Overheard on the Trolley Ride Home

A mentally ill janitor:

Wow! Look at you! Look at how beautiful you are! And you! You are beautiful! And…oh my goodness! YOU are such a beautiful woman! And all these couples! So many perfect, beautiful couples! Look at how beautiful you all are! This has been a perfect day! And the Phillies will win the World Series!

And later:

People, listen to me! If you do not have joy in your life..make joy! Make joy! I truly believe in this, I am a very Christian man.

I think he would be very happy to know that after leaving the trolley, I was indeed full of happiness. Honestly and truly.

Footnote – aside from these proclomations, the man tried to engage the woman sitting next to him in conversation, but she seemed absolutely repulsed by him, and refused to even make eye contact with him. She was on her way to the nail salon.

Designing a Scientific Poster

In August, I’ll be heading to Milwaukee to present the research I did in Australia at the Ecological Society of America’s annual conference. Perhaps because I’m a foolish and naive young academic, I’m incredibly excited about this conference, and the idea of being surrounded by hundreds of other people with similar interests, and new knowledge to present within those interests, has me really stoked. And it’s not just presentations, there’s workshops and field trips, and I want to attend every single one! Of course, that’s not possible for both financial and temporal reasons, but it shows how excited I am.

I’m presenting my research in the form of a poster, so I’m currently working on designing it. I already made one in Australia, but Australian scientific posters are very different from American ones. The Australians prefer extremely concise posters, with large amounts of empty space for important images, and a concise take-home message. Here’s the poster I made for my research, in the Australian style:

The Future of Voucher Specimens

Kannan, R. 2007. New bird descriptions without proper voucher specimens: reflections after the Bugun Liocichla case. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 104: 12-18.

This story begins with the discovery of the Bugun Liocichla, a spectacular but possibly rare bird discovered recently in India. The formal description of the bird stirred up a lot of controvery, as no type specimen was sent to a museum or examination, as is the formal procedure. Rather, the authors decided to take photographs and feather samples, as they believed that the species was too rare to allow for the taking of an individual. This raises some important questions about the current state of museum specimens, and whether they remain relevant in biology today, and if traditional practices are conservationally unadvised.

1001 Books and Movies

A series of books has recently been released, listing the Top 1001 Books, Movies, and Paintings to _____ before you die. Obviously I don’t want to list all of them here, but you can find the complete list of books and movies on various blogs (with the movies list updated every now and then). It’s fun to go through and see exactly how many of these works you’ve read or seen, so that’s what I’m going to do here. Feel free to post your own lists in the comments!

Strat-o-matic Update

Here’s my Strat-o-matic team’s winning percentage, graphed by date. Actual winning percentage, in blue, is obviously the team’s actual Win-Loss record. The expected winning percentage, in green, is calculated using the Pythagorean Expectation based on Runs Scored vs. Runs Allowed.

I’ve loved watching my actual vs. expected records fluctuating together, and gradually converging towards the mean. Though hopefully that mean will get higher.

Moving in!

WordPress is the new blogger. Everything has been moved over.

Overheard at the Bubble House

Some stoned philosopher, rambling endlessly one table over:

I am the sum of all my lovers.

I am light. I believe in God, yes.

You have as much potential for growth as I have ability to make a PDF document.

What am I gonna do, form a charity of sperm capitalism?

Birding with Joanna and her Dad

Definitely the most frustrating part of Finals period is not necessarily the stress and the busyness, but the fact that I have to miss spring migration! Finally, I got a chance to head into the Crum this morning with Joanna and her dad, which was a nice treat. We headed out around 1030 am, which is a bit of a late start for me, but it didn’t matter as we found some great birds!

Where Things Lie

How many times have I written in this blog since the school year started? Once? Maybe twice? In any case, not frequently enough.

It’s not that I don’t know what to write about. I have a lineup of potential talking points, ready to go. The thing is, I have a lot to say about those talking points, and not enough time to really expand on them to the point where I’d be satisfied with what I had to say. I’d prefer not to spend only a single paragraph talking about Global Warming, for instance, but that’s all it seems I have time for these days. I guess I could write these posts paragraph-by-paragraph, but I feel like that would lack any consistency in voice and view. If I were to do that, I might as well write a book, or a formal essay for publication or something. Somehow, my blog doesn’t feel like the right forum for that sort of thing anymore.

I’m not abandoning this blog completely, I still plan on writing in it occasionally, for sure. But to fit my more time-constrained lifestyle these days, I’m starting to transfer my thoughts to Twitter instead. So if you’re still interested in where I’m at these days, subscribe to this blog’s rss feed, and follow me on Twitter. Links continue to my posted at my del.icio.us page. And thanks for keeping up!

Spring Migration Timing

Currently re-reading Scott Weidensaul’s Living on the Wind, a personal account of bird migration in the Americas, while studying how and why birds migrate, and what the future of migratory bird conversation looks like. In high school, it was one of my favorite books, as it combined both my scientific fascination of birds along with my more personal connection to birds and their environments. There’s a lot of really scientifically interesting stuff on the mechanisms of bird migration, but there’s also some really emotional stuff about the death of thousands of Swainson’s Hawks due to insecticides in Argentina, for instance.

Re-reading it now, it’s not quite as good as I remembered. The book doesn’t have a clear narrative arc, which I’m fine with, but it also doesn’t do the ’sprawling New Yorker style’ that McPhee does so well, and that I’ve been reading so much of lately. Instead, there really doesn’t seem to be much of a structure at all, and feels like facts and stories haphazardly thrown together. There are probably better ways to structure this book.

Anyways, one small factoid caught my attention as I was reading the second chapter. It was mentioned that birds know when to migrate based primarily on two factors: genetic predisposition, and photoperiod (length of daylight).