Fingel.com: Served From a Patch of Dirt in SOMA.
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This website’s server is located on what appears to be a dirt lot in San Francisco’s south of Market Neighborhood according to Geotool. I always knew Laughing Squid had secret undreground headquarters.
Thoughts After One Year at Southern Oregon Univeristy
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So here I am, sitting at this desk that I’ve written so many posts from before. Scattered around me are miscellaneous notes and papers crying for attention, “Study me!” says my Geology Final review sheet, “Fill me out so you don’t get a $50 fee!” says my end of the year dorm checkout packet. Its the end of my freshman year at Southern Oregon University. Some of the time has been great, some bad. Here are my thoughts for anyone interested in the school:
The Good
First of all, lets talk about the size of the school. Its small, really small, for a university. There are only about 5,000 students in all. Now I never quite understood why this turned people off, but I think its great. The average class size is only about 20 people. When you combine that with the fact that 90% of all the professors have a PhD in their field you get some really good personal education. The classes here are absolutely top notch, every day I go to sleep feeling like I’ve learned a lot. Professors are also very acessible. Because there aren’t too many studnets office hours aren’t very cramped, and its usually possible to see a professor for help without an appointment.
Many of the professors also run extra curricular clubs after class. This can be really beneficial to students interested in the subjects they are studying.
If you like the outdoors you will like Ashland. SOU lies under the shadow of Mt. Ashland, which has skiing in the winter and top notch mountain biking during the summer. The Rogue and Klamath rivers are just as stone’s throw away as well abundant hiking trails in pretty much any direction. Make sure to pack your boots.
The Bad
Dorm life. I know this can be a matter of opinion but living in the dorms is a nightmare and there is no way it should be “required” for incoming freshman. You pay nearly $800 a month to be put in a little 15x20 room with another person. I could practically tell what my roommate had for dinner every night just from the smell of his breath even though he was on the opposite side of the room. In the summer there is no air conditioning, during the winter we had our heater up 100% for 3 months straight and it never got warm. Its loud, there is no privacy, it smells and the bathrooms are absolutely horrid. On top of that you get a bunch of drunk idiots wandering around all the time thinking they are your friends just because you were unfortunate enough to be stuck in the same hall as them. Now I can only speak for myself, but I don’t enjoy being treated like a child. There are special “campus public safety” officers wandering the halls all the time trying to keep an eye on you making sure you aren’t doing anything naughty. No, dorms were not for me.
SOU also comes across as a little money grubbing at times. This is understandable considering the economic state of schools in Oregon but it has to be mentioned anyway. Lately the school has been renting out the F&G classroom, which is basically the main entrance to the Forest Hall where I live, and us students often have to go around. How would they like it if we held a party in their living room and made them go around? Often us students feel like second class citizens to anyone else using the school even though we pay the most to be here. Also, there are fines for everything here, but I think that comes with the territory of running a profitable institution.
The Ugly
The Cascade Food Court where freshmen can spend their meal points which come as part of the dorm package. This place has literally made people sick, and its made me skinny. We are talking bottom of the barrel low quality generic Sysco food that is left in steaming buckets for way too long. The food has often times been known to be inedible, and sometimes students say that they would prefer just to skip a meal or two than to dine in cascade. I would encourage dropping the meal points and learning how to cook.
Conclusion
I think SOU is a great school and I will be returning next year. Although it does have its share of bad parts, I believe most of them are associated with being a freshman. Next year should be great for a number of reasons, mainly because I wont be living in the dorms any longer and I can take some of the higher level classes I have been waiting for. Have a good summer all!
Vince Neil - You Betta Fight For Your Rights Now!
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I made my first YTMND site today, you can find it here:
http://vinceneil.ytmnd.com/
Doughnut, Ice Tea and Some Live Typhoid Bacteria.
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention my next travel destination Nicaragua can be a pretty germy place. Along with a few other immunizations, I was prescribed an oral vaccine for Typhoid Fever sold under the name Vivotif Berna. It was not easy to get a hold of. When I went to my doctor in hopes
to get a prescription, she insisted that she had never heard of it and hinted that I must be mistaken in it’s existence. I sat in the doctor’s office for nearly 45 minutes while she made phone calls but eventually she did return with a prescription paper in hand. “You learn something new every day” She told me.
