I cleared up the “ophitic basalt” debate, at least to my satisfaction, this evening. I went to a beach listed in my book to have a good amount of ophitic basalt, and it looks quite different to me than what I would identify as diabase (I found some of that there too).

Most of the rocks at Flood Bay are basalt. I’m still confused about how to differentiate ophitic basalt from diabase, though. One of my books draws a distinction, but another doesn’t. I read into it online, but I’ll have to keep studying in the field!

When I was in early elementary school, I really liked rocks, but my interest in minerals wore out sometime not long thereafter. When I was little, I remember looking through the gravel with friends, the prizes being chalk rocks, quartz and the occasional geode you could break open, which were my favorite finds! We used […]

As highlighted in the feature photo, it’s hard to come to Lake Superior and not notice the rocks. There are seemingly so many different kinds of beautiful colors along the shore. I learned about agates and began looking for them along the beach, but I wanted to know about everything I was encountering, so I […]

I got to the wetland at 7pm, with the last possible shot of OK light. Luckily, my Swarovski scope was able to make the most of it. I ran into a few birders there who were grateful for the gear as well! We picked out the sharp-tailed sandpiper at the back of the flooded field […]

A few tips and tricks along the way for spatial models… you must have an observation for every feature those observations must be in order of the shape file the corresponding identifier can only be (1:length of shape file) I’m not sure the spatial effect alone will be much more than a localized range map […]

The forecast from the coronal hole panned out: the night was spectacular; I only wished I had something better than an iPhone to catch it all on! I was watching a great northern lights show (a bright green homogeneous band over the city and the lake, reflecting off the water) when the moon began to […]

This weekend’s drive up the north shore took me to a place I could see the namesake of Palisade rhyolite. I had planned to maybe hit Flood Bay on the way back, but it was late in the day and storms were rolling in, so I went straight home.

TGIF! I really like my new “rock picking” hobby. Today, I found a tiny piece(?) of an agate, and continued to grow my rock collection. I have found lots of basalt (including ophitic, diabase, gabbro, and vesicular). I’d love to find basalt with pipe vesicles but I’m not sure what my odds of that would […]

I kind of hesitate to post “general” R-INLA posts because it’s a.) not my job so b.) I don’t really have time to give it the treatment it deserves. I don’t want to rewrite the website, yet, though I do want to make it more accessible. Right now, I’m mining the R-INLA site for biologically […]