eco science nerd fest 2010

I'm back in the sweltering STL after a week in Pittsburgh communing with my fellow eco science nerds. I know that the only thing more boring that attending a week long conference is reading someone's recap of it, but there are a few things that I feel I must note about the meetings, the venue, and the host city itself. I'll be brief.

Which way to the conference? Follow the throngs of sport sandals and hiking backpacks.

No one knows how to dress-down the already dressed-down business casual of conference attire like biologists.

How can you tell you're at a ecology meeting? When you're asking yourself "are these flip-flops too dressy?"

Also: I cannot remember the last time I was surround by so many super fit white people. It is making me wonder about the demographic breakdown across scientific disciplines. Is ecology the whitest science?

I was happy to notice that the upward trend in female graduate students and young faculty that I've noticed in my own city seems to carry across the field. But the senior scientists are still largely male. Is it only a matter of time until we all move through the ranks or are we dropping out before we get there? There are books and theses that delve into this topic, so I won't attempt to parse it here, but I remain optimistic.

***UPDATE*** I almost forgot to mention that I got to meet an internet pal in the flesh. Here's to putting faces to pseudonyms!

Pittsburgh? I salute you.

Who knew that Pittsburgh is actually kind of interesting? While I didn't get to explore very much at all, I was lucky to be staying in a B&B in a neighborhood (Lawrenceville) outside of the downtown conference-center area, so I got a small glimpse of the city on my route in. It's like an entire city made out of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In a good way. In an 1800s-houses-with-1950s-awnings sort of way.

The best part was all of the really excellent murals and street art. Dear St. Louis-- why can't we make this happen here?

Some of my favorites:

This awesome mural is by artist John Pena. lovelovelovelovelove this. passed it every day on the bus.

This one is so excellent in person:

(mural by Brian Holderman, pic via Cardboard Sea)

And there was Shepard Fairey stuff everywhere. Maybe a little played out if you live in LA or NY, but unexpected in Pittsburgh, if you ask me.

(pic via justseeds.org)

ALSO? It was not 105 degrees there. So, that was nice too.

public service message

A heads up any of you who might be considering going back to school. A Lady Scientist had a good post about choosing an advisor, and I have to say it echoes my sentiments exactly. I made a bit of a compromise on location for grad school so that Adam & I could live in the same city (in the past our record had been 6 consecutive months in the same zip code. In 5 years). I wouldn't have thought it at the time, but now I think I actually lucked out, because the person I'm working with is shaping up to be a fantastic mentor. Totally accessible but completely hands-off, good feedback and editing (sometimes too good...), and a good role model for what I consider to be two crucial elements of graduate school: 1. critical thinking skills, and 2. learning how to read through reviewers' comments on your work completely unemotionally and weed out the useful from the junk.* 

I mean, we're biologists, so there is very much of all of the requisite social awkwardness involved in it all, but that comes with the territory.  

My greater point is that you should go and read her post because she hit the nail on the head. And I think it is something to consider for a lot of other types of endeavors as well, including job searches in other fields. We can all get so caught up in the shiny glitz of status that it can get in the way of what is best for our personal and professional well-being.  

* i won't go on & on about it, but learning to weed through criticism & take the good and ignore the bad is a skill that I still do not posses, but one that I really need to work on. You have to have a good anchor down in your own sense of the worth and direction of your work, otherwise every comment from a reviewer will send you (me) off into a tailspin of doubt.  

flashback whiplash

Remember when you were a freshman in college and you had that teacher who was so nice, but perhaps had not the strongest grasp of English, but you got used that, it was just that there seemed to be no correlation between the slides he was showing and the words that were coming out of his mouth? And then you received your homework assignment, and it didn't seem to be related to either the words OR the slides, but was in fact traveling along some orthogonal axis toward the infinite land of confusedness? But you handed it in anyway, and then in the next class the slides suddenly had everything to do with the homework? Until they didn't. Repeat for four months.

That never happened to me. And I am paying for it now.

I thought grad school was about higher thinking and not about trying to remember stupid obscure* physics equations from high school.

I'm listening to Santogold on repeat and breathing deeply.

*sadly, probably not obscure to anyone else, as everyone else took physics in college, like good science majors, but i studied the history and politics of large African countries instead, and while it informs my processing of the news, I don't get graded on that. I was recently asked by a tutoring place if i'd be interested in tutoring a student in physics. "Hahahahahahha," I said.

dedicated to the study of nematodes

This is my new favorite mug.

From the Society of Nematologists, est. 1961.
I found it in the cupboard by the department's coffee pot. It has the temperature sensitive strip that reveals a secret message when you add hot liquids!


Nematology is HOT!
Biology humor-- so hilarious, in so many unintended ways.


