More Haekel.

I'm working on my new header so that I will feel happy when people look at my blog.

Came across this:

Bateman.

Doug was speaking with Robert Bateman over the past weekend. He has connections with the Guelph Guitar, though I can't remember the exact story this late on Friday night. Robert Bateman's paintings give me chills. Even the most simple image, barns I've probably driven by several times throughout my life, winter scenes that are so common to rural Canada, they just hit me somewhere hard and send a shiver up my spine.









Information about one of Robert's current projects can be found here. His foundation is working to build the Robert Bateman Art and Environmental Education Centre. This will be located at Hatley Park National Historic Site. This park is located on the southern point of Vancouver Island where an actual castle was built by the governor in 1908. The centre will enable many people to learn about the art, culture, and ecology of the local area.

More Please.

I was thinking, after this morning, about items or activities that would make interesting stop motion videos. I thought it would be really neat to look up some plant growing themed clips. Here are some of the best ones I found tonight.

I wish I had set up a camera in the greenhouse over the last few years. It would have been so cool to be able to watch my years of work produce alvar plants for restoration in 1 minute flat.

Part of my attraction to these little videos are the soundtracks. I really appreciate it when people pick beautiful music to go along with their creation.

This next series is quite cool. Celery: The Movie is my least favourite.

Stop Motion Craft.

I spent some time today watching stop animation on YouTube. I like the crafty ones the best. Here are a couple of the best examples I found today. The first one is how to make a felt bunny. At the end, a bunch of different bunnies are shown. I really like how the creator makes the embroidery letters.

This second animation is quite clever. The mole is made from fabric and thread. I really like making little creatures like this one to have around the house. There's a neat science-y twist at the end of this one.

And, a morbid tale of a giant button attacking a town of mini buttons. You'll just have to watch this one. It's a bit sad, actually. Great character development though.

Finally, a clip I've been meaning to bring here for awhile. Actually, this brings me to an entire story I've been meaning to tell here. This is an interpretation of one of my favourite Edward Gorey tales from childhood. Last summer Bronwen and I went to see a special exhibit at the Toronto Public Library. I came across this book and I had forgotten all about it (where did it go?). Somehow, I managed to forget about it again until recently when I joined an Edward Gorey swap on Ravelry and was thinking about some of his work. This time, though, I couldn't remember the name of the book so I couldn't find it anywhere. I e-mailed the librarians at the Osbourne Children's Collection at the TPL and they got back to me the next day with the title. Since then I've been checking out all sorts of media inspired by Edward Gorey's work. This is my favourite creation of "An Inanimate Tragedy".

Yeah.

Yesterday was not a shining day of wonderfulness-to-remember in thesisland. I feel more pulled together today and I really have to knock out some discussion. I think that counts as Make Things. And I feel a bit better about Get Excited too. Also, it reminded me of this and I love this:

Yep, that's it.

Emily just sent me this as part of a message and it made my day, if not my week:

Also, I was just doing some reading, and came across this passage in the book I am reading, "The Origin of Species", by Nino Ricci. It made me think of you.

"The real breakthrough, though, had come when he had finally braved an excursion into the natural sciences and stumbled upon the sociobiologists: here was a whole netherworld of unabashed trend-buckers, people who put the words 'science' and 'art' in the same sentence without fearing they would rend the very fabric of the cosmos. It was all total anathema to the literary purists, insofar as they even deigned to notice anything so reactionary - it was just biological determinism writ large, they said, the worst sort of regression, a heartbeat away from social Darwinism and eugenics - but that didn't mean it wasn't true."

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.

This Man.

The history of science is interesting and important to study. All of our modern thoughts, ideas, and conventions have important connections to the scientists that came before us. One scientist that we talk about a great deal in our lab is this man:



Nikolai Vavilov was born on November 25, 1887 in Moscow, Russia. There he graduated from the Agricultural Institute in 1910 after completing a thesis on the impact of snails on agriculture. He went on to hold many important positions in Russia where he studied botany and agriculture. He was the man who first determined the centres of origins of many of the most important agricultural species we still use today. This work relates to the work that my lab did just previous to my joining which was summarized in the book The Urban Cliff Revolution.



Vavilov collected seeds from all over the globe. He developed the largest seedbank in the world in Leningrad. During the Siege of Leningrad, which lasted from 9 September 1941, to 18 January 1943, Vavilov's research assistants defended the seed collection. As Hitler tried to gain power over the Soviet Union people were dying from starvation, but the edible seeds and potatoes survived for prosperity. Even one of the research assistants starved to death during that time.

Vavilov, himself, was arrested in 1940 for repeatedly criticizing the non-Mendelian concepts of his one time friend and Stalin's protege, Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov died in the German prison in 1943 due to malnutrition, but the entire time he was there he delivered over 100 scientific lectures.

In studying modern agriculture and botany we follow in everything Vavilov laid out for us. The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry stills maintains one of the largest seedbanks in the world.

