By special request

Caroline suggested I give this figure a home here. It is from a paper published in PNAS I think, and has been posted up on our office door for a couple of years now:

Liberal arts courses of the future

I was talking to Destry just now about a common topic in the Ramer/Abramoff/Cames/Grigelevich (whew!) household: Amherst college course titles.

Becky has frequently posited that course titles follow the format: [actual subject] and the [noun] (i.e. Lacan and the Word and the Body and the Law and Women in Asia from 1801-1899). Following Strizzle's suggestion that I teach Ecology and the Penis someday, I was inspired to create a whole curriculum. Feel free to add your own! The more obscure the better:

Proust and the Lost Time: A survey of gay nightlife in Auteuil from 1900-1905

Conservation and General Mills in Mexico from 1945-1953

Foreign Policy and the Lithuanian Judiciary

Babar and the French Colonial Imagination: Domesticity as Subversion

Signage and Punctuation: Slow Blind Child

Evolution and the Balls <- this would actually be super interesting (check out papers by AP Moller and AH Harcourt from the 80s and 90s for an excellent discussion on primate testes-to-body size ratios as a function of sexual dimorphism and promiscuity)


Back the the books!

Beware the Himalayan blackberries

All you need for preamble is that I am reading a paper and this is from the Methods section:
"Each of the sample sites was surveyed, unless it was deemed too dangerous for student access due to a combination of factors such as dogs, areas being used for various illicit activities, homeless encampments, or extremely steep slopes covered in Himalayan blackberries."

Go the Fuck to Sleep

I'm on this great new diet. It's called: Poor and Busy. Admittedly, this diet can lead to sickly waifdom or morbid obesity, depending on habit. My habits tend toward off-brand Trader Joe's nutra-grain bars (e.g. "This fig walks into a bar"), the really old pasta in the finzi lab walk-in fridge, and carrots, which are portable, pre-washed, and sold at cvs. Earlier this week, Carmella sent some chives, spinach, and herbs via our Australian couchsurfer, Lachie, which are much appreciated.

I was looking at my old stats notes, and noticing that when I get bored in class, I don't stop taking notes, I just get wildly off topic. Tucked into the corner of a page full of SAS code is a class cast of characters:
Prof Tim (starring Harrison Ford)
Exacerbated Dumb Questions Lady ("Excuse me, WHY do we care about the sample size?)
Caffeinated Vocal Affirmations Girl ("mmm...mmmhhmmm...ohhh...mmmHMMM..." WE CAN SEE YOU NODDING I'M GLAD YOU GET IT NOW SHUT UP)
Girl with water fountain ponytail that blocks my view of the board as it bobs around on her head
Guy that looks like Rocky Balboa.
Probably never making it into the feature film that gets made about my blog in 50 years when they've systematically made films about every blog that has more than 5 readers....and then get to me.

Also, I'm going to try and get my laundry done tomorrow before the rapture, taking place at 6pm (Local time everywhere, so check with Australia first to decide whether or not to repent). I hope they take Teds Nugent and Haggard because I don't want those dicks on Earth anymore making death threats or torturing gay kids. They can hang out with Jerry Falwell in whatever sexless, hateful cloudfest they've got going on up there.

Colleague and cool mom Aryn sent me the world's best children's book, reproduced in total, illegally, for you:

Quag for short

words for wet land:
dune slack
swale
mire
morass
quagmire
slough
sump

pictures from the last few weeks:

jp's "wake up the earth" festival. the world cries for about a month as it wakes up. i have a funny video of a zumba class in the rain that i'm not going to burden the internet with.

bat rescue

mass general

Letterwoman

Word of the day:
podzolization - Iron and aluminum and organic matter leaching from a specific layer of soil (A/E) to a specific deeper layer of soil (B)

Had a productive day of studying and hanging out with the roomies plus Rach at Fiore's (cafe). Should get back to chopping tofu but wanted to share:

I flipped through my notes just now and copied down the (commonly used) acronyms. These are they:
NEE, NEP, NPP, GPP, R, NDVI, TCBA, AGWI, AGWB, CWD, Q10, Ps, Rp, Rr, Ra, Rh, Rd, DOC, DON, ON, DIC, DIN, SOM, OM, MRT, PDB, FACE, O, A, E, B, C, CUP, NIR, TBCF, BCF, PAR, APAR, AET, TSR, EM, ECM, AM, VPD, LAI, T, E, ITCZ, GHG, cV, AN, TBGC, AL, PLFA, HPLC, GC, HBEF, HFEMS, WHRC, REDD, IRGA, LiCOR, P-M, M-M, CEC, AAC, CUE, NUE, WUE, LUE, TLF, C-C, PFT, IBIS-2, CENTURY, GSL, ED, DBH, HATS, LATS
and that's not including any molecules.

Every discipline makes up its own vocabulary, but this one makes up it's own texting-worthy shorthand. Good for EBE, GE, and ES.

Hi Mary!

Maybe you are reading this!

I visited my friend Mary in the hospital today. She has an amazing attitude that puts hypothetically sick me to shame. And I hope she gets better lickety-split.

<3

p.s. The love emoticon pictured above apparently made it into the Oxford English Dictionary this year. Brave new world.

Nerds!

I've had an exciting week. And I'm excited about science. The downside is that I'm working too hard, waking up too early, and generally freaking out. For two nights in a row my dreams have been 80% about root and soil research and 20% about being lost, meeting old friends, being in imaginary cities, having whimsical superpowers, and all that normal dream stuff. It is really sad. I didn't even know I could HAVE a science dream until I dreamt that root proliferation also depends on oxygen concentration and pore space, which is, I thought upon waking, probably true.
In other news, here is a picture of some equipment.

I was at Harvard Forest on Tuesday (yeah, they have a forest too) and got to hang out around these soil respiration chambers that a postdoc installed. They are automated, which means that when they close, it is with a very satisfying PSSSHHHHHHTTTTTT sound of a piston being turned on by an electrical setup housed in a giant tupperware. The absolute #1 BEST thing about outdoor research is that everything interesting is kept in a giant tupperware. So when you are walking around a forest and it looks like IKEA is having a kitchen sale scavenger hunt, you know science is happening.
Also, today is the first day that I was mistaken for a Dr. by a piece of mail.

....it was just a newsletter, but still!
In closing, here are some glam shots of plants: