We're tired of doing homework...

Emily and I are sick of doing homework this morning. I have something resembling the flu. I'm kinda sore and my throat is raw and my chest feels tight and congested. I had the chills last night. I feel like poo.



I saw a personal trainer last weekend and I only have six weeks to whip myself into good enough shape to do 5 pull ups. It's been one week and I've only made it to the gym twice. I was hoping to go today and tomorrow so that I could claim 4 workouts per week, but I think it's wiser to stay home and relax.

Maybe tomorrow I'll feel better. Thankfully, I have hours and hours of work to do at home, including a lab report on Drosophila melanogastor that I REALLY do not want to do. My goal is to get the Methods and Introduction sections finished today. I can't do the Discussion, Results or Abstract sections yet because there's some confusion about what data I'm supposed to be using.

And in the first week in March, I have my mineralogy midterm. I honestly don't even know what I should be studying because we've approached things so randomly in the class. Thankfully, the professor is providing us with a review outline.

I suppose I should end this post, since it's a procrastination tool. Back to work. *cough*cough*

I'm sick of winter, but this is beautiful...

Not having a car has been pretty sweet. I take a bus to work and the walk to the bus stop is really pleasant in the morning (unless I'm running late). Last night, we got a couple of inches of snow and this morning, everything was whitish blue - even the sky.

Happy Birthday!

Today is Charles Darwin's birthday...though I'm sure you know that already. There are lots of things going on in celebration around the country (though not much around here except for a short 10-minute cake-eating session before a geology class). And there's also a lot going on in the blogosphere.

Tom Holtz has composed "The Twelve Days of Darwin"
Julia has written a post about Darwin's Image
Neil has tempted us with some awesome cupcakes!
Larry Moran shares an excerpt from Janet Browne's biography of Darwin
Dave Hone offers us "Darwin in Beijing"
Chris tells us all about Darwin in Australia
Micheal shares some links
ReBecca has, like, a ton of posts :)
The Panda's Thumb has lots 'o' links and posts

I'm sure there's more (and if you'd like me to list yours...let me know!) and it's fairly early in the day...so keep checking your favorite blogs!

Darwin probably would have freaked out from all this attention, were he still alive - so I think I'm going to celebrate his birthday as quietly as possible. I have a geology lab tonight and we're going to the Barre granite quarry to do some mineral identification (um....granite???). Darwin's ideas were largely influenced by the geologists of his time and Darwin made some of his own important geological observations - namely that geological processes implied a very long Earth history.

So, a little geology for Darwin Day...and then, at 7, I have an exam covering evolution!

I plan to end the day on the couch, eating ice cream. And then tomorrow, it's J's birthday (and Julia's!!!), so the celebrations will continue.

Things Get Crazy

School this semester has been all over the place. My classes are great. I'm really enjoying my biology class because we're covering evolution and all things related. I'm also enjoying my mineralogy class, even if some of the material is not all that interesting (it's hard for me to make it through a chapter about microscopes and various spectroscopic techniques when the reading is quite technical and I don't understand it). Still, I like it and find it fascinating and I've been constantly reminding myself that there's plenty of time to learn and that I'm not required to know everything about minerals this semester.

So, things are going well and my only complaint this semester...okay, it's not the only one, but it's the biggest...is that there's no structure to my schedule. My biology class was going by effortlessly. I read a chapter from a book every couple of days and did some in-lab exercises and answered really easy questions like "Is it okay to omit data from your lab report?" I was beginning to think it would be smooth-sailing this semester. And then BAM! Yesterday, I got two lab reports dumped in my lap - I have an exam on Thursday night and a decent-sized homework assignment due next Monday. All within the next two weeks. It's doable...but I'm a little stressed out.

My geology class is fairly unstructured, too. We've had one homework assignment and almost no assigned reading. I've been reading from the book, anyway, but up until a week ago, I had to guess at which chapters the information we covered in class was found. We have two exams in the class - a midterm and a final. Since we don't have any other tests/quizzes, I don't know what to expect on the midterm, which makes up a lot of the grade. I'm not sure at this point what it is I should know and in what detail I should know it. We've really just skimmed a bunch of topics; spectroscopy, definition of a mineral, symmetry, and what influences mineral formation.

I'm sure I'll survive. If I can make it through the next two weeks without freaking out, I'll be pretty proud of myself!

HAHAHAHAHAHAH! HAHAHAHAHH!

This is hilarious, but if you're going to watch it in a public place, I have to warn you that it's not light on the expletives!



Pretty sure I bought one of those last year and that it doesn't work anymore.

Outlet

I've been engaging in an argument about evolution in the comment section of the local newspaper (due to recent local events involving a propagandist and an honorary degree) for the last few mornings and this morning, I got really, really tired of it. I've been called a "libtard," been accused of only being interested in listening to people who share my worldview, been accused of loving Micheal Moore (are you serious? not even close!). And I've seen people rail on other people for being religious. It's ugly - lots of hate and irrational finger-pointing. Everyone is talking at each other with their fingers in their ears. It's a battle between liberalism and conservatism. It's a battle between religious and non-religious. Except I don't believe that's the truth.

