The Great Backyard Bird Count has begun today, and continues through the 15th. My wife has been staring out the window all day, scribbling notes on paper, and I might have wondered what weirdness she’s up to, except that she just told me I should tell everyone in the world to join her. Not in our backyard, that would get crowded, but in your own backyard. I’m exempt, because she knows I only count spiders. And dinosaurs.
That was agonizing. My students have projects ongoing, so I leave the lab open so they can get in and work with their flies. I go in early in the morning specifically to unlock it.
Someone locked it back up again after I left!
Students were backed up, trying to get in, and were frantically phoning and messaging me!
While I was trying to teach my other class!
It was agonizing: non-stop ringing and beeping while I’m trying to deliver a lecture, and it wasn’t so much that the noise bothered me, but that I couldn’t just ditch one class to help another, and so I couldn’t answer or do anything about it. I finally broke down and ran into the other room to ask my long-suffering wife to take my keys and unlock it for them. I’ve now posted prominent signs telling people not to lock it during class hours.
I guess I should be grateful for diligent staff who maintain our security, and for eager, ambitious students, but wow was that a stressful class hour.
(For that matter, this pandemic has already pushed my stress levels off the charts.)
My new regime begins today, and it’s one of the awkwardnesses of teaching a fly genetics lab. Mere human schedules don’t work; I informed the students from the very beginning that we’re going to be at the mercy of the flies’ schedule, and they have a roughly 9 day generation time, which doesn’t align well with our 7 day class cycle.
So what do we do? The class becomes more of an exercise in independent study. We have the regularly scheduled lab time, which I use to explain where we should be at and what to do in the next week, and then I open up the lab early every morning so they can come in whenever they want. I’m also posting my personal cell phone number on the door so they can call me at any time to come over (it’s not at all far, fortunately) — I’ll be requesting no calls after midnight, though. So starting now, I am on Fly Time and Student Time.
Which means I have to zip over to the lab right now.
Man, it would be handy to have one of those Time Tacos.
I’m afraid I looked deeper into the late Lewis Wolpert’s views, and I found a lot of cringeworthy stuff.
I made a quick trip to the lab this morning (it’s -25°C! I walked quickly!) to take some fly photos for this week’s genetics lab. The students are doing a simple complementation assay with fly eye colors — can you tell which one is scarlet (st) and which one is brown (bw)? Every year it’s a struggle to get them to recognize even obvious mutations like these, but it’s not the students’ fault. This is their first time working with flies, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the alienness of Drosophila.
Me, I’m always impressed with how beautiful their eyelashes are.
Of course, immediately after their glamorous photo shoot, these flies were sacrificed on the altar of the spider gods.
This week, I gave my first exam of the semester — a take-home, with ten multi-part questions requiring lots of calculations and and statistical tests, and I required that all answers by typed and in a specific format. It was due last night at midnight.
Nobody took the hint. I got 100% on-time submissions, so this morning I’m looking at a big stack of pages of numbers and formulas and explanations and hard work that I have to get evaluated this weekend.
Why didn’t you guys tell me to make it all multiple choice and true/false? I’m blaming you all. You need to come to my house and grade them for me.
Spotted this morning: a pair of pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) hanging about the birdhouse on our tree.
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Silly birds. You’re much too large for that house.
You should read the whole comic — it’s painfully accurate.
I’ve seen academics form publication rings — not just agreeing to cite each other’s work, but make each other co-authors on all of their papers. I’ve witnessed colleagues put each other down by snarling impact factors at each other. Academia does get ugly.
That said, I don’t know that the remedies suggested in the comic are practical. Maybe the first one would work: having standards and requirements for data sharing, the better to confirm the work. ‘No scientist could possibly object to that,’ I simper naively. Unless there are patents involved.
The second is for universities to change their hiring policies to encourage greater breadth, which would be great, except that the grand poobahs who administer universities tend to be completely disconnected from both the research and teaching going on.
The third is for the funding agencies to wake up and stop throwing all the money to the big flashy projects. There are things like that going on right now, but you know who has the most power in peer review? The scientists who do big flashy projects.
I like this one.
Heh. Where have I heard of that one? The catch there is that that was published by another kind of ring of crackpots, publishing in an obscure specialty journal edited by more crackpots. They can do that. There’s nothing illegal to stop them, and it’s all encouraged by Elsevier, which only cares about money.
You might notice that more than a few people jumped on that as one of the dumbest papers ever written, but there are no academic incentives at all to do that — you can’t get tenure by being good at cleaning up the droppings of bad science, and if anything, it counts against you. Maybe that’s something that could be fixed, but I’m not counting on it.
So, yes, read it, great comic, very accurate, but maybe too optimistic. We need good goals to work towards, though.
Poking around in the weeds as we do every summer, looking for spiders, one thing we turn up a lot are frogs. Big frogs. They like to nestle in some nice shady leaves during the day, and we occasionally part some leafy foliage to find a frog looking back at us, as if wondering how dare we intrude on his home. I’ve often thought they need a good predator to teach them a lesson.
Like a clever huntsman spider.
Retreat and predation event near retreat of Damastes sp. (a) Spider specimen of Damastes sp. (THC140, adult female), the prosoma and opisthosoma are approximately 1.5 cm in length (smallest square = 0.1 cm)—Observation 1; (b) Damastes sp. feeding on Heterixalus andrakata (frog) inside of the retreat, built of leaves of Tambourissa sp.—Observation 1, (c) Predation event where Damastes sp. captured Heterixalus andrakata near the retreat—Observation 1; (d) Damastes sp. hiding in the retreat, built of leaves of Cedrela odorata—Observation 4
These cunning ambushers from Madagascar use silk to stitch together a few leaves, making a nice shady refuge that might appeal to a frog looking for respite from the daytime heat. The frog snuggles in, not noticing the large-fanged venomous arthropod lurking in the back, and then snicker-snack, he’s a juicy piece of meat being sucked dry by Damastes.
I don’t know about you, but if I poked my face into a local bush and saw a big glorious spider instead of a fat frog, I’d be delighted. It’s not likely, though, since our harsh winters tend to kill off most of the spiders, giving them only a short growing and breeding season.
Maybe this would be a bright prospect from global warming? Do you think Republicans would be even more resistant to the idea of good legislation if they thought climate change would create a better environment for big hairy blood-suckers? They do have some things in common.
Yay for the Pacific Northwest! The first official human composting service in the US has opened. They stuff your corpse in a cylinder with wood chips and rails that automatically rotate your rotting body to maximize the rate that you decompose.
I am impressed with how quick the process is — two months, and then you get to be put into the garden.
The Recompose process takes 30 days in a vessel full of wood chips and straw, then another few weeks in “curing bins,” large boxes (one per person) where soil is allowed to rest and continue exhaling carbon dioxide. Once that process is complete, friends and chosen family can either retrieve the soil themselves, or donate it to an ecological restoration project at Bells Mountain near Vancouver, Washington. So far, most have elected to donate.
What I also find appealing is that the service is based in Kent, Washington, which is where I grew up. There’s nothing special about the location except that I like the symmetry of being recycled back into the place I began when I end.
