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As an (admittedly) failed biologist, I can assure you we thought of the physicists locked away in their labs as quite brainy; the geologists we never got to know too well cause they were always trompin away out in the field, but they did seem quite manly. I did, however, spend quite a bit of time explaining the important work both were doing while comforting their girlfriends ;)
Bah, proper physicists don't have girlfriends*!
Also, geologists are chemists, almost (and some are actually astronomers/space scientists).
My research was more like mathematics, absolutely. Linear algebra, mostly.
*Not strictly true. For some mysterious reason, certainly not physical conditioning or social brilliance, most of us did OK. Of course, one does have to watch out for those biologists, who have plenty of time for courting given that they do so little recognisable work...
Also, geologists are chemists, almost
Yes, that's what I was saying. Scientists.
There are structural geologists around, too, who dabble in the dark arts of physics and mathematics.... :D
INFIDEL! (I probably shouldn't admit I've got a master's in hydrogeology...)
Batman's a scientist. Are you Batman?
Michael Keaton: "I'm Batman!"
Alex Trebek: "For the last time, no, you are not."--SNL, "Celebrity Jeopardy"
Hmmmm lets see.. My 4 best friends have Doctorates.. And I joined the Air Force... Where did I go wrong?
Maybe you're the one evangelical hanging out with 4 atheists?
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My Physicists friend has a Biologist Girlfriend... also My friend...Hmmmm lets see.. My 4 best friends have Doctorates.. And I joined the Air Force... Where did I go wrong?
People with doctorates are famous for being self-absorbed long-winded contrarians, and I should know. Perhaps you dodged a bullet.
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Hmmmm lets see.. My 4 best friends have Doctorates.. And I joined the Air Force... Where did I go wrong?Maybe you're the one evangelical hanging out with 4 atheists?
3 are Atheists, 1 is Wicken and I am generic Christian.
Edit: Add my wife who is Muslim and we have a Great time!!!!!
Actually we do...
Boreholes to aquifiers?
Edit(clarification): Sorry, speculating/asking if that's what you're involved with?
Yes: sometimes I install them; sometimes evaluate them to see if unconnected zones are being cross-contaminated, or if plumes are migrating and/or degrading. Often, I just clean up other people's messes. Mostly, though, I keep my clients out of court. (I'm a consultant.)
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8
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People with doctorates are famous for being self-absorbed long-winded contrarians, and I should know. Perhaps you dodged a bullet.
My Physicists friend has a Biologist Girlfriend... also My friend...Hmmmm lets see.. My 4 best friends have Doctorates.. And I joined the Air Force... Where did I go wrong?
Absolutely. To get a PhD you have to spend 2 or 3 years thinking of a question no one has really bothered to answer before. Then you spend 2 or 3 years answering it. A PhD doesn't mean you're smart. It means you have a high tolerance for boredom.
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8
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Yes: sometimes I install them; sometimes evaluate them to see if unconnected zones are being cross-contaminated, or if plumes are migrating and/or degrading. Often, I just clean up other people's messes. Mostly, though, I keep my clients out of court. (I'm a consultant.)Boreholes to aquifiers?
Edit(clarification): Sorry, speculating/asking if that's what you're involved with?
Is he talking about sex?
well, i'm a retired mixologist.
Is THAT what you called it? I've heard a lot of euphemisms before...
"And with that, the subject turned to math, the flame war narrowly averted. Remember folks, when you are faced with a crowd of raging nerds, consider bringing up 3D mapping techniques or some other sciencey subject. That's all for now. This has been your host, Dayenn Naight. See you again next week on When Nerds Attack"
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Absolutely. To get a PhD you have to spend 2 or 3 years thinking of a question no one has really bothered to answer before. Then you spend 2 or 3 years answering it. A PhD doesn't mean you're smart. It means you have a high tolerance for boredom.
They only give us three years funded in the UK, more than four years affects your department adversely and at my institution, more than five years and you can't ever get it.
As a matter of curiousity, how exactly would you go about tracking the flow of water through, for example, a porous Traissic sandstone? Are you mostly dependent on 3D mapping techniques, or do you have some kind of (non-pollutant) tracing method which you can use to monitor a situation?
