Transient Theorist

Waiting...

2010-12-22T16:29:00.002-05:00

At this point, 3 of the 4 people I want as committee members are on board, but I'm still waiting for a response from #4. Sent an email on Friday (as I was advised that this can be a nice way of asking as it doesn't put profs on the spot), and had no response by mid-day today... Sent a super-polite reminder email to make sure email #1 hadn't gotten lost in this person's inbox. Still no word. It'd be so nice to put this to rest before I leave for Christmas! Oh well; I have a back-up plan just in case (but it would make my life more complicated, by potentially adding a committee member from a different institution/state).

All kinds of planning going on right now too, for traveling to a conference (in a warm place!) coming up in Feb, plus applying for a fellowship to spend some time in Scandinavia next year (where my advisors will be during a sabbatical). Busy busy busy!

R function currently blowing my mind: melt() and cast() in the reshape library (the built in use of aggregate is fabulous).

Taking another step (committee!)

2010-12-16T15:11:00.003-05:00

Lots going on in real life that I'm not going to write about now (what else is new).

Big news for the moment is that after months of procrastinating/agonizing, I finally just sent an email to a former professor asking them to be the first member of my graduate committee. This is a big step for me; I've been writing and re-writing the email all week. I really really really hope that this person answers with a big YES, because I think that their knowledge and experience would be invaluable to me, and in a number of ways their work is closer to what I want to do than my own advisor's. In general, I'm still skeptical of the value of committees, but I can totally see how this person would fit in. Part of my anxiety about it is that if the answer is no, I can't think of anyone else even at this huge institution who would be able to fill a comparable role. Mostly I'm filling my committee because the rules say I have to, but I'd really love to work with this person more.

Anyways, that's where I'm at. Cross your fingers for me.

With the holidays coming up, maybe I'll post more, including the list of favorite R functions I've been accumulating.

Theo out.

UPDATE: Success!! Big weight off my shoulders. Now I can ask other people on my list.

In search of great ideas

2010-10-05T10:07:00.002-04:00

Not surprisingly, I'm still on the hunt for a great thesis topic. My advisor and I have been meeting weekly, and while he says that I've got a couple of established projects that could become solid PhD theses, it's early enough yet in my graduate experience that I can still spend time challenging myself in search of a super-shiny topic. So we've been putting a good bit of thought into what makes particular topics time appropriate, influential, etc, such that they result in classic, highly cited papers. Good things to think about, but not always entirely obvious.

The last week or so was dubbed ' 70's week ', and we've been hitting up a bunch of classic papers from the 70's. Some of them are terrible, some of them are pretty neat. Mostly what I've been struck by however, is the realization that a lot of the topics that turn up in weekly lab meetings and paper discussions and over lunch at the cafeteria - they're not really 'new' hot topics to the extent that I usually consider them. I've been surprised by just how much these 'old' papers are really discussing the same ideas that we still wrestle with today in ecology and evolution. Sure their discussions tend to be a little more qualitative and verbal than quantitative, and they aren't using all of the powerful new methods and resources that have been developed more recently. But a lot of the ideas are there.

Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised - lots of smart people have been (and are) ecologists. Wading into the literature though has been a good experience. I am both comforted and somewhat stymied by these realizations though - on the one hand, it's good to realize that even though a lot of the really foundational ideas in our discipline have been thought out and written about for decades, people are still making a living and doing good work to flesh out these ideas without having to come up with paradigm shaking new concepts. On the other hand, while I'm challenging myself to try to come up with a super shiny new idea, it's intimidating to realize how much has already been though out/discovered, and the extent to which most of what is done these days is 'just' filling in the blanks.

Ok, back to the late 70's....

Where do classics come from?

2010-09-27T10:50:00.001-04:00

Quotes from R. McIntosh, "Citation Classics of Ecology"

"A less professional recognition was given to a Scottish landlady who fed J. H. Connell very economically, and stretched out his G. I. Bill funds. [...] Collateral stimuli were attributed by some authors to liquid refreshments ranging from soup to bitters and to the cup that cheers without inebriating, tea."

"Several [Ecological Classics] were explicitly considerations or tests of theory, and some urged the utility of theory as a guide in their research. Paul Dayton, however, among others, had reservations. He commented, 'Ecology often seems dominated by theoretical bandwagons driven by charismatic mathematicians; lost to many is the realization that good ecology rests on a foundation of solid natural history...'"

Grad students are people...

2010-09-19T13:05:00.001-04:00

"Initial premise: Graduate Students are People.

Graduate students can be described by models identifying their many functional and structural roles in research labs, field projects, classrooms, and budgets. However, the most encompassing model of the nature of a graduate student is the humanistic model, encompassing submodels of both physical and psychological well-being. Given this premise, a long list of corollaries can be developed. [...] "

- D. Binkley, 1988. Some advice for graduate advisors. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 69 (1): 10-13.

Unknowable

2010-08-24T21:50:00.002-04:00

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every breathing heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glance into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always that individuality, and which I shall carry in mind to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?"

- Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

Changing structure of scientific inquiry

2010-08-11T08:44:00.004-04:00

At ESA the other week (this post got slowed down by my now traditional post ESA cold), I attended an intriguing symposium on Ecoinformatics that led my thoughts in an interesting direction. Ecoinformatics (short for Ecological informatics) is, broadly, concerned with solving the technological challenges of making the increasing wealth of ecological data broadly available, accessible, and analyzable (?). In the symposium, several presentations were given on different efforts to unite existing ecological databases (DataONE) and to create a system for authors to submit datasets related to their publications (Dryad - which currently focuses on evolutionary biology, not ecology specifically).

This second project I find particularly exciting. There are many challenges that need to be worked out to make it a reality, but I really just want to comment on a few of the things that I found especially cool:

1) Authors will be expected to submit properly formatted and annotated data related to their papers for archival at the time they submit papers for publication. If done well, with an appropriate system, this means lots of cool data available to the scientific community allowing many interesting synthesis and modeling projects, and potentially fostering many cool collaborations. (Obviously lots of interesting challenges involving appropriate citations, etc, embargoing sensitive data or allowing authors more time to publish follow up papers, infrastructure issues, funding, etc.)

2) I was amused thinking about how this would mark a further step in the Ford-ification of Science; already within big lab groups, PI's have Big Ideas and write grants and get funding that supports various post docs and grad students and technicians who experiment, collect data, and analyze it. Open access data sets could compartmentalize science even more, making it totally possible to do great science and synthesis without ever collecting data. Fascinating to think about. Specialization can bring rewards in terms of skill levels at particular tasks, and increased efficiency, along with new challenges, such as making sure that appropriate data are gathered, and that communication between roles is good.

Anyways; fun to think about.

Back from ESA

2010-08-08T19:48:00.002-04:00

Just returned from an intense week of ecology thanks to the ESA's annual conference in Pittsburgh. It was a stimulating and eventful meeting for me, and has me motivated to start blogging again occasionally. As soon as I unpack, do laundry, water my plants, attempt to rescue my garden besieged with weeds, make dinner.........

Day 3 update: the magical land of spring-break campus

2010-03-09T21:40:00.003-05:00

Ok, so today went a little differently than expected...

I read in the morning as usual for this week, but did so at a coffee shop in near campus instead of at home, to mix things up and to get some caffeine into the system. Spring break is a marvelous thing - I didn't have to wait in line at the shop, I didn't have to fight for a table, and I didn't have to wear headphones to drown out the usual crowd of students and others. I got a seat near the fire place AND the window. Magical. Walking around campus is a lot more fun too - fewer cars, fewer maniacal bikers trying to run me over, and fewer slow walkers to dodge (yeah, I'm one of those fast-walking types). The only downside is that the library closes early. Ooops. Guess I'll have to wait another day before delving into the catacombs of hierarchy theory.

Mid-day I showed up at one of my reading groups (having not been prepared enough last week to imply upcoming absence). But it was cool - one of the better little interactions I've had with such groups - everyone was tasked with bringing a single slide containing graphs/analysis of data they've been working on. I think I was the only one that rigidly followed the directions, managing to get 5 graphs intelligibly on a powerpoint slide. It was cool though to hear really succinct tidbits about a real diversity of different projects in progress - I feel like I learned something interesting from each one, which is more than I usually expect.

However, the downside to all of this is that, in addition to taking me away from my reclusive reading for a while, it also got me thinking about my current data analysis project again... and I had new ideas that I couldn't wait to try out. It's possible that I spent pretty much all afternoon tinkering with R code. But my new stuff works decently well (still a bit kloodgy) and I think it will save me a lot of time in the coming weeks, as I've been able to generalize a function so that I can give it in short notation the statistical model that I want to fit, and it will go off and do it for me, without my having to write out explicitly what I want each time with minor variations and new names. Pretty exciting. Now if only I could do it more elegantly.... hmmmm

BEWARE: Caution my dear readers; for those of you not already hooked... programming can get really really addictive. It has a way of inspiring the feeling that the breakthrough you've been waiting for is just around the corner, and then holding out success on you for hours or days on end. In this case, I've got a general formula now that lets me combine multiple linear regression and multiple logistic regression on two different distributions combined in a mixture distribution and fit in one fell swoop by maximum likelihood analysis. Fear me.

Oh, and it makes pretty graphs too.

Tomorrow I will strengthen my resolve and return to another day of reading. It's supposed to be rainy too, so I'll be less inclined to frolic around campus pretending that I don't have to share it with anyone. I'm off to delete a few dozen emails before bed.

Theo out.

Think Week: Day 2

2010-03-08T22:35:00.003-05:00

Ok, time for an update on think week - this'll help make me draw my thoughts together. Just got back from a lovely sunny walk to a park down the street... it was nice enough that I wore my spring jacket and sat on a bench in the sun writing for a while! Spring here we come!

At this point I've polished off pretty much all of the articles on the reading list I put up yesterday. Some I read with greater attention than others; several of them are reviews of books that I'm going to get out of the library when it's open again. Together though, they cover about 2 decades of an on-going discussion about whether or not general ecological laws can exist, and if they can what are they, do they matter, and have we found them yet? Lots of comparisons an analogies are made to physics and other disciplines (these are part of the 'physics envy' debate). I think collectively, too, they're part of a (relatively) young field attempting to define and justify itself, something that at least traditional physics has moved beyond long since. Some of these papers were suggested to me during a discussion I had with an empiricist about what theoretical ecology is as a field/discipline (a definition I'm still turning over in my head).

In an attempt to summarize:

Ecology is a complex field. Complexity varies with scale relative to the observer, and just how complex something is relative to our attempts to predict it depends on the number of interacting entities involved, the nonlinearity of their interactions, and the degree of precision desired in predictions relative to the scale of the interacting entities. By way of analogy to physics (as is so often done) - when we deal with systems of many interacting particles, like gases, we can predict their macroscopic properties really well, drawing statistical conclusions and looking at average behaviors. But any physicist would be pretty unhappy about having to predict the exact trajectory of an individual gas molecule, or even a collection of them.

In the same way, as Lawton and others point out, within ecosystems the number of interactions that occur between different species and their environments is large. Broad scale patterns as explained by a growing number of macroecological ideas are somewhat easy to capture, arising out of statistical relationships and generalizations (ie, we can predict general relationships between species abundances and distributions, body size and geographic range, etc). On the other hand, he points out that we're also increasingly good at working with population level dynamics, and developing general principles governing them, like physicists can predict the interactions of a few particles. But we get stuck at the intermediate scale of communities, which are a whole bunch of species interacting locally. A lot of this makes sense and rings true, although I think the outlook for community ecology is a little brighter than he made it seem; we are tracking down relevant mechanisms, and weaving them together and understanding more all the time.

The crux of the matter though, is that making good predictions at the community level is really important, because in many cases, that's where a lot of our visible ecological/environmental problems are taking place. That's the scale that managers work at, and the level at which endangered species are handled often. So some of the greatest need for strong predictions arise at scales that may be fundamentally the hardest to understand and generate predictions for, without the time and resources to do a lot of comprehensive and often case specific studies. Also, a lot of what we find most compelling about ecology are all of the fascinating stories of unbelievable species interactions, incredible organisms and wacky environments. Good thing I like a challenge.

Seems like there's a tricky balance between 1) throwing up your hands despairingly and saying we can never know anything general about communities and will have to studying all of them individually, and 2) looking too hard for a holy grail of generality that may not be feasible. You don't want to get so focused on a particular species or system that you lose all perspective. And at the same time, the only way we're going to get anywhere is by looking at a bunch of deep case studies of communities in particular systems and searching for patterns and interacting mechanisms. How does all of this fit in with the scope and time scale of a PhD thesis? Holy grails take too long and are risky, and organismal myopia is bad for job prospects down the road... I need to figure out how to trace a middle road.

Topical list for tomorrow (Time to start getting more concrete):

- whole lake manipulates by Steve Carpenter et al.

- check out papers, yet to be selected, on microcommunities in pitcher plants and bromeliads

- finish a great conceptual paper on spatial coexistence, drawing together a body of theory (Amarasekare. Competitive coexistence in spatially structured environments: a synthesis. Ecol Letters (2003) vol. 6 (12) pp. 1109-1122 doi: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00530.x)

- check out this crazy topic I stumbled on earlier, "Hierarchy theory"

- a few papers from the voluminous works of Bob Holt

- foodwebs and maximum likelihood analysis ala Stefano Allesina

- having finished off the ~17 papers in my big ideas folder, it's time to take a whack at the 52 in the regular to-read pile.

Stay tuned for more!

Two of the more formative papers from today's reading:

Lawton. Are there general laws in ecology?. Oikos (1999) pp. 177-192

Simberloff. Community ecology: is it time to move on?. Am Nat (2004) vol. 163 (6) pp. 787-799

Spring Break = Think Week?

2010-03-07T09:53:00.003-05:00

Apparently Bill Gates has a long running tradition of holding 'Think Weeks', where he would retreat to a small, remote cottage and spend a week intensively reading papers (to the tune of more than a hundred a week), thinking about up and coming trends in the technology business and how to strategically direct Microsoft over the coming year and beyond. Also drinking lots of orange soda. Check it out here.

I mention this because I've been planning my own variation on 'Think Week' this coming week, coincident with our spring break and a brief respite from coursework. Goals for the upcoming week:

- Try to read everything in my 'To Read' category in Papers (currently sitting at ~52 papers)

- Follow my nose beyond that

- I'm going to start really broad, with a set of commentaries on ecology, theoretical ecology, and where they're heading (the good, bad and ugly), then towards the end of the week start to read more narrowly

Best case scenario, I'd like to emerge from the end of the week having identified:

- 1-3 topical areas that I would enjoy doing a dissertation on,

- 2-3 theories/models related to these topical areas that I could try to test with experiments (and possibly additional theory) over the summer.

This blog is going to be one of the outlets for me to keep myself on task, as well as collect and summarize my ideas a bit. I'll try to post a daily reading list of what I've been looking through each day. Suggestions of other good articles are most welcome.

Here's my queue for today (Big ideas in ecology):

Stumbled upon: "Humpty Dumpty Effect"

2010-03-01T23:28:00.002-05:00

Whilst reading a review (Young et al. 2005, Ecology Letters) in preparation for a reading group I might sit in on, I stumbled across the term 'Humpty Dumpty effect'. After a good chuckle, I did a bit more side-track reading to find out about this curious monicker. Check it out, it's pretty cool:

"Humpty Dumpty and the Ghosts" - NYT

In other brief news, I finished my review of that manuscript and turned it in; we'll see where it goes! It was an interesting learning experience, and I think (hope?) I did a pretty thorough job. I've also kicked out two abstracts for conference presentations; Transient Theorist is going to be at MEEC and ESA this year! (Pending ESA's acceptance, technically). Now I just need to figure out where I want to head with research this summer...

More posts to come towards the end of the week; I've been squeezing in some interesting reading on general theories of ecology, and other articles trying to define what our field is, what it seeks to do, where it's heading and if it will ever get there. Heady stuff. Not sure what I'll have to add to it, but it is really interesting to think about - I should practice defining and justifying my discipline more concretely and more often.

Not again...

2010-02-19T15:22:00.002-05:00

It is really discomforting to have your grad advisor tell you that probably you should have chosen a different program/institution, even when it's said with the best of intentions in a friendly manner and a "hindsight is golden" attitude. This is the second time I've heard this from him. It doesn't make a bit of difference now where I could have gone, this is where I am. All that is accomplished by saying that is adding another little dent to my self confidence, which is a little shaky right now as I still have no concrete plans for the summer or a dissertation topic. It's challenging enough for me to stomp out the little voice in my head that says the same thing, without it being aided by external confirmation. Oh well. I'm sure it's not intentional; certainly not his fault that I'm feeling fragile.

In other news, I think I've just about finished writing up this manuscript review. I think it's a little long and I probably have spent too much time on it. Not going to submit it right away, as I want to take another look at what I wrote again tomorrow. I want to make sure I'm not either making what I wrote too harsh or too accommodating due to today's fluctuation in my confidence/anxiety levels. I've got another week anyways; maybe someone will look over it too. Wheeeee!

Scientific writing + Plagiarism in different disciplines

2010-02-16T21:55:00.003-05:00

So I read through the manuscript that I was asked to review, and I've decided to go for it. It's not directly in an area with which I have tons of experience, but I know enough about it in a general way that I've been able to do some background reading and browsing through the references to get up to speed. If this were a longer paper, one with more technical difficulty, or for a higher level journal, I'd ask for a rain check. But I've decided that I can do this, and it will be a learning experience, and I have to start somewhere. I'm up to the challenge. And hopefully I'll be able to get a reality check/advice from either my advisor or a good friend and post-doc in our lab.

I'm only about halfway through an intensive reading of the manuscript, and it's already raised some interesting challenges and presented me with issues I've never thought about before. I'm feeling more and more like I'll actually have some useful advice and critiques to share. I have suggestions already for improving the intro, extending and clarifying the analysis, and even on a technical aspect of a certain statistical test/related assumptions.

One aspect though is particularly tricky; to summarize (while maintaining confidentiality)...

My big question for this post is: What constitutes plagiarism in scientific literature? (I've heard more than one person refer to the Supreme Court quote "I know it when I see it" during discussions of this topic). I have some previous experience working as a peer tutor for college level english courses. As you might expect, as a discipline, English/Literature seems to me to place much more emphasis on particular sequences of words or phrasings as being the intellectual property of an author. To avoid plagiarism we advised students to substantially paraphrase and reword similar sentences, or to use a cited, direct quote employing lovely punctuation: the ever popular " and ". In this paper I'm reviewing, after looking up references, it has become apparent to me that entire sentences can be traced to previous articles by different authors, almost verbatim (usually with the omissions or substitutions of only a couple of words).

Now I'm left to wonder how big of a deal this is. It makes me uncomfortable because I know it would be a problem for the english students I used to advise, but this is a different context. Scientific writing is necessarily more precise, and often there are fewer alternative ways of saying the same thing. The emphasis in science is on the creativity of research ideas and methods, the ideological content that is conveyed by language, and less so on the creativity of language used for communication.

Further muddying the waters, after looking at several of the citations, its clear that existing papers in the literature also use very very similar language when describing this particular kind of model, although usually these are multiple papers by the same author (not the same group as the one behind the paper I'm currently reviewing, and in better journals by and large). Is it ok to plagiarize yourself? If other papers in the literature use such identifiably similar language, is this standard for the discipline and I just haven't paid close enough attention before?

I think that a really important aspect of plagiarism is intent. Intentional and willful plagiarism without appropriate citations is a much more clear cut situation in my opinion - it's flat out wrong and demands serious consequences. Unintentional plagiarism is more grey, and I think requires more subtlety in its resolution. In this particular case, it's likely that the authors don't speak English as a first language, and there's no obvious intent to disguise the source of the models and ideas as citations are given. If direct quotes and quotation marks were used, I wouldn't blink (except for how rarely direct quotes seem to show up in journal articles). The wording is just soooo similar. Some journals have (relatively) clear policies on this, but not the one I'm reviewing for.

I'd love to hear what you all think... Are standards for plagiarism different in different disciplines? Should they be? And, (this is the part I'm stuck on right now), what is the appropriate role of a reviewer in this kind of situation? What kind of accommodations, if any, should be made due to linguistic and cultural differences in the peer review and publication process, especially as research becomes more and more international?

In upcoming posts I'll say more about this process as I work through it and figure out more about the role of a reviewer.

Theo out.

The hazards of being a scientist

2010-02-12T08:36:00.002-05:00

As a graduate student, I do a lot of writing. And when I do mathematics, I really like begin able to write in multiple colors; it helps me see different parts of equations, or pick out particular variables, or make clear thought-graphs. My favorite pens for the last several years have been this kind:

I can get them in packs of 5 or 6 different colors, they're great. Lots of ink, they last a long long time. (Tiny caveat/caution - I no longer take these with me on plane trips to conferences, etc, as the change in air pressure seems to cause them to leak more often than not).

However, as I learned the other day, it's a very bad idea to say, absent mindedly place one of the red pens in your pocket without putting the cap on it first. About halfway through the day I noticed a huge red splotch on the side of my pants. (Not being cool enough/well dressed enough to wear a shirt with pockets on a regular basis, and not having found a pocket protector made for pants, I often carry my pens unprotected in my pants pocket). About half a reservoir's worth of red ink had soaked into my jeans. A stack of paper towels later, I was able to absorb enough of it to not risk staining anything else. But I had to spend the rest of the day walking around looking like my leg was gravely wounded.

