Field Season Is Go

I'm back at Ghost Ranch, NM, for some field work with the same team from last summer. Today was my first day out. No fossils yet, but we caught this juvenile Crotaphytus collaris (eastern or common collared lizard) on the way in this morning. We also saw a couple Aspidoscelis lizards, but weren't fast enough to get a species ID.

We spent all day moving overburden, but we had help from some junior high students, so we got a lot done and now we're set for a while. Actual excavation begins tomorrow!

Mendocino County Herptastica

One of the best things about UC Berkeley (and about the University of Oklahoma) is that there are still plenty of organismal biology classes available to the students. The Berkeley Natural History Museums co-sponsor a ton of classes that I would have killed (maimed?) to take as an undergrad. These are the types of classes that get you out into a field (literally) and realizing that none of the best parts of biology have anything to do with the premed curriculum. The types of classes where students are not only motivated to learn the material (as opposed to earning points), but are super psyched at the chance to learn about the world and its inhabitants. The kind of classes that are fun to teach, the kind of material you're privileged to learn, the kind of students you look forward to having as colleagues.

California is the perfect setting for organismal classes like Herpetology, which I was super lucky to TA this spring. Last time, I posted pictures of the most recent trip to Death Valley, but earlier in the semester we had another capital-A-Amazing field trip to Mendocino County, a few hours north of Berkeley. Here are some (not nearly all) of the awesome critters we found, with some select tidbits on their natural history:

Sceloporus occidentalis. Most of the California lizard diversity is within the family Phrynosomatidae (or, for those of you who prefer rank-free phylogenetic taxonomy, the clade Phrynosomatidae). The genus (clade) Sceloporus is broadly distributed across the United States, and some species occur as far south as Panama. The taxon name is derived from the Greek sclerosIn Oklahoma, I saw a lot of the eastern fence lizard, S. undulatus, but here in California, the S. occidentalis (the western fence lizard) is everywhere. True to their name, you can often see either species of fence lizards hanging out on fence posts, but they are also pretty common on rocks and trees and other wooden objects.

Last post, I put up a picture of the ventral side of S. magister and mentioned that all of the Sceloporus have blue belly patches, at least on the males. In the species where females also have blue bellies, it's always much more obvious in the mature males. The above image should give you an idea of the variation there is in the belly patches of this genus.

This affable fellow is Taricha rivularis, the red-bellied newt, heading into its aquatic phase. Like other newts, Taricha have a terrestrial or eft phase, where their skin is rough and bumpy, and an aquatic phase where their skin is smoother. When they head into their aquatic phase, their tail becomes more paddle-like (flattened side-to-side). The skin of this critter looks more orangey than it probably should; in life their ventral side is as red as a really ripe tomato.

Mmm.... Ambystomy... Ambystoma gracile was one of the highlights of the trip for several of our students. Probably a lot of people would recognize other Ambystoma; they include the tiger salamander and the axlotl. But this little guy has dull coloration compared to its cousins, much more granular and glandular skin, and large paratoid glands behind its eyes. In California, they're limited to the northwest coast and are not found in the immediate Bay Area, so it was neat to see them at the southern edge of their range. One thing I think is cool about these is that the higher up you go in elevation, the smaller the percentage of the population that fully transforms into the adult form. You have all these sexually mature adults running around that look like juveniles, with external gills and squarish rostrums. I would love to cut up the bones of some of these neotenics to see how their growth rates compare to the adult-form adults.

This is Batrachoseps attenuatus, one of the slender salamanders. These things are so tiny, especially when compared to the other salamanders in the area. The field guide makes it seem easy, but in practice it's pretty hard to tell apart the various species of Batrachoseps. None of them get much longer than 2.5" (from nose tip to back legs), and their legs always seem wildly disproportionate to the rest of their bodies.

Rhyacotriton variegatus was one of the other northwest coastal salanders whose southermost range we visited. This guy was a darker orangey-brown-mottled color above. There are four species in this genus, largely distinguishable in person by knowing their range, or with knowledge of their genetics.

