Today.

Blog needed some organization today. The list of blogs I follow keeps growing and growing. I decided to add categories to make things easier to keep track of. I think I like the new set-up.

I'm really glad I started writing here. Whenever I need a break from anything I can come here and feel completely refreshed. Writing out all of these things that usually swirl around in my head makes me feel much more focused and pulled-together. Also, I've found endless sources of inspiration in the blogging world and it's really nice to know that they are all in order here. Every time I open up this page I find something new and exciting.



Now that I've become more comfortable with html editing I know how to make the changes I want to make before I tell other people about this place. Today I figured out how to make a little icon for my blog tab. This why my personal style will show up on the tab as well and readers will be able to collect it for their bookmarks. The one I added today is not simplified enough to show up on such a small scale. I just clipped one of my favourite images from the title bar and used converted it to an icon file with this free converter: converticon.com. It's cute and worked well ad has a little Mac interface design. Then I uploaded it to this spot to make a direct link to the image: Image Boo Hosting. So, I'll work on the header and the icon over the next little while, but things are starting to come together!

O, and I almost forgot to mention, check out this collision of art and science:


Fluid Sculpture from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.

Cass

Chaos.

In my head and in my mind and all around me today. Apparently, we're in the mood to move books around and get rid of stuff from the lab for the big move-out that's looming at the end of August. Today is also the day I plan to finish the results section of my thesis. This has proved difficult for two reasons. First, the crashing people all around me and secondly, the fact that along the way some of my data managed to mix itself up. There was an inconsistent dip in evenness amongst my seed plots and I'd been meaning to investigate the reason for this for months. Finally I got around to it today and realized that I had cut and pasted the first five columns of data in survey 3 incorrectly. Thus the dip and an entire day spent rearranging graphs. This has created the chaos in my mind. The chaos in my head has to do with the weather and the unbelievable amount of static electricity my hair is capable of holding onto. It's driving me nuts, to say the least.

I've decided to come here to escape from all of this hectic energy and create a post about why I admire e.e. cummings so much. I mentioned him in the previous post about poetry and was thinking about my appreciation for his work last night before I fell asleep. In my Grade 12 English class we had to make a presentation about all different aspects of a poem we had selected to study. (Strange how you can remember some projects and things so vividly). I picked a favourite of mine: anyone lived in a pretty how town, by e.e. cummings, of course. I knew that I enjoyed reading his poetry because of the images it conveyed, but I had put little thought into the meanings and symbolism of his work, or the impact his life had on the things he wrote.



I put a lot of effort into that project. I can remember sitting in my seat in the middle of the bus, scrunched up with my knees pushed into the back of the seat ahead of me, reading everything I could find in the library about e.e. cummings and his work. I managed to deconstruct his poem, probably deliver one of the better talks of my highschool career, and come out the other side wanting to know more. Usually, this was not the case for me and as soon as I finished a project I attempted to delete the unnecessary information from my brain. The difference this time was just that he defied every rule he came across, grammar and punctuation, the English language. The characters in his poems were outcasts but they did whatever they wanted to do. His style was dark, but pretty at the same time.

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

Poetry.

I've always been interested in the work of certain poets. Two favourite I always read are Margaret Atwood and e.e. cummings. I have a few other collections of poetry, but I've never really been completely sucked in. Today though, I found this fragment of prose and it struck a chord with me:

FIGS ALMONDS DATES

We have in our cross-hairs
your

figs, almonds, dates, your pome-
paradise, your orchard

--"A duet with Rav Zalman who used to sing," Margaret Aho

I went on a bit of an internet search to try to find more. I couldn't find this particular poem at all, so I might head to the library in the next few days. I have a hard time letting this sort of thing go. I still need to write about the mystery book I mentioned a few days ago.

While I was looking for that particular poem I came across some more of Margaret Aho's work at the Beloit Poetry Journal. This journal is an incredible collection of interesting poetry. It appears to be free to access the entire site by anyone. From the website's History Page:

"The BPJ has remained remarkably consistent in its independent and eclectic editorial policy, its high standards, its international scope, its selection process, and its format. It has never missed an issue."

