HEO/CLT Professional Development Fund

On monday I had spoken with some of the people responsible for the HEO/CLT Professional Development Fund. I spoke with PSC-CUNY regarding the “PDF” (up to $3K every academic year). I wanted to get a stereomicroscope, sieve pans, picking brushes, and other equipment to continue my grad school research, along with membership in a few societies and some reference books. Ms. Slifkin stated that you can’t get equipment, but then at the same time said that you can use it for anything that involves professional development. I had started describing it as something that we can incorporate into our classes, which apparently is no good because it’s supposed to be something that the college wouldn’t get us. I was able to get the names of the people on the committee for this fund.

Joy Johnson
from Medgar Evans College in Brooklyn 718-270-6210 joy@mec.cuny.edu
Bob Suhoke
from City College in Manhattan 212-650-8154 suhoke@sci.ccny.cuny.edu
Linda Slifkin
PSC-CUNY fund Rep 212-354-1252 No email


Ms. Johnson re-stated that the materials can’t be something that the college would be normally ordering. She stated that she has seen it go through for chemical reagents, and then answered that it is at least conceivable that it could go through for the larger equipment. She also stated that there was nothing like a ‘line item veto’, where some items in a proposal could be approved and others rejected. The whole application is either accepted or rejected.

I spoke with Mr. Suhoke on Tuesday. He was even more adamant that the funds not be used to obtain equipment or materials for the department, and that, in the case of the above example of a stereomicroscope, its obvious that any department would already have one. However, he did admit that it was possible, though it would be extremely difficult, to make a convincing case that the equipment would only be used for personal, professional, use, unrelated to the functioning of the department. He stated that reference books and society memberships would be much easier to obtain. He stated that it was possible to submit two applications at once, one for the equipment, and another for the reference books and memberships and the like.

I wrote this information up and printed out some copies to give to some of the other CLTs who I've spoken to who've said that they are interested in the grant.

NAGT part deux

"Caffeine and Carbs" breakfast at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in their new science building, the Gary Comer building. Apparently Mr. Comer is a businessman who sailed through the northwest passage on a bet, that he wouldn't be able to do it. After completing it, he was apparently so impressed by the lack of ice blocking the passage, that he became very interested in climate. One of the results of that is then this new research facility. Most of the researchers haven't moved in yet, at least it looked like that to me, but there were several that were doing work while the conference was going on. I beleive that Dr. deMenocal's lab is going to be in this building also. Out of the blue, Dr. Green from the department showed up and we talked for a while. Then, possibly out of the same blue, Dr. Coke from Adelphi showed up. We talked for a while too. That was especially fortunate for me, because I didn't have the car for that trip and he offered me a ride on the Iron Mine trail trip, which I had been planning on going on. Dr. Green was attending a different trip. NAGT had prepared box lunches for the trip, but you had to pay for them, which is unusual, but probably a result of having to plan the whole thing on two month's notice.

After breakfast, Dr. Wally Broecker from LDEO gave a talk. Infact, it was the same talk he had given at the OSM 2008 meeting in Orlando, "Warning from the world's tiny Oceans (closed lake basins)." He started by considering Held's (Issac Held, Princeton) prediction that in a warming world, the tropics get wetter and the drylands get drier. Dr. Broecker reasoned that if thats what happens in a warming world, then should, in a cooling world, the tropics get drier and the drylands get wetter? He tested this by looking at the sizes of various pluvial (closed basin) lakes through the ages. He decided that the following equation applies:

A(basin)* hRfr = A(lake)hE (hR rainfall rate, fr runoff fraction, hE lake evaporation)

and that from this,

A(lake)/A(basin) = fr (hR/hE)

He refered to a 'mystery interval' between just before 18kya and 14kya where climate acts strangely. In this interval, the Southern ocean is warming, while ice coverage in the Northern hemisphere grows. He also stated that there was an increase in CO2, probably caused by the retreat of seaice in the Southern Hemisphere.

The ITCZ shifts southwards, because it follows heat across the globe (this is what it normally does in austral summers). This incidentally results in a weakening of monsoons. The biggest southwards push of the ITCZ is during the Mystery Interval.

Dry lakes are largest during the mystery interval, and large at the LGM. Dr. Broecker concluded that the ice volumes that existed during the ice ages do NOT obviate Held's prediction, and that drylands will infact get much dryer as the world warms.

He also, interestingly, stated that he wasn't too concerned anymore with shutdown of global thermohaline circulation, especially not by influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic. The Younger Dryas cooling that may have resulted from just such an effect would've required a great amount of water. Since there aren't giant reserves of ice today, Dr. Broecker observed, we're probably not going to have a massive influx of freshwater, even with melting at the poles, and shutting down THC. He also felt that the recent papers that claimed to have observed a shutdown of the Gulf Stream were just too short in duration to be able to call 'abnormal'. He figured you'd need a 30 year record or something like that on that level of detail to be able to rule of 'normal' cycles.


There was a break after the talk, and then we met for the saturday field trips. I went on a trip to the Iron Mine trail at the Sterling Forest Visitors center in NY. Dr. Gates of Rutgers lead the trip and passed out a trip guide booklet. The trail included a pre-revolution Iron Furnance which had been shut down in the 1760s, but then, at the command of none less than Washington himself was rebuilt and reopened to aid in the war. Afterwards, it was shutdown again. It reopened again much later, and ceased operations in the 1920s. Originally ore rock, charcoal, and limestone was carted to the Furnace, dumped into it, and then it was tapped at the bottom to release molten iron. In the closer to modern period, magnetite ore was actualy mined on location. Apparently the people that built the Furnace didn't know that there was in fact a large reserve of ore so close by. The remains of the more modern that shutdown in the 1920s are still there. Cables for the cable cars are strewn all around the cable house. We walked off the path and behind those remains and a little ways and came upon a small strip mine, with an entrance to another underground mine nearby in a depression of rocks, the organization had sealed a gate over the entrance to prevent anyone from entering, the interior of the mine if of course flooded anyway.
The magnetite in this location, Dr. Gates explained and pointed out, did not, as is usual, form by deposition within fractures of the surrounding rock. Rather, the source water leached into the surrounding carbonate rocks, and slowly replaced them such that now the magnetite has the relict structures of the carbonate.
The visitors center had very nice dioramas of the furnance and mine and the park in general. We also watched a short video wherein Dr. Gates, and a cartoon cave man (Dr. Gates was equally bewildered as the rest of us), described the geological history of the park. We started in the visitors center and ended there. One of the park rangers had relatively recently been able to acquire and trace back to the more modern mine an ore cart (apparently the person who had previously found it had been using it as a bbq), and also a part of the pre-revolutionary Furnace, some sort of iron flange that they thought was slotted into a beam as part of the Furnance, which was powered by a waterwheel.

NAGT Trip

Friday
Apparently the meeting was supposed to be in the Hamptons, but 2 months ago that all fell through. Within that time, the group managed to set up a meeting at LDEO and some field trips. Unfortunately, the hotel is terrible. I called up to make reservations and could hear that there was construction going on. Some hallways in the hotel are metal rafters for the ceiling and carpeted floors. Its been raining so the whole place stinks of mold, and the floors in some hallways are sopping wet. The lady at the front desk when I showed up was sitting at a fold out table with a hardhat on. After checking in she lifted up a plastic tarp that was covering one of the doors and let me go through a torn apart hallway with equipment lying everywhere to get the side of the hotel my room was on. We're also going to have to pay admission for some of the trips.

