The month of waiting around...

Well it has been quite a while since I've written here, but I have excuses!  Mostly I was waiting for my professor to put up an image from a slide he had in class so I could talk about the salt and potash deposits in the Paradox Basin.  My Colorado Plateau class had a great discussion on the Pennsylvanian salt deposits in that famous basin system, and I really wanted to have the stratigraphic representation of well logs he put up before I began talking about anything relating to the basin.

I've also been waiting for insurance people to settle the totaling of my '99 Chevy Lumina, which was hit by a drunk driver on Superbowl Sunday (February 7th).  It was a long and anxiety inducing process, but I finally had it towed away sometime today while I was at school and we settled on the money it was worth last Friday.

Now I have been looking at vehicles, mostly jeeps and small four wheel drive capable cars, so that I can get for around the compensation money the totaling gave us.  This has left me spending a lot of time researching potential replacement vehicles and biking to and from classes at the university.  The half mile ride isn't too long or cold to need a vehicle, but the entire campus is placed on a hill and it seems all the more steep for my lack of motorized transport.

These things aside, my life has been pretty ideal.  I have done very well on my first round of exams, especially in Geochemistry, Entomology, and regular Chem. The weather here in Las Cruces just keeps improving, with temperatures almost reaching short-weather highs.  Almost.

The main academic concern I have right now is with my LIBS oil research.  I have seven oils analyzed with at least 140 samplings for each.  Enough, I feel, to begin using the analytical software my adviser has to examine what our LIBS data can be used to investigate.  At the moment the primary concern is still looking at reservoir rock traces in the oils to show how LIBS analysis could be used as a first notification of changing conditions in oil samples.   If the LIBS data will be useful for those ends will be interesting to see.  The technology has always been introduced to me as "quick and dirty" and I have had enough oil on my hands to believe it.

Graduating to three dimensions

Looking back at my academic career an interesting thing occurs to me: my teachers were always holding out on us with the third dimension.

Before I began learning the beautiful things calculus can represent and model, the only time I recall using the third dimension in any work I did was for measuring simple volumes (of spheres, cones, cubes, etc).  My entire world seemed to be made of algebraic curves and trigonometric triangles.  When someone traveled on an airplane for example, I made a line or curve across a flat map to track their progress.  Molecules had simple lewis dot structures to show their orientation and that was that.

As I learn about the true mechanics of waves, moving bodies beyond simple particles, and molecular arrangements due to certain bonding schemes I realize the main difference between college level and high school level learning seems to be paying attention to a third dimension.  Towards the end of my high school career I had some advanced classes in physics and some calculus that introduced concepts that consider the third dimension, namely the right hand rule for cross products (not that we were told that was what was going on) and to find where those volume formulas of yore were derived from.

I remember the right hand rule enraged me when my teacher explained that was how all the electromagnetic forces we would be considering were handled.  Why should I have to contort my hand and then align it with the forces explained in a problem?  Surely there must be an easier way?! 

There was were vectors.  I think our teachers teased us with our early introductions to vectors.  Planting the seeds of a third dimension then and there, possibly testing our potential for higher learning with those first rudimentary lessons that never seemed to go anywhere but was still "in the curriculum".  I must have passed those quiet tests, those subtle moments that lay my entire intellectual merit bare for inspection. 

I have had a lot of instructors put their faith in me as a competent student based on a prior teacher's recommendations.  I can't say with any confidence if I deserved that trust and opportunity, but here I am in college coming to terms with everything they didn't teach me.  However, I am also coming to realize how they still laid the groundwork for later education, whether I was going to make it here or not.  Now I understand why graduation felt like a hollow ceremony compared to my entry into calculus: I had been weighed and measured long before that decorated day.

The Jung and the Restless

This semester, I have a considerable number of blocks of time in between classes where I have to find something to do, but it isn't worth heading back to my apartment or start doing research work.  Lately I've been spending the majority of that free time walking the shelves of the main library on campus.

Zuhl library is an interesting place for a number of reasons.  First, it is purely a literary repository with Branson library containing the public documents, maps, and other great caches of scientific works.  Secondly it has a huge collection of petrified wood donated from its namesake: Herb Zuhl.  Thirdly, it has the most accommodating seating and lighting to read and lounge away free time.  With the weather warming up, most of the people squatting in the libraries for the warmth are also clearing out, so it has become a great place to haunt.

So, for the past three or four months I have had a terrible time committing to a book.  I've browsed and surveyed over a half dozen books, but haven't settled on anything since I finished Khalil Gibran's The Prophet.  I tried reading John Wesley Powell's account of his trip down the Colorado River, read a bit of a fictional story of a sleepwalking bookie with a family curse, and a few other odd books just picked at random from the shelves to fill my time.

After nearly a week of this fruitless searching, I think I've settled on reading through the Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious.  I had actually begun to consider reading his works a long while back, but repeatedly found the compilation-style volumes usually offered in bookstores to be uncouth and frustrating. Now that I have a large library at my disposal I can find more well portioned works of his.  As much as his ideas are referenced in psychology, music, and countless other places I have yet to come across any non-psychology/philosophy major who has read any of his vast writings.

