tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-183213802024-03-07T20:13:26.820-06:00Research at a snail's paceIf you aren't moving at a snail's pace, you aren't moving at all. -Iris MurdochMatt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.comBlogger618125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-5507857293810734612014-05-27T22:22:00.001-05:002014-05-27T22:22:17.216-05:00A slight change in direction - Moving the BlogIt's been quite the academic year. The spring semester is now finished and final grades are just about finished. Summer research is gearing up and I've got a backlog of ideas to share via blogging and science videos. Therein lies the challenge: I started this blog primarily to talk about my PhD research - a topic that is near and dear to my heart, but not something I spend most of my time on Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-39029240080300686612014-04-02T09:43:00.000-05:002014-04-02T09:43:02.976-05:00Advice for studentsAdvisement day is today. We've got plenty of advice for students. But a big goal for me is to cultivate a sense of ownership and urgency in our students. I want the students to drag us in to fabulous projects and opportunities, rather than waiting to be served.
Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-69294517531661285302014-03-30T12:49:00.002-05:002014-03-30T12:49:51.493-05:00Photographing the night skyI've been dabbling in astrophotography lately. I'm building a "barn-door" mount and also fitting a worm-drive motor to an old equatorial telescope mount. Some follow-up build info and explanations are in progress…
The Andromeda Galaxy and an airplane (300mm f/2.8)
Betelgeuse (300mm, f/2.8)
Jupiter, for moons and a star (300mm, f/2.8)
Orion (17mm, f/4.0)
Orion Nebula (420mm, f/Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-50689541505246639452014-03-13T10:11:00.000-05:002014-03-13T10:11:50.847-05:00OBEYThe Egyptians worshipped us as gods. Future archeologists will look at your Facebook timeline and reach the same conclusion about you. Now, feed me.
Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-62441287132759163892014-03-08T09:44:00.001-06:002014-03-08T09:44:47.680-06:00The Pentax WG-3: Point-and-Shoot Field Camera RecommendationMy biggest problem with photography during field work is the issue of water and dust. Neither of which are really good for expensive cameras. So I usually have to separate my time into "digging in the dirt" time and "taking pictures" time. Not a big problem, but also not terribly convenient.
My wife and I went down to Belize over winter break and I was looking for a camera to take snorkeling. Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-11670537966244275882014-02-21T12:02:00.001-06:002014-02-21T12:02:23.485-06:00Buckminster-Fuller inspires a new classroom demo
One of the challenges in teaching Plate Tectonics to introductory students is that - along with being spread out over a huge scale - most of the maps we use are flat, whereas the plates are actually distributed across a sphere (oblate spheroid, technically).
With most map projections, the polar regions are heavily distorted and much larger in comparison to equatorial regions. So, for instanceMatt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-74778715022441259022014-02-20T19:28:00.000-06:002014-02-20T19:29:25.821-06:00So. Much. Snow.It's been a cold winter up here. And we're in the middle of a pretty impressive snowstorm, too.
I suspect we're going to lose a few branches in the back woods. Which will be good for improving the litter conditions of the woodland floor.Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-75087218880596287742014-02-07T13:01:00.001-06:002014-02-07T13:01:15.380-06:00Dispatches from the Dirt Lab, 3rd Edition
It's been cold around here. Very cold. Cold enough that boiling hot water seems to instantly vanish into clouds of steam when thrown into the air. So I did. Just to be clear - do not throw large volumes of boiling water directly into the air over your head. The risk of scalding is real. I used heavy welding gloves to protect my hands and used a squirt bottle to turn the water into small Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-10599676544654205332014-02-06T20:48:00.000-06:002014-02-06T20:49:16.499-06:00A Get Well TARDIS for Caitlin
Get well cards are cool.
Our friends Michael and Lynn Thomas have a wonderful daughter. Caitlin had surgery recently and it's been a long challenging week for all of them (nine days, actually). I had been kicking around the idea of a get well card that also served as some geek sculpture/puzzle to send to them. It's a chance for me to try crafting something new and it'll give Lynne and MichaelMatt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-3432740910855704072014-01-14T14:39:00.006-06:002014-01-14T14:39:51.980-06:00Back from VacationMy wife and I went on vacation last week and I'll be sharing pictures and stories soon. To give you a hint as to where we went and what we were up to:
Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-60125985760874654132013-12-31T14:34:00.003-06:002013-12-31T14:34:30.015-06:002013 In Review: GSA in DenverOkay, last up for the year in review (I'm not going through spring/summer things, because vacation).
In late October I journeyed out to Denver for the annual Geological Society of America meeting. This year I had some special projects planned. First, I brought along my Kinect scanner - and Steve Gough of Little River Research and Design was kind enough to let me set it up on one of their stream Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-28963561806765075542013-12-30T10:55:00.001-06:002013-12-30T11:16:24.061-06:002013 In Review: TED EdAnother great thing this year was getting to go to New Orleans and talk to a bunch of Middle and High School students about science. I gave a 6 minute talk about "sand" and got to talk with a bunch of motivated students.
There's something special about those three red letters and the little orange mic that makes a person feel like they're giving a "real" talk.
Obligatory selfie during Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-64196534213861790152013-12-22T14:16:00.000-06:002013-12-22T14:16:22.147-06:002013 In Review: MythbustingAs the calendric transition into 2014 draws nigh, many of us go through some of the highlights (or lowlights) from the past year. This year brought with it some absolutely wonderful things.
