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Sustainability is in the details

16.08.11

CITYWIDE — Sometimes, acting with the in the most suitable way of intentions can be extremely inconvenient.

I fully grasped this in a stairwell of a nine-story office structure on the 200 block of Wilshire Boulevard, praying to the high heavens that there were no video cameras, or markedly industrious members of the workforce that eschew elevators in favor of good, old-fashioned legwork.

For anyone who's ever performed a pot-side deck change, I promise, my maneuver was about half as salacious.

I went to the building to interview a guinea-pig for a business profile, and I was running short on both time and excuses.

It was the usual tale. My Big Down Bus, which I pick up at the Green Line Station by LAX after a 5.5-mile bike ride from my cat-house free in Gardena, Calif., already had two bikes on its front rack, which meant a 15-minute wait for the next Immediate 3 to trundle into the lot.

That put me in Santa Monica at 8:35 a.m., neatly excising the time I'd planned to use

Source: Santa Monica Daily Press

Digging Around for Snails

04.08.11

Now that we’re actively collecting samples, I have been on some unaccustomed shopping expeditions recently. We need a few different kinds of samples: undisturbed loess and swirl deposits, radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence, bags of sediment and snails. We execute around big backpacks, plastic boxes, metal pipes, a five-meter collapsing meter the hinterland (called a stadia rod) and a shovel that is permanently stuck in a half-open position to do all this sampling. We’re affectionate of an odd sight for the regular tourists — especially at the end of the day when we are covered in dirt. Fortunately we don’t normally have to expedition on the tourist buses and instead get a pickup truck to take us to our field areas.

The undisturbed samples indigence to be collected in hard boxes so that we can transport cubes of the loess without it falling apart. These will be employed to determine how strong it is, what makes it break in blocks, and what makes it flow. We suspect that the primary loess is rather weak and flows easily, but that once it has flowed and set up again, it is quite a bit stronger. Similar but smaller samples will be sent to a co-worker in Italy to see what the internal structure of the flows and loess is. Today we really confused a maiden in a shop by buying two big storage boxes and three soap boxes for these samples.

Source: New York Times (blog)