These last two images are actually of the same species, Aneides flavipunctatus. We caught them at the same site, a couple meters from each other. The one in the above image is definitely a juvenile, and the one below is an adult. Though A. flavipunctatus is commonly known as the black salamander, there are several color morphs, including a speckly gold-green and a black with white spots. The color morph below reminds me of snowflake obsidian.

Yay herps! Next time, more herp pics? I may have paleo field pics by then.

My herps are cooler than your herps

Recently, Dr. Vector uploaded some nice pics of an Emys marmorata that Vicki found in their driveway. This was a pretty nice turtle (I've got some shots myself, thanks to a conveniently-timed visit), and it gave me an opportunity to record gular pump breathing (the turtle ribcage is fixed in position and can't expand or contract to assist with lung inflation/deflation, so they use the bottom of their throat/mouth as a pump for air) for future herp teaching. But I've got some much nicer herp pics to show off, from a recent class field trip to Death Valley National Monument and the Desert Tortoise Natural Area. The Mojave desert is absolutely fantastic, and it's loaded with herpy goodness:

This awesome lizard is a male Sceloporus magister. It was the first really excellent herp I saw on the trip. All Sceloporus have blue patches on their belly; the males always have a more intense coloration. This group is also a little weird because if you rub them the right way, they will lie calmly on their backs in the palm of your hand. This critter got more and more colorful as he got more and more stressed from the handling. We did let him go before he got himself sick, though.

Sweet Uma scoparia! This is a juvenile male, and we had to drive for a while, hike two miles to sand dunes, and dig in the sand to find him. It was worth it, though. Uma are arenicolous (sand dune specialists), and have a ton of modifications to help them get around on the dunes. For example, they have little fringes on their feet to help them run across sand, a countersunk jaw for burrowing in sand, little ear flaps to cover their tympana, cryptic coloration to hide on the sand, and a very glossy belly to reflect heat. My students can all tell you this, because I put it on their lab practical.

This is a very gravid (= full of eggs) female Crotaphytus bicinctores, surrounded by the herp paparazzi that has become so difficult of late. She was very gentle and even let us probe her eggs. From the road, we could see her sunning on a rock.

Crotalus cerastes, the North American sidewinder! This was the largest of the three we saw on our night drive through Death Valley. The asphalt gets hot during the day and retains the heat longer than the adjacent dirt, so the best place to see herps at night is from the comfort of your vehicle. On busy roads, it unfortunately means lots of flattened animals. But Death Valley didn't have that many drivers, and we saw some neat snakes and geckos. And TONS of kangaroo rats. We saw another one of these the next day, much bigger, which eventually climbed into a bush.

Dipsosaurus dorsalis, the desert iguana. I did not expect to see one on this trip, because they like it really hot (their preferred body temperature is around 110), and it was only about 90 or so for most of the trip. But this little guy had just come out of his burrow and was sunning himself at the mouth of it when Jim spotted it. We spent a few minutes plugging exit holes under a dry, scratchy bush (the burrow was inconveniently located) and eventually dug him out.

This was an unexpected bonus salamander. Though we did see some toads in Death Valley (there are waterfalls!), this guy was a complete surprise for us. This is Ambystoma macrodactylum, and we [legally] collected two of them on the road from Monitor Pass to Lake Tahoe (the other way, towards Berkeley, was closed). It was snowing on the top of the mountain, but raining further down, and dozens of these guys were crossing the road. Bonus: this was the first time the MVZ has collected this species from Alpine County.

Next time: more herp pics.

Scientific Literacy and Sensationalist Journalism

This morning my friend Dan sent me a link to this AP News story: Sludge Tested As Lead Poisoning Fix.

The story begins: "BALTIMORE - Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients."

