Tag: Life

Knowledge Drain

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

This long weekend is full of little tasks. Besides a little volunteering at the Westcoast Curling Classic, I did a bunch of tasks that are the opposite of Spring Cleaning: harvesting plants, putting compost on the garden, and putting away the potting soil in the deck pots that produced so many tomatoes and peppers this year.

Part of that last task is separating the soil from the drain rock I use at the bottom of the pots. It got me thinking about how our veggie plants are benefiting from our education. More directly that you might expect: my drain rocks are mostly rock samples collected during thesis work by me, or by my better half.

My Master’s thesis was a pretty old-school map-the-geology type thing. I spent probably the most idyllic summer fieldwork season even mapping a bunch of little islands off the east costs of the Saanich Peninsula, and a bit of the Peninsula itself. You can read the abstract here , or even download the entire 260MB bastard in pdf. I would highly recommend against that, unless you find ichnofacies analysis to be compelling, but it does include a lot of pretty diagrams I drew myself!

Three years of my life: zoom to enrage.

During the summer, I collected a lot of rock samples. Some to serve are representative hand samples for future comparison, some to cut into thin sections to do petrology, some because they contained fossils (my not being a palaeontologist, I need to look them up or ask someone smarter than me to identify them); and some just because they looked cool.

The Smart One in the Family had a different type of thesis. She was up in the interior of BC looking at glacial deposits, and trying to decipher patterns in the deposits to figure out which way the ice flowed at what time, and concomitant to that, where gold or other lucrative minerals might be found under the glacial deposits based on evidence smeared out within the surface deposits.

Aspects of her thesis relied on statistics to tease trends out of seemingly random data. To do that, you generally need to start with a lot of very meticulously collected data. One line of evidence she used for ice flow was collecting samples of pebbles from glacial till, and characterising the pebble types to see if there are patterns across space. To have adequate statistical support, she needed to collect 100 samples (using a randomising selection method) from each site. To provide adequate statistical control over these sites, she needed 100 sites. So she collected, and petrologically described, 10,000 pebbles. Compared to my couple of buckets of samples, this was a monumental task, and it was only one aspect of her thesis. It is clear which of us is the geologic stud.

So what to do with 10,000 pebble-sized samples, and thousands of others, once your thesis is done?

A few years after her defence, I took a couple of 20L pails of pebbles and mud samples (used for geochemical analysis) that were kicking around a lab at SFU and dropped them in a persistent pothole puddle on the North Road Trail on Burnaby Mountain – every time I ride my mountain bike around that (to this day, puddle-free) corner, I think about the rocks there, and what an enterprising geologist would make of all these Adams Plateau pebbles on Burnaby Mountain.

Some of my samples were pretty enough that they are around my garden today. Some of her samples were used to make patio tiles by her Mom, as part of a family-themed patio paving project.

However, a combined ~17 years after our thesis defences, we still have a few 20-L buckets of pebbles, samples, off-cuts, and fossil samples kicking about. Averse to throwing things out (much to her chagrin), I am always trying to find uses for them… This is how the drainage rocks in our veggie pots came from the Gulf Islands and the Adams Plateau. I think this makes them cooler than a $4.99 bag of crushed quartzite drainage rock I could buy from Home Depot. Especially when I find a nice polished piece of sandstone with a Sharpie-lettered sample number on it. Memories of that summer in the bottom of my veggie pots.. oh, look, there is good ol’ sample PDJ04-107a. That was a nice spot. 

My Fan-Boy weekend.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I spent much of the Thanksgiving weekend at the Royal City Curling Club, volunteering and watching some curling.

For the last 12 years, that weekend has played host to the Westcoast Curling Classic, which is a pretty big event in the world of Curling, and really should be a bigger deal to the rest of New Westminster. This is an annual event that brings the best curlers in the world together to compete right here in New West for a big pot of money. Last year’s final was an epic battle between the reigning Canadian and World Champion team (Kevin Koe) and the reigning Olympic Gold medallists (team Kevin Martin). This year, Kevin Martin returned to the final after dispatching 6-Time Canadian and 4-Time World Champion Randy Ferbey in the semis, and won the final over multiple Grand Slam winner Mike McEwen. So saying the “best in the world” is not hyperbole.

I can’t think of another annual sporting event in the Lower Mainland that, every year, brings the best in the world to compete, and it happens right here in New West.

This year I was volunteering as a driver, shuttling out-of-town teams between the hotel and the Club, or wherever. Last night I gave Randy Ferbey’s team a ride to the airport just after they lost a close semi-final to the eventual champions. If they were disappointed with not winning the $17,000 top prize, they didn’t show it.