I headed over to Bi Mart to get the prescription filled. They told me it would take only 15 minutes, but ended up taking over an hour. The pharmacist finally called me to the desk and not only did he have the pills but also a huge book with tiny print. “So lets see what we have here” he said as he squinted at the page. “The pills must be refrigerated at all time. You are to take one every other day with cold water 1 hour before a meal. Make sure you don’t chew or break the pills.” I’d never heard instructions like these before. “Those pills are alive, huh?” I asked. “I suppose they are. So go home and stick them in the fridge. Have a nice trip.”
The fact that it was 100 degrees outside and I had to walk 2 miles to get back to my room worried me a little. I didn’t want the lil’ buggers to wake up but I’ve already taken 1 and I feel fine so far. However, If I don’t post for a few days, assume the worst.
Comment Response: Ocean Fossils at Siskiyou Summit? Say What?
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Guy DiTorrice commented on my previous post Southern Oregon Universtity Geology 103 Field Trip:
Interesting to note that some of Oregon’s oldest fossils are found at one of the state’s highest elevations — south of Ashland near Siskiyou Summit! And, that most of the fossils found at the I-5 exposures are from an ocean environment. How did that happen???
It may seem a little strange that oceanic fossils are found so far inland from the ocean. In fact, the last thing you expect to find while going for a walk on Mt. Ashland is a bunch of clam shells. However, there is a reasonable explanation…
The concept of geologic time may be hard for some people to grasp. Our perspective of time is squeezed into minutes, days and years. By contrast, geologic time is based on thousands, millions and even billions of years. If you were able to count one number every second of your living life, you would have to live 147 years just to count to 4.6 billion, the approximate age of the earth.
Its important to realize that in such a huge amount of time, the earth didn’t always look the way it does today. Most people are probably familiar with the super continent Pangea that existed ~250 million years ago. well it turns out that Pangea was only one of many super continents that have existed in Earth’s history. The earth’s tectonic plates are in a constant state of motion, thus the earth is constantly changing.
So it would make sense that what was a beach a long time ago can now be miles from the ocean. Some of the most interesting places to find marine fossils are in Montana, in the middle of the USA! In the case of
fossils found near I-5 in Oregon, we can get a little more specific. The Hornbrook Formation where we found the fossils were not originally part of the North American Plate but instead formed as an island arc chain on the Pacific Plate. As subduction occurred on the boundary of the two plates, the Hornbrook formation slowly moved towards the coast of Oregon where it eventually collided with the North American plate and became a part of it. This process is called accretion.
Think of the earth as a giant pot of soup. If you don’t stir soup, stuff starts to collect on top. The longer you leave it, the more other parts of the soup attach the the conglomerate in the middle. That “stuff” is like continental crust. In fact, Oregon’s coast is made up of many different accreted materials.
If The Hornbrook Formation was once an island chain, you would expect to find marine fossils contained within it. There are several other ways that fossils may come to exit far from the present day ocean. In the past sea levels may have been higher then they are now, allowing inundation of the coast and creating beaches farther inland. Valleys could become shallow sea ways, where you would also expect to find marine fossils.
Always keep your eyes open for fossils, you might find them where you would least expect.
The Incredible Adventure of SOURC at Botfest '08
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As I sit here in the car, it seems as if I have been on this trip for days, although it has sparsely been 34 hours. I’m looking out the window at a hilly green expanse dotted with cows, old farm houses and strip malls. Ahh, the I-5 corridor south of Portland. Quite a contrast to the giant skyscrapers and twitching robots that have been the focus of my attention up to 3 hours previously. I am returning from the Southern Oregon robotics club’s trip to Portland for BotFest ‘08, and what a trip it has been.
I met my fellow roboticists in SOU’s physics classroom on Friday, which was yesterday, with a bag of clothes in my hand and my computer on my back. The triple digit temperatures outside promised an extremely uncomfortable trip, possibly dangerous to my sanity, but I didn’t care. I was on my way to my
first robotics competition after all, and I had been looking forward to the trip all week. I was pumped and ready to go. The 5 of us who arrived on time waited in the classroom for half an hour for stragglers, and then we were off.
I tried to enjoy the 5 hour car ride even after listening to the System of a Down cd for the 5th time in a row. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits, despite our sweaty backs and tortured burger king filled digestive tracts. The burning freeway air trapped us at mercy of our Kia Sedona’s climate control system, fastened permanently between boiling and freezing. To be fair, there was a temperature dial on the thing, but we couldent figure out how to use it for hours, and once we did, nobody seemed to remember it was there. Fanally, the horrible funny-because-they-arent –funny jokes and painfully nerdy converstation, came to a close once we pulled up to the Dunes Motel, our home away from home for the night.