(The text is backward because I took this pic with Photobooth.)

crisis averted

Marveling, wondering, that all this hard work, all that time, sweating in the desert, all that data entry can be so succinctly stored in this one, small folder entitled "Dissertation Data".

And then I drag it into the backup drive.

mind meld

Last night Adam and I both had dreams about
Jad Abumrad, co-host of one of my all-time favorite radio shows RadioLab.

I don't really know what to make of that, other than to tell you that he is a very nice guy & if you haven't caught any of the last four seasons, well, now you know what to listen to on your summer road trips. Great science-based stories for scienctists and lay-people alike

Some of my favorites episodes are:

• Emergence
• Detective Stories
• & Sleep
  

Season Five comes out in Nov. 2008.

a little science lesson

As I left this morning I looked down and noticed that our crocuses are coming up! And not just a little bit. Could it be a sign that this interminable cold could someday end? Is spring on its way?

On a related note, I just ran across a bunch of drawings I did for a little educational book about vernal pools. I worked on it for an old job, along with my friend Andy (who coincidentally just emailed me to say hi. Hi Andy!) Andy and I also worked together on a book about wastewater treatment, but that's a story for another time... poop on a conveyor belt! wheee!

The annual migration of amphibians to vernal pools is my absolute favorite rite of spring. During the first rainy spring nights, the earliest emerging frogs & salamanders migrate to temporary woodland ponds that form from snow melt and rainwater. Think Serengeti wildebeest, but with salamanders, in the dark, in the rain. And maybe not quite so many, but a lot! So many that in some towns they set up roadblocks around high(salamander)-traffic crossing points, or install tunnels under the roads.

Vernal pools are critical habitat for a whole host of organisms, such as:

Spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum)

Wood frogs (Rana sylvatica)

and fairy shrimp (Eubranchipus spp.)

Yes! Shrimp! In the forest!
They survive all year long as little tiny eggs on the forest floor, then for two weeks in spring they hatch, grow, breed and die, and their eggs spend the next year hanging around in the leaf litter. I'm telling you, it's things like this that make me wonder:
Why doesn't EVERYONE want to be a biologist? Biology is just so awesome.

All of the other organisms that breed in the vernal pools have to hurry up & get to it as well, as they have to be grown and out of there before the water dries up. It's a mad dash.


For a real multi-media vernal pool experience you have to listen to Adam's story about amphibian migrations here. You can hear all the peepers & wood frogs go wild in the background.

mmmm... corny

I already knew that high fructose corn syrup is a) in everything and b) not exactly good for you, but here are nine new things I learned from the documentary King Corn:



1. Over 70% of the corn grown in this country goes to feed livestock on large feedlots.

2. None of our livestock evolved while eating corn, so it does a number on their digestive tracks, and can eventually kill them! Good thing we get to it first.

3. There is corn in our hair! (They were sketchy on the details. I like the idea, but it's odd how they just showed a shaky camera view of a "Scientist", in his "lab", taking a "sample" and then a machine that looked like a seismograph spit out a "report", which he looked at and shook his head. Proof!)

4. This film provided further evidence that Petitie Sophisticate provides the wardrobe for all Public Relations reps. from [insert name of corporation being outed in documentary of your choice here].

5. The average yield of an acre of corn has risen from around 40 bushels during our grandparents' generation to around 180 bushels today. This is due not to greater yield from an individual plant, but to the fact that the plants are bred to survive crowding, thus can be planted at greater density.

6. I knew vaguely, generally, about how farmers get paid by the government just to plant corn, but now I know a bit more detail... but not much, because it seems that the producers were also a bit confused about the whole process. But the long and short of it was that the system is set up in such a way that it only makes sense to have huge conglomeration farms. The money is in saying that you're farming the land, not in what you get from the crop.

7. It takes sulfric acid to make high-fructose corn syrup! (I think I maybe learned this once long ago, but watching someone add battery acid to a pot of corn really drives home the point)

8. "High fructose corn syrup enhances the flavors of fruit or spice in sodas." --Petite Sophisticated P.R. Woman

9. Michael Pollan has a comb-over. I love him anyway.

I thought that this was a nice, well produced documentary, that was not at all as preachy as it could have been. I liked the low-budget my-buddy-the-cameraman look to it, although some shots belie that they had more funding than they are letting on.

Something I think they could have dealt with, in place of stop-animation of Fisher-Price farmers planting corn: Pollution! Run-off! The crazy amounts of nitrogen that are being dumped onto corn fields and what that means for the health of anything living downhill/downstream/ anywhere in the near vicinity.
I mean, even our own St. Louis Post Dispatch did a story on run-off from corn fields.

Some additional reads on where our food comes from:

Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meat
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation
Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma or In Defense of Food