Soap and staples

My belated birthday-and-christmas present arrived from Freiburg, Germany .. from my best friend from home who is in med school over there.

It consists of some hilarious/lovely cards, chocolate, and fancy opium-scented soap:

In other news, I recently graded a worksheet that was stapled like this:

Thanks, kids.

Weekend Plans

Because I'm a hip young person, I'm thinking of spending my Saturday doing one of these two things:

Symposium on Conservation Challenges at Tufts
http://sites.tufts.edu/wazesymposium2011/

or....
Cambridge Science Festival!!
http://cambridgesciencefestival.org/2011Festival/2011ScheduleOfEvents.aspx

I get that the science festival is basically for kids, but I still REALLLLLY wanna go.

Also, speaking of festivals, I'm pretty sure a couple of us W.Mass girls are hitting this one: http://www.greenriverfestival.com/index.html

So if you're in the area, bored, and have at least one cat, check it out!
p.s. While Romain is elsewhere for the weekend, the rest of us are in charge of the cat, whose name is currently, Kitty, Little Kitty, Cat, Fucking Cat and officially Maddie. I think, just for the weekend, I'm going to try and throw Emily Dickinson in with the mix.

Rubric

So I spent most of the day grading. At the end of the semester, the administration stops providing rubrics for the postlab worksheets because I guess everybody gets tired. So I've been making my own rubrics. Today's postlab point breakdown looks like this, "...-0.25 if no error bars, -0.25 if no discussion of significance, -1 if graph is stupid..."

I hope I'm never asked to assemble a teaching portfolio.

In general teaching portfolios seem kind of silly, because even if the sausage comes out tasting good, testing well, and understanding biology, you still don't want to see it get made. As in, I think I'm a fair grader, but my rubrics sound like voicemails glenn beck would leave on the CIA's answering machine, "+1 For correctly identifying the crossover event in the cell. +2 for convincing me that you understand what is going on here and can see the forces at work in this system!!!"

colloquial note-taking

I just had a Leffe Blonde after a glass (ok, plastic cup) of champagne at Eddie's thesis defense reception, not realizing that it was 6.6% alcohol, that I was a lightweight, and that I would return to my office basically useless. I tried to take some notes on the Odum model, but stopped when, re-reading my notes, I noticed that I had written the following: "No plateau [of biomass versus time since agricultural abandonment in the Northeast] cuz more land up in this bitch [for secondary forest growth]." You'll notice that not only are the important bits of information in brackets because I left them out, but my companion graph looked like this |/_ , which is meant to signify a positive relationship but is about as informative as an emoticon made entirely out of mouths. Although in my defense, I did label the axes.

Princess Diana

In a willful attempt to participate in current events without leaving my desk, I opened up my Google Reader, which in addition to news feeds is also shamefully littered with fashion blogs and webcomics. One of the latter informed me that Princess Diana had a fancy designer purse named after her called the D-bag. They presented this information like nothing was wrong with it.
The day is half over and all I've learned is this D-bag thing and that nitrogenase is limited by temperature and phosphorus availability; this limitation drives the production of extracellular phosphatase enzymes. This positive P for N feedback loop explains why nitrogen fixation exists in the tropics where only phosphorus is limiting...and that Kate Middleton also has a D-bag.

Do you want to see legitimacy?

Here it is, my new (used) bike. I will call her Miss America. She has a rear-view mirror and responds well to glamour shots. Not like my (Rachel's) last bike:

This photo was taken at Stage 2 of 3 in the 1st annual DISMANTLE MY BIKE YOU FUCKING SCAVENGERS benefit for the homeless of Jamaica Plain.
Stage 1: Remove seat
Stage 2: Remove back wheel
Stage 3: Steal the rest of it (why didn't you do this first??!! why?!?!)

Anyway Miss America and I are going to be very happy. We've been commuting on the Southwest Corridor, which is really pleasant except for the mysterious red and white paint lines:

Steve is gently encouraging me to get in the kitchen where I belong and work on Becky and Steve (and Rose) pasta surprise.

Panspermia

look it up.

My notes say that plants need molybdenum to survive, that many of our enzymes depend on a bit of Mo, a mineral that is not terribly common in Earth's crust but is more common elsewhere in the cosmos.

Francis Crick at one time believed that aliens could have brought the origins of life complete with these rare elements to Earth in a very dubious deus-ex-spaceship kind of theory.

I recall seeing Francis Crick driving around La Jolla (where he lived near the end of his life in 2004) in a car with a personalized license plate, "ATGC". I remember not being able to decide whether or not this was cool, whether or not he should be driving, and whether or not I should rear-end him and ask for an autograph. I never did. Regrets.

My Qualifying Exam

...is what I'm studying for right now.
A fellow prisoner of Office 511 lent me some handouts from a plant physiology class I should have taken ages ago but didn't.

A lengthy explanation of the Penman-Monteith equation for energy balance in plants ends with this,

"Let's clean up: "

...to which roommate and personal sanity therapist Becky correctly responded, "Well it does look less complicated than what came before it," but to which YOU, reader, should respond, "WAAUUUUUGHHHHHHHH!!!" *stabs at eyes* *nicholas cage-esque sobbing*

Something about studying all this quantitative stuff gave me the urge to blog/procrastinate/use words instead of those horrible italicized numerical concepts.