AGGH! The wireless internet didn’t work. You could practically hear the nerds wail in despaired unison down the dark motel hall. Maybe it was a good thing, because we had to wake up early the next day and it was already 1am.
We woke up in the morning and met at the van, all of us except for one. The missing roboticist was instead rushed away by two wailing ambulances because of low blood sugar. He was released four hours later. Not the morning we had imagined, but still a promising morning nonetheless.
Finally, to even our own disbelief, we made it to BotFest ‘08 at the Children’s Museum in Portland. The floor
was packed full of 15 year old kids rushing around our ankles. Robots butted heads in the sumo competitions, became hopelessly lost in the mazes. One humanoid bot tried to start a conversation with me as I walked by. A flock of agitated Pleos cried out for attention in one corner of the madness. Pockets of men conversed around the floor furiously taking notes about each other’s machines. “Transistor”, “Microcontroller” and “C plus plus” could be heard over the noise of servos and and screaming.
Finally, we felt as if we were home. The first event that we entered was the medium sized sumo bots. Silver dragon did alright by beating the robot that was beat by everyone. After that, it was all downhill. Bluedragon never even had a chance, he was swept off the rink like dust. SOURC did fare slightly better in the line following challenge, Twitch was one of 3 robots that actually finished the course. One 3rd place ribbon for us.
After the competition was over came the robot talent show. There were only two entries, an impressive balance bot that was able to stay upright on two wheels like a segway, and a very large remote controlled arm on four wheels that played robot basketball. The judge gave both entries second place because they were so different, though I thought the balance bot should have gotten first because it was a true autonomous robot, and the big arm was RC.
After a few hours of mingling, we decided to get pizza and then go home. And that is where I am now. It is pretty much the same drive that we had on the way up, minus the System of the Down. There was enough moaning in the back seat that the DJ decided against it. I’m dirty, smelly and sweaty, and I’ve been doing far too much sitting down. A nice shower and clean clothes sounds better than root access right now!
All in all a great trip, we learned what we have to do to kick butt next time and we are all inspired to make it happen.
I cant wait to kick some 12 year old ass. I don’t care how old they are I will have no pity – Carl
Southern Oregon Universtity Geology 103 Field Trip
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On Wednesday Dr. Elliot’s geology 103 class went for a field trip. The main focus was on gathering fossil specimens from various locations. The fossils were all found in the Hornbrook formation, contained within Osberger Gulch Sandstone. The rocks were formed during the Cretaceous, which gives them and the fossils an age of approximately 95,000,000 years.
The interpretation is that the sediments were deposited from a beach or shallow marine environment. The abundance of the shells and the broken state of them suggests a high energy environment, so waves must have been present. By far the most common fossils (and original hard parts) were clams and mussels, but gastropods were also present. One lucky student even found a shrimp.
Dr. Elliot and 2 other students climbing a tilted bed of sandstone on the side of Interstate 5, just south of Ashland.
A nice collection taken inches away from a fault that dampened and softened the surrounding sandstone making it easier to collect
Identifying Fossils
One of the many local scorpions we found. We didn’t kill it in hopes that it would die in a depositional environment somewhere and make a nice fossil.
Trying to remove a fossil from the sandstone.
Relic of time.
Southern Oregon Nightlife in a Nutshell
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Robots That Will Own You
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We all know that its not a question of if we will be replaced by robots, but when. After looking at a few of these machines, the day may be closer than anyone thought.
Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog
From Boston Dynamic’s web site: “BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.”
This thing is as creepy as it is cool. It seems unreal that a machine could exist that appears so lifelike. The only way to really see how impressive it is would be to watch the video. It recovers after being kicked, slips on ice but never falls over, and walks over a pile of bricks. The amount of work put into this dog must be staggering. Check it out:
Robotic Exosuit
The Crusher
Another one of DARPA's research projects. The "Crusher" is one helluva vehicle that can handle a wide variety of terrain. The machine can be remote controlled or drive itself autonomously. the thing already has a machine gun mounted on top - it will have obvious uses for the military.
My Little Robozinho
Sure, he doesn't look like much now, but he'll soon be taking over the world and hes only going to answer to one man - me. Start sending in checks for protection now and you will be spared.
Amazing Guitar
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Just wanted to share with you the awesomeness of this video. The duo is called Rodrigo Y Gabriela and they are from Mexico.