Lest you think all we do in my lab is mess around with magnets, I’m posting a few tweets with photos of today’s lab barbecue! Bonnie and I have an annual summer party for students, alums, and associates in our labs. Unfortunately, my camera is broken, so I have to rely on photos taken by Bonnie and her […]
Author: Peter Selkin
Magnetic Susceptibility
My students and I are preparing to go up to Bellingham on Thursday to do some work in the paleomagnetic lab up there, so we spent today’s lab meeting getting everyone acquainted with the data they are going to collect. I started explaining something in the lab meeting that I thought could use a demonstration. […]
How Old is Earth’s Inner Core?
This post summarizes a publication in the journal Nature (note paywall): Biggin, A.J., Piispa, E.J., Pesonen, L.J., Holme, R., Paterson, G.A., Veikkolainen, T., and Tauxe, L., 2015, Palaeomagnetic field intensity variations suggest Mesoproterozoic inner-core nucleation: Nature, v. 526, no. 7572, p. 245–248, doi: 10.1038/nature15523. Earlier this month, an article about the age of Earth’s inner core made […]
Getting Involved in Undergraduate Research
Almost 20 years ago, I was lucky enough to be a student participant in two undergraduate research programs – the Keck geology consortium and Caltech’s SURF program (full disclosure: I didn’t participate in all aspects of the SURF program). The Keck program in particular involved a summer spent mapping and studying gabbro [1] on the […]
Writing for this blog
I wrote an assignment for my students yesterday. I ask them to write a blog post (watch for those soon), and give them some guidelines for doing so. I thought it was worth putting up here both for public comment and because I think it’s a nice statement about what I’m trying to do here. […]
A Visit to the Gulf Core Repository
While at Texas A&M University for our postcruise editorial meeting [1] with some old friends from the Bengal Fan expedition, I took the opportunity to visit IODP’s Gulf Core Repository.Fortunately, Curatorial Specialist Hannah Kastor, who sailed with us in the Bay of Bengal, was there to show us around the repository. Along with Michael Weber, […]
Checking Out Books from the Lab
In my drive to get everything in the lab automated, I’ve set up a checkout system for the lab books. To check books in or out, use this form, or scan with your phone. Note that on the mobile app, you will have to type in your UW NETID, whereas on the browser form you […]
Modified CSE Format for Zotero
If you are a UW Tacoma student who uses Zotero as a reference manager (as I suggest my students do), you can now output a bibliography in the modified CSE format that we use in our science courses at UW Tacoma. The hallmarks of the modified CSE format are: It’s based on the standard Council […]
“I am not a Computer Science Major”
Last quarter, I introduced some programming (in Glowscript) into my intro physics course. At the end of the quarter, I got evaluations from a number of students who said something like, “I’m not a computer science major. Why do I need to learn to program?” Besides being a marketable job skill, learning to program gives […]