The most unusual occurrence for me this year was going down to the New Westminster SkyTrain Station at 11:00 at night to pick up Kevin Martin’s team (returning from the BC Lions Game via the most logical transportation route). Interesting that the mixed bag of fellows that hang out around the New West Skytrain late on a Saturday night didn’t recognize the Olympic Gold Medallists walking through the station. Not curling fans, I guess.

That got me thinking about the value of the football game. If you want to go see the Lions play, you can pay $40 for a ticket in the upper bowl, 100m from the field, pay $9 for a beer in a plastic cup, $7 for a hot dog, and get your three hours of entertainment under a $600 Million roof you already paid for.

In comparison, for $15 you can get a Monday pass to the Westcoast Classic, watch 7 curling games over three draws (between 9:00am and 6:00 at night) from a seat about 2m from the ice surface, pay $10 for a great homemade hamburger with all the fixings and a big basket of thick-cut fries, and pay $4 for a real pint of real beer served in a real glass. As a bonus, between games you can chat with the players, and even have a beer with them after the games: an unparalleled fan experience. No wonder the Royal City Club has a full house Monday.

Memo for next year: if you buy a $30 weekend pass, you can attend the party Saturday night. Live band, open bar, and fun times for all, curlers and fans. Trust me – I was a designated driver that night – it gets wild.

One year on.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

Things are so busy these days, I forgot to notice I have been doing this for a year. It’s been a year since I first posted with what has become my regular schtick: Half complaining about the City, while also giving them kudos.

1 year

139 posts (~one every 2.5 days)

13,000 all-time hits (including, I suspect, 6,500 by my Mom)

1,500 average monthly hits for last few months.

All-time most-read post: “on being visionary”.

O.K., when it comes to bandwidth and net presence, this is clearly not CNN, or even DrunkCyclist, but 40-50 hits a day is more than I should probably expect, as my target market is pretty tiny, I tend to blather on about the same crap, day-in and day-out, my marketing is non-existent, and anyone on the web in New West really should be spending their time over at 10ttF, where much more useful discussions ensue, and there is less profanity and fewer unending run-on sentences like this one.

However, going in, the purpose of this blog was to give me some practice writing, which I clearly need. I still start too many sentences with conjunctions, and end too many with prepositions. This has also forced me to bring my ideas and thoughts out in to open, which hopefully causes me to reason them through a little more, and hopefully learn from your criticism. This goes for my political ideas about the City, and my ideas about what it means to be an “environmental scientist”, when so much of the rhetoric around environmentalism (for and against) lacks scientific rigor. It also helps keep my spleen vented, and all the money I raise through it will go directly to my political campaign.

Clearly, I still need these things, so onward to Year 2. And thanks, Mom, for coming by.

Finally, for those who have come this far, I thought I would provide a rare glimpse into the process. Here is a brief behind-the-scenes view in the Green New West Headquarters, with me at my creative best…

Old Glory

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Last weekend, my Mom had one of those birthdays ending in “0”, bringing the Johnstone Clan together in the Kootenays to do the presents, cake and singing thing that is obligatory for such events.

Born in Castlegar, I don’t get back there very often; home is very much New Westminster now. Any idea I used to entertain of moving back to the Koots is usually pushed aside pretty quickly by thinking about everything I would need to give up: my City Girl wife (whom I am still rather fond of), my job (that I also quite like), my funky little house (that I can almost afford), my curling team (who are just good enough), riding a bike in the winter (without snow tires), and this great New West community into which I have somehow become immersed.

That said, I think the hike up the Plewman trail to Old Glory Mountain is my favourite place on earth.

Old Glory is a 7,800-foot peak in the Rossland Range, part of the Monashee Mountains in the West Kootenay. It is the highest peak in the range, but not as tall as the highest peaks in the Valhalla Range, which is clearly visible from the top. What makes Old Glory so great is it’s 3,400-foot prominence, the fact most of that prominence is above the tree line, making for spectacular sights much of the way up, and the accessibility of the peak by a relatively easy 2-hour hike.

The first time I went up Old Glory, Mt. St Helens was erupting, so it was probably summer 1980. I remember this distinctly, as I thought every cloud passing over head was ash from St. Helens, and when I found out the rocks that make up Old Glory were “volcanic”, I turned that into pre-teen angst that it would erupt when we were there. Of course, Old Glory is made up of Jurassic volcanic rock that erupted in an oceanic island arc something like 180million years ago, long before this part of the world had accreted to the North American continent. So eruption risk was pretty low.
Last time I was up there was a year ago at the Seven Summits Poker Ride. That day it was windy enough at the summit on a cloudy day that hoar frost was forming. I had to provide proof to the Seven Summit organizers that I had made it to the top of Old Glory with my bike in order to get a “Bonus Card” in the Poker run competition, so here is the i-Pod video I used for proof (also providing proof I am not Stephen Speilberg… or even Kevin Smith).

