We seismologists at the UW have had an exciting past couple of weeks. The episodic tremor and slip event that we expect about every 14 months came a few months early this year! At http://www.pnsn.org/tremor/, you can see the map of the movement of tremor for yourself. I highly recommend that in "Overlay Options," you select "Color vs. time" to see how the tremor has moved.

This year, it started south of Olympia and slowly moved north. We watched it progress and sat around, biting our nails, asking ourselves, "Is this a false alarm or is this it?" After it held strong for over a week and crept north toward our seismic arrays, we decided that it was probably the real thing, and we went out to activate our seismometers.

Now, last year, catching the tremor episode was easy. Our seismometers were installed in plenty of time, and the batteries had plenty of juice, so no special effort was required.

This year, though, the batteries had been out in the field for a long time, and they were pretty low on power. Also, we'd had to return the actual seismometers to IRIS, the NSF-funded resource for seismometers. Luckily, they'd managed to get us some spare seismometers this summer. So we had two challenges: (1) We had to put the seismometers back out - the easy part. (2) We had to make sure each site had a working set of batteries - the hard part. See, these batteries are rather specialized and very expensive; we couldn't afford to buy anymore. So we did a not-so-fun activity: we pulled good batteries out of sites that weren't important, and we put them into sites that were important. Now these batteries are about 16 pounds each, and we have 5 per site. These sites can be pretty far back in the woods, because if they're too easy to find and get to, people vandalize them. In some sites, we had to take out all five batteries, and in others, we had to replace five batteries. You do the math. It was hard work!

Luckily, it was all worth it. The tremor kept rumbling on northward, and we got the last stations hooked up the same day that the tremor reached our seismic arrays. Whew! Now we just wait another week or two for the tremor to totally pass by, and then we go collect all our great new data.

Jonathan was kind enough to join us in this effort, and he was an excellent field assistant. He was great at hauling those heavy batteries. Plus, one station wouldn't have gotten running if it weren't for him: We had a site that was vandalized, and the vandals had cut the lead that connected the battery to the power cord. Lucky for me, Jonathan knew that we could just strip the wire and wrap it around the battery lead. Not as elegant as an intact power cord, but it worked!

Jonathan also took a lot of pictures. There are a ton of them so I'll put this behind a cut. Here's a little preview:



( Click here for more! )

Jonathan and I went to Portland and had many adventures!

• We took the Amtrak there and back. Usually it is a quiet, relaxing trip, as indeed it was on our ride back. When we traveled to Portland, though, it was a Friday afternoon, and this group of five guys had apparently decided that that means it's party time. Our train left at 2:20 PM, and they cracked the first beer within minutes of the train rolling into motion. Seriously. And those fellows did not have empty hands for the entire trip. They were across the aisle from us and we are fairly sure that they had at least six drinks apiece (beer and liquor) in that three-and-a-half-hour train ride. By the time we arrived in Portland, they were very loud and I was very ready to get off that train.


• We stayed with our friends Randy and Drew, who just bought a house. Craziness! The house was really nice and amazingly spacious, especially compared to their old apartment. Also, they have two long-haired black cats who I love.


• Randy and Drew took us berry-picking at a U-Pick place. We picked 20 pounds of berries: blueberries, kotata berries, boysenberries, and a small amount of raspberries and cherries. The next day, we made two pies. Yum.


• After berry picking, they took us to a goat farm, where we got to meet goats that are raised for their fiber. They are so fluffy that I thought they were sheep, except they have wicked horns and creepy goat eyes. The fluffiness, all the curly hair, it was unbelievable.


• We saw Star Trek in the Park. It's a thing where people act out an episode of Star Trek (The Original Series). The episode was "Mirror Mirror." It was very well done, and so much fun. Example: when they used the transporter, they had girls in gold lamé dresses run around the people being "beamed up."


• I got to see a few Scripps friends - Katherine and Gwende. With Gwende, I saw (a few minutes of) a spelling bee that preceded a pub trivia night. Never seen a pub spelling bee before. That was pretty funny. Katherine and I enjoyed drinks and donuts together, including trying to have a thoughtful conversation about poverty while ignoring a really bad stand-up comedian in a bar. Fun times!


• Got to try the famous Portland food trucks. On Monday I got malai kofta from New Taste of India around 6th and Oak, and on Tuesday we got Vietnamese food from Mai Pho around 10th and… something. Alder? It was close to Powell's. The Vietnamese food was awesome and I very quickly devoured a huge take-out container full of it. The kofta were good but the amount of sauce was truly excessive. I could not finish all the sauce and rice. There was just so much.