Field Trip to Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, NJ to a former Zinc mine w/fluorescent minerals. Collected ~9lbs worth of material from their tailings pile. Calcite fluoresces red, willemite green, and I managed to get a small sample with a little bit of hydrozincite, which glows a pale blue. All of this apparently a result of just one element in the form of impurities in the mineral, Manganese. In different crystals, forming different bonds, the bonding electrons which are participating in the fluorescence fluoresce different colors. The museum also gives a tour of the mine where the walls of the mine, of course, are made up of these brilliantly fluorescing minerals. The museum also has a great mineral collection on display, apparently obtained by the Oreck vacuum family.


I spoke with Earl Verbeek, the field geologist at the Sterling Hill Mining Museum regarding their teacher education program, which seems like an interesting program. They have on site training and also videoconferencing, which is good because we have that ability too.

I gave a presentation before the group on our MSS-OST program. Most people seemed interested. At least we were able to get the word out about the program. Other presentations included evaluating teaching techniques with reference to certification level, using GIS in the class room (specificallty ArcGis and ArcExplorer) and the Einstein Program.

I spoke with a Ms. Kathy Prichinello from New Utrecht HS (1601-80 St Brooklyn NY 11214) during the group dinner. She was curious to see our Introduction to Earth Science Lab Manual, I told her I would find out if it is permited to sent it out. She said she is allways looking for new ways of running her labs.

A couple of things

- I submitted 3 separate Internal Service Requests to our Buildings and Grounds Department, for missing ceiling tiles, exposed wires, water damaged ceilings, requests to install leak pans, replace lights, fix light fixtures, replace some blinds and fix/replace some windows.

- I spoke with N.Roth about the filaments. She said that she gave them to Dr. Weisberg when they showed up and that we should figure out a time to find out why the invoice wasn't paid next week.

_ I called and left a message with the computer desk (5353) regarding a computer for the SEM room, which we had requested previously. I also forwarded the orginal email for the request to the head of that department.

Carbon Coater for the SEM

I called up Ted Pella Co, regarding their carbon coater again. I spoke with Jack again also. Regarding maintenance, he stated that after 10K hours of operation the rotary pump should be greased with silicon grease, and that the oil should be changed. The rotary pump is a sort of pre-pump, and then a turbo-pump gets you to high vacuum.

As far as the Film Thickness Monitor, it monitors thickness by examining the changes in the frequency of a vibrating crystal in the chamber, as carbon accumulates on the surface of the crystal, the frequency changes. You don't clean the crystals, you just throw them away when you can visually observe flaking of carbon on the surface of the crystal. The device works by entering a density of carbon value along with a correction factor for the position of the crystal inside the chamber, which can all be stored in memory. Hitting the 'zero' button clears the device to get it ready for coating another sample. Things like the microprobe can then have the FTM information entered into them and then they make the necessary corrections to their readings. Jack said that many people use the FTM for a while, to get a handle on what their Carbon Coating procedure is putting down, but then don't use it every time thereafter. A rotary-tilting stage is, he said, still going to be very useful for larger specimens. I emailed Dr. Weisberg about all of this.

Poster for NAGT

Completed and printed out a 24 inch wide poster for NAGT on the MSS-OST program. Created file in Adobe InDesgin, which does not export as a tiff. KCATT, where the poster was printed by Brian (Dr. Rosen was out)works in tiff format. They also allways seem to work in MS Publisher. I will have to remember to try to prepare the next poster in Publisher. I thought I entered the size into Adobe InDesign as 24 inches, but apparently it was smaller. Brian was able to easily resize to 24 wide.

Trip encumberment

I spoke with Natasha Roth regarding trip reimbursement / encumberment. She stated that I can apply for a trip reimbursement through the Procurement System, and that whenever she does so prior to the trip occuring, she is called by the final approver and told to instead re-do it once the trip is completed. I still will need to fill out an "Application to Attend a Conference" form and have it signed by the Chair. But then afterwards, upon return, I will apply for reimbursement.

Human Resources and Leave Time

This is probably pretty late in the game to be figuring this sort of stuff out. But here it is for my own reference. I accumulate as a FT CLT 1 2/3 days per month sick leave, an can hold up to 160 days. I receive 4 unscheduled Holidays per year that can't be held over, they expire within the year. I also receive 1 1/4 days of annual leave per month, which comes out to 15 days a year. No more than 45 days can be held or carried over a year. A year runs from September 1st through to August 31st. This is per Ms. Rosanne Scalice in HR (6525).

NAGT Meeting

Prof. Christensen told me about this National Association of Geoscience Teachers meeting up at Lamont-Doherty in Pallisades.

http://stevekluge.com/nagt/

http://www.nagt.org/

Sounds like it will be useful. I will present our KBCC Summer Program results as a poster there. Prof. Christensen noted that the field trips look the most promising. There is one to a location where you can collect flourescent minerals, and another to an old mine where you can collect magnetite from the tailings. There will also be a talk by Wally Broecker, a wisened one who gave a talk at The Oralando OSM 2008. Should be plenty good. Prof. Christensen said that she will be at Lamont running samples that weekened anyway. I will apply for trip expenses through the department.

AMS Ocean Studies Diversity Project

This is a project open to schools that serve large minority populations, it provides training for implementing the American Meteorological Society's Ocean Studies Course. AMS covers the full cost of attending this workshop in Seattle, travel, food, lodging, registration, etc, in exchange for an agreement to implement the course at least for one semester. It was easy to get support to attend, especially since there is little to no cost.

http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu/online/oceaninfo/diversity.html

Ocean Sciences Meeting 2008

OSM 2008 is going well. My talk was early, 8 in the morning on Monday. There was decent attendance. Dr. Christensen said that she thought it went well. The talk that was scheduled to go after me had been canceled, so the section moderators said that there was time for questions. Wahoo. There were some good questions though.

One person asked if we knew how many women had attended compared to boys. I did not. We didn't keep that kind of data, though it might be a good idea to do that in the future. I explained in the talk that our demographics for the program were basically the same as the demographics in Brooklyn in general and had a slide showing those demographics for Brooklyn. Another person asked if we had worked with any HS teachers, no we did not. But that might also be a good idea to try out next time. Indeed, some of the other talks in the session did just that, in order to get the HS teachers better prepared for teaching ocean science. Another person thought that we needed to explain why some of our students had scores as high as 39 out of 50 on their first try. I really couldn't explain why, in fact I don't see a reason for us to have to explain that. One student got a 50 out of 50 on the first pass. The test should 'capture' a wide range of abilities, and that should be reflected by low score and high scores.

I spoke with a Dr. Ingram from the Rose-Hulman institute of technology at the end of the session (she had given an interesting talk about a project where students monitored the conditions of a local pond). And she had lots of ideas about what I could do in terms of statistical analysis of our score results. I will have to look into the methods she mentioned and try to work them out when I get back. I also spoke with Dr. Christensen and she suggested getting someone from our sociology department (do we even have one, I assume we do?) and working with them to create our own evaluation and to work with the results of it, which could be interesting.

From the other talks, I am thinking that we can have a 'HS wide Science Challenge", which is an attention getting event that is 'fun', so in one case the students worked in pairs as pretend helicopters searching for a lost ship and sailors, this was done as a sort of mystery addendum to their normal program, which involved understanding shipping and the like. If we could have some sort of student presentation at all then that would be excellent. I am also thinking that it might be of use to bring in HS teachers in the role of our normal office assistants, that way they can get some work on advancing their science education during the school year.

Bruker Training

Bruker training went well. I was able to confirm that we can trust the results we're getting for Dr. Li's silicon spheres; they're not too rough of a surface. Though I should sample from the side facing the x-ray detector just as an issue of general practice.

