July 3-4, 2025 - Contracted a Cold

Getting sick is so random. I did an intense 2-hour bike ride (nearly maxed out on HR and claimed some strava trophies) on the morning of July 2nd and by the evening I was feeling off and on the 3rd I had a fever and was clearly under the weather. This was after 5 rest days coming in with the best total fitness I've had in at least two years (though I was traveling during those rest days, so who knows what my exposure was). Oh well. Seem to be recovering quickly (fever gone on the 4th). 

I've been spending the illness watching more SCEC 2024 talks (Earthquake Engineering Resilience AND Communication about Earthquakes During Crisis) and reading a few chapters (as best I can) of Don Turcotte's treaties on Fractals in Geophysics. Of course I was well aware of the fractal nature and natural chaos of most geophysical phenomena (scale-independence and getting wildly different end results from just minor changes in initial conditions), but it is nice to see it formalized mathematically (although still challenging for me to think in mathematical equations) and well explained by this famous geophysicist (advisor of a former colleague that attended Cornell in the 1990s). I hope that perhaps I can formally incorporate some discussion of fractals regarding things like the lengths of coasts, rivers, etc. in my geomorphology classes in the future AND perhaps have some undergraduate research students use fractals to examine relative activity of mountain fronts, in place of mountain front sinuosity. At the very least, reading this book is going to help me further grasp all the power law relationships we all encounter in geoscience (earthquake distributions, normalized channel steepness indexes). 

6 hours of reading and watching talks. I also booked a hotel for SCEC 2025, thinking to drive to the meeting to save on money (allowing me to stay at a slightly further away hotel and not spend $500 on the plane ticket). Unfortunately, SCEC no longer has free or all that cheap registration ($350) and the hotel cost has gone up by 40% over just a few years ago and all my travel funds for the academic year are already spoken for. 

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