Dirtdoc1:
The last question first: I'll quit learning the day I die! And I have no doubt that you could teach me a few things -
I get "wound up" sometimes; not angry, just animated.
I understand your position on PhDs. I did not mean to malign them all; just those that think that education trumps experience. It doesn't - you need both. You also need to apprentice with a really good geotechnical engineer in order to make the best use of your education and experiences.
Please keep in mind that I have had opportunities to disagree with a few PhDs on a professional plane; you might not be too surprised to learn that I am thorough and win quite a few of these disagreements. (I even had one of my (well known) grad school professors effectively "surrender" when I challenged his analyses and arguments during a litigation assignment about 10 years ago.)
Unfortunately, you are often not in a position to challenge an engineer when he/she claims expertise based solely on "experience." (This is unfortunate.) I find that the claim of "experience" without an adequate technical argument to support their position is usually a smoke screen for ignorance...
Regarding adobe: I'm very cautious about local soil descriptions. In particular, the term "caliche" has caused me a lot of indigestion over the years. Just wanted to know what you meant by the term.
On the use of subscripts, underlines, bold text, etc. - these are built into TGML (Tecumseh Group Markup Language).
TGML is proprietary to these forums and allows you to format your posts, enabling bolding, italicizing, and so on, as well as typing in color and changing your text alignment (center, right alignment). (Text in italics copied from a Javascript pop-up panel on the Eng-Tips website. You can open the panel by clicking on the link just above the
Submit Post control button at the bottom of the "Your Reply" window. Emoticons/Smileys are described in the adjacent link.)