Uncategorized – Page 24

Wanted: Geologic maps (formation contacts) of South America countries, ideally for use in GIS

Here’s a good ol’ plea for help from the scientific community. As my questions to “the scientific community” via Academia.edu have gone unnoticed, I’m posting this out here to see if anyone else searching for the same thing has had any luck. [Since then, I’ve discovered ResearchGate, which I generally like better for questions like this. 2014-03-05]

I’m building a GIS (geographic information system) model to determine the possible biogeographic districbution of a genus through time. What I need for this, since the fossils are from South America, is a good geologic map, either of most of the continent or of the countries of Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. Hunting around online hasn’t shown me anything that I want to shell out a bunch of money for, site unseen, and I’m honestly trying to avoid having to scan paper maps and register them (additionally, I haven’t been able to access our worldwide collection of paper geologic maps recently).

1:500,000 or 1:100,000 would be great, but I’d even take 1:1,000,000 at this point. I need something with formational contacts so I can plot possible distributions.

So that’s the challenge of the day: have any geologists in South America discovered a good source for this type of material? Would you be willing to share or trade?

Quick Evernote for Mac Review

I have been thinking about using Evernote or OneNote for a while now, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to dump all of my notes into a proprietary format. The idea behind trying Evernote out was that it would attempt to OCR my handwriting, and would let me link between different notebook pages I could easily photograph or scan into the program (I understand that OneNote does this as well).

Simple, right? I looked into Evernote and discovered that they would rather sync all of your data to the cloud. I’m not down with that, but I did find out that you can run a local version, so I figured I would try it. However, once I dumped a PDF file of a previous notebook in (scanned at a readable resolution), I got a message asking me to upgrade to the “premium” version of the software so I wouldn’t go over my transfer amount for the month. So goodbye Evernote, and I’m back to Tiddlywiki until I can find something better.

Evernote pros:
– Dump everything in one place (images, text, audio, video). I could see using the video if I wanted to describe something on a diagram.
– Lets you sync across devices if you’re into that. I have no other devices and I have a laptop, so I’m not interested.
– OCR of attached files without any extra steps (supposedly)
– You can export to plain HTML if you ever want to leave Evernote behind. This is a good “safety net” to add into a program so people will be interested in trying it.

Evernote cons:
– They want you to create an account with them, even if you don’t want to deal with syncing to “the cloud”
– 40 MB monthly limit for notes and attachments, even if you have no interest in syncing to “the cloud”
– When you import an existing file, makes a copy of that file in its own folder. Ideally you would be able to change this setting so that it would only create an alias or shortcut in order to save space, plus if you are linking working files, creating a copy means that the most current file is not in the Evernot folder, so that doesn’t work.

Now back to work. In the future I hope to review Klok 2, but I shouldn’t right now because I’m down to half the RAM I had before and the whole machine is dragging.

Moving Large Items with Bicycles

The more you ride bike instead of driving, the less you want to use your motor vehicle for things. Sometimes it’s a necessity, such as Ted needing to move a futon this past weekend:

Sometime’s it’s purely a question of “is this possible?” as seen here (from earlier this spring):

More photos are available on Flickr, click on one of the images above to get to my photostream.

Phone Photos

Took only a few photos this weekend with my phone, so you can probably assess the quality right there. If you think about it though, phone photography is really just another way of expression, and I don’t think it always means “I was too lazy to pull out my real camera” or even “I can’t afford a real camera.” I think the point behind such “low quality” photography is that the situation was meaningful enough for me to try to capture what was going on. (“Low quality” is another concept that could be discussed forever: when the first digital cameras came out I was taking photos that were 640×480, but it allowed me to shoot as many as I wanted for free. What will we be calling “low quality” in the future?) I thought they were cool, so I’d like to share them. In other news, ~~I’m considering moving~~ [I have moved, 2014-02-04] my Blogspot blog (which has been up seemingly forever at http://protichnoctem.blogspot.com) to this Drupal website in order to consolidate things. I would probably leave the blog up as an artifact and a link to here, but this would also mean changing some Google Account settings around. I’d welcome any feedback on the idea. I used to host that blog on my Geocities (remember them?) account back in high school, so this isn’t such a bizarre concept. They do take care of server stuff for you though.

[activity] Sold one of my photos

Last fall after the second UND Fall Classic CX race I was contacted by Flint Communications in Fargo, ND about licensing this photo for use in an ad campaign. Long story short, the ad came out sometime this spring and I finally found it a few weeks ago at https://www.bcbsnd.com/blueinsight/campaign/.

Thanks to Pat White for unintentionally modeling. I don’t think this will jumpstart my photography career but it worked out pretty well.

Welcome!

Here you will find reports on my various activity: some long and some short, some current and some after-the-fact. I have a wide variety of interests, not all of them academic, and hopefully these posts will give you a better idea of how I spend my time.

Matt

[activity] Teaching Geology 101 Lab this summer

I will be teaching a lab section of Geology 101 (Introduction to Physical Geology) at the University of North Dakota for the first summer section (16 May to 24 June). We (the instructors) are earning pretty much the minimum possible in order to have the class with so few students, but it should be a worthwhile experience.

[activity] Raced in END-SPAR 2011

kamelseesv has been updated

After a little bit of troubleshooting yesterday with some input files, I’ve updated my kamelseesv script to add a few more lines about the output format (latitude and longitude will appear reversed in the KML file, but they are really in X,Y format instead of Y,X format) and to allow you to view/download the result rather than copying and pasting into a text file. This should let people preview converted datasets without having to save each and every one of them.

[activity] Too Flat, Too Furious 2011 (April 30th, May 1st)

The weekend was a half-success (only because we woke up to snow and ice on Sunday and had to cancel the road race).

As Race/Event Coordinator for the UND Cycling Club:
– Organized the UND race weekend on April 30th and May 1st, including a great number of things listed here.
– Kept the criterium course mostly free of cars (need more volunteers to be able to do this at the Ralph Engelstad Arena next year.
– Got some folks from out of town to show up and race the open USAC categories.
– No serious injuries even though there were several crashes.

As member of the UND Cycling Team:
– Placed 1st in the men’s category C race after a crash behind me in the last lap (that’s racing).
– Fourth rider on the 2nd-place men’s UND team in the 2011 North Central Collegiate Cycling Conference Team Time Trial Championships.