It was damn cold up there for Labour Day, but at least we didn’t get snowed out like the previous year.

This trip, I walked up Old Glory with my brother and two of my nephews, both a couple of years older than I was the first time I climbed this hill, and they soldiered up there like solders (totally resigned to their fate and no doubt cursing the names of their commanders for leading them into certain death and discomfort), and this time the sky was blue and the view was spectacular.

One of the great features of Old Glory is the mini-ghost town on top. This was once the location of Canada’s highest elevation weather station, and a forestry fire protection lookout. The lookout shack is still there, kept up as a hiker’s shelter, but all that remains of the homestead is foundations and scrap metal.

And a very windy outhouse.

But for me, the best thing is the view from the top: the rolling hills of the Rossland Range, all just touching the tree line, with the Valhalla and higher Monashee ranges in the distance, landmarks all around that I can just barely recognize from my growing up climbing mountains, skiing, and riding bikes. This landscape is my favourite place in the world.

Probably made more so by the fact I only get to go out there once in a while to visit. And that’s OK.

What I did this summer – Grand Canyon.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

Ok, I am very late starting this blogs topic, because I actually took my summer vacation way back in early June, when my tomatoes in tonight’s salsa were mere seedlings on my window sill and the Canucks were looking good for their first championships. So much time has past.

I still wanted to blog about my trip, however, because blogging about travel was my first introduction to the medium, and because I like to talk about geology. This trip was all geology. I walked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with a buddy of mine who shall remain anonymous, but happens to be a Professor of Geology. The purpose was to enjoy the majesty, a once-in-a-lifetime hiking trip, and a chance to get away from spring doldrums, but mostly to look at and enjoy the geology of the Colorado Plateau.

The author with some Coconino Sandstone

For those lucky enough to have avoided travelling with a geologist, it is hard to explain what “enjoying the geology” means. It is startlingly close to what you would do if you were working in geology. We first review the available literature, then look at the rocks, try to identify the rock types, look for recognizable structures, fossils or traces, try to make sense of the structural relationships, or figure out the paleo-envrionmental conditions where they were deposited. Try to point at all of the changes from one “formation” of rock to another, be that a sharp unconformity or a gradual transition. And we take lots of pictures, and talk a lot of rocks.

Geologists generally have more pictures of their scale card
than they do of thir kids.

How many pictures? I took about 250 photos below the canyon rim. The Prof took more like 500.

How much talking? We walked down the South Kaibab Trail to the Colorado River, about 12km, and all downhill. Even with the heat and rough trail, most people complete the hike in 4 or at most 5 hours. It took us about 9. After a day hanging at the bottom of the Canyon enjoying the charms of Phantom Ranch, we managed to come back up the Bright Angel Trail in a much more reasonable 8 hours. We were carrying less whiskey this way.

I am going to blog the trip in pieces, in the order of rock formations encountered on the way down (therefore, some pictures form the way up will be mixed in with those from the way-down). That way, the narrative will be a journey backwards through geologic time, more than a tour through our three-day trip. Remember, Law of Superposition: the rocks at the top are the youngest, the rocks at the bottom oldest.

Simple section of the canyon, modified from wikipedia.

This section shows the names of the major rock formations one encounters walking down the canyon, from the Early Permian Kaibab Limestone (about 275 million years old) at the top to the Precambrian Vishnu Schist (probably 1.7 billion years old). Add to this the Laramide Orogeny, resultant uplift, and 2 million years of melted snow runoff from the Colorado Rockies, and you get yourself a canyon drawn grand.

Click to make grander and more panoramic.

Details to follow…

It wasn’t all fun and games.
Happy 50th, Prof!

Bugs in the Garden – UPDATE

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

This has been a tough year for the garden. A cool wet spring had a lot of our seeds dying in the ground. The weather also brought us slugs, snails, and aphids. The first crop of lettuce expired, as did the first attempt at carrots. The beets and radishes got eaten by slugs. Radishes wormed-through. I am a terrible gardener.
??

By the Middle of June, not much was happening. Besdies the Garlic and the two “vounteer” potatoes, everything seen was transplants sprouted inside.

??Besides the weather, a constant issue in my garden is the combined aphid-ant battle. I learned last year that some species of ants actually farm aphids. The aphids apparently take more sugar-filled sap out of some plants than they can digest, so they…uh… pass a very sugar-rich waste that the ants harvest. Ants “milk” the aphids like we do cows. This is so successful that the ants have actually learned to farm the aphids. They move small aphids from one part of a plant to another to spread around the feeding space, they even defend the aphids from predators. My attempts to dissuade the ants from my plants, using tanglefoot on my blueberries, and diatomaceous earth on my sunflowers, were to no avail. Using a spray-bottle or water to knock the aphids off was pretty effective, until the ants replaced the lost flock with more young aphids. I just don’t have the time to do it every day. I’m a terrible gardener.

