alumni reception - Syracuse Universe Department of Earth Sciences ...

Course on “World Water”, and will be teaching a new
large lower division course on “The Science of Water”
for the A&S curriculum. I plan to take undergraduate
students to China in May 2011 to see firsthand the
major water problems that nation has to deal with.
Finally, I insist on mentioning that last May,
I took a comprehensive exam in the culinary arts at
the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu.
There, I was the first westerner invited to give a
Chinese-style cooking demonstration to the master
chef of the Institute. Video of the demo will be on
Youtube sometime in the fall. The Institute’s master
Chef commented that my knife skills were excellent,
and that my presentation and order of cooking in
the massive wok were fine. As to the taste, the Chef
was sufficiently satisfied to invite both Bette and me
(for baking) to give a set of presentations on western
cooking. My appraisal was a “C” grade--but I passed!
Bruce Wilkinson
This past year, I became a paleontologist. For
the past couple of decades, I have been making light
of stratigraphic types who see “cycles” in sedimentary
successions (Emperor’s New Clothes). One way
to look at the issue is to measure vertical distances
between supposed cycle bottoms (e.g. sandstone bases
of Carboniferous “cyclothems”). If indeed periodic,
then distances should look like waiting times at a bus
stop; regular recurrences in space or time. But, it
turns out that “cycle” recurrence is largely random;
cycle base separations are unpredictable, like the
durations between goals in a World Cup soccer match
turns out that patches of different carbonate facies
across a depositional region like the Persian Gulf or
the Bahamas is also well-described as being largely
random; areas of patches are much like the pieces of
a broken plate; lots of small pieces, relatively few big
areas. Sizes of countries look exactly the same.
This all bears on paleontology because
numbers of smaller fossil groups belonging to larger
fossil groups (taxonomic membership frequencies)
exhibit exactly the same distributions; groups with
fewer numbers of subtaxa are more common than
those with more subtaxa. Why should a broken plate
model of random division of geographic depositional
area also serve to describe taxonomic memberships?
The reason may be that taxonomic identity (e.g.
Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homo sapiens) is
dependent on morphological attributes; on the basis
of what an organism looks like. Just as depositional
surfaces are partitioned among different facies, the
division of biologic morphospace serves as the basis
of classification for various organisms. Fun stuff.
Taxonomic membership distributions resemble the
distribution of fragments of a broken plate.
or the decay of radioactive elements; lots of short
durations, few relatively long waiting times. That
brings up the related question: if vertical stratigraphic
distances are random, what do horizontal areas of
sediment on modern surfaces look like? Well, it