Holy crap. This is good lead, well-written, and it suggests everything is still wrong with the world. The government is funding scientists to run experiments on the effects of toxic and human waste on poor black families? It's a horrible, horrible thing, if it's true, and both the US government and agribusiness have funded this sort of terrible experiment on minorities and on the poor in the past. It brings to mind all sorts of eugenics nightmares, and our country unfortunately has a rich tradition of doing much worse to the poor and to minorities. So on the surface it seems tragically plausible.

The story continues: "Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department." It then goes on to explain that the high levels of phosphate in the sludge can bind to heavy metals, including lead, "allowing the combination to pass safely through a child's body if eaten", and that federal policy has been based on this idea for decades, despite a 1978 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memo that said the sludge " 'contains nutrients and organic matter which have considerable benefit for land and crops' despite the presence of 'low levels of toxic substances' ".

Wow. So the sludge itself, already toxic, contains additional toxins, and the EPA has known for years. Furthermore, a scientist at the National Academy of Science (who is a Johns Hopkins professor of public health) worries that the sludge is worse than that: it's human waste, so there's nasty microbes in it. And the EPA funded another study to test the sludge in another poor black neighborhood in East Saint Louis, IL, to see if the phosphates did bind to lead... this time in a vacant lot next to an elementary school. So, all in all, things look bad for this study. At this point I asked, "Why would the government fund this sort of study? Especially when I have such non-controversial paleo research in need of funding?"

At this point, the story started raising red flags with me. It quotes a local environmental advocate: "If you wanted to do something very questionable, you would do it in a neighborhood that's not going to be there in a few years", then launches into a description of the main researcher, Mark Farfel, also at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (remember? his critic above also was there. But so are three more of Farfel's co-authors. Red flag.). Apparently, he is also the recipient of several government-funded projects looking at the effects of lead in urban poor neighborhoods. The article seems to imply that his reign of lead and toxic waste terror extends further than this study, but to me it makes sense that if he studies the effects of lead poisoning, he would do it more than once, and in areas with high levels of lead. I dismissed this as the reporters not understanding the nature of scientific specialization. The story briefly mentions that the study passed the standards at Johns Hopkins for public health studies involving humans.

The story then takes an abrupt turn for the conspiratorial. The last part of the article starts by saying Farfel denied repeated requests for interviews (What does he have to hide???), then makes a point of stating that Farfel now works interviewing 9/11 victims. Are we supposed to assume he is now torturing 9/11 victims, poisoning them with human and toxic waste, like he did to the urban poor? The story next explains that some of his previous work has been controversial, that people associated with his previous research have sued for lead poisoning. Scientifically, this is a methodological red flag for me, but the article doesn't dwell on what happened to those people, only commenting on the resulting court case: "The Maryland Court of Appeals likened the study to Nazi medical research on concentration camp prisoners, the U.S. government's 40-year Tuskegee study that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the illness and Japan's use of 'plague bombs' in World War II to infect and study entire villages." So you are left with the impression that this racist, immoral asshole is exploiting American tax dollars to poison the poor. He's done it in the past, therefore he is doing it now.

So, is this a case of horrible people (Nazi-esque, even) taking advantage of government funding to perform experiments on poor minorities? Is this a return to eugenics? Or, is this a case of a story taking advantage of Americans' lack of scientific literacy to sell papers (or gun for a Pulitzer)? I decided to look into it. Fortunately, the research in this study was published [1] (though I couldn't track down a reference for the case that went to court), and even better, my university had access to the journal. So I read the article, and now I would like to call into question some of the 'facts' in the AP story:

