sherne's blog

August 5th I flew into boulder to give a presentation on the work that I had accumulated thus far.  It went well. My audience consisted of the staf who work at UNAVCO, the agency in charge of implementing Earthscopes PBO (Plate Boundary Observatory).  They're the IRIS of GPS.

Afterwards, i flew to el paso (hometown). I am not quite done with the paper im supposed to finish. Ive been here 2.5 weeks already, but all ive been able to finish is my abstract:

Shear Wave Splitting Analysis from Newly-Installed Seismic Stations in Antarctica

one of the most pathetic excuses i consistently utilize is that "ive only ever taken one physical geology course". well, that excuse has reared its ugly head again this summer. sure, ive taken a years worth of seismology, but the density of jargon such as "cretaceous", "pan-african", "gondwana", "eocene/oligocene/holocene/pleistocene" "jurassic flood basalts" etc etc is very small. whats the point of this blog? im not sure. maybe im giving myself an "intervention."  i feel i am always hindered by my lack of knowledge of these terms. i come from a math background. math and physics. so whenever i need to learn a bunch of geology, the effort doesnt seem all there.

but, im working on my geology. i promise.

just gotta get these darn excuses out of my system...

(i would like to apologize before hand for my "stream of consciousness" style of writing...)

so far things have been pretty busy. been in st louis for 2 weeks already. the prof is super cool. and the building is super nice too. the sun machines are way better than what im used to in el paso. ive been reading up on lots of research articles on the art of shear wave splitting and seismic anisotropy and mantle flow and all the other relevant buzz words. it took a while to download the data for some reason. we were using weed. now thats weed, NOT bud. bud is differernt. oops, excuse me, weed didnt work, so we had to use jweed. thats the java version (apparently the people at iris are a bunch of stoners, who like munchies too ("breq_fast"? come on!))

i like the number crunching. even though most of the analysis this summer will be performed using someone elses code (boo!) but if i get a chance, i would like to take a crack at writing my own version of the analysis code, preferrably in matlab as opposed to sac.

havent been scoping out the city too much. its terribly muggy, but that was to be expected. my apartment is nice (and big) and so is my roommate. shes from manhattan. i like that im able to log in remotely and work from home. i live a coupla miles from the university. i walk to work. it takes about 40 minutes. the first day i tried it, i walked in some brand new dress shoes. they werent broken in yet (though i dont think it would have helped if they wer) and it made my ankles bleed. it was a huge mistake. luckily i didnt have to walk back home. i know how to ride the bus, but im gonna walk anyways... its healthier and cheaper;)

ive got lots of writing to do. i turned in a literature review today. next week will be an introduction. we're gonna put together an entire research article piece by piece during the summer. im going home august 8.

drove into socorro new mexico on sunday morning after a rush to take care of some last minute details concerning the aprtment i will no longer live in. after packing a weeks worth of supplies, i made the beautiful 3 hour drive up I-25 to socorro new mexico. Ive been here for two days and Ive already seen as much rain here as i had in el paso for the past two months! (thats not saying much, since i live in the desert and these dry spells are all too common)

ther are lots of great people here, and im trying to make the best of it before i head out to st louis on sunday may 31st. one thing i would like to do possibly visit the river. the river is much fuller and wider than down in el paso where all the farmers and people suck it dry.

picked up some new skills about inverse theory and some new commands on UNIX (an old dog can learn new tricks!), and im definitely looking forward to the rest of the week. i dont know whats in store for me this summer, but im very excited...