The side of my leg is still pink, although I've had some success getting the stain out of my pants surprisingly. I let them soak overnight after rubbing in a baking soda paste, and then washed them with some oxyclean. The next time around, I figured that if baking soda paste worked well, then things could only improve if I rubbed in some baking soda paste and then dumped some vinegar on the stain. I mean, who knows, right? That was always the best course of action back when I was a practicing kitchen scientist. And I have vague notions that maybe the CO2 production will bubble through the fabric and release the ink somehow. Probably crazy... but it sure was fun to mix the two together again!

So, the moral(s) of this story:

1) Always use protection.

2) When in doubt, use vinegar and baking soda.

3) Maybe remember to put pen caps on before jamming pens into your pocket.

Theo out.

Science + Romance + NPR

2010-02-12T08:17:00.002-05:00

Does it get any better than that combo?

Check out their neat story about the Voyager project that brought together Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan here

Wow. And you can listen to parts of the recording of language, music and biology placed on a gold record and carried onboard the Voyager spacecraft as they push on into outer space.

Writing a review???

2010-02-08T20:26:00.003-05:00

The other day, I opened up my email, and found a message from an editor at a lower-level, peer reviewed ecology journal. This polite message was address to "Dr. Theo Miss-spelledLastName", and turned out to be a request that I consider reviewing the attached manuscript to evaluate it for publication in their journal, based on provided criteria.

First reaction (worth enjoying):

WOW! This is pretty exciting, I've never gotten such a request before. And it definitely counts as being another little step towards becoming a bonafide scientist.

Further reflection:

Peer review is a hugely important part of scientific pursuits; it's what helps us set and assure standards of quality, rigor and academic integrity in our discipline, both in the work of others, and in our own. Reviewers to the best of my knowledge usually remain anonymous, so they are free to provide honest, critical (and hopefully constructive!) opinions without fear of political/career repercussions. In its most idealistic sense, it also helps to free the evaluation of the merit and originality of ideas from being dictated by a limited number of people (publishers, editors), making science more democratic, and hopefully dissuading the rejection of an idea because it is unpopular, instead of actually unsound. (Whether or not this always works out the way it should is certainly a matter of some debate).

Any paper submitted to a journal that goes out for review usually needs at least two reviewers. Without doing any explicit math here, I'm sure you can see that the number of reviewers needed to evaluate all of the papers being submitted to this, and other journals, adds up pretty quickly! Most of this process is handled through a sort of unspoken karmic system - one of our responsibilities as academics that want to have our own papers published someday is to also serve as a reviewer for the work of others. When people do their share, this helps support the important goal of maintaining an effective peer review system. (This is overly rosy and deserves qualifiers; I know that less than ideal things happen, but I don't want to go into that at present).

I'm a little conflicted over this one. I'm excited and honored to be asked (although I'm sure in a few years it'll seem like no big deal), especially as someone must have referred me - which probably means they think I can do a good job. I want to do my karmic share. Then, on the other hand, I'm no expert, I haven't even published yet myself (just one failed attempt), I have a lot yet to learn and a bunch of projects on my plate, and they didn't even get my name right.

Another part of the karmic system is that the not-yet-published manuscripts that you read as a reviewer are held in confidence - in other words, you can't take their ideas before they've published them, or copy their work, or distribute it to other people. I don't know if this is kosher or not, but I did take a brief look through the paper to try to get a sense of how challenging it is prior to making my decision... I think I could do it, although certainly not as well or as thoroughly as someone with more experience and knowledge.

I'm going to sleep on it (again), and will make a decision tomorrow; I don't want to slow down the process if I choose not to review it, as they'll have to locate someone else. Otherwise, I have several weeks. I want to do my share in order to do right by the system, but I also want to do right for the authors of the manuscript and make sure they get a fair, knowledgeable and useful review.

Ups and downs

2010-02-03T14:09:00.002-05:00

So lately I've been feeling very positive about my work and productivity. To summarize:

- I'm keeping up with course work for two classes

- I've presented at two different lab meetings

- I've attended a slew of seminars

- I'm making significant progress on two different manuscripts both headed towards publication, on both of which I'll likely be first author. Not earth shattering work, but interesting and solid in my opinion.

- I'm learning LaTeX

- I've been able to squeeze in select reading on a potential study system, and I'm feeding myself small morsels of a plant ecology text book and absorbing more knowledge on hierarchical modeling.

So I'm doing all of this stuff, and making lists and evaluating myself and checking things off. Which is good. Feels way better than last semester, and I'm more involved and interested in what I'm doing.

But somehow, all it took was a 30 minute interaction with my advisor while walking across campus, containing the phrase 'So, do you have any more thoughts on your thesis and what you want to do this summer?' and now I feel like everything that I've been doing is just filler, because I don't feel a bit closer to figuring that out or converging even slightly on a topic. 0 to substantial anxiety in under 60 seconds... yeehaww. Major downer.

I'm enjoying a lot of what I've been up to, even writing (!) which I often find to be a struggle/boring. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I'm far too tool oriented. I like problems where I learn more tools - different programming languages, different mathematical techniques, more statistics or experimental methods. I'm fascinated by all of this technology... But I think I have to stop picking out projects based on the tools I get to learn! I really should be selecting them based more on the questions they're addressing... otherwise I'm going to end up being a hell of a technician, but probably not much of a scientist.

The sensations are very similar to my experience last year trying to pick out a graduate school/advisor, except there the alternatives were well defined and finite. This decision could be just as significant/important, but is so much more open ended. There's no way to make up a pros and cons list of insanity like I did last year. I don't know how to tackle all of this, particularly when it's so easy to fill up all of my time working on other things. Ugh.

Intimidating questions

2010-01-19T16:53:00.002-05:00

For one of my seminar classes this semester, I'm supposed to answer the questions:

1) If you were to write a single paper on your dissertation research, what would be the title?

2) What is the most important unresolved question in your field of research?

Panic mode! These are very important and cutting questions, that I need to think about... but which I feel vastly unprepared to answer. Given that I have no dissertation research yet, or even a dissertation topic. And given that I'm still learning more every day about my (broad) field of research. I've been procrastinating, but I only have an hour left so I'm about out of time.

I wrote down a bunch of keywords for the things I'm interested in, and did a google search. Just to see if any insane people have tried combining ALL of these topics at once with any success. Surprisingly, a paper by my advisor came up as the fourth hit. I guess that's a good sign, as I sometimes wonder if I'm in the right lab (probably not a unique worry).

Ok, time to hammer out some BS title using some of these words and picking a system.

2010: Graduate Semester Two

2010-01-07T16:35:00.003-05:00

*high five* if you get the subject line book reference...

One of my biggest "New Years" resolutions this year has got to be trying to implement regular, constructive evaluation of my work and progress. I need the self-awareness and motivation that I hope this will increase. In this spirit, I tried to put together a big big list of what my goals are for 2010, academically and personally. Things I would like to do. Things that I have to do, but hope to do well. Almost all of that list is here (it's long, no obligations to read it):

Professional/Academic

Dissertation topic - I need one. Even in a vague incarnation. So that I can start directing my reading, and planning summer experiments.
Graduate committee - this sort of has to happen after #1, but also has to happen before I know that I've finished my coursework.
Publications - I'm currently sitting on 2-3 projects that, if written up appropriately, could almost certainly be published somewhere. I need to do this. I've been sucking at making headway, mostly due to procrastination, and this needs to change if I'm going to make this science thing work. I care less right now about where they get published than that they do get published somewhere, and that in the process I start figuring out a good system for writing. Maybe I need to schedule a weekly time for doing this.
Finish coursework - after this fall's experience with classes, I've pretty much decided that there aren't anymore classes that are really important/useful for me to take, that I can't learn more efficiently and effectively on my own, if I'm disciplined enough. I wasted a lot of time. Now I want to finish off the bare bones requirements that I have remaining, and move on (there's some hope of actually accomplishing this by the end of this semester, subject to the dictates of the committee I need to assemble - see #2).
Be selective about seminar attendance.
Take better notes - when reading and in seminars. Things make sense at the time, but I don't remember them as well as I usually think I will. I also need to take notes in a more organized fashion so that I actually can find, and go back and look at the information I bothered to record.
I need to start practicing generating ideas. I'm going to get a special notebook and write down all of my crazy ideas and questions. Maybe I'll keep track of how many I have each week.
READ MORE - fewer classes for me this semester. I need to sit down and actually read through the stack of interesting books and reference materials I have fun picking out but rarely actually read. Same goes for journal articles. I'm good and finding and collecting them, I need to get better at internalizing them.
Statistics - one of my old undergraduate bad habits reappeared this past fall. Despite loving my statistics course, I shirked on the reading from the assigned texts. I really need to go through this stuff, I know I would find it interesting and useful.
Learn LaTeX - I'm auditing a seminar on this weekly.
Spend less effort on classes and more on my own scientific interests - probably.
Remember to be EXCITED about what I'm doing and the opportunities I have.
Every time I read a theory paper, I need to try to think up a corresponding experiment. I've decided there's no one around here that's going to force me to think about this - I have to push myself to do it if it's going to happen. And this is a skill I dearly want to have, so I don't end up spending my life generating, but never empirically testing, theories.
Table of Contents - I signed up to receive a lot of them. So I need to actually read them instead of letting them sit in my inbox for a few weeks and then deleting the backlogs.
Learn about experimental opportunities at my field station - talk to people about what they're doing, and what resources, data sets and opportunities are available to me as I'm designing my own project.
Hang out with more empiricists - I'm going to try to sit in on some lab meetings of another lab group that does a lot of good empirical work, again as part of trying to train my brain.
Reading lists - I want to find a good way to compile them and actually make use of them, instead of just dumping reading material into folders from whence it rarely again sees the light of my LCD screen.
Self evaluation - On a regular basis, look at my goals and evaluate my progress towards them.

Personal:

Regular exercise - this makes me better mentally and physically. I need to set up something regular here in the city; attending weekly soccer games on friday nights out at the Bio station didn't work well - by that time I was always just too tired mentally and physically to have the motivation to make it happen. I may join a different team here in the city; my cousin and I are also going to try to set regular racquetball matches.
Break some habits - less TV, less eating out, a few other things
Food - do a better job of eating regularly, more fruit, less processed stuff. I should do this to unwind instead of TV shows on hulu.
Plan my garden - for this summer out at the station!!! very exciting
Spend less time being stimulated - that probably sounds weird. What I mean is, not spending 12+ hours in front of a computer screen consuming random information and noise and visuals. I could use more regular, healthy doses of silence and existence, instead of information overload drowning out self reflection.
Meet non-science people - I realized the other day that everyone I know here in the city, and actually the whole state, on anything like a friendship basis, is a scientist of one variety or another. While I love scientists, I really need more balance and diversity than this. Not sure how to go about it yet.
Try attending the catholic graduate student group get-togethers - this might help with #5 and #6 if I stop chickening out.
Sleep wake cycle - get up earlier, go to bed earlier, make both times more consistent. I'm a morning person, and I need to get that schedule back again, even though a lot of my friends are more night owls. I'll be happier and more productive.
Correspondence - stay in touch with friends better.
Say NO more often
Do something creative and non-scientific
Volunteer - I think I'd be happier if I were engaged in some fairly regular activity doing something with tangible, short term, realized positive results. Would make me feel less useless/pointless, and meet new people.

Might add more things as I think of them. This is a lot to do... but no one ever accused me of not being ambitious in my projects!!!

Happy New Years everyone!

Fall semester in review

2010-01-07T13:19:00.003-05:00

The good, the bad, and the ugly (on fall semester academics):

Good

No one's kicked me out of graduate school yet, so I've still got them all fooled.
I found myself more than capable of handling my coursework; frequently it felt downright easy.
I had a great statistics class, learned some things, and did significant work on an interesting project.
I've got a great labmate, and also a great cohort of first year students to muddle along with.
Heard some really interesting and exciting talks given by various visiting seminar speakers
Attended a neat, small conference and met some interesting people
Gave my first lecture (~3 hours long, and technically at a graduate level!)

Bad

I made no progress on writing up papers for either my undergraduate project (since August), or the project I completed prior to graduate school as a technician working with my advisor (and presented on at ESA in August). This is kind of inexcusable, since both of them are pretty much sitting around, results in hand, and crying out to be written up and published.
My courses frequently felt too easy. My typical response to this is to get frustrated with the subject, unmotivated and rather apathetic. This didn't matter when the course in question was "Technical Theater" or some other course for my liberal arts undergrad degree. This matters a lot, and is harmful, when the course in question is directly related to my field of study for my graduate work. I spent a lot of time feeling frustrated that classes were too easy and I knew too much for them, and simultaneously feeling extremely overwhelmed about how much I don't know about my field, etc. Again, this didn't help much when it came to me getting stuff done. Something I need to rise above.
Part way through the semester, I realized that I was attending far too many seminars because I felt obligated to do so, rather than because their content matter was interesting to me (there are a lot of seminars that happen at a university this big). Then, as a result, about halfway through the seminar my attention would wander, however caffienated I was, and I'd spend the next 30+ minutes with open, glazed over eyes, staring into space in the general direction of the speaker. In at least one instance, this unproductive stupor carried over into the rest of the afternoon following the seminar, and in my attempt to get home I took the wrong bus twice before it all wore off.
Not enough critical (= useful) self evaluation and too much self criticism. I just sort of worked at whatever was on the top of my vaguely defined to-do pile, hoping stuff would get done, and drifting along, with the tensions mentioned above. I need to intentionally and constructively review my work and my progress towards defined goals on a regular basis and try to discipline myself more. If I can make myself do it, this will be much more useful and productive than maintaining a constant, diffuse, critical feeling of being inadequate.

Ugly

Deciding that because my classes felt too easy all semester long, I'd pick out very very challenging topics/projects/analyses for my various final projects and finally challenge myself. Challenging yourself is good. Challenging yourself on 3 different fronts simultaneously under a 2 week deadline is ugly.
As my (more assertive) lab mate has observed and pointed out to me, I don't tell people 'no' often enough. I like being helpful, and am very loyal to my friends, but I need to set boundaries for myself so that I don't let these traits, and the interactions that result from them, consume all of my time and energy. I'm sure this is something I will face in the future when (if??? long story) I get a TA position, but there the official nature of my position will help me draw a line. With friends, fellow students, etc, it's a lot harder for me to say no. As I have fewer classes this semester, it'll help, as there will be fewer classmates asking for help. It's not my job to teach them - that's the professor's job (at one point this semester, the prof for one of my classes was very busy, and referred a few students to me to get questions answered. This is ok when I am established and know what I'm doing, but this past semester it became a significant time sink when I really need to be getting my own act together). I also need to place some restrictions on what sorts of collaborations I engage in. I have some ideas on this, but it's a topic for another post.

Summary

Fall semester was far from a disaster, there are a lot of good things going here, and I learned some stuff. I didn't accomplish a lot of what I wanted to, but I have some ideas why, and on how to do better this Spring. I've got some good friends, have handled living in a city and being more independent than ever. I haven't been kicked out, and I haven't lost my enthusiasm for the things I do.

Next blog post: Goals for 2010/New Year's resolutions.

Cool graph

2009-12-09T20:15:00.002-05:00

Check it out:

That there is science Theo-style.

10 Points if you can tell me what this is a graph of. Hint: it's not archaeological... (leave a comment)

Self-cooking Turkeys and the perils of extrapolation

2009-12-03T23:24:00.004-05:00

In a jovial mood over Thanksgiving, as my mother attempted to figure out how long to cook our 18 lb bird, I came up with the following graph:

Basically, Joy of Cooking recommends different lengths of cooking time per pound your turkey weighs. They give three increments based on a range of total bird weight, as as the bird gets larger, the length of time per pound decreases. Amused at the thought of this, I did a little extrapolation, and determined that if we get a ~32 pound turkey next year, according to the Joy of Cooking, it should cook itself!!! (if we can ever get it to defrost)

Oops.

2009-11-11T23:08:00.001-05:00

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What dreams do come.

2009-10-22T22:17:00.002-04:00

I had a dream last night, the first one that I've remembered clearly on waking in a very long time. I was in a house, with quite a few members of my extended family. I had the feeling that it was my parents' house, but it wasn't one that they've ever owned while I was alive. There was a fire place, with a fire burning in it - one of those that has glass on two sides so you can see through into a different room. Everyone was sort of dressed in dark clothes and it was rather dark in the house, but for the fire place. They were all getting ready to leave the house, to go to a funeral, my grandmother's funeral. Except my grandmother and my grandfather were both there, getting ready to go with everyone else. I was walking up the stairs into the main part of the house, getting ready to go along with everyone else, but then I was told that someone had to stay behind and watch the fire in the fireplace, because it was important that it stay lit. And it fell to me, since apparently "I wasn't all that involved in keeping up with the family anyways". So I stayed there and watched the fire burn and everyone else left.

So that was the dream. I'm generally not much into dream analysis or anything, but damn, there's a lot in that one that hits kind of close to home in some discomforting ways.

Grad school update

2009-09-09T00:01:00.004-04:00

After that last rather introspective post, here are some more up-beat particulars on life :-)

Made it through my first sets of classes. I think I'm going to like the graduate school deal - classes are more predominantly based on a "learn it yourself based on your own interests" with "teachers as facilitators" philosophies, which I really like/prefer. And, 9 credits is hardly a killer load.

I still haven't been able to settle into a regular schedule yet, due to a partial week last week, a long weekend, fighting with a sinus infection (boo), and now, prepping to leave for a small, several day conference, starting mid-day tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it quite a bit, although I wish I wasn't sick, and that I'd been able to prepare better for it before hand.

Still only slowly getting to know other students and people in the area; there are some good people around. Probably I should be patient.

Annnnd, I made an awesome pizza for dinner! almost close enough to my fav. italian pizza to ring familiar taste buds.

Theo out.

Meaningless words

2009-09-08T23:06:00.002-04:00

I think this is the second time in my life this has happened to me, and I don't really understand how it happens, or if there is (or should be), any cure. About all I can do is document the phenomenon itself.

One of the fundamental gifts of our species is language, allowing us to communicate ideas and most importantly aspects of ourselves, our identities to each other. Language relies heavily on symbolism - a word, an image, a sound or a gesture is given meaning when two or more people recognize it as a true symbol of some action, thing, or relationship. For language to be a successful means of communication, it is essential for both parties to believe that a certain symbol truly stands for this one other thing. In other words, to communicate, at a certain level we have to trust that what someone is saying to us really means what we think it means.

If this linguistic code of honor is broken by lies, and by the twisting of words and phrases to mean something other than they were originally intended to mean, the ability to communicate through language begins to decay. The words themselves are still there, but their meaning(s) are lost, either because we no longer believe in their meaning, or we stop listening to their message. (Humanities flash-back: An old Greek Dude named Thucydides documents this phenomenon, and attributes the rapid collapse of an entire society to its effects).

What can happen to ancient Greek societies can also happen at smaller scales to friendships. It happened to me first several years ago, when in a bewildering couple of days I went from having what I thought was a really good friendship with someone, to the point where this person barely, and begrudgingly will even recognize my existence. I still don't understand how things went the way that they did, but somehow, my friend decided that I saw all human relationships as a game and friendships as an intellectual, but not emotional, connection. (not at all how I see myself). Somehow that also got entwined with a deep mistrust in anything I said. After that, I could see a good friendship going down the tubes, and I had no way of even trying to save it, because anything I said was mistrusted; my words were rendered meaningless. Pushed over the cliff, and no way back up.

I haven't really thought about this in quite some time; I couldn't explain it, I couldn't understand it, and it hurt, so I put it away.

But I'm slowly realizing that a similar thing is developing in another of my friendships, where our interactions have grown almost formulaic. Pretty much any response on either side is predictable. Conversations inevitably feature the same topics. Each person shares the same frustrations and challenges, and gets the same, expected, customary responses. It's not that the words are being deemed as lies (so far as I know), but if you know what will be said to something before you even ask it, then it's really easy to stop listening to the words, and to let the meaning behind the words leech away, until only brittle skeletons of meaning remain. If communication, and hence language, is the glue that binds people together in friendships, and this language gets a severe case of osteoporosis, what's left of the friendship?

I don't know what to think here. This is certainly not the case with even a large majority of my friendships, but I think it is very real, and occurs most commonly with very close friends, the ones I communicate with practically daily. Is it just the result of too much communication cheapening the value of words? Wear and tear due to over use? Is there any panacea for this weakness, or is it the case that the only solution to an unavoidable conclusion is to let the dissolution occur?

Right now I'm frustrated and tempted to think that I should make my excuses, shove off, and be content in later times with good memories from earlier days.

Tired of nagging.

2009-09-01T20:43:00.002-04:00

I've only been living with my cousin for about 2.5 weeks now, and I'm starting to get rather frustrated; hopefully not unreasonably so. Sorry for blurting this into cyberspace, but I need to get it off my chest.

Rent for September was due, well, Today. Prior to this, I personally have paid for both the deposit on the house (sometime back in, oh, April?), and rent for the portion of August that we've lived here for. It made sense, it was easier at the time, and I figured it would be no problem, I'd get paid back his half relatively expediently. But somehow it's still in the works. Ok, whatever, I'm laid back and I've got some cushion, we'll work this out. Now September has arrived, and as per my conversation with him, I've only paid for half of the rent as he wished to pay the other half independently instead of going through me. I took care of my end yesterday. You probably see where this is going... I reminded him at least twice yesterday to do something about it, and again this morning, and in an email from during the day while I was on campus.