#1. TOXIC HUMAN WASTE SLUDGE IS PUT ON LAWNS
As it turns out, it's not raw sewage at all. It's not a sludge. It's not even liquid. The product they used in this study is a compost fertilizer called Orgro, and you can buy it in bulk commercially, or at a garden store. One of its ingredients is treated human sewage, but it is composted with woodchips and sawdust first. According to the study, Orgro "is approved by U.S. EPA and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) for unlimited use in lawns and gardens as a soil conditioner/fertilizer". This is important because to get that certification, you have to make sure it is safe to put on people's lawns. So the rules are: any fertilizer that uses any animal or human waste must be pasteurized to kill pathogens before it can be sold and used for residential purposes. This process is how we make milk safe to drink. While you probably wouldn't want to make an Orgro milkshake, I think it's safe to assume the bad microbes are pretty much nonexistant in Orgro. The article points out that there were already people in Baltimore using it to make their lawns look nicer before the study started. And this site claims that Orgro is "sold for use on golf courses, athletic surfaces and the lawn of the residence of the Vice President of the United States". So: safe enough for rich people.

#2. SLUDGE DOES NOT MAKE SOIL LEAD SAFER
Orgro is rich in phosphate and iron, and both (but especially phosphate) bind to lead (and zinc, another contaminant) in a way that makes it nonsoluble (so it won't dissolve when it rains) and bio-inaccessible (so organic things can't break it down with enzymes and then become poisoned). So it's marketed as a fertilizer that can make your contaminated soil grow plants again. And because of this, it also has been used as a treatment for toxic soils. In this study, they mixed the Orgro (which, again, is compost, not raw sewage) with the first ten or twelve inches of soil, then seeded it.

So where does this research come in? There are two problems the study is trying to address: there is a lot of lead in urban soils, and the soil is well-exposed because plants can't grow there (because there's too much lead and lead is toxic to plants). So when kids play on the soil, it's easy for kids to get at and be exposed to the lead in the soil. The kids undoubtedly already had lead levels before the start of the study. Now, the best way to clean up lead contaminated soils is to completely replace it with new clean soil, which brings us to the second problem: most cities can't afford to remove all the soil and bring new stuff in, and federal government regulations are written such that unless it is a Superfund site, they will not pay for soil replacement. The study cites long-term studies on the health risks of this stuff, and it has been used before in non-urban toxic places (in MO, ID, PA, and Poland, as well as several Superfund sites). They know what high doses do to small animals and adult humans. Orgro just had not been field tested in an urban setting before. The idea behind the study was that it could be a cheaper way (and thus, affordable to urban homeowners and cities) to treat soil for lead, and at the same time, get the soil covered up with grass so the kids had less direct access to it.

The study did not test whether stomach acids can break the bonds between phosphates and lead. That may be true, or it may not be. I don't know how long something that is bio-inaccessible can stay that way. But the study did find that the bio-accessible lead levels were reduced by 50-70% in one year, in the areas of highest concentration. We're not talking low levels of lead here, either; many of these lawns had lead levels 3-5 times higher than the EPA's maximum safe amount. If anyone in this study has elevated lead levels at the end of the study, I'd bet a lot of money that they had them before the start of the study. And it did show that Orgro can be used to grow grass where little grass grew before (the pics are pretty amazing). So the study succeeds in both counts: neutralization of lead and preventing access to lead in soils by covering it up with grass.

#3 SLUDGE ADDS TOXINS TO SOIL
This interested me a lot. What were the toxins that Orgro (again, not sludge) was putting into the soil, the toxins the landowners weren't informed of? We know from above that it's not microbes. Does the study address this at all? It turns out that it does. The toxins in question are... heavy metals. That's right, stuff like lead and zinc, which is present in all soils to some extent. And they know how much was in the Orgro, because they tested it. They needed to measure it as a control on the experiment; they needed to know how much they were adding to the system, because those were the exact things they were trying to neutralize in the soil. It turns out that the levels of heavy metals in the soil were very, very low; much lower than the EPA's safe amounts, and negligible when compared to what was already in the soil.