Sandstones are often laterally continuous, with nice, mostly-horizontal flow. A few piezometers (that would also double as monitor wells, because I'm usually looking for chemical impacts), draw a potentiometric suface map, and maybe run a series of slug tests to determine the hydraulic conductivity and... voila! Low-tech, but simple. v = K * i/ N. (If the sandstone is well-consolidated and well-cemented, and slow-producing, a pump test would be more in order, unless contaminants are present and you want to minimize purge water production.)
In karstic limestones, that's when you have to get into tracers and the like. And you may never find them again!
Is this a test? Just wondering, since whether the sandstone is Triassic or Cretaceous, for example, or just a bunch of sand that some idiot cemented together, wouldn't make much difference.
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As a matter of curiousity, how exactly would you go about tracking the flow of water through, for example, a porous Traissic sandstone? Are you mostly dependent on 3D mapping techniques, or do you have some kind of (non-pollutant) tracing method which you can use to monitor a situation?Sandstones are often laterally continuous, with nice, mostly-horizontal flow. A few piezometers (that would also double as monitor wells, because I'm usually looking for chemical impacts), draw a potentiometric suface map, and maybe run a series of slug tests to determine the hydraulic conductivity and... voila! Low-tech, but simple. v = K * i/ N. (If the sandstone is well-consolidated and slow-producing, a pump test would be more in order, unless contaminants are present and you want to minimize purge water production.)
In karstic limestones, that's when you have to get into tracers and the like. And you may never find them again!
Is this a test? Just wondering, since whether the sandstone is Triassic or Cretaceous, for example, or just a bunch of sand that some idiot cemented together, wouldn't make much difference.
dude, my cleric has an int of 11. thank you for making him feel even dumber than he is ;)
dude, my cleric has an int of 11. thank you for making him feel even dumber than he is ;)
He asked! But what sucks is that if I take 15 minutes or longer to answer, I have to start billing in 0.25-hour increments, per the Sarbanes-Oxley act.
Bah, proper physicists don't have girlfriends*!
Also, geologists are chemists, almost (and some are actually astronomers/space scientists).
My research was more like mathematics, absolutely. Linear algebra, mostly.
*Not strictly true. For some mysterious reason, certainly not physical conditioning or social brilliance, most of us did OK. Of course, one does have to watch out for those biologists, who have plenty of time for courting given that they do so little recognisable work...
Well, there's not much else to do when you're waiting for bacteria to grow on a petri dish...
From the posts above, sounds like the few guys in Earth Sciences I got to know were a bit more mercantile. Might have been because we were all in co-op programs, which didn't lend itself to traditional academia-like pursuits. Our biggest concern was who would get the next best job, which depending on how much was in your wallet, might be judged by the experience, or by the paycheck. Those Earth Science guys I knew were always off to Alberta, once or twice up north for gold, but mainly oil, oil, oil.
As an (admittedly) failed biologist, I can assure you we thought of the physicists locked away in their labs as quite brainy; the geologists we never got to know too well cause they were always trompin away out in the field, but they did seem quite manly. I did, however, spend quite a bit of time explaining the important work both were doing while comforting their girlfriends ;)Well, I did say 'in the sciences' (and as a physicist, I'm talking about physics/astronomy, chemistry and most of biology when I'm being generous...).That's OK. As a geologist, I consider you theoretical physics guys to be mathematicians, not scientists (and we refer to many biologists and especially paleontologists as "stamp collectors").
Run! We're surrounded by frustrated geniuses! And some have girlfriends/spouses.
Say it with me now, 'frustrated genius'
This explains a lot.
Gary, I hate to point this out -- I'm all in favor of free speech -- but in the interest of maintaining a rational discourse (not to mention the ability to discuss actual game suggestions, instead of just who "deserves" to attack whom) you might keep an eye on the thread entitled, "Using Beta in RotRL (Stop buffing the fighter class)!!!"
Sorry to post a reply to the thread this late, but read the 5th post down on this page.
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=2162.120
And look who the poster is.
