A group in favor of building a bridge over the Red River of the North at Merrifield Road (County Road 6 / 12 Ave NE) has a new website to organize support: http://southforksbypass.wordpress.com/. A letter to the editor appeared in the Grand Forks Herald today.
NPA and Toeds team up to provide third END-SURE checkpoint
(zoomable map here, miles count down to finish, 1.5 mile out-and-back at CP2 is not included)
Northern Plains Athletics and Toe’ds have teamed up to provide a third checkpoint for END-SURE: the Extreme North Dakota Sandhills Ultra Run Experience…and what an experience it’s going to be!
Together with Toe’ds executive chef Ted Bibby, I’ll be hauling gear in (on foot or via snowmobile) to the most ‘wildernessy’ part of the 31-mile END-SURE course to set up a checkpoint and aid station between six and seven miles from the finish line. Unexpected amounts of snowfall have made the finish time estimates grow longer and longer the closer we get to the race. The impending storm tonight into tomorrow will add insult to injury, and perhaps finally convince some of the racers that they’d like to be wearing snowshoes (for those not in the loop, gear has been quite the debate).
If you’d like to follow along with the race, we’ll be tweeting from @nplainsathletes, sharing the hashtag with the two other checkpoints and the finish line. Check out the roster to see if you know anyone in the race, and feel free to tweet us some messages to pass along. An extended 6.5 hour cutoff to reach CP2 at mile 18 means a potentially longer finishing time, so who knows how long we’ll be out there.
Sidewalks as a Sedimentary Analog
Came across this example from Callan Bentley at Northern Virginia Community College and thought it was an interesting way to help students keep thinking about geology, even while they’re walking around campus.
Cycling through the Blizzard
Eight inches of snow? No problem:
The Grand Forks Herald has a thing for putting winter cyclists on the front page–check out this one of Chase Christenson from January 2010:
.png)
Updated: Here are a few more (I’ll keep updating below).
Matt Burton-Kelly waits for traffic at the intersection of University Ave. and N. 25th St. as he bikes to work at EERC
Tuesday. (Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald) (1 Dec 2015)
Professor Gordon Iseminger of the History Department at UND pedals across campus during Thursday’s snowfall. (Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald) (15 Jan 2016)
News Comments: A Topical Aside
Although this topic may not seem to immediately affect the streets of our fair city, it does affect a related aspect: community.
The Grand Forks Herald, after several months of allowing fewer and fewer articles to be commented upon, has finally removed all functionality on streets, etc.)?
And now that this particular community has been removed, how and where to rebuild a bigger and more inclusive one?
______________________________________
*Since I have no information on the reasons for the change, I’m forced to speculate. Obviously, if comments are hurting the company financially (paying someone to moderate, hosting fees, etc.), then there is no reason for Forum to keep them on at the Herald. I’m not asking for the Herald to keep free comments up if it is not helping them make money. Based on other AreaVoices comment sections remaining active, however, that doesn’t seem to be the reason.
**I have a theory that by allowing people to show off what they know through comment systems or message boards, we could get a better “oral history” of the area than we would if we relied only on people who want to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia requires citations, comments do not.
**I have a theory that by allowing people to show off what they know through comment systems or message boards, we could get a better “oral history” of the area than we would if we relied only on people who want to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia requires citations, comments do not.
State of the City 2013
The State of the City address was yesterday. You can find the summary information here (at least until next year). Direct links are below.
– Speech text
– Speech video
Highlights include a new focus on downtown and the 42nd Street corridor, props for Choice Health and Fitness and the Greenway, and especially support for CAT riders in the form of a new mobile app (well, actually interfacing with an existing mobile app, Columbia Road widening project, which focuses on moving cars, not people.
Geologic Figures Database, step 1
I hope to someday put together a tagged database of figures pulled from the geological literature that may be useful to others, primarily maps and stratigraphic columns. For now, though, I am sharing an Evernote notebook to which I will be adding over time. It can be accessed here:
https://www.evernote.com/pub/matthewbk/publicimages [EDIT: No longer. 2014-02-04]
Future plans include tagging the images (type of map, area covered, stratigraphic units) but I am not sure of the platform to use. Tumblr, Blogger, or even Pinterest (in addition to the possibility of Drupal) are all possibilities at this point that will allow collaboration.
Pumped.
Another weekend of racing here at Northern Plains Athletics HQ! Here’s the final current map of the Extreme North Dakota Iceman Triathlon course. It’s going to be a blast.
For whom is our mayor competing?
Petra: Select wells with a datum
In Petra 4, to select wells that have a datum (e.g., if you want wells you can export with sub-sea true vertical depth [SSTVD] rather than just measured depth [MD]), the correct search criterion is Well Header–Datum–By Active Datum–Datum Is Between the Minimum and Maximum, and set the minimum depth to something greater than one.