Cherry Limeades and Italian Cheesecake

After the conference I went down to North Carolina to meet up with my brother and his wife. They live in Fayetteville, but apparently Ft. Bragg, which is located within it, is bigger than Fayetteville. Didn't go onto Ft. Bragg though. The whole town is very much orientated torwards the military. Most of the restaurants had military discounts, for example. It also seemed like the town was broken up into smaller sections, groups of blocks or developments would have shopping centers that had restaurants, laundromats, bars, etc, bound up with them, like smaller little towns. Apparently, most of these centers have buffet style restaurants in them also.

There are Sonics out there, which was great, because I got to have a cherry lime-ade, the first in a long while. The Sonic one's seem to be a little bit sweeter than I've had before, and they are red, I suppose that that is from cherry syrup that is added to them.

The military life seems to be treating them well. They have a great little house with an inground pool, central air, gas fireplace, cable, even a digital video recording system. And to top it off, a dog. A little beagle that was lost and that they brought home. It seems like its a hunting dog of some sort. Apparently, a week or so before they came across the thing runnning around the street, some one at a flea market had been trying to sell a couple of beagles. They figure that this was one of them, that the person just let them loose after not being able to sell them.
He's probably going to get sent to Iraq this summer, he seems pretty ok with it. Possibly to the northern portion of the Sunni Triangle, thought it looks like other elements of his group are in Ramadi(at the south west corner) and Mosul (outside of the triangle). The northern point of the Sunni Triangle is Tikrit, which is famously where Hussein's tribe lives. Interestingly, the triangle itself is to the West of and slightly overlapping with a region inhabited by arabic speaking pagans, the Yarsan, who might be a group related to the Yezidi. I know that the Yezidi of Iraq hate the colour Blue, its a symbol of extreme bad luck or something along those lines; an ill omen. It will be interesting to see if he runs into any Yarsan people and if they dislike the colour blue also, or if they even stick out at all from the arab muslim population. I'd doubt it, if they could spend centuries hiding themselves from prostelytizing muslims, they'll sure as heck be able to remain invisible to mid-20's Americans for a tour.

Its hotter in North Carolina than in Baltimore, but it was a heckuva lot more humid in Baltimore. By the end of the conference it was hazy with humidity, and starting to rain. Luckily for NC it was great weather for the whole time we were there. Except the ride down, it didn't rain much onto us, but in the distance there was apparently a lightening storm for most of the trip down. Since it was so nice out, we were able to have a BBQ on Saturday with some of his local friends. Most of them are into this "Ultimate Fighting Championship" stuff, which I'm not too into. After spending most of the afternoon drinking beer, that kind of thing can seem pretty interesting !

After the long drive home, I walk in a bunch of my aunts and uncles are there, having dinner for the holiday, which was a surprise. Everyone ended up leaving pretty quickly, it was the end of the night for them, so at least I got to see them all for a bit. And I walked in just in time for a slice of Italian Cheesecake that someone had brought. A tasty little weekend!

Presenting at a conference

The reserach has been turned into a poster, and the presentation of it has gone fairly well. Attendance at the meeting is lower than expected, but I've still been able to get a few people who have shown some interest in the research. Interstingly, a professor of one of my co-authors strolled by and talked with me about the research. That was intruiging. Lots of people have had some good comments and what to follow up with and the like.

At the moment I am typing out this entry from one of the free access computers at the conference, mostly everyone has left the poster session. Whats absolutely hysterical is that right now there seems to be some other meeting at the conference center. I had thought that someoen was just singing in the hallway next to me, not realizing that they could be heard. But now they've worked up to a crescendo, seems to be a preacher of some sort. Every other sentence is 'in the name of jesus'.

Downward Spiral

After much work, my (small) Nq. pachydermaproject has been completed. The data has been tabulated, many graphs and comparisons were made, and the poster was prepared. Thanks, in no small part to my Professor whom I've been working on this with, I know have a rather professional looking poster to present. The last few days of the project were, perhaps understandably, the most hectic. And nerve wracking. At one point we thought that the entire way we were looking at the data was completely wrong, that we had defined a parameter in a way that it wasn't being used in most of the literature. Fortunately, it wasn't, there was just some initial confusion over the terms.
I have to say, its been a humbling experience, which is what I had hoped for and anticipated. Even in the simple write up for the poster I had a good deal of trouble. Often I was making 'wild assed speculations', and it was difficult to determine exactly what the data was permitting one to say about it and the situation. I have noticed before though that the best scientific papers are the ones where, when you read their results and conlcusions, you almost feel like the person is an idiot for stating things that are so completely obvious from their data. Similarly I have noticed that some of the best writting in general is the sort that states things that are pretty basic and that perhaps wouldn't be noticable in day to day life. I have yet to present the poster, so I might be quite a bit more humbled after that!
I am expecting that the people it is being presented to will have lots of questions, and that I will be caught completely flat footed at times. I haven't had any experience with forams or this region before this project, and there is such a huge amount of literature on those subjects, that there is simply no way that I won't be stammering in many responses. I can only hope that I at least manage to not make a fool of myself.
At the same time, I can relax a little because there are going to be a lot of other posters presented, and a lot of other papers being presented, so I at least won't feel too much in the spotlight.
I had previously presented some very preliminary results in a research conference at my University, and the people I had to talk to at that were mostly faculty and a hefty dose of people who weren't geolgy students or paleontology professionals, so it should turn out to be quite a different experience. At the same time, I expect that there will be some similarities. I know that when I have been at other poster presentations, I try to very quickly figure out what the whole presentation is about, why its important, and how good the evidence and interpreations match one another. People at the University research conference were, similarly, not interested in long drawn out explanations of things that they aren't familiar with, and at least one person actually interupted my initial blatherings to say, in effect, 'what were your conclusions'. That was good, because for the rest of the University conference I had to really excise out all the uncritical stuff. If there was anything anyone wasn't clear on, and they were interseted, they would ask.
So I expect that that aspect will be similar when I do present as this professional research conference. I will be presenting for two days also, and for a much longer period of time than at the University research conference. That should make a difference also.

Sinister Coils

As previously noted, Nq. pachyderma is composed of chambers that are added in succession. The chambers form a 'trochospiral' coil. This coil can be sinistral or dextral, left or right coiling. The sinistral forms dominate in polar waters, and are a proxy for such water masses. Right now, I am counting the relative abundances of sinistral and dextral forms throughout the core. This is proceeding much faster than the previous work of picking out Nq. pachyderma from the slide sample.

I've also been thinking of what to do in the future, as in over the summer and for a thesis starting next semester. Fortunately, I might be able to do some paleontological research at a few places, such as at another local university or possibly at a museum within a paleo-department. That would be exciting. However I am also concerned about focusing too narrowly on paleontology; it'd be nice to actually have a job after getting the 'peice of paper' that is a graduate degree. There isn't much call for paleontologists out there in the market.

Bah, that's the market's loss!