Peeing and Pooping in the Field
If you need to pee or poop without a toilet around… Don’t be embarrassed. Everyone needs to. It is dangerous not to let your body remove waste – it can cause serious health problems. There are many ways to find …
Author: Dawn Y. Sumner
Links to advice for doing well in the outdoors
Here’s a nice page with information for recreational camping from REI: https://www.rei.com/learn/series/intro-to-camping. And they provide a whole suite of pages on general outdoor skills: https://www.rei.com/learn/c/outdoor-basics Locally, there is the Bay Area Wilderness Training organization. There are some good sites from Canada and …
Camping in the Rain
A good tent can keep you nice and dry, even in a major rainstorm. However, it is also possible for water to pool on the floor of a tent, getting everything sopping wet. I’ve done this to myself, and it …
Keeping Warm When It Rains
It is easy to get cold when you are wet. Thus, one of the most important things to do to stay warm on a rainy day is to stay as dry as possible. If you are doing field work, you …
A Gear List for an Overnight Sed/Strat Trip
Here is a gear list for our sedimentology/stratigraphy field trip in California in May. It won’t be cold, and it won’t rain (most likely), so if you are heading out in different weather, this won’t be sufficient. Field Gear Jacobs …
Keeping Warm While Camping
It is actually fairly easy to stay warm at night if you prepare in advance. My dad is a mountaineer who has climbed Mt. McKinley several times and was on an expedition to K2. He has given me lots of …
NSF Collaborators Template for Hundreds of Collaborators
Here’s the NSF collaborator template (as of May 2017) with hundreds of rows for collaborators. You can arrange your collaborators, co-authors, etc. in another spreadsheet and paste them into this one. Make sure you do Edit -> Paste Special… -> …
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Uncertainty in Climate Predictions
I find Bret Stephens NYT first opinion piece appalling because he conflates uncertainty in human behavior (like voting) with scientific uncertainty in our ability to predict climate change. Human behavior has no right answer, and uncertainty emerges from innumerable cultural …
Djerassi Dream Vortex Project
My artist friend Meredith Tromble and I spent July at the Djerassi ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains working on a 3d digital art project and installation, the Dream Vortex and It’s All the Real World. It was a great month …
Siphonophores and Multicellularity
I just read Wired’s Absurd Creature of the Week post on siphonophores. They are amazing creatures, composed of colonies of cloned individuals that specialize for different functions. This is different from animals, which are colonies of specialized cells (plus billions of …