Rocky Mountain Rendezvous in Laramie, Wyoming

Okay, I'm somewhat caught up on sleep, but the reality of how much homework piled on while I was in Laramie is cruelly sinking in. I don't really plan on getting a whole lot of sleep this semester; I'm already feeling burnt out on school. If I don't blog this now it won't happen, so here's the story of my trip to the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (rhymes with mouse) in Laramie, Wyoming.

The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous is sort of like a career fair, but that's an unfair comparison. This is much more than that. The first day was a semi-useful resumé and career workshop, but the next day was one of the best geology field trips I've ever been on: a trip through some incredible scenic geology in the Hanna Basin of southern Wyoming. I've already shared the two panoramas I took from the trip, now I'll share the rest of the trip with pictures:

A wind farm near Laramie, WY.

This is called the "Beer Mug Anticline." No one was sure why "Beer Mug," but it's a spectacular anticline, the beds are folded very dramatically.

This is the panorama of the Ferris Formation that you've seen before.

This is a boulder that has fallen downhill from the Ferris Formation, and you can see that it's upside-down because there are courser grains on the top than on the bottom. The top of this boulder represents the bottom of an ancient river channel.

Here's the Ferris Formation outcrop up close, and you can see the curved bottom of an ancient river channel. Since the beds are tilted vertical, you'll have to tilt your head to the left to see how it was originally.

These iron concretions formed after the sand was already deposited. As water flowed between the grains it left iron behind, and cemented the grains together around the iron first. These weather out and form little balls of sand with iron cement in the middle.

This is an outcrop of the Morrison Formation near a reservoir. The Morrison Formation is famous for fossils, but this picture is purely scenic.

Another artsy picture of the Morrison Formation.

These ripple marks were formed by waves when the Morrison Formation was originally deposited. The penny is for scale.

This rock has broken, revealing the ripples between layers.

These are interference ripples, like you see in a swimming pool. You can see two directions of ripple marks in one place, and in this case you can see the cross section in the left of the photo, and in the foreground you can see where I broke it open revealing the ripples themselves and also a cast of the ripples.

The depression in the middle of this photo is a sauropod footprint. I don't have scale, but I could fit my entire shoe in one of the toes with room to spare.

This is a cast on the underside of a rock layer of a foot print from a pterosaur, which is this bird-like thing:

Here's another one with a pen for scale.

And this is the Pine Ridge Sandstone outcrop that was our last stop.

So that was the extra-cool field trip. You probably have to be a geologist to really appreciate the extra-coolness of it.

The next day was a short course on oil production and development. It was a very good course, taught by people from Shell Oil, that combined the geological aspect of oil exploration with the engineering aspect of production and even included the business aspect of the oil industry. As they talked about the cost of producing oil, the sheer numbers are staggering. Exploring is expensive enough, and every time they drill a hole it can cost between $400,000 to $1,200,000 every day to operate a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and then you have to spend similar amounts to recover the oil. Hurricanes can ruin everything; in fact, every step of the process has incredible amounts of risk that can be devastating for the company producing the oil. As I hear people talk about the ridiculous cost of oil and come up with idiotic plans to bring the cost down by boycotting a single company (which has no chance of working, by the way), I get very frustrated. If there's no chance for major profit to offset the incredible risks involved with oil production, who in their right minds would do it? Especially when it means dealing with the government every step of the way, trying to tell you how to do your job!

As part of the course, we were divided into four groups, each one of which was a mock oil company (we named ours "Crude Oil", just so we could use the word crude). The four companies were collectively presented three different possible oil plays, one of which was small but an almost sure return on investment, one that had huge potential but was also a huge risk, and one in between. We examined the data and made recommendations to our "Vice Presidents" on which wells to drill, and the V.P.s negotiated with each other on possible joint ventures and made decisions based on our assigned budgets on what to bid on what property.

