New Office - again - in new Building this time

So, last September I posted about how I had become department chair and moved into the Chair's office?  I didn't even get to keep that particular office for a whole year. Over the summer we had to move everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, out of the old Science Building and into the newly renovated Science and Mathematics Complex (Phase 2). The department office, my faculty office, my laboratory, and everything else had to vacate because the old building is coming down to make way for Phase 3. 

The new department offices are pretty good - here is the Chair's bit of the Earth Sciences and Science Education office ...

Too little shelving space and the layout is weird. I sit on one side of the room and the motion detector for the light is on the other side of the room, so the lights are always turning off on me, which is really annoying. And I am doing a bunch of class prep so the surfaces are completely covered.

I do think that our department office has the coolest office wallpaper though ...

All the offices have discipline relevant gray-scale wallpaper, like equations or molecules. We have the a view of the Lake Ontario shoreline at Chimney Bluffs State Park. Much cooler!  In my biased opinion at least. They tried to get us to put up a picture of Arizona (O.o) or a bunch of leaves (O_O). Local rocks, water and wind is much better for an Earth Sciences Department. 

I got to visit Cape Town South Africa!

View down into Cape Town from the road up to Table Mountain

I got to visit Cape Town, South Africa !  Happy dance!  Unfortunately it was a flying visit for a conference so I didn't get to see or do nearly enough.

I was there to present a talk entitled Portable X-ray Fluorescence (PXRF) Spectrometry of Soils: Method Limitations at the 35th International Geological Congress held in Cape Town, South Africa as part of the special 5th International Conference on Criminal and Environmental Soil Forensics session. The talk was more exciting than the title makes it sound. Seriously. 

I did play hooky for part of a day with a friend from Italy and we went out to hike up Table Mountain.  Amazing place though I was rather disappointed to figure out that I flew 12+ hours then another 9+ only to land on rocks that were Ordovician and Siluro-Devonian rocks - same age as home. We had a great time hiking around and enjoying the breathtaking view.  Very windy but the sun was out and it was a gorgeous day.

Good thing we snuck out too, since this is what it looked like the next day ...

Seriously cloudy.  Couldn't see a thing.  Everyone there was complaining about how cold it was (winter in the Southern Hemisphere) but I thought it felt wonderful!  Way nicer than the 85°F+ temperatures we have been having around home. 

My Office and a Galileo Thermometer

Well, I have officially survived my first week and a half of being department chair. I figured that I should take a picture of my office before things explode and you can't see the desk anymore.

If you have an eye for detail you will note that I have a Galileo thermometer (the kind made of a sealed glass cylinder filled with a clear liquid and containing several glass balls filled with liquids of varying density) sitting on my desk.

Actually - here is a bigger picture.

The clear liquid in the cylinder in which the bulbs are submerged is usually not water but an organic compound (such as ethanol) the density of which varies with temperature more than water's does (though water does get used in some models).

Each of the sealed glass floats contains either alcohol or water dyed with food coloring  and is of a slightly different density (controlled by controlling the weight of the hang tags actually). For most liquids as temperature increases, the density decreases, thus as the temperature in the room changes, the individual floats will rise or fall in proportion to their respective densities relative to the liquid in the cylinder. 


To read this Galileo thermometer, look at the distribution of the bulbs in the cylinder. If there are some bulbs floating near the top, some clustered at the bottom, and one bulb floating alone in a gap in the middle - the hang tag on that lone bulb tell you the approximate temperature. If there are no bulbs in the gap then average the temperature values of the bulb above and the bulb below the gap to find the approximate temperature. Or with some models you simply look at the tag hanging off of the lowest floating bulb to determine the approximate temperature.

Either way - you will note that all of the bulbs have sunk to the bottom of the cylinder. This means that the room is over 80°. This is actually the first day that the top bulb shows any signs of trying to float. Most of the week and all of last week the bulbs were buried at the bottom of the cylinder. It has been hot in here.

So - that is the downside of having the fancy office with the windows in a place where the A/C is broken. OTOH - I think my plants might like it here.