They also recommended shutting the PC running the detector each night, or at least every once in a while, to 'purge' the memory, that might undo our scale bar problem, where the scale bar is correct in the first image, but that first bar is carried through to all other images. They also suggested making sure that a particular checkbox for communication between computers was checked. Indeed it was.

I got to see a lot more of the features that we have with the machine, especially the reports writing feature, which looks like it could be useful, and the quantification feature, which looks pretty powerful, much more so that I suspected before. I had really thought of the machine as especially useful for mapping and qualitative analysis. So this was a real eye-opener.
The course of course also was very informative on the physics of x-ray analysis. It combined lecture and lab work. There was an interesting set of people attending the program, one guy who is an art preservator from the Smithsonian, two guys who work for Bosch out in Michigan I think, and a researcher from VA Tech. Interesting range of jobs that are using x-ray analysis and the SEMs that they operate along with.

The class was in Ewing, NJ, which apparently was right next to Princeton, but I didn't get out to see the campus. The other people did and they seemed to have enjoyed it. I ended up in Trenton one or two nights, but the area I was in one night looked pretty sketchy, so I had to bail out on dinner there that night.

I did get to eat some good indian food (chicken tikka masala and somosas) for takeout one night, and some good hungarian/polish (chicken paprikash and perogies) food another night too. The weird thing is that my GPS device sent me to two different locations for indian food where there weren't any restaurants at all, before I finally got to one.

Funding Came through

Funding came through for the Bruker training and the OSM, Dean DiLorenzo's office had the funding and was able to give permit its use for those trips.

So I will be attending the Bruker X-ray analysis training in Ewing NJ, this month.

I am also attending the 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) in Orlando Fl, this year. I will be giving a presentation on our Middle School Students Ocean Science and Technology program, our Oceanography Summer camp program. The meeting looks like it will have many other talks about outreach and education in addition to plenty of research talks.

Prof. Christensen and Cathi are doing a poster on the Deep Earth Academy (formerly Joint Oceanographic Institutes) classroom activities.

CollegeNow Meteorology

The issues with CollegeNow have been cleared up and I am teaching Meteorology to around 25 high school students. I say 'around' that many because the first day only 14 showed up, today, the second day, only 20 showed up, and the roster has 25 on it. The classroom wasn't unlocked today, and I was caught in traffic so the students were waiting outside for about 25 minutes before I showed up. Had to get people in the office to open it up. I filled out a card for keys after class. There aren't any textbooks for the students yet either and we won't meet again until the 11th of March. They have off for a week for Presidents Day, and then I am at training and a conference until then.

Apparently there is a problem with the course code or section, so they haven't been able to set it up on blackboard yet. I don't think I am going to bother with that anymore. The school has a license for a wiki, so I am going to have the students try that out. It could make for some interesting assignments for them too (create or edit the page on Tornados, edit the page on Dew point, provide citations for the page on weather maps) as well as allow them to coordinate their projects with one another.

Mr. Li's Silica Spheres

We've been fortunate enough to have someone from industry come in to use our SEM. Mr. Li has set up an account with us and I've been operating the SEM for him on a set of samples that he's made. We've had two sessions so far and it seems to be going well enough, he seems to be happy with the results we've been getting. We're actually scheduled to meet again next week on the 19th.

Mulitple Events

Funding for a Bruker training session in Feb and the OSM in March may not be available, which is disconcerting since I've spent $400 to register for OSM. I had been told that it would be acceptable by the department chair, and at the same time was going for SEM training from JEOL. For that training, I filled out an expense report and applied to have it refunded. Apparently I should have applied to encumber funds before doing anything. So I didn't encumber funds for OSM, thinking I would apply for reimbursement, and now there are no more funds available in the department.
Fortunately, there are external funds (from the college still), that had been encumbered for another person to use, however they were unable to use them. There was enough in that deal to cover both of my trips, IF it can be switched over to them. Hopefully it can. They are checking with Dean DiLorenzo to find out of this is workable.

Earlier in the day I received a phone call regarding CollegeNow. They were checking to see if I could be ready for a Meteorology class on Thursday. The problem was that I hadn't talked to my Chair about it, and it seems to me that any instructions regarding something like that need to come to me through him, since this is his department. I didn't think that there would be any problem, but still, I'd need to talk to him before actually starting it. Especially since we're in a wintersession, and the college class wouldn't start until afterwards, in the spring session. However, the Chair asked if I'd like to do the class when I met with him today, so that clears all that up. They're going to get off to an odd start however, since I have those two trips to go on in the beginning.

I also made contact with Mr. Li. He had originally be one of the candidates for the position that I have. He know works for a plastics company. They have some material, apparently its a plastic with silica grains embedded in it that they'd like to look at using the SEM. I was able to speak with him today and he'll be stopping by at around 11 on Thursday.


As a further note, I just started receiving payment in the last two weeks for the KECSS Astronomy class that ended last year. At least they are coming through now.

SEM Issues

I was working on our SEM the other day I decided to look at an electron-mirror image of our machine. I had an uncoated fossil specimen in the chamber that was charging, so I magnified tightly in and let it charge up some more and moved around to built up a big charge while at 50 kv, and then dropped down to 2kv. I didn't get a great electron mirror image but it was there at least, looking like as if I had been shrunk down and was standing in between the teeth of the fossil specimen, looking around at the specimen chamber. One that that was particularly neat was that I could see parts of the charged specimen, and the other specimens on the multi-sample holder. The image of our Backscatter electron detector was severely warped however, I was actually worried that it might've actually been warped at some point, but later on when I exchanged specimens I could see that it was perfectly fine.

The problem is that when in Backscatter imaging I should be able to see all parts of the detector as bright objects, however, half of one of the halves of the main chip (not the shadow chip) was dark. This must indicate a problem. I am going to have to contact JEOL to try to find out what can be done.

Porphyritic Basalts without Coverslips

I've been looking for the above for use in both traditional light micrscopes and Scanning Electron Microscopes. I had some difficulty finding vendors when searching under 'geological thin sections', but someone in a google group suggested searching for petrographic thin sections, which has yeilded some good results. So far I've emailed

mineralopticslab.com - minoptic@sover.net
nationalpetrographic.com - npsinc@flash.net
tulsasections.com - samples@tulsasections.com

I'll hold off on contacting any others until I get some responses.

Attempts at Organization

Today I attempted to organize S302 a little better, unfortunately I still don't have permission to move around too many of the larger items in there. I had hoped to get to assemble the lap-table today too, but there is some question of whether or not I should be doing that or standing by for any SEM issues. Clarification is pending.

Spoke with Prof. Ericco a bit today, seems like he has pretty much got things handled in terms of his EPS38 lab and Astronomy lab. I mentioned the Enrichment Cluster Astronomy course, he seemed bemused by the idea of inductive learning.

I was able to sort through the five overhead projectors that we have in the prep room, and pick out one new-ish and functioning one to set aside for our section. I don't think that anyone actually uses overheads in the department anyway, no one that I've talked to does. I'm just waiting now on confirmation that I can get rid of the remaining four. There's a lot of wasted space in the prep room, it could become pretty functional with some effort. Apparently the person here before me went through a real herculean effort to get it to this level, so I can be thankful for that.

SEM 'school' has become a priority, so I will definitely be going to that. Should be interesting. I think that starting next week, since there's a long break in classes this week, I will be logging in a lot of co-pilot time at the SEM.

I didn't get in touch with the people organizing the CollegeNow Oceanography program, left a message at their number though. I will have to just bring in the syllabus tomorrow and see what happens.

