...is the name of a really great track off of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King soundtrack ;)

Hehe, anyway, my internship here in Arizona is wrapping up, as I leave at the awful time of 4:45 AM tomorrow morning to catch my plane back to the East Coast.  It certainly has been a great experience, but there are a couple things to do before I go.

Hopefully someone catches the reference in the title of this post, even although it could probably reference a number of things.  Hmm, maybe it'll help if I tell you that it seems like I'm running down a long canyon, with my goal at the far end, and I've got one shot to get it right.  Props go to the first person who correctly identifies the reference!

Alright, so Ryan and Willy (my roommates for this summer) are now both out of town on awesome trips to cool places.  I hope they have a great time, but it'll mean a pretty quite house now.   Another side benefit is that I can use a better computer in the lab now (i.e. Ryan's), which allows be to go back to posting pictures for everyone!  Score.  So, how about some focal mechanisms?

Alright, so the past couple days I've been working on picking p and s arrival and polarity information to input into a focal mechanism inversion code that Andy has been wrestling with.  Late yesterday we succeeded in producing the first focal mechanism plot, and then soon after 5 more.  There are some minr bugs or kinks in the code that are still being worked on, but it looks like it's nearly ready to go.  After cleaning up the diagrams a bit we'll probably take a closer look at some of them to see what (if anything) can be determined from them.  It will probably also mean checking over

Michael has challenged us all to present our project in our own words.  I'm seeking to determine focal mechanisms for earthquakes to better understand why said earthquakes are being triggered.  Based on this information I can then build by acoustic amplifier, find weak fault lines and wreak havoc across the globe before asserting my ransom demands.  In the end it will boil down to world domination through means of seismology, huzzah!  Or maybe I got it confused with a science fiction novel I read a while ago...oops.  World domination sounded good though!