Our V.P. made a spectacular bid of $205 million on the big risky well, beating the nearest competitor by only five million. We offset that risk by winning a bid on the mid-range well also, and both bids were joint ventures with another company. The smallest competitor won the small well, and bought a 17% interest in the big, risky one when it was discovered we didn't have enough money to drill after buying the land. Since these were data from real wells, we got to see the "results" of our acquisitions. The little well was a big payoff, which was good news for the little competitor. The big well was dry, which was bad news for everyone. In fact, it was such an expensive loss that it took the little company into the red, with just a 17% interest. Fortunately the mid-sized well was a decent payoff, and we'd been smart enough to buy 66% of it, enough to bring us back into the profit range, but not our joint company. Just before reading the results, though, the Shell people informed us that each member of the winning company would receive a $50 gas card. The company I was in won with $330 million "profits," and each of us $50 of gas richer. Plus, everyone who took the course is getting a free textbook on oil exploration in the mail, that would otherwise have cost $150. It looks like a good book, I'm excited to get it.

After the short course was the official presentation of the geology posters, where those of us presenting them stand next to them and present them to the oil recruiters and other people at the event. Two of us from BYU-Idaho presented posters on research we're doing as undergraduate students, the only undergrads with posters; all the rest were students working on M.S. and Ph.D.s. The posters were judged (kind of like a science fair), and Tyson and I both won honorable mentions that came with $100 checks. Tyson at one point was even asked by a University of Wyoming faculty member what graduate program he was in, and was shocked to hear he was just a junior, so winning honorable mention against grad students is pretty cool. Plus it brings my total net earnings on the trip to $300, when you include the gas and the book.

The rest was interviews for internships with oil companies and well-logging companies, who are the ones that look at the drilling debris and analyze the wells. Since the oil companies mostly hire grad students, those were more for face recognition for next year; but there's a pretty good chance for those of us who went to get well-logging internships.

So that was my trip to Laramie, Wyoming. I went last year, too, and I'll go next year and take more photos; the field trip is different each time. For now, I'm way behind on my homework.

Panoramic Photos

Well, I'm very busy trying to keep my head above water getting caught up on all the homework that accumulated while I prepared the poster I presented in Laramie, Wyoming, and while I was gone on the trip to Wyoming. I really will write up a summary of the trip, but first I want to at least finish my field notebook for my pre-semester field trip, which is due tomorrow but won't be done on time. I do have something, though, that's just too cool not to post now, which is a pair of panoramic photos. I took a short break from homework today to stitch the photos together, and it was surprisingly easy: I clicked "New Panorama" in Photoshop Elements and selected my photos, and was done. That's it. I've taken many photos intending to stitch them into panoramas, but this is the first time I've ever actually done it. So here they are, two panoramic photos from my field trip in Wyoming:


Click on them to see the full-sized images. For space reasons on Blogger, these are lower resolution than the original files, but still quite good; I have the sharper full-resolution images for anyone who might want them.

For those of you reading this interested in the geology, these are cretaceous fluvial systems in the Hanna Basin in Wyoming. The first panorama is the Ferris Formation, and up close you can see individual channels of the meandering stream system. The striking thing to me about this place is that the beds have been tilted completely vertical. The view at both ends of the picture is on strike with the unit. The second panorama is the Pine Ridge Sandstone, and if you zoom in you can see near the left some spectacular lateral accretion surfaces, and just next to them on the right a channel form. This is about as good as it gets for seeing these features in an outcrop.

I have more pictures coming, plus more info, but that's about all I can justify typing now. I need some sleep.

Laramie, Wyoming

That's where I've been since Thursday night. This is a placeholder post, just a promise to my readers that I will have a very full, very detailed report with pictures, possibly in multiple parts, recounting my adventures at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous at University of Wyoming's campus. It's kind of a job fair, but more serious than what you'd normally associate with that term; it's specially geared toward petroleum geologists and geophysicists and some engineers, those of us who want ties to evil Big Oil. There was a resumé and interview workshop, an amazing field trip through southern Wyoming, a short course on oil exploration, development and production (including the business aspect, which was very cool), a poster presentation (for which Tyson and I both received $100 prizes for honorable mention, competing against posters presenting research conducted by masters and PhD students, which is very cool), and interviews with oil and gas companies as well as well-logging companies for internships and possible jobs upon graduation. But for now, I'm tired, so I am going to get some sleep (we got back to Rexburg at about ten after midnight). I'm not dead, I didn't quit blogging, there's more to come!

