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?

Conundrums

I'm currently working on a research permit application for one of the state National Wildlife Refuges. One of the boxes I'm supposed to fill out asks for a map of proposed study sites and/or plot locations. That's dandy, except that I'm asking for the permit so that I can go off-trail in the NWR's to find my frogs and therefore my study sites. I cannot attach a map of my study sites if that is the reason I am asking for the permit. What to do?

Maybe I can find little ponds on Google Earth and sent them screencaps? Woe...

Is that like Platform nine and three-quarters?

I applied to a grant at the end of January, and today just checked the announcement to see when they announce the winner.

It says, "February 29, 2009."

Umm...

Happy Darwin Day!!

It's Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, hurray!!  And this year marks the 150th publishing anniversary of his book The Origin of Species (and the 170th publishing anniversary of The Voyage of the Beagle). 

The Bell Museum at the U of MN is having some special events for Darwin Day, including the opening of a really interesting sounding photography exhibit.  And today my department celebrated by having short Darwin-esque themed presentations during seminar hour.  The seminar was both preceded and succeeded by "fossil cake", which turned out to be chocolate and banana layered cake with nut "fossils."  Apparently the sliced almonds went extinct and never made it to the banana layer...I did not notice this becuase I was far to busy going "CAKE!!!" and shoving it into my mouth to investigate the geology of the cake.  I'm such a horrible scientist...

To paraphrase a friend and fellow EEB student's Facebook status, I hope you all get lots of evolutionary presents under your Darwin Day (phylogenetic) trees. And don't forget to leave out seed for the finches that bring those presents!

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!

Brrrr

It's cold out. How cold, I cannot say. Vista/my desktop tells me it is -10 F. Google says it is -2 F. This website says it is 0.9 F but the windchill makes it 2 F (what??).

Either way, it's cold outside.

1/10th of the way there!

I have completed the first semester of my graduate school career. Woohoo! Only nine (or more? who knows) semesters to go. It's amazing how quickly the time went by. Sure, some parts draaaaagged and I thought I would never make it to winter break (the NSF fellowship experience comes to mind). But all in all, it was a decent enough semester.

Now I'm spending my time doing productive things like catching up on television shows, watching all the DVD's I got for my birthday and Christmas, hanging out with friends, and eating Christmas cookies. Oh, and playing Spore. I know there have been a lot of negative reviews about the game, but so far, I'm pretty impressed. Yeah, there are things that could be better and things that could change. It took me forever to get out of the "creature" stage (you're basically an animal running around, eating, and mating), and that got a little frustrating. And there's definitely a learning curve. But, no game is perfect, and especially for this nerdy biologist, the fun of running around collecting new body parts to evolve with and trying to ally with other critters far outweighs the negative bits.

For Christmas I also got The Future is Wild (Discovery Channel and Animal Planet). It discusses animals that might exist far into the future (5 million, 100 million, and 200 millions years future) after humans die out from planetary changes and whatnot. For example, marmots might evolve into large rodents capable of surviving an ice age, and wolverines might evolve into a larger sabertoothed version of themselves that preys upon the evolved marmots and other creatures. We don't know that these animals will evolve, but scientists looked climate changes, current species, past species, and evolution, and came up with all these species that could plausibly evolve. One thing bothers me though. All the scientists featured on the show as the experts are male, as is the narrator. I double checked the credits to be sure, and yep, all seven science consultants are white males. There isn't even a racial minority or one female to try to fill some quota. What's up with that, Discovery Channel?? Surely there were some prominent female evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, or natural historians you could have consulted.

What is that bright light up ahead??

The end of the semester is...in sight? Weird. I have surprisingly little to do. Today I turned in my last statistics assignment. Now I only have an essay and two finals left (stats and animal cognition). Oh, and one more journal club meeting. Then I get almost a whole month off to relax (eg, write grant proposals, read lots of papers, and analyze more data). YAY!?!

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