As much as the cliche of self-discovery in college is touted, separation from parental influence is the main reason I've seen people change.  People pick up new music tastes, new friends, start smoking or drinking things, but only minor worldview changes occur.  My own personality and opinions have been rather static for a long while now, at least from the start of high school.  As nice is it is to offer a reliable element to my friends' lives I've felt stunted and unsatisfied.  I'm hoping if I start looking towards my subconscious, I'll overcome most of the neurosis in my life.

As happy as I've been with my classes and social intimacy, I haven't been at peace with my life.  There's not much to complain about with my lot, but I do find myself wanting.  My school work keeps me pleasantly occupied and learning, and my friends and family are more distant than I'd like but I know they are there for me.  That just leaves myself to work on, and I hope that the promising ideas I've come across from Jung will help fill my free time and the personal vacuum I've felt in my life.

Sit and nod

As I progress through my undergraduate experience, I've realized a somber truth: many of my peers are either too fearful to discuss concepts, or (more frighteningly) they are generally too inept to follow the instructional process most teachers use.  I was raised and instructed to believe that "there is no such thing as a stupid question" and "if you don't understand speak up" were cardinal rules in education.  Now that I am paying beyond three figures for my education, I intend to make that money count for something beyond credits to earn a degree.

I feel badly for the teachers who have to deal with the indifference and mild entitlement I've seen.  I can't speak towards whether this is a generational phenomenon or if modern higher education has always been plagued thusly, but as I get deeper into college I wonder why so many classes are presented as informative entertainment.  My entomology class is entertaining, but when more than half of a lecture there is spent with the professor playing a BBC documentary series on insects, I wonder if he enjoys instructing this course.  As smart as some BBC documentaries are, or comparative productions from the Discovery channel, can anyone really believe this is really at COLLEGE level instruction?

The teachers I do know well enough to ask how they treat introductory level courses, where the worst level of indifference occurs, usually have ambivalent takes on their situation.  They view their basic courses as a chance to introduce new concepts to students they would otherwise would miss out on and inform their pupils enough to have a conversation in the subject they are attending.  These professors also tend to tell me that they feel most of their lectures fall on deaf ears, with students reading powerpoint slides online before an exam and pass with a "gentleman's C".  Looking back on how tedious retaking calculus classes was in my freshmen year, I wonder how a professor can teach three introductory level courses each semester, year after year.  The word steadfast comes to mind...

 

This whole rant started when I noticed peers afraid to speak up in class, so that's where I'll return to.  Geochemistry is currently my favorite class, in part because Dr. R will call on students and seek an answer from them until he is satisfied.  In there, the silence is often deafening and everyone seems to squirm and feel uncomfortable about being picked out (myself included).  I feel like this keeps me honest in a way that no other course I have this semester lets me get away with, and so when I sit though another class where only a single teacher's pet type is chiming in regularly this makes me self conscious of my own commentary but also baffles me why nobody else seems to care.  It's a catch-22 and its cause is contagious, so I tend to grow partially antisocial in my classes as a result.

I don't think I will ever understand why some people are as cripplingly shy as they are but, in my mind, when the majority of a classroom is silent because nobody wants to answer a non-rhetorical question only the two causes I mentioned earlier could be responsible.  I'm at college to learn and I expect some my peers are just here for the ride and others are figuring out why they're here, but it worries me that so many are spending so much of their parents or their own hard earned money to be mediocre and mute in class.  I know the value of an education and the loving investments my family has put forward for me to be here, and I intend to make them proud.

Photo Credit
Seevas. "The first lecture of biochemistry xD". http://www.flickr.com/photos/seevas/2924350054/

Elemental substitution

So with no Optical Mineralogy classes to attend this week, I've been a little starved for new and exciting geologic material. With the disappointing hour short lecture in my Colorado Plateau class (on the Cambrian and Devonian transgressions of the sea on Rodinia), I was left with my only other geology class: Geochemistry.

While the class originally struck me as too much chemistry in one semester (I am taking the second semester of "scientist level" intro chemistry) I've recently grown to reconsider. In mineralogy, solid solution series' and coupled substitutions were the bane of my formulae memorization but were also fascinating to me. In geochemistry, I am spared most of that former pain and can now learn beyond the balancing of charges and comparing ionic radii to what it really means to have have cations interchangeable in a mineral's composition.

A similar pleasure came from Dr. R's explanation of chemical systems typically "treating" different isotopes of an element identically, and yet sometimes preferentially depending on weight, energy levels, and other factors. It made me wonder why in all of the years of general, chemical, and physical science I had never been taught anything beyond radioisotopes. Granted radioactive atoms are vastly more important for current uses in geology, yet here all isotopes are presented in a whole new light.

In the midst of an uneventful week for me (who cares about Groundhog Day after elementary school?) it was nice to have a moment of novelty from what seemed a dry well. I've been learning a lot of new concepts and details in my classes but this isotope surprise has really cheered me. Six more weeks of winter, even in relatively toasty Las Cruces however...

Photo Credit
Aram Dulyan. "Olivine (peridot)". Natural History Museum, London.