The Decemberist's last album, The Crane Wife memorializes Vavilov in one of their songs, When the War Came. His story is tragic, but inspiring at the same time. Every time we talk about Vavilov in the lab or find out new information about his life traveling the world and doing good science we end up laughing and smiling. He would have fit in very well here because, as Doug says, Vavilov captures what is good in all of the best scientists we've known.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. A book review.

Last night I visited the Ward homestead in Belleville, ON. As usual, there were many new and interesting books around the house. Ching Bee had recently purchased some new cookbooks and I hadn't been by since well before Christmas, so all sorts of new things were around.

I found a book that I had been looking to read for awhileAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle A year of food life by Barbara Kingsolver. Kindly, the Wards told me to borrow it for as long as I would like. I took this book to bed with me in the pink and green room. However, before I got into bed I took a quick look at the bookshelf, one of my favourite in the household, in my room. I came across Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Before Christmas I was considering picking up his latest work, Outliers, but had passed on beginning a new book since I had so many on the go. Luckily, before I had left Guelph I had removed all of the hardcovers from my overnight bag since they were "too heavy". So, I decided to take a look at the first few sentences. I ended up reading the introduction and most of the first chapter before I fell asleep last night. I had to force myself to put the book down because I knew we had a big day ahead of ourselves on the road to Ottawa for vacation roadtrip.

Blink is a study of the most subtle, critical, infinitely small aspects of human judgement. Gladwell attempts to explain how we make split decisions and understand human intuition. I find these to be very fascinating concepts because so much of this relates to body language and the way we communicate with one another. This book describes Malcolm's journey to achieving greater understanding of these nuances that play such a vital role in every single choice we make. He interviews professionals, researchers, people who work with people and don't even realize that their everyday life relies on these facets of the human condition. I really enjoy nonfiction science-y type books that are written in such a way that the general public can easily understand the process of science. I'm only a short way into this book, but I am completely engaged and will be back with much more. Not only on this topic, but many other topics that Blink has inspired me to think about and consider.

Happy Darwin Day!

Earlier today the webmaster at school sent everyone an e-mail that contained an emoticon wink and a recommended link. Of course, I clicked on the link and it connected to today's press release. Every day they (the webmaster and friends) feature an interesting article about the latest goingons at the U of G on the main page. Today's article started out with the line:

"Hoping for a little romance this Valentine's Day? Then avoid logging onto Facebook."

And it continues on to explain a pretty funny study by two Guelph PhD students. I didn't totally relate to their findings; the study cohort was from a younger age group than I and I think that I've worked through some of the issues that these people are currently dealing with. That being said it sort of made me feel better about disconnecting for awhile. Doug always teases me about being from the plugged-in generation and to be honest, I'm starting to feel the pressure. Looking at my computer makes me feel a bit nauseated and as I click along my regular websites I'm starting to feel a little bit bored :( These are bad ways to feel when you need to write about 100 more pages on your thesis.

Anyway, I'm constantly amazed by the opportunities for this sort of study to be carried out. If you can find a gap in the literature or notice some sort of controversy you'll be able to work out a project. I'm glad this type of social phenomenon (facebook) is gaining so much attention because it really lets us look inside the collective psyche and understand how society is shaping up these days.

Later, Cass

p.s. Andrew just told me that he is quitting school to focus on his rap career (sorta like Joaquin Phoenix).

First off.

There's this thing that has been bothering me for a little while now. I catch myself thinking about it at odd times and noticing it around me wherever I go. It distracts me from my work and my everyday life. I know I need to deal with it, but I'm not quite sure how to go about doing that.

If there's anything I've learned in my past 7 years of postsecondary education it's that when something is bothering you this much you need to do something about it. This bother is what makes the scientific community tick. We notice something and it gets to us, we feel angry about a situation, confused or frustrated because we don't know, so we learn all we can and we ask questions. We ask clear, consise, well-thoughtout questions. Then we take these questions and develop hypotheses and predictions to study. And so it goes.

This thing that I'm thinking about is too big right now for me to put it down in one post. I think I'm going to need a few good, long ramblings just to sort this all out. I know it has to do with communication, disconnect between the scientific community and the general public, the division of arts and science, being pigeon-holed as a scientist when there is really so much more that I do. I suppose I'm struggling to define my own identity right now. I'm at this funny-feeling changing-over graduating and looking for the next big project while I try to satisfy my craving for adventure place. I've spent the past year trying to live in the moment and manage my anxiety, but it's tough to enjoy my current situation while I deal with all of these new ones.

So, lately I've been looking for some way to focus all of this chaotic energy. I've been trying to find myself a personal challenge or project. A lot of people on the internet seem to enjoy documenting some aspect of their daily life with pictures and blog entries. I think I want to do this too. I've made three previous attempts to join the blogosphere. All regarding topics I thoroughly enjoy, but I haven't been able to commit. I'm not making any promises about the content here, but I am going to attempt to stick with it for awhile. Maybe I should think about giving myself a more well-defined goal in that respect. I'll think about it for awhile.

Just had to get that out there,
Cass