Now, I have no idea what motivates Mark Farfel to do his research. He could hate the poor. He could hate black people. He could take personal delight in seeing them sick and suffering. It does not come through in his writing. His research seems sound to me, and he seems to be motivated by helping people, not harming them. But I'm not an environmental scientist, nor an epidemiologist. And, furthermore, I'm not completely sure about the quality of the journal in which this study was published, "Science of the Total Environment" (impact factor: 2.359, read more about it here). But the article I read was peer-reviewed and pretty straightforward, and didn't raise any statistical or methodological red flags with me. If you have compelling arguments against the article, I'm open to hearing them. But in the meantime, I think we can chalk this up to journalistic sensationalism. Which kind of sucks for Mark Farfel, his co-authors, the study participants who now feel victimized (unnecessarily), and the government agencies who will now be pressured not to fund future research in this vein.

Reference:
1. Farfel MR. 2005. Biosolids compost amendment for reducing soil lead hazards: a pilot study of Orgro(R) amendment and grass seeding in urban yards. Science of the Total Environment 340: 81– 95.

Nothing whatsoever to do with science

If there is one thing about hockey season that irks me, it's that I have to listen to the Blackhawks' theme song a lot more often. Don't get me wrong; I like their theme song in moderation, but it's not a fight song... and it's very dated. I like the instrumental version better, but only just barely. But it got me thinking: surely the 'Hawks don't have the worst theme song in Chicago sports.

If I had to rank the Chicago sports theme songs, I'd obviously list "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" first. It's a good song, not too long, easy to learn. It practically begs to be sung in a bar with strangers, like a pub song. I Iike that I hear it on tv when the Bears score at home. I like that I hear people singing or humming it in the offseason, on the street. I like that I occasionally am so moved that I burst into this song when going about my daily business. You could even sing it on the subway, and people would join in. I don't even hate this version.

My second choice, "Let's Go, Go, Go White Sox" is probably surprising for a number of reasons: I'm not a huge baseball fan, and I haven't seriously rooted for the White Sox since I was getting free tickets for perfect attendance. But the song easily translates to bar culture and it contains the line "we're glad to have you out here in the Middle West". AND it starts out with something that sounds a lot like the the 20th Century Fox Fanfare. As a sports fan I think this song has all the good qualities of a theme song, though it doesn't quite work as a fight song.

I think after re-listening to the other themes, I should put "Here Come the Hawks" at #3. This song is good. It may be a better whistling tune than a singing tune. You don't hear the 300-level uniting in this song oleeee-ole-ole-ole style.

"Hey Hey Holy Mackerel" is one of the traditional Cubs tunes. I'm not bs video, people clearly don't know it as a fight or theme song. It's no "Go Cubs Go" in terms of airplay.

I don't like "Go Cubs Go" at all. This is the song they play on WGN and at Wrigley when the Cubs win at home. It's the worst sort of new-country-meets-inoffensive-pop. It's corny, and tragically, it's the kind of corny that drunk people get REALLY INTO. The kind of people you cannot avoid at the bar. The kind of people who want to play corny music over and over and over.

For unofficial themes, I think nothing beats the Chicago Bulls Intro. The Bulls Intro is really where the Alan Parsons Project reached its peak (FYI, the song is called "Sirius" and it's on the Eye in the Sky album). Turning off all the lights in the stadium was a nice touch. Good theatrics, good song to get you into the start of the game. But it fails as a fight or theme song in that there are no lyrics. Great for mood, not so great for pub bonding.

Human Relations

I found a great chart on wikipedia that explains the many states of cousinhood:

The great thing about this chart is that it simply and clearly explains the relationships at multiple levels. I'm taking a class this semester that in part deals with how to make good graphics to explain lots of data. I see a lot of charts these days, and very few of them are this interesting (and, alas, none of them have been this interesting).

The difficult thing about this chart is personal: I'm still having some difficulty trying to figure out who, exactly, my second cousins are, even with a map of relationships. This is probably because I don't know any of my second or third cousins. My family also uses the term "great aunt/uncle" for what is called "grand aunt/uncle" (= my grandparents' siblings) on this chart, and that may complicate how I am trying to remember things (I hit a mental block when I get to that square). I have met most of my grandparents' siblings, but very few of their children, so I have very few names to work with. Trying to figure out who your second cousins are is so much harder when you haven't the slightest idea what their first or last names are. Forget trying to ascertain who your third cousins are.