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Feast

The wife and I went to a feast this evening with Gigi in Port Washington. It was a bigger feast than I'd've expected. Casino tents, long rows of food tables with meatballs, sausage and peppers, fried calimari, zeppollis, corndogs, etc. The old gravitron was there. I wonder if there's just one of them owned by one carnival company, or a whole bunch? I suspect that perhaps its just one or two, that most of these carnival rides are just built for specific use during a short period of time, and that new designs come out after a season or two.

We decided to book a trip to Disney next week. Gigi's brother works there, and can get us free tickets to all the parks. Her grandmother also has a little house near it that we can stay at, so we'll just have to cover airline tickets and food and the like.

SEM School and conferences

Profs. Goodrich, Connolly, and Weisberg are hoping that I can attend an SEM 'school' session, from the 13th to the 17th of November. I can almost certainly find people to cover any setup that I can't prep in advance for the regular courses, but I am not too sure about what to do about the CollegeNow and Enrichment Cluster courses. Hopefully someone can be setup to cover them. We'll have to check in with the Department Chairman.

I got a call from one of the people involved with the CollegeNow program, and they're going to want a syllabus Monday, so I will have to work that out this weekend.

Start of Classes at KCC

Today was the start of classes at Kingsborough. I had come in on Tuesday to meet with Dr. Goodrich to set up for today's labs. It was a straighforward setup, the students would just be doing some exercises to either introduce or re-introduce them to the metric system. When they actually showed up to do it today, it was interesting because almost everyone had trouble with it. In the first lab session, only one student finished, but they made some odd mistakes on the units in their calculations. Whats interesting though is that the Middle School kids from the summer program seemed about as familiar with the metric system as these college students, if not, perhaps a little more familiar with it. Both the Middle Schoolers and college students had about as much trouble with the problems as one another though. In one session, a couple of students seemed extremely dismayed by the lab, and were concerned that the rest of the year was going to be as difficult. In truth, it will almost certainly get more difficult, or at least much more involved. They seemed concerned about having to do 'formulas and stuff'. I tried telling them that any science course is going to involve at least this level of difficulty, so if they're taking the course to fulfill a science requirement, then it might not make sense to switch out. They thought that the rest of the class would involve looking at 'rocks and stuff like that', which might've lead them to think the course would be 'easy'. I told them that it'll be up to them if they want to stay in the course.

I recall the first day of classes being hectic as a student, and it appears to be just as hectic for the profressors. I think that the schedule for the day had only been finalized the night before, if not this morning. One class, an Oceanography class, was supposed to be instructed by one professor, but, as it turned out, they had to teach a course at a different college at the same time, and couldn't do the oceanography course. When I walked in this morning, I was told this, and I think it had just been revealed to anyone this morning anyway. They asked me to be ready to go over to the class so that there'd at least be someone there for the first day. Turned out to not be necessary though, as another professor was willing to take the course over.

I'll also be instructing an Oceanography course through the "CollegeNow" program, where high school students take a college level course. The professor that is teaching the regular Oceanography course doesn't have much of an oceanography background, so we are going to be collaborating on creating a syllabus. The CollegeNow students would be doing the same stuff that the college students are doing. I'll also be instructing in an Astronomy course at the highschool on campus, as part of an "Enrichment Cluster". The students will have to create a set of presentations for an assembly at the end of the semester. Neither of those will start this week however.

An interesting first day. I can't tell exactly how much the rest of the year will be like this. I sat in on the lab classes and helped out, only having to leave for a while to meet with people connected to the Astronomy and CollegeNow programs. But for the most part I'll just be setting up lab course materials. The other classes that I am responsible for, the professors don't have any lab materials yet that need to be set up, that will come in for later labs.

Final Day of Summer Program

Today was the final day of the summer Oceanography program at Kingsborough. The program was definitely a success. Torwards the end, I was asking students if they'd do it again if the program was offered next semester, everyone that answered said yes, and one kid even wanted the forms for it now. If it's done again, there's a chance it will be expanded. This was a $300k grant, next time it might be as much as $900. That will probably mean more kids. If its done again, hopefully a boat can be requisitioned earlier on.

The major problems during the program were a result of lack of planning, not at the pre-camp stage, but during the actual operation of the camp. None of us were camp counselors, so we had a steep learning curve to deal with while the camp was going on. Things worked out, but this meant that there was a lot of stress going around. A meeting, at least once a week, or heck at least once, with everyone, the instructors and college assistants, would've gone a long way to preventing most of that, I believe.

KCC Summer Program

I've been able to get a job working at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. I will be working on a special project wherein Middle School Students from around Brooklyn are brought to the campus to attend a summer camp. They'll receive two periods of instruction and science oriented activities, with physical activities in between and after. The program will run from around 9 o'clock, when they get breakfast, until around 5, when their last physical activity is completed. The college is also working on getting sailing ships for the kids to go out on,where they can perform oceanographic experiments.

College Lab Technician Position at KBCC

I've been able to get a job as a College Lab Technician at Kingsborough Community College, within the Department of Physical Science. Specifically, I'll be setting up labs for the Earth and Planetary Sciences section. So I'll be a CLT at KBCC in EPS. The job also includes responsibilities related to the maintenance of the department's Scanning Electron Microscope. Fortunately I had a course on Adelphi's SEM this past semester.

Wedding

Today, 6/2, was the day of our wedding. I am adding this post well after the fact. Everything went well, excluding the preist forgetting my name, and even using the wrong book at one point for the ceremony. The reception was excellent. The next day, we went to my new wife's parent's house to have a family party, and that was very nice too. We went to the Yucatan, the Riviera Maya, for the honeymoon. The honeymoon was great. We thought we lost my wife's wedding Thaali necklace after packing for the flight home, but luckily, after getting home, we found it in with out luggage.

More ex-Moderator Lamentations

I think I've done a decent job of keeping myself from going back to my old discussion site. I want to participate, but I have to resist going back. It just won't work out in the end. A human brain is very good at tricking itself. You'd think that an individual actor can't deceive itself, that it'd be logically immpossible to con yourself into doing something, but it certainly does. I keep thinking, "I will log back on to see if there are any messages for me" or "Maybe they changed their minds" or "I should just go back and participate as normal". I went back once of twice to get particular, specific information from two threads from the past, without engaging in discussion or logging on. But the minute I did that I set about looking around. "Any mention that I'm not a mod" I'm thinking to myself as I search the recent discussion thread titles. Nope, none, which isn't surprising. Then I see that there is already a new interface, a totally revamped frontpage, which was in the works while I was still there, and a re-worked 'member page'. The intention had been for a while to make the member page, which had your profile, into something more like a myspace page, for social networking. So now it displays your recent threads, recent tags, etc, along with the ususal account information. There's also a comments section, where people can leave messages if you've activated it (which it isn't on mine), and a "Friends" list and a "Foe" list. I have to say I am surprised at who's on which. The Foes list, for one thing, I short. And at least two of the people on it seem to have taken it seriously, they're people that I know strongly dislike me. I'd've thought that people would take something like that in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but apparently some people are really wound up.
The friends list illustrates what was so great about that place. "I'm just this guy, see", just a normal, average dude. But on the friends list, there's a bunch of people that I either wouldn't know in real life, or that I wouldn't know in the same way. There's a proud muslim. Knowing muslims is hardly a rarity, but I'd've never had the conversations with that guy that I did if I knew him in real life. They're either socialy inapropriate, or simply the oppurtunity for them just doesn't come up. There's a Thelemite who's a master of occult practice. Maybe I do know someone in real life who is that, but I'd never actually know that they were. There's a hard core brother who doesn't take no shit from nobody. Again, not a rarity, but how much interaction would we actually have had just passing on the street or working in an office? Most people my age already have a set of friends and they're not looking to bring many new people in. And who can really have anything other than a superficial discussion while inside of an office or in the lab or at class? There's a fun and fiesty chick from puerto rico, which I knew before she said she was because she even writes in an accent, so occurs thats where she's from. There's a mason who's simply a master of arcane knowledge, taking tributaries from all the underground streams and traditions. There's shriners, conservatives, the irreverent, the pious, black nationalists, pan-arabists, jewish nationalists, rude bollywood gyals, jews, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. And, again, this is just the tiny list of people from the board that actually marked me down as 'friend', rather than 'foe'. In other words, its a small sampling of the types of individuals that you'd encouter and engage in dialogue with there.
It sure was fun while it lasted.