I get home at 8 pm, and he hasn't checked his email, and he hasn't taken care of the rent payment. GRRRRR. He doesn't even have the right password for his account, etc, can't do anything about it tonight. So now, half of our rent is going to be late. I can handle tardiness between my cousin and I, but I feel terrible that now it's affecting our landlords, who I really like and have had a good relationship with. And, I feel like a nag because I've been bugging him for several days and nothing has happened. I'm glad that almost all of the utility bills are in my name if he's this bad about taking care of things on time. I'm not paying for late fees if he screws up. I hate nagging, and I don't want to feel like his parent. I know he has the money, that's not the issue. He just needs to open his eyes and realize that his parents aren't taking care of everything for him anymore, and I'm not going to step in and fill up that role.

And it just all makes me really frustrated. I hate money, and I hate making a deal about it, but this isn't right and I don't want to be taken advantage of unreasonably.

His gf has been visiting for almost the last week, and all they do is sleep in late, make messes, put recyclables in the garbage so I have to fish them out, eat my food, and go out for dinner and drinks. I, of all people, certainly appreciate the desire to spend a lot of quality time when a long distance girlfriend comes to visit, and so I've been trying to cut him a little slack, but I've about had it.

I'm dying for classes to start so that I can finally meet and regularly interact with other people, 'cause I'm going a little crazy right now after feeling like a cross between a third wheel and a parent in my own home for almost a week now.

Grumpy Theo signing off.

Can't go back?

2009-08-30T22:19:00.002-04:00

I like talking on the phone with my mom, it makes me happy. All the trappings of home, even from a distance - stories of a weekend spent moving wood and making doors, tomato sauce cooking on the stove from garden tomatoes, the "darn" dog underfoot again (like they'd want it any other way) and so on. Brings back good memories.

Also makes me feel a little bitter sweet - Seems like no matter how hard I try, setting up in new apartments and organizing new homes for myself, there's something that I can't even close to duplicate. And I really wish I could, 'cause I feel like until I get that right, every place I live seems temporary, and a bit of a disappointing shade of brown contentment. It's like playing house, or tea party as a kid - mimicking adult things. Each time maybe it gets closer to reality, but it still feels a long ways off from a home.

Lettuce Grow!

2009-08-30T16:17:00.002-04:00

I just planted a bunch of baby lettuces and spinach. I'm very excited. According to the seed packets, in 7-10 days I will start to see little plantlets! Hopefully before it frosts I'll be eating leafy greens grown in my very own backyard. This should help to disguise the fact that I'm living in a city.

In other good-food news, I found a farmers market in walking distance that takes place once a week. I'm going to try to do all of my vegetable shopping there from now on - at least until winter hits!

Lots of stuff has been happening on the grad school orientation new life end of things, but I haven't much felt like writing about it. So there.

Maybe you should go plant some lettuces too! I got my seed packs for ~3 dollars, and spent maybe an hour or so digging and planting. And I should get many many lettuce plants out of the deal - much more than I could buy for $3... I wish it were earlier in the season so I could plant other tasty things too, but the sun is deceptive and I saw an orange leave the other day - fall is just around the corner.

The still of the night

2009-08-23T22:48:00.003-04:00

I'm 95% settled in my new home for the next year or so. Furniture is assembled and fixed up, my boxes are unpacked and organized, my clothes are in a dresser for the first time in more than a year. All my potted plants are cluttering up the window sills, and hanging in corners of rooms. Pictures of family and friends are unpacked and distributed around my room. I have a bed that requires no inflation, and is more than 6 inches off the ground. My fridge is full of groceries, and fresh office supplies are stocked in my desk.

Tomorrow I begin orientation for graduate school, for my department and for TA training. Tomorrow I'll locate my desk, and get my student ID. Tomorrow I'll start learning my way around campus. Tomorrow, in many ways, is a tangible beginning of graduate school for me. In a little more than a week I'll step into a classroom again as a student, for the first time in over a year. "Transient Theorist" isn't going to be quite so transient anymore.

Probably I should have lots of insights from the last year's worth of experiences, and I should be writing something insightful... But tonight it's just me. All the memories from this last year, and the friendships and the places, are things that won't go away. Right now they're just a part of life, part of the tapestry, even if I haven't interpreted them and catalogued them away in neat boxes. I kept thinking it would be a restful year, a time to take stock of life and it's direction, to pause and sort out future trajectories. But I'm not sure it's possible to catch up on life - it happens so fast, and speeds up like a glorious kaleidoscopic whirling dervish. Maybe I've learned a little better to accept this, to enjoy the journey even without knowing it's meaning or destination, although it's still very unsettling.

Tomorrow comes, and it's just another now, no longer a beginning, just another day joining the rest. It's sure to bring new challenges, and new excitements, and even big changes. Transient Theorist here plans to ride the swells, to give it his best shot, and to enjoy the journey.

I want to sign out and leave you with my song of the evening:

Transitions

2009-08-11T22:05:00.002-04:00

Quick update. Back from ESA and family visits. Had a great time. Did too much, slept too little, ended up with a cold. Flew home on Monday without the ability to equalize pressure in my ears... very painful. More than a day later and I still can't hear clearly.

Trying to catch up on paperwork, emails, and a hundred detaily things in preparation for moving into my house in graduate-school-state on Saturday. Being sick sucks. Spending time with mom/dad/sister is great though. We watched "Blade Runner" tonight and ate homemade ice cream :-)

I have soooo much from this summer yet to digest, consider, and write about, but that back log is going to have to wait a few weeks more, until I'm settled in my new house and life slows down enough. And when I get internet hooked up at said house. So stay tuned for further thoughts on traveling, family, life, graduate school, workshops and conferences, networking, relationships, books and more.

Camping adventures

2009-08-01T06:14:00.002-04:00

Camping and good sleep don't always go together, usually resulting in some pretty funny stories well after the fact.

Thursday night I spent in a leaky tent, while torrential thunderstorms rolled through. A round of tent line adjustments made by flashlight while in my skivvies and hiking boots ensued. That helped a little. Even a leaky tent is drier than no tent at all, so I was trying to think positively. Unfortunately for me, a small rodent (think enormous field mouse) had already had the same thought, and had built a nest and delivered 3 baby rodents underneath my tent and mattress pad... at first I contented myself to poking the tent floor with a water bottle and making noise. As the night went on, I started getting less friendly. At about 4 am I gave up on the whole endeavor and made a mad dash during a brief respite in the rain, crammed into my car with my sleeping bag and pillow, and reclined the drivers seat. Ahhhh - dry and rodent free at last!

24 hours later I was up wicked early again, hitting the foggy roads on my way to the airport. ESA here I come!!!!!

Observation

2009-07-26T22:37:00.002-04:00

The ashes of a person take up a surprisingly small amount of space, but the space that person leaves behind is enormous, and the difference made by that life is unmeasurable.

Flavors of information criterion...

2009-06-30T10:27:00.002-04:00

it's all shades of grey people, mwahahahaha. Good old Akaike.

I'm TAing a one week math/stats class I took two years ago. Juggling ~13 students coding in R and Mathematica, with abilities ranging from biologists with limited calculus to mathematicians and physicists, and second year undergraduates through grad students with more years under their belts than myself. Good times.

Theo out.

From the land of Eire...

2009-06-15T06:20:00.003-04:00

A few photos from Ireland... First time I've been on a computer in a week, yay! Not even going to try to catch up on the stories now though - back to the states on Friday, and then I'll tell more. I want to fill up these last few days of adventure as much as possible! I'll be happy to head home though...

Shiver

2009-06-06T12:37:00.003-04:00

Duuuuuuude. Weather in Ireland is an abrupt change from Italy!!!!! I went from sunny and 70+ degrees to today in Dublin, with wind chills of less than 40 degrees, and cold cold rain. Brrrr.

I dunno if I brought enough clothes for this, especially if I keep getting wet every day! My rain shell is pretty good, but after a couple of hours walking around in the rain, things were getting damp, and I don't have rain pants... Oh well, with luck I won't melt.

So far we're still in Dublin. Explored a bit during the day, ate food and spent a long while drinking tea trying to warm up after a visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Not sure yet what we'll do tomorrow; depends on the weather a bit. We'd planned on doing some camping, but consistent rain makes that a less attractive possibility. By Tuesday we're heading to a farm in the SW part of Ireland to spend ~4 days wwoofing, which will be nice.

Might head back into the center of the city tonight for dinner and a drink or two; I'd be delighted to find a nice warm fire in a fireplace somewhere... Brrrr.

Nothing particularly photo worthy yet; that'll come when i get out of the city probably. It's nice to be with friends again (even if they're jet lagged and I'm adapted - they're snoozing right now). And in a place where I (mostly) understand the language again! Makes things much much simpler.

update

2009-06-04T16:17:00.003-04:00

Last night in Italy... Haven't been keeping this here blog up to date, no apologies. This is my last night in Italy, and my first hostel with wifi, so I figured I'd let y'all know that I'm still alive, and rather well. Got myself a bit of a tan after a few days down on the mediterranean. So many stories and sights. I've been keeping pretty good notes for myself, so I'll tell stories when I get back and share some more pictures. Tomorrow, I fly to Dublin, where I will meet up with my old friend, and a new one I haven't met yet! I'm looking forward to having some company on my travels, I've gotten to the point where I occasionally find myself having conversations with myself, including hand gestures, while walking down the street... oops!

Photos

2009-05-22T12:16:00.003-04:00

Lonely abroad, pushing on.

2009-05-22T07:50:00.002-04:00

I'm in Italy. Enough has happened in the last ~3 days or so to write pages about, but I'm lacking the energy/motivation, so we're gonna go summary style here. Someday I'll post pictures and better stories.

Spending 24+ hours traveling by plane, train, subway and foot - exhausting. Knowing how to ask for directions - useful. Not knowing how to understanding the instructions you're subsequently given - problematic. Hostel - has a bed, enough to make it amazing! Also a sketchy shower. Food - haven't had anything yet that wasn't quite tasty. Esspresso - life saving means of dealing with jet lag. Jet lag - something I've heard a lot about but never fully appreciated... suckiness. Math course - excellent; not very hard so far (mostly stuff I have already taught myself), but spending 6+ hours a day listening to lectures on mathematics in english has been helping me maintain the ol' sanity levels at an acceptable point. One thing that falls inside the comfort zone at least. Language - I'm learning bits and pieces, and gaining a lot of sympathy for young children whose parents use big words and sentences to communicate over their heads so they don't understand. So far everyone has been really friendly though, so that's nice. I've gotten a heck of a lot farther with a little language guidebook than I would have imagined possible, quite easily. People quickly know that I'm not from Italy, but so far don't immediately know I'm from the US - I'm taking this as a positive sign. So far Theo has been a Russian and a Brazilian.

Overall feeling about international traveling (based on my now vast experience) - it's not as difficult as I had expected, and I feel like I can manage quite well and rise to the challenges with patience and energy. Fun to see new places and experience new things + good food. But, I'm lonely. All the time, it's just me that I have to depend on, and only my own thoughts to hear. All the new-ness of things generates a lot of thoughts and new ideas, but between not knowing the language and not having a travel buddy, there isn't much outlet for it all. As much as everyone back at the bio station thinks that I am a solitary hermit by tendency and nature, I really very much value personal interactions. We'll see how things go in the following weeks - I'm hoping that my stays on organic farms will be more personal than this city business.

On top of it all, I've found out in the last two days that my grandfather has passed away, after breaking his hip last week. Still spinning in circles in my head. It was what he wanted, and he was surrounded by family and peace. But I am so far away from it all, and even more helpless than ever. I don't know how to describe it. Of all of my grandparents, I was probably closest to him. His approval meant so much to me, and I know he was very proud of me, but I can't help but feel that I wasn't good enough, and didn't do as much as I should have. Ugh. Try explaining that to someone in Italian. My little survival Italian guidebook doesn't come close to having the right words if I can't even find them in English.

Can't deal with this more now, class is starting soon and I've got to get my act together again.

Theo out.

On my way...

2009-05-19T11:15:00.002-04:00

One flight down. 3 more hours in this airport, another flight, waiting for an hour, then an 8 hour flight across the Atlantic, and I'm in Italy!!! Yeeeehaw

In the last two days I managed to pack up everything in the house I was living in and store it away in the basement; I won't be moving back into that house again when I return. It was a lovely place. I tried hard to pack light, but I'm sure I have too much stuff even so. Sigh. ~28 lbs in an external frame pack, including clothes, tent, sleeping bag, toiletries, sunscreen, hat, sandals, pocket knife, cord, clothespins, pack towel, first aid kit, and a water bottle. All in plastic trash bags to protect against rain. Then I've got a small day pack, with paperwork for the trip, a notebook for the workshop, camera, pens/colored pencils, travel guide to ireland, italian language guide, one pleasure reading book, and a laptop. Wooo.

I don't like good-byes. Eugenie is in the Galapagos by now; spoke to her several times on the phone yesterday while she was traveling, but now that she's in Ecuador, we're out of reach, probably until she returns in about two weeks. Even then though, it'll be occasional internet access if anything. You'd think that with as well as we've managed over the last year (!) spending most of our time in different places, 2 weeks to a month wouldn't be so hard. But I'm really going to miss hearing her voice on the phone, and sharing each other's days through instant messaging. Guess I'll just have to keep myself distracted.

Got my NSF rating sheets today, go figure. Must have finally finished their decisions. Looks like I scraped into the fellowship with two very goods and four excellents. Sort of strange to read other peoples' comments about yourself. Pretty good by and large, although there were some (rather justified) mentions of parts of my application that were vague... That's what comes from applying without knowing what school or department or advisor you're going to have the next year! Now I just have to do my best to live up to everything that I talked about.

Interesting happenings so far on the trip:

On my first flight I ended up talking with the person sitting next to me. She's a local elementary school teacher/librarian and knows the bio station I work at. She asked me if I knew anything about the guy she sees outside behind a house at all hours of the day digging massive holes in the ground. But of course, I replied. That's Terry. He's nuts. (He's building waist-deep trenches in the dirt around plots that he's setting up where he hopes to manipulate water levels and study drought effects. Every year he also builds rain-out shelters that traditionally get trashed by summer thunderstorms). So that was fun. We also discussed principles of epidemiology (vaccination, social network models, mathematics, Jared Diamond), ecology, math in biology, traveling in Italy and china, and water issues in the south west. Not bad for pre-8 am conversation!

Currently I'm looking at my juice bottle, which carries the phrase "When it comes to juice, we understand your need to get Naked". Hmmm. Probably I'll pass on that right now - might not be the best idea in an airport!

Ok, time to get some stuff done quickly on my remaining 30 min of internet time...

Peace!

Loss of man points...

2009-05-16T23:17:00.003-04:00

Loss of man points:

Your housemate returns home from a night on the town, and finds you sitting on the couch in the darkened living room, watching a chick-flick starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.

Gain of unabashedly-being-yourself points:

Not caring enough to flip to channel 43 and pretend to have been watching Terminator 3 instead.

That's just the way I am.

All the news that's fit to ... blog?

2009-05-14T15:14:00.002-04:00

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's been a long time...

But spring is here, and I've been out living my life and spending a lot less time writing about it. Winter breeds introspection. Spring, heralding summer, not so much. Or at least what I've been introspective about I can't write down here. But, I'm having a lethargic afternoon and the grey matter isn't firing real well, so I figured it's as good a time as any to provide assurances that I'm still alive.

Since I wrote last, stuff has happened. Major items to follow:

1) I've located a cute little house that I will be renting and sharing with my cousin this next academic year, as we both start graduate school. It's a cheerful yellow outside, with a big porch, new carpet and flooring, front-loading washer/drier, good insulation, and a very clean interior. Out back, there's some lawn space, parking, annnnnd - a vegetable garden! I'm pretty delighted. Soooo many orders of magnitude better than the (dump) I lived in last year of my undergrad, not that there aren't good memories from that place. "Growing up" - ie, renting, going to grad school, managing your own insurance and vehicle, etc, has to have some perks... and I think living here will be one of them. It's a reasonable distance from the campus, but in a neighborhood not dominated by undergraduates or apartment complexes. Perfect.

2) Looked like my grandparents might be able to make it back to the skilled nursing facility closer to my extended and immediate family after all. But I just heard last night that my grandfather fell and broke his good hip, so that plan may be shot to hell. I still don't know how to deal with all of that, heck.

3) I'M GOING TO EUROPE!!!

Seriously.

WHEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Transient Theorist isn't just thinking about a theoretical trip, he's packing up for some extended, real-life transience.

For anyone previously following my life, I've been wanting to get out of the US and travel for a long time. Casting about for travel buddies I've been largely unsuccessful, and hence procrastinated about going anywhere.

But in a bold move the other week, I threw caution to the wind (dogs?), found a plane ticket, and hit "Confirm". Since then I've been planning how I'll attend a 4 day math/ecology workshop in Italy, then spend the rest of almost a month's time splitting vacation and travel time between Italy and Ireland. I'm going to see some sites, learn some Italian, eat good food, WWOOF and get my hands dirty, and hopeful do a lot of hiking, wandering and riding on trains. With a little more luck I won't get mugged/lost/imprisoned/etc. I'm clueless and I know it, but I can be a quick learner...

I feel bad-ass about the whole trip. Flying solo. I'm actually doing it. It's not just something other people do and come back and tell stories about, I'm going to do it to. No more listening to other peoples' stories and doubting that I have the guts to do what they've done. I'm going to see a different place and a different life and be a stranger to it all, even the language. And maybe come back a little less scared of the world, less sure of what is impossible, and more at ease with wherever I find myself. Time to smash a few walls and break out.

It's heady stuff, this reminding yourself that the tallest walls are the ones that you build around yourself, and that as solid as they seem, a little bump and you can knock them all down. So far the excitedness is out-weighing the panic..... wooo. Although it makes it hard to focus on anything work related.

I'm trying to pack light - I want everything to fit into my external frame pack. Planning on taking a tent, my sleeping bag, a few changes of sturdy clothes, guidebooks, printouts and maps, a camera, and not much else. I'll probably even leave my lap-top behind(!). Just to prove it doesn't run my life. So probably there won't be many updates here until after I return towards the end of June. Don't miss me too much - I'll be out becoming a more interesting, regret-free person. I promise I'll bring back some stories and pictures for y'all.

- Theo

Fading memory

2009-04-21T13:37:00.004-04:00

I haven't seen my grandparents on my dad's side in more than a year and a half now, since they left their retirement house and moved to an assisted living community in cold midwestern city, near one of my aunts/uncles. Growing up, this was the pair of grandparents that I was closest to, because it was only a couple of hours to their house in the country, rather than the plane flight it took to see my maternal grandparents. From my grandfather, I developed a love of Scrabble - we'd play at least once every day we were together, gardening, stacking wood, and valuing doing good work with my hands... My grandmother's hobby was quilting/sewing; every grandchild and all the parents have home-made, unique quilts that she made. From her I learned a fair bit of needlework, piecing/blocking, and some knitting, a healthy dose of Irish blarney, as well as how to win at Canasta by making up your own rules... From both I have received a great deal of love, wonderful memories and family pride.

As I got older, I got busier, spending summers at science/environmental camps, traveling, and exploring the world. I moved away from home to start college. My opportunities to see my grandparents were shorter, and farther between. They started spending their winters away from their rural country home, and only coming back with help from aunts and uncles during the summer.

Now my grandmother is in her late eighties, and my grandfather his late nineties. Their health is deteriorating quickly, and over the last few months I've been learning that probably they won't ever make it back to their home. More upsetting though than physical health, is that their memories are fading. The last game of Scrabble I played with my grandfather, even a year and a half ago, I could tell how much harder it was for him to play; he used to be a tremendous player. I hear now that my grandmother now can't even remember the names of her children.

I've been dealing with this like a well practiced coward by trying to pretend it's not happening, and remembering things as they were in past years, walling off the updates and changes and information I hear via email as intellectual facts and not letting them sink in. I've hardly called or written, I haven't talked with them in months. Instead of doing what might be good for them, if they even remember me, I've been protecting myself. I couldn't even make myself call them to let them know about the good news of the NSF fellowship the other week. I can't even imagine what this is like for my aunt and uncle in cold midwestern city.

Right now I'm feeling pretty solidly like a selfish, helpless, cowardly, guilty grandson, and I'm not sure how much longer I can keep running away and hiding from this. Time marches on.

And I just killed the last of a box of tissues sitting here at work in the middle of the day. Fruitcake. I'm going for a walk.

Up-and-coming third wheel, looking for upgrades, opportunities for advancement

2009-04-20T22:10:00.003-04:00

My best friend, Ariel, here at the station also happens to be sort-of kind-of dating my housemate, James. But this is a recent thing. And Ariel more than once has talked to me about it rather emotionally. I've never seen them commit any PDA's around the labs, or in the company of any other graduate students. They act like they only partially know each other at best. Ick. But Ariel stays over a couple of nights a week now most often.

AWKWARD.

I don't know how to act around them - pretend like I don't know anything even though I do, or pretend like it's normal when it happens here at the house and like it doesn't exist elsewhere. Ugh.

Walk beside me

2009-04-16T10:00:00.003-04:00

A quote for today, capturing a part of my mind:

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. "

- Albert Camus

And also a song that I'm hooked on right now (thanks to sarcozona)

Back to doing mathematics and being pensive...