• This computer is trying to autocorrect kofta to kaftan.


• Odd encounter: So when I was eating my food truck Indian food, and Jonathan was eating his food truck Cuban food, we sat down at this two-sided bench to eat. A girl was sitting on the other side of it, reading a paper. At one point she asked us if we smoked, and we said no, so she actually got up and walked a little ways away to smoke her cigarette. How considerate is that? I have never before had someone ask, and wander away to light up. So thoughtful! So I was like, "this girl is cool." We exchanged a few more words with her. Later on, I was exclaiming about how I had way too much food, and my food was just sitting there with me clearly not touching it while Jonathan finished up his food. After a good number of minutes, she ventured to ask if I was going to finish it and whether she could have my leftovers. Now, I'll admit that in some situations a question like that would make me uncomfortable. In this situation, though, I'd clearly been bemoaning how I had too much food, so it didn't seem all that rude. In fact, I had been thinking, "Can I give this away to someone? There's just so much, and it's so tasty. I don't want to waste it." So I was very glad that she asked, especially because I was already well-disposed toward her on account of the cigarette thoughtfulness, and I was very pleased to give her my leftovers.


• On that note, I don't have as many assorted randos talk to me in a week in Seattle as I did in a day in Portland. I guess that the Seattle Freeze is real after all. And I guess I have become very comfortable with it. All these people randomly talking to me, commenting on my conversations, what?!


• I bought nine books at Powell's, the magical giant new-and-used book store. It felt good.

Look, I'm updating!

On Friday night, Jonathan and I went to the Seattle Men's Chorus's fall concert, "Heartthrobs" - an ode to boy bands. Basically a bunch of medleys, ranging from 50s songs to disco to the Backstreet Boys era. And supposedly there may have been some very recent stuff like Jonas Brothers in there, but I am not even completely sure what a Jonas Brother is, let alone what their songs sound like. One of my good friends and officemates is in the chorus, which was my main motivation for going.

Anyway, it was such a fun, energetic, happy concert. Lots of good songs. Fun dancers for some of the songs. And there was an ASL interpreter the whole time, which I thought was very nice. I thought he was terrific. Not that I could understand what he was signing, really, but he was so into it and he sure was fun to watch. Sometimes there weren't any dancers and so there was little movement on the stage, and I just watched the interpreter.

The Seattle Men's Chorus is almost all or perhaps all gay men. That was Pride weekend, and in conversation, we decided that although it was not an official Pride event, it was definitely a proud event.

After the concert there was a dance party. So funny! It's this fancy concert hall where they hold operas, and here was a dance party in the lobby. Jonathan and I danced around for a while. It was remarkable in two ways: (1) the range of ages was huge, with quite a lot of over-50 types dancing, and (2) in couples that were dancing together, same-sex couples were the vast majority. It was cool!

Here's a picture of the concert, which was in McCaw Hall. My friend is one of the guys in the blue suits up front. He was in this small group up front for one of the medleys and even had a few solo lines. Clearly, I picked the right concert to go to.



Later that weekend, we went to the Pride parade and the Pride festival in Seattle Center. It was the first time I'd ever been to a pride event so that was fun. The parade was not all that crazy but cool. Lots of creative costumes, some floats from gay groups and some kind of random things, like a mammogram-providing van driving the parade. Not actually providing mammograms at the time, though. There was this big group of a whole bunch of Lutheran churches marching in the parade, too. Are Lutheran churches unusually open-minded or something?

The festival at the Seattle Center was huuuge. So many people! It was kind of overwhelming! At that point we were developing sunburns and I was intimidated by the crowds, so we didn't stay for too long, but we did enjoy wandering around and people-watching for a while.

I recently visited my uncle, who pointed out to me that I hadn't updated this since... November. Really? Oh. Oops. I'm not sure how that happened.

So let's have a quick recap of the last six months!

Jonathan and I spent Thanksgiving in California and Christmas in Colorado. For Christmas, I didn't do any crazy running around between California and Colorado this year - unlike previous years, that involved flights on Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas, respectively. I decided to make it a little less stressful that year. It was odd not to be with my family but I had a very nice time with Jonathan's family. Of course, by the third Christmas with them, I was feeling very comfortable and at home, so mainly I just had a really nice time. I was a bit sick for a lot of the time but we did go cross-country skiing once!