This all makes the dating pool seem that much scarier.

Astonishing Tales from the Medical Literature

With apologies for the semester-long, qualifying-exams-related departure, I bring you an update of my recent reading list.

As part of my Post-Orals Two Weeks of No Science Celebration (now in its third week, if you don't count editing proofs), I've been reading a book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach [1]. It's a "science-for-the-educated-masses" book, and an odd book to read, even as someone who works with human cadavers on a semi-regular basis. It's also a poor choice for a No Science Celebration, as it deals with how cadavers are used in scientific research and medical procedures, but it's not aimed at scientists, so I think it should get in on a technicality. The tone of the book is very casual, almost flippant at points, which is not the normal attitude people have about cadavers. I think this might be a coping mechanism on the part of the author, who's a journalist and not a scientist by training. But at times the jokes are almost jarring, which is unexpected, because I've worked with cadavers for a couple years now.

One point in the author's favor is that she has a fascination with odd, morbid medical research, and a nose for sensing the bizarre. However, one thing I've found a little creepy/odd is that she frequently cites medical literature that I have also (independently) come across by accident. As a result, I find that when she gets sidetracked, I often go, "Oh, I wonder if she read _____", or "Hey, I've photocopied/downloaded that article".

Case in point: she was talking about how she was surprised at the relative paucity of cadaver-based penile research and the near complete lack of genital research on female cadavers. I thought about this for a second, and my mind wandered to a 1999 British Medical Journal article I requested via interlibrary loan just before I left Oklahoma: "Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal" [2]. The point of this article is that basically, people have theories about the positions of organs during intercourse, but nobody had tested these. Now, this article has nothing to do with cadavers. Cadavers are not mentioned anywhere in the article. I don't know why I thought of it. But, on the next page there was an entire footnote about this article, so perhaps my brain isn't wired differently from other people's after all.

A quick trip to my laptop reminded me that the article appearing immediately after the above article had an even better title: "Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis" [3] and an equally interesting conclusions section. They found that "shaken martinis were more effective in deactivating hydrogen peroxide than the stirred variety, and both were more effective than gin or vermouth alone" (p.1600) but were unable to determine the reason. How does this research get done, and where do I apply to use those funds to study ornithopods instead?

Stiff also pointed me to some medical literature that was new to me. Now, I don't read The Lancet regularly because I am not a medical doctor and because they don't have much in the way of anatomy-related articles. Occasionally, I do need to read something specific in this journal aspart of my own research, but not frequently. Every time I do, it occurs to me that I should be browsing The Lancet more often, because then I would be able to send Matt Wedel more of the type of crazy article I've been assuming he wants to get in his email inbox since I met him.

One such article is from the 6 April 1985 issue of The Lancet, titled "Case of Bulimia Nervosa presenting with acute, fatal abdominal distension" [4]. The article is about a 23-year-old model with an eating disorder. There was no indication of her height, but on a previous doctor visit, she weighed in at 38.4 kg (~84.6 pounds). Not a very big girl, even if she was short. She apparently had a pattern of going 3 or 4 days without food, then bingeing. At her last meal, she ate so much that her stomach ruptured and there was no room for her lungs to expand. What did she eat, you ask? Only this: "8.6 kg (19 lbs) of food: liver 600g, kidney 900g, steak 200g, two eggs, cheese 500g, two large slices of bread, 500g mushrooms, 900g carrots, one cauliflower, ten peaches, four pears, two apples, four bananas, 900g plums, 900g grapes, and two glasses of milk" (p.822) According to Stiff, cadaver experiments have shown that the average human stomach can only hold about 4 pounds before it ruptures. But what did the authors of the Lancet study conclude was the reason for her death? "The main cause of death was probably septicaemia, but the massive abdominal distension, diaphragmatic splinting, and high serum potassium may well have contributed to a fatal outcome" (p.823) Apparently, eating 1/5 of your weight and not being to breathe "may well contribute" to death---take note.

