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A geologist's song 01
The Geologist's Come-All-Ye (a folksong) by Brenna Lorenz
Come all ye lads and you will hear
About the life that we love dear,
Refrain: With our diddle-air-re-oh, falling rock away, knock it down,
Fall-di-knock-a-rock-away, me laddie-oh!
Geologists all bold and strong,
We are the subject of this song.
We get up with the rising sun
And map until the day is done.
We walk two hundred miles a day,
And study rocks along the way.
We fight our way through brush and trees
And slog through bog up to our knees.
When flies are thick, then we don't walk,
They carry us from rock to rock.
We swing our hammers with a whack,
Take home an outcrop on our backs.
Nine hundred pounds of rock or more
Is just an average daily score.
If we run out of food to eat
There's always rock beneath our feet.
There's nothing quite like granite stew
'Though graptolites are some good, too.
In the evening to the clubs we flock,
To drink Dominion and Old Stock.
Here's to your health and our health, too,
May your life prove as good to you,
As our...
A geologist's song 02
Sea-Floor Spreading Lament (folksong) by Brenna Lorenz
Refrain: Alas for the spreading of the ocean,
Alas for the spreading of the sea,
Alas for every year that passes by,
Taking you two inches more from me!
Oh, why did you leave our native plate,
Causing me to weep and to mourn?
With the plates diverging at such a rate,
To leave me alone and lorn?
If only the mantle would my counsel take,
If the Earth would but listen unto me,
I'd say, "Your convection cell remake,
And bring my darling back to me!"
So dive you down, you ocean dark,
Part of the mantle be-
Fire you up, you island arc -
Subduct my darling back to me!
A geologist's song 03
The Marginal Basin Song by Chris Stillman
(melody: Lead us on, thou Heavenly Father)
On a margin runs a canyon down into the ocean dark;
There's a basin slowly filling with detritus from the arc.
Refrain: For the drifting causes rifting,
Opens basins mighty fine
Which strike-slip will close in time.
With volcanics there's no problem; they're erupting all the time;
Fill the thin with pillow lavas, sheeted dikes and serpentine.
Rising slowly from the ocean filled with gritties coarse and fine,
Are you fore-arc? Are you anti-arc? Are you just a geosyncline?
A geologist's song 04
Newfoundland, My Newfoundland
(Oh, Christmas Tree, Oh, Christmas Tree) by Brenna Lorenz
Convection's cell was at thy door, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Thy ancient heart to pieces tore, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Great faulted blocks came crashing down, and flood basalts the land did drown,
And clastics coarse fell all around, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
Iapetus began to spread, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Detritus from thy coast was shed, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Thy slope was draped, so proud and great, with massive banks of carbonate,
Grand bank to meet so sad a fate, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
For flysch encroaching from the east, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Devoured thy margin like a beast, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
The ocean floor was raised on high, its mafic head reared to the sky;
Its chromous threat was drawing nigh, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
Your once-proud bank was bowing down, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Subduction did thy margin drown, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
The angry mantle did desire to smother thee with ash and fire,
And close Iapetus entire, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
The island arc with fiery breath, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Did shower all the land with death, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Until subduction's starving throat, on Grenville crust was made to choke,
The tyrant's rule collision broke, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
The land subsided in its pain, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Olistostromes in chaos reigned, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Then in Caradoc time there came a shale everywhere the same
That blanketed thy wounds and shame, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
Behold! Upon thy ancient shore, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
A landmass was annealed once more, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland,
Alas! Thy trials go on and on, for rifting struck the Avalon -
The cycle must repeat anon, Newfoundland, my Newfoundland!
A geologist's song 05
Graptolites (Melody: Danny Boy)
by Brenna Lorenz
Oh, graptolites -
Your stipes, your stipes are calling
From every shale in every ancient land;
Oh, graptolites -
Through dream's dark oceans falling,
Your rhabdosomes with grace in every strand.
Oh, take me back to Cambro-Ordovician days,
With all your youth and glory in full blaze -
You lived to see a mighty ocean wax and wane,
But modern oceans spread for you in vain.
Dendroidea -
Your autothecae smiling,
Through Tremodocian trials they would last -
Dendroidea -
Your bithecae are crying,
For when you fade, alas, they too must pass.
Why did you leave the ocean bottom safe and wide
To drift with plankton on the roving tide?
Oh, Dictyonema, from thy thecal loins emerged
Proud Graptoloids, that from their past diverged.
A geologist's song 06
The geology poem
Ode to Olivine in Thin Section, a poem by Brenna Lorenz
In basalt a lurid green
Bespeaks the savage olivine;
Mantle's child, born of fire,
Restless in the open air,
Little beads of anger bear
The torture of desire.
Silica upon its face
It suffers, helpless, in disgrace,
Its powers of reaction bound
By solid's bond and cage,
In agony confined to rage
Unstable and unsound.