This alwayyyys happens

2009-04-15T20:36:00.002-04:00

I love hard problems and things that are intricately complex to the point that they make my brain whig out. I just do. Sometimes it's nice to have a really good excuse for wandering away from my desk to a comfy chair in a different, hidden room, and sort of curling up, closing my eyes and shoving my hands over my ears... To think, *naturally*. I even have a pandora station that serves as my source for "disturbed genius" music, when things aren't complex enough to justify leaving my desk.

Trouble is, almost every time I tackle a problem like this, my first solution is dreadfully complex, if correct in theory. Usually a thing of great elegance and beauty for those who appreciate the truly convoluted and arcane. Then, after hacking away coding out my solutions and trying to make what works conceptually work out in-silico, I gradually realize that parts of my colossus of a solution aren't necessary. The hubris falls away, bit by bit, and in the end I'm left with something that is a lot more functional. A part of me though grieves for all the subtle complexity that bore such mundane functionality - all those little pieces of brilliance that no one will ever see or appreciate. Sigh.

Back to work Theo.

Doing my share

2009-04-11T16:15:00.002-04:00

... to boost the economy.

Today I bought new socks. And underwear. This is kind of a big deal. I hate shopping, never think to do it, avoid it whenever possible. Laurie and Fiona (grad students) teased me that getting socks and underwear doesn't count as "going shopping", but I beg to differ. See, when I started off college, I owned enough clothing to go about 2 weeks without doing laundry. I'm down to about a week now before I start running out of important stuff. I think this is mostly because my clothing has been decaying over time, but, not living at home any longer, my mother hasn't been enforcing the entry of new items to my wardrobe. If I weren't so lazy, I'd make a graph of this, and we could extrapolate the point in time where I'd be walking around essentially naked.

Except, I went shopping today. *victory dance* I have 6 new pairs of socks, so I can get rid of some holey ones... now I'll have rags for when I do projects!

I also picked up a bicycle helmet so I can ride safely, zip ties so I can fix up the net on the soccer goals we've been using (I feel bad damaging goals that "little" kids play on too), and dessert for tomorrow's Easter party.

After all of that stressful business, I treated myself by checking out a used bookstore in nearby-city. Of course, this always ends in purchasing new books:

Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes (author of Under the Tuscan Sun) - travel.
Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon - travel book, sort of. Recommended to me.
Lord of Chaos, Robert Jordan - solid fantasy, nice long read.
Off the Map, Hib and Kika - seems like a quirky, different read. I'm excited about it.
The Man Who Saw Through Time - Loren Eisley's take on Francis Bacon and science.

Gotta love it when the guy checking out your books at the bookstore comments on how ecclectic your selections are!

Ok, now I'm going to go hunt for spring wildflowers, and maybe read outside, and maybe go to Easter vigil mass.

Good news

2009-04-10T19:34:00.003-04:00

So, I got some good news today. :-)

I'm still pretty darn excited about this, although if I had had time to write this morning it might have come across more intensely (today was filled with seminars, lab meeting, and other meetings).

Due to some good fortune, and thanks to the NSF, it looks like I'm set for graduate school. I won't have to worry about TAing except for to the extent I want to do it, and I don't have to work on anyone else's research for grant funding... I'll have my own funding, and can direct my own research interests. I hate thinking about money, and so this will be a huge relief, to not have to worry, so I can just do the work that I love. I'm excited about the science that I hope to do, and wicked energized by this. I can feel some of the old creative energy starting to bubble.

A number of my good friends ended up similarly lucky, which is great. Others weren't as fortunate this year. I'm very happy for the lucky, and feel a little guilty that some will be reapplying next year, but maybe I can help them edit and focus their ideas for the next time around, if I know anything.

Part of me is a little sad this evening that I haven't really done much special to celebrate this good news (other friends in other places are out celebrating with lab groups and such) - just heated up some leftovers, lounged, watched a little TV (ok, so that's kinda decadent). I did call and talk to a number of my best ecology buddies, and that's always really fun. I also talked with my parents this evening and earlier in the day - apparently they went out to dinner to celebrate even if I didn't. I'm kind of a private guy though, so maybe this is a better way anyways.

I want to end this post a little differently...

If it weren't for someone who became a very good friend of mine in the South during my adventure there this fall, I would never have put together an application this year. No way. Without her energy and motivation, I just wouldn't have gotten myself to do it (for those that weren't reading back then, we worked on applications together, a sort of mutual support group of two). She didn't get an NSF this year, so I just wanted to recognize how influential she has been... sort of dedicating this post to her, if that's not too strange (she's not a reader). And, people, it really is amazing how little things can change your life. If I hadn't been here at the bio station last summer and made a different friend, I wouldn't have had a job in the South to go to, and I might never have met this awesome person, who has now in a very very real way changed my life (not that friendship in and of itself isn't just as powerful).

So, this is for my friend.

And for the rest of you, remember that life is an amazing, unpredictable, and wonderful thing. You never can tell the implications of the path you walk, but the directions you take, and the friendships you forge, they matter. So stay optimistic, stay awed, stay joyous in the unpredictablity of life.

Funnies for the graphically inclined

2009-04-09T18:16:00.002-04:00

A science friend passed along this website... Some good humor to be found there, although with a few pretty poorly constructed graphs. But maybe that's half the fun...

I liked this one:

see more Funny Graphs

What do you think? (Summer plans)

2009-04-09T10:11:00.002-04:00

Now that I've decided about graduate school (!), I realllly need to start figuring out what I'm doing with my summer.

Constraints:

- Graduate school begins the end of August.

- The first week of August I will be at ESA.

- I can only work at my current job until May 19th.

Opportunities:

- If I spend a minimum of 6 weeks this summer doing graduate school type stuff (could include ESA and trips to workshops), I can accept a 6K fellowship.

- I've been offered a one-week position in late June to help out with a summer class here at the bio station on math/ecology, which could be a lot of fun. It's being taught by my all-time favorite post-doc.

Desires:

- visiting family and friends in the SW before or after ESA

- getting the heck out of the USA, seeing some place new and different and memorable, and having an adventure

- spending time with Eugenie

- spending time with my family, maybe helping mom and dad build a cabin

- visiting friends

- doing stuff not related to ecology or mathematics

- doing something to help other people

Any suggestions people?

I'm trying to decide about accepting a summer fellowship (6K, fun place, but it would eat up 6 weeks of my 'last' summer). On one hand, listing fellowships on a CV is good, and it's hard to argue with 6K. On the other, I really do want to do things that aren't ecology and that help other people out this summer. I'm in the fortunate position of not needing that money to last the summer, although it could help pay for other adventures/travels.

I also wonder about the merits of spending six weeks volunteering/some sort of community service, versus me working six weeks at a job that I am skilled at, and just donating my earnings. The first would probably have a bigger impact on my life, while the second might have a larger overall benefit. I dunno.

If I take the fellowship, probably any big trips would need to happen between May and June, which is really soon, and I still don't know where I'd want to go (excited about lots of places).

Yikes!

A lot has happened

2009-04-08T10:49:00.002-04:00

A lot of stuff has gone down in the last week and a half, and for whatever reason I didn't feel like blogging. Time to catch up now... Lots of news to share. I could write entire posts on most of these, but in the name of catching up, I'll try to keep them short:

1) I committed to attending School 1. It's done. Permanent. Set in stone. No looking back. The saga is over. Contacted all of the other potential advisors (in the end, by email, despite my dad's recommendations of making phone calls - yick). Responses were quite nice, including two "let me know when you need a post-doc" comments, so that's good. Nice to have those messages over with.

2) Excited - Very relieved to have the decision over with. In retrospect, amused by how much the psychological build-up to telling my advisor was reminiscent of asking someone to date, shudder. Excited to start making what was an amorphous vision of a new future into something with concrete, fun realities. I can let myself get excited now, it's safe.

3) Housing - Trying really hard to believe in the bold new me. Currently pretty intimidated by my preliminary attempts to locate housing... I will be spending my first 1-2 years living in Big Midwestern City, before getting to move back here to the bio station. I'm overwhelmed by the number of housing options, roommates, sublets, leases, locations, bus routes, neighborhoods, parking, etc, etc, etc. Back at my undergrad, you pretty much knew where everything was, what the houses looked like, and could walk everywhere. I've been looking at craigslist, and will start asking around. So far every place I've lived, someone else found/arranged, so this is a new experience for me.

4) Labmate - I will have a lab mate!!!!!!!! I'm really happy about this. My new advisor had another prospective student accept, so there will be two of us in the same year/program, with propensities for math and ecology. One of my concerns about this program was that this lab group is small, but maybe that's changing! Haven't interacted with her yet, but she sounds pretty cool. And, being kinda nervous about this whole new endeavor, the prospect of having a good friend, compatriot, fellow clueless soul, etc, is really quite wonderful.

5) Coincidence - I discovered that one of my cousins will be attending graduate school at School 1 too, in a very similar program. I had no idea he was even applying here; I haven't seen him in years. This is pretty nifty too! Maybe we could live together, i dunno.... I kind of wonder what he's like anymore, although I guess he's probably thinking the same thing!

6) Travel - All of last week (plus a few days) I spent visiting Eugenie back at SLAC. Almost a thousand miles round-trip (yeeeehawww). It was a nice visit, although I spent several days of it being quite sick, thanks to my younger sister. Good food, old friends, the works. Re-engineered parts of her chinchilla's cage. Cooked food. Watched movies. Hung out. I'm glad I went - it had been a long time since I saw her last! It's really different though to go back and visit a place where you used to live. Strange disconnects between what hasn't changed, and the fact that you don't live there anymore, or have a life there with things to do. Probably a week was about the longest healthy visit length. It was also a little frustrating to visit while Eugenie had a busy class/homework/research schedule.

7) Paper - I took advantage of my return to SLAC last week to bug my undergrad advisor, who was sitting on a final draft of my undergraduate research manuscript. Having extracted that from him, and being laid up in bed with a cold, I redid all of my figures, updated the citations, finished off the last edits, and, as of Monday night, I submitted my paper to a journal!!!!!!!

This is huge, huge news, as this paper has been delayed literally for years. So nice to finally get it out. I soooo hope that it is accepted, 'cause having to redo it my reduce me to quivering gelatin.

M'kay, that covers most of the bases for those that are curious. More to follow later - I should get back to work.

Chicken

2009-03-25T13:14:00.001-04:00

I was sooooo close to telling advisor at School1 today that I have decided to work with him, ending this frickin saga.

Buuuuutttt I stood there in the door with the words in my mouth and didn't let go of them. He's gone for the rest of the day.

Fruitcake.

In other news

2009-03-24T18:07:00.002-04:00

My goal was to finally make my decision by the end of this past weekend. As you might probably guess, that didn't quite happen. I was really close, and then I decided that there was one more piece of information I wanted to wait for. And then I started thinking about just how much it's going to suck to call and let people know that I have declined their offers. As previously established, I am terrrrible at talking on the phone. This is going to be acutely awkward, painful and sad. UGH. So I've been procrastinating more. And feeling pretty guilty, because I know if I really have decided that it is courteous to share the information as soon as possible. I figure when I decide I pretty much have to say yes somewhere before I inform anyone else, so no one can try to change my mind.

Then there's the second guessing; it seems like if I'd made a solid decision, maybe I shouldn't be feeling like this about it, and procrastinating, and feeling guilty.

On a more positive note, I made a huge leap forward in research this week. I'm hot on the trail of what is promising to be an exciting new graphical approach for visualizing and understanding the complex system we're juggling. My advisor got really excited about it, and mentioned even that this stuff might make it in a journal like "Evolution", which would be a big deal. For me maybe even a Big Deal. We're beyond the realm of the kind of things he's done before, and maybe that anyone's done before (whereas the earlier part of this project involved applying established techniques to a new system). A rather heady mix of dynamical systems, rapid evolution, ecology, numerical techniques, etc. Another comment I got was that after we polish this piece up, we definitely need to stop and write one or two (!) papers.

I should be pretty darn thrilled by all of this, but right now that reaction is being muted by external inputs, my indecision, and a perhaps misguided feeling that no one else knows enough about it to be excited with me, other than my advisor. Wheeeeee! Sometimes being a mathematical ecologist (scientist) is lonely. Really takes a lot of self-motivational energy, b/c you can't rely on siphoning off the energy other ecologists (nonscientists) get when you share what you're doing. I know it's tempting to keep cultivating feelings of being a "misunderstood genius", but probably what it really means is that I'm not doing enough to make myself understood.

Ironically, I'm feeling isolated, but yet I just wriggled my way out of heading out this evening to socialize with some of the graduate students, despite agreeing to it earlier in the day. Why am I like this? Hypocrite.

So I could definitely launch into a grad career here with wind in my sails. One or two papers before starting grad school would be sol-id. And that's in addition to my archaic undergrad paper-in-waiting, and a recent collaboration I've been drawn into as a statistics "consultant".

Why am I not happy right now, durnit?!?!?!?

Maybe dinner will help.

Not knowing, not curing, not healing.

2009-03-24T17:16:00.003-04:00

*warning - philosophical/introspective post follows below*

I think about the following quote a lot:

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

I don't think that this sentiment is always true, but increasingly I think that there are situations where it really does hold. Sometimes friends really do want advice, comfort, and healing. Other times, there's nothing I can do, and pretending or acting otherwise makes light of their predicaments and makes things worse than they would be if I had simply acknowledged what they are going through, and made my presence known but simply abided with them.

By and large, I feel much more competent at providing advice than at abiding in silence. Feeling powerless sucks, let's face it. My default response, as a scientist, and mathematician, and person, is to try to fix/solve any and every problem that comes my way. This makes me pretty terrible I think at "not knowing, not curing, not healing", a lesson I never seem to be able to learn. I don't know how to tell with approach would be best in many cases, so I switch into default "solve the math problem" mode.

The other, more selfish, aspect of all of this is how someone else's challenges affect you. The way I work through stress/sadness/bad times is usually, well, by working - moving forward, pushing on, getting the hell out of dodge, etc. I'm not good at living with such challenges for any length of time without doing anything. Sometimes I wonder if this too makes it more difficult for me to simply abide with someone else in their troubles; out of empathy I at least partially experience what they feel, but because such feelings are second hand, there's no way for me to work through them. Makes me feel stuck, and useless, and sad. How do you deal with such things, without being able to do anything, and without running away from your friend and their challenges?

This vacuum sucks...

2009-03-23T18:01:00.003-04:00

But not really, which is part of the problem when you're trying to clean carpets. An 40 year emphasemic chain-smoker could probably generate larger pressure differentials. And the resulting dusty odor would probably be about the same.

Also, it took me > 10 minutes just to figure out how to turn the archaic piece of junk on. I literally felt the thing up all over hunting for a switch, was about to give up, and/or kick the thing, when I noticed a very large, concealed gray button hiding in plain sight about where I was going to kick.

Final thought - for the record, this may make me sound like a domestic incompetant, but I'm really quite good at the whole cooking and cleaning deal, and take pride in my abilities. As with anything though, doing a good job depends on having the appropriate equipment...

When fine dining and drain cleaners converge...

2009-03-19T18:57:00.004-04:00

... Theo gets scared.

Having just returned from the grocery store, I am savoring a fresh loaf of crusty Portuguese bread, dipped in olive oil, balsamic vinegar and crumbled feta cheese, in addition to sliced pears. This makes me think happily of Eugenie.

Soon, I will be tackling a set of two plugged shower drains with a draino knock-off and a pair of gloves. (Note that this does not make me think of Eugenie, although if I succeed it will make me happy). This is the continuation of this past weekend's adventures in plumbing.

On a related note, wtf is Ammonium chloride doing in bagels????? I am a big fan of the bagel - I think it's one of life's perfect foods. Tasty, hearty, a multitude of flavors and toppings, portable, just about the best thing around. I saw a new brand at the store today, and glancing through the list of ingredients, ammonium chloride showed up at the end. Not comforting. I think I'll stick with the usual brand, which is clever enough to disguise what are probably equally unpleasant ingredients with complicated chemical names that surpass my ability to understand them, despite two paltry semesters of organic chemistry.

Time to go eat more, and get to work...

Thinking makes it so.

2009-03-19T00:10:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about this passage recently; it's a classic, but I'll share it anyways...

Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserv'd at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

Guildenstern: Prison, my lord?

Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.

Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst.

Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet: Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Recent life events have only deepened my belief in this last principle. The entirety of mathematics rests on defining a few basic axioms or truths, and seeing what useful things follow as consequences of these definitions, noticing patterns and arriving at theorems. In less deterministic realms, such as experiments, or social/economic/competitive games we think of the probability or likelihood of a particular result occurring, relative to a set of potential outcomes. We recognize that these outcomes are driven both by the mechanisms of the process being tested by the experiment, or the rules of the game being played, and the variation of experimental units or the actions of individuals playing the game.

There is a lot of power in this paradigm. If we can understand the patterns that arise, and predict events or truths, we can work backwards to uncover the nature of the underlying axioms, rules, and mechanisms. The converse is true as well; propose a mechanism, and design experiments to see if the results match patterns predicted by your hypothesized mechanism. This is the heart of science, and also, I would argue, the essence of the deductive/inductive approach we take (whether consciously or unconsciously) towards understanding all of our world as individuals.

I think there is a second aspect to this paradigm that is just as powerful, but less commonly taken advantage of. Basically, recognizing that the definition of a system determines the behaviors it can and cannot exhibit, the power lies in changing the definitions to achieve a desired end. In other words, if we recognize that thinking a certain way makes a specific perspective or belief true, and we have a desire to change this perspective or belief, we need merely change the way that we think. Change the rules of the game, and you can make the impossible possible.

The lesson? Chose your definitions carefully, and intentionally, for the sake of making your desired outcome convenient or more probable (Note: not necessarily a good practice in the world of objective science, but often perfectly acceptable in social and personal interaction). By changing the way you see the world, or yourself, or a situation, you change what is possible in a situation, or for yourself, or for your world. Change the rules and you change the game. Don't be surprised if you formulate a set of rules and see the game play out exactly as predicted.

Philosophical Theo is signing off for now.

Crash and burn

2009-03-18T13:07:00.002-04:00

11:58 AM - I'm hot on the trail of a new graph that I'm really excited about. The parade of students/post-docs/faculty heading to share lunch at the dining hall usually starts a little after 12, so I'm in a rush to try to finish converting my ideas into code. The function I'm working on is a intricate little thing, involving some subtle manipulations of numerical routines for differential equation solving, and I'm on top of my game enough that I remembered a particular case I needed to take into consideration in the code. It's the kind of thing that if you don't think of it when you write the function, you'll end up spending hours of debugging time trying to catch it later.

*Buzz Buzz Buzz*

That's my phone ringing. Still thinking/trying to finish off this idea before I lose it, I slide my phone out of my pocket, don't recognize the number, but answer it anyways. *duh-oh*

It's potential advisor from School3, checking in to see how I'm doing, and if there's anything else I need to make my decision that he can help me with. Gulp.

I am not skilled at communicating by phone, even under the best of circumstances. Such as when I know several days in advance that a phone call will be happening, and I exhaustively plan out my conversation ahead of time, including making notes to have in front of me. I prepared in a similar way for interviews.

In this case, I had no idea the call was coming (it took me close to a minute to figure out who i was talking to), I was lost in thinking about something else entirely, and became very flustered. I'm pretty sure I sounded like a bumbling fool, and had no real response for this guy, beyond I think mumbling a few things that I liked about a different place I had visited (School2), but how I'd rather live at School3. No questions or anything when he asked if there was any other info I needed. About the only good response I gave was when he said to let him know if monetary issues were playing into the decision, and I told him that I rarely let such matters govern my decisions, which is true.

UGH.

I feel awful, and worry that I might have made "potential advisor" feel bad, especially when, returning from lunch, I got an email from him apologizing for ambushing me, providing more info on what I think/hope was the only concern I expressed about School3 while mumbling, and worrying that he didn't do a good enough job of showing me around. And now I'm worrying that I may not be giving School3 fair enough consideration.

How am I evvvver going to make a decision if I feel this bad after a simple conversation with a potential advisor, when to make a decision I will have to say no to 3 people that I really like? My general approach to life is to help everyone I come across, and do my best to support them and make others happy. Which presents me with a rather impossible situation here.

I sort of thought that my oscillating opinions were converging on a solution, but what does it say about the stability of such a solution if a simple phone call is enough to throw things wildly out of orbit again?

Double UGH.

Fruitcake.

Thunderturtles.

*Phone just rang again and made my stomach flip, but it was Eugenie*

I need to decide soooooon so I can get all of this unpleasantness behind me, and maybe avoid similar phone calls from the other 2. I wish also that I was invisible, because I spend all day walking around and working here at the station feeling like everyone is looking at me and wondering, often asking, what I'm thinking today.

RUN AWAYYYYY

Calendar confusion and Commando plumbing

2009-03-14T17:20:00.002-04:00

Today was a good day, despite lots of rather humorous occurrences, which I offer up to you in case anyone needs a laugh.

To start off with, I woke up a bit on the late side, having watched a sci-fi movie (Minority Report) until very late at night. Logging on to my computer, I got wind of the fact that St. Patrick's day parades were happening today. Being who I am, my immediate thought was - 'Whoa, how cool is that! St. Patrick's day happening on the same day as Pi day, go figure. Why have I never noticed this before?' Knowing full well that I am really bad at remembering the dates of holidays, with the exception of Christmas (a two-fer, whew), New Years, my day of birth and any time 15 rolls around, I was perfectly willing to believe that this year some unusual calendar quirk had caused the coincidence of these holidays. I thus preceded to wish quite a few of my friends a very merry St. Patty's day.