Second Day of Prep

I arrived at Dr. Farmer's Paleoceanography Lab at Hofstra this morning to start a second session of specimin prep. All went well enough. There were still a few samples that were either lost, or that seem to have too little material in them to be useable. I went back to the first day's worth of prep and collected the ones that also looked like problems. Between tomorrow and the next day I will finish the normal picks, and then also re-do the problem samples. With all that, I should have around 36 samples crushed and ready for the final day of preparation.

New York City Teaching Fellowship

NYC has a programme in which people who have academic degrees, but no teaching certifications, can get those certifications. If you're accepted into the programme, you're put quickly to work in a NYC school, teaching a subject you are qualified for, getting paid as if you were a regular hire, and after about a year you get the certification needed to be a teacher.

I applied to the program, not expecting to get into it. Infact, I applied on the very day of the deadline. There's only a limited number of positions, and thousands of people try to get them. By some miracle, I've been able to advance to the Interview stage. Their website has some paperwork that I need to fill out, and I'll have to decide what category and grade level I'd want to be considered for. I need to schedule the interview for early next week, I think, if I'm going to hope to have any chance. Even then, it seems unlikely that I'll be accepted, its the end of the process, they've certainly filled most of their positions, and might just be interviewing a large number of people, in part to find a small number of the best applicants to fill in the final spots, and probably also to keep a 'buzz' up about the program.

Thesis Proposal

Part of the process of doing a Master's Thesis is proposing the project. It is an odd requirement, since by the time you're presenting the propsal, you're already heavily invested in the project. That goes double for me, since I've proposed my project in the middle of the same semester that the thesis itself has to be completed.

The presentation went well, started at 4:30, with the process of doing a power point presentation and then a question and answer period lasting a little more than an hour. In the week prior I had written up the thesis proposal itself, which ended up being only 5 pages of actual text.

I presented to Dr.'s Christensen, Farmer, Coombs, and Russell, who together make-up my Thesis Committee. I'll have to defend the thesis before them at the end of the semester. Dr.'s Christensen and Farmer of course I am working with, and Dr.'s Coombs and Russell are professors from the department. They did seem genuinely curious about the project, which isn't to surprising. The details of my project are barely within the normal confines of biology, at least here. It seems like everyone else here is doing a genetics project, running PCRs, gels, etc. And then I come in with what looks like spoonfuls of sand 'but I assure you, they're fossils'. True enough, these professors have heard of Foraminifera, and surely are aware that they're marine protists that extend pseudopodia outwards to pick up food particles. But be damned if I've got to deal with actual living ones. These things are dead as dirt. Literally, they've accumulated as dirt. Most biologists tend to think of biology as involving things that were at least relatively recently living.
This idea actually seperates biology into two overly wide domains. Pale-ontology, and Ne-ontology. Everyone in the department here is a neontologist. If they haven't killed it themselves, or known the guy that did kill it, they don't want any part of it.

Fortunately they looked past any of that, I was genuinely concerned that there would be objections to it for being too much of an environmental studies programme sort of project. Dr. Christensen prepped me well for the presentation, I was at least able to prevent myself from trying to speculate too much and rather just admit that I don't know the answer to a question. Speculation, it seems, can be too easily received as bullshitting.

I suspect that the actual thesis defense will be a much more rigourous process. I don't expect to have the thesis accepted right off the bat; that's relatively rare. Equally rare is to have it completely rejected. What normally happens, or so I read, is that revisions are requested, and the degree is awarded sort of 'conditionally'.
One of Dr. Christensen's previous students, from another University, infact has been through many revisions. He defended his thesis before I was even in my Master's programme, and he's been going back and fort with revisions ever since. This is while already being accepted into a PhD programme.
I can't really even consider thinking about the revisions at this point, I just have to work on actually finishing the data collection and writting the initial, pre-defense, draft, first.

De-modded

I ended up being de-modded today. I had been participating on a discussion board since July of 2004, and had be selected to be a moderator on it a while into it. It was a great old time. Wonderful discussion that you just can't have anywhere else. And a variety of people that I'd've never met in my lifetime. I had been getting heavily invovled in a series of conversations about Holocaust Denial on the board, these kinds of conversations aren't, to say the least, dispassionate. One of the peopel running around promoting the nazi propaganda that the holocaust didn't happen/wasn't that bad/or that the jews themselves did it, sent me a long private message, through the board system, attacking me and picking a fight. I send him/her back a short, to the point, beautifully vulgar response. Hey, if they want to pick a fight, I'm not one to dissapoint. But it was one of those moments when you realize right afterwards that it wasn't a good idea. Some of the other nazis that had swept onto the board, and this sort of thing does tend to happen in waves, and it does tie into the Iran Holocaust Conference which at least brought up the idea in the public spotlight again, had been complaining that I was too 'mean', both in the complaints section and also just openly in the threads. Apparently, these people aren't 'sensitive' enough to not rant that the jews were the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the holocaust, but are 'sensitive' enough to bitch and moan when someone frankly disagrees with them. So not too long after having sent the private message I get another one, from one of the three board administrators, quoting my vulgar reponse to the member and informing me that I wasn't going to be a moderator anymore.
What could I say, they were right. As a moderator I represented the board's administration. I thanked the administrator for even letting me a mod for the time that I was. But I can't continue on on the board now. I really loved the board, but I can't even justify to myself anymore spending that much time on it without being 'on staff'. True enough, it sounds silly to refer to a discussion moderator position as a staff position, but we, as mods, were part of the organization, and we did help it move along and advance, outside of normal moderation duties. THe board had grown a lot in the time I was there, and I at least like to think that I contributed to it. Everyone participating on the board did contribute, but I like to think that those of us working as moderators were a part of it, in addition to being contributing participants.
It was great to have all those intruiging interactions with completely different people, to learn from their nearly alien worldviews (infact, a person or two would occasionally claim to be an actual extraterrestrial alien), and to have my own ideas challenged. Thats not something that you too often get in regular life. The people that I personally know aren't, in the end, all that different from me. They're mostly from the same region, living similar lives, and operating in similar manners. But there, you'd be mixing it up with someone who's family was in the Iraqi Insurgency one moment, debating UN policy with people in post-communist era countries the next, or listen in on a debate between a master mason and a Thelema devotee before getting a good lecture on US monetary policy. And usually one of those guys or gals would also be trying to explain a paranormal event that had happened to them, or posting a possible (if improbable) UFO sighting photo that they had taken.
Alas, thats just going to have to be a stage that's over for me now. If I go back to participating as a member, I'll allways be wondering about whats going on in moderation and administration. And in all honesty it'd be almost too painful to watch from the sidelines as the board continues to grow and expand, as it certainly will. And while I was a moderator, I held my tongue. I held back, because we had a certain amount of responsibility in that position. Without that responsibility, who's to say how long it would be before I was booted off altogether? That'd be a bad experience, and it'd, in a way, make at least the time between being demodded and this hypothetical future booting, something of a waste.
All good things come to an end.