I'll definitely have to heck this out a little further. In my searches I also came across this little inter-gem: The Poet Name Generator. It never ceases to amaze me what people will do with their free time. From my html coding today I know that developing this sort of site is no easy task. It takes at least a good portion of a university-level course to come up with this sort of thing. So, yeah, approximately 14 solid years of education.

Cheers,
Lady Evelyn Picklesouse

Science Fair 09.

Today I volunteered to judge 36th annual Waterloo Wellington Regional Science Fair. The Fair is a day long event. All of the projects have won the science fairs at their respective schools and have moved on to present at this regional fair. The students range in grade from 8 to 12. There are several divisions which are divided based on age and field of study. I judged 7 displays from the Life Science and Biotechnology categories in both the junior and senior divisions. I was impressed by the level of effort and dedication the students put into their projects. One of the students decided to test the effect of energy drinks on his hockey performance. He was in grade 8 and had a rink in his backyard. He shook my hand and offered me a seat while he talked about the skills he tested after him and his dad drank Red Bull, Full Throttle, and some other highly caffeinated, sugar water drink. He had to have special permission to incorporate these drink products into his study because they aren't permitted in his elementary school (good thing, in my opinion). His observations about the way the drink altered his performance were things like 'made me fidgety'. I was impressed by his cleverness and his determination to study the contraband beverage. I tried to ask several questions, but unfortunately he was never quite able to explain what some of the negative aspects of consuming these drinks were. He also had a hard time explaining why the information he gained was useful and beneficial to the general public. I think this is where most the projects began to breakdown. And I do suppose that this sort of cognitive synthesis is going beyond the level of most grade 8 students as well.

Overall I had a really fun time. It seemed like the students were having a great time too. I think this sort of an atmosphere is great for teaching the importance of displaying your work well and sharing the information you gather.

I actually went to the Science Fair with one of my friends from down the hall in Integrative Biology. She is heading into her 7th semester and mentioned the fact that she is finishing up the last edits of her thesis. When she handed her first draft in it was only 20 pages long! I'm way past that point now, so I think I'm going to hammer out the ending and focus on submitting it asap. Even if the discussion isn't quite up to par this will get my committee talking about it and I could use some suggestions. I need to stop feeling stuck, put the ideas down on paper, and work on things from there. Moving to the next point is the goal at the moment and that requires letting all of my readers see a fair copy and sign my request for evaluation form.

Just now I also made a change to my blogger template. I managed to figure out how to edit the html and add a label cloud! I've been wanting to make that change for awhile, but I was intimidated by all of the lines of code. Blogger doesn't seem to have a gadget for just adding-on a cloud. So I went to this friendly site: phydeaux3 and figured out to add their code into mine. I also found this really cool 216 Web Safe Color Chart in order to change the colours of all of the features on my blog. I'm sure this will come in very handy in the future now that I know how to use it. I ended up making my cloud range from light pink to burgundy.

And in other exciting news, as I was browsing through the recent updates of blogs I keep tabs on, I found that the muffin bunnies were featured on IndieFixx along with a cool tutorial for these sweet little cherry blossoms.



At another of my favourite blogs, I found a tutorial for making tulle blossoms was posted yesterday. These flower crafts are so fresh and spring-timey to me. I wish there wasn't a blizzard outside. I think I'm going to have to incorporate some of these ideas into my secret swap package that's heading to South Africa this week.

Childhood books and authors.

One of the things we talk about a lot around here is how the conventional educational system attempts to squish the creativity out of everyone who enters it. Now, I'm all for public schools. I went through the public school system in Ontario during the Mike Harris years and we saw drastic changes in quality. I also managed to make my way though and turn out to be a genuinely creative person. I spend all of my spare time making things, I have a well-developed imagination, I appreciate the creative efforts of the people around me, and I work to surround myself with beautiful things (thanks Em). However, I was a bit of an outcast in my earlier school days. I hated it then, but I thank the gods everyday now that I did. Somehow I made my way through a situation that I perceived to be difficult and unnecessary at the time and turned it into a character building experience. That being said, it is fairly obvious that many of the students I work with did not manage to succeed as I did; highschool has numbed their brains and sucked out much of their creativity.



In his retirement, Doug is planning on tackling this lack of creativity through the Guelph Guitar project. He aims to engage all of the people of Guelph in stories about the science and history in this city. I think this is a cool idea.