Still Alive and bonus Moose

Stress levels IRL got super high a while back and posting on the blog is one of the things that fell by the wayside. Plus, I made the mistake of getting involved with the Hugo Awards, which burned me out really, really fast (I am one of the new voters who decided that No Award was vastly preferable to presenting awards to highly substandard work.)

However, now that I have had a break and a road trip out west, I am going to try to get back on track with posting again.

I spent a chunk of August hanging out with the moose in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming, where there was no such thing as cell service and WiFi was harder to find then a moose.

Yes - that is a mother with her calf. I was behind a stand and out of sight so that I wasn't disturbing them. Moose are actually quite dangerous and will charge if they feel threatened.

The other tiny bit of news is that I have been promoted to department chair (eek!) which is going to impact my activity as well. But - since this is supposed to be stress relief for me, I am still going to try to post something once or twice a week.

Happy Moose Day, I mean Tuesday!

Sigh, its gotten even colder ...

Getting really tired of this. Negative 11 (yes, -11) at 8:00 o'clock this morning. The truck didn't even want to start. I am somewhat amazed that it did.

And it's official too ... not just me having Marvin as a weather station. This is what I got when I checked this morning ...

Feels like -28° - so cold it hurts to breathe and the wind strips your body warmth in subseconds. Cleaning the truck off was a ton of fun. :-( Our weather station isn't registering wind chill appropriately because the anemometer is basically frozen so it can't spin freely. We trudge over and free it up so that it works for a while, then it slowly locks up again.

Too d**m cold around here

I guess complaining about the weather can be dangerously similar to arguing with the narrator.  The actual temperature, not wind chill but temperature, was -6°F. Yep, negative six at 8 o'clock in the morning on a sunny day. The snow outside is so cold it crunches and snaps as you walk on it. The cushion in the seat my car was hard as a rock and made a crack sound when I sat on it. EEK!

The actual temperature has now risen to -1°F but the windchill has now dropped to -17°. YUCK!

This is what is outside my office window !

Okay - ENOUGH! We have had enough snow. They only finally just cleaned the bl**dy sidewalks *yesterday* after we have gotten over 20 inches of snow this week. The only reason that I have been able to park at work is that I have a four wheel drive truck and can use it to flatten a spot in the parking lot - or more technically speaking - in one of the snowdrifts currently occupying the parking lot.  I should be taking more pictures out here there. 

This is the view out my window ...

Window on left looking left

Window on right looking right

This bears a striking resemblance to the parking lot and the sidewalks around here - at least until yesterday, when they finally started clearing some paths, ramps and stairs. Good Grief !

Pop-up books

The library on campus has a neat display of pop-up books. Here are some quick pictures which don't really do the books justice (you should be able to click on them to get larger pictures) ...

Snow White - Pre-Disney

Snow White - Pre-Disney

Disney Snow White - overview

Disney Snow White

Disney Snow White

The Hulk - yes he is bursting right out of the page there

Tron - which was intricate and minimalist at the same time

Wonder Woman - Dig the Combat Kangaroos!

Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski (Thanks to Ian Barrans for the correct title)

Work is crazy so ...

in loo of a real post ... I give you the bird !

To be specific, here is a sightly blurry photo of a suspicious Scarlet Ibis shortly before it decided it didn't like me there and flew away.

Ibis are medium to large sized wading and terrestrial birds that have a somewhat long neck and legs. They are related to storks and very closely related to spoonbills. The males are generally larger than the females and have longer bills.

According the Wikipedia:

The scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber) is a species of ibis in the bird family Threskiornithidae. It inhabits tropical South America and islands of the Caribbean. In form it resembles most of the other twenty-seven extant species of ibis, but its remarkably brilliant scarlet coloration makes it unmistakable. This medium-sized wader is a hardy, numerous, and prolific bird, and it has protected status around the world. Its IUCN status is Least Concern." 

 This particular ibis is an inhabitant of an aviary in Niagara Falls, Canada.  

And this is my wild leopard, also in the same aviary ... she is trying to make a break for it  :-)

Spring is Blooming

I am glad that I caught these flowers looking like this - because now the rain is trying to drown them all.