Hiring in Advance?

I've had what appeared at first like potential offers to work for some companies. I'd put my resume up on a job search site, and sent out a bunch of inquiries to matches for jobs in biological and geological fields and received a few call backs. But it turns out that they're not really interested in hiring anyone months in advance, before they even have their degree. Which shouldn't've been surprising, but was disappointing.

Rejected by Stonybrook

I had completed my Stonybrook application a while ago and sent it in. I was able to get letters of Recommendation from Dr.s Christensen, Schoenfeld, and Hobbie. I also contacted Dr. Forster at Stonybrook to see if she was taking on any more graduate students. Unfortunately she said she already had 5 students and wasn't looking for anymore, but, she said to contact her again to see if something could be worked out. I responded saying that I'd still like to work in the program, and would like to meet up with her at Stonybrook. She agreed and asked for me to send in a day to meet, which I did. Unfortunately, the next time I heard from Dr. Forster was when I received a rejection letter from Stonybrook. The letter seemed like standard fare, but at least it had been sent directly from her, as she is on the graduate admissions committee, rather than from someone that I hadn't spoken too previously.

I sent a follow-up letter to Dr. Forster to get more information about the specific reasons why I was rejected, and what I can do to improve my chances of getting accepted into another program. Hopefully she will respond and it will be something that I can work on.

New Teaching Assistant Assignment

I've been fortunate enough to get assigned to another TA position. This time it is in Dr. Coombs' "Fundamentals of Microbiology" lab. There is only one section with all the students from the lecture, and it meets twice a week.

The students are going to be working with cultures of microbes, including BSL 2 organisms in the second half of the semester. BSL 2 organisms are 'potentially pathogenic' organisms; they can cause disease. Bio Saftey Level is a rating from 1 to 4, with things like Anthrax being Level 4, and non-disease causing varieties of E. coli being level 1.

Cleaning for Mg:Ca Analysis: Problems and Solutions

I collected around 40 individual G. bulloides for the first 15 or so depth intervals from the core. I seperated them into two sets of 20 individuals each and carefully crushed the test chambers open in prepartion for cleaning them for Mg:Ca analysis. This gave me 30 samples, which were put into certified metal free tubes on a rack. Even though they were certified metal free, I still treated them to a long heated acid bath to ensure that there were no metals that had collected in them, such as with dust. I then went to Dr. Farmer's lab at Hofstra for the cleaning at around 9 in the morning. The rest of the cleaning work was done inside of a negative pressure hood, to prevent metal bearing dusts from contaminating them. They were then put through a series of treatments, the goal of which was to remove all clay minerals and wash away any Mg or Ca crusts (non-biological) that had accumulated after deposition on the ocean floor. A small amount of methanol (for clays) or acids (for leaching) would be added to the tube and then siphoned off. I also treated the samples to a boiling bath of strong Hydrogen Peroxide, to destroy any organic materials that may also have accumulated, using a sonicator at many steps to aggitate the material. Leaching in a weak acid was the penultimate step before final dissoution. It was after leaching, and this was around 6 or 7 at night, that I realized that the tiny amounts of material were missing, they had either been dissolved at one of the acid steps or sucked up by the vaccuum. That was unfortunate.

So several days later I collected a small sampling of forams, not necessarily all G. bulloides, but similarly shaped and with similarly thin test walls, from a 'practice' jar of washed material. There were four tubes, with around 20 crushed individuals in them each. I then used the same procedure as I had previosuly used to clean them, and after the weak acid leach, they were still there and looked good.
So its possible that I had previously sucked them up with the vaccum, or that I had crushed them too finely, which allowed them to dissolve in the various acids. But it looks unlikely that carefully crushed tests will be dissolved by this procedure, which of course is to be expected, since many other workers have used it with success, including Dr. Farmer.

Now I will have to finish picking the foram samples and clean them, hopefully there won't be any problems with this round.

Wintersession

For the intersession during the winter break, I had to.

 

1. I need to contact Dr. Farmer over at Hofstra. (done)
2. Prepare a new outline for a Thesis Proposal (done)
3. Contact Dr. Forster at SUNY Stonybrook about her program (done)
4. Complete SUNY Stonybrook PhD application.
5. Prepare a draft cover-letter for new job applications.
6. Pick 40 G. bulloides to later be analysed for Mg/Ca ratios from all of the 1H1W and 1H2W intervals.

I am waiting on any kind of response from Dr. Forster. I have to wonder at how they react to emails from people that they don't know, asking to work with them and asking about grant money. Seems like it would normally sound suspicious. Maybe I can pretend next time to be a Nigerian Bank Manager.   I suppose that they expect it to be part of the territory that comes with being a professor in a programme.

 

Outlining the a new proposal for my thesis went quicker than expected. Prof. Christensen had previously said that I should use her other student's theses and proposals as a way to structure it. But I hadn't done that. I tried it this time, and it sure was a lot more helpful.  The difficult part was deciding what sections to put everything into, but seeing that other students had just flat out broken it up into the study area, background on the techniques and science, and then an explanation of their method, was just a sensible way of laying it out. This should make the writing of it go quickly.

 

As far as cover letters and essays for applications, I have to get going on that.

 

Picking the samples has been a mixed experience. I focused on my previous picks from Jim's material, pulling out what I now recognize as G. bulloides.  I've gotten through all of 1085B 1H1W, and now just have 1H2W to go through.  After that though, I am going to need to either sieve some more material to get up to 40 G. bulloides for each point I want to sample down the core, or go through the rest of Jim's and see if there are any to get from there. I'll probably end up doing both.

More forams

Met with my Professor today to go over what I need to get done before the semester starts. We're going to meet for another couple of days to review what I've gotten done. I need to reorganize my Thesis Proposal, so I can present it to a committee for approval. I also need to actually select who will be on my Thesis Committee too. Apparently I might be able to include Dr. Farmer on this, even though she is at Hofstra (and in a different department on top of that). That should be helpful, since she has direct experience with this kind of work. I will need to contact her soon to set up when to come to the lab and find out exactly how many specimens to pick for each level.
Thats the big task right now, picking the specimens. I started by trying to pick out G. bulloides from Jim's slides, I got through half of one section of the core and was barely able to find one. I think I might've picked too liberally when I was looking for Nq. pachyderma previously, and taken up all his G. bulloides. So I went back to my old slides and really started hitting a roadblock on just what defines which organism. I definitely picked a lot that weren't Nq. pachyderma, in the early slides at least. I was able to get some G. bulloides out of them too. But now I am not at all confident in my understanding of which characteristics define which. Yes, I have Kennet & Srinivasan right in front of me, but the descriptions just seem like they can go either way on so many individuals. I ended up spending a long time in the lab, but got nothing done with it.