February was a good month. We went on our department retreat to the San Juan Islands, which is always fun. Jonathan and I also went home to Glendora for a week and I had a very nice time catching up with family and friends again.

Did anything exciting happen in March or April? I can't think of anything. Well, I started lifting weights. Does that count? I may be mere weeks away from doing my first pull-up, people! Goal in life: do one pull-up before I turn 25. It's gonna happen.

In April and May I worked very hard to get ready for the EarthScope conference in Austin, Texas. It was worth the hard work! The only conference I'd been to before was AGU, which is attended by 15,000+ people. The EarthScope conference had just 300 attendees. Much more focused, much smaller, very different. In some ways I preferred it. It wasn't as exhausting, I didn't feel burnt-out by the end because it was shorter (2.5 days instead of 5), I didn't have to choose between talks to attend because only one thing ever happened at a time, and everything that was presented was at least somewhat interesting to me.

Also, it was warm in Austin. Yay! We've had this pathetic cold spring in Seattle, so that was very nice. We did get to do a little sight-seeing, including a tour of the Capitol building with a friend and my advisor; an art museum visit with some friends; and - coolest of all, I thought - this amazing flight of bats. There's this bridge in Austin where 1.5 million bats live, and they all fly out at sunset. Check it out:



Also, the conference in Austin was really fortuitous, because it meant I was not that far from Houston, which meant I could visit my Uncle Mark and Aunt Marsha, who I hadn't seen for three years! We had such a fun time. It was great catching up with them. Fun activities included lounging by the pool, seeing Galveston, and touring the Johnson Space Center!

Here's a picture of us in front of the Saturn V rocket at the Space Center.


And, there's your five-minute summary of the last six months! I'll try to update the blog again a little sooner next time. :)

Well, we had a lot of excitement today!

For the past week, forecasts predicted weekend snow, but it was very uncertain. A fairly famous UW professor and weather blogger thought that it would be too dry for us to get any snow, certainly now significant accumulation.

On Sunday morning, we woke up to find it snowing! It snowed lightly, but all the snow melted on contact, at least here in north Seattle. I believe that the snow stuck a little bit around Tacoma and Bellingham, but where we live, the snow didn't stick.

On Monday morning, we woke up to find it snowing gently, with a nice light dusting of snow already in place.



(Don't worry - we brought the top-priority plants inside on Sunday; we knew it was going to freeze on Sunday night.)

Around the time when I was getting ready to house (11ish), it started to seriously snow.



Luckily, I was warned last night that the Metro buses would be on snow routes Monday morning, so I could plan accordingly to get up and leave earlier than usual. Once I saw the snow, it was pretty clear that the buses were going to be completely messed up. In addition to reroutes and snow routes, there were guaranteed to be lots of delays from accidents, people driving slowly and/or badly in the snow, etc. Like California drivers with rain, Seattle drivers just aren't used to snow, and so things get crazy the moment snow starts falling. Only I think it's even worse with snow, because you have to contend with slippery ice, not just wetness.

Anyway, it was clear that the buses were going to slow and wildly unpredictable today. There is a website with real-time bus arrival information in Seattle, but it wasn't working today - they've been working with the bus company, but they didn't have all the snow route information necessary to get the real-time stuff implemented in time. Also, Seattle buses don't have GPS. Instead, they have radios that periodically let a central dispatch station know where they are on their route. One Bus Away uses the knowledge of the bus's last confirmed location combined with its knowledge of the routes and average speeds to predict where the bus is. It works very well, but when snow throws off the routes in a big way, that system breaks down.

So, I was waiting for my bus at a stop where the 16, 30, and 31 buses stop. I stood there for ten minutes - no buses. Then, two 16s back-to-back. Two minutes later, another 16. Finally, maybe five minutes after that, the 30 and 31 (which are normally offset from each other by about 15 minutes) arrive at the same time. Good times! It was probably about 28 degrees Fahrenheit at this point. Not too bad, and I was too excited about the snow to be very uncomfortable.

