First Post from Hawai’i

So, I’m in Hawai’i now. Still working on some grad school apps. Got at least two left. So, while I’m in a Starbucks near my hotel, working on them, and also procrastinating a bit. I’ve been to the beach, and taken a few pictures.

So, here they are.

Registration desk in the hotel. I guess the stone is some sort of porphyritic basalt. Edit: Rapakivi-textured granite, per Ron Edit 2: Baltic Brown, quarried in Finland, around 1Ga, as per Dave

A table in the hotel. I guess it's a diorite Edit: More likely larvikite, per Ron Edit 2: likely a stone from Brazil known as Uba Tuba, per Dave

A neat banyan tree near the hotel.

The beautiful beach by the hotel

A sea urchin. My first regular echinoid observed in the wild.

Cityscape + mountains + clouds = awesome

Hope people like the pictures.

Just submitted another grad school app (4 complete now, 1 to 3 more to go). Going to the big island tomorrow for three days, and I’ll try to put up some of the better pictures plus maybe even some geology in the accompanying post. However, I doubt it’ll be quite as good as what has already been put up by better bloggers than me. But, I’ll do my best to at least put up an okay shot or two.

Edit: updated the captions of the table rocks, as per Ron’s comments. Why is wordpress being lame and not doing strikethrough for the captions?

Edit: Ah, okay, I at least know probably why it was being lame. Oh well.

The spiral of Nautiloids has nothing to do with Phi

There’s an interesting post at God Plays Dice about how is less significant in nature than many think it is, with links to a few different posts by others.

The really interesting bit, both in terms of paleontology and math, is the link to an article from the March 2005 issue of The College Mathematics Journal. For paleontologists, the key bit is on pages 126-127: the author measured several nautilus shells, and never got close to , even though of course it’s still a logarithmic spiral.

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while, but it kept getting lost in the shuffle of prepping for exams, getting ready for GSA, and the ordinary day-to-day work of school. Despite the fact that it wasn’t much of a post. But, I’ll be done with exams for a bit after this week, I’ve given my presentation at GSA (which seemed to go pretty well), and gotten back to Virginia.

Anyway, the point is, I’ll try and not be as lame about updating. For all two of you reading this.

Top 5 Minerals Meme

In response to Callan’s Top 5 Minerals Meme.

I’m organizing around chemical formulas, not names. So, for example, just clays are not a candidate, because there are too many different formulas. However, smectites would be fine, even though that isn’t as specific as, say, quartz.

So, for my list,

• Quartz, : extremely physically and chemically stable at Earth surface conditions. Has conchoidal fracture, which sounds cool, looks cool, and has practical applications. It’s what most sand is made of and is a major component of the continental crust ( both due to that whole stability thing). Reasonably interesting to look at in both hand sample and thin section.
• Calcite and Aragonite, : everybody’s heard of limestone. Many organisms have hard parts made of it. An important part of some fairly common geomorphology. Plays fairly significant role in hydrology and oceanography. Can have some pretty neat properties in hand sample (double refraction!) and in thin section (that characteristic change in relief on rotation!).
• Olivine, : it’s what the mantle is mostly made of. The mantle is what the Earth is mostly made of. And it’s pretty in both hand sample and in thin section. Case closed!
• Smectite, : One of the major groups of 2:1 clay minerals. Does that whole swelling and contracting thing as it absorbs and releases water, which leads to one of the main reasons I’d want someone unfamiliar with geology to know about it: it can lead to landslides, and screw up the foundation of your house. So, yeah. Nobody should panic about it, but everybody needs to be aware of it. Montmorillonite (a type of smectite) feels cool, and comes from the weathering of bentonites, so that’s pretty neat.
• Apatite, : It has a hardness of 5. It’s pretty in hand sample, and very cool looking in thin section. Also? It’s a major part of what vertebrates do some of their most important biomineralization with. In other words, it’s your skeleton.