Ants and aphids working together to kill my bluberry plant. (click to zoom).

The problem with using anything more powerful (even insecticidal soap) is that it tends to knock down the natural enemies that control aphids and ants and other pests. The natural enemy of the aphid is the lady bug. So every time I see a lady bug in the garden, I know it is on my side. My experiences with ladybugs this year have included the whole life cycle.

Back in June I found a bunch of ladybug eggs on one of my sunflower plants:

Not long after, I found a bunch of freshly-hatched ladybug larvae on a leaf on my pepper plants:

Problem is, my pepper plants are amongst my tomatoes on the hot back deck, and the only two plants not being nuked by aphids. So I took matters into my own hands. I clipped the leaf off the pepper plant and attached it with a twist-tie to an aphid-infested blueberry plant in my front yard. I hoped the larvae would find a quick bounty, and stick around the garden patch where they were most needed.

That is where I learned about the ants and their defensive skills. 10 minutes after moving the leaf, there were a half dozen ants on the leaf, attacking the freshly hatched larvae. Oops. I moved the leaf to safer spot, and hopefully some of them survived! When they get big enough to defend themselves, the larvae are pretty cool looking:

And I can announce now that the weather has turned, there is a good population of ladybugs in my garden, and the aphids are almost gone completely. I still see a lot of ants around, and the sunflowers seem to have some aphids, but they are big enough to defend themselves, and they seem to be just populous enough to keep the ladybugs fed.

Oh, and now that the weather has turned, the garden is booming. Too late to get too much off the tomatoes this year I expect, but the beets, carrots, cukes and zuchs, the garlic, the blueberries, the potatoes and the onions seems to be going gangbusters, and the herb garden is loving the summer. We may even get a pumpkin to survive. Unfortunately, lettuce has been hit-and-miss this year, after a really successful last season. I really don’t know what I am doing. It sure is fun learning.

It looks like about two weeks until Fig Season, the greatest week of the year.

I am also taking part in a community science project being sponsored by Douglas College’s Institute of Urban Ecology, but I’ll talk about that later. If you are on Facebook, you can check it out now.

First update: That picture at the top shows what the garden was like inJune, with the late start, here is what it looks like now:

Second Update: I did a little research into Lady bugs, and I am supposing that little bug I photographed above is actually not a native ladybug, it is likely Harmonia axyridis, or a Japanese multi-colour ladybug. OK, because they eat a lot of aphids. but bad because are apparently displacing native species that might be better adapted to our climate. An interesting peice of background on native vs. introduced ladybugs. good reading!.

In which our Hero Questions his mind

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I had a dream last night that I had a panic attack.
This is interesting for several reasons. First, I rarely if ever remember my dreams. Second, I have never had an actual panic attack when I was awake. Third, I have been, if not half-heartedly, at most two-thirds heartedly studying for my Professional Practice Exam, the first real sit-down-in-a-classroom and fill-out-bubbles-with-a-No-2-pencil closed-book-exam I have had to write in something like 10 years.

Funny part is that it wasn’t the PPE I was panicking about in the dream: it was my 2011-2012 Hockey Pool Draft.

In my dream, it was Poole Draft Day, and apparently, I had drawn first in the draft. I was completely unable to make my first pick. Will the Sedins pull it off again? Which one to pick? Is Crosby back? Why can’t I remember the pre-season? Where did Stamkos end up after free agency? Did he get moved? How the hell to you spell Ovechkin!?! (it seems it was vitally important in my dream pool that the player’s name be spelled correctly). Everyone is staring at me, waiting for mee to fill out the form… in a panic reflex, I write in “Oveckin”. No problem. Plausible deniability. But then the 20 other guys all fill in their picks instantly and I immediately have to decide again. How did they do that so fast, and now they are all waiting for me again. Oh, the curse of the unprepared. Where is my draft sheet? Why can’t I see what they picked? I was completely paralysed in indecision…until I woke up.

Funny, I didn’t feel the least bit stressed about my exam. Maybe I should be?

If nothing else, I have resolved to be fully prepared for this year’s Draft. I’ll have my pick sheet prepared before the pre-season games start. Last year’s stats will be reviewed, all the player moves analysed for strength and weakness. I will make the appropriate adjustments during the pre-season based on how the lines are shaping up. My finish in the basement of last year’s pool will not be repeated.

A man has to set some priorities.

Oh, and I wrote my PPE today. No panic, I was prepared. There were a few very thought-provoking questions, a few that surprised me, but it all went well. I’ll know the results in 8 weeks, just in time for the NHL Pre-season.

Back to blogging.