SpaceMika

You know what makes a thesis-cruncher ridiculously happy? Getting her references sorted out!

The glory that is WorldCat allows me to fill in any missing information in my entries (and fix accent-errors induced by my fights with RefWorks, unlinked because it is unloved). The equally glorious JabRef provides a pretty, clean interface for seeing all my references at once, editing any misplaced data (for instance, all my book chapters were classified as “miscellaneous” instead of “in book”, and tagging entries as sane names (say, LastnameYear instead of refworksEntryNumber) so I can actually cite from memory instead of looking up the unique identifier name every time. The clear and complete NatBib Reference Sheet lets me automatically insert references in absolutely any format my little heart can dream of. Finally, the continuing and pervasive joy of LaTeX Wikibooks (this time, the Accent Reference Sheet so I can spell all the foreign places and authors correctly) keeps my thesis beautifully formatted without me needing to fight with it.

…this is the sound of girl well-satisfied with her references.

While working in the relatively cooler summer night, I sorted through a stupendous amount of paper to extract thesis ideas hastily jotted on class notes, readings, and expired To Do lists. Hidden in the marginalia were quotes that made me giggle:

Well, Philly cheese steaks come from Buffalo. … Pardon me, Philly. -unknown

Salt is so much worse for you when it’s scientific. – Joanne, re: sodium chloride in MacDonald’s fries

You can’t look dignified when you’re having fun. – Jason Wes, pg 208 (of what?)

It’s okay to be wrong as long as you’re reasonably wrong. – Greg Gosson, 13 March 2008 at UBC EOS 531

I have a whole series of quotes by someone from the mining industry in Tasmania who came to speak to the UBC EOS 531 course on 26 February 2008. Unfortunately, I have no idea who the speaker was!

He growls and grunts and makes all sorts of horrible noises. – re: Taz

Quite a few beaches and not many people. – describing Tasmania

In Tasmania, the footprint of mines < the footprint of pubs.

Likewise, another unnamed speaker from the same course on 18 January 2008 discussing diamond exploration gave us the following delightful bon mots:

There is no economy past the stone age without stones.

…plus two others where I can’t actually read my own handwriting. Whoops!

Although I’ve found a surprising number of landslide-bloggers (my favourite is Dave’s), google searches on the DAN-W and DAN3D software packages seem to drop people here. I’m fairly regularly getting comments asking how to go about modeling particular landslides, or acquire the software, or related queries. To speed up response time, I’ve developed an F.A.Q.

1. How can I get DAN-W or DAN3D?
DAN-W is owned by Oldrich Hungr. Please see his software website and contact him directly with any inquires about acquiring the software. DAN3D was developed by Scott McDougall as part of his phD thesis. To the best of my knowledge, it is for research purposes only and not currently available commercially, but again, Oldrich Hungr knows for sure.

2. What information do I need about a landslide to model its runout?
For DAN-W, you need a profile of the travel path (including entrainment zones) and the source area, and the width of the path. This can be either a list of coordinates or a to-scale sketch which you can enter directly into the software. For DAN3D, you need digital terrain models (topography) of the area before and after the landslide. You will need to format this as ASCII grid files of the path, the source area, and any entrainment.

3. What rheology should I use?
If you’re doing a back-analysis, you use whatever rheology and parameters provide the appropriate runout distance, debris distribution, and velocity profile. If you’re doing a forward prediction, you can follow the suggestions in my thesis (currently TBA, sorry!), or back-analyze cases similar to your target and use that range of parameters in your prediction.

4. Tell me more about a particular landslide.
If I’ve personally modeled a landslide, it should be floating around this site somewhere. Most are linked off the Thesis page, although the latest versions haven’t been translated from thesis-formatting to website-formatting and hopped online yet.

5. What about modeling this specific landslide not on your website?
If you’re working on modeling a landslide I haven’t seen before, I’m curious. Tell me about it!

The countdown is on mere minutes. Soon, I travel by land south across the border, the wing my way overseas, over the equator, and out of this increasingly-cold city and into the jungles and deserts of Australia. Booyeah!

The thesis is not as complete as I’d hoped, but in remarkably good form. The painstaking data collection is done, and only finishing the analysis remains. There are clear patterns, so I’m not terrified of finding nothing. I’ll be resuming work on it in January.