I took lots of pictures on my way to the bus. ( Here are my favorites. )

Later in the day, we had a snowball fight on the roof of my building. There's kind of this outdoor landing, and from that landing, there are stairs up to the main roof area. A group of people camped out on the upper roof area, lured people up to the roof with false promises of cider and cookies, and then ambushed them with snowballs. ( Snowball fight pictures, and pictures taken from the roof of the building )

Getting home tonight was unpleasant. Again, with the crazy, messed-up buses, I waited for more than half of hour at a bus stop, in a situation where I normally wouldn't wait for more than 10 minutes to get a bus. This was a long enough wait that it might have been as fast for me to walk, but I was worried about the ice. I'm not very proficient at walking on ice, so it was very likely that I would fall on my butt if I tried to walk home. Still, standing around wasn't so fun; it was windy and cold, cold, cold. (It's about 25F now, apparently.) As soon as the sun set, the roads cooled off enough that they got icy and snow started settling on them. I saw a lot of stuck cars, and I heard about a lot of accidents. A few cars had chains, but not many. Vehicles like buses and fire trucks had chains and seemed to be doing okay, for the most part, though I did see one bus that was having trouble.

A very exciting day! And I'm very curious to see what tomorrow will bring. The most likely situation is that we will get little or no snow tomorrow, I think. However, it's possible that a fluke of the weather could bring many more inches of snow tomorrow. We're flying to California on Wednesday to spend Christmas with my family, so, fingers crossed that the weather settles down by then!

I slacked off for a few weeks, whoops. But here at last is the environmentalism installment of my vegetaranism discussion.

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Now that “green” is the trendiest concept around, the environmental ramifications of eating meat might just be the most powerful argument out there for vegetarianism. Some people may not be bothered by animal cruelty (or, more likely, simply refuse to think about and acknowledge it), but global warming gets a lot more press and creates a lot more panic. In fact, the environmental arguments were the biggest drive for me to give up meat. In the ensuing years I’ve learned more about animal cruelty and other issues involved in vegetarianism, but a desire to reduce my “carbon footprint” and ecological impact was definitely my biggest motivator.
( Read more... )

Susan was kind enough to pass on the great news to me that Ohio recently passed a law mandating more human treatment of food animals. I had forgotten this, but California passed a similar law two years ago.

These laws basically require animals to be given more space and to be treated better. For example, the Ohio law will "phase out extreme confinement systems for breeding pigs and veal calves," forbid building new battery cages for egg-laying hens (which I mentioned in a comment to my last post), require humane euthanasia, and crack down on puppy mills and cockfighting. Although the ban on veal calf confinement doesn't start until 2017, and it doesn't seem like there's any requirement to get rid of existing battery cages, this is a great step.

The California law, passed in 2008, will take effect in 2015, at which point it will begin to phase out extreme confinement for egg-laying hens, breeding pigs, and veal calves. Also great stuff! I wish it could happen even sooner but I am glad that it is happening at all. Hopefully this means that it will soon be a no-brainer to buy cage free eggs in Ohio and California. (Though I do wonder if big egg production centers will just shift to more cage-friendly states?)

I really recommend reading this article about the California law, which is my source for the info in this post. The first page has a (short, image-free) description about life for egg-laying hens in battery cages. It's awful but if you are still buying caged eggs you really need to read it. I will put it behind a cut here. ( Read more... )

The article linked to above notes that "Although this is an historic initiative, no one is saying Prop 2 will end all cruelty." It's important not to become complacement or to assume that everything is fixed just because a nice law passes. Still, both of these laws are great steps, and I'm very happy to see the voters and the governments of these states who are willing to say that less cruelty to animals is more important than the fear of price increases.

(Side note: I noted in my last post that I didn't know many specifics about pig raising. If you want a smidge of information, page two of the article about the California law has a very sad description of the life of a breeding sow that may be of interest.)

Now, we get to one of the major reasons* for why I’m a vegetarian, which is this:

Mass meat production is pretty messed up.

( Part 3: Corn and Cannibalism )

Over the years, many people have expressed interest in why I'm a vegetarian. I thought it might be fun and useful to address this through a post, since I think my reasons are well thought-out and hopefully interesting to others. Now I can have a definitive document and I'll just write down the URL when people ask me about vegetarianism. So easy!

Important note: The purpose of this isn't to be preachy or accusatory or to convert anyone. It's just information, which you can read, or not. I hope you will because I think it's important for our choices to be educated ones, whether or not any of this actually changes your mind about eating meat. But I try not to be an aggressive preachy vegetarian, because then this happens. If people want to ask me about it, I'm happy to tell them about it, but I'm not going to evangelize. So if you don't want to read this, don't. My feelings won't be hurt, I promise.

I actually have a lot to say about this so I will be posting this whole thing in several parts over a week or two. Here is part 1, the introduction and background.

( Part 1: My style of vegetarianism, and how I became a vegetarian )