GPS on the Mac: Basecamp transfers and overwriting points

My parents gave me a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx for my birthday this year (thanks Mum and Dad!) and I’ve been using it pretty much nonstop for two weeks. I’ve been getting into geocaching as a way to hone my GPS skills (and have an excuse to ride my bicycle around with my girlfriend), but I’ve been having some issues with waypoint transfers.

The software I’m using for storing and transferring waypoints, tracks, and routes is Basecamp for Mac. It does what it needs to do without too much fuss, which is a good thing. However, I just began dumping a lot of Geocache waypoints into Basecamp and the GPS unit and some weird things happen when points are named the same (“duplicate” points for anyone searching on Google).

I imported a bunch of points from Basecamp to the unit, then I decided to see what would happen if I moved all the points back from the unit to Basecamp. In some cases, I get the unit-truncated name of the point (which is expected, as the unit is designed to only store so many characters of name), but in certain others I get the same name with a “1” appended. I can only assume that doing this multiple times would give me “2” and “3” and so on, but maybe not–I might get “11.”

This only happens with certain names. It turns out that this is because the points are considered different by the computer and the unit–because the note field is truncated as well when the waypoints are uploaded to the unit, so when they get downloaded back to Basecamp, they don’t pass the “whatever’s the same don’t worry about” test.

I’ll need to discover if there is a way to make the info field contain more data, as well as the name field, since it’s better for me to have the name of the Geocache than a string of letters and numbers or a truncated name, and it’s much better to be able to put more than 14 characters in the name field and 30 in the note field.

Searching GSA Publications

If you’re working with older print materials like I am for the moment, you probably realize that citation styles have changed over the years. In particular, what now would be cited as an abstract related to a specific conference volume would previously be cited as an independent article within the journal issue it was first printed.

For example, I have before me the following citation:

Howard, A. D., 1946, Caliche in glacial chronology: Geol. Soc. America Bull., vol. 57, p. 1204.

We’re clued into the fact that this is really an abstract by the single page number, which helps. If you’re not into citing abstracts, especially if abstracts in your field usually don’t contain real data, you could probably skip reading this reference entirely. If it were a more modern abstract (within the last five years or so) I might be inclined to contact the author for a copy of the poster or presentation they gave at whatever meeting this was–but only if I was pretty sure this would be helpful. Unfortunately, this reference is quite a bit older than many working geologists so this option is not open to us.

So let’s say I still want to read this abstract. I could go up to the library (conveniently located in the same building as I am) and track down this volume. The library is closed today for floor-waxing, so that’s out of the picture. The Internet is our last resort, but luckily we have an institutional subscription to the GSA journals (“luckily” because they won’t take my member ID for some reason).

Search — Geological Society of America Bulletin

On this page (for the GSA Bulletin), there are a variety of search fields. Not all of them will help you in this case. If I search for “Howard” in Author I get 26 results, but not what I’m looking for.

Not very helpful. You might be thinking “drat, another bad reference,” but this isn’t so. Since we’re looking for an abstract, we need to do a full-text search, because (and this is what I found out today) GSA abstracts are not stored by title in the database!

The correct field to use in this case is “Text | Abstract | Title,” which is full-text. If I put in “caliche in glacial,” up pops the result I’m looking for:

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS PRESENTED AT THE DECEMBER MEETING IN CHICAGO, DECEMBER 26–28, 1946 Geological Society of America Bulletin December 1946, v. 57, p. 1173-1302, doi:10.1130/0016-7606(1946)57[1173:AOPPAT]2.0.CO;2
…drift to the northeast indicate that the Wisconsin ice actively erodedonly within an inner zone marginingLake Michigan. CALICHE IN GLACIAL CHRONOLOGY ARTHUR D. HOWARD U. S. Geological Survey, Washington 25, D. C. Studies in northwestern North Dakota and northeastern…

* Abstract
* Full Text (PDF)

Voila!

Here’s a question for another day and another blogger: which publisher has the best search capabilities and easiest access to past issues?

Why teach humanities?

The City Beat: The tension between art and science

Tran isn’t arguing against the humanities, but it seems that some of the humanities professors at UND are worried about the new national focus on science and technology. The question raised is essentially “Of what worth are the humanities?” in response to interviews with candidates for the Vice President for Research and Economic Development.

I think Tran answered this question in his previous post: “The arts make life pleasant here.” If it weren’t for literature or art or philosophy, what would we do when we weren’t working? If nearly everyone hadn’t had at least some exposure to Shakespeare, would we find as much meaning in modern film (including movies)? I know philosophy helped me as a critical thinker, and even if I disagreed with someone’s worldview, I could still recognize the beauty of their logic.

I know that not everything makes money for the university (aside from tuition), but there has to be more to life than that. Not everything is about economic development, and not everyone has grand schemes about the future of the country as a whole–most of us just want to survive, and it’s the art and those other nonessentials that make the in-between times worth living.

There is more to develop here, but I have to eat breakfast*.

*Have you ever noticed those non-sequiturs when you write them? Here I am, throwing around grandiose ideas about the meaning and value of the non-sciences, and I mention eating breakfast. Not a particularly scholarly thing to do, perhaps, but certainly humanizing.

Importing XY coordinates to QGIS

I was having some problems yesterday trying to import some xy (latitude and longitude) points into QGIS using the Delimited Text plugin. It turns out that a) my Excel spreadsheet should have been exported as “Windows Comma Separated” rather than the default (Mac) “Comma Separated Values,” and b) the last column in the file MUST have values the whole way down in order for the plugin to determine the number of columns (and therefore, apparently, which column has the x and y values). I was being lazy and hadn’t input all the zero values that should have gone in; now I probably should go back and do that.

Hopefully this will help someone else.

P.S. If you’d like to fill in all the empty cells, you can follow these directions. You can just copy and paste into the selection, rather than doing the formula thing.