Me & Armini

I don't actually know anyone named Armini, but it's kind of a cool name. "Me & Armini" is the name of Emilíana Torrini's new album, which she released in the U.S. last Tuesday, and I finally got to listen to a couple days ago. Sadly, I don't own a copy; but fortunately Emilíana has updated her website to have actual content, and there was a link to a site that allows you to listen to the entire album, which I've done four times now. Emilíana Torrini is my favorite singer, so I was very much looking forward to this album. Here's what I think:

It's not her best stuff ever, but that's okay because it's still pretty good. It's short, but that's fine because I'm more concerned with quality of music than quantity (though quantity of quality music is the best). It doesn't have as much of the odd, otherworldly feel of her first U.S. release, Love in the Time of Science, and it doesn't have the personal sincerity of her second, Fisherman's Woman; instead it's somewhere in between. As one reviewer puts it, "Torrini reveals a more adventurous side but sacrifices some of the emotional intensity that underpinned her 2005 masterpiece." That's a very fair statement. It's still Emilíana's voice, though, and that's the important part. So even if the lyrics on this new album aren't as meaningful or cryptic as on the previous two albums, I still can't get enough of that voice.

So you can listen to the album here. Most of the tracks are good, fun songs. I really like Fireheads, Me and Armini, Heard it All Before and Big Jumps. Hold Heart, Gun, Beggar's Prayer and Bleeder are okay. I didn't much care for the vocal part on Dead Duck, but the instrumentals are good (ironic, since it's her voice I like). The only song I didn't like was Jungle Drums, because of the dumb lyrics. The beat and music are good, but the lyrics ruin it for me. I especially liked Ha Ha, probably because rather than a silly upbeat song it's a mellow, somewhat spiteful song that reminds me of songs from Fisherman's Woman. My favorite track was Birds. I'm not sure what symbolism is in the lyrics, but the tune is good and there's an awesome, slightly dissonant guitar and piano interlude that offsets Emilíana's voice very nicely. If you only listen to one track, I recommend you listen to Birds. In fact, you're required to do that right now. Go.

Now that you've done that, this is a great place to start talking about the excellent* music I have included in this blog. Emilíana Torrini was my first exposure to Icelandic music, of which I am now a huge fan (if her name doesn't seem Icelandic, it's because her father was Italian). The first I ever heard was Hold Your Hand, which is on a Paul Oakenfold techno album called Bunkka. Unfortunately I didn't notice, since this album was one of several annoying albums one of my missionary companions would play all the time (yes, apostate, non-church-approved music), that is ironically now one of my favorite albums. This companion also introduced me to Depeche Mode, another band I didn't like at the time but do now.

(Not a photo of Emilíana Torrini)

I didn't really notice Emilíana Torrini until I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. She sings Gollum's Song during the end credits, which is one of the most amazing songs ever. Her dark, smoky voice is perfect to represent Gollum's tortured personality, and the mood of that song along with the brilliant lyrics perfectly capture the emotion necessary for a song to represent such a complicated character, my favorite character in the series. I heard that song once and couldn't get it out of my head, so I looked up the singer and started listening to the rest of her music.

Love in the Time of Science is the first album she released in the U.S. The style is a bit similar to Björk, as is her voice, but not as wild or weird. It's still weird, though, especially the lyrics. It's heavy at times on the electronics, but only where appropriate. It's one of my all-time favorite albums. I included one song from the album on this blog, one of the few with easily decipherable lyrics: To Be Free. I love everything about this song, but a line in the lyrics particularly caught my attention: "It shouldn't hurt me to be free, it's what I really need to pull myself together; but if it's so good being free, would you mind telling me why I don't know what to do with myself?" Of course, she's singing about getting out of a bad relationship and not knowing what to do next, but for me this is how I feel during the summer: lots of free time, and not much to fill it with. There's not a single song on this album I don't like, but my other favorites are Tuna Fish (there's an awesome acoustic version of this song on this blog), Baby Blue, Telepathy and Dead Things. It's a unique, original album that I can listen to over and over again.