I believe that the people who are most aggressively arguing are also the most extreme. Extreme liberals, extreme conservatives. It's a public display of the most extreme types of people around. I'm willing to bet that there are many people out there, completely disinterested in arguing, or thinking there's a better way, who are religious, liberal people that understand evolution and its contributions to our understanding of the world. And there are atheist conservatives who feel the same way. It's not as black and white as it seems. I refuse to believe that.

What I do notice is that the majority of people I've come into contact with arguing that evolution is full of holes seem to have a very very poor understanding of how evolution works. And it angers me that there are people out there that are so willing to call it a lie, when their understanding of evolution doesn't even go beyond the high school level.

Dear faithful readers,

A few posts ago, I promised to write about redox boundaries. Except it dawned on me that I don't really know what they are. I mean, I do, but not well enough to write about them publicly.

Instead, I give you a summary of a lecture I went to that spurred the unkept promise. And perhaps you could explain this redox boundary thing to me.

Bjorn Sundby’s lecture, “What can we learn from metals in the environment: A tale of two oceans” included highlights from research projects involving two bodies of water– the Arctic Ocean and Lake Matano.

In the Artic Ocean, Dr. Sundby’s research team used redox tracers such as manganese, rhenium and AVS (acid-volatile sulfides) to determine the location of the redox boundary in the ocean-floor sediment at several stations in the Arctic Ocean basin. At about 10 cm of depth, ocean-wide, there was an enrichment of AVS, but no
enrichment of rhenium. Organic carbon was found in the top 10 centimeters. Dr. Sundby’s team concluded that recent global warming has reduced the volume of ice in the arctic and caused a huge flux in organic carbon to the ocean floor, which is supported by the position of the redox boundary.

At Lake Matano, the presence of banded iron formations suggests that organisms
inhabiting Earth’s early oceans metabolized Fe2+. Dr. Sundby and his colleagues
studied the chemistry and fauna of the lake and found that at 100m deep, the
environment became anoxic; however, there was photosynthetic activity occurring
below that depth. They determined that between 110 and 120 meters, a mixed community of Chlorobiaceae inhabits the waters. Because the levels of sulfates in the deep waters of Lake Matano are low and the waters are iron-rich, Dr. Sundby’s team concluded that there are ferrophototrophs in the lake and that Lake Matano is a modern analog of the oceans of the Archaean.

On being a pushover...

I like to think I'm a nice person. Sure, I have mean, terrible thoughts and I quietly hate on a lot of the world, but I don't usually act on those thoughts. I try to be kind, compassionate and if I wouldn't want you to do something to me, I try not to do it to you. I try hard - key word being try- to improve my outlook and attitude. I do it actively, every day. In fact, sometimes I spend so much time thinking about it that I cause myself heaps of anxiety.

I like avoiding controversy when possible. But, every time that somebody takes advantage of my tendency to avoid controversy, a little bit of me dies. Today, two manuscript authors called me with, um, concerns about their papers. Both of them treated me like I was a child - telling me how to do my job, treating me like I was a disinterested customer service representative. Both of them, when I explained the status of their papers and why they weren't ready, fed me the "that's not okay" line, which is really annoying, because, well, it's going to have to be okay. If you want us to publish your paper, you're going to have to be okay with the process.

I am not a complaint department. My job is not to compensate for other people's technology retardation. It is not to make excuses and grovel and apologize. My job is to make sure that your manuscript gets reviewed by other professionals and that the publisher knows what and when to publish.

Did I say this to the two angry callers? NO. And I wish I had, because now I feel like I didn't take care of myself when I was being attacked. I let someone else (2 someone elses!) walk all over me and I was polite and quiet because was afraid I'd lose my job if I wasn't. Except now I've lost a bit of my dignity.

Hmmm....

I just stumbled across this poll on my university's website:

I'd Rather Do Anything Than...

a) clean

b) exercise

c) study

d) balance my checkbook

I'll give you  one guess at which one is the most popular choice.  For the record, I chose "balance my checkbook."  

The state of my carotid...

I went to see a neurosurgeon last Tuesday and he told me a little more about my aneurysm. It's in the cavernous carotid, which is a good thing because if it were to rupture, it would probably not bleed into my brain. So, not fatal, really. But, if it ruptures, it could cause my eye to swell and pop out a bit from the socket. Think final scene from Total Recall:

So, in a year, they do another CT angiogram to determine if it's growing. And if it is, they want to consider doing a minimally invasive surgery called Coil Embolization, in which they will snake a catheter into my leg and into my blood vessels and then, through that, insert a small coil into the aneurysm. Blood clots will form around the coil, preventing blood from flowing into the aneurysm and therefore releasing the pressure on it.

I'm hoping the aneurysm just stays nice and small. I don't want to have something foreign snaked into my brain through my leg. That sounds horrible. And apparently something like 7% of the procedures require additional surgery or treatment. Not great.

But it could be worse, so I'm pretty happy about the news.