I'm dealing with this issue in my own way, as well. I think that remembering our favourite childhood stories, authors, and illustrators is a great way to get our creativity flowing. This is why I like to post about my favourites here. I'm creating a little collection of stories that had an impact on me in my formative years and gaining inspiration from them for my current work. Some day I'll even tell more people about this blog and they can take a look at them too. When we grow up we operate based on logic and learned reason (hopefully). But when we were young we operated on imagination and our perception of the unbelievably large world around us. There weren't any rules governing physics or the universe that we knew of, so the stories we admired could take us anywhere we wanted to go where we could do anything we wanted to do. I suppose some clever adults slipped in a meaningful lesson or two along the way, but really we were free to take them however we wanted to.

One of my favourite childhood places was Where the Wild Things Are. Maurice Sendak created this story in 1963. Reading that article, I just realized that the book contains only 10 sentences. The way I remember things, this story holds much more important information than my adult brain considers 10 sentences to contain.

Next October 2009, wherever you are, I'd recommend taking this in. It's amazing what creative people can do with 10 sentences and a lot of cash.

I won an award.

So many things to update on. I've been meaning to post this all weekend, but every time I come here I end up thinking of other posts I want to make and just adding draft posts to my list. Anyway, now that I'm actually here at school, working on my writing, I need something to do whenever I get stuck. I started out today by making one the corrections that Uta had suggested. I need to good short descriptive titles for my treatments and use them throughout the entire thesis. I started doing that, and then got stuck in the wording of my hypotheses. At least I made it through the introduction.

Back on topic, what I've been trying to say, is that last Friday I won an award. The award consisted of a little bit of money and a good am out of honour. I presented some of my research at the Latornell Research Forum and my talk was judged to be the best. This Forum is one of the programs the Latornell Endowment Fund runs annually through the U of G. It was a small gathering of grad students, undergrads, faculty, and people from the conservation sector in Ontario. Arthur Latornell was very interested in supporting the development of young people in conservation careers and he gave his entire estate to the University to set up these programs. I have a really neat little biography about him that I have been intending to read for the past while. Once the April showers (and snowstorms) have passed maybe I'll get to spend some time outback working my way through the dangerous stack of books on my bedside table.



Doug just called me away from my computer to show me this:



Yes, this is a sun visor made out of the skin of Cane Toad which is a highly invasive species in Australia. Doug has been obsessed with Cane Toads for much much longer than I have know him. Every course he teaches includes a class on invasive species biology where he shows a film made in the early 1980's about the movement of Cane Toads across Australia. He even has a preserved Cane Toad sitting on the hearth of his fireplace at home. Somehow, he found this and deems it to be the ideal gift for a invasion biologist. I said he could give, "a toadally serious lecture wearing that disgusting thing". At least then everyone would know he really is crazy.

I have many other items to cover today, but I feel the need to return to my thesis for a bit. I might be back later. Knitting Group is almost over for the summer semester, so I won't be going there tonight. We're having a special session on Thursday this week. I am planning on knitting at home tonight, of course. These little guys will be on the agenda:



More muffin buns! These will be Easter treats for the little puppies that live at my parent's house. They love knitting and they will love throwing these around, for sure. The ears will probably be ripped off the first night. I also need to finish off another accessory for the spring challenge. Luckily my mitred square bag is flying off the needles.

Tomorrow I'm judging the regional highschool science fair, so I'm sure I'll be back with some observations on scientific communication,
Cass

Happy 1 April.

I have no tricks for fools today. Over at Rav however, Casey, the programmer dude, is having a heyday. I looked at one of my friend's projects and a little bug was crawling around the screen. Also my avatar is wearing a petite top hat.



Also, I was thrilled today to see that one of my favourite blogs had mentioned a giveaway that included a free embroidery pattern for a muffin bunny! This is the second day in a row that tiny muffin baby bunnies have been in my life. I hope I get to see another one tomorrow.



I think that's all for now. Just wanted to get a roll on the April blog posts. I have an exciting story about a mystery I solved today, but I'm going to save it to post in the next little while. I still have some important information to collect.

Stay tuned, Cass