Only to discover much later, first from Eugenie, and then from lots of other people, that the day itself doesn't happen until the 18th. Sigh. Go me!!! Stupid parades.

Other activities of the day featured Commando Plumbing, and Laundry. I'll let you decide for yourselves if the two events were related. The first of the two was partially successful (shower drain is still sorta clogged), but resulted in my discovering how to rig up some wires such that I now get more than just wi-fi internet access. This is very exciting since the wifi only works right up against the wall on one side of the house, and even then is shakey. Now I can crack into this new fantasy series I stumbled upon (the books were ok), without sitting in the lab!

I've consequently been rediscovering that I really am inescapably a sci-fi/fantasty geek. Good stuff, even with the occasional hokey moments/dialogue. Better than thinking in circles about the real world and a determined future....

Bed time now.

Theo gets Quantitative about grad school

2009-03-11T22:13:00.011-04:00

As the result of multiple requests, I've been attempting to list and rank the graduate school options that I have, as I near the point of having to make up my mind. Being who I am, I think probably I've gone wayyy overboard (that's what you get for asking), but the results are provided below if you're interested/have enough stamina. I wrote it up as a mock lab report/paper, mainly to amuse myself.

- Theo

Quantitative grad school selecion: Or, mathematical objectivity abused

Abstract:

Selecting the right grad school is important if you want a PhD and a career as an academic. I want a PhD, and hope to have a career as an academic. Therefore, it would be good to make the best possible choice of graduate schools, from the available options, based somewhat objectively on a set of criteria.

Methods:

I brainstormed a list of a bunch of separate features of a graduate school that I think are important. I grouped them into hierarchical groups, and assigned them weights within groups and levels, based on their comparative importance to me. These numerical weights, with higher values corresponding to increased importance, were converted to proportion weights, multiplied down the hierarchical trees. These trees and integer weights (for readability) are reproduced below:

Generally, these features were grouped based on whether they were academic, non-academic, or "discretionary" - ie, my chance to subjectively incorporate my gut feelings, without assigning a particular descriptor to them. (This included such things as the presence of a vet school Eugenie might want to go to - Shhhhh; she doesn't like it when I think that way).

Having previously eliminated 2 of 5 schools (one for general uptightness and location, the other for location and insecurity of funding), I had 3 remaining schools to choose between. For each school and each important feature, I subjectively assigned a score between 0 and 4. Results were determined by taking the product of the weight and the score for each category and school.

Results:

It is with some chagrin that I report the results by way of excel figures, but I'm too tired/busy to do any differently, and it's better this way than showing the numbers.

By sub-category then:
Major take-homes here - School2 gets the highest ranking for the academic category, followed by School1. In the non-academic category, things get shuffled around; School1 takes the lead by a good bit over School2

And now the overall results:

For the quantitative folks out there, this corresponds to:

To help this make sense, a perfect school would score a 4 in every category, and have a raw score of 4, or "percentage" of 1.0. (Yes of course these calculations require ~6 sig figs!!! Naturally.)

This, based on this, I should go to School1 (followed by School2 and School3. It's coincidence (?) that I numbered them in that order, actually).

Discussion:

I tried as much as possible to be very objective about this ranking, and to trick myself. That's why I tried to add so many categories, and make the weighting system rather complex, so that I couldn't predict ahead of time what the result would be. I also made the categories and weights first, and then later rated the schools all at once, before doing any calculations. That being said, the points assigned to each school in each category are necessarily subjective. For example, I much prefer rural to urban areas, so in the "Urban/Suburban/Rural" category, rural corresponds to 4, and, for example, Los Angeles would be a 0, or 1. Not all of the categories are independent of each other; I'm not sure how big of a problem this causes, but whatever (ie, rural, a good thing, corresponds by necessity to less public transportation, a bad thing).

All that being said, these results do a fairly good job of reflecting the more intuitive response/ranking I've been accumulating over the last week or so of trying not to think about it all.

School2 would be a new place for me, I got along fantastically with the advisor, and enjoyed meeting and talking with the various members of the lab group. The lab does a solid mixture of theoretical and mathematical work. It's part of a big department, at a university where collaboration between faculty of different departments is very common and encouraged. I'd be free to do pretty much anything I wanted to, including seeking out collaborations with other students and faculty. And, rather excitingly, there are some students doing theoretical work. I'm not used to being able to discuss what I do with fellow students with a similar level of understanding (usually I have to talk to prof's or post-docs, and there aren't that many of them either). It was really nice to talk theory with people who were roughly my peers. Could be a lot of fun to be around more theory people. While I'm sure the funding situation is easily sufficient for me to live on happily, it's not as solid as the offer I have from School1 (more on this later), and probably would require more teaching. My advisor there regularly obtains grants, but if the work I was doing wasn't related to those grants, I'd have to secure my own funding, or TA. [Another intangible, that bothered me a bit, but doesn't make sense to the logical part of my head... every one of this advisor's grad students is either married (with kids), or in a serious long-term relationship, and several years older than me... makes me a little worried that no one would want to hang out with a "single" youngster; "single" because at least for the first year of graduate school, Eugenie will still be at SLAC and I'll be bach'ing it.]

School1 is the school/biological station where I currently work. So I'm very familiar with it: I know the graduate students, several of the faculty, and the area quite well. It's a rural location, which I like. I've been offered a set of 3 fellowships, and I'd be certain of solid funding during my PhD here, including two years guaranteed to be free of teaching or research duties. The cost of living here is also significantly less than at School2 (check out this fascinating website for COL comparisons: link). I'd work with the same advisor that I have right now. I get along with him well; he's very very sharp and I learn a lot. He does almost exclusively theoretical work, and thinks in terms of a system that I'm not terribly enthusiastic about. However, he's said before that he'd be supportive of a co-advising situation, where I'd pick out a second faculty member (such as the one next door) that does empirical plant ecology, something that I want to do more of. His lab group is small, but because of the small size of the station and associated student community, the graduate students behave like an extended lab group and there's quite a lot of interaction. And people reallly want me to come/stay here. After my first two years, I'd relocate to the bio station, so auditing math courses would be more difficult, as the main campus is over an hour's drive away.

School2 would be meeting new people and making new connections; I've already spent 2 summers plus the last 3 months at School1's bio station. Both universities have vet programs, unlike school3, although Eugenie will be glad to know that even when I removed that from the calculations, the rankings of schools stayed qualitatively the same. So there.

School3 is the closest to home, and reminded me a lot of places that are very dear to me. I have a good friend there, and it's a smaller city than School2. The academic fit isn't as good, although realistically, I could probably do what I wanted to there as well. The advisor is a partial member of the stats department, and quite mathy, so I could get my math fix. Funding is intermediate between the other schools. Lab group is pretty focused on a particular topic. I only met 2 of 3 grad students, and none of the post-docs, whereas at School 2 I met pretty much everyone (3 grad students, 2 postdocs). No vet program. Pretty campus. I'm actually surprised it didn't rank higher, but maybe it's paying the price for not being the most recently visited school (School2), or the place where I live (School3). People sounded quite excited to have me there, which was awesome. I dunno.

Conclusions?

What do you all think? How important are academic vs. non-academic concerns in making a decision? If I weighted academic concerns even more heavily, School2 would win; currently it's the "best" academic fit, and the "worst" non-academic fit. As it is, giving non-academic concerns 35% and academic 55%, School1 "wins".

I'm not certain that any of the numerical differences in rankings is sufficiently large enough to reach a solid conclusion, I don't know. I know I could make any of these places work happily.

Feed back would be most welcome....

Holding pattern continues to, well, hold.

2009-03-10T23:17:00.003-04:00

Everyone asks. Still no decision.

With the level of inquiry I've been getting about my grad school decision, I feel like I should be taking it even more seriously, and spending all of my waking moments giving it intense concentration and examination. Instead, I've been walking in the rain, reading science fiction, making food, doing mathematics, watching movies, and in general acting as if I have not a care in the world. Today I found blooming forsythia and snow drops, and saw my first robin of the spring (here at least). Nice signs that whatever my subconscious is in knots about, the larger world is still cycling along.

Meanwhile, decisions continue to loom in the background. I need to decide soon, out of courtesy to everyone involved. I more or less have all of the information that I need; what's missing I can pretty much gather from the internet with a bit of work, and a conversation or two.

I keep telling myself that what I'm trying to do is sort of mentally cross my eyes up, and distance myself just enough from the decision (you know how it is when you've been working all day on a math problem, and you can't see it for the life of you, and you finally give up and head to bed... only to having something hit you in that in-between time half sleeping and half waking, when everything is looser?). Maybe that's what I'm aiming for. It surprises me though, because I had predicted that my response would be much more along the lines of agonizing panic instead of calm pseudo-apathy; maybe I just haven't hit that stage yet.

Everyone wants to know, because they care and they're awesome. I want to know too. So I'm looking at plane tickets to Paris, Costa Rica, Dublin, Italy and New Zealand...... *head scratch*

Security question for a Nerd

2009-03-09T14:20:00.002-04:00

Security question (in case I forget my password to a certain website):

Who was your childhood hero?

My (truthful) answer:

Jonas Salk

ALIVE

2009-03-06T23:43:00.002-05:00

I feel very ALIVE right now, look out!!!

I'm recently returned from playing soccer (our team played awesome - some truly beautiful work). I'm scraped, bruised, and totally pumped. On the way home I was a total "bad-ass", driving with my windows down (yup, it's that warm right now! crazy huh?), and rocking out to a mixed CD of music from Eugenie (ranging from some rockin' guitar/vocal type stuff, all the way up through "Beyond the Sea", a big band favorite), my now quite unruly hair sticking out in all directions in the breeze.

Now I'm showered, patched up, munching on Triscuits and dried apricots, and engaging in some shirtless blogging (Hey, I warned you - I'm in "bad-ass" mode).

A lot has been going on. I'm done with all of my graduate school visits; that part of life is behind me. I have a lot of information, have met and talked with a lot of people, and seen a lot of new places. There's some awesome science going on out there people.

I still haven't made up my mind about where I want to go (wrestling with a 3-way tie for first place). Earlier in the week, when I had just returned from my last visit, this was a significant source of stress and, according to my friends, melancholy, for me. Right now though, maybe because I'm feeling so damn alive, I'm not so worried. Driving home tonight, I realized that I've got a lot to be proud of. I've been rocking my interviews, picking up admissions offers from 4/5 of the schools I applied to, and in many cases competitive fellowships as well. (And that 5th school is blind; I'm well contented not to go there). At all of my interviews, I successfully made myself interact with lots of people, being cheerful and sociable, focused and generally on my game (even though my general preference is to stand in corners and watch). I avoided getting sick until my very last interview, and even that was a minor cold that I beat down in about 3 days.

I don't know where I'm going. But tonight, more than many nights in a good long while, I feel like wherever it is, it will be great. And the possibilities are determined; there's a path out there waiting for me, and I think I'm gonna have funnnn walking it. I can kick butt at science. I can make my life what I want it to be. It's mine to take. I can learn, and think, and discuss, critique and reason and intuit and keep up with the best of them. I am going to stop worrying so much, and start living more. Some things you just can't predict. Living in fear, cautious of doing something wrong, makes for a less tangible existence. So then it's time to jump, to try my best, and start flying. And if something falls and hits the ground, well, I'll pick it up, dust it off, and keep rocking along through life. The most valuable thing about something that is good now is that it is GOOD NOW; I want to revel it in, and extract every bit of enjoyment from it, hoping that it will persist, but beleiving too that life holds in store many other lovely and unforseen moments to come. And, at least for tonight, I am feeling that the NOW is GOOD.

I don't know where I'll be in a few weeks even; maybe my project/job will be done, and I'll hit the road, or embark on an adventure. I don't know even where I'll be spending the summer. But it'll be good. I'll find myself a place. Come the end of the summer, I'll be somewhere good starting a big adventure indeed.

And knowing all of that is enough for me to smile and laugh right now.

*cranking the Paul Simon and kickin' back after kickin' butt*

Theo

is

O
U
T

dudessss
.......

Updates - fun + graduate school

2009-02-28T23:11:00.004-05:00

It's been a while. Two main goals for this post: 1) fun things that have been happening. 2) the obligatory update on the grad school process.

Fun things first:

Earlier today I made a special watering can for my lovely baby bonsai tree. It needs quite frequent watering because the pot is pretty small, I keep it in a fairly sunny window, and the air in our house is dry. It doesn't deal well with pouring water on it - the H2O either runs right off, or causes a lot of erosion. I've been sprinkling with my fingers, but today I decided to make a special watering can for it. Requisite materials: 1 minute-maid orange juice bottle (plastic), a sturdy push pin, and a pair of hands. basically I push the push pin through the top cap of the OJ bottle a bunch of times in a whorl pattern, making little tiny holes. Now I can fill the bottle, and gently apply water to my tree without disturbing it! The wholes are just the right size too - small enough that barely any water comes out simply by turning the bottle upside down, due to adhesion/cohesion. But with a gentle squeeze, you can control how fast the water comes out, in a beautiful little shower.

My apologies if you're not into trees/plants, I'll move on now... ;-) Today was the first day in almost a month that I haven't be away at grad school interviews. I took full advantage of this fact (maybe even too much so) - I slept in, lounged in bed reading in the morning, talked with Eugenie on the phone for a good long while, made a delectable breakfast (herbed egg toast, with tomato and Canadian bacon), and then proceeded to spend pretty much the entire rest of the day reading. The sun was out, a not too frequent occurrence this time of year here, so all day long I switched around between chairs, following patches of sunlight around the house. It was lovvvely. Also, my housemate has been gone all day, so other than Eugenie, and a brief chat with my sister, I didn't have to see or talk to anyone all day. Sweat pants and my favorite old T-shirt allll the way. It was the perfect medicine for recovering from interview trips, which are very social, anti-sweat pants, and draining.

Other highlights of the preceding week - got to play soccer again (because of interviews I've missed games the last two weeks), crepes at a small Mardi Gras party, seminar Friday, submitting my abstract for ESA (and being told I might actually get funding for attending, something I hadn't planned on), and day-dreaming about a cross-country national park visiting bicycle trip (wistful sigh).

Grad school update:

I'm going to keep this brief; after I get back from my last interview (taking place over the next 3 days), I intend to sit down and lay all this out in detail to organize my thoughts.

Last weekend's visit was quite lovely. The school I interviewed at is the closest to home, Eugenie, and my old stomping grounds, of all the places I've applied to. And I could feel it - the terrain, the people, the countryside, even the grocery stores, were similar. This is very appealing to me, as I am really quite a bit of a home-body. I liked it much better than the private school in big city, for any number of reasons. Pretty campus. Friendly people. Close to farms with cows (not that I'm planning to interact with cows... that's Eugenie's department). The school/program is much bigger that private U, and all of the people I talked to were very excited about their science, and fun to converse with. Funding isn't as good. Advisor is much more laid back, has an established lab/tenure, and was interesting to talk with. The overall research focus of the lab is not what I'm interested in, but there are strong overlaps between the theory behind the work they do, and the technical skills, and the kinds of questions I want to study in Ecology, so it could probably work quite smoothly. Also, one of my potential labmates also enjoys swing dancing, and took me one of the nights I was there... fun! We'll see.

In brief, right now I have two explicit offers (detailing funding, etc) from schools, and a third in the mail apparently from the place I visited last weekend. Nothing from private U (i won't be surprised if I don't get an offer from them though - I think I'm not rabid enough for their program). That leaves only the school I'm visiting between tomorrow and Wednesday. Which by all accounts, and my background research, should be quite a lot of fun, and probably a good fit for me (similar in a lot of ways to where I was last weekend).

I'm sort of anticipating ending up with a 3-way tie for my preferred place to go, which is frightening. Private U is pretty much out. Southern state school could be cool, but their funding sounds pretty shakey compared to my other offers, and it'd be more of a gamble. That leaves 3 big state schools, one of which I work at now and like, one of which reminds me a lot of home, and one of which I'm anticipating will be the best academic/research fit for me. Gulp

More to come when I'm back from my last trip!

Possibility

2009-02-19T23:36:00.002-05:00

Something got me thinking of one of my favorite E. Dickinson poems:

I dwell in Possibility --
A fairer House than Prose --
More numerous of Windows --
Superior -- for Doors --

Of Chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of Eye --
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky --

Of Visitors -- the fairest --
For Occupation -- This --
The spreading wide of narrow Hands
To gather Paradise --

Things are going better. I hacked out 4 diffuse ideas of PhD research project for overachieving potential graduate adviser, and jotted down a very frank, cut to the chase sort of email. Haven't sent it yet (i'm going to sleep on it), but I think I might tomorrow. It's sort of refreshing and liberating to name the game and the positions of the players, instead of pretending we're not playing it. This whole thing reminds me of the phrase "How do porcupines mate? Very carefully". Maybe I'm being a little cocky, but I think I'm in a position where I can afford it, and it might make things simpler for everyone. If he doesn't want to take a gamble on me, because he's new, with a small lab and I'm not a sure bet and I have some unusual skill sets and interests, then I'm not going to hold it against him, and if I send him this email, he'll know it. And, there are plenty of other places very interested in me (I got my first official offer of admissions today!)

Time to go to sleep, so I can get up in the morning, pack and head to my next interview. Wheeeeee!!!

Leave me alone - I just want to do science!!!

2009-02-19T12:13:00.002-05:00

Woke up this am early, pumped to tackle some new approaches to one of my problems, and fired up with energy from yesterday's excursion into mathematics.

Got to work, checked my email (mistake number 1). Several emails came in from prospective grad school advisers, one of which is stressing me out. He's asked me to give him a list of 5-7 projects I envision I would work on with him at that school, with descriptions. By the end of the weekend. A weekend that I'm going to be spending away at another interview, although one that sounds like it might be more low-key. *fingers crossed*

Also in the email, I've been asked where his institution ranks on my list of places I want to go. This is just an awful question to ask a prospective student. I mean, I can understand why he has (young faculty member, needs good students, on a time crunch, lots of competition). But still. I'm obviously not sold on this place, but I don't know that so far I like anywhere else any better. Responding is going to be quite unpleasant, trying to be diplomatic/honest/but not completely. All of the programs I've applied to are pretty different, so it's not like I can just take all of these, put them in a list based on prestige or monetary support and have an obvious choice. Argle. I think in his case, his persistence is probably not going to be helpful to him if he wants me as a student, but maybe he doesn't care.

Either way, all of this stuff, plus additional emails from other potential advisers, means that instead of being able to clear my mind and think about my research, which is taking some interesting branchings, I keep going in circles in my head thinking about other things, and staring at the computer screen, or my notebook, or papers. None of which is helping to get anything actually done. I realllly wish I could just skip all this BS and be able to spend time doing MY work and learning what is interesting to ME. I'm tired of it already - stand back and let me do science!!!

Time to try again, sigh.

A good afternoon

2009-02-18T22:29:00.002-05:00

So today, I randomly and spur of the moment decided to accompany my adviser/boss to a nearby small liberal artsy type college, where he was presenting guest lectures in two classes. I had a blast. The last time I sat through a class was in May of 2008. I realized that I very much miss math courses. It's soooo strange to spend 6+ years of your life getting really good at something (ie, sitting in courses and studying and such), and then to have all of that disappear pretty much overnight. So it was like a bit of a nostalgic thing to do, even if it was in a totally different place and with different people.

Besides, it was a realllly cool lecture topic - essentially using random walk concepts to derive the PDE (partial differential equation) representing diffusion of particles in space and time. Sexy equation, check it out: wiki

We even talked about some tricks for studying PDE's - mainly converting them to ODEs. And solved Fisher's equation, studying invasion fronts (the examples were even biological!). And all of this is the foundation for sweeet things like Turing structures, and Zhabotinsky soup. I wish I could have taken a class like this when I was in undergrad, alas.

The driving today gave me a good chance to spend some time talking with my adviser dude. I quite like him. We have surprisingly similar backgrounds, although he has come down much more strongly and unapologetically on the side of doing all theory and little experimental work. Who knows, maybe I'll end up like that too. One amusing (and all too true) comment that came up during a random conversation was that I'm a really good deal for him. If we get a solid paper out of my project, which I expect to do, then he'll have gotten a paper for the price of supporting a lab tech w/out benefits. In comparison to funding a graduate student (stipend, plus tuition, plus benefits/health insurance) or a post-doc (larger stipend, benefits, etc). Apparently I'm cheap! I decided to take that as a compliment.

I think I realllly really need to make sure that I land in a spot for graduate school where I can reliably get my math fix. I want to take courses in numerical analysis, statistics (esp. multivariate), nonlinear dynamics, and PDEs. For starters. And, while this admittedly vacillates, right now I'm of the opinion that maybe I should have studied even more math, or looked for a Master's degree in applied mathematics/statistics before heading to a PhD. Ooops. I'm also sort of temporarily at least wishing that I had applied for one or two of the more prestigious/rigorous math/ecology programs that I shied away from... Sigh.

But tomorrow I could swing the other way again, who knows.

Interview #2

2009-02-17T23:38:00.002-05:00

So I was away from work interviewing for graduate school from Thursday afternoon through Sunday evening. Not going to record the whole experience here, but I do want to mention some of the salient features, for general interest and to help myself remember.

