Wildflysch

Change in my work email

2011-05-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Hi,

My work email is changing. It is now david@davincisciencecenter.org Please update your records accordingly. While you are at it, why not check out our new website at www.davincisciencecenter.org?

Thanks,
Dave Smith

The Arctic would like its winter back

2011-02-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

As we shiver here in the Northeast, it is common to hear comments that embed two major misconceptions - comments like "whatever happened to global warming?" There are two things wrong with these statements:

1. Weather does not equal climate

2. The United States does not equal the world.

Although we have had unusually cold winter weather over much of the lower 48 states this year, the Arctic has been having yet more unusually warm weather. One piece of evidence is the record low extent of Arctic sea ice. The graph above shows the decline in the average annual extent. To be sure, the Arctic melt-off is much more severe in summer than in winter and these data points are year-long averages that incorporate summer extent, but there is still a clear trend consistent with significant warming of the Arctic.

This winter's weather in the Eastern US is most likely due to the North Atlantic Oscillation - a periodic rearrangement of the dominant weather systems - high latitude high pressure and mid-latitude low pressure - that changes the storm tracks across the northeastern United States and parts of Europe as well. The NAO is similar to its cousin ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation. It seems to be that El Nino and NAO are not linked, although both have profound hemispheric, even global, impacts. Although the deeper causes of the NAO are not yet well understood, there is growing understanding of how to predict it and what the resulting effects on the local weather will be. What is also not known is the extent to which additions of fossil fuel carbon dioxide and the resulting warming may create a feedback with the NAO. Although we are currently in a negative NAO, it has been unusually positive for most of the past two decades, which is intriguing but certainly not definitive. See Professor David Stephenson's NAO page http://www1.secam.ex.ac.uk/cat/NAO for more detailed description and history.

What Happens When the Science Really IS Shaky

2010-12-14T07:47:00.001-08:00

The scientific findings indicating that anthropogenic climate change is occurring at an increasing rate, with far-reaching consequences are about as robust as science ever gets. Nevertheless, they are under ceaseless and increasingly aggressive political attack. So, how can one tell if a scientific idea has any merit in the face of all this political grandstanding?

It's quite simple, really. Sit back for a short time and watch other scientists react to it.

Two weeks ago, NASA scientists published a paper in Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1197258 presenting evidence that arsenic could replace phosphorus in at least one species of living organism, an extremophile bacterium in Mono Lake, CA. This would be, if true, a Really. Big. Deal. So people read the paper. Very. Carefully. In less than a week, scientists have come pouring out of the woodwork, discrediting the research findings and techniques used in the paper. See http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html and the comments therein for one example of the critique. At the very least, there remains a great deal of more careful data collection to be done before any sort of confidence can be assigned to these findings.

This is exactly the sort of response that scientists expect and desire, but with the spread of the blogosphere, it is now much more public than it ever has been, which means that even casual readers can see the testing of scientific ideas in action. If you believe that scientists tend to stick up for each other in some kind of secret society, take another look at those comments on RRResearch - it's a feeding frenzy. This feeding frenzy is not an aberration, either. This is how scientists talk to each other, even scientists who fundamentally respect each other.

When ordinary people think someone they know and like has made an error, they may elect to keep it to themselves to protect the relationship. People don't generally go to a dinner party where the chicken soup is too salty and say to the host, "You know, I've reviewed your technique and you clearly forget to account for the effect of increasing concentration due to evaporation losses." But, in science that is exactly what scientists do to each other. Unchallenged mistakes are a big problem so it is best to shed light on the problem immediately. Ideally, this happens pre-publication, in the peer-review process. However, no system of review is foolproof and editors may also opt to publish something they think is important, even in the face of reviewer's objections. It's not yet clear what happened during the publication of the NASA results, but it should be clear in the aftermath that poor science, once exposed to the view of the scientific community, does not stand for long.

Big news in science, just as in other fields, can get a lot of media hype and that hype may or may not be justified in the end. Ditto for political attention. If you want to know if the science is any good, however, don't pay any attention to the media or the politicos. Instead, pay attention to the scientists.

