This Is Interesting
I downloaded ImageJ and have been playing around with combining the 3D data into a composite stack. What's nice is that it will take several hundred individual scans and combine them by median or mean...
View ArticleA "Spring" Break project: Making a Snow Dragon
It's now been a full week since our Spring Break. And in that time, many people have commented about our big "Seekrit Projekt." Kelly blogged about it, Neil managed to get in to town and see it, too....
View ArticleFluid Dynamics in sand
Sand and silt are really cool. Experimental Sand Jets from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
View ArticleHacking the Em2: Using the ImageJ to create 3D surface images
I've been putzing around with ImageJ as a way to visualize the 3D data produced by the Kinect scanner. So far, I'm please with how quick and easy the process is, but I'm a little disappointed at the...
View ArticleDinosaur WHAT now?!?
Visited the Children's Museum with my sister and niece. On our way out the door, I noticed this on one of the gift shop shelves: So that's how it is in their family...
View ArticleEaster Monotreme
It's Easter Sunday for many people around the world - this also means that the Easter "Bunny" is showing up, hiding eggs for people to find. But rabbits and eggs don't generally co-occur. But there is...
View ArticleThis is not a... cow?
I visited the Eau Claire Children's museum this weekend with my sister and niece. One of the items was a miniature dentist's office, complete with some kind of animal sitting in the dentist's chair....
View ArticleDry Quicksand
I revisited the "dry quicksand" and used the good high speed camera: DryQuicksand from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo. A sphere dropped into very loose sand and silt forms a cavity, which then collapses and...
View ArticleCrossing a milestone
According to my Blogger statistics, the 100,000th visitor came to the blog yesterday morning. Cool! I don't know exactly when the Blogger stats begin, but I think it was sometime in 2009. Hopefully I...
View ArticleDispatch from the Dirt Lab: Dry Quicksand
I finally put together the demo video about dry quicksand. It's been a longer process than I had anticipated. In part it's because I didn't like either versions I shot on wednesday or thursday, so I...
View ArticleScience is Hard.
Science is Hard. Digging out the stuck vehicle, Wasatch Mts, Utah. Science is hard. There's no way around it. If you want to find out how the world works, you gotta go and look. And sometimes that...
View ArticleGeomorphology from the Cockpit
Last fall I had the opportunity to fly around in an airplane. I've been meaning to do this in western Wisconsin for years - some of the best geology can be done from a few hundred feet above the...
View ArticleBoing Boinged Again
My video about dry quicksand was picked up by Boing Boing this morning. That marks the third year in a row one of my demos has gone just a wee bit viral. Last year it was the Liquid Nitrogen Volcano,...
View ArticleWhoa, that was pretty cool
As I mentioned before, my dry quicksand video was picked up by Boing Boing, plus it got a few other re-tweets. Of course now I'm working on a follow-up. Here's what I'm working on next:
View ArticleTiny Dinosaur
I went out to fill the "dinosaur feeders" in our front yard today. The late season snow cover is keeping the birds close to the easy sources of food. Under one of the shrubs was a white skull. I don't...
View ArticleChilling
(Note: I'm going to try and avoid any obvious traumatic stress triggers, but I do point out something that hasn't been explicitly stated in the news yet, but is - for me - quite telling of what was...
View ArticleWorking on the next Dispatch episode
I've been working on a new Dirt Lab Dispatch. Here's a sneak peek: Yes, that's a bowling ball being held up by a sand castle. If you're curious to see how you can make a super-strong sand castle, be...
View ArticleDispatches from the Dirt Lab #2: Building Better Sandcastles
It's getting toward the end of April - and while it's still snowing around here, summer (and time at the beach) is drawing close. In this episode, I talk about why sandcastles stand up in the first...
View ArticleGoing Viral with Sandcastles
Well, it seems my Sandcastle video has also managed to get picked up by Boing Boing and then Gizmodo, and now Digg.com. That's after it was mentioned by Earth magazine and some other cool bloggers. I...
View ArticleHow strong were those Sandcastles?
Well, I have some quantitative data for those super sandcastles. My soil mechanics students were charged with making the strongest sandcastle they could. I gathered all the class data, added some...
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