Ah, the messy desk of a lowly scientist…

Today is the day that many of us get to do our civic duty. Get out there and vote folks. In honor of today, here’s one of the most kick ass Neil Young songs, “Lookin’ for a Leader.”

An email today from a professor at the University of Texas requested to use one of my photos for a new geology book for children. Awesome! The lucky photo?

It will apparently be used to teach children about caliche.

Went to Tahoe this past weekend to enjoy the fresh powder…

Wow, I was browsing through my photo library in iPhoto and came across my New Zealand photos. Exactly two years ago today we were mapping uplifted coastal terraces at White Rock on the North Island.

This is awesome! A few guys put together a hip-hop song that is pretty funny and cool by itself. Then, they took it to the next step by editing the iPhone guided tour video from Apple. Enjoy!

[Via TUAW.]

Total Number of In N’ Out Burger restaurants that I’ve been to so far?
32!

You can check out my latest count, now available via Google Maps:

Among our friends, my roommates and I are known as pranksters, constantly pulling random jokes on each other and other people that we love.

Over the holidays, our landlord posted an interesting sign in the lobby and elevators of our apartment building. It basically said that the building could not accept 12″ x 12″ x 12″ boxes over the holidays. Included with this announcement was a helpful drawing of a 12″ x 12″ x 12″ box, just in case someone didn’t know what a square looks like.

These signs had been posted for over two weeks. One evening, when my roommates and I were taking the elevator up to our apartment, we thought of a potentially funny idea (at least to us!). We thought it would be funny to have the sign say the exact same thing, except that the drawing would be a rectangle with 12″ x 12″ x 12″ dimensions. Below that would be a message that claimed the drawing was not to scale.

A quick trip to Kinko’s resulted in the following:

We set about posting these around the building one evening. Happy with our work, we went to bed. Upon awaking the next morning and setting off for work, we found that someone had scrawled in angry block letter on one of our signs, “YEAH, NO KIDDING!!!!” with a giant arrow pointing to the “Drawing not to scale” message! Hah. Pretty funny.

By the time we returned home at the end of the day, all the signs had been replaced with correct ones. Ah well. I wonder if our landlord at least laughed?

Us science geeks can have a pretty esoteric sense of humor at times.

I still cannot believe how many people haven’t seen the “Here Comes Another Bubble” music video by The Richter Scales. It perfectly sums up the Web 2.0 culture and living in the Bay Area. 😉

Anandtech posted an article today that reveals some information about the processor being used in Apple’s new laptop, the MacBook Air. It’s definitely a technical read, but for those curious, check it out.

Turns out, they are using a customized 65nm Merom based processor. This is interesting, especially since Intel was releasing over a dozen different types of their new 45nm Penryn based processors in the first quarter of 2008. The key advantage of these processors is that they use less energy and run significantly cooler than the older processors.

My MacBook Pro gets HOT when I use it. I’m willing to bet that the MacBook Air is going to be quite hot as well. The case of the laptop is so small that heat dissipation is going to be a big issue. And if a MacBook Air has a regular old hard drive within, that’s going to produce even more heat. (Not to mention that hard drives themselves really dislike heat)

It will be interesting to see how well the MacBook Air sells over the next year. As I’ve said before, $1800 is pretty steep for what you get.