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    Google Earth it!

    By Hasselhoff
    Nov 14, '06 9:25 PM EST

    Just a short blog this week. I'm pretty busy. We have a silent review on Monday. Should be interesting. Basically, we pin up boards, and can't defend them. They have to speak for themselves. I'm a little nervous because my boards always suck. Good individual images, terrible layouts.

    Then that night I am flying out to London to spend Thanksgiving with some friends who are doing the AA semester. So I will probably sleep quite well on the plane. Really, school is just school. Nothing special, but probably my best semester. Tina is just really great.

    There was a poster in the hall this week that was driving me crazy (because I'm a nerd). It said “convergence,” and though my geomorphology knowledge is a little rusty, I'm 99% sure that it was an alluvial fan. The context was nicely blurred out and it was rotated so that the narrow, mountain stream edge faced the bottom of the page. Seeing that we typically look at pages from top to bottom, it made it look like many streams were converging into one. As you may know, an alluvial fan occurs when a valley restricted stream emerges (bleh) from the mountains, slows down, drops it entrained load and basically DIVERGES. It FANS out. Just to be sure I wasn't utterly insane, I checked my geomorphology and sedimentology text books when I got home and couldn't find any images of convergent stream flow that looked like the image on the poster. But surprisingly, there were plenty of alluvial fans that were identical. If they wanted to use some type of geological example of convergence, why not a convergent plate margin or glaciers coming together? Or even twining of a crystal lattice (closer than an alluvial fan). Sure I'm overreacting, but when you work with that stuff for six years, it's really annoying to see mistakes like that. Imagine seeing a Corb building credited to Zaha.



     
    • 11 Comments

    • the silent observer

      Damn...I want to be that nerdy...

      I am driven crazy by one scene in Mr. and Mrs. Smith which uses footage from another part of the movie as filler...the car is absolutely NOT the same one that Pitt is shown driving in the interior shots. Interior, cadillac CTS, exterior, crappy black lincoln town car. How the editor missed that is beyond me, but everytime I see that scene, I get pulled right out of the movie.

      Nov 14, 06 11:01 pm  · 
       · 

      maybe the person who made the poster did it to be ironic? sorta a visual pun? i mean, if you want to make a point about convergence, showing something as unlikely at several streams merging at one point would be a way to do it.

      (wishful thinking on my part?)

      Nov 15, 06 7:17 am  · 
       · 
      liberty bell

      Hasselhoff, I'm with dyee, I desire to have that type of nerdiness.

      But for now I'm going to start calling you Orson, as you'll hear a very similar rant coming from the great Orson Welles if you go to this link...let's hear you say it: "If you can show me how an alluvial fan is a result of convergence then I'll go down on you!!"

      Nov 15, 06 8:49 am  · 
       · 
      the silent observer

      Liberty Bell...that is AWESOME. Come on Hasselhoff...let's hear it!

      Nov 15, 06 10:21 am  · 
       · 
      strlt_typ

      image not content...i guess...

      Nov 15, 06 12:34 pm  · 
       · 
      mespellrong

      I overheard a line like that in one of my favorite Chicago bars. This place has a two-way mirror over the men's urinal so you can watch the whole place while you relieve yourself -- a must have for any bar in my opinion.

      Anyway the line was "She like reads War and Peace, but she won't give me head."

      Nov 15, 06 5:58 pm  · 
       · 
      treekiller

      my guess is that most architecture profs at that symposia are geologically challenged. but the irony of promoting convergance with divergance is sort of funny.

      Nov 15, 06 8:44 pm  · 
       · 
      Hasselhoff

      It's also funny that there is this rigor rigor rigor thing, then just a GLARING mistake. Well, glaring to the James L Dyson geology award winner (thank you thank you).

      Nov 15, 06 11:45 pm  · 
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      strlt_typ

      \m/

      Nov 16, 06 12:05 am  · 
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      geimanj

      Sounds like someone saw an image and thought, yeah, that works, without actually knowing what it was. Rigor all up in there, indeed. I think this calls for a creative graphic intervention on your part... Do you carry a rock hammer around in your carhartts like most of the geo majors I used to know?

      Nov 16, 06 4:23 am  · 
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      bonestorm

      I admire the rigor of your critique, as always. But think that quite often for these mini complexity love-ins the departmental administrative assistant or perhaps a TA is called upon for her photoshop and poster-making abilities, and that the rigorosity factor is not very high. Not sure if she is provided with an image, if so by whom, or if Rahim, Ruy and the like just request a pretty pattern from nature. Of course, this excuse may be wishful thinking on my part... Perhaps when you graduate you can start developing an image library for the nonlinear selforganizers with some convergence, a few fractals, maybe some circle packing?

      Nov 25, 06 9:47 pm  · 
       · 

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