begin rant

You know what does not enhance your calm?

Trying to identify very small things. I don't care how great your microscope is - microsculpture is still hard to rotate and keep in focus. It helps to have a well-prepared specimen. It helps a lot, but it also helps to know what you're going to need to look at before you prepare your sample, and if your sample is an unknown? You won't know what you need to look at until you can't quite make it out under the scope, no matter how much you rotate and refocus the little monster. This only gets worse when your unknown is under a millimeter in length. Even if you knew what you had to move out of the way to see what you needed to see, getting a hold of a limb and gently moving it up and out and over without also completely removing it from the body as a whole is probably just as tricky as you might imagine.

How sharp are your microforceps?

How steady is your hand?

Now do it for five hours.

Now how steady is your hand?

Posted by Derksen at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Best pizza ever.

I mean that, and I have eaten a lot of pizza in my lifetime. Gainesville does not have a lot of great food, but this place is of special note. The whole establishment reminds me of Austin, with its hippie-ambience, occasionally live funky music, and local artists' work for sale on the walls. You can even eat in one of those old VW breadbox-vans on their front porch. Should anyone ever come to town, and have even the remotest appreciation for the pie - do remind me to take you here.

Posted by Derksen at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is amazing how much of a difference three hours can make.

Three hours to the South of Gainesville, there is still sun, and the leaves are still green. Gainesville may never quite experience winter, but it unquestionably sees fall as the leaves here turn to yellow and gold and sail and swirl away on the wind.

Visiting family for Turkey Day was good. Family is good. They have helped to fill the empty space that my surrogate family made up of my extended network of friends used to fill... or maybe I have that backwards. Whichever it is, I know that it makes a difference to sit down and break bread with people, and to see the same faces every day. There is more than a sense of community - there is a sense of 'belongingness' that I did not find outside of Austin. Besides, few things in the world beat watching your aged and respectable parents laugh and chase after dragonflies with an enormous butterfly net.

Finally got a new battery for my laptop, and it is rather like falling in love all over again: I have no strings, and I may wander. No longer do I need to worry about squandering power frivolously on such things as a monitor with gamma bright enough to read. No longer must I race from outlet to outlet, hoping that I will have enough charge to last all the way through class.

So life is good.

Then again, I am about to re-enter hell-week. You should either expect extended silence from this station, or lengthy tales of procrastination. One of the things I do not miss about the whole educational program is the sheer number of things that must fall together at the last possible minute. I am moving forward, and with far more diligence than in my undergraduate years - but... Yeesh. Corporate life retrained me to accept lower standards, but I am starting over and I refuse to hand in anything less than a solid effort.

Time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just spent a whole day looking at flies under a microscope, and boy - are my eyes tired. I still do not feel confident of my abilities to identify a given family of fly on sight alone, and the keys are poorly executed - only to be followed quickly after developing much familiarity with the individual traits responsible for dividing organisms into one group or another... and I just don't have the practical experience to assess those traits rapidly, and there has been no one to reassure me that I have even reached the correct conclusions for good reasoning - or even the wrong conclusions for the right reasons.

Agck.

Time will tell.

Posted by Derksen at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So...

Thursday night last week was one of the better days I have had in a long time. Not only was I looking at a three-day weekend due to the observance of Veteran's Day, but the seminar speaker for the afternoon was Dr. Jim Marden - a guy I think of as famous for his work on the evolution of flight in early insects. He has done a lot more work on a lot more integrative biology since then - pushing the science at the level of the gene into its effects on behavior and population structure. One of the projects he is exploring looks at the frequencies of certain genes in a metapopulation of butterflies. These genes are responsible for the butterflies' ability to convert sugar to energy and stay aloft for long periods of time, and inadvertently represent the butterflies' ability to migrate from one area to another. Butterflies who express one form of this gene tend to be very good at staying in their natal patch and reproducing there. Butterflies who express another form of this gene tend to disperse and migrate out onto new patches.

