You Rock!
“It’s called Fossil Falls because…”
Rocking Out
On the geology menu course (Ge 1) 3-day field trip, I had a ton of fun and big thanks to Prof. Asimow for continuing to teach the class.
I’ve never been out to this part of the country, but rural California is actually just the wild west. All the buildings have that kind of saloon-look where the font is very bold and has a serif, and the roof is flat but there is a vertical rectangle right on top of the main side.
Looking at some town before Mojave, I felt kind of like I was in Breaking Bad because there was just this area off the road where there was a trailer in the middle of nowhere.
Rock Licker
One of the places we went to was Panum Crater 🕳, which is the youngest mountain in NA at 640 1. The obsidian is so high-quality that it was traded by the Native Americans all the way east to Missouri.
Here, some of the rocks were very porous, so we started lifting the rocks as a joke, saying that iff someone could lift a large rock, then they were a good guy.
Truly back to the stone age, but I think that it’s good to connect with nature. That’s why I licked a large piece of rhyolite. It had no flavor, not even salty. So, I guess it will not be my new strange addiction2.
Podium of the Past
The main attraction was Podium Rock, a big piece of layered obsidian and airy rhyolite.
Professor (Asimow) at the Podium (Rock)!
I know you’re looking at that cave…
But, we also found a kind of deep cave that we could have spelunked into, but the top seemed kind of sketchy because it was only held up by a little bit. Any disturbance and we could probably get trapped in there.
Mysterious cave… who knows what could be in there.
I started joking that there was a body down there and the prof said he had never seen that cave before 🤔.
At dinner, the prof sat at our table and I said that we need to get diamond armor tonight if we are gonna fight the Ender Dragon tomorrow and he just started giggling and it was just so funny to me because he knew about Minecraft probably from his kids playing it.
Foam Eater
At Mono Lake, which has these large tufa pillars made of limestone coming out of the water, the water was very slippery because it’s so alkaline and there was some foam on the shore, so I picked up some of the foam 🌊 and threw it around.
The interesting thing about the lake is that the tufa used to be underwater until LA decided to divert its feeder streams to the city. Environmental activists stopped that with a lawsuit which said that it was illegal to take water away from a navigable waterway.
Even then, the city’s lawyers tried to say that the feeder streams are not navigable, so they can take water from them, but the courts used the definition of feeder stream to just say that water cannot be taken from the streams going into the navigable waterway.
If and when the water comes back up, the tufa will be knocked down and new ones will grow underwater.
Getting Wild
At the basecamp run by Sarah, a cook who lives nearby, I asked if she has any instruments, and she said that she could bring her guitar for me.
How convenient that it was exactly what I wanted! So, I played some guitar on the second night. Sunset was super beautiful if you don’t think about all the bugs there were.
Day 1 Sunset
Anyway, I got bit a few times by mosquitoes because I couldn’t move while I was playing. J and E from the band joined me for a bit of karaoke, which was a pretty good memory.
Uncommon Sense
It turns out that a wasp got inside the room while I was outside, and no one could kill it or get it outside, so they just sprayed the ceiling with bug spray, which was kind of questionable because I remember getting very sick one time when I slept in a room where bug spray was used the previous day.
Nothing bad happened the following morning, but I hope there’s no long term effects. I also huffed some of the fumes coming from the mop fluid while I was cleaning the floor, so I hope nothing happens there either 🥴.
Another Patterson
We learned about radioactive dating (Ooh-la-la~) of rocks and how Clair Patterson developed a method to find the age of the Earth by comparing uranium and lead ratios.
He needed a very clean room to prevent lead from getting into samples, and was basically the main reason why Americans are not breathing lead from the gas in their cars.
It’s kind of crazy how a geological scientific endeavor ended up helping so many people!
Fossil Falls
At Fossil Falls, which got its name from being the fossil of a waterfall that dried up rather than being a place where people fall down and become fossils, we went almost all the way down the waterfall by climbing down the chimney holes 🕳 over and over.
Fossil Falls from above
I was scared to go all the way down a long stair-like drop that was probably around 4 meters tall because I thought I wouldn’t be able to climb back up, but since everyone else was down there, I thought I might as well go.