Its birefringent power plays
The sifted light to rare displays;
The haunting, primal colors tell
Of fire and fury's flag unfurled,
Flag of fluid, nether world,
Beneath the fragile shell.
Geology word plays
Several short geology plays on words
Okay, if you are a real geologist, you probably enjoy transferring geology
vocabulary into everyday situations. For example, if you agree with what someone
has said, you may say, You breccia! or My sediments exactly!
And if you are not pleased with the person's statement, you may resort to the
old:
That's not gneiss!
Dedicated geologists
Total immersion geologists
Total immersion geologists: Are you totally obsessed with geology? If so, then
you are a total immersion geologist. Here are the ten warning signs:
1. You judge a restaurant by the type of decorative building stone they use
rather than their food.
2. You manage to turn any conversation into a discussion of geology, as in:
"What did you think of that Superbowl game last night?" "I must have missed that
conference. Who sponsored it? Geological Society of America?"
3. You refuse to let nightfall stop your field excursions and continue looking
at the outcrops using the headlights of your field vehicle.
4. You like rock music only because it's called "rock" music.
5. You will try to claw through the water flowing in a stream to get a better
look at the bedrock at the base of the channel.
6. You will walk across eight lanes of freeway traffic to see if the outcrop on
the other side of the highway is the same type of rock as the side you're parked
on.
7. You name your children after rocks and minerals.
8. You're not sure if you have children.
9. You view non-geologists as subhuman.
Asked in science class
REAL QUESTIONS ASKED IN SCIENCE CLASSES
Are the rivers flowing up the mountain or down the mountain?
Is that the ocean? (Asked while on a field trip to Marine Lab Beach on Guam (a
small island in the Pacific).
How can the river be flowing north? That's uphill!
How can mass wasting be an agent of landscape formation on the Moon? The Moon
has no gravity!
How do I get water into this beaker?
Earth science answers
REAL ANSWERS FROM EARTH SCIENCE EXAMS
The terrestrial planets are much larger than the gas giants.
Wegener found matching bedbugs on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
The main problem associated with limestone aquifers is Lyme disease.
We don't have rock salt on Guam because that forms from from evaporation of
oceans and we don't have oceans on Guam.
Erie, Pennsylvania has no volcanoes because it's too cold there.
The most important agent of landscape formation on Guam is greyhounds - they are
intelligent.
We know that the sun is much farther away from us than the moon is, because we
can see stars between us and the sun, but not between us and the moon.
The rear end of a trilobite is called a trilobutt.
Rhymes in chemistry
CHEMISTRY RHYMES
Old Man Stokes
Old man Stokes was a gentleman fine
Who lived beside the Raleigh line;
Old anti-Stokes, his existance denied,
Lived never-the-less on the other side.
Real chemistry names
REAL CHEMISTRY NAMES OF REAL PEOPLE
Gold J. of North Carolina
Silver J. of North Carolina
Argon C. of Guam
Florine J. of Tennessee
Clorine J. of Maryland
Benzena J. of South Carolina
Ethyl J. of Ohio
Ether J. of Tennessee
Methyl S. of Maine
Methane M. of Alabama
Jokes of science 01
At the physics exam: 'Describe the universe in 200 words and give
three examples.'
Q: What do physicists enjoy doing the most at baseball games?
A: The 'wave'.
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was known as SLAC, until the big
earthquake, when it became known as SPLAC. SPLAC? Stanford Piecewise Linear
Accelerator.
A student recognizes Einstein in a train and asks: Excuse me, professor, but
does New York stop by this train?
Researchers in Fairbanks Alaska announced last week that they have discovered a
superconductor which will operate at room temperature.
The answer to the problem was "log(1+x)". A student copied the answer from the
good student next to him, but didn't want to make it obvious that he was
cheating, so he changed the answer slightly, to "timber(1+x)"
One day in class, Richard Feynman was talking about angular momentum. He
described rotation matrices and mentioned that they did not commute. He said
that Sir William Hamilton discovered noncommutivity one night when he was taking
a walk in his garden with Lady Hamilton. As they sat down on a bench, there was
a moment of passion. It was then that he discovered that AB did not equal BA.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed
the road or the road crossed the chicken depends on your frame of reference.
Jokes of science 02
The experimentalist comes running excitedly into the theorist's
office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. "Hmmm," says the
theorist, "That's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here's the reason
(long logical explanation follows)." In the middle of it, the experimentalist
says "Wait a minute", studies the chart for a second, and says, "Oops, this is
upside down." He fixes it. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "you'd expect to see a dip
in exactly that position. Here's the reason...".
A Princeton plasma physicist is at the beach when he discovers an ancient
looking oil lantern sticking out of the sand. He rubs the sand off with a towel
and a genie pops out. The genie offers to grant him one wish. The physicist
retrieves a map of the world from his car an circles the Middle East and tells
the genie, "I wish you to bring peace in this region".
