After picking around 300 individuals of G. bulloides from my six sample sets, I was able to successfully clean them over at the Hofstra Lab. Dr. Farmer was very helpful during this process.
I only had the two seives that she had created, but I don't think I would've used more than that to clean them at once.
Procedure:
I brushed the samples into the seive, then marked down which seive correlated to which sample.
I placed the seives into a regular beaker that had enough methanol to fill to the half-mark of the seives.
I placed the beaker into the sonicator, and sonicated for 3 minutes.
After sonication, I removed the beaker and then the seives from the beaker quickly and placed them on a paper towel to dry. This took a few minutes.
I then carefully tapped out the seives onto fresh weighing paper.
I curled or folded the weighing paper and poured the forams into a numered jar, which was underlain by another peice of weighing paper in case of any spillage.
I then marked down which jar had which sample.
There were some problems. The first two samples I sonicated for 5 minutes, but that turned out to be too long, they became broken up. This made it difficult to remove them from the seive or get them off the weighing paper and into the jar. I had to use a brush to do this. I used a different brush for each one, but the first brush was the brush I had used to get them into the seives previous to cleaning. It seemed like some of the sample was lost because of the breakage. After those first two, I switched, upon the advice of Dr. Farmer, to a 3 minute sonication, and no more breakage occured. The samples easily fell out of the seives and poured off the weighing paper.
Breaking in itself shouldn't be a problem, the samples are going to be crushed, vapourized, and then, to further abuse them, that vapour gets scorched into soot and that soot is analyzed for the actual dating.
At one point, I neglected to record which sample was in what seive until after sonication had started. I am nearly certain that I remembered which was which, but there is a chance that, say, sample 3 is marked as "4". This should be corrected by the carbon 14 dating.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Mawage
Today, I finally managed to propose to my girlfriend, now my fiance. Thats got a nice ring to it, literally I suppose.
It almost didn't happen today either. I had planned on going to the Stroll Garden, but she didn't think she could get there in time for it to be worth it, so we ended up going to someplace nearby. I made like I was just taking photos with my camera, I had it on a tripod and had a shutter release cable, so I could take photos of us together. After snapping shots for a while, I made like we were going to take just another photo together. She was getting tired of it and was ready to leave. Before I tripped the shutter, I pulled the ring out of my pocked and said, "So, you wanna get married?".
Not the traditional format, I suppose, but it worked!
It almost didn't happen today either. I had planned on going to the Stroll Garden, but she didn't think she could get there in time for it to be worth it, so we ended up going to someplace nearby. I made like I was just taking photos with my camera, I had it on a tripod and had a shutter release cable, so I could take photos of us together. After snapping shots for a while, I made like we were going to take just another photo together. She was getting tired of it and was ready to leave. Before I tripped the shutter, I pulled the ring out of my pocked and said, "So, you wanna get married?".
Not the traditional format, I suppose, but it worked!
Friday, August 11, 2006
Meeting with the Parents
On 8/11 I met with my girlfriend's parents in order to ask her father for his permission to marry her.
I was terrified in the lead up, incredibly nervous. I drove to a bookstore nearby to calm down, browsed around, bought two books, and called them, asking to stop by. I am certain that they knew why. The most nerve wracking part was that first phone call. I had been putting it off for far too long, and now that it was over, I wouldn't say I wasn't nervous at all, but I could deal with it.
I get to the door, and her mother answered, huge smile on her face. Thats a good thing! Her father was on the phone talking to one of the relatives I beleive. I think that her mother was a little excitable, she called her husband on her cell phone to get him off the phone. He say down, I explained and asked, and he happily said yes.
The expected questions followed, what I plan on doing, they asked in more detail about my own family, etc etc. I didn't expect them to say no or anything along those lines, but still, it was great that they said yes and chatted about it. After a while I left, because they had to get ready for a physical therapy session, her father had broken his arm just a short while ago and was heading back to work after the weekend. All in all, it went very nicely. One thing that might've been a faux pas, I mentioned that I had already bought the ring, I wanted to let them know that it was happening before long. But in retrospect, that seems out of place, why am I asking their permission, yet I already purchased the ring? Seems forward no, and sort of nullifies her father having any say no?
I am making a point of not telling my parents, since they've been anxious for me to go over there and talk to him. My girlfriend is expecting the proposal, but, in large part because I've delayed in speaking to her father, she has no idea when its going to happen. She should be surprised. This way my parents will be surprised too. Just having a little fun with that.
....