Before all that I had to clear up an issue with financial aid. They had cut a refund check for me early in the semester, but when the TAing tuition waiving came through, they shut off the financial aid. That meant that the check that the school had cut for the refund wasn't being covered by my Financial Aide, so now I owed them for it. Luckily, all that needed to be done was to have a stop put on the check.
After that, I gave the biology office my probable schedule for Spring. Hopefully, I will be able to get another TA position. The professor in charge of doling out the positions had only picked up the student schedules earlier this morning, so they shouldn't've assigned anything to anyone yet. On top of that, one student that was a TA last semester isn't doing it again, so that should mean I am pretty certain to get a position.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Got this book for Christmas, which is funny because I had picked it up in a bookstore and thought it looked interested but ended up not buying it. So I lucked out and ended up having it anyway. Just finished reading it, really interesting book. Its about a father and son, neither of which are named at anypoint in the book, wandering through the world after what seems to have been global thermonuclear war. The world is completely destroyed. The inside flap of the dust jacket says that they are walking through "burnt America", which says it all. Everything everywhere is completely burned out. There event happened in the man's lifetime, when his wife was pregnant, and the books starts years later with just him and the kid. The descriptions in the book push the sensations of the charred out world where the only thing that seems to move is a permanent cover of ashes. There's no sun anymore, or at least you can assume it still exists beyond the never ending overcast of the sky. Only a diffuse light exists during the day. McCarthy describes mornings as 'palings', and night is absolute blind blackness. The only things that are alive in the book are humans for the most part. We once hear a dog parking, but that stops before long. Hell, people are capturing and eating other humans, so of course they've done away with dogs, cats, etc. Pets, I suppose, are pretty superfluous in the apocalypse. The only other time any animals are mentioned is during a nightmare of two with hideous monstrous animals, and then one scene where there are snake. A group of men pull open a peice of hill to get at a mass of hibernating snakes within it and just set them on fire. McCarthy describes it as little more than them wanting to destroy something that represents evil.
I don't think it necessary to view the book as a science fiction novel. It doesn't make sense that way. Nuclear war would be destructive, but here, its like every square inch of the planet was hit with a flame thrower. And every animal is dead, there's never any insects, birds, worms, nothing. But humans are still alive. The coasts at some points are completely littered with millions of tiny fishbones, and the oceans are just churning gray masses. The description of rivers are great, they're just these dead, whirling black slicks with greasy froth and scum all over them. The only food that they come across are tinned goods, and it seems to be what everyone survives on, either that or other people. The man and the boy are like concentration camp victims, but they seemed to have walked from Virginia, or even further north, to the southern tip of Florida. So no its not a science fiction book. Its almost more poem than prose. McCarthy also doesn't use much punctuation, which can be annoying, especially with dialog. Its easy to forget who's talking or thinking any particular line, or if its even being narrated when you start reading the sentence, which, I suppose, must be the point.
Its almost funny to even think of it as a "post apocalypse" story. Just compare it to the TV show Jerhico or Mad Max or anything from the 'after the end of the world' genre and you can see that its just completely different. There are hints of the post-annihilation history, but its muddled and infrequent. "Blood Cults" and "bull drums" are completely used as props to reinforce the mood of the book. Its like when a horror movie never gives you a good look at the monster. You know its hideous, and therefore it is, you don't need an accurate and detailed description, its as horrendous as anything you know, because you've more or less made it up.
Its the descriptions that I think come out most stronly in the book. Even though the whole world is nothing by gray dust, black ash, and scorched soot, where even the snow is gray, you still manage to get a 'vivid' impression of it. You can feel how freezing cold it is, with minimal sunlight during the day, and nothing but scavenge wood or gas to burn for a fire.
The story ends oddly, but I guess that McCarthy figured he couldn't have an unhappy ending. You definitely feel completely hopeless for these two completely pitiful people through most of the book. Half the time you just hope that the man snuffs out the kid before some one roasts him over a spit or wears his skin for a hat. If the narrator said "but in reality, this wasn't earth, the man and boy had died in the attack and now they were wandering through hell while everyone else was alive', you'd beleive it. They're traveling down the road, because its the only thing around. Its all asphalt and oil, and the novel appropriately ends with someone telling the boy to get out of the middle of the road. The other thing that I noticed about the novel is the physical book itself. At first I thought it was just poorly cut, but after a little while I realized that the pages must've been made uneven on purpose, gives you a feel for it being something to be left during the apocalypse.

Here's a page about the author, from the looks of his other titles, he doesn't seem like the most jovial guy around:
CormacMcCarthy.com

From his page I see he apparently is the author of "All the Pretty Horses", which was made into a movie. Never saw it.

Random House has a pretty nice looking page for the book, but from the looks of the url it will change with his publication history, so it might not allways be for "The Road".

Last day of TA work for Fall Semester

Today was the last day of TA responsibilities for the Genetics Lab for me. The whole thing's been a really interesting experience. The last lab session with students was yesterday, and today I went in to sort through the genetic samples that were left over, ran the DNA off the last of the gels, and just cleaned the lab in general. The Professor says that there might be a shortage of lab classes next semester, but hopefully I will be able to get another TA position for the Spring.
The lab itself was a lot of work for the students. In addition to the three long term experiments that the professor had designed for them, they also had to design their own fourth experiment. And in addition to the regular assignments of maintaining a lab notebook, and writing lab reports, they also had to prepare a poster presentation of their group designed experimental results, and then each of the two lab sections had a Poster Session. The first lab section only had three groups, so they just presented one at a time to the class. The second lab section had eleven groups. They ended up doing the session in the hallway, and each group ended up presenting to the professor, and then rotated to at least two different selections of other groups. Some of the other professors and workers in the department also attended this micro-Poster Session. I'd say that these students had their work cut out for them, but that now, after all of that, they're really much more prepared than the average biology student at other Universities.

Wascally Wabbit

After the debacle with GMAC, I've been fortunate enough to get a car that I like, the VW Rabbit. The Rabbit is a model that first got started in the '70s, I beleive. After a while VW changed the name to "Golf", and I think that there was a version of the Golf called the "GTI". Now they've dropped the "Golf" moniquer and have gone back to calling it the Rabbit. I love it. It get good gas mileage and has lots of luggage space inside, since its a hatchback. On Black Friday after Thanksgiving, we went out and picked up a new TV at 5 in the morning, to take advantage of the wildly reduced prices. It fit into the Rabbit with no problems at all, plenty of room to spare. Its an automatic transmission, I have no idea how to drive a manual transmission. In addition to regular automatic, it has two other modes. A "Sport" mode, where the gears kick in at higher RPMs, and a "Triptronic" mode. Triptronic is a type of transmission, developed by Porsche, that allows you to Upshift and Downshift through the gears of the transmission, no clutch action required. If you try to shift down into a gear that would over-rev the engine, the computer won't permit it. In some descriptions of Triptronic, its claimed that when the RPM are lower, the computer will remember that your command and then down shift. However I've played around with it, and it doesn't seem like the VW Triptronic at least will do that. It will also downshift on its own if the engine's RPM fall very low.

The car has a bouncier ride than I am used to. I've noticed that most companies are claiming that this is a 'sportier' ride. That the American public is moving away from the old feels of some cars, where the smooth ride was important, and are becoming more accepting of the more European style 'sporty' rides. I had an old Mercury Grand Marquis, and driving it was like cruising along on a boat. Now, apparently, everyone wants to feel every bump and joint in the road. Takes a bit of getting used to, at first I thought something was wrong with the suspension!

