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.