I'm not an engineer - Reason Number 67

Changing the wiper blades on my car is the mental equivalent to solving three sides to a rubix cube. No, seriously, Holly usually has to do this.

(image from Popular Mechanics)

Geekin' Hard

OK, so this post is gonna make me seem like a Giant Geek.

I have to build a stock of continuing education credits as part of the certified professional soil scientist thing (I need forty hours in two years I think). This is kind of new to me, so I'm trying to get a jump on things and figure out how much of this I can do without actually going to $600 conferences (or whatever the going rate for these things is). I can get up to 10 or 20 credits just by reading journal articles. The nice thing is that I'm real close to OSU and they have plenty of journals to choose from.

So, one of the weekly e-mails that I get is from the National Academies and it mentioned a soil science related workshop. I went out and retrieved the headline paper related to the workshop and read it as my first CEU credit. It was called Advancing the Frontiers of Soil Science Towards a Geoscience and contained very little practical information about cleaning up a petroleum spill in the oil field, figuring out how to make synthetic Hanford groundwater, or some of the other challenges that confront me from time to time. In the paper, somebody is making a noisy case for introducing yet another hyphenated discipline into the field. Anyway, the paper had all sorts of BIG IDEA topics that I suspect academic proposal reviewers would eat up like girl scout cookies.

The take away point for me: Sometimes the scope of a scientific discipline is only limited by the boundaries placed upon it by the practitioners - its all about the conception of soil science by the people that do it. Soil Science used to be an applied science about making crops grow better. Now it has evolved and works in the environmental arena (my emphasis), and is starting to take on global climate issues.

It was published in an issue devoted to Hydropedology: Bridging disciplines, scales and data (When I asked Holly to pull the paper, she exclaimed "who ever heard of Geoderma". Beats me.). It looked like it had all sorts of good stuff in there for someone who is looking at soil/water interactions. For example: Soil moisture patterns in a forested catchment: A hydropedological perspective.

Anyway, by now it should be apparent that this post is simply a way to make a couple of readers that I know are out there aware of some stuff out there in the literature (literature that I have no business reading, I think) that might or might not be of interest.

At this point I will stop pretending to be a grad student. Go check out Kenny Roby's new album called the Mercy Filter. This guy was from the Clemson, South Carolina area and rocks harder than you.

What have I done?

With a couple of clicks of a mouse's button, this blog is now retooled to accept comments from any John Q Public out there (at least I think - somebody better test it and git back to me).

I also changed the default style template, cause our monitor at home is starting to fade to black. It was gettin' hard to read/see the text. (Anybody know a deal on the fancy new flat screen jobbies?)

Anyway, it looks like all the links were stripped from the old one. We will have to rebuild.

Why all the sudden activity? Simply because I had a surprising inquiry about the blog from some folks. I had no idea anyone was still looking at it.