Malibu gone

So today my '03 Malibu had to be returned. I had thought that I was working with GMAC, I had thought that they were going to let me decide today even (though I was late returning my car after its smartbuy was up) whether to refinance the balloon payment OR get into a new lease. But apparently I thought wrong. They told me today, when I called them to say that I wasn't going to get a new vehicle and, rather, I would sign the contract that they had sent me to refinance the ballon payment, that they didn't want to do that, and that they're requiring me to turn it in to one of their dealers.
So now I have no car. This is wonderful. I had thought all those things because....thats what we'd do when I worked at GMAC, we'd work with people who were overdue on turning in their car, either have them sign an extension while they were trying to make a final decision, or try to get them to sign a new contract. And when I had spoken to the people at GMAC's Midland Center, I made it clear to them that I was trying to decide between the two options, but needed to wait for a certain ticket from my former GMAC co-workers that'd give me a discount on any new vehicle I got into. Later I got a phone call from someone from the Hartford branch, I explained the situation to him, and said I'd be able to get back to him by today either way. I thought everything was fine. Yesterday I get the ticket, contact a couple of dealers, and decided that it wasn't worth getting the new car. I call the guy from Hartford to let him know that I'm going to sign the contract for the refinance, and he tells me no. To turn the car in, now, or else its going to be re-possesed.
I argued with this idiot for a while. In the end, I had no choice but to turn it in, and now I don't have a car of my own. I suppose that its actualy in my favour. THe car was old at this point and had over 50K miles on it. It'd be a bad deal to have to pay around $12K for a 3-yo car with 50K miles on it. I'll have to pay an overmileage charge for part of that of course now also. But you'd think that the guy would prefer that I send in a check. The first payment for the refinancing wouldn't even be due until next month even. How much of a difference does it rationally make if I signed the contract 10 days ago or today, and then sent the first payment in next month??? Not a helluva lot.
And I offered to pay for an extension to cover the time between now and when it was due back, on top of signing the new 36 month refinancing contract. But no, apparently, that'd be against GMAC's interest. Unbeleivable.
So there's simply now way that I'm going to be getting any of the family of GM cars now. Even if other companies would do the same, they haven't done it to me, and if it ever did happen, hell, at least they wouldn't be doing it to a former co-worker. Half the people in that nitwit's office are 'refugees' from my old office too. Apparently it counts for nothing. Heck, he even went so far as to say that 'I should know better then because I worked for GMAC'. Well when I worked for GMAC getting cars that were past maturity and overdue, we'd actually do stuff that made sense. This moron couldn't do anything other than say that the car in his que has to be returned.

TA Work

I've started the TA position, and its pretty hectic. I was told at first that I'd have 3 lab periods, and then a few days before I was told I'd have 2 labs a week. But then it turns out that there are 4 labs a week,, everyday in the late afternoon except Friday. On Friday I need to come in to prepare for the labs on the following week. They're around 3 hours each, and the prep on Friday can take a few hours on its own.

The Thursday Lab actually conflicts with my Marine Geology class, which starts at 6, but the Lab Professor, who is the Head of the Biology Department, is ok with me leaving for that class. Infact, often the labs end a little bit early.

For my research, I need to still pick the samples for the Mg:Ca analysis, and then prep them at the Hofstra Lab. I should hear back from Hofstra soon as to when I can some in and do that, and picking the samples shouldn't take more than one session at the microscope.

Procedural Corrections

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.

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!

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.

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.

Contacts and Projects

I am currently continuing to work on setting up a project that can be used as my Masters Thesis. Fortunately, one of my professors knows a few people, not terribly well but well enough to hopefully get my foot in the door. We've sent emails to one worker at the AMNH, who does research in vertebrate paleontology. I revently sent another first contact email to someone at Lamont Dorety who also does paleontological work, although he doesn't just work on fossil specimins. In fact, his research might be said to be more on the geological side of paleontology, using research on magnetostratigraphy and structural geology to unravel some important events in, most excitedly, dinosaur history. Apparently his insitution only has a Doctoral programme, but its possible that he might have a project that isn't big enough for a doctoral thesis, and thus might be something that he's not had a chance to work on but would like to. If I am extremely lucky, he will permit me to work on any such project. Both the AMNH and Lamont Dorety contacts are long-stretched gambits that might not work out at all. In all likelyhood, I won't even hear back from either researcher. That is why I am also extremely fortunate that the same professor I worked on the foram project with has another project that could serve as a Masters Thesis basis. It would be looking at the morphometrics of forams. Not dinosaur paleontology, but still firmly within paleontology and something more than climate reconstruction. Climate reconstruction has proven insteresting, I can see myself doing more work in it, but its simply not my first choice.

On that, the material prepared for the poster presentation is of suffiecient size that it might be workable as a paper. I would have to look at some other ODP core sites in nearby regions, and try to relate the data from them to my site, in order to make it into a paper. That is definitly worth doing, and it should be exciting to get a chance to publish a paper no matter what the subject.

Publishing papers is, from my outsider's impression, a bit of an arcane and complex subject or art. There are many things that can go wrong with it, and even the choice of which journal to publish in can have huge effects, positive or negative. Choose one journal, and perhaps its readership just isn't interested in the subject at the time. Hopefully I'll be able to publish this in some place where it will get attention and be of some use to other researchers in the field. Thats a rather odd thing to think about, because, even if I don't do anything else with forams and climate, I will have, technically and unspectacularly, made an 'imprint' on that field. I've already gotten an email request for information on my poster, which is pretty darned neat; someone is actually interested in the work.

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!

Blogging Spam

I just deleted a "spam comment" to the previous post. Whats intersting is that it claims you can get a PhD within 2 weeks, simply by calling 413-208-3069, wow, imagine that! A doctorate within 2 weeks! The 'trackback' to that spammers account name reveals that they don't have a blog within blogger, just an account. Previously, spammers would make their account have a blog that had their spam message, that way people would see it. But I suppose that this represented a problem, because if you have a blog, there is a 'flag' option for a viewer to check, which apparently puts it onto a list for the people that run Blogger to review, iow, the spammer would be exposing themselves. So by not having a blog, but having an account, they're apparently able to get around that and spam people's comments. I googled around for that phone number, and apparently there are numerous accounts spamming the same message, on blogger and other blog pages.

Whats really funny is that, in a sense, anyone that did call that number, hoping to get a degree on the sly (there are degree mills out there that award advanced degress for cash), deserves to have their identity stolen and credit standing destroyed. I doubt that that number connects to a degree mill scam, but rather to a simple ID fraud scam.

Anyway, the number registers to South Deerfield, MA and a carrier called "Global Naps." That apparently is a co-location service, rather than a cell phone carrier, which is intereting. It might mean that the phone number is somehow being "freaked", that the entity at the other end of the line isn't in MA, but is re-routing information to that location.
Even more interstingly, Global Naps was involved in a FCC lawsuit:

http://www.fcc.gov/ogc/documents/opinions/2001/00-1136.html

That suit does seem to imply that this Global Naps company is involved in telephone communications. Also, from their website:
"Our primary focus is high volume, high ussage business customers". They apparently have a national distribution in their "Switch Sites", but a focus on the East Coast, with a location in Quincy, MA. Their website overall is pretty primitive, lots of flash animation, little substance, and they have a photo of Frank Sinatra as their Chairman.

More interestingly, there is no actual information about anyone involved with the company. Perhaps they don't want their information out there because then people would be able to make connections to criminal enterprises that operate through them, such as this Degree Mill scam that they enable.

I sent an email to info@gnaps.com to see if they had a response or comment to make about that illegal operation. Blogger, unfortunately, doesn't bother to give people the option to report whole accounts, nor do they make it easy to report such matters to them directly. This is probably because they aren't really interested in it. It will be interesting to see if "GNAPS" is concerned about this usage.

Update

My access to this blog was down for a while. I had given up on it, but I see that I have access again. Thats nice.

The foraminiferal project has been interesting. I have prepared a small poster on it, and will be doing a prresentation on it in the near future. I will say one thing though, I noted below that they can move around a little bit within the water column, thats what most of the literature says about them.

However, I have discoved an entirely new form of foraminiferal locomotion, saltation!

Because every time I'd try to move one of the things around with the brush, *SPRING*, they'd jump all over the place!

I am also now looking into doing some more research. I have a few possibilities right now, some biogeochemical research might be possible, or some paleontological studies might also open up. I probably won't be doing any more work with forams in the near future. They're actualy really interesting little creatures, but it seems like that sort of research won't take me in the directions I am looking to go right now.