The True Face of Scientific Dissent

2010-05-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot about how scientists are supposedly squelching dissent on issues such as evolution and climate change. This is nonsense, but it might be helpful to have a case study of how accespting science is to dissenting views, as long as they are presented in the form of scientific arguments - novel explanations that are supported by data and analysis.

The March 2010 issue of Reviews of Geophysics just arrived in my mailbox. In this issue is a paper by Kutcherov and Krayushkin on "Deep-Seated Abiogenic Origin of Petroleum: From Geologic Assessment to Physical Theory." Most petroleum geologists, reject this idea and instead accept the biogenic theory (petroleum is derived from the thermal breakdown of fatty material in the remains of dead single-celled organisms in oxygen-poor sediments.) Not only that, but the abiogenic hypothesis posits that petroleum is super-abundant and that we could find it anywhere. If this were true it could case a global crash in petroleum prices, which depend on a belief in scarcity. There is a powerful incentive to suppress this hypothesis in favor of the current dogma, especially by Western petroleum geologists, most of whom work for petroleum companies. So how did this article get published?

It's very simple, they wrote it and submitted it, but most importantly, they generated evidence and the editors could not find any substantive problems with their data. These authors create a case, documenting the production of hydrocarbons from the reduction of carbonates at mantle temperatures and pressures. These experiments were not easy to do, but they document a methodology that is reasonable and they provide results that match natural petroleum profiles in at least a few cases.

This paper may well be wrong. In fact, it still seems very unlikely that most of the petroleum we extract came from anything other than dead organisms. However, the editors of the journal not only published the paper, they celebrated it, by putting two of the authors' illustrations on the front cover of this issue. That's because, whether they are ultimately right or not, the authors have produced an important new body of data that should cause everyone to re-examine the existing data and their ideas on the subject.

The truth of the matter is that novel scientific ideas, no matter how far-fetched or anti-orthodox they are, usually get more press than the accepted idea, not less, provided that they are scientific ideas, based in data and supported by analysis. The next time someone tells you that a scientific alternative is being suppressed by scientists, ask to see their data and their analysis. It is very likely that the alternative is not so scientific, after all. Otherwise, it would probably be on the front cover of some journal somewhere.

The Death of Disciplinarity

2010-05-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

New work, funded by the National Science Foundation, provides more evidence that traditional disciplinary boundaries in the sciences have become essentially meaningless.

Robots that have no circuity and no motors
Programs that are written in DNA molecules, not a computer language
Chemical reactions that create engineered structures

Biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering have effectively ceased to exist as separate disciplines. How long will it take our schools and colleges to recognize that and respond? Will it be fast enough?

Flood Forums coming to Easton and Allentown in April

2010-04-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

Many people know about floods on the Delaware River, but did you know floods have resulted in more than $3 million in flood insurance payments in Allentown in the last 35 years?

From our partner, Kate Brandes, at the Nurture Nature Foundation in downtown Easton comes the following announcement:

Nurture Nature Foundation is excited to announce upcoming community forums on flooding in Eastonand Allentown. NNF is developing a science center about flooding. We’re asking people who work and live in Easton and Allentown to share thoughts and concerns about flooding, streams, and rivers in their community. The purpose of the “Flood Forums” is to:

1) Provide feedback from community members to decision makers, and

2) Gather ideas for our developing science center on flooding

Flood forums will be held in Easton on April 18 and April 21. In Allentown, forums will be on April 19 and 20. Please see the flyers for times and locations. All participants will receive $30. You must pre-register for the events.

Please contact Kate Brandes at 610-253-4432 or kbrandes@nurturenature.org if you are interested in participating or if you have questions.

This project is being supported by the National Science Foundation and our project partners include the Museum of Science in Boston, North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, LehighUniversity, and Lafayette College. More project details are available at:http://nurturenaturecenter.org/floodforum/index.html

There's a volcano in my kitchen, again!

2010-03-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, Eyjafjallajökull Volcano in Iceland recently began erupting. There's a satellite image at NASA's Earth Observatory and it's been well-covered in a number of geological blogs, including Eruptions. But the most amazing thing to me is that you can watch it yourself, live, on streaming video with a fast frame rate. Go at night and you can see the glowing lava still fountaining from the vent. Enjoy, but be forewarned. If you are prone to being distracted, this could seriously impair your productivity.