1) This interview was at a private school. They are (very) well funded in a region where the cost of living is low. Students and faculty alike, pretty much everyone I talked to, made sure to mention this fact. Funding is high, TA responsibilities are light. While I'm ok with being provided this information, it started to annoy me very quickly how often it was brought up. Maybe this is normal, I don't know. But being very much of public school stock, I'm not afraid of the idea of getting by on what is necessary, working hard, etc. Just like I didn't want to apply to work with a renowned adviser because I want to be known for my own work, I sort of feel turned off at the thought of too much funding and too low work requirements because I feel like things shouldn't be too easy. That graduate school shouldn't feel like a posh, relaxed experience. Then again, I may just be crazy. It also made me a tad nervous that some of the people (though certainly not all) that were there were doing science because of the good funding, above and beyond their love for the science that they are engaged in. Bizarre. I much prefer people that <3 science, because let's face it, science is awesome.

2) The department is small, but pretty high powered. I enjoyed all of the faculty members I met with, some of them quite a lot. Even enjoyed talking with the dude that likes to come across as very gruff/iritable/unlikeable. I think it's all a show.

3) There isn't much interaction with the math department, although the math people are pretty solid. This is a big con to this particular school - whereas in other places I could pick up a masters in Stats. enroute to my PhD, this place didn't even require a single stats class to get a degree! I think this is paramount to blasphemy in this day and age.

4) Talking with people and being social is exhausting. I love talking and hanging out, don't get me wrong, but I think even in the last year or so, I've gotten a bit more solitary of necessity. My social circles are smaller than they were in college, and I'm used to spending a lot of quiet time thinking and working, flavored by quality visits with friends. This weekend was highly social, and for me to maintain such a friendly outgoing facade in the face of large groups of people, most of them new to me, for extended periods of time, is realllly exhausting. A little strange to think that this is probably more the case now than it would have been a year or two ago.

5) Considering the pros and cons of interviewing with a group of other prospective students. Someone pointed out that this can be both good and bad for a school potentially... if one of the interviewees is really obnoxious/unlikeable, it increases the chances that the rest of the prospectives won't choose to attend, on the off chance that they'd get stuck with having to deal with the obnoxious person for 5+ years. On the other hand, if it's an awesome group of people, it's in the school's favor. I was glad to get to meet everyone, even if it was awkward to know that there were two other people interviewing for the same position as me (not that I think I couldn't take them, mwahahaha). No one was totally obnoxious, but other than my good friend who was also interviewing, only one other student out of a group of ~10 of us really connected. It would be awesome to work the same place as my good friend though.

6) As part of the weekend, we were shown a bunch of graduate student apartments. It seems like a verrry grown up thing to me to rent such classy places (right now I live in one room with sparse - ie nonexistent - furniture). Also to know that some of the grad students I was talking to were married. And buying houses. Most of me still feels like I'm maybe a sophomore. All this serious heavy-duty real life business is kinda frightening.

All in all, I'm not sure I want to go to this place, although learning more about it definitely improved its chances. The next two weekends I'll be visiting my two top-choice schools, and I'm realllly hoping that I'll fall in love with one of them (making my life/choice much easier). If I really don't like them though, I know I could make this place work, especially if my friend were to choose to go there. We'll see how things go!

Sometimes...

2009-02-17T17:07:00.002-05:00

I wish I were a much better mathematician.

One of the useful things that mathematicians often do is figure out whether or not a problem is actually solveable. Some people spend several years of a PhD in mathematics and discover that the problem they're working on isn't solveable - but that's a result! Some find solveable problems. Others, well, who even knows what they do? ;-)

But one thing that's really frustrating is being a pseudo-mathematician, and being able to define problems that you want to solve, but not knowing enough to know whether or not the problem you've written down falls into the class of "solveable" problems. And not having a real, bonafide math whiz around to ask. Then you end up spending forrrever on something that probably isn't solveable. And then you're like, damn. What a frustrating waste of time.

Also, I think I'm really losing my math edge... things that I used to know and do without a second thought aren't coming to me as easily as they did. I realllly need to get back in school. And maybe hire me a mathematician.

overwhelmed

2009-02-14T20:20:00.003-05:00

I'm most of the way done w/ my first weekend grad school interview/recruitment.

I'm tired, my voice is dying, I'm feeling really antisocial and I'm dying to get out of this city. I think I like the school and the program ok, but I've just about hit my limit. Ugh. If one more person asks me if I have any questions I'm going to flip.

Life is coming on fast, egads.

Now I'm gonna try to pull myself together for this last night.

Meet tree (or, Why my girlfriend is the best ever)

2009-02-11T23:42:00.003-05:00

So, on Monday I was stressing out in a significant way, in preparation for my first set of interviews. I was overwhelmed trying to get ready, while responding to information requests from the next two places I'm visiting, and trying to actually work on the research project that I get paid to do.

Guess what arrived and made everything 10 times better???? Check this out:

It's a baby bonsai tree!!!!!! How cute is that?!?!? I've wanted to try bonsai trees for years, and never quite got to it or chanced giving it a try. Eugenie sent me one in the mail as a surprise! Now that I'm on the other side of my first interview (more to follow on that), I've finally had a chance to try repotting the tree, a juniper. But just knowing it was waiting for me at home kept me thinking positive, happy thoughts so it was easier to relax. When i get too stressed out from being around people, hanging out quietly around plants is the best cure. I only wish I could have carried it with me alllll day!

So far I've just been referring to the newest member of my family (it has lots of plant brothers and sisters, if not in a phylogenetic sense) as "tree", but it really needs a name. Any suggestions? Ideas I've had already include

- Ernie
- Juno
- Jenny
- Steve
- Glenn
- Bassie

Isn't Eugenie the best???? :-D

Aaaand I'm off

2009-02-09T14:02:00.002-05:00

First batch of interviews is tonight and tomorrow. I'm stressed, fidgety, worried, and excited. I want to do well. Probably once it starts it will be ok.

Time to go get in the car and drive, and blare some tunes. I'm gonna prep like this is a soccer tourney.

Peace out!

The calm before the storm...

2009-02-07T14:56:00.002-05:00

... hasn't actually been so calm.

Thursday afternoon I helped a grad student with some outdoor winter sampling, involving skis, snow, cold wind, many layers, and significant adventure. I felt like a hard core ecologist. Took a couple of pictures, so maybe I'll take them with me on interviews, in case anyone doubts my abilities as a theorist to understand or perform fieldwork... That evening we had an indoor soccer game; tough game, but we managed to scrape out a tie when one of my team makes scored a brilliant goal off of a free kick in the closing minute of the game.

That was pretty much the high point of the evening, after which a lot of stuff went downhill. We stopped at a grocery store on the way back home, and I discovered when I went to pay for my groceries, with my debit card as per usual, that my bank had recalled my debit card. In other words, the cashier was instructed to take my card and not return it (as usually when a bank recalls a card it's because the card is suspected to be stolen). Talk about confusing/disturbing/embarrassing, I didn't know quite how to deal with it, even though I knew it was my card. I must have looked like a pretty suspicious character, since I had just played soccer and my hair was going in all directions, i was wearing sweats, and looked pretty grungy. Aaaand, since I usually pay for everything with my debit card, don't carry much cash, and have been unable to get approved for a credit card despite numerous attempts, I had no other way to pay for my things. Ucky ucky ucky. One of my friends/teammates was kind enough to help me out, but I haaaate asking for favors like that, and it was just all around an unpleasant deal.

Finally made it back home, flipped on my computer to check my account, and found out that all of my banks' debit cards had been recalled, because hackers had cracked in to some big company's database and stolen names and numbers. So I guess it's good because my account and savings were all just fine. But it also is really bad timing, since interviews start next week, and I have to get gas in my car, and traveling without access to some sort of resources is a bad idea. I think a friend is going to help me cash a check, but this is all more than I wanted to put up with.

All of that is nothing, however, to what one of my friends is dealing with right now. I got some very very sad news from her in a brief email that same night, and by comparison, this financial hullabaloo is trivial at best. I'm hoping and praying for her and her family, so suddenly faced with something very hard to come to terms with. Remember always to love life people, and share love with the people in your life.

Friday was nuts too. Started off sleep deprived and tired from the game the night before, plus staying up late helping edit a letter, and getting up early to finish reading a journal article for our lab meeting. Our lab was hosting this week's seminar speaker, so he was at our lab meeting as we discussed a recent paper of his. Interesting to have such discussions with the author present - quite enlightening. Nice guy, although very confident that what he has found is the answer. Seminar follows meeting, lunch follows seminar, and then I was meeting on and off with my advisor for most of the rest of the afternoon, trying to catch him up on the things I've discovered during the last two weeks that he was away. I also spent half an hour talking one on one with the seminar speaker, which was fun. I'm getting better at it - fewer nerves getting in the way i think, maybe because they've all become desensitized to repeated stress shock.

We had a second soccer game Friday night, the last of this session. I was really tired before the game, and pretty fed up with being around people (I can really only handle so much social interaction in one day before I get overwhelmed and stressed/cranky, especially in the presence of group indecision/inefficiency; when I get tired, this effect intensifies. Eugenie is realllly good at buffering for me when I get like this.) Once we got playing though, I perked up quite a bit. It was a really good game. I had two good goals, no lucky/cheap shots this time. The whole team played really well, and we carried the game, finishing the session with the best record in our league. Yay!

Fortunately, today I've been able to slow down a bit and recuperate. The weather has been stunningly spring-like, which I have very mixed feelings about. But I guess it's nice to be walking around in sweats as supposed to experiencing negative temperatures! I've installed my new RAM, quadrupling my former capacity on my laptop, and I'm backing my files up to my new shiny external hard-drive. When that's done, the project for the rest of the weekend is to reformat my laptop hard drive and try to see if I can get everything running smoothly again. Also laundry, and trying to organize my thoughts in preparation for 4 interviews in as many weeks. I'll be sure to try to keep you all up to date on how things go!

A day in the life of TT.

2009-02-03T16:17:00.002-05:00

Just in case you've ever wondered what a day in the working life of this transient theorist might entail, here's a choice snippet from a paper I'm trying to digest (note, this really is English, I promise, no fooling):

"The impact function I maps the unit cube into the L-dimensional parallelepiped spanned by the impact niche vectors Ci while the sensitivity function S maps the unit cube into a parallelepiped spanned by the sensitivity niche vectors Si."

I remain undecided as to whether it's more frightening that such a sentence exists, or that I think I've mostly figured out what it means. And it's sweeeeeet!!!

Am I living in a Fantasy world?

2009-01-31T16:02:00.006-05:00

I've re-written this post about five times, lets hope maybe it's finally come out right. I know it's a little long, but please read it - I badly need some advice.

The other night I was out at a local brewery with a group of grad students from the station here, at a reception for this week's visiting seminar speaker. At one point during the evening, the conversation turned towards a particular institution's graduate program, a premier program which usually admits a very high-powered, small, and highly selective group of students each year. Someone proceeded to express a set of very strong negative opinions about the program's students, noting that good GPAs, recommendation letters, and GRE scores only meant that they were "book-smart" students. Said individual had gone to a much less renowned program in a different part of the country, identified as anything but a book-smart student, and yet has done some stellar research work, and has the publication record to prove it.

To boil down my take on the matter, (this is nothing revolutionary), "book smart" is a stereotype. We're all familiar with the general way of things - stereotypes are generalizations about a group of people, based on experiences drawn from a set of case examples demonstrating a pattern. Often stereotypes can actually point out things that aren't good about a particular group, or the way that they do something, or the privileges that they receive. As with any generalization, there are exceptions (often many exceptions) to the generalized rule.

"Book smart", being a stereotype, fits all of this. Without going into this a whole lot, because there's another part of it that is more on my mind right now, I'll be the first to admit that "book smart" people can be arrogant about their perceived "intelligence", and that often they are afforded opportunities (graduate school, jobs, scholarships, etc., etc. etc.) that other people with other skills are equally deserving of, and could perform at just as well. So many people seem to want the skill, and dislike those that have it with degrees ranging from mild rancor to hate.

What's really on my mind right now is how to respond to a stereotype when you're in the group that it refers to. This is where it gets kind of personal. By pretty much any standards, line up the credentials and I'm "book smart". I can't help it. It's who I am, it's my nature, it's who I was taught and raised to be. I can't help it.

So what are we supposed to do? What are the options when someone dislikes you for who you are? Retreat into your books, which can't hate you, lose touch with the world and place your trust in the fact that jabs you aren't aware of can't hurt you? Take the offensive, develop a thick protective coat of arrogance, and surround yourself with a similar group of "elites" to weather the raging? Either response simply serves to reinforce the stereotype that engendered it. Accusations of arrogance, elitism, and feigned superiority hit their mark, targeting both the people for whom this stereotype is unapologetically accurate, and those who are driven into adopting such a protective persona. And even talking (or writing on a blog) about the subject is often enough to get you classified as arrogant.

I am acutely aware of this stereotype, and where I fall with regards to it. I can't stand arrogance, and nine times out of ten I wish I could wave a magic wand and change things so I wouldn't stick out. It makes me feel isolated from other people, even people that are really close to me, not because I choose to be isolated but because they choose to set me apart. Put my picture on the wall. Hang meaningless things around my neck. Put me up on a pedestal, and then dislike me because I'm there, and decide that I can't understand who they are and the path that they walk, because of where I've been put.

So how do I deal with it? I don't know that I've got the best solution. I think so far I've managed to avoid completely sinking myself into my studies, letting myself get pigeon-holed, and losing touch (although I can always feel this tugging at me. it's so tempting sometimes to slide into that - comparatively - safe world.) I'd like to think that I've avoided the arrogance armor, although this is a continual source of self doubt. I even avoided applying to some good grad programs because I was afraid of the arrogance bug. But I don't know that my hands are clean even so (maybe just mentioning it or thinking about it this way is tantamount to exhibiting it).

The path of recourse I've been taking so far involves clinging with a good degree of desperation to the belief that anyone could be where I am, given different past opportunities or present motivations. That if they believe in themselves enough, and approach the world with enough tenacity, they can take what they want from it. And that hopefully, if I can work hard enough to be a source of encouragement for other people, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, I can somehow assuage the guilt that I feel for being who I am. That if I deny my skills hard enough, swear them off as nothing and unimportant, maybe they will go away or become irrelevant and stop serving as a painful source of separation.

So you tell me readers, I really want to hear your thoughts. Do I live in a fantasy world? Am I clinging so hard to this optimistic belief (perhaps for my own selfish reasons) that I do more harm then good by believing in people? When do you start causing harm by refusing to accept that something is impossible, that someone can't change their life and their prospects, that somethings can't be overcome and only lived with?

Perhaps more selfishly, if I were to stop denying that differences meant anything at all, how do I live with myself, and the realization that the part of me that is so detested, the "book smart" part is actually an inseparable part of me, rather than just a position that I find myself in by good (cursed?) fortune? That it's not my luck that's disliked, but actually me? What's left to do then... suck it up, let it hurt, come down to earth alone? run away to the books? Cut my ties, go over to the dark side of the force and put on black arrogance armor?

Am I going about this all wrong? HELP!!!

A speaker I once heard talk about diversity from a racial perspective said that what was important was not to get to the point where we are all blind to racial differences and ignore them, but to get to the point where we could recognize them, celebrate them, and live together enriched by them instead of using them to alienate ourselves. Maybe I've been approaching this all with the attitude of blindness. But I don't know how to recognize and celebrate these differences without feeling convicted by society, and hence myself, as an arrogant, ungrateful, pompous jerk. This is too big for me, I don't know what to do.

Please please please tell me what you think.

This blows my mind!

2009-01-31T15:33:00.002-05:00

Is this amazing or what???

Komodo dragfox

2009-01-31T11:29:00.001-05:00

I bet that got your attention...

So you think you have weird dreams? Amateurs. I was going to try to hybridize a few images to share my night vision with y'all, but I don't have photoshop anymore (and probably my computer would be too slow to run it anyways), and I'm lazy. At any rate, picture a hybrid Komodo dragon and fox, but dressed in drag.

The Komodo dragon part I owe to my housemate, who told me about this. That's whacked out people... almost as weird as plant reproductive systems! The rest of it is anyone's guess.

Also there's a tarantula living in my house. She eats crickets, which we're trying to breed. They make a lot of noise.

Analogies

2009-01-26T20:44:00.002-05:00

This is just to show you people that, while I make up more than my fair share of dubious or strange analogies, they're really quite good compared to some of what's out there. Check this one out for example:

"Imagine you wake up one morning and find yourself on an alien planet entirely deserted except for a watermelon with a step stool beside it."

- Synchrony, by Steven Strogatz

That's the lead in to a thought example that he uses to explain how lasers work. Interesting factoid that was new to me - the word "laser" is actually an acronym, standing for "Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation". Way cool. As is this book:

I'm only about half way through, but it is an engaging read. Lots of fascinating examples, drawing together everything from the biology of fireflies to the physics of the power grid, and revealing their common underlying mathematical framework. I dig it.

Something else that has me pumped right now: read this

I so hope that this all comes together, it has me feeling so hopeful to see already these beginning signs of changing policy and new chances for a better future.

Beauty.

2009-01-25T23:17:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I really love the winter. I came home from the grocery store today, and saw this:

So I threw the groceries on the kitchen counter and ran outside with my camera. Took a few pictures, and my fingers froze, so then i put my gloves back on and just watched the sun set.

*sigh of appreciation*

The Similie of the Cake.

2009-01-24T17:35:00.002-05:00

Warning - the following contains an inside message that will be pointless to pretty much everyone. But trust me, it's pretty important, and I want to remember it, and somehow this blog has become a place for saving memories.

Here's to working towards an ever better, and more understood, cake.

stupid shoes. help(?)

2009-01-21T13:38:00.002-05:00

At lunch today, for some reason, the subject of academic attire came up. Apparently, the combination that I wore to last night's bio station "inaugural ball" (sweater, buttony shirt, tie (!), khakis, and brown sneakers) has a major flaw that sticks out to some unusually perceptive people. A hint for all you normal people out there like me, it has something to do with the footwear. I was like, ok, well, no big deal, it was a gathering of 6 grad students and me (not a grad student) in the middle of nowhere. The problem is, see, this represents a measurable portion of what I had planned to wear for grad school interviews, and everyone is saying no sneakers.

So for all you fashionistas out there, what should I do? I limited what i brought to the bio station with me... sneakers, hiking boots, ski boots, snow boots, dance shoes. Mostly I wear hiking boots around all day. I guess the options are to stick with the sneaks, wear my fun dance shoes, have my mom mail me my dust covered dress shoes (even though they claim to be comfortable, they can't compare with sneakers or hikers), or grudgingly shell out $ for yet another pair of footware that I will rarely ever wear. I figure y'all will have fun telling me what to do, and then I don't have to think about it...? :-/

I very much dislike spending time thinking and worrying about fashion and attire - it bores me, and I'd rather be doing something else like science. I need like a butler to decide such things for me so I don't have to worry about it. I think what gets me most of all though is that as much as I'd like to totally ignore it and write it off and be liberated, a part of me that really diggs doing my science worries that such opinions will limit me. Yay hypocrisy.

Humbug.

Why I avoid animal stories...

2009-01-19T20:38:00.003-05:00

Over winter break, while she was visiting, Eugenie read "Marley and Me" a book about this dude and the rambunctious Labrador he and his wife raised and lived with for 13 years. When she left, she left it behind for me to read, as I had remarked at the number of times it made her giggle. Brought it with me when I left home, and in keeping with the theme of the weekend (ie, pretending not to know what science is), I read it through in the last two days.

It was good. Lots of funny parts, easy to read, moved along and kept me interested. But then you get to the inevitable part of every animal story out there, and it seems, particularly dog stories. Every dog story ever written, the dog dies. Sometimes heroically, sometimes unjustly, often of old age. Regardless, the dog moves on to a different existence, leaving its adoring human behind with a profound sense of loss and grief, and a head full of memories tinged bitter-sweet.

I read these books, and I'm a sucker. Almost without fail my nose starts to get drippy, my eyes water, and I end up scrambling for a tissue box or handkerchief. "Where the Red Fern Grows" - fantastic book; trainwrecks me every time. Eventually as a kid I noticed the pattern, and started trying to avoid such books. Who can stem the tide though? They're everywhere. "Old Yeller", "Call of the Wild", "White Fang", "Shiloh", "Sounder", ... , ... On and on.

I've learned to mostly stay away, and am no longer at an age where assignments can force them upon me... But every now and then one slips through the cracks. And I find myself laughing, and, inevitably, exuding a certain moisture from the viccinity of my eyeballs. Sigh. Sometimes it's good though I guess to have your emotions stirred up a bit. Not something that journal articles usually bring to the table, that's for sure.

The essentials: Food. Computers. Word games.

2009-01-19T19:56:00.003-05:00

Hey y'all.

Just in case anyone was starting to worry that I'd starve away into a space smaller than the empty set, I did make it to the grocery store yesterday. I'm now stocked up with enough good eats to last me a week or more. It was a bit of an adventure though - despite forecasts that the snow would stop (it had been snowing for a good five days or so), it never really got around to it. And I was getting hungry. So I ventured out, down roads that apparently this state chooses not to plow with any real frequency on the weekends. Seriously - there was a good 4 inches of snow on the road. Felt like I was in the middle of a blizzard. But I made it. ~$100 later, I've got lots of food, and a little set of tiny screw drivers so I can take my laptop apart (yeah, food is definitely more expensive here than it was down south; I wasn't shopping at a gourmet store by any stretch of the imagination). Although the first shop in a new place always costs more - 'cause you have to invest in all of those one-time items, like a pack of TP or ketchup or olive oil, etc.