Sorry to post a reply to the thread this late, but read the 5th post down on this page.
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=2162.120
(Shrugs) Maybe that sort of interaction is how the "cool kids" do things over there. The "less intelligent" (read: "more socially adept") people here have a lower tolerance for it. The thread I mentioned originally has become a lot more productive after I created this one... coincidence? You decide.
The thread I mentioned originally has become a lot more productive after I created this one... coincidence? You decide.
Whew. Thank god you were here.
Whew. Thank god you were here.
Well, the watch-poodle wasn't barking loudly enough. Anyway, Paizo can apparently do more with a well-placed warning than all of us put together can do with threads.
To clarify, I instinctively went for a Triassic sandstone, because here in the UK, it would most likely a desert sandstone ('New Red Sandstone') and rightly or wrongly I assumed it would thus likely be very permeable to water. Some of the other sandstones we have here are more tightly packed (I'm thinking of a Carboniferous example I saw on a field trip once) and/or cemented by mineralisation, and would be less good (presumably) for aquifier purposes.
Ah! Sorry, I hadn't realized you were across the pond. That makes sense, then. In any event, you'd need at least one borehole to introduce a tracer (even if you wanted to go that route); while installing it, the supervising geologist should be able to get a fair feel for the extent of compaction and cementation, even if air rotary techniques are used, for example (judging based on resistance and advancement rate -- I've worn out drill tips in some of the hard sandstones in the Permian Basin in the U.S.). When this borehole is completed as a well and developed, a good feel for likely production rates can be obtained (based on volume recovered and re-equilibration rate), and subsequently confirmed with one the tests mentioned above. Bear in mind that fracture zones or loose seams can sometimes transmit water relatively quickly through even well-consolidated formations.
If I had a better idea of the end goal, I could likely provide more productive input.
On the subject of fracture zones, we had an earthquake (just about big enough to be heard happening, which isn't much on the scale of things) a few years back in our area, and I've been lately wondering if it could have messed around with underground waterflows, since several parts of a local park (park in the small 'nature reserve' sense) seem to have since become very damp with water leaking up where it wasn't before. The only other explanation I can think of is if an industry dependent upon water extraction (brewery for example?) had shut down, possibly raising the water table.
Depending on where in the U.K., there might be some thickness of glacial till -- enough so that fractures in the underlying bedrock would not result in the formation of new springs, for example. Closure of a golf course, etc. (as you surmise --although I seem to recall that golf courses, for watering, seem to use more water than breweries even) or an abnormally large amount of precipitation (check the local airport data) might be more probable, in that case. On the other hand, near Dover you've got that magnificent chalk that outcrops, and of course in the Scottish Highlands there's all that textbook metamorphic rock. Whereabouts is your park?
Speaking of breweries, one day I'll make a pilgrimage to Samuel Smith's in Tadcaster. My father once threatened to disown me for saying this (I was born in Germany), but the English brew some of the best beer in the world.
P.S. In what field are you working now, that you get no geology conversation? It must be terribly awful!
P.P.S. Maybe we ought to start a geological topics thread in the "Off-Topic" forum?
Hey, anybody want to discuss the use of of chord structure in the prelude to Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and its significance in relation to the 1st movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and how this relates to their shared mutual position as revolutionaries of both music and politics?
No ;)
Sorry to post a reply to the thread this late, but read the 5th post down on this page.
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=2162.120
And look who the poster is.
Is there really anything to be gained by going to other boards looking to borrow trouble?
Sam
Was merely trying to show a pattern of behavior. It is my opinion that if someone is not so nice in one place, they're usually not so nice everywhere.
Sorry if I offended.
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Sorry to post a reply to the thread this late, but read the 5th post down on this page.
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=2162.120
And look who the poster is.
Is there really anything to be gained by going to other boards looking to borrow trouble?
Sam
Was merely trying to show a pattern of behavior. It is my opinion that if someone is not so nice in one place, they're usually not so nice everywhere.
Sorry if I offended.
Well, thankfully the furry self-image hasn't turned up here. There is that.
This thread has run its course and has deviated from the website feedback format. Thanks everyone for letting us know about the flame war.