Thou mammering pottle-deep fustilarian!

This amuses me:

http://www.trevorstone.org/curse/

That is all.

A little southern culture

Yesterday was the big day - our first full scale attempt of our coordinated experiment.  Things went really smoothly, perhaps even surprisingly so.  A very long day though - I clocked in about 18 hours of work; exhausting business, and not something I want to do on a regular basis.  But, in the name of science...

Only had about an hour to grab dinner last night, so instead of driving all the way back to my apartment (~20 minutes), I stopped at a small town BBQ place.  "Catherine's" is only open three days a week, and consists of a buffet of various southern dishes, including pulled pork, BBQ sauce, fried okra, hushpuppies, sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, rice, some sort of orange brown stuff to put on the rice (I think), swea' tay'  (sweet tea - supersaturated sugar water with some brown coloring), mac and cheese, potato salad, coleslaw, and dessert options: banana pudding (with real banana chunks!) and peach cobbler stuff.  Did I mention that it's a buffet, and you can come back for as many helpings as you want?  Pretty much a perfect situation for dinner on a long work day, preparing for a long cold night of work...  Cold air fights rather effectively with threatening food-comas.

It's an interesting place to eat solitarily too - lots of local character to watch.  There aren't really any small tables here, just long ones with lots of chairs, so it's rather communal.  It's fun to listen to the conversations and try to understand the "southern-ese" with varying success.  Usually I can only catch a few words here and there.   Highlights from last night:

"And someone baked that lil' child a cake, and he'd never seen one before, so he asked 'what'd you do to the corn bread?'"

"Say something soft and sweet",  response:  "banana pudding"

... from where I sit now, maybe those aren't quite so interesting as they were last night when I heard them.  Shrug.

Other notable objects of southern culture to be found around town include probably my favorite pawn shop ever - "We Buy:  Gold - Coins - Silver - Diamonds - Jesus Loves You"

Does it get much better than that?

On getting excited...

Hey all

So the graduate school search continues.  I've decided to shelve my efforts to throw together an application for the NSF graduate fellowships for the time being, and focus on getting to the graduate school and advisor that will be right for me.  Seems like this is a more important and immediately pressing goal.  If for some insane reason I find myself with enough time as the deadline for the NSF thing approaches, and am simultaneously struck by inspiration, I'll give it ago, but for now it's cooling its heels.  I've been discovering how hard it is to work on designing and thinking about science when you work 40+ hours a week, and aren't in an academic setting...  one more reason to get my butt in gear applying to schools.

Towards that end, my total count of potential advisors contacted is up to 4, of which 3 have responded, and 1 has conversed on the phone with me (soon to be 2)... I've also started contacting their graduate students to get some inside scoops.  I'm kind of starting to get excited about one place in particular, although that may just be because I've gotten the best response/most information from them to date.  So far everyone responding has been very helpful/friendly/informative, so that's nice.  It's cool to be on the up swing of a "feeling excited about science" cycle - sometimes I just get too overwhelmed to feel the excitement.  There are probably about 4 more people I want to e-mail, but definitely I'm making headway... whew.

In other news, we've got the first of 9 replicates of a very large experiment happening down here tomorrow - something we've been preparing for over the course of several weeks, and involving the coordinated efforts of 6 people and several radios.  Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well tomorrow, gulp.  If so, then I'll be working the next several nights collecting data (argle, also yeeeehaw!).  I'm working significantly more than 40 hours a week right now, which was something i was concerned about when deciding if i wanted this job - I'm trying to preserve the time I need for grad school apps, etc.  But I tend to be very stubborn, and want to work until a job is done, rather than cutting off at 8 hrs a day, so I'm well over 40 again.  Extra hours are saved up and count towards paid vacation apparently...  at this rate, I could be getting paid for a week or two of extra 'work' well after having finished physically working here.  Good deal.  I'm planning on burning some of that over Thanksgiving, when I'll be heading off to visit Eugenie and her family (more on that in the future I'm sure).

But for now, off to bed, as tomorrow could be a 16 hour day (eeeeek!)

Peace out...

_________________________

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner.

- Jonas Salk

The gates of the temple of science...

Currently engaged wracking my brain trying to come up with a research project to propose for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship application.  I feel like there are so many things that I am very curious about (which is a good prerequisite for a research project), but that at least for now, the vast majority of them are things that quite a lot is already known about.  I just need to study the topics more, which is why I want to head back to academia.  But it doesn't make a great "original research proposal" to propose to learn about things that are already known.  Trying to come up with an original, meaningful project to advance the edge of scientific knowledge, when you still can't feel quite where that line lies, and if the stuff on the other side of the curtain is worth knowing, is, well, HARD.  Not sure what to do about this.  But it did remind me of a quote that I like, by "some physicist dude"...

