schooling. #
- Judge if you want. We are all going to die. I intend to deserve it. #
- Happy Buy Nothing Day! Do your part to help ensure the so-called global "economy" remains in shambles. Yeah, Dubai, that means you, too. #
- very sad to realize that the last 7 years of my life have been pretty much a complete waste. #
- Things could be worse. Things can always be worse. However, I'm starting to wonder whether or not they can ever be better. #
- Why does it always seem like I've got 7 +/- 2 things to do? #
- Found a middle-eastern grocery in Denver near the Platte River bike trail. Also, I need some more pants. #
- Got some tasty olives, some pants, and a 42 mile bike ride. #
- English is wonderfully flexible. I'm going to try using xor when I mean exclusive or, and just plain 'or' for the and/or case. #
Monthly Archive for November, 2009
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of November 28th, 2009′
- Adopted Uighur little sister conscientiously morning-stomping on my bedroom ceiling, not realizing I've actually been up since 3:30am. #
- If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. cf.: graduate school http://bit.ly/1LgMaA #
- Thesis beard is beginning to impinge on the lower portion of my peripheral vision. Must mean I'm almost done. #
- Feeling inexplicably calm looking forward to Friday. Fixing those errors helped. I guess mostly I just feel like the die is already cast. #
- Trying to get a whole PhD into one 45 minute talk is just as ridiculous as trying to get a whole paper into a 10 minute AGU talk. #
- In 24 hours I'll either have a PhD, or be a raving unemployed homeless person. Or maybe both. #
- Finished making my presentation a whole 3 hours early. I could even like, practice it. Or revise it. Or something. #
- The only question now is, who wants to play Doctor? #
- Checked out a new diving location, in the natural refrigerator that is Colorado November. Got 20lbs of fresh produce, mostly greens. #
- Defended PhD wearing Hunter S. Thompson's Gonzo Fist emblem. Gonna read his Fear and Loathing on the 1972 Campaign Trail now. #
- I love libraries: Energy at the Crossroads, Intro to Bioinformatics Algorithms, Ghost Wars, Biological Networks, Sleeping w/ the Devil, etc. #
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of November 20th, 2009′
Dear District Attorney Stone,
I have been a daily cyclist in LA County for more than 15 years, using my bike as my primary means of transportation. As a result, I have experienced many instances of either reckless or malicious behavior by drivers on our streets and highways. Teenagers “having fun” and people out to “teach me a lesson”, no doubt. These are very serious offenses, which needlessly endanger me, and infringe upon my right to use our publicly funded infrastructure in a healthy, economical, fiscally responsible and environmentally friendly manner.
The case of Dr. Thompson is an extreme one, and I believe that he deserves the harshest penalty under the law for his violent act, which might well have ended the lives of one or more cyclists in Mandeville Canyon. However, he is only one person, and there are many lesser and some greater offenses committed against cyclists in LA County every month, which go largely unnoticed by the media or law enforcement, or if noticed, are dealt with in a manner which does not appropriately apportion responsibility. Drivers wield hundreds of times more power, in the literal sense, with their vehicles than cyclists do, and travel at much higher speeds, with much greater energies. They have the ability to cause much more harm than cyclists. This should result in greater responsibility. “I didn’t see him”, as drivers often say after an accident involving a cyclist, is not a valid excuse; it is evidence of their dereliction of this responsibility, a responsibility that all road users have to be aware of their surroundings, and the potential consequences of their actions.
More than any particular sentence for Dr. Thompson, I would like to urge you to take less spectacularly reckless behavior by drivers more seriously. For instance, driving while using a mobile phone, while now illegal, is not being aggressively ticketed, despite being an impairment on par with driving while under the influence of alcohol. Drivers who do not take their responsibilities seriously, or worse, who use the power their wield with their vehicles as a means of intimidation against other more vulnerable road users, should have their drivers licenses revoked for a long period of time. They need to be taken off the road. Losing your license is often seen as an extreme punishment, because we have built our city, and more broadly our society, so entirely around the idea that everyone will own and drive a car on a daily basis. But driving is not necessary, even in LA, as I can attest having never owned a car here, and I do not believe we should confer the right to operate a motor vehicle on every citizen when they turn 16. It should be a privilege that is earned and maintained through consistently responsible actions.
