penn

I want everyone on the internet to be very clear on this point

Humans need to breathe oxygen. We expel carbon dioxide.

Trees do the opposite. They take up carbon dioxide (and water). They expel oxygen. (side note: it's not a direct conversion, this CO2 to O2. The O2 comes from the water).

If I read another student paper wherein I am told that trees produce carbon dioxide, I might just scream. I thought we all learned this in first grade.

For all the Ender's Game fans out there

Ridiculously amusing comic today at xkcd. I'm more amused by this than I should be.

RIP to a fellow vendor

Bill Scott, a vendor from the Kingdome, just died. I don't think our tenure overlapped at all, but I'm not sure.

If you check out the pictures with the story, you'll see one of Rick the peanut guy. He's still vending at Safeco Field, and I know him decently well from all my years of vending in the same stadium, even though we worked for different companies.

Longing, or thoughts from a strange land

I received an email from a college friend the other day. She's working in Spain these days. In her email, she vocalized how I have been feeling these past many months:

It's not that I've been sad really; it's more complex than that. In Spanish: añoranza. In English: yearning, longing. (I guess that's about right.) Recently, I've just felt a deep desire to be with you in the places I know...half way around the world. But that desire doesn't translate to my wanting to leave here. Some of you know what I mean when I say I wish I could be in more than one place at once. I wish my worlds could somehow converge without losing those idiosyncrasies of people, place and time that make them what they are.

-- Viola Wilbanks

Green Screen

Fun photo from OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) -- we were supposed to be forecasting weather. What you can't see is that Sarah and I decided to read off the forecast prompts in Spanish, which result in much hilarity. This was taken sometime the fall or spring of my senior year (was a bioclub fieldtrip, and I just don't remember when we did it -- I want to say it was in spring).

Fingerprints

Apparently, they're formed by touching the amniotic sac during pregnancy. Who knew?

Yet still excited for spring

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
-Andrew Wyeth

Signed a lease!

I just signed a lease on my new place for next year. I'm super excited. I'll be living in a two bedroom place, and I will be saving money over the 6 bedroom place I am in now (that is to say, it will be cheaper to live with one other person versus 5 other people).

Our monthly rent will be $1080, and it includes heat and water. From talking with people in the area, it sounds like electric will be about $20 or so a month, and I'm definitely going to look into methods to get our electric as cheap as possible. So, my total rent plus utilities will be $550 a month (as long as we split the rent evenly, which I think we will do even tho one room is 20 sq feet larger), which is the current price of my room not including utilities. The only thing I'm currently worried about is the internet/cable issues; it looks to be so expensive to get them. Our house is currently paying $72 per month for a combined package. I suppose if we can even just get the same package I have now, we'll still be paying under $600 each a month, which is great.

In any case, I'm glad to have the apartment thing taken care of. We'll be living 0.7 miles from school, so it's still plenty close. I'll be a bit further from the farmer's market (I'm currently one block from the farmer's market, and this new place will be about 4 blocks or so), but still within short walking distance. The new place has a balcony, and it looks out over a bit of the river.

I'll be moving in on September 1st (standard Ann Arbor school year lease). Very excited!

A Seattle kind of day

The high today was somewhere in the 60s with grey, cloudy skies and a nice, wet, coolish breeze. I could almost pretend that I was back home. This is the sort of weather I absolutely love. It's warm enough to go without a coat, but cool enough that you need a jacket. Unfortunately, these two nice days in a row (Tuesday was sunny and warmer due to less of a breeze) were but a brief, teasing prelude to spring; it's set to get down to the 30s again through the weekend, and it won't start warming back up until late next week.

I've been quite busy with school lately, hence the lack of posting. Quite busy, by the way, is an understatement. I took on a giant load this semester, and it's been a struggle to attempt to keep up with everything (I say attempt because I don't really keep up with everything; thankfully, I have some understanding professors, so an essay a day late isn't too much of an issue). I'm taking three official classes -- statistics [linear regression and analysis of variance, which is actually a wonderful class], community ecology [hearts! this is a great class, and I'm learning a lot], and advanced evolution [again, learning a lot, but it's a huge challenge since I did not take evolution nor genetics in undergrad. I'm muddling along in here].

Additionally, I'm teaching an intro bio lab/discussion section again; it's not as much work as last semester, since I'm familiar with the material, but it still takes time to prepare homework assignments, grade papers, and have office hours with students. I also make teaching hard for myself due to my perfectionist nature; I have reworked every homework assignment from last semester before giving out to this semester's students.

Finally, I'm also doing an independent study reading course. It's interesting reading, but it tends to get pushed to the back burner due to my other commitments.

I'm convinced that once I make it through this semester, I can't possibly face anything worse. Here's to hoping my preliminary exams next fall are no more stressing than now (and hopefully less so -- while I'm teaching again next fall, I will only be taking one credit worth of class. The rest of my time will be dedicated to research).

I should get back to my reading -- it's midnight, and I still have quite a bit to do for classes tomorrow. One last thought:

Someday, I think it'd be a lot of fun to spend a week living up in the canopy of a tree and not coming down. Kind of like a wacky camping trip, I'm thinking. Of course, the best place to do this would be in the tropics, where I would have no shortage of viewing material. I wonder if it's possible to do this without being a research who works on canopy issues?

My Grand Plan for driving

I was just in a debate about cell phone use when driving, and a lot of people complained about the flagrant disregard for traffic rules some cell phone users display. In my mind, though, I think people are turning a correlation into a causation situation. Does cell phone use really cause poorer driving? Or is it just the fact that more people are on cell phones, so of course more poor drivers will be using cell phones?

From this idea, I've come up with a grand scheme to improve traffic safety. Simply put, people need to take driver's ed again after they've received their license.

Now, I don't want people to take the whole multi-month sequence; I think that's a bit of overkill. But I do propose that people take a refresher version of driver's ed (say, defensive driving) that is perhaps 6 or 8 hours long. If you think about it, we get most of our driving education before or just as we're learning to drive, but continued education could certainly prove useful. I took defensive driving a few times during college; my school required it to drive school vehicles (they had a computer program and video series for the course), and I also had to take a program from Sears' driving school in order to remove a speeding ticket from my record. From these two refresher courses, I feel my driving dramatically improved. I reviewed lessons I had forgotten from driver's ed, and I learned new tidbits and ways of thinking about the road in front of me. My favorite lesson was learning about when to move over when passing someone: you are okay to move back over once you see their headlights in your rearview mirror. Any sooner, and you're cutting the person off.

This is what I propose:
-> Require a short driver's ed class to get a license. If you're over 18, perhaps this "class" could be just taking the 6 hour defense driving class.

-> Before you're allowed to renew your license at the 4 or 5 year mark, require the 6-8 hour class again. Now that people have had plenty of time to practice driving, it could help clarify and solidify some road rules that passed by in the first instance of the class.

-> Every ten years thereafter, require the class again.

Yes, it would add to the cost of getting a license. It is another burden for people. But you could teach these classes just like you do food safety classes (required for a food handler's permit): teach them with videos and books in a large room, and have a test afterward to check retention of knowledge. In that way, I bet you could bring the cost down to $8-10 per person for the class.

We require a class every 2 years to get a food handler's permit in order to prevent illness and death. Why not require something similar for a practice that has just as great a potential to cause harm?