Hooray for Texas (Really!)

2010-03-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

Once again, the Texas State School Board has allowed the ideology of its members to dominate its discussions, leading to the curricular version of a witch hunt. Last week it was revisionist history, last year it was questioning modern science. Denying the work of generations (literally) of scientists, historians, and other thinking people, they have once again revised the standards that govern what gets taught in Texas. Since Texas is so big, it buys a lot of books, and the common wisdom is that as Texas goes, so goes the rest of the country. Major publishers need a major market and even the ones who refuse to be stooges for ideology will dumb down their materials, eliminating potentially controversial ideas, appeasing a radical minority whose ideas have little or no academic credibility. There has been a predictable amount of hand-wringing over this, but I think there might be a silver lining, at least for those of us who don't live in Texas.

I posted a link to Seth Godin's self-described rant on textbooks before. Science textbooks have repeatedly been reviewed by people without a vested interest and found wanting in both accuracy and pedagogy. They reduce complex relationships to simple lists of jargon and definitions, they cannot respond to a student's existing knowledge, and in order to sell well, they are replete with multi-color diagrams that have repeatedly been shown to confuse rather than enlighten students. Finally, in a desperate attempt to produce a book that could meet all of the mind-numbing diversity of standards in our locally-controlled education system, they are all bloated tomes, three or four times the length of comparable grade textbooks in other developed countries. They then become the de facto curriculum with teachers rushing to "cover" every chapter.

These shortcomings of science textbooks have been widely documented for some time and yet it remains an implicit assumption of American schooling that students must have textbooks and so schools continue to invest millions of dollars into a failed system making publishers wealthy, but adding no value to students' education. More enlightened districts still feel they need them, but they "buy them for use as a reference." Why buy a reference you know is inaccurate? Why pay $ for a reference at all? Excellent reference materials, from Wikipedia to the web pages and lectures of leading scientists are all available online for free. Of course, we need to teach students some media literacy to separate authoritative materials from bunk, but we need to teach them that anyway.

Back to Texas. An excellent way to begin to teach information literacy is to teach students to identify and reject sources of information that are tainted by bias. Any textbook rewritten to conform with the new Texas standards surely meets this criterion. This is where Texas may have done science education a huge favor. In the storm of publicity surrounding the effects of the new standards on textbooks, I have begun to see thoughtful science teachers questioning whether they really want their district to buy them new books next year. If Texas can finally wean education from textbooks, then hooray for Texas!

Massive Earthquake Hits Seismic "Gap" in Chile

2010-02-27T06:22:00.000-08:00

Last night a M 8.8 earthquake struck offshore of Chile. Below is the helicorder image for the Da Vinci Science Center's seismometer, as of 9:15 AM EST, 2/27/10.

The live update of this seismometer can be found at http://www.davinci-center.org.

A detailed description of this earthquake can be found at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2010tfan.php

This earthquake happened on the plate boundary between the Nazca plate and the South American plate, where the Nazca plate subducts eastward underneath the South American plate. This is the same plate boundary that gives rise to the volcanoes that form the core of the Andes Mountains. The portion of the plate boundary that slipped in this earthquake was between the portion that slipped in a M 9.5 quake in 1960 (the largest earthquake ever recorded by modern instruments), and the portion of the fault that produced a M 8.5 earthquake in 1922. Both of those earthquakes produced tsunamis that affected Hawaii and other areas of the Pacific rim. For more information of these tsunamis and others, see http://www.tsunami.org/index.html.

Textbooks

2009-06-14T05:36:00.000-07:00

What he said! (just substitute science or math for marketing)

You might want to check out some of Seth Godin's other posts. After all, creating motivation is an everyday part of what marketers do. You might also want to check out his TED talk. What could you do in a classroom with his ideas about tribes and leadership?

Miocene to Recent sediments of the northern Apennines

2009-05-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

The materials we were studying in the Northern Apennines were very young sediments (geologically speaking, at least, where 1 million years is not much time at all). Below is a series of photos and descriptions that attempt to lay out the sequence of these rocks in the way they would be seen in a geologic column, youngest on top.

At the top of the section are the very recent Quaternary terraces, Qt8 and Qt9. These are 50-year old floodplain deposits that have been incised by downcutting related to gravel mining that began shortly after WWII.