It was six years between that and her next album (1999 to 2005), Fisherman's Woman which has a completely different feel. Torrini was apparently going through a hard time, and this album reflects it with a very mellow, reflective, more personal feel. It's entirely acoustic; voice, piano and guitar, with a few subtle ambient sound effects thrown in such as creaking boards to give a feel of being aboard a boat. The mood of the album is alternately melancholy and hopeful. I don't like it quite as well as her previous album, but it is very good. My favorite song is Today Has Been OK, which I've included on this blog. I almost had the line "This life has been insane, but today has been OK" engraved on my iPod (instead I went with "Feed Your Head" from White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, which is a total drug reference). My other favorites from this album are Heartstopper and Next Time Around (an excellent Sandy Denny cover).

Like I do with any musician I'm fanatical about, I've grabbed up as many obscure Emilíana Torrini tracks as I can find. I've put ten of her songs on this blog, and I've discussed four of them, which means there are six more, most of them cover songs:

Ten to Twenty is a song by another band I like, Sneaker Pimps. The version on this blog is the only version I know of, and I lifted it from a video of a live performance. I don't particularly care for the original, but this version is just cool.

If You Go Away is the English (better) version of a french song by Jacques Brel, Ne Me Quitte Pas. I've heard other versions, and this is my favorite. It's kind of a sad song, but the lyrics are great, and Emilíana captures the sentiment of the song perfectly.

Lay Down (Candles in the Rain) is a cover of a song by Melanie Safka, a 60s hippie whose work was influential to Torrini's style. This is an essential hippie song, and of course I like Torrini's version the best. The lyrics are about Woodstock, and a bunch of hippies doing drugs and holding up candles to ward away a rainstorm. This song is the best one I know of for showing off Emilíana's versatile range of styles, from dark, cozy and quiet to clear, piercing high notes. Also, there are drug references in the lyrics. This is one of my top favorite Torrini songs.

Ruby Tuesday is another hippie song by The Rolling Stones. A different cover version is playing during a particularly intense scene of Children of Men, but naturally Emilíana's is my favorite version. This is another great song for showing off the full range of her voice, and the lyrics are very good. The last verse is my favorite:

"'There's no time to lose,' I heard her say

You've got to catch your dreams before they run away

Dying all the time,

Lose your dreams, and you could lose your mind

Ain't life unkind?"

And finally, Why is a song by GusGus, an Icelandic band for which Emilíana was the singer before her solo career. I like it for the minimal, laid back jazz feel. And of course for the voice.

All ten of these songs are in my playlist on this blog, but Why is under GusGus, Gollum's Song is under Howard Shore (composer of the soundtrack), and Hold Your Hand is under Paul Oakenfold.

Of course this just scratches the surface; those are my top ten Torrini songs that I chose to show off her music. I hope you enjoy them!

One more thing. I've put a lot of pictures of Emilíana Torrini in this post, but I didn't show the cover of the new album. That's because I'm not sure what I think of it. It's not exactly bad, but it's not my favorite look for her. I keep changing my mind whether I like it of not. Here it is:

I'm not sure if that's a prison outfit or pajamas. I have no idea who Armini is. At least the music is good.

*Excellent is based on my opinion, which you are required to agree with.

More 9/11

I wasn't going to say anything on this topic, and still I won't say much. I hoped to find a good bit on YouTube with clips from the attack, but all the ones I found were either extremely long or pieced together with sappy music, and I didn't have a whole lot of time to spend searching. So I posted a few pictures instead.

I'm not going to give my story of how I remember where I was when 9/11 happened, because everyone does that and my story isn't exciting anyway. I will, however, share this excerpt from Rush Limbaugh today. I don't care what you think of Limbaugh, if you think you don't like him because he's a white, rich, racist, arrogant snob, it's because you haven't listened to him. It takes about six weeks to become fully acclimated to his show, used to all the jargon he uses and his nicknames for public figures, etc.; but his analyses are always right on, brilliant, and insightful. This is a 9/11 timeline of sorts, but not like what you hear elsewhere; this is a timeline of the politicization of the attack, and the hypocrisy of Democrats who accuse Republicans of using 9/11 as political leverage:

RUSH:  This is the seventh anniversary of the terror attacks on September 11th of 2001.  Everybody says you shouldn't politicize this day.  Sorry, can't help it.  My remembrances of the September 11th attacks do not just stop on the day of 9/11.  There have been a lot of things that have happened since those attacks, and I think we need to remind ourselves of them, because it was seven years ago, ladies and gentlemen, that we were blindsided.  Nineteen terrorists possessed by evil, hijacked our airplanes using box cutters.  They stopped an election that was taking place in New York City.  They brought down the twin towers.  They blew a hole in the Pentagon.  They crashed a plane in Pennsylvania that they were trying to get back to Washington to crash into either the Capitol or the White House.  At the end of it all, nearly 3,000 Americans were dead.  But up 'til that point, Al-Qaeda's war on America had already claimed hundreds of American lives, through embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing in Yemen, and countless other attacks.  