Later this same evening, I went back over their house to hang out with her, we were planning on watching a movie. Turns out, her parents mentioned that I stopped by. I didn't tell them to not tell her, I had just assumed that thats the normal way things go. Her parents hadn't intended anything by it, they assumed that she had known that I was stopping by that day. Shouldn't really matter all that much, she's known for a while that I would be coming by, this just means that she knows the big event will happen before long.
I was terrified in the lead up, incredibly nervous. I drove to a bookstore nearby to calm down, browsed around, bought two books, and called them, asking to stop by. I am certain that they knew why. The most nerve wracking part was that first phone call. I had been putting it off for far too long, and now that it was over, I wouldn't say I wasn't nervous at all, but I could deal with it.
I get to the door, and her mother answered, huge smile on her face. Thats a good thing! Her father was on the phone talking to one of the relatives I beleive. I think that her mother was a little excitable, she called her husband on her cell phone to get him off the phone. He say down, I explained and asked, and he happily said yes.
The expected questions followed, what I plan on doing, they asked in more detail about my own family, etc etc. I didn't expect them to say no or anything along those lines, but still, it was great that they said yes and chatted about it. After a while I left, because they had to get ready for a physical therapy session, her father had broken his arm just a short while ago and was heading back to work after the weekend. All in all, it went very nicely. One thing that might've been a faux pas, I mentioned that I had already bought the ring, I wanted to let them know that it was happening before long. But in retrospect, that seems out of place, why am I asking their permission, yet I already purchased the ring? Seems forward no, and sort of nullifies her father having any say no?
I am making a point of not telling my parents, since they've been anxious for me to go over there and talk to him. My girlfriend is expecting the proposal, but, in large part because I've delayed in speaking to her father, she has no idea when its going to happen. She should be surprised. This way my parents will be surprised too. Just having a little fun with that.
....
Later this same evening, I went back over their house to hang out with her, we were planning on watching a movie. Turns out, her parents mentioned that I stopped by. I didn't tell them to not tell her, I had just assumed that thats the normal way things go. Her parents hadn't intended anything by it, they assumed that she had known that I was stopping by that day. Shouldn't really matter all that much, she's known for a while that I would be coming by, this just means that she knows the big event will happen before long.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Technical Difficulties
Technically, today was a disaster in the lab. For the past week I've been 'picking forams' for analysis. We are going to have the carbon-dated. I needed to pick out around 300 individuals of one species, Globigerina bulloides. That was expected to give me around the 10 miligrams of sample that were needed. Six sets, each from a different depth of the ocean drilling project core, were selected, those were the points that we wanted dates for.
So I pulled the specimins, and brought them over to the Hofstra lab, there is a professor/researcher there who has the lab materials and has similar research interests and was kindly enough to permit me to clean the samples there. This is a necessary preparation step before they are sent away to be C14 dated.
I had to put the specimins into a small seive that she had created (six seives, one for each set of 300). These were then split up into two large beakers, which were filled with methanol to about the middle of the seives, which were now partly submerged. These beakers were then put into a sonicator, a device that has a water bath and that vibrates, the vibration will travel through the water to the methanol and mix the methanol with any dirt, clay, sediment, and other carbon bearing materials that need to be eleminated. The non-foram carbon will screw the analysis.
After sonicating for about five minutes, I remove the beakers and take out the seives to let them dry. They dry quickly, because the methanol just evaporates away. I started brushing one of the samples out of its seive, but noticed that a glue used to hold the tiny cloth-like seive screen to the seive had become very soft. The forams were sticking to it.
Crap!
Thats not good! Forams bound up with glue! Thats allways bad no?
I hoped it was just because they weren't completely dry, so I put it down and gave them more time to dry. But it was no good, the glue dried, but at least half of the sample was bound up within it. I brushed out what I could. The Hofstra professor was completely shocked and I could tell that she was mortified and very concerned. She had created the seives herself, and had used them for the same purpose, and nothing like that happened. She speculated that perhaps the glue she used had aged and changed to become unstable somehow. We tried sonicating two seives again, hoping to loosen it completely and set the forams free. I set the sonicator timer for 10 minutes, and it did soften and loosen up, but the foram material was just immpossible to seperate. I though maybe it would be possible to dissolve the glue somehow, or flush it with methanol from a squeeze bottle, to get them out, and then perhaps boil it down on a steam bath, leaving just the forams and vapourizing the dissolved glue, but the glue wasn't necessarily dissolving, just softening.