Each of the surfaces separating these units in an unconformity (time passed without deposition of sediment). The lower boundary of Qt8 in this picture is an excellent example of an angular unconformity.

Here we see Qt3 on top of Qt2. The top of Qt2 has a deeply weathered "fossil" soil or paleosol. The presence of carbonate nodules in that soil indicate a prolonged period of warm and dry climate. The lower gravel (Qt2) was deposited about 450,000 years ago and the soil developed about 400,000 years ago

Here is Qt2 on top of Qt1. Qt1 is the oldest Quaternary gravel stream terrace in the region. It is moderately tilted everywhere along the mountain front and is characterized by a reddish weathering soil at its top. This soil developed about 630,000 years ago

This is the upper mud in the AEI (Association Emilliano Inferiore - Lower Emillia Association). The AEI consists of alternating lake muds, representing glacial periods, gravels, representing glacial melting, and soils developed on top of the gravels, representing interglacial times. These sediment cycles occur due to 100,000 year cycles in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit. The reddish strata in the background are debris flow gravels that lie on top of this mud.

Here is another mud interval (yellow and grey material at the bottom of the photo), overlain by a thin fluvial gravel and then by debris flows. This is the second of three such cycles in AEI.

Here is a fossil cypress(?) stump at the top of the lowermost AEI mud unit This shows the unit was deposited on land,or in very shallow water

This is the lowest unit in AEI. This mud contains terrestrial fossils and was deposited in a lake on land. The base of this mud is roughly 800,000 years old.

Somewhere in the AEI unit, should be the most recent magnetic reversal in Earth's history. At this time, the magnetic field went from a period of reversed polarity (Matuyama chron) to a period of normal polarity (Brunhes chron). The Brunhes-Matuyama reversal occurred 780,000 years ago.

These interbedded sands and gravels lie at the very top of the Sabbie Gialle.

This unit is approximately 1 million to 800,000 years old

The muds of the Argille Azzure are overlain by medium to thick bedded sands and gravels of the Sabbie D'Imola (Sand of Imola), locally known as the Sabbie Gialle (Yellow Sand)

In the upper part of the Argille Azzure, fossils are abundant. In particular, there are beds of very coarse calcarenite (calcite sands) made of shells and shell fragments. These beds range from 3.1 Ma (million years ago) to 1.8 Ma, corresponding to the Gelasiano and Piacenzian Ages of the middle Pliocene Epoch.

These grey muds of the Argille Azzure show distinct bedding. Much of the Argille Azzure is completely homogeneous mud with no evident bedding. The differences between the bedded and unbedded parts may reflect differences in the depositional environment, in the sediment supply, r in the degree of bioturbation (churning of the sediment by living creatures). The Argille Azzure was deposited between approximately 4.9 and 1 Ma (million years ago).

Cross-bedded sandstones of the upper Miocene Colobacci Formation. This formation is 5.6-5.3 Ma in age. There is an unconformity (time without deposition) between the Colombacci and the overlying Argille Azzure.

Beneath the Colombacci is a very unique rock unit, formed roughy 6 million years ago. These are the Messinian evaporites. This picture shows bedded gypsum that grew out of the evaporating waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Above these rocks lie layers of gysum crystal conglomerates (resedimented gypsum).

Here is a detailed view of the gypsum crystals that make up the Messinian evaporites in this section.

Catching up after Italy

2009-05-15T04:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't get nearly as much blogging done in Italy as I might have hoped. Two big reasons - one is that we spent most of our waking hours as you see on the left, up to our knees in Torrente Stirone.

The other, as you see in the second picture, is that our apartment was a bit remote and had no Internet access of any sort.

So now, I'm back and I'm finally caught up with what was waiting on my desk, so I can get a few updates posted on my time in Italy.

We had a great time. The grad student, whose project this is, Kellen, three faculty working with him, and I all had a chance to work together and we got a lot done. The primary work involved measuring the stratigraphic section and sampling for magnetic intensity and for magnetic reversals. For magnetic intensity, we took bulk samples of the sediment every 0.75 meters or 1 meter of section. Because the rocks were tilted, this corresponded to about 2 to 2.5 meters along the river bank. We needed a way to mark the sample sites and the normal method of using a dot of spray paint was not going to work on these soft and wet muds.

