In the sciences, the dissertation is typically published. Each chapter is usually a separate paper. In fact it's common to take all your published (or at least submitted) research papers and staple them together (or combine into a single LaTeX file), and call that the dissertation.

I don't think a contest between Green and Purple is likely to turn out well.

And the launch has been scrubbed. They'll try again tomorrow.

The problem is that while funding may have been continued at the previous year's level, NASA can't plan on that happening. There can be no new project starts unless Congress passes the appropriations bill. So NASA may have the same funds as the previous year on a continuing resolution, but it's only allowed to spend that money on the previous year's programs. Even if those are complete. That means the agency may have piles of cash sitting around that it doesn't need for old projects, but is not allowed to spend on new projects. I've had grant proposals that were selected for funding, but the grant could not be awarded and the work could not start until an appropriations bill for that year was passed and signed. It's an appallingly inefficient process, but NASA presently lacks the authority to improve it.

I'm also a planetary geophysicist and generally agree with your assessment. I also note that the author is a terrestrial geologist. This is as far as I can tell, his first foray into planetary science, and so he may not be so familiar with the planetary literature. Plate tectonics has previously been hypothesized on Mars (Sleep, 1994). The press release suggests that somehow, for forty years, no one has seriously looked at Valles Marineris. It clearly has a tectonic origin, but I don't see evidence for plate tectonics.

Most of the energy the Earth receives is dissipated in the oceans. Very little is used to heat the interior. Back when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, the tidal heating on both bodies would have been more significant, but the Moon has receded so far away that it's not that important now.

The bulk of the Earth's (and Venus's) internal heating is the result of the decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes in the mantle (K, U, Th), and heat leftover from the accretion and differentiation processes. Assuming the solar nebula had similar compositions where Venus and Earth formed, then they ought to have similar amounts of radioactivity. Venus may have actually retained more of its accretionary heat, since it lacks plate recycling, which is a very efficient way for the Earth to cool. Less that 1% of the Earth's heat flow is from volcanoes. We don't actually know Venus's long-term tectonic regime. Currently it's lithospheric conduction, which is very inefficient. But the relatively young (~ 700 My) surface age suggests it must have resurfaced somehow.

As for TFA, I'm quite skeptical. Plate tectonics on Mars has indeed been investigated before. In the nineties, the hemispheric dichotomy was hypothesized to be a plate boundary. But the rest of the geological evidence was not convincing, and I don't think it ever gained much support. In the late nineties / early aughts, there were measurements of stripes of crustal magnetism in the southern highlands, a pattern similar to the magnetic reversals on Earth's seafloor. This brought up the idea of seafloor spreading, but the Martian stripes are much larger, and it's hard to see how this would occur in the thickest part of the crust.

The primary evidence for left lateral slip in TFA seems to be an offset impact crater. But I don't see it. The southern edge does look vaguely like an arc, but I see nothing on the northern side resembling a crater rim. The floor of the putative crater is the same depth as the rest of the Valles. I wouldn't expect that if this was actually an impact feature. I also don't see how lateral slip would result in such a wide rift. I think it's more likely this is actually a rift; extenison driven by loading of the lithosphere by Tharsis.

Further evidence presented is the linear arrangement of Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus Montes. This has previously been suggested as evidence for hotspot volcanism. But here we have only three giant volcanoes instead of the dozens in the Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain. So if it's a plate moving over a hotspot, it's very puncutated. Moreover, the direction of motion would have to be perpendicular to that required for lateral movement along Valles Marineris. Furthermore, the linear pattern of the Tharsis Montes is only remarkable when you exclude the two large volcanoes that don't fall on that line: Alba Patera and Olympus Mons.

As someone who does computational geodynamics (mantle convection, tectonics, tidal dissipation), I use math(s) all the time. I'm doing trig, vector calculus, complex (real and imaginary) analysis, PDEs, and linear algebra all night and day. Sometimes I even bust out the spherical harmonics, why not? I don't use things like combinatorics, number theory, or topology, though the last is relevant for setting up meshes for finite element models. I don't use a lot of statistics, but my colleagues who perform more data analysis are all up in there.

The PDEs and the like are discretized for numerical integration, but I need to know the underlying continuous mathematics in order to do that. It's true that routines already exist for many standard problems, but if I want to add more physics or solve new problems, then I have to be able to do that myself. I also need to be able to solve simpler problems analytically, so that I can verify that the numerical models are actually giving the right answer.

I should note that my educational background is in the physical, rather than computational sciences (specifically geology, physics, and astronomy). This involved a lot of mathematics classes. A major in physics comes with a free minor in mathematics. My computer science background is relatively week. I've only ever taken a couple programming classes. I picked up most of my computing skills in grad school or on the job.

It was so much fun, you can't wait to do it again next year! Oh, wait...

You can get a bit of that by watching old episodes of the Daily Show or the Weekend Update segments of old episodes of Saturday Night Live. In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

I don't think we're likely to have the occasional woolly mammoth of our ancestors. But I'll agree with the spirit of your suggestion.

I feel certain that nobody voted for Bill Clinton in 1994, as he had only been elected two years prior.

The masses given equate to 80000 kg and 23000 kg respectively. Or 80 and 23 (metric) tons. Two significant figures. Not more. No doubt those were the numbers originally supplied by the scientists, and the author of TFA converted it to pounds for the typical American reader without understanding how precision works. This happens all the time in the popular press. Clearly you can't estimate the weight of a creature you've never seen to within 1 lb. Your standard human's weight fluctuates by more than that over the course of a day.

I believe Futurama established that the correct pronoun is "shklee".

My original post was meant to be more a dig at the title than at anything else. Most watches are worn in the manner I described rather than with subdermal magnets.

A lesser person might have just attached the iPod to a wristband, and worn that. Like an _actual_ watch.