I was kind of a lazy bum all weekend; hardly left the house here, and didn't really do any science, which is bad. But I did spend a good chunk of time on computer maintenance, trying to bolster my laptop and help it hang on for another half a year or so, until I start grad school. I'm jumping from 512 mb of RAM up to 2 gb, which should make a huge difference with luck - waiting forever for firefox and other essentials to load is really starting to suck. I might even be able to run Mathematica again on this machine. Figuring out what memory to get took a long time though, as I had to do a lot of sleuth work to determine the make and model of my laptop (an old, not mainstream piece of technology). Along the way, I came across a site with all kinds of advice on my particular kind of laptop, including the reccommendation that the fans and venting duct work needs to be cleaned out every 6 months or so to prevent blockage and overheating. Good thing to know, now that I've owned this computer for ~4 years... Oops! So I pulled out some surprisingly substantial dust bunnies, and the temperature of my CPU is now 20 C cooler than it was before. Still too warm, but loads better. And, my computer no longer sounds like it's an early prototype jet plane trying to take off.

Saturday night we hung out over at one of the grad student's houses. Had a really good time. Snacks. Beverages. People in good humor. Dirty Dancing (the movie) on fast forward. And then someone brought up word games. I've found another word game addict! Joining forces, we coerced various other people into playing speed Scrabble, Squabble, etc. Fun fun fun. Also, playing speed Scrabble while slightly buzzed adds a whole new twist to the game, haha. Before we knew it, it was 2 am. People started dispersing, heading back through the snow to their own houses. Jogging through the snow/snowbanks at 2:30 am with a headlamp on is a happy experience. There was ice in my beard when I finally arrived back at the house here. Yay winter!!!

Whales

2009-01-19T19:37:00.002-05:00

Quick combination of factoids, something that's on my mind:

I'm reading "A Whale for the Killing" by Farley Mowat (a wonderful Canadian naturalist/author, who has written some excellent books, among my favorite is "Never Cry Wolf"). It's a mixture of an autobiographical account of time he spent living on the coast of Newfoundland, and information on whales and the hunting of whales.

I consider myself to be an environmentalist, right? And decently well informed. So we all know that a lot of whales are in trouble, threatened by extinction, and probably most of us know that human hunting of whales for oil and commerce since the 1800s (and continuing today to a degree) has played a huge part in creating this problem.

But I had no idea the sheer number of whales we're talking about here. In one chapter of this book, published in 1972, Mowat goes through species after species, with original population estimates of half a million, or a million, or more, reduced systematically to a few thousand, in some cases even fewer. Blows my mind. Quickly referencing Wikipedia to generate a comparison, that's like taking a few cities like Philedelphia, Dallas, San Jose, Phoenix, Detroit, or San Francisco and systematically killing off their inhabitants until only a few thousand remained, shrinking them to a fifth the size of Wasilla, AK. Damn people.

Another thought that crossed my mind - all these marine biologists that study whales and whale behavior, and maybe spend time pondering what the purpose of whale brain capacity is, How Can They Ever Know? Think about how much would change about a human population if you reduced it from a million to 1500!?!?! Knowledge, customs, social constructs of all sorts would vanish. So much would change. And as usual, as biologists we're left to pick up the pieces and try to understand what we can of something that is forever changed in our increasingly depauperate world. Daunting.

Humbug.

A visit with invention's mother

2009-01-17T10:54:00.003-05:00

I left home on Monday, the back of my car packed up tight, including a few boxes of assorted food items in cans, tea, flour, sugar, spices, chocolate, and some other odds and ends. Two and a half days of travel later, I arrived here at the bio station, having accumulated a bag of bagels, some butter, and string cheese along the way.

Since arriving, I have lacked both the time and energy to trek to a grocery store, the closest of which is about 20 minutes away, especially in the dark - not having ever driven much in this area, and never in the winter, I was partially worried I'd get myself lost. This has resulted in some interesting meals. At this point, pretty much all the bagels are gone - toasted with butter, fried with butter, plain, sliced with peanut butter. I managed to scrounge up a box of spiral pasta, a jar of "chunky vegetable tomato sauce" (which both sounds wrong and is wrong... I love mushrooms, but not pieces of rubber shaped as mushroom slices), and a can of olives. As a firm believer that cheese is an essential component of pretty much any good meal, and that it's addition is one major way to rescue pretty much any questionable meal, I resorted to grating string cheese onto my plate of pasta... That's stooping to a pretty low level for this here guy, who tends to consider himself a quality cook and appreciator of fine food.

Fortunately, things are looking up - it seems that tomorrow a break in snowfall might coincide with a break in the arctic chill pervading this area of late. In other words, my car might actually start, and conditions will be ripe for a major adventure to the grocery store!

In the mean time, I'm gonna fry me up a bagel, sprinkle on some cinnamon, drink some hot chocolate and peel open another string cheese...

Back in the saddle again...

2009-01-15T20:41:00.002-05:00

Hey all -

After several long days of travel, and visits with some friends (including back in my old college town!), I arrived at the biological station yesterday. I'm pretty much settled in to the apartment I'm sharing here. It's nicer than I had hoped, which makes the little bit extra in rent more or less ok - I'm sleeping on a real bed instead of a Thermarest, and I've got a fair sized room which is close enough to one of the academic buildings that I can pick up mediocre wireless. My own bathroom if I use the one downstairs. And there's even a dining room and a living room, both with furniture! Haven't used them much yet since I'm so used to just existing in my own room. Kitchen is pretty nice too, although there isn't much space for my food and stuff - I moved into the top most shelves since my housemate is a good bit shorter than I.

Last night I got tired of unpacking around 6:30, and decided to take a power nap. 13.5 hours later I woke up, after a series of rather intense dreams (one of which involved the CIA!). WOW. I can't remember the last time I slept that long. I didn't even wake up to make dinner or anything! Felt very refreshed in the morning, if somewhat sore from staying in the same position all night. But I think I'm caught up on the sleep debt accrued from several days of travel, and late nights visiting with friends.

Today I settled back in at a desk in the lab I worked at all summer, and started the painful process of trying to remember where I left off on this research project 4 months ago. I thought I had left myself pretty good notes, but wow the dust is thick. Might actually end up being a good thing for the project though, because it's forced me to back away from the nitty gritty in your face business of trying to make code work, and developing new code for its own sake. I've got a chance right now to stop and think about the questions we were originally trying to answer, how well we've done with them, and what else needs doing. Talked with my advisor here for a while this afternoon, and apparently he thinks we're a lot farther along towards the requisite material for putting together a paper than I would have thought we were. This is quite heartening, and also confirms my suspicion that I have absolutely no sense for breaking science into paper-sized morsels. If left alone to my own devices, I'd probably spend years working on a project, and then belatedly realize that instead of one ginormous paper at the end, I could have gotten a bunch of pubs along the way. Sigh. Oh well, doing the research is the best part anyways. And there's still quite a bit to do on this project.

I'm going to try hard to not put too much time into this project right away - this will be hard. Once I get going I don't like to stop. But I really really do need to set aside time to do my own reading of papers, tinker with my own projects, and most importantly, start getting ready for grad school interviews. Gulp.

Life: Reformatted.

2009-01-10T22:10:00.003-05:00

Cold night. Upcoming topics at a glance: transientheorist.blogspot.com puts on a new tuxedo; a discovery about health insurance; walks down memory lane; book reviews; setting off on a new old adventure.

I'm in between again. Yesterday I sadly concluded a lovely visit with Eugenie here at my folks' house in the "arctic" as she refers to it (Trying hard not to think 'bout how it could be a good 3 months or so before we can visit again). And Monday morning marks the beginning of my next road trip, heading back to the biological station where I spent this past summer to work. I've been using the intervening hours to address some projects that have needed attention for a while, and may not get any again for quite some time.

First, and the only one any of y'all would notice, I've changed around the format of my friendly old blog here. I pick up occasional complains about the white text on black background business. They haven't gone entirely unheeded; months later, I've done a bit to address the problem. Still really like the black and white feel, but hopefully this is easier for the aging eyes of my readers ;-) With so few of them, probably it behooves me to heed their complaints on occasion, lest I end up lonely in cyberspace. I'm moderately pleased with the result, although I'm having the darndest time trying to make the grey boxes be the size I want them to be. Years ago I dabbled with html just a bit, but having spent the last 3+ years working with C, Mathematica, Matlab, and R, all languages that actually like dooooo things in a logical, orderly progression of steps to solve problems, all this edit html template business is highly confusing and seems only to create problems. Sigh.

Paralleling the changes in my cyber-life, I spent a good chunk of today cleaning out years worth of accumulated paper files that I've been storing in boxes in my parents' basement. The final tally for this recycling spree: 1 year physics notes; 2 years chemistry notes; english papers galore; page upon page of environmental activism material I used back when I was much much more, well, environmentally active I guess; old correspondence; a whole public speaking course; assorted materials from 6 years worth of higher education and a couple of high school. For the most part, I hate going through stuff like this, either because it reminds me of times gone by and I feel guilty remembering the people I haven't kept in touch with, or in the case of course notes, I realize how much knowledge has used my head like an exit ramp motel - staying for a night/semester, then hopping back on the highway and heading off towards greener pastures in the distance. In other words, there's a junk load of stuff I knew at one point and definitely do not anymore. This makes me sad. Also, it just plain out hurts to recycle notes and assignments that consumed hundreds of hours of work and cramped writing. Alas.

A few parts were amusing though. Like coming across a print-out of the very first computer program I ever wrote, in visual basic... a language I haven't tinkered with since. My dad got all excited back then when he saw me getting into it, and came home one day with 3-4 "learn to program visual basic in a week" books, all of which I pretty much failed to make use of. Guess I ended up going down a pretty similar path in the end anyways. Also amusing/bitter sweet was coming across the only yearbook I own - from seventh grade, as most of my life I was homeschooled. The page in the back is still there, where everyone scribbled messages and such. I'm not in contact with any of these people anymore, and haven't been for years. The puzzling message scrawled in one corner is still there though - someone thought I was "hot" (!?!?!?!), cautioned me to stay out of trouble, and signed anonymously. Probably someone's joke, as best as I can figure. Just one of those things though that makes you think of the "what-ifs" every time you come across them. Strange to think of myself almost a decade ago(!)

One of my favorite leisure indulgences is reading sci-fi and fantasy novels. It's been a good long while since I've been in any place with a quality library long enough to hold a library card and visit with regularity. So I'm wayyy out of touch with what good new stuff has come along. But last night I started and finished "Chalice" by Robin McKinely, one of my favorite fantasy authors for years and years now. It was pretty good, and delivered some of her usual uniqueness (a strange phrase come to think of it!), although I was sad at how fast it ended.

Also new and inspiring, I've been reading "Vagabonding" by Rolf Potts, a book about how to set things aside and go off on an adventure. Something I rather dearly want to do, especially with interviews looming in the immediate future, and grad school kicking off this fall. The way this guy writes makes it seem so easy and possible and in reach to strike out on an adventure with just a bit of advanced planning and an open mind. It's been very therapeutic, to dream of escape and adventure. That alone is worth having bought the book, and who knows, it might just pump me up enough that I'd take a leap and see where I landed! Chock full of really good quotes too - I'll add some when I get a chance.

It's definitely time to get back to work, although I'm sort of begrudging packing again and leaving home. But, I have projects that need finishing, and I need to get myself back into the academic, near-drowning-in-science mind frame in preparation for upcoming grad school interviews. Also, a paycheck is going to become rather necessary in the near future...

*Warning, rant*: (had to shell out 345 bucks for dental care last week... yay vacation?). Fortunately, after many hours of confusion, misdirected paperwork, faxes, emails and phone calls, we ended up determining after all that I'm still, remarkably, covered under my parents' health insurance for another year after all, despite what we had initially been told, even though I just had another one of those birthday thingies happen. This is really good news for me, as it saves me 130 plus dollars a month, and I'll have more than just bare-bones hospital coverage. Universal healthcare people. Seriously. Can we do it already??? Any maybe while we're at it, simplify the tax code, in the hopes of helping this poor math major here be able to figure out how to do income tax returns for 3 different states and the federal government??? Not looking forward to that part.

Ok, bedtime... I was up wayyy too late last night reading, and I've got lots of driving coming up in a few days. Might be more posts before I leave, but who knows. Keep your fingers crossed I don't get stuck in a blizzard somewhere.

Theo

The New Year's bandwagon

2009-01-01T23:54:00.000-05:00

New Year's thoughts

Aaaah, New Year's... a time for introspection, self-evaluation, a putting to rest of things in the past, and of hopeful glances towards the future. And, in my family, usually falling asleep well before midnight. Last night was no exception - the rest of the family was in bed by a bit after 10, and I was more or less out by 10:30, drifting in and out of sleep until I knew Eugenie had arrived safe and sound at home around 11:30. She then proceeded to write an awesome post with her goals for the new year, while I acquiesced to the demands of my pillow.

Spent most of my time today cleaning in preparation for her arrival tomorrow (!), working on a surprise (working outside with metal tools in a shop is rough this time of year - last night it was -4 here!), and drinking copious amounts of tea to fight a cold. Peppermint, Spearmint, Echinacea, Rosehip/Lemon, Lapsang, Orange Pekoe, Chai, beef broth, hot chocolate, I've had it all at least once today. My bladder is filling a demand for overtime/holiday pay.

This evening, after dinner, my family prevailed upon me to join them in a game called 'Chronology' - the gist of it is that you have to successively place cards with historical events in order by the year they occurred in. History, and in particular dates, may well be my Achilles heal... I'm terrible! Although I don't feel bad about not knowing things like "What year Ed. Lowes invented cat litter in" or the comparative ages of slinkies and lincoln logs. Maybe in another 20-30 years I'll at least be good at the history that happened during my lifetime! Strange to think that history really is occurring in our lifetimes, every year, even every day. I guess that's one of the things that celebrating the beginning of a new year is good for - stepping back a bit from the day to day, and realizing even briefly what the big things in your life and world are.

2008 -

A pretty big year, all in all. I guess one of the more significant events was finishing my bachelor's in biology and mathematics in May. Since then, I've held two research positions, one in mathematical research at a biological station in the Midwest, and the other doing hands-on ecology fieldwork at a site in the Southeast. These experiences have been a good chance to check myself, reassuring me that I'm probably heading in the right career direction. I know for sure that I need the stimulation that comes from constantly having things to think about, problems to solve, and mental challenges. As much as I love being outdoors and seeing cool plants and animals, it's not enough to overcome the boredom of repetitive fieldwork for me. Ideas are what keep me going. So maybe I'm a little closer to finding the right balance of field and office for me. At the very least, having experienced this boredom/frustration as a field technician, I feel more confident that graduate school is the right place for me - a place to drown myself in ideas.

Graduating has brought along other new things too; trappings of an independent life. I own my own car, no longer pay school bills, or have help from my parents in paying for food and rent. Starting this new year, I'll be paying all my own health insurance, car insurance, phone bills, the whole kit and caboodle. I decide now where I'll live, my schedule, and what I do, more than ever before. It's exciting, but scary too - no more buffers. I'm still followed by the persistent feeling that I'm the same person I used to be, but trapped in an older exterior of whom more grown-up things are expected. Maybe that's a universal feeling, I don't know.

Another major major thing that made this past year different from any other before it, has been dating Eugenie. The five wonderful months we spent together and school have now been joined by a harder, but still amazing seven plus months of this long distance business. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, we manage to talk a lot, and she's become an integral part of my life, even from far away. The biggest lesson I take from all of this, is a sense of humility. I never thought such a thing could be possible, not for me. It's scary now to think how very close that certainty came towards making this relationship impossible by denying it a chance to begin. So, people, be humble - we can't know or see all of the wonderful things that are possible for us in life. Say that something is impossible for you, and you make it so. Humbly deny your ability to judge what might be, and if you're really really lucky, you might get a blessing like Eugenie.

I'm also very grateful for my companions and friends in 2008 - they stand out as one of the best parts of the year. Many new friends come with working new jobs in new places, and I have made some good ones indeed; friends who have shared good food, humor, different perspectives on life, and interesting ideas. I'm glad that our stories could come together. It's a delightful thing to meet someone and feel that you've made a friend that you get to keep for life! I also had the good fortune to visit many old friends on my travels. I realize more and more that these friends, these people, old and new, are at the core of my joy in life, deeper down even than all the equations and ecology and plant names and facts that swirl around me and identify me.

2009 -

I'm tempting fate, and lucky already if I've escaped without being too sappy in the above. So I'll move on to looking forward with a hodge podge of thoughts for the coming year.

A bit more than a year ago now, I decided not to apply to graduate school, opting to take a year off. I had some good reasons for this (having spent 6 years doing the college deal, I wanted to try a different kind of life, distance myself from academia a bit, travel, challenge myself in different ways and broaden my perspectives), and some not-so-good reasons (procrastinating about applying, a ridiculously busy fall semester - five 300 level biology/math courses, among other things, and being scared of future commitment). At this point I've got about 8 months left before I'll be in graduate school, starting a PhD. And I feel like i've only partially lived up to my goals for this time. I've traveled a little, but by and large I haven't come close to stepping outside my comfort zone. Life is definitely different from being a student, but even in my employment, the work I've done is quite similar to what grad school and an academic future will bring me. I've been sticking to things that are safe, known, and predictable. So, a big goal for 2009 is to take advantage of the time that is left to me, and really try to push myself in new ways. Maybe find a job thoroughly outside of academia and maybe outside of this country, working for an environmental movement, or some kind of social justice initiative. Something to shake me up, and help me see the world from new angles.

Of course, there's the excitement of deciding on a graduate school, settling my future to some extent for five or six years to come. Adjusting to living in a new place, and to new academic challenges. I hope I choose well, and am happy in the place I go, and what it brings me, academically and personally. In particular, the choice that I make will unavoidably have consequences for Eugenie and I. It's pretty much impossible to predict and plan for a future right now, as there are many, many unknowns. But I dearly hope that things work out such that we can be near to each other, one way or another. We're tougher than I imagined, but time and distance are weary weights to carry, especially as life stresses rise. One way or another, I wish, too, to keep growing and learning, and becoming a better boyfriend and supporter for her in achieving her hopes for 09.

Another goal I have for myself is to keep up the tightrope acts of balancing theory and reality, mathematics and ecology, the academic and the applied. I'd really like to reconnect to my early roots in ecology, when I was much better informed of current events, environmental and social issues and movements. I don't want to end up as a disconnected and irrelevant academic, studying fascinating questions that do squat to address real problems in the real world. While I'm looing forward to a graduate experience where I can steep myself in my subject, I don't want to do this at the expense of maintaining the diverse interests that make me who I am.

Finally, as I move on to new places, new people, new challenges, I don't want to walk away from the old. That's a big one. I've moved on before, not looking back, and in retrospect, it gets lonely without connections to your past, things that ground you. I'm looking forward to having friends from college that remain friends from life - but like any relationship, that means keeping up on things.

________________________________

Wow, that's rather a lot of text. If you made it through all of that, probably either:

1) You skimmed it, didn't you? thought so...
2) Winter break has bored you significantly
3) You're procrastinating
4) Wow, you really are stalking me aren't you? ;-)

Whatever the case, best wishes for a peaceful, productive 2009.

TT

A bad case of boomerang arm

2008-12-31T12:53:00.003-05:00

The other day, a good friend from my college years (haha, that makes me sound like an old fart) visited me here at my folks' place in the middle of nowhere. Accompanying him was a boomerang that he discovered while cleaning out his aunt's garage. Perfect, right? I mean, two young guys with not a lot going on, middle of nowhere, and the house here is right next to a big abandoned agricultural field with lots of room for flying objects.

The trick, apparently, is how to make said boomerang actually fly in a somewhat appropriate or intentional manner. Being recent college grads, and with at least one of us a physics geek, we figured we were now more educated than the average joe (plumber?), and with a few hints, should easily have been able to overcome this challenge. Resourceful guys, we asked the all-knowning google, which took us through meandering pathways to a page on "wikiHow". We read about how to hold and aim a boomerang, as well as tips on adjusting for wind, layover, and catching without fear. While we doubted that we'd achieve the prowess of this dude:

We are in awe... this boomer' is easily three times the size of ours... Formidable indeed!!!

we were feeling pretty confident that we'd get some acceptable results. The phrase "Always wear open-fingered gloves and some form of eye protection to guard from shrapnel" caused but a momentary concern.

Two hours later, we'd traversed all around the field many, many times, chasing mis-directed boomerangs, and often walking in circles looking for a brown piece of wood amongst dead brown vegetation. Also climbed trees and finagled our way through brush and briars when a few throws went especially wrong. By the end of it, we'd managed to throw and catch the boomerang upon its return exactly once each. Both times as I recall, there was a bit of mad dashing and athleticism involved, as the boomerange refused to return to its actually point of release, although often it would wizz over our heads, tantalizingly close, but beyond our jumping abilities. Despite this, we felt fairly pleased with ourselves as we headed in to lunch and to warm ourselves at the woodstove.

A day later, I'm here to report that the boomerang had the last laugh... nowhere on the wiki page was it suggested to stretch thoroughly before and after boomerang sessions, or better yet, spend a few months weight training before attempting a 2 hour session. Alas, today, my arm is sore enough as to complain about carrying and putting on a coat, a rather necessary ability up here in the cold north... Next time maybe I'll use the boomerang for the purpose it seems made for at first glance - not hunting or sport, but kindling wood!!!