This is interesting because the butterflies also sometimes go extinct on a given patch as their environment gradually changes, but their population as a whole has stayed approximately the same size over many years. This is exciting stuff, because it appears that there is a form of balancing selection encouraging a particular frequency of "colonial" butterflies, and a frequency of "homebodies" within the population as a whole. For the population to avoid extinction, it must be continually expanding through colonization at a rate which matches the rate of patch extinction and environmental change - but if there are insufficient butterflies in a given patch because everybody has moved away, the population density will be too low to reproduce effectively, and they will also go extinct in a given patch. This encourages heterozygosity within the population for individuals who carry the genetic potential of both alleles... and makes one wonder at the level of selection: is it merely at the level of the individual carrying forth the generations, or is it better to consider this at the level of a whole population exploring different adaptive strategies in response to two separate environments?

Crazy stuff!

We had dinner catered by a local "Latin" restaurant at Dr. Dan Hahn's home afterwards. I really want to take Dr. Hahn's insect physiology course next semester, because this is the sort of thing that interests me. More importantly, I want to see if I can convince Dr. Hahn to teach a special topic - or at the very least mentor a seminar in insect developmental genetics, because I think it would be fun, and he has the background for it. I got to meet more of the folks around the department and see professors outside of their professional environment. I had more course options and ideas tossed at me for future coursework and research directions. I met more of the students around the department, and a few folks from outside of the department who had shown up to meet our guest speaker. I was excited, I was thrilled!

I loved grad school!

Then I went home and started to study for biochem for another hour before I went to bed. And then I got up on Friday morning, and went to a review session with some of my classmates, and studied for another six hours. Some of my friends forced me to take a break, but when I came home, I got in another hour before I went to bed. I got up on Saturday morning, and put in another four hours of review before the truly awful Florida game. My friends then twisted my arm a little and forced me to watch Fight Club - just to give me a little more perspective before I went back to work.

I got up on Sunday, and put in another four hours on biochem while I did my laundry.

Grad school makes my brain want to explode!

That said, I still love it. I haven't had this much fun in years, and no matter what the final outcome of today's test: I am in far better command of this material than I have been in years. I will walk away from this institution with more familiarity in subject areas I was once intimidated by, and I will continue hungrily forward in related research.

Upwards and onwards!

Forward the future!

Posted by Derksen at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Behold!

New shoes, and for what it is worth, I actually managed to find two pairs that would have potentially fit my feet. The other pair were true running shoes instead of the allegedly more durable trail-runners that I purchased, and not only were they bright tomatoe-red, but they were also little more than a sock atop a rugged rubber sole. Amazingly comfortable, but they also screamed "broken toe!" louder than I would have the first time I tripped over a log.

Posted by Derksen at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My fellow Americans?

Go VOTE!

'Nuff said.

Posted by Derksen at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So late last night, the sole of my right shoe finally wears through and starts to peel off. This is really irritating. I still haven't found the time or a pair of shoes to replace them, and I am getting pretty desperate - so I have turned to more traditional means of shoe repair: Elmer's school glue and a pair of tacks. While I don't plan on doing any heavy-duty footwork in the next couple of days, this kind of short term fix is going to have to be replaced, and fast.

Before	After

Posted by Derksen at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just for the record, I hate shopping for footwear. The recent move to Florida and its rainy weather have gone a long way towards gradually destroying my last pair of trail-runners, and I have an unusually difficult time replacing them. Something about finding clown-shoes in my size. Two hours in a shoe store this afternoon, and nothing to show for my efforts. Either the heel was too tight, the tongue was displaced, or the lower sole fit - but the uppers were constricted. I even found a pair that would have been almost okay - except it was designed for heel-runners and I am unquestionably a toe-striker who would have received less traction than I'd like. I've suffered through bad footwear before, and I need something that fits like a glove, and runs like a shark.

Posted by Derksen at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)