Gear nut

Getting ready for almost a month in the field, split over two trips. Here's a photo from last night of the logistics station I set up in my bedroom. Packing lists taped to the wall, small items laid out. Not pictured is all of the actual gear: tent, dry bag, sleeping bag and mat, chair, day pack, boots.

This morning we met at 5:30 am to start on the drive. Yes, it's the day after the switch to Daylight Savings Time. No, nobody was late. We are excited.

More about this when I get back in April.

Keeping their attention

Today I gave a guest lecture to an introductory oceanography class. It's part science, part slide show, and all about the kind of research I do. I try to include a lot of photographs and descriptions of the process of how we do science, because I think that part is both interesting and appropriate. Basically, it's a lecture version of the topics I write about in this blog, merged with some elements of the shorter professional talks.

There were 200 students in the room, and I talked for 80 minutes. These are freshmen, mostly non-majors, and some might never take another science class again. How to keep their attention? As I talked, I felt myself getting more engaged in the material, more animated, starting to be more dramatic in my presentation.

Most students were zoned out, staring into space, texting on their phones. A few in the corner talked all the way through my presentation, and I had to force myself to ignore their rude behavior. Only a few students seemed totally engaged, and two of them came up to me at the end and asked questions. None of this is new. Every class I've ever taught has this approximate distribution of "students who care" versus "students who are there because they have to be" (except that nobody has to be in college). It makes me sad, though, that I can do such interesting things and present such interesting problems, hopefully in an engaging way, and people are still totally tuned out.

No ocean here

This week I'm at the Ocean Sciences meeting, a conference held every 2 years that is co-sponsored by AGU. This year it's in Salt Lake City, which, inexplicably, has no demonstrable ocean anywhere near it. No the lake doesn't count.

They are very excited to see us, even at Rite-Aid.

Glamour magazine

This week, my dear friend Orbulina universa, the planktonic foraminifera, was featured on the cover of this magazine called Science.

Ain't you glad you're a High Fashion Queen?

This is actually a pretty big deal. The photo is of a living O. universa, and looks just like the ones that we collect by hand while scuba diving in the San Pedro Channel off Catalina Island. The spines are each a single crystal of calcite, and you can see the thousands of dinoflagellate symbionts, which show up as the tiny gold dots producing the halo effect. The big ball is the adult, spherical shell, and you can see the dark cytoplasm blob in the juvenile shell inside.

All this from just one cell.

Most people work on fossil Orbulina universa, which look like tiny white ping pong balls, and are thus much less interesting. This is the view we actually get when hunting them in the water column, minus the fancy lighting. The photo was taken by my advisor 20 years ago, and reproduced here with permission. Unfortunately, although the article is about foraminifera, the research doesn't directly pertain to studying living forams.

The best winter to bicycle in Wisconsin

Last week I got a call asking if I could come out to Wisconsin to do some prep work for analyses I plan to do later in the spring. This was the only time that lined up with everyone's schedules. Three plane flights later, I'm in Madison, manipulating tiny forams with a brush.

I'm staying with Brian out in Middleton, who has kindly offered me the use of his cruiser bicycle to get around town while I'm here. Luckily, it has been unseasonably warm (unreasonably warm, some might say). If ever there was a February to go bicycling around town in Wisconsin, this is it. The bus is an option, too.

Peroxide blonde

I've been cleaning all of my samples from last summer. The idea is to get all the organic gunk out, because  all I want to analyze is the chemistry of the shell, not the chemistry of the other stuff. This translates to a lot of sitting very still and working with very tiny things.

The cleaning process happens at 65ºC, which takes a while to stabilize.

Not quite at 65ºC. Yet.

Slow servers

Today I'm trying to submit an abstract to a conference in June. The meeting is in Montreal, which should be fun--several thousand geochemists descend on a picturesque French Canadian town.

The server, however, for the abstract submission website, is a different problem. This appears to be powered by some kind of gerbil wheel or other improbable device. Of course everyone has left their submission until the very last day. I spent 2 hours clicking through their site, setting up a profile, entering all of my information, and refreshing the page about 3 dozen times. Luckily, I am patient and persistent.

At the end of all this, it turns out that they had so many problems with other submissions that they have moved the deadline forward. Glad I was so persistent today.