Fortunately, the professor was able to find a different glue. We pulled one screen off its seive-ring, it had been loosened that much by the sonication, and used this other glue to hold it on. The rings for the seives are some type of acrylic, and the glue was methylene chloride, a glue for acrylics. We were worried that the seive screen itself wouldn't bind, but it turned out to work nicely once she assembled one under a hood. I was concerned that the methylene chloride would react badly with the methanol once we put it to use, so we threw in some sand and tested one out. It worked perfectly, the stuff held together, and the sand grains, a decent enough proxy for forams, didn't stick at all.
So I lost the samples for the most part, and basically have to pick them all again. I only say that it was 'technically' a disaster because I just wasn't too upset over it. Something allways goes wrong, something that forces you to start all over, and usually it happens a few times. Hopefully this is the only time it happens with this C-14 dating project, but who knows.
Yoga
Recently, I took some yoga classes. They were for beginers, I had no prior experience with it. It was taking. I took the course at a community college. Most of the stretches were entirely unfamiliar to me, but a few weren't. That was surprsinging. They ended up being basic stretches that we'd do for wrestling practice in high school. I suppose that isn't to be unexpected, but it was odd to see them as recognized yoga movements.
The instructor for the course seemed to be very much into yoga, and made references to having been in ashrams in the past. That indicates that they're very serious, and have been doing it for a while, I'd think. Yet the instructor was very friendly, she didn't push anyone into any positions, as I have heard they sometimes do, and insisted that everyone merely move up to the edge of being uncomfortable, but not to hurt themselves. She insisted that that would be extremely out of place in a yoga class, and seemed to be saying that other places will insist that you do this, but they are wrong.
One thing in particular I found intresting. I have heard about yoga being done to activate all sorts of whacky mystical "energies" (the term never sensibly defined). I can't say what the instructor beleived, but she did tell us to take notice of how you feel after moving into the positions. She explained that the sensations in the limbs and body were largely resulting from the movement of blood. Raise the arms above the body, and hold them there for a time, and the blood will, to a degree, drain out of it. Twist the torso, and the lymphatic fluid will be moved about. I'd assume that intersitial fluids would be worked around as you move into and out of position also.
Perhaps this is what is really meant by these activations of energies and chakras and whathaveyou. Yoga in general is considered very ancient. I'd expect that ancient man might've been curious about those senstations, and perhaps attributed some sort of meaning to them, and that that might explain part of why yoga becomes so important in many societies.
Ultimately, yoga seems as "nothing more" than the simply movement of the body, not at all dissimilar to physical exercise. Before hand, I had considered it as a different sort of activity, it seemed as something people approached as a mystic happening, heavy on the meditation. This course invovled mediation also, and clearly a short 8 session course can't tell you too much about any subject, let alone something with as long a history and varied a practice as yoga. I don't think that I understand it on any level of detail, but it was an intruiging experience and at least now it is de-mystified for me.
The instructor for the course seemed to be very much into yoga, and made references to having been in ashrams in the past. That indicates that they're very serious, and have been doing it for a while, I'd think. Yet the instructor was very friendly, she didn't push anyone into any positions, as I have heard they sometimes do, and insisted that everyone merely move up to the edge of being uncomfortable, but not to hurt themselves. She insisted that that would be extremely out of place in a yoga class, and seemed to be saying that other places will insist that you do this, but they are wrong.
One thing in particular I found intresting. I have heard about yoga being done to activate all sorts of whacky mystical "energies" (the term never sensibly defined). I can't say what the instructor beleived, but she did tell us to take notice of how you feel after moving into the positions. She explained that the sensations in the limbs and body were largely resulting from the movement of blood. Raise the arms above the body, and hold them there for a time, and the blood will, to a degree, drain out of it. Twist the torso, and the lymphatic fluid will be moved about. I'd assume that intersitial fluids would be worked around as you move into and out of position also.
Perhaps this is what is really meant by these activations of energies and chakras and whathaveyou. Yoga in general is considered very ancient. I'd expect that ancient man might've been curious about those senstations, and perhaps attributed some sort of meaning to them, and that that might explain part of why yoga becomes so important in many societies.
Ultimately, yoga seems as "nothing more" than the simply movement of the body, not at all dissimilar to physical exercise. Before hand, I had considered it as a different sort of activity, it seemed as something people approached as a mystic happening, heavy on the meditation. This course invovled mediation also, and clearly a short 8 session course can't tell you too much about any subject, let alone something with as long a history and varied a practice as yoga. I don't think that I understand it on any level of detail, but it was an intruiging experience and at least now it is de-mystified for me.