-Caue Borlina  

 

This is a very normal and very solid planetary science lecture. Good stuff. But it's not for the layman per-se. It's still very very important to keep up with this kind of video. This one in particular gives us clues on what we can conjecture about asteroids and the interiors of small rocky worlds like Luna, Mars, IO, & Mercury. If you don't keep up with the context of these kinds of videos, it's hard to have an idea about what planetary scientists are really spending their time on.  

Model-makers are all the rage in planetary right now, and that's here to stay, not just a trend. What they do is very mathy and statistical. The reports they give tend to be quite dry and frankly dull. This lecture  qualifies as model-maker material, but it's not as dull as most. 

Universities are focusing on producing more model-makers from young students. This has a lot of good & bad effects. We need them, in bulk, to get more quantification studies. Theories like Jupiter grand-tack, dark mater formations. Big picture stuff, that takes a lot of labor to produce. At the same time it's harder to make their work popular and publicly accessible, at least until it's done, which takes a long while and often leaves only one simple proven fact to dwell on. And lastly, the math-wall is just making the ivory-walls thicker. Combined with the pay-wall, that is most detrimental for public education. Also, math by its nature is rife with casual plagiarism, so people working on mathy projects tend to guard their work, and create no buzz. They certainly don't publish boldly.      

• At 19:50, there is an interesting method. Probably the highlight along with the conclusions at 46:20. Poorly sorted magnetized bits cannot be used to show direction, but they can be used to show intensity and cumulatively can be used to show abundance, and direction can ultimately be inferred. That and methodology is pretty much the whole video. 
  

Let me know if you would like to see more LPI's that are highly statistical. I tend to prefer lectures that have lots of pretty slides, but I watch nearly all of them. Either way I won't run out anytime soon.