Fossil Falls cliff
The view at the bottom was not really worth it, but the bottom to the view was worth it for sure. Sometimes, the only thing to fear is fear itself. And heights and wasps.
Meet the Spy
Most houses have some version of Assassin. Avery’s is called Assery, which is poorly named, but we basically play with water guns 🔫 and power-ups.
Initially, I didn’t sign up, but after the first round, my friend E (who I was going to meet up with in NYC) decided that he was too tired to play, so I stood in for him in the second round which is ongoing.
Some basic rules:
- No shooting in academic buildings
- No shooting in rooms in houses
- If you shoot your pursuer, they are rooted (can’t move) for 2 minutes, once per hour.
Doubly Sharp
Our team consists of me, AP, and AV. This is the first time that two people with the same initial have shown up in the same blog post, so I think I will just reveal their full initials.
Yesterday at around 12:40 PM, J killed AP before they went to Ge 1. On my way to class, I saw them having a conversation so I rooted J and ran to the lecture hall 🏃♂️.
During the lecture, I was trying to take notes while texting N, who is the one trying to kill J.
Outside of the Arms Laboratory of Geology, which contains the Sharp Lecture Hall, N was waiting for me to run out with J chasing me.
However, I left one minute before class ended, so J decided not to chase me and instead went out the back because he heard from a random woman that there were more people out there with guns.
At least I got to kill S, who heard that I was outside and tried to root me for J. I don’t think he recognized me while he was riding his bike 🚲. He went past and I just shot him 🔫.
Potential Ideas
I think it would be interesting to make some kind of remote-controlled car with a camera attached so that it could scout around corners before you actually cross the angle yourself.
However, the problem is that someone could just take it or flip it upside down.
As a countermeasure, we thought that the car should have a fart spray3 that can be fired remotely.
Alternatively, just use a drone to fly around and find people. However, I don’t think that drones can be flown on campus without permission.
Boom boom boom
At the Cultural Fair, I played the djembe African drum in a circle with a professional drummer who drummed for The Lion King, which was very fun.
T, J, and I were getting really into it but I did not seem to be smiling, where by I I mean a person with that initial. That has never been a problem either!
Anyway, I think that I was not frowning (entirely) because she was not interested in drumming, but because our hands all started to hurt a little bit after some time. My thumb actually still hurts at the interphalangeal (IP) joint.4
Real-time facial recognition
As a bonus, while I was walking away from the fair, I found IM, one of our targets who I have never seen IRL.
In fact, she walked past and didn’t know/care that we were after her, so I asked V to pull up the directory in the middle of the road and check if IM actually looks like that. So, after a good 30 paces, we ran back up to her and shot her.
In that situation, the cost of a false positive is very high compared to the gain from shooting someone in this stupid game because it’s very bad to shoot an innocent person.
Red Flags 🚩
Taylor Swift’s new album has a pretty good concept, but it also has some really poor lyrics and the songs sound way too similar. I enjoyed the first song, but I’m not sure why Post Malone was featured but only sang like 30 seconds.
I don’t think there is really a good defense of the lyrics (the 1830s one, obviously), but I don’t think they are as egregious as people say.
For example, “So High School” has some really weird lines, but I think they only need a little bit of work to be a bit catchier.
Rankings
M from my high school runs a TS fan account on Tiktok that has quite a large following, and I saw that she ranked the new album third but put Speak Now last.
Anyway, I enjoy the organic instrumentation and production, but I put this new album close to the self-titled album. I know she will recover.
As long as you’re happy…
is something people say when they don’t agree with your opinion but they just want to be nice about it. It’s one of those situations where all the possible responses converge to that phrase because it’s just the easiest thing to say.
I think I’ve blabbed a bit too much already, but I’m going to be very vague and just say that one of my friends was able to escape from the consequences of a case of extremely poor judgement. 🚩
Something to do with bacteria in a petridish when you put a drop of soap down…
To finish it off, I will say that sometimes things go so right but turn out to be the opposite of what you want, kind of like the Midas Touch.
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