Wild (and not so wild) animals in the field

I don't want to miss out on the domesticated or wild fun, so here are my contributions to the recent animal memes.

New and creepy insects are always turning up on field trips:




Fortunately, there are birds to take care of them - when they're not trying to steal your food.





Of course, why worry about birds when there are four-legged critters to watch out for?





Some are cute...



Some you wouldn't want to hug, but they could still qualify as cute...



Some definitely aren't cute or cuddly...


And some are are just so utterly comical that they require long breaks before any meaningful field work can get done.

Geology reference alert!

House is on, and our favorite misanthropic doctor just made a comment about mineralogy. And what's even better? One of the other doctors understood it.

[Yak yak yak how do we find this tumor if we can't bring the guy to the hospital and have only limited equipment...]
House: "What part of olivine, pyroxene and amphibole don't you understand?"
[Blank stares]
Cameron: "They're indicator minerals. You can't see diamonds so you look for the indicator minerals."

Woohoo! Geology metaphors strike again! (Although this one is kind of in reverse, but still, it's cool. I did a little happy dance when I heard it a few minutes ago.)

This is SO right.

I just saw this and had to share. Oh, PhD, how relevant you are to my life...

Getting dirty

This week has been a fun one in my intro labs - we're doing a lab on rivers, and we get to play with the stream table. I've been pretty tired lately for various reasons, and I wasn't looking forward to teaching labs, but I am now, because this lab is just fun.

It's kind of amazing to watch a bunch of college students - most of whom are just taking the lab as a science requirement - get excited about something. It seemed like initially, they didn't quite believe they could learn anything by "playing in a sandbox", as one of the guys put it. But when I told them that the only thing I was going to do in the lab was turn the tap on and off, and made them get their hands wet and sandy and pruney, they started getting really interested. And when they reached the part in the lab where they got to design their own landscape and streamflow experiment, they were downright enthusiastic. Granted, the other TAs and I had a lot of fun testing out the table last week, but we thought that was just us being geology geeks. Turns out it wasn't just us. Some of the students wanted to stay late so they could do more experimenting.

And that, I think, is one of the best parts of geology, especially when you're just learning it. There's memorization, just like any other class, and you have to learn how science works, but you also get to go outside or to a lab and get messy and watch it work and There will always be people who complain about getting their favorite shoes dirty, or not wanting to touch the mucky fossil you just pulled out of a streambank, or not wanting to lick the halite to test that it's salty - but the ones who aren't bothered by it have fun. And that's great. There's no better draw than showing someone that geology is a science where you can do the same sort of things that you did as a little kid - playing around in the dirt and getting wet and scraping your knees up - and still learn something.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow afternoon, because the lab is mostly guys and I can definitely see potential for competition to build the coolest floodplain. I'll have to clean up the mess at the end, but it will definitely be worth it.

Whew

Now I feel better about life. (And yes, I'm breaking my "one election post" promise. It's worth it.)

I'm jazzed that this year, my vote did have a real effect - Virginia voted Democratic instead of Republican for the first time in forty years. At one point, the difference between the candidates was sixteen votes. SIXTEEN. That's just crazy, and it's especially crazy how long it took to call Virginia.

It's really wonderful when you actually have the feeling that you're an important part of a democracy, and what you think and do has an effect. It's a feeling I've only ever had when I was much younger and learning about how our government works, when everything was new and exciting. I'm so glad I was able to participate in a process like this, because so many people around the world can't.

I'm excited about the next few years now, instead of resigned, and the chance that I won't have to feel embarrassed by my country for a while makes me really happy.

I'm quite tired from staying up late, but glad I did; it's not often that I get to experience a positive turning point in this country's history. And, perhaps not most important overall, but the icing on the cake for me, I get to listen to a truly eloquent person make speeches at last. I can't describe how happy I am about that. The president is the face America shows the world, and I'm really proud that we've chosen to show them this one.


Now I'm going to go collapse on the lab couch for a few hours, because I am freaking tired. :)

Vote or die!

This will be my one and only almost one and only election post, because after spending 20+ years living just outside of Washington DC, talking too much about politics makes me twitch. (It's like the official recreational pursuit in the DC Metro area. We started, I swear, talking about this election about five seconds after the 2004 election was over. The official TV news graphics showed up a few days later).

Anyway, here's the meat of the post: GET OUT THERE AND VOTE.

Naturally, I won't tell you who to vote for - I have my own preferences and I suspect they're the same as those of most people who read science-related blogs. But I do want you to vote. I see too much apathy nowadays, especially among students, and this is one election where apathy is NOT an option.

I'm not sure how much of the election coverage I'll be able to stand watching tonight, unless it's the Daily Show, because all the other news channels have made me want to throw a brick at the TV at some point. (Too bad Dan Rather won't be around mixing metaphors until his head explodes - that was entertaining.) But I really, really hope I won't be disappointed tomorrow morning.

GO VOTE! I did...

(Yeah, I'm always a little sad about not getting the sticker since I vote absentee a lot. I'll just have to make do with this one.)

Send To Phone

Strumpeting

In the process of applying for extra funding for my graduate studies, I'm finding myself again stuck writing a "personal statement" essay, and I can't say that I'm fond of it. Oh, I have plenty of motivation to write the thing - what grad student doesn't want to, say, earn an NSF fellowship and not have to worry about their funding for the next three years? But I'm never comfortable writing an essay that basically demands that I trumpet how wonderful I am. (Dave Barry calls it "strumpeting", which he usually uses to describe what he does in a book tour, but it's basically the same thing.)

I don't mind writing about what I've done in terms of research, or my education, or my nonprofit work last year - that's basically just stating facts. But when it comes time to say, "I'm a wonderful scientist, and I can do better than everyone else I'm competing with, and my project will change the world"...well, I don't really like that. I'm not saying I won't do it - how else would I have gotten a job last year? - but it makes me really uncomfortable. It feels like hubris.

It's possible that this feeling stems from a need for more self-confidence. I'm constantly second-guessing myself on things, even when I'm reasonably sure that I'm right, and being able to write about myself in a confident way doesn't always come easily. I had a hard time with my grad school applications when it came to this, although judging by the responses I got, I must have been doing something right. I honestly don't know where this whole thing comes from, though. I never experienced any discouragement from my family or teachers when I let them know that I wanted to be a scientist - just the opposite, in fact. And when I got to college, I didn't come up against a single instance of anyone trying to discourage me because of my habits or gender or otherwise.

So I'm left wondering where I developed this minor phobia. I love to write, and I obviously love to write about what I do, or I wouldn't be blogging. But I don't like singing my own praises - maybe I feel that my work should be able to do that better than I can. At any rate, I'll sit here and write the damn essay, and it will be great, and hopefully it'll help earn me the fellowship. It's necessary, and it does get results, and as much as I complain about it, I'll still get the thing done. But I won't enjoy it.

(Then again, this could just be a "this is the weekend and I don't wanna work" sort of thing. But seeing as I've been putting off this part of the application for a while now, I'm betting it's more than that. Eh.)