Seeking tech advice: smartphones for geologists

I currently have what I fondly refer to as a "stupidphone." It makes calls. It receives text messages. It stores phone numbers from some of my contacts. I can set it to "silent" mode during class. And... well, that's about all I do with it.

But that's going to change soon.

I'm thinking hard about getting a smartphone. My current cell carrier is being acquired (locally) by AT&T, which means that iPhones are finally an option in Durango. But Verizon also has good service here, which means that the various Android phones are also possibilities. I'm going to upgrade to one or the other, but I'm not sure which. I've talked to my local salespeople, but I'm not sure they quite understand what I want from a phone. In my ideal world, I would get a phone that would allow me to do the following on the road from Durango to Albuquerque or Denver: find my location from GPS, plot it on a map, look up the geology on a geologic map, figure out the direction to a mountain peak in the distance, take a picture of an interesting outcrop, and show it to the world on Twitter. (In my dream world, I would be able to do this while driving through the Navajo reservation, but I don't think any carrier has decent service through much of it.)

So, Internet: what's your experience with smartphones? I'm interested in hearing what you like and don't like about your current phone (especially the iPhone, Droid X, and Samsung Fascinate, though if you love another Android phone, I'd like to hear about it, too.) I'm also hearing about what apps you like as a geologist (or as a non-geologist who knows the kinds of things that I like).

(I know that Android vs iPhone can be a near-religious preference, so I guess I should also say that I'm agnostic. I like Apple products (I've got a Mac at home and I love the iPod Nano I won from my local NPR station), I like Google (Google Earth, the search engine, gmail, blogger...), and I use a PC at work. I could work with any of the operating systems.)

Edit: Given that the first comment gets into the Apple vs Android preference immediately, here's some more ground rules: I want to know what YOU like about YOUR phone. If you're an Android fan, don't tell me what's wrong with the iPhone; if you like iPhones, don't tell me what's wrong with Android. I've kept one comment, but will not publish any others that bash the other operating system.

Goals for the next year

It's still the beginning of December, and I know the tradition is to review the last year before AGU, and do resolutions after. And the geoblogosphere is doing the first-post-of-the-month meme. But it's not just the beginning of the last month, the end of classes, and the week before AGU for me. It's also my 42nd birthday, and in celebration of the number 42 and the answer to life, the universe, and everything, I'm going to skip straight to plans for the next year.

In the next year I want to:

- Put more miles on my bike, skis, and feet than I do on my car. ("Better start taking long bike rides," says my husband. Bad news, because I prefer to run. But I was doing 20-mile weeks a few years ago while training for a marathon; I would like to get back to that kind of mileage.) If I can't pull it off, I want to at least do two running races: the Mother's Day 10K trail race (with free chocolate) and the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot. Both start within a bike ride's distance of my house, too.

- Get one paper sent off to a journal. I know this doesn't sound very ambitious, especially for people who are still actively in the job hunt. But for me, it's more about not feeling guilty than about being a super-productive scientist. Finish the paper, stop feeling lousy about myself.

- Follow through on at least one really crazy idea. Could be a research idea, could be a teaching idea, could be some kind of non-work thing that I'm scared to try. (Husband says I should do this 42 times, but when I say follow through, I mean really follow through. It could take a year or more to really give a crazy research or teaching idea a chance.)

- Avoid unpleasant interpersonal politics. I've been lucky this year - I've been on good committees, my department is getting along, and the geoblogosphere has been pleasant. I'm going to try to continue the pattern.

- Post more pictures. I got a new camera for my birthday. Now I need to learn how to use it (and how not to break it).

Oh, and unrelated: for an AGU meetup, how about at the Thirsty Bear (661 Howard St., SF) at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, December 17?

Unpacking and the urge to classify

I spent the holiday weekend moving into a house in town. This may seem a bit weird, but I kind of like moving. It makes me go through drawer and bookshelf stratigraphy, and rediscover things from the Paleogene (well, ok, 2000) that I had forgotten I owned. In some cases, they were things that we didn't need any more (such as size 3T Halloween costumes, which went to a daycare yard sale). In other cases, they were potentially useful (such as unopened tubes of toothpaste). And then there were the interesting things - the set of pretty metamorphic index minerals (garnet, staurolite, kyanite, andalusite...) that I had packed away when my son was born, for instance.

Now I'm working on UNpacking. It's work, but it's also an opportunity, to make sure that we will be able to find all three bottles of ibuprofen when we need them. I needed some logical schemes to let me find medicine, books, CDs, dishes, food, etc.

About halfway through the bathroom drawers, I realized that I had developed a new classification scheme for my stuff.

Medicine and hygiene stuff is classified by how it is used. Cough, runny nose, sore throat, headache? It's all in the "respiratory ailments" drawer. Clothing malfunction? Needles, thread, safety pins, etc are together. The "skin" drawer has hand cream, foot powder, and diaper rash ointment (leftover, because Boudreaux's Butt Paste is useful for things other than diaper rash). There's a drawer for glasses cleaning and repair. There's a drawer for bleeding (with everything from Spiderman band-aids to massive pieces of gauze for injuries that I hope never to see).

