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Anne Jefferson over at  Highly Allochthonous has organized a writing challenge.  The idea is just to state your goals for manuscript writing either on your own blog or in the comments on the above link. Every Sunday you post a new update sharing what you've accomplished in the past week to move your manuscript/project forward. Anne's idea: Here’s the plan.  Use the comments below to tell me what you want to accomplish in the next 5 weeks. Each Sunday evening, I’ll stick up a post summarizing what I’ve accomplished during the past week, and what I need to get done in the next week order to reach my goal. You can do the same in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, please!) During the week, we can use whatever means we please, such as reviving Brian Roman’s old #sciwrite tag on Twitter, to keep in touch, provide encoruagement, and brag about our progress. By December 4th, we will have reached our goals and we can go out for a virtual or real ce...

EDIT: There was an error with the lineno package call in this template, it has been fixed. I wrote a guest post for HackCollege about why students (or anyone, profs, ect.) should switch to using LaTeX to write documents. I'd like to include in this post my go-to template for almost every document I write (including my undergrad thesis). It's adapted from a template my undergrad thesis adviser, Christie Rowe, used, with a couple extra bells and whistles. It's primarily set up for writing science papers, but will work great for any research paper. It's set up to use bibtex citations.  Click this link to download the template. Install it wherever your LaTeX software requires. For TeXworks, install it to the specified user directory when you first opened TeXworks. Now that I'm thinking about LaTeX, the hardest, most frustrating part for me was getting tables to work nicely. It's a pain in the ass, especially if you're trying it for the first time. Coming soon i...

The blog En Tequila es Verdad posted an interesting article about teaching geoscience religious students.  Ron Schott noted that taking a slow approach, introducing the scientific method, evidence, and how science is made, encourages them to critically think about the evidence and engage in the class. It's a great article, go check it out. This article reminded me of a time in the 4th grade. Our class was learning about dinosaurs. I was talking with a friend about how dinosaurs were millions of years old. He replied with "but the Earth is only 6,000 years old." I can't remember exactly what my response was, but I do remember giving him a quizzical look. Being in elementary school, we weren't given a proof of how we know the age of the Earth. I accepted it on faith that the teacher was telling the truth, and probably on the fact that dinosaurs and rocks are really old and really COOL (thanks, Dad and ,uhh, probably Bill Nye, too). Hmm, now that I think about it, I...

Figure 1: Fossil Hunting on Bell Island, Conception Bay, Newfoundland. The most memorable stop (for me) on a recent McGill grad student trip that took us around the whole of Newfoundland was Bell Island, in Conception Bay. The discovery of iron ore in the late 1800s led to the an industry boom on the island that lasted until 1966 (Bell Island Mining History). We were fortunate enough to tour the Number 2 Mine (now a museum) and learn about the island's history and geology. The thing that stuck with me the most was that the story of Bell Island's mining history was one of pride and more or less, a happy story. This seemed unusual as most stories about mines in the news seem to usually involve accidents, death, or oppression of the mine workers. Our tour guide's father, grandfather, and great grandfather all worked in the mine. Her tour was filled with pride and a conveyed the bravery of the miners. Figure 2:  Photo courtesy of VirtualMuseum.ca The iron ore is found in...

Figure 1: Dinosaur My parents recently flew out to Montreal from California for their anniversary and to visit me. I was tasked with filling their days here with adventure and well, things to do. One afternoon they came and visited me on campus. My adviser and office mates had suggested I take them to McGill's Redpath Museum. I was quite surprised by the quality and scope of the exhibits there. Figure 2: The old interior The Redpath Museum was completed in 1882, making it the oldest museum building in Montreal. The museum originally housed the collection the Canadian natural scientist Sir William Dawson. The original intention was for the collections to be used by professors and students at McGill University. The museum's mission has since been broadened and is now a natural history museum open to the public. The mineral collection housed at the museum is fantastic. It consists of over 20,000 specimens. The collection has been built up over the years with samples from around t...