I cannot wait to spy out The Clouds of Magellan.

I’m highly fidgety, especially in the Vancouver winter when the gray skies and constant rain discourage going outdoors to play. To keep from going crazy, I knit. I knit a lot. I knit when walking to work, when watching movies, while watching my models run, while having intense intellectual discussions at dinner, I knit pretty much all waking hours. When I don’t have something to knit, I lose hours to browsing for yarns, patterns, and ideas for the next project. To avoid this during my thesis-crunch, I decided to cast on my second sweater, this time using a pattern that looked demanding. In theory, the timing worked nearly perfectly — the sweater pattern was selected in the summer, the yarn didn’t get purchased until the fall, and I just cast off this past week. Of course now I’m in thesis-crunch and don’t have a significant project, so I’ve had to go yarn-shopping multiple times in the past week. Still, I am in love with the sweater:

Variation of Green Gable Hoodie

There were (of course!) several modifications from the pattern.

• replace horrid Lion’s Bulky with two thinner yarns (including a hand-dye laceweight misty alpaca — beautiful!)
• thicken back cables to 3×2 instead of 2×2
• remove hood (may continue to modify neckline with later revisions)
• lengthen sleeves so they sit below the thumb instead of at the wrist
• lengthen body so it sits by the hips instead of at the waist

I also entered into some sort of strange violate-physics alternate knitting dimension and used far, far, far less yarn than calculated. I actually have enough yarn pare to knit an entire extra sweater. Yeah, crazy!

By the way, Stacks… knitting scarfs is dull. Try slippers or fingerless gloves or event a hat on a set of circular needles with a fairly bulky yarn. Knitting is far more rewarding when you actually get a finished project in a reasonable amount of time! Even with a pair of sweaters and countless accessories, I still dread the scarf-knit. It just takes so long!

I accidentally finished my Thesis Sweater* a few days early, and immediately fell into the trap I knew would if I didn’t have a major project: I’ve been burning through small projects (and yarn) pretty much nightly. This means that each morning I need to find new yarn and a new project (which often means new patterns or inspirations) to keep my hands happily occupied, which eats up valuable time.

…Tonight, I think I’ve cured this unhealthy situation. I’ve fallen for a Very Bad Idea. Now I’ll just dream about the perfect yarn and fidget with only mild dissatisfaction over a lack a significant on-the-needles project (and keep on churning off hats until all those I know have toasty ears).

*Photos from the designer, not my sweater. I’ll upload one as soon as I find a photographer!

A friend recently wrote to me, “Having ‘knit’ and ‘landslide’ as your two largest tags and right next to each other makes me think you should knit a model of a landslide sometime.” Although I completely agree with her (and have idly daydreamed of knitting a scarf embedded with recommended rheologies & parameters for different types of events once my thesis is written), in the next few days I suspect the “landslide” tag is going to expand to a level all of its own.

Why? I’m writing up all my landslide descriptions just as fast as my little fingers can type. The main list on the Thesis page is being updated as I go, but for the next few days your RSS feed will be downright clogged with every case description I can manage. Shortly after this binge will be a silent, secondary binge as I go back through all those descriptions and add on the “results” paragraph outlining the model that provided best-fit results. And after that? Figures, of course! And updating the references to tie into my fantastic RefWords database so it’s all formatted for easy conversion into the desired thesis format.

While writing a thesis homeless, I’ve discovered a deep affection for coffee shops. By purchasing drinks at regular intervals, I’m renting table space in a work environment of my choosing. Morally, I feel obliged to buy a drink at least once every three hours. If I think of it in terms of how much money I’m spending on unnecessary drinks, it’s an outrageous affront to my budget. But if I think of it as a rental, $1/hr is a fantastic deal.

There’s a coffee shop on campus with huge windows looking out a strip of brick, a wider moat of raw gravel, the street, and a boxy concrete building. It’s all very dull, and very grey excepting the occasional flash of blue and yellow bus. Yet somehow, on a grey rainy day where even the sky denies us colour, it’s the perfect place to be. Maybe it’s part of the joy of being inside looking out, or maybe it’s my landslides being exponentially more colourful and interesting than any flat expanse of gravel, but either way I’m doing a whole lot of writing here.