Positive slope

And the trend continues! DC voted today to recognize gay marriages that were performed elsewhere. W00t! As a friend said, "it's like a wave of gay rights is sweeping the nation." Let's hope it keeps sweeping, particularly in this direction.

Hey

First of all, this has been a pretty good week with much cause to celebrate. First Iowa okays gay marriage on Friday, April 3rd, and today Vermont did too. We're up to four now! (Connecticut and Massachusetts are the other two, for those of you not keeping track.) Now if Minnesota can just get up to speed, I'll really be happy.

In work related news...
1. I have permits! My State Park permit came the other week, adding five more parks to the total I can conduct research in, so I should be good for this summer. Now I have to plan my route and try to figure out when I'm leaving. It's been pretty cold out lately, especially at night, so it's hard to tell when the frogs will start coming out.
2. Despite the gray treefrogs not being out quite yet, the chorus frogs soon will be. I'm taking a grad seminar on bioacoustics this semester, and we're doing a project with them. Said project is yet undecided, but will involve recording and being in a pond. Time to dust off the chest waders and break out the head lamp!
3. Assuming I get accepted, I'm going to Denmark in August for an international PhD course on animal communication. Sweet. Must get passport.
4. This fall/winter's experiment never got finished due to the increased non-responsiveness of the frogs. I only needed one more... We'll start up again with that part in August after the breeding season ends, but I'll be able to get some data during the breeding season as well.
5. Due to #4, I have a lull in research right now. It's nice.

Today I get to learn plant quantification methods. Yay?

Happy Obama day!

I'm not sure I'll get a chance to watch the inauguration tomorrow, despite coverage from 8:30am to 4pm. But between rebroadcasts, the internet, and blog posts, I'm sure I'll see and hear plenty about the festivities.

In other news, spring semester starts tomorrow. I would normally have evolution lab, but thanks to the first week of school, it is canceled. Hurray!

We interrupt your regular program...

Today, we are going to deviate slightly from the usual biology nerddom to look at two videos.

This first one is about a month old - I meant to post it earlier, but see previous post. But I like it, it's a good message, and so I'm still going to post it. Here you go (it's captioned if you go to the YouTube page and turn them on): Keith Olbermann on Prop 8




This second one is hilarious (but also a good message). And it has that Barney guy in it from "How I met your mother" (alas, no captions): Prop 8 - The Musical

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

T-minus 3 days

School starts in three days, and I don't even have my notebooks set yet. I have purchased my textbooks though. I'm not pleased about the cost of my statistics textbook...or that I must once again enter a stats classroom. "Evolution and Animal Cognition," however, I am really looking forward to.

I have finally, mostly, recovered from my three week flu -> bronchitis -> pneumonia episode. Still have this annoying cough, the ribs/muscles on my left side still feel odd (they think I strained the joints or tore muscles), and walking for over a quarter of a mile at a time makes me wheezy. I hear that takes awhile to clear up though, so I'll take what I can get for now.

Now that I'm off the couch, I've been back in the lab. I finished a third of the data analysis for the Lombard experiment. Granted, it was the tedious but easy third, but a third nonetheless. I started the other two-thirds on Friday, but now I have to deal with the "quirky" software again. My files are finally small enough that I can manipulate things, but when I try to import data into Excel, it does it's own thing. Logically, data should arrive at the highlighted cell. Illogically, it arrives on the previous spreadsheet in the file, somewhere in the vicinity of cell A1729. My scrollwheel finger is getting sore. Progress on this two-thirds will be slow.

Deviating from work-related talk, I have to comment on the latest political happenings in the US. Palin? Seriously? I know he's 72, but I didn't think he was senile yet. And if he thinks that he's going to get the Hilary votes because he picked a woman as his VP, well, then he's definitely senile, or else has a really low opinion of females. We are not dumb, we know the difference - Palin is not Hilary. I would love to have a woman VP or president, but no way am I going to vote for someone who is strongly pro-life regardless of situation, pro-creationism in schools, wants to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic Refuge (in the middle of the caribou migration route and calving grounds), and denies that humans have anything to do with the current climate change and global warming...just because she's a woman. I'm way smarter than that, thanks.

Continuing the negative theme, my city has thrown democracy out the window this week. The RNC hasn't even started, and already people are being held and arrested, houses are being searched (without the inhabitants seeing the search warrant beforehand), and laptops, cameras, and phones are being confiscated. I hate to see what will happen once the event actually begins. Read about it here and here.

On a brighter note, Barack Obama responded to fourteen questions regarding science in America (scroll down to get to the questions and responses). I'm pleased with most of his answers, puzzled about a few, and not so pleased about a few.