"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with. "

- Max Planck

I guess I'll keep reading and thinking and see where I end up.

PS, I think this is me.

And so it begins...

In the last several days I've begun at long last contacting potential grad school advisors.  I feel like I still haven't looked at everyone I should, or compiled the best list of people possible to write to, but it's starting to get late in the season, and I need to get going.  So last night I jumped off a cliff, send out a letter to a guy I met at ESA over the summer, and took a deep breath.  Now that I've begun, I feel like this means I'm definitely committed to beginning grad school next year.  Gulp.  Hopefully a lot of the nerves are out of the way now that I've begun, and the excitement of this whole thing will shine through.

This afternoon I got an e-mail back from the guy I wrote to - it was very, very positive, which makes me happy.   He wasn't planning on taking a student in 09 because of a sabbatical that he's taking, but he said he "can't pass up a chance to get you here".  WOW.  Very unexpected...  am I just being flattered?  Eeeek.   Now the pressure's on.  I realllly didn't think I'd get that good of a response from someone I'd only briefly met and conversed with.  

I'm pushing on, with the intent of getting out a letter a night minimum until I'm done (right now 7-8 people are on my hit list).  Before I get to that though, I'm paying rent, grabbing some thai food with the other research techs, and then back here to read through my paper manuscript (the lab group here is reading and discussing it at the meeting tomorrow am to give me feedback.)  I really hope it goes over well - this is a group of people with a much more applied focus than who I usually share this project with.  My co-author's comments on the current draft are in the mail too, so maybe this weekend I'll submit the sucker (who knows!).

Time for a shower...

Pesky Plant

There's a plant from the genus Desmodium (Fabaceae) all over the place down here in our field sites.  It ranges everywhere from about 10 cm high all the way up to plants taller than I am.  When I first started a few weeks ago, mostly it was still flowering.  Since that time, it has gone to fruit, and it produces these special legumes called "loments" with an exterior that is very, very sticky (like microvelcro or something).  These "seeds" are now sticking to everything, and I mean absolutely everything.  All you have to do is brush against a loment and it sticks in pieces or as a whole section to your shoes, pants, shirt, skin, facial hair, you name it.  At the end of a day of field work, you can be covered in these suckers.  Our office back at the lab has them all over the carpet, and some people have been arranging the loments into little pictures and mosaics...

The most annoying this about this plant and its tenacious dispersal mechanism arrives (as I recently discovered) when you go to do laundry...  if you don't get all of the loments off your clothes beforehand, then end up in every bit of your clean clothes.  Alas, I just spent a half hour picking them out of my clean underwear, socks, shirts, etc, etc.  Sigh.

I kind of wonder where these seeds will end up if I toss them in the garbage?  Would they have a chance at some sort of long-distance dispersal event and establishment of a new population?  Or do they end up buried so deep that they are unable to germinate?  I usually try to pick the seeds off and leave them behind me as close to where I picked them up as possible, but sometimes I definitely miss some.  And I don't want to just chuck them outside my door.... Hmmm.  The conundrums of attempting to be a conscientious ecologist and understanding invasion biology...

(Images are from an archive of plant photos maintained by the University of Texas, Austin, check it out here)

Getting paid to wear assless chaps, or Why I love ecology

*Yep, I got paid to wear assless chaps today for work...*

...

*I know you're dying of curiosity... keep reading*

So the project I'm a part of down here in the southeast involves habitat restoration experiments.  For some of these systems, this means the periodic clearing of brush and small saplings and subsequent controlled forest fires.  Fire plays a really important role in the regeneration and maintenance of many traditional plant communities and habitats.  

*Wait for it...*

Being a lowly research tech, today I was assigned to help clear out these "small" saplings (trees can grow awful fast in a year!  Mostly oaks, cherry, sassafras, and various nut trees) from some of our experimental plots.  So I spent all day using one of these to clear brush.  Hot, tiring, sweaty, smelly, loud work involving quite a bit of physical exertion.  And, as part of my personal protective equipment (PPE as the red tape calls it around here), I had to wear these assless "chaps" made of a special fabric that stops saw blades (useful for if you slip with a chain saw and try to cut off your leg or something).  Usually the buckle right on over the top of everything, although mine was messed up today.  Oh ecology - runs the gamut of skills and talents needed in the pursuit of science, ranging from power tools to electrical knowledge, genetic analysis to mathematical modeling...  And involving so many fun toys (not talking just about DBH tapes here...)!

Also, the air conditioning in our apartment makes me think of the sound of the brush saw engines revving and cutting - that's how you know you did the same thing for too long a time period!

Another country heard from...