Thank you for your time and attention,
Zane Selvans
- Ahhhh. The thesis draft is really done. Now on to fixing known errors, reading background papers, and making a talk. But first, a nap. #
- Silly me. I thought *writing* the thesis would be the hard part. Never offer to give someone a 136 page hardcopy of anything. #
- I can't remember the last day I didn't drink any coffee. #
- Rode 30 miles in a warm November sun to turn in the paper copies of my thesis. BIkes make me happy. #
- Mark Twain's "War Prayer": http://bit.ly/3z901Y #
- Getting plenty of sleep is soooo nice. Being woken up in the middle of a dream fight scene with Ed Norton & a fireplace poker, not so much. #
- Having my new prescription spex makes me wish I had Rx sunglasses. #
- Sometimes it is surprisingly difficult just to remember to breathe. #
- Ahh, fixed my sign error. Nice consistent story, both techniques playing well together. Everyone lives happily ever after now, right? #
- I see no way to differentiate the 9/11 prosecutions from show trials. #
- Anybody have a favorite bioinformatics text, good for someone with more background on the info side than the bio? #
- I just applied to the Personal Genome Project. They probably have enough young white males already though: http://www.personalgenomes.org #
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of November 15th, 2009′
- A good holy book is like a good horoscope: given the right cues and context, it can mean whatever you, or your dear leader, need it to mean. #
- Anybody interested in going to the CO Environmental Film Festival, Fri or Sat night in Golden? Help me celebrate turning my thesis in! #
- Road raging anti-cyclist Dr. Thompson of Mandeville Canyon guilty on all 7 counts, & held w/o bail pending sentencing: http://bit.ly/3AWHVB #
- Yet again I find the problem I'm working on has already been considered, and deemed difficult, for >100yrs. Thanks, Richard Dedekind. #
- I do have to wonder what greens will turn to next year if COP15 flops, as seems likely. Just how dark are we? http://endciv.com #
- I think @longnow should host a debate between @AlexSteffen and Derrick Jensen. Or maybe it should be a gladiatorial death match… #
- Tired. Irish cream and milk. Steamy shower. No more graphs tonight please. #
- I'm obviously not going to be doing any sleeping any time soon. #
- This is not going to be a disaster. This is not going to be a disaster. This is not going to be a disaster. This is going to be a disaster. #
- Four hours of sleep, but then I took a shower, so I can't be tired, right? #
- Why am I such a loser sometimes. #
- Regained perspective over dinner. At least I'm not going to be deported in January. Making a thesis triage list helped too. #
- wooziness setting in. brain shutting down involuntarily. #
- Even this is not in my written up yet! #
- Gorgeous warm autumn day in Boulder. Too bad my thesis is not about looking out the library window at girls as they walk and bike past. #
- Now if only it were a week ago, I'd only be half a day behind schedule. #
- I feel like science is this beautiful thing, and I'm puking all over it. Thank goodness I usually feel better after puking. #
- 50% of all US food is thrown away. Producing that waste requires 30% of all US water, or as much as all non-agricultural water use combined. #
- If 1% of the food LA grocery stores send to landfills was rescued it would feed every hungry person in LA. Go see Dive! http://bit.ly/1MNsFr #
- Am I being neurotic, or does my thesis really suck? Hard to decide. I guess that's what the defense is for. Here's hoping for neurotic. #
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of November 6th, 2009′
It seems a bit of Vaudeville is still lingering around the Academe…
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
of
THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER
DISSERTATION DEFENSE
of
Zane A. Selvans
FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Date/Time: 2:30pm, Friday, 20th November, 2009
Bldg./Rm: Benson Earth Sciences (BESC) 380
Examining Committee Members:
- Karl Mueller
- John Wahr
- Robert Pappalardo
- Bruce Jakosky
- John Spencer
OUTLINE OF STUDIES
Major Field: Geological Sciences
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
A descendant of Dust Bowl migrants, Zane grew up near Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He left as soon as humanly possible, and got his BS in Computer Science at the Caltech in Pasadena. After a brief stint working in Silicon Valley (which unfortunately did not result in any kind of dot-com stock option fortune), he returned to Caltech via sea kayak to work with Mars Global Surveyor data, mapping Mars’ south polar layered deposits. While he has been a student at CU Boulder since the fall of 2002 you may not have seen much of him lately, because in early 2006 his wife and advisor both moved to Caltech/JPL, and like a long period comet, he slid back down into that place’s deep potential well to be with them. Next year, Zane intends to spend a lot of time on his bicycle.
THESIS
Time, Tides and Tectonics on Icy Satellites
Faculty Advisor: Karl Mueller
ABSTRACT
In the outer solar system, we cannot directly use the radiometric dating techniques widely applied in terrestrial geology. We also lack the detailed understanding of the correspondence between crater size-frequency distributions and absolute ages that the radiometric dating of lunar samples has given us in the inner solar system. Additionally, many geologically interesting surfaces on the icy satellites are insufficiently cratered to allow us to infer precise relative ages. Thus it is desirable to find other ways to construct geological chronologies that function well in the outer solar system. In this work I develop two techniques.
The first compares the linear tectonic features covering Jupiter’s moon Europa to modeled tensile fractures resulting from tidal stresses due to the non-synchronous rotation (NSR) of the satellite’s decoupled, icy, lithospheric shell. The amount of shell rotation required to align a feature with the stress field resulting from NSR is used as a proxy for time. This translation is potentially convolved with a phase lag between the tidal potential and the stresses it induces, resulting from the shell’s partially viscous response to the NSR forcing. The geography of individual lineaments is found to be no more consistent with NSR stresses than chance would predict, however, the ensemble of global lineaments displays a non-uniform apparent rate of lineament formation throughout the time period recorded by the surface. This non-uniformity may be explained either by steady state fracture formation, activity, quiescence and erasure, or by a transient episode of tectonics.
The second technique encodes the myriad superposition relationships evident between Europa’s tectonic features as a directed graph enabling algorithmic analysis. The observed superposition relationships are generally insufficient to construct complete stratigraphic stacks, but we can calculate the degree to which they corroborate or contradict another hypothesized order of formation. We find that they tend to corroborate the hypothesis that the lineaments are tensile fractures due to NSR stresses.
Together these results offer cautious support for the idea that Europa’s shell rotates independently of its silicate interior, and demonstrate techniques useful in comparing tectonic features on other icy satellites to hypothesized mechanisms of formation.