After 10 long minutes of deliberation, the genie replies, "Gee, there are lots
of problems there with Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and all those other places. This
is awfully embarrassing. I've never had to do this before, but I'm just going to
have to ask you for another wish. This one is just too much for me".
Taken aback, the physicist thinks a bit and asks, "I wish that the Princeton
tokamak would achieve scientific fusion energy break-even."
After another deliberation the genie asks, "Could I see that map again?"
What is the difference between a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician?
If an engineer walks into a room and sees a fire in the middle and a bucket of
water in the corner, he takes the bucket of water and pours it on the fire and
puts it out.
If a physicist walks into a room and sees a fire in the middle and a bucket of
water in the corner, he takes the bucket of water and pours it eloquently around
the fire and lets the fire put itself out.
If a mathematician walks into a room and sees a fire in the middle and a bucket
of water in the corner, he convinces himself there is a solution and leaves.
An experimental physicist performs an experiment involving two cats, and an
inclined tin roof. The two cats are very nearly identical; same sex, age,
weight, breed, eye and hair color. The physicist places both cats on the roof at
the same height and lets them both go at the same time. One of the cats fall off
the roof first so obviously there is some difference between the two cats.
What is the difference? One cat has a greater mew.
French physicist Ampere (1775-1836) had two cats, one big and a one small, and
he loved them very much. But when the door was closed cats couldn't enter or
exit the room. So Ampere ordered two holes to be made in his door: one big for
the big cat, and one small for the small cat.
A psychologist makes an experiment with a mathematician and a physicist. He puts
a good-looking, naked woman in a bed in one corner of the room and the
mathematician on a chair in another one, and tells him: "I?ll half the distance
between you and the woman every five minutes, and you?re not allowed to stand
up." the mathematician runs away, yelling: "in that case, I?ll never get to this
woman!". After that, the psychologist takes the physicist and tells him the
plan. The physicist starts grinning. the psychologist asks him: "but you?ll
never get to this woman?", the physicists tells him: "sure, but for all
practical things this is a good approximation."
There is this farmer who is having problems with his chickens. All of the
sudden, they are all getting very sick and he doesn't know what is wrong with
them. After trying all conventional means, he calls a biologist, a chemist, and
a physicist to see if they can figure out what is wrong. So the biologist looks
at the chickens, examines them a bit, and says he has no clue what could be
wrong with them. Then the chemist takes some tests and makes some measurements,
but he can't come to any conclusions either. So the physicist tries. He stands
there and looks at the chickens for a long time without touching them or
anything. Then all of the sudden he starts scribbling away in a notebook.
Finally, after several gruesome calculations, he exclaims, "I've got it! But it
only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum."
Jokes of science 03
Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip? To get to the same side.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Issac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay
at rest, chickens in motion tend to cross roads.
A neutron walks into a bar; he asks the bartender, "How much for a beer?" The
bartender looks at him, and says "For you, no charge."
Two fermions walk into a bar. One orders a drink. The other says "I'll have what
he's having."
Two atoms bump into each other. One says "I think I lost an electron!" The other
asks, "Are you sure?", to which the first replies, "I'm positive."
Renee Descartes walks into a bar, the bartender says "sir can I get you a
martini "Descartes says "I don't think..." and he disappears
Where does bad light end up? Answer: In a prism!
Heisenberg is out for a drive when he's stopped by a traffic cop. The cop says
"Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg says "No, but I know where I
am."
The chemist's recipe
THE CHEMIST'S RECIPIE FOR CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
The following recipie for chocolate chip cookies recently appeared in Chemical &
Engineering News (C&EN, Jun 19, 1995, p. 100). It was attributed to Jeannene
Ackerman of Witco Corp.
Ingredients:
1. 532.35 cm3 gluten
2. 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3. 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4. 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated
tallow triglyceride
5. 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6. 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7. 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of
protocatechuic aldehyde
8. Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated
avain albumen-coated protien
9. 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10. 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume
meats (sieve size #10)
To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall
heat-transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr add one, two, and three with
constant agitation.
In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm
add four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is homogeneous.
To reactor #2 add eight followed by three equal portions of the homogeneous
mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add nine and ten slowly with constant
agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any
temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction.
Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer place the mixture piece-meal on
a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is
in agreement with Frank & Johnston's first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21,
55), or until golden brown.
Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25 deg. C heat-transfer
table allowing the product to come to equilibrium.
Chem one-liners 01
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry
is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams
Chemicals: Noxious substances from which modern foods are made.
Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate!
There is the joke about the homeopath who forgot to take his medicine and died
of an overdose.
How many physical chemists does it take to wash a beaker?
None. That's what organic chemists are for!
It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked in
chemistry for not knowing what we later found to be untrue. --quoted in Robert
L. Weber, Science With a Smile (1992)
Physical Chemistry is research on everything for which the negative logaritm is
linear with 1/T -- D.L. Bunker
Q: What weapon can you make from the Chemicals Potassium, Nickel and Iron?
A: KNiFe.