First on my list is the "Behind the Myths" stage show that my wife and I went to a few weeks ago. This was the second tour they did for this show and it finally rolled into a theater near me. In this case Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-79565855792493425142013-12-20T11:09:00.001-06:002013-12-20T11:12:04.896-06:00Happy Holidays!For the last couple years, I've taken time during finals week (once the exams were graded) to shoot some holiday-themed slow motion video. I had found some clear glass christmas tree ornaments that seemed perfect for smashing. I rigged up a simple "Newtons Cradle" and experimented with just getting them to swing back and forth. The conservation of momentum in these collisions is pretty complex, Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-40366035569426626532013-12-16T15:55:00.001-06:002013-12-16T15:59:05.642-06:00Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain - Part 6If you've missed the other bits, be sure to check the rest of the series:
Part 1: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain.html
Part 2: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_16.html
Part 3: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_9632.html
Part 4: http://Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-19092176949983183882013-12-16T13:55:00.002-06:002013-12-16T15:58:27.184-06:00Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 5 - Iron and TectonicsOkay, the story so far: we've got this "paleo-continent" of Rhovanion with features like the Lonely Mountain and the Iron Hills. Looking at the formation of gold deposits, the most common places on earth include late-stage igneous melts and hydrothermal systems. Something more easily found deep in the bowels of a volcanic system rather than at the surface. Let's take a few moments to look at the Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-68905440283410260742013-12-16T10:38:00.000-06:002013-12-16T15:57:48.627-06:00Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 4 - GOLD!Gold. It's at the heart of nearly every Fantasy trope. It's what any reasonably complex fantasy economy is based on. Aside from the fact that the amount of gold portrayed in "The Desolation of Smaug*" might represent more gold than has ever been mined on Earth, gold is the great shiny, malleable, dense MacGuffin of fantasy.
So where does gold come from? Without going into stellar nucleosynthesisMatt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-38667802272867368632013-12-16T09:30:00.000-06:002013-12-16T15:57:18.669-06:00Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 3When we left, we had established the possible tectonic system responsible for the two large mountain ranges related to events in The Hobbit. The Misty Mountains to the West, and the Ered Mithrin to the North. Side note: Ered Mithrin means "Grey Mountains," and Gandalf was called "Mithrander" or "Grey Pilgrim" by the elves… Any guesses as to what "Mithril" means? Tolkien was an Oxford Professor ofMatt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-61892192214799891922013-12-16T08:53:00.000-06:002013-12-16T15:57:03.606-06:00Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 2I hope you've had a chance to look at a map of Middle Earth. There is a lot going on - the landscape was formed by the need of Tolkien's narrative. Tolkien was a linguist, not a geologist. But he based his descriptions on the places he knew. So his landscape draws on the same geologic history that formed our own world.
In the map above, we see three main features. On the western edge of the Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-62535684661120191812013-12-16T08:00:00.000-06:002013-12-16T15:56:46.012-06:00Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 1Like many of you, I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug last weekend. Like many of you, I've read "The Hobbit" several times (and had it read to me many times before that). But how many of you have wondered what kind of mountain the Lonely Mountain really was?
Tolkein's description and drawings of the lonely mountain bring to mind an inactive volcano. With its narrow peak and symmetrical Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-33354009269533612132013-12-13T19:17:00.002-06:002013-12-13T19:23:49.346-06:00If it ain't Scottish, it's crap!*Our cats like my wife's lap. It would appear that they are either not bound by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, or Pippin has a different integer spin than Birke.
*Title of this post comes from my high school physics class where my friends and I decided that phrase as an alternate explanation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. And yes, Wolfgang Pauli was Austrian, but SNL was one of our primary Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-31657276302245278132013-11-30T13:11:00.001-06:002013-11-30T13:11:45.900-06:00You see some pretty strange things sometimesEvery now and then I get a bit of a creative "itch" that needs scratching. I was strolling through the hardware store last month and they had plastic lawn flamingos on sale. I already had some other items like black and glow-in-the-dark spray paint, and a few plastic skulls. The nucleus of a project began to form in my head.
Together with my pal Kelly, we just installed them and are Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-16592404232363433922013-11-29T10:19:00.001-06:002013-11-29T10:19:22.545-06:00Cool, there are some photos of me at TED YouthThere are some pretty awesome pictures of me giving my talk about sand to the kids attending TED Youth in New Orleans a few weeks ago. I'm hoping a separate video of my talk will go up in a few weeks.
I hope all of you in the US had a grand Turkey day yesterday. I'm thankful for the opportunities to share how amazing the world is through this blog.Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-83689693769323087322013-11-20T09:55:00.003-06:002013-11-20T09:55:51.013-06:00Some dancing water droplet slo-moInertia. I has it. You has it. A drop of water has it. If, say the floor were to suddenly drop out from under you, it would take time for you to start falling downward. Once the floor disappeared, the force of gravity would start accelerating you, but you would start moving slowly, then continue to move faster. Inertia is the tendency of an object to keep doing what they were doing (motion, rest,Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18321380.post-47296305362532660272013-11-19T08:46:00.002-06:002013-11-19T08:46:52.245-06:00TED Youth 2013: Talk Archive
If you're interested in seeing what I had to say - or what any of the other speakers talked about, go on over to the TED Youth streaming video page. My talk is at about 48:07 of Session 1. But there are enough awesome talks that it might be cool to let them just play through.Matt Kuchtahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18168846490598155683noreply@blogger.com0