The Clinton administration treated them as criminal cases, deliberately handicapping and handcuffing our intelligence agencies, and eschewed any kind of a strong military response.  And, of course, Jamie Gorelick, the then vice attorney general, whatever, deputy attorney general, erected the now famous wall that prevented the CIA and the FBI from sharing information because they were gathering it in grand jury testimony, which must remain private and secret, limiting our ability to figure out what was up, what was next.  In the immediate hours after the 9/11 attacks, Drive-By journalists sneered that President Bush was running scared aboard Air Force One.  The late Peter Jennings lamented on ABC, after the president spoke, (paraphrasing) "It's just obvious some presidents are better at this than others," referring to, of course, Bill Clinton.  Within days, ladies and gentlemen, Clinton associates were quoted as saying they wished these attacks had occurred on Clinton's watch so he could have had a chance at greatness, so that something momentous would have happened on his watch.  The Democrat leader, Tom Daschle, attacked George Bush in the days after the attacks, within weeks, two weeks, for doing nothing.  

On the day that Daschle launched his attack into Bush for not doing anything, Bush was planning that very attack.  Daschle's attack on Bush for doing nothing came on the eve of our military operations in Afghanistan.  Democrat political memos suggested that the president's popularity could be diminished by branding him a liar on weapons of mass destruction and any number of other things.  The Democrat Party began to politicize this event within days.  They were doing everything they could to come up with a strategy, to end up blaming this on Bush, head into the 2002 elections so that they could retake the House and the Senate.  Democratic political memos, in addition to suggesting that Bush could be branded a liar, Democrat political memos surfaced from Jay Rockefeller, strategizing how to use the war for political gain, and I, to this day, have that memo from Jay Rockefeller on my desktop of this computer in my studio here at the EIB Southern Command.  I have not filed it away so that it will be tough to find, and even with my Spotlight search feature, I have put it on my desktop, and it's never left.  

Hillary Clinton echoed the conspiracy-based claim that Bush knew about the attacks beforehand.  We had a Democrat-voting poet laureate from New Jersey claiming the Jews did it because all of the Jews got out of the World Trade Center.  The Drive-By Media amplified this guy's theory. All over the place, theories were expounded and amplified that suggested George W. Bush not only knew about it, but if he knew about it, he had to be in on it, let it happen.  The Democrat Party seized after just a couple days, couple weeks the opportunity of these attacks on 9/11 to politicize everything so as to reacquire their power, and they did not stop, and they have not stopped for seven years.  Left-wing Hollywood's revisionist history movie, Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11 was released.  It won the big award at the Cannes Film Festival.  I am convinced to this day that to whatever extent the American president, our population, our country is hated and despised around the world, it's because of who around the world has seen that lying propaganda piece of garbage movie that Michael Moore made.  And then Jay Rockefeller's memo surfaced. 

Seven years later, where are we?  The president's diminished, video of the 9/11 attacks rarely seen, although MSNBC today replayed it all in real time.  Our victories in this war on terror are downplayed.  Let us not forget that the Democrat Party sought defeat in Iraq.  They were waving the white flag of surrender.  They were condemning our troops.  They were suggesting our troops were rapists, murderers, and thugs.  They were compared to Nazi thugs.  Meanwhile, the same Democrat Party doing that embraced the rights, the congressional rights, the US constitutional rights, I should say, of the people who wanted to do to us again what they had done to us on 9/11.  They became the sympathetic figures.  We became the brutes.  We were violating their rights.  They were planning numerous 9/11s, but they haven't happened, have they?  There have been no more attacks on this country.  Not one train's been attacked, not one bus, not one bomb has made it through a port, not one airplane's been hijacked.  We don't know how many terrorist attempts have been blocked because we cannot brag about our successes.  We can only brag or publicize our failures, which the Democrat Party is willing to do.  