On our very first day, inspiration hit when we stopped for gelato on our way home. The little plastic gelato spoons were brightly colored, had a flat area where we could write a number, and a relatively stiff stem that could be pushed into the mud. Our one Italian speaker asked the proprietor if we could buy some and he responded "This is not a spoon store." We persevered and the next morning, we were able to buy a big bag of gelato spoons from the owner. Here is one of those spoons marking a sample site.

After all the samples had been collected, we removed the spoons. Here's is the first day's take.

When I left Italy, we had collected over 500 of these samples. They will be analyzed for their magnetite content to test the hypothesis that there will be a periodicity to the magnetic intensity that matches the 100,000 year and 400,000 years cycles of eccentricity in Earth's orbit around the sun. These cycles are paralleled by climate cycles, making the magnetic intensity measurements a proxy for climate and allowing the project to evaluate possible links between climate cyclicity and patterns in deformation, if there are any. As this data comes in, I will be working to figure out how students can engage with this data set to understand more about basic concepts in earth science, but first we wait and hope that all those boxes yield something useful.

Coming up next: 6 million years of mountain building and climate, recorded in sediments.

2009-05-08T10:52:00.001-07:00

Little Boxes on the Hillside... (or at least on the riverbank

The free Internet at the local library won't talk to Blogger, so it's time for a cell phone update. We have been busy collecting samples of mud for the magnetic study. Every two meters along the bank, we stuff a 2 cm plastic cube with sediment, mostly mud. The boxes have been pre-weighed and numbered, so we have to keep track of which is which and where they get filled. Today, we collected oriented samples to look for magnetic reversals. In order to preserve the orientation while getting it into the box, we had to carve little pedestals of mud and slip the boxes over them, then measure the orientation of the box before cutting the box off of the outcrop, trimming off the excess, and putting on the lid. 9 boxes took 6 hours.

Tomorrow is a field trip then one more day in the river before heading home.

2009-05-04T10:02:00.001-07:00

Day 3 in the field: we have measured and sampled more than 60 meters of sand and mud, sampling every .75 m. The rocks are Miocene and Pliocene and are barely lithified. They look like rocks, but you sink in to your ankles when you step in a wet spot. We've also seen a whole set of Quaternary gravel terraces, some of which are tilted by deformation.

More details on Thursday!

Getting ready for Italy

2009-04-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

Right now, the geology on my mind is the geology of the northern flank of the Apennine Mountains in Italy. From April 30 to May 12, I will be joining a team of structural geologists, tectonicists, sedimentologists, and paleomagnetists to study Plio-Pleistocene sedimentation along the north flank of the tectonically-active Apennine Mountains, in and around the spa town of Salsomaggiore Terme (salty thermal springs). The project is evaluating possible links among tectonics, sedimentation, and climate in the development of mountain belts. I hope to blog from the field, although I may be limited by how often I have access to the Internet.

A lot of what we will be doing is detailed sampling of Plio-Pleistocene sediments in river banks, collecting mud that is just barely lithified, for paleomagnetic analysis to establish a detailed mangento-stratigraphy. Once a chronology can be established, then depositional rates can be determined and compared to the tectonic and climatic history of the area. It's a different kind of field work from anything I have ever done before and I am really looking forward to it.

My role, beyond providing labor in the field, is to use the work of the project to create classroom materials for earth science teachers. I will be looking for ways in which the data sets we generate can drive useful inquiry by students at a variety of levels. I hope to create materials that are specifically connected to existing inquiry-based earth science curricula (EarthComm and Investigating Earth Systems), but will be useful to teachers of any curriculum. If you have any comments about what would make such materials most useful, please share them.

There's a volcano in my kitchen (or classroom, or...)

2009-04-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

There's a volcano in my kitchen almost every night. That's where I sit to use my laptop.