My husband was a bit surprised by the practicality of the scheme - he half expected me to organize the medicine by chemical formula. (If I had taken organic chemistry, I just might have done that.) I suppose I could have organized things by shape (bottles vs boxes vs tubes) or by color or by expiration date. And that made me think about the ways that geological things are classified.

Take rocks, for instance. Our classification into igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary is a good way to remember how rocks form, but it's horrible for students who are trying to learn how to tell apart nondescript dark-colored rocks. (Black limestone? Basalt? Hornfels? They can look very similar, despite being respectively sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic.) And it isn't very useful for people who want to use rocks, either. Metamorphic rocks might make nice sculptures and polished bathroom tile, or they might be good building stone but difficult to polish, or they might be good for roofs or floors. (Or they might be good for figuring out the temperature and pressure of metamorphism, and for sparkling in the light, but not much good for anything else.)

Builders and stonemasons classify rocks differently than I do. Does it take a nice polish? Then it's marble (even if I would call it serpentinite or limestone). Is it hard and difficult to polish, with speckles of various colors? Then it's a granite, not a gabbro or a granodiorite or a gneiss. If it breaks into flat slabs, it's slate, whether I would call it slate, phyllite, mylonite, or thin-bedded sandstone. (And if it crumbles, it's shale. Even if it's really something volcanic.)

When I teach about rocks in my intro classes, I often mention the other names students might have heard for rocks. It's confusing to switch organizational schemes. (And not all students think about rocks in this way.) But maybe I could help some of the students by telling them about the various ways I could have organized my bathroom.

Unfinished business

I've spent the last week rearranging numbers in Microsoft Excel.

This isn't the sort of thing that one tells people in order to sell the glamorous life of a geologist*. But it feels useful and productive. See, I should have done this seven years ago. Yes, that's right... I'm working on a draft of a paper that has languished for seven years.

Let me back up. My first teaching job involved many changes: I moved to a different coast, I went from a research fellowship to teaching five courses plus labs per year, and I started doing research in a new mountain belt (and a new metamorphic grade and tectonic setting). I figured that broad experience was good for someone who wanted to teach (and whose job involved a grand total of nine different new course preps in the first four years). I knew it would be difficult to find new research projects in a new field area, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be to earn the respect of the people already working in the area. I worked anyway, cobbling together money from small grants to pay undergrads for their field time, and collecting data with instruments at my institution. After seven years, I had started publishing in the new area, and I was trying to figure out how to get NSF funding for research with undergrads. I had tried three different programs as a PI without success, so I tried something new: I networked. There's a program called Research Opportunity Awards that allows professors at teaching-intensive colleges to get money tied to an existing, funded NSF grant. I found people from whom I wanted to learn, I contacted them, and I wrote a proposal.

And then I didn't get tenure.

Even though I landed another academic job within three months, I was faced with moving away from my field area and from my instruments, to a new place, with new preps and different expectations. I probably should have apologized to NSF and the PIs (and I did talk to the PIs about backing out), but the PIs thought I could pull it off. So I spent the summer between jobs doing lab work and modeling work at two different institutions.

And then I dropped the ball. Six courses a year, plus field camp, left me exhausted and ready to stare at some walls. Plus I wasn't teaching courses that related to my old research, and students wouldn't work with me in a field area on the other side of the country. There wasn't even that much pressure to publish for tenure here - publishing on pedagogy or as a third author on my old PhD work, and writing equipment grants with other members of my department, was fine for this job. And then I had a baby, and I had even more responsibilities here, and nothing forcing me to finish the old work.

And, to be honest, I couldn't face the Vermont research. It depressed me to even open the draft of the paper, or to look at the thin sections or the spread sheets. Research isn't just a matter of working hard - it involves inspiration, and although anger may be a useful emotion for some purposes, it doesn't lead to great research.

But I've been here for eight years now. I've got tenure. I know my courses. I've got local research projects with senior thesis students, and I've been developing local research projects for intro students, as well. And my son is five, and doesn't need me as constantly as he did as an infant and a toddler. And I got a tiny internal grant to get a little more microprobe data. And now... it's time to put it together, to finish writing the paper that's been sitting on my hard drive for seven years or more.

I've searched georef to see what's been done. The only things published in the past eight years were work that was in progress in 2000. (In fact, one is co-authored by one of my old academic advisees. Yay for her!) Perhaps it's a sign that my work was never cutting edge - but then it never aspired to be. Not all research needs to be published in Science or Nature - sometimes it is worthwhile to tell the world what one knows about an obscure, overgrown corner of the world.

And sometimes it is simply worthwhile to take care of unfinished business.

*I realize that it is unlikely that anyone would mistake me for "one of the coolest, sexiest men alive." However, I might be fun to have breakfast with, if you've got good enough coffee.