Even to this day, the Democrat Party, as a political item in its new platform is claiming we are no safer.  In fact, we are at greater risk than we've ever about, despite the fact they have done nothing to help protect this country.  They've ended up voting for things, but they opposed them.  When the rubber hit the road, the Democrats did the right thing, but not until they had ginned up so much anti-American hatred within this country, so much anti-administration hatred, so much anti-war fervor with their buddies in the Drive-By Media.  Our victories have been profound.  They have been downplayed.  But the truth is that tens of thousands of Al-Qaeda terrorists are dead.  There have been no more attacks on American soil.  That, among the remembrances of the dead and the recollections of where you were and what you were feeling and what you saw that day, in addition that those, remember one thing:  Despite anything you've heard from the Democrats and their associates in the Drive-By Media for the last seven years, not one more attack on American soil has occurred.  Remember that.

(The Rush Limbaugh Show, Thursday, September 11, 2008)

September 11

Back to School

Today was the first day of school. Oh, wait, that was actually last Tuesday; today was the first day for other people. Those of us in the geology department who are starting our heavy classes began with a field trip last week. Today marked the start of normal classwork. This semester I am taking Stratigraphy/Sedimentology.... from my own dad, which should be interesting. I'm also taking Structural Geology and a class on GIS where I get to learn to make maps. To relax a bit, I'm taking a bowling class with a couple other geology buddies, a photography class to satisfy an art G.E. credit, and Bryce Mecham, who taught me Trombone lessons over the summer, has invited me to participate in the master class he teaches to all his Trombone students. That should be a lot of fun.

Meanwhile I already have a whole hell of a lot of work to do: reading for all my classes, reworking my field notebook from the field trip and preparing a map and poster, making another poster and writing an abstract for my senior project, updating my resumé for the upcoming Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (at which I hopefully will have a poster to present!) and proofreading a couple dozen of my classmates' resumés, and hopefully finding time to sit down and use my art skills (haha!) to update my dad's powerpoint diagrams so they're original and legal. Verdammte scheiße!

Okay, enough of that. The field trip was a lot of work, but a lot of fun! We looked at important geology in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, mostly related to building the mountains in the area. I won't go into a lot of detail, since those of you reading were either there and know what the pictures are all about, or don't care about the geology anyway. I'll just share some pictures, with a few comments:

This is the sign that goes to the above travertine terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, which just happened to be on the way to the first field trip stop. With a name like Hymen Terrace, I had to take a picture. I couldn't have made this up if I tried!

This is The Great Unconformity. An unconformity is a surface that represents missing rock, rock that used to be there but isn't now. This one represents two billion years of Earth's history that has ben eroded away and is lost.

A layer of shale in a sandstone unit.

The view from the dam at Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

Brian operating the machinery they used to use to pull the plug on the dam.

This is one of my favorites. The vertical shapes represent bits of rock torn up by a major hurricane and stacked against each other. I'm sure Bush caused this hurricane, too, and made it only flood in prehistoric minority neighborhoods.

We made a non-geology stop to the site of the rescue of the Willie Handcart Company, which was pretty cool.

The view of a lake between two moraines, which are mounds of dirt deposited by glaciers. The ice used to be at least as high as where I stood to take this picture. The ice melted 10,000 years ago, due to the overabundance of SUVs.

Rebekah imitating Dr. Moore, and Steve being a goof.

A very cool outcrop that represents an ancient braided stream. Look closely at the tree on top of the outcrop on the far right; I got a very cool up-close picture of it:

Everyone sliding down the hill.

That should do it!

Emilíana Torrini's album comes out tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to get my hands on it for awhile; I doubt they'll have it at Wal-Mart. On the bright side, I found out that Apocalyptica is performing in Boise on October 22, and I'm finally going to go see them live! I should wait until near that date and write a post about Apocalyptica, but I doubt I can wait that long, so that might come much sooner. I spent a lot of time yesterday watching YouTube videos of them. It's been a long time since I've been this excited about an event....

Okay, now to that reading I've been putting off.