I have been tracking Redoubt volcano in Alaska for the past several months. The Alaska Volcano Observatory as been using a Twitter feed (@avo_alaska) and their web site to share information on the increasing activity, and then eruption, of the volcano. Of course, there is news coverage anytime a volcano erupts near a populated area, but this one is different because of both the amount of information available and the ease with which it can be acquired. The picture at right is from the Hut webcam, one of three regularly updated images of the volcano available at the AVO website. The combination of the Twitter feed and webcam feeds provide an almost real-time stream of information, both text and images, from the volcano and have made it possible to have a much more personal experience of this eruption than for previous eruptions, accessible only through the media's coverage. In addition, the technology available is improving very rapidly.

Recently, AVO installed a new webcam at their Hut site - this cam is now zoomed in on the crater, showing the lava dome you can see in the image above. The camera's resolution is high enough to see the geometry of cracks in the surface of the growing lava dome and sensitive enough to detect incandescence in the dome at night. That's amazing! I can probably see more detail at my kitchen counter than I could if I were standing at the Hut station myself, unless I had a zoom lens or binoculars with me there.

I've taken courses on volcanology in graduate school and read professional papers on volcanoes, but I have still learned a tremendous amount about the evolution of a lava dome and especially about the time scales of activity from this day-by-day experience. I've also learned a bunch about related topics, such as the weather in southern Alaska (it's cloudy more than it's clear at Redoubt this time of year and there are frequent snowfalls).

Now consider the image below:

This is the image that most students get of this type of volcano. This one is from a USGS
online book about volcanoes, but there is little difference between this image and most earth science textbooks. There are things in this image that cannot be seen in the picture that led off this post, so it is important to have students see this sort of image. The trouble is that there is nothing about this image that grabs you. There is no immediacy and no reality. It is clearly a cartoon.

The active photo, especially when it changes from minute to minute, hour to hour, and day to day, has an immediacy and reality that this does not. It also has detail that this does not. The real-life picture shows the gasses being vented and even a thin gray smear of ash coming off the middle of the dome in front of all that condensed steam. It clearly shows that there are no lava flows associated with this event, but that there is a debris apron around the dome and also that there is an impact on hydrology (water in the stream draining from below the dome.) None of this is in the textbook picture. The real world picture is much more complex than the pre-digested textbook picture. That means it is harder to interpret, but it also makes it a much richer springboard for inquiry.

Dan Meyer has inspired me with his "What can you do with this?" sequence on the use of real-life images and video to teach mathematics. It also ties into a question I learned from a talk by Don Duggan-Haas at GSA - "Why does this place look this way?" I would love to see more science teachers using this kind of real world data to promote student engagement and student inquiry. So let me pose that question to you readers - what can you do with the image at the top of this page? Also, do you have images that you think are good prompts for open-ended exploration, measurement, or other forms of inquiry? Please share in the comments.

PS: Here's another AVO image: http://www.avo.alaska.edu/image.php?id=18224 This one has a scale in it and shows the prominent waterfall in the gorge below the dome (altough the scale only roughly applies to the dome, due to the horizontal separtion of the dome from the falls). Interestingly, that "little" waterfall is roughly twice the height of Niagara Falls!

Wildflysch?

2009-04-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

Even though my favorite geoblog name was already taken (Highly Allochthonous), I have decided it is time to join the geoblogosphere. Wildflysch was the next most appropriate name I could come up with.

Wildflysch is a term coined by Franz Josef Kaufmann, a Swiss geologist, in 1871 to describe rocks with a strong and often folded foliation in a slate or schist matrix surrounding blocks of varying size and rock type. The term is used mostly in European geology and has been largely supplanted by the concept of a melange, recognized as a tectonic assemblage rather than a stratigraphic unit. These chaotic assemblages are generally thought to form in subduction zones, but have also been interpreted as the result of gravity-driven slumping.

The idea of chaotic assemblage under high pressures seemed like it might be an apt analogy for the way this blg is likely to come together, given the other commitments I have. This blog will also likely end up containing a mix of "blocks" on varied topics in geology and earth science education, extending, or perhaps straining, the anlaogy. As often as not, it will contain musings about questions rather than answers, but that is the nature of science and scientists.

I feel profoundly lucky that I have been able to make my love of the natural world and my love of teaching into work that I deeply enjoy and am passionate about. I look forward to sharing some of that with whoever happens by and finds this and I look forward to hearing your comments in response, whether you are pleased, provoked, or foliated.