Random Memory

2008-12-22T18:27:00.002-05:00

While shopping in a curiosity shop for Christmas presents, I came across a loose-leaf tea section. I am a big fan of tea, and loose-leaf tea is great. But I pretty much lost control when I saw one kind of tea being advertised:

"Poobong tea"

Perhaps I am too juvenile for my own good, but that had me giggling for a good thirty minutes. I'm sharing it on the off chance that maybe one of my 5 or 6 readers has a similar sense of humor...

Adventures adventures

2008-12-22T16:34:00.002-05:00

Wow, so a lot has happened since I wrote last. In particular, I've driven more than a thousand miles over the course of 4 days, including one 12 hour day of snow-storm awfulness. I rarely swear, but during one part of the trip was heard to repeatedly exclaim (with feeling), "Just get me the hell out of ____". Sometimes you couldn't tell if you were on a three lane highway, or if maybe there were only supposed to be two lanes and people had invented the third. Other times you'd wonder why you were paying tens of dollars in road tolls, to drive on roads that were not being plowed at all. I had new firsts, like "first time ever driving on an 8 lane highway"(!!!!). I'm home now though, and got to visit a lot of great people along the way (fellow alumn and physics grad student, old housemate + lady friend, and Eugenie :-D...).

Oh yeah, and the trip almost got off to an interesting start. As is rather customary prior to packing up your life and apartment and moving, I'd been focusing on consuming as many edible things in my fridge as possible, to avoid wasting or moving food. This included a third of a carton of eggnog, which I downed while packing up my apartment. I generally very much enjoy a bit of eggnog around this time of year (sprinkled of course with some ground nutmeg). Talking with Eugenie, I learned two important things:

1) There are some kinds of eggnog that are alcoholic.
2) "Southern Comfort" is a kind of alcohol. I thought it just sounded homey and was probably a brand name. After all, I was in the south.

Who knew? Alcoholic eggnog? What will they think of next???? Adding vodka to kids' juiceboxes?

After a bit of panicked scrounging in the trash, and secretly wondering if this is why I enjoy eggnog so much, I managed to retrieve the carton. In fine print, it declared "non-alcoholic". Whew, crisis averted. Starting off a major roadtrip by accidentally getting a buzz would not have been a good sign.

Packing up my car was a challenge too. I remain quite pleased with myself for how much stuff I got in that car, even now as I look at the mound it has made in my room here at home. I had to leave enough room in "Cosette", my 4-door sedan car, to pick up a passenger - a friend of mine who lives in the same state - as I was giving him a ride home for the holidays. This wasn't going to be a problem, until I opened up the last closet in our appartment, and discovered a stack of five or six boxes containing all of the glass bottles I've been saving for the last 3 months. We couldn't recycle glass where I was, and it pained me immensley to see them thrown out... glass is so easy to recycle comparatively!!! I called up my friend, and learned that he could recycle glass... so into the car all of the (beer, wine, peanut butter, microbrewery gingerale) bottles went, most coming to rest in the front passenger seat where there was still room left. After arriving and disposing of the bottles, it occured to me that it's a good thing I didn't get pulled over or something. I can just imagine the conversation... "No officer, I have no idea how those got there, but I assure you I haven't just consumed three bottles of wine and close to 40 some odd beers"... "Only the gingerale was mine"..."It's really good stuff, just enough bite to it; wanna try some"?

I also stopped by a big state school in a major city to visit a potential grad school advisor, and check out the facilities and program. It was a fun time. I had been quite thoroughly nervous, worried that I'd seem like an idiot, or generally clueless. When I showed up, they had a whole schedule figured out for me, and I drifted back and forth between meetings with different faculty members, and grad students, talking about science and sort of repeating the same things about mysel over and over again. Once I relaxed, (which happened almost as soon as I started talking about math and bifurcation diagrams with the potential advisor), and realized no one was out to get me, everything went smoothly and I started having fun. Made me excited to finish my grad school applications, and now I'm really looking forward to "official" grad school interviews at other schools. Especially now that I've gotten some practice.

Incidentally, I've been invited for the first of those as well (yay!). Looks like things might really come together. Which means I may have some tough decisions to make in the future... eek. Today I finished off another application (yay for recycling personal statements), so now I'm more than halfway done. I might be able to finish them all off before x-mas with a little luck, so I can get back to doing fun work, or maybe even a little plain old having fun.

For now though, it's good to be home, and not driving anywhere in particular for the near future.

What makes a bad bookstore...

2008-12-16T21:22:00.003-05:00

The single thing that is guaranteed to turn me off about a bookstore (something that ordinarily isn't easy to do, because I love books immensely) is when its shelves are poorly organized. Titles clash, subjects are all mixed up, even alphabetization by authors name is out the window. Ruins my ability to browse for something new and exciting, as well as my chances of actually finding any particular title I might have been looking for, and by and large doesn't put me in the mood to buy books. How bad is it when you can't even find Dr. Seuss books with ease? Jeepers. I like supporting smaller businesses, although this might have been a chain for all I know, but seriously... makes me long for Amazon. Sigh.

Also, what's with half of the books in the science section being about God? "How Science deals with God" and a dozen other books with similar titles mixed in all over the science section. As a scientist and a "papist" (to steal Dr. Isis' term for it), I think about such things from time to time. But they don't have books in the religion section about science, so why is the science section half populated by pseudo religious books? Give them their own section at least, so I can find science when that's what I'm looking for. What science books weren't dealing with the science-god controversies seemed to have to do with a very limited selection of other topics, including sex, our brains, and Einstein. I'm sure he'd be glad to know he made the hit list with humanity's favorite preoccupation. There's a whole world out there book-store owners... c'mon now.

And, get rid of the small stuffed animals that make obnoxious sounds each of the fifty million times bored children squeeze them. Or bad things are gonna happen.

(I wasn't supposed to post again, but I'm irritated, and avoiding packing. ick)

This is 49 Tango signing off...

2008-12-16T18:57:00.002-05:00

Today was my last full day of work here down south. We took it kind of easy, compared to earlier weeks of insanity. Visited our field sites one last time - they looked somewhat naked, with all of our meteorological gear gone and pin flags removed. Still very familiar, but different. Like they can finally settle down for the winter (or maybe that's just how I feel). We collected one last errant data point, then did a little sight seeing, visiting a bunch of low spiderwebs coated in dew from the fog, examining low growing mistletoe, and generally wandering around. Ate lunch outside (wearing my HAT); it was easily 70 degrees out. Not at all what it'll be like when I return north...

After lunch we packed up the last few boxes, fiddled around, and eventually settled into a bit of data analysis. I'm still seeking the quintessential contour plot to show our data to best advantage. Made one this afternoon that looks pretty snazzy, but apparently they would prefer that I use a different program so they can avoid licensing issues. Shrug. Ended up working late, as we were waiting until dusk to take some staged pictures of our 'fieldwork techniques' for potential presentations and publications in the future.

Given the way things work down here, chances are good that unless I go to a particular grad school I applied to, probably I won't ever see these places again where I've been working the last three months. Adds an unusual sense of finality to it all, that I haven't experienced despite having left behind a number of places in the past year. I'll get to see lots of my coworkers again though, and that's been the best part all along, the people I get to spend time with.

Ok, my dinner is at an end (quick meal of leftovers - Chickpea Artichoke soup, easy garlic bread and a spinach salad w/ poppyseed dressing, broccoli, sunflower seeds and feta). So now as I promised myself, I have to stop writing and get my act in gear. Tons of things to get done before I hit the road tomorrow afternoon/evening... When I'm finally settled in again back home, I intend to write a post reflecting on this job from a distance :-)

As for now, 49 Tango (my radio call sign down here on the job) is signing off.

365 Days

2008-12-15T20:36:00.004-05:00

Watching movies. Peaches and footsteps on a chilly fall evening. Don't turtle up! Roast beef and American. Bagels - delivered specially, any time, anywhere. Oooo, come take a picture of this plant! Hockey hockey hockey! Salivary amylase. "That's not all you have..." TOES:

Dinner every Friday night... Falling asleep in biostats. Smokin' hot holiday ball + dark chocolate M&M's. Conferencing it up. Creaky floors, cold rooms, warm hearts. Chlorine. Slip-sliding down the hill. Best reason for a train trip ever. Let's ice skate...or not... or try ice skating up a mountain! Singayou a song. [] dancing. Sailing on the sunfish. Ghetto Chicken. Spatula fight. Full court pingpong...... Here, hold this turtle! The noble eating of the jelly. "visits". Life as a Pirate of the Carribean. Claiming to 'slip' as an excuse to grab my rear in public :-P Kyaking! That long-ass swimming thing where they fire the gun. Great stories. "I just made a pi in the snow!" Disparaging the pinkies. More (probably ineffective) pep talks than I can count. Packing the forerunner to the gills. Watchin the lympics. Snow football. "Taste this, it's good, I promise". Canoeing at sunset. "Yes, you really do have to dress up and put all that stuff around your neck, goof". Random elephants. Phone calls from the grocery store. 7th order polynomials at town court. Halloween parade. Fresh Laundry like whoa. Furniture moving! The search for Bailey chair. "Tastes like ____!" Scrubs. Post-its. Backrubs. SQUISH! All the latest from CNN and craigslist. Welcome to the blogosphere. Manatee. Random french phrases about potatoes or cabbages or something. Perfectly timed "dope slaps". Cold feet... but warm eyes, smile, hands, hugs. Meet the ol' roomie. Published poets!?!?!?!? Mac-Queen. Pop culture interpreter. PURPLE! Dream land. Matching pens.

And sooooo much more. Wouldn't trade a single one of these, even for that new matrix modeling book....

"You" know who you are.

Remember these things when stuff seems impossible and gloomy. I never thought all this would be possible, and can't remember a time when I've been so tremendously glad to be proven wrong. Couldn't do it without you: you have the patience, faith, stubbornness, strength, personality, and hope that make this happen. Just be yourself, remember these strengths, have hope, and keep shining that beautiful smile. I was going to write more mushy stuff (something along the lines of deep brown eyes, silky hair, cute ears, thermally extreme bod', huggability, effortless coordination/grace, loving personality, etc) to teasingly embarrass you, but if you want that I guess you'll have to send a special request...

Here's to 365. And to a whole lot more!

With love,

'Theo' (one lucky dude!)

Getting smoked out

2008-12-14T08:53:00.003-05:00

Our neighbor in the next apartment down the hall smokes. And is doing so currently. And every time that happens, the smell of it works it's way through our front door, making our apartment smell too, despite the towel I've got crammed under the door frame. Grrrrrr. And I had just made a nice breakfast, and settled down to take on a huge to-do list with time constraints.

I'm leaving the south in 4 days. Between now and then:

- One grad application is due
- I need to make soup
- A final draft of my manuscript, formatted for submission to a particular journal is due
- A bunch of papers need to be read, so that i can sound halfway intelligent when i visit a prospective grad advisor on my way back north
- Christmas shopping is incomplete
- I'm trying to finish up making some sexy graphs based on this fall's data to contribute to an NSF grant my boss and his boss are putting together so that this project can be better funded next year.
- frisbee so I don't go stir crazy
- grocery shopping so the soup will have something in it (stone soup anyone?)
- straightening out my application for expensive health insurance that provides little coverage (as supposed to really expensive health insurance that provides moderate coverage). Good thing that the periods in which I have the lowest income will probably correlate to the times when i'm at my healthiest, if I'm lucky.
- I almost forgot to mention packing my life up into a car, and cleaning out the apartment.

And i might have to move back into my bedroom to work 'cause it reeks. But the only table is out here in the living room. Bah Humbug.

Christmasy things

2008-12-11T18:00:00.003-05:00

After 3 days of significant rain and thunderstorms, today it was clear and sunny. With the passing weather, moods all around lifted and changed. Also, I spent the majority of my day today working on analyzing some of the data from our experiments, involving tinkering in excel and R. I made some kick-butt graphs, and I think really surprised my boss dude. I even came out ahead on a "discussion" with him about whether or not rotations of vectors in space are the result of a linear transformation or not (they decidedly are). That was a small victory for mathematics; maybe one more ecologist will be conscious of the appropriate use of terms now... just maybe. I think a good part of my lethargy and gloomy mood the last several days was related to spending all day counting repeatedly to twenty (sorting and counting seeds). With an adequate diet for my brain, I'm feeling much better.

I really dig mistletoe. Can't remember ever really noticing it back home, but down here, now that the leaves are mostly off all of the trees finally, there are little spheres of greenery scattered about the branches of the oak trees, high off the ground. Mistletoe. Parasitic plants are sooooo cool.

Yesterday was the annual Christmas party at the Forest Service unit I'm affiliated with. The whole cast of characters was there, ranging from researchers, natural resource managers, forest fire crews, maintenance and administration. The office curmudgeon (Bob), was in classic form. The Christmas party consisted of a luncheon, during which bad christmas jokes were told, and one employee played an Appalachian dulcimer with moderate success (he knows exactly 3.5 songs, and played them all).

The highlight of the event was a game known as "Dirty Santa" or "Yankee Swap" (depending on how southern a person is I guess). I'd never heard of it before, but it was pretty hilarious. The general idea is that everyone participating brings a small wrapped gift of some sort; all gifts are placed under a tree, and each person gets a number. The first person picks a present, and opens it. The next person in line can either open a new present, or steal the already revealed present. If your item is stolen, you can then either steal from a different person, or open a new package. And so on. Combine a bunch of characters with a random assortment of presents ranging from desirable (multi-tools, crock pots, food goodies, sandwich maker, socks) to entirely humorous (santa claus toilet seat cover, rapping reindeer, rubber chicken, ceramic angels, singing frog in cardiac arrest), and the potential for theft, and hilarity ensues. I haven't laughed hard enough to cry in aaaages.

Some favorite moments:

- manly firefighter opens a bag, revealing a decorative (and rather feminine) glass container of bath oil. Reading the label out loud, he says "smells like fresh linen.....!?!?"

- tough female firefighter pulls a reindeer stuffed animal out of a bag, holds it up examining it, and accidentally triggers a switch, causing the reindeer to start wiggling around and rapping a christmas song. She must have jumped about a foot and almost lost control, haha.

- Bob opens one of those U shaped neck pillows with built in massager... this is totally his type of thing (he's re-arranged his office so you have to walk all the way in and around a partition to actually see him, and everyone's sure that he frequently takes naps back there). Predictably, the neck pillow gets stolen after a few rounds, and, opening a new parcel, Bob ends up with a matched pair of small ceramic angels instead of his nap pillow...

- in the final play of the game, a humorous character gets stuck with the rubber chicken (and now is honor bound to foist it on someone next year apparently).

This weekend is going to be intense. I've got a half week of work next week, followed by a roughly 4 day trip back north, involving a grad school visit and meetings (gulp), and visiting several friends, as well as hopefully a visit with Eugenie! Which is enough to make anyone excited. However, in the mean time, I've got a grad school application to finish, a final draft of a paper to complete, a rescue mission to a nearby state to pull off, and two going-away dinners the next two nights. Plus packing. It's gonna be a busy one!

What am I getting myself into?

2008-12-10T18:24:00.003-05:00

Picture this:

1) You hike all day, struggling up steep trails with a hefty pack on your back, challenged every step of the way.

2) Upon reaching the top of the mountain, you find a nice big granite boulder. Taking a long, sturdy rope from your bag, you anchor one end of the rope to the boulder and tie the other end around your waste.

3) With another bout of hard labor, gritted teeth, and maybe some friendly advice from fellow hikers who you've encountered along the way, you manage to pry the gigantic boulder from the ground, and set it in motion down the mountain. Bystanders cheer you on.

4) You straighten up, wipe sweat from your eyes, and in a moment of clarity realize what you've done. Your life is tied to a boulder bouncing and tumbling down a mountain, choosing it's own direction, and stopping only where everything ends up, down in the valley. Everyone else is gathered around, patting you on the back, congratulating you and wishing you luck, and proud of their part in helping you to this point. No one looks hard enough to see the fear flickering in your eyes.

So what do you do? Cut the rope and stay up on the mountain, letting go of all the work you put into getting there, and moving that great rock? What about the parts of the tumbling whirlwind of the boulder's trajectory that are highly appealing? Things you've wanted (or convinced yourself that you wanted) for years now. Is that desire real, or just a conjuration arising from that fear-sharpened clarity, and sense of the future? Is this just a passing moment of weakness? You've done everything right, worked hard, and thought through your actions as much as you possibly could. All indications seem to point to having taken the right path. But if that's the case, what's the shock all about?

And then someone taps you on the shoulder, tells you that you can't stay up there on the mountain forever. Before you're ready, or you've made up your mind, before anyone notices or takes seriously the flashes of fear and checks up on you (maybe they just didn't know what to say either, or maybe all they could see was their own great stone), you feel the rope start to tug. Out of slack already, you start to slide alone down the mountain, propelled (compelled?) onwards to catch up with the rest of your life on it's way to the distant valley below.

_______________________________

That about describes the feelings I have about my life right now, driven in part by sitting alone on a quiet, dreary evening. Reading blog posts by new professors and such about the insane work loads they have has me worried that however much i think i might like science and think that i can do and enjoy research, that deep down I really don't have anywhere near the love of the subject to carry me through all of that. Hence the twin concerns "what am I getting myself into" and "is it really worth it?" are making an appearance. Having done a lot of things pretty darn well to get to the boulder in the first place, and to set it in motion, makes it even harder I think to digest feelings of doubt... because I feel like I shouldn't be having them!

That and the part about being tied to a moving boulder fits pretty well too. Captures both the feeling of distance I feel towards a chunk of my life right now, and the simultaneous connection and inseparability of the pieces. And the wish that there were people who knew me better than I know myself, people that would understand me and say "See here, it's all right." and explain to me how I work and make me make sense to myself.

Maybe I should have tried a career writing cheesy books... hmm.

Curse of the Transient

2008-12-08T20:31:00.004-05:00

Yeah, yeah, so it's been a while. Shrug. I've been busy.

Thanksgiving week was pretty enjoyable. Insane amount of traveling (6 planes, 6 long car rides), but things went really smoothly, with only my last flight of 6 being delayed (not that it was fun to sit on the ground in a plane for 2 hours waiting to leave). I was low key about computer usage over the vacation, which was probably good for me. I don't remember the last time I spent 2 days consecutively without checking my email! Being back in the town I went to school in was a blast. I got my hands on a sub from my favorite sub shop, ran into a number of old friends, and spend a few hours talking with my old advisor. It's always so nice to see him. I forget sometimes just how much alike we are in a lot of ways (or maybe, how much I grew to be like him), although there are some differences. Got a lot of good feedback on my manuscript. Inch by inch it's getting closer to being done.

One of the best parts about being back was surprising my sister. She had nooo idea I was going to be in my home state, let alone at school! Eugenie invited her over for dinner, and I hid, then snuck up behind her and surprised her most thoroughly. It was a lot of fun. Most of my old buddies from swing dance club were still around too, so we got together and busted out the dance moves (I finally got to use my new shoes!). Good times had by all. The longer you dance with someone, the easier and more enjoyable it gets - you just learn how to move together. The current president of the club started taking lessons at school the same time I did, some 4 years ago now, and we've been dancing ever since. So it felt good to be dancing again with someone that it's easy to synchronize with, if that makes any sense.

Most of the time I was there visiting I felt like I could fall back into my old routines without blinking. I kept expecting to head home from class to my old house, hang out with my guys, and start cracking on some math homework with my thinking cap, fingerless mittens and fuzzy blue bathrobe for attire (it got cold in the old, leaky house we rented last year). Or to walk to a different part of town and crash on the futon in the downstairs of the apartment I rented the year before that with my roommate of two years, and close friend.

But I don't live in these places anymore. New people are there, creating their own stories. The places are the same, and some of the people are the same, but even just 6 months after I left, I can feel a growing sense of disjointedness. It's really strange. Spending too much time walking around seeing memories that no one else close at hand shares makes me very pensive. I was also getting a little frustrated with Eugenie, for no good reason I could figure out at first. Later I realized that I was just feeling a bit jealous that my time there at school is over and hers continues, and wishing that I had appreciated those years even more thoroughly while I had them. There's something rather indescribably different when you cross the boundary between school and working a job. New cares and concerns, different social experiences and topics of conversation, even new sleep-wake cycles. I was feeling that disconnect too when chatting with Eugenie and her housemate/former roommate. I hope it doesn't get any bigger.

All of this sort of spurred me on in my graduate school quest. Maybe the only way to deal with letting go of an old home is to hurry about the business of finding a new one to distract yourself with. I just hope someday I can land somewhere for a good long time and maybe never have to make new homes again. Ah the curse of the Transient. Probably there's a reason that a lot of people setting off on journeys and choosing to become transients intentionally try to leave everything behind them, and avoid ties to places and people and memories of the past - less to pull at your heart strings in a sense. Despite the challenges, I think I much prefer to hold on to these things though; they provide a sort of grounding, structure, and meaning that I'd be lost without.

Still breathing...

2008-11-21T08:23:00.002-05:00

I'm on the last day of a very long work week, involving a 16 hour work day, followed by an 11 hour work day, and more fun... I'm working again today/tonight, and then blowing out of this popsicle stand at 0400 on Saturday morning, starting my journey back to visit Eugenie and my sister up north. I deserve this vacation like none other, whew.

Time to finish the laundry, pack, cook dinner, and hit up the store before heading in to work. I've got some fun stories for y'all from the last week - I'll get to them when I'm settled down at Eugenie's.

Peace,

Theo