But can you flip to any issue of The Lancet and find an interesting article about something that is tsunami cool? I'm not sure. I tried clicking on three or four recent issues at random, but didn't find much. The 31 January 1998 issue has an article about PMS entitled "Moody women respond abnormally to normal hormonal changes", but that's just a review of a New England Journal of Medicine article (vol.338: 209-216; it concluded that either it's all in their heads or that estrogen "may indeed play a part in the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome"). I got bored after that and clicked over to the older issues---and not just the stuff published before 1990. I got bored because I know that every single issue of every single medical journal published before 1890 contains something awesome.

Such as: Althaus J. 1867. On the treatment of obstinate constipation by faradisation of the bowel. The Lancet 90: 606-607. What is faradisation, you may ask? It's using a faradic current (an intermittent, asymmetrical AC) to zap something. Just so you know, you can knock some stuff loose if you do this to your large intestine.

Awesome.

References

1. Roach M. 2003. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. W.W. Norton & Company, London. 304pp.

2. Schultz WW, et al. 1999. Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal. British Medical Journal 319: 1596-1600.

3. Trevithick CC, et al. 1999. Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis. British Medical Journal 319: 1600-1602.

4. Edwards GM. 1985. Case of Bulimia Nervosa presenting with acute, fatal abdominal distension. The Lancet 325: 822.823.

Flaming Balls of Graduate School

So many ways I could go with that title, I know...

I had the opportunity/need to describe what grad school is like earlier today. I used a variation on this metaphor, which I have now extended and thus driven in the ground:

Grad school is like juggling a dozen flaming balls that can't be droppped. There's no time to completely extinguish any one fire, and if you let any of them drop, they could explode and your whole house could burn down. There's the coursework ball, the research ball, the teaching ball, the advisor-student ball, the interpersonal relationships ball, the mental/physical health ball... and since you can only handle juggling so many things at once for so long, at some point you will drop a ball. It might crack and destroy itself or it could burn you badly, depending on which ball falls and the conditions at the time. So at some point you are likely to find yourself facing the prospect of sacrificing one of your balls to save your life (so to speak), whether you like it or not.

I suppose this could just as easily be a [better] metaphor for real life, though. One of my sisters works full time, has a functional relationship, has a two-year-old son, just bought a house, and is planning and paying for a wedding, and still finding time to hang out with friends. I, uh, have a hard time reading papers on the evolution of the scapula and still making it to class on time.

Wayne Coyne and Advice

Sometimes I hear the right thing at the exact right time in my life, which means sometimes I blog only tangentially about science...

First, here is Wayne Coyne's 2006 Commencement speech for the Classen School of Advanced Studies in OKC. If only my high school commencement speakers had offered us anything this entertaining or helpful... Our speakers were our co-valedictorians. I think it is best for graduation speakers not to be members of the graduating class, and they should definitely not be the top scholars or top athletes (or really, the top anything). It is almost certain that their wisdom and life experience does not match that of most of their co-graduates, especially since they wasted so much time studying/practicing and spent so little time living.

Anyway, Wayne's thoughts:

Part 1

Part 2


My favorite two lines are:

"We are not what we dream. We are what we do, and all we have is action, and we can only really learn from experience. So if we can only learn from experience, what use is all this knowledge?"

I think this is important to remember in grad school and in real life. It's a problem I struggle with. I love acquiring knowledge, I love learning. In my academic life, I'm not so good at doing (yet). I'm good at coming up with projects but not as good at executing them or producing a written summary of them (yet). This isn't unique to me, and I suspect it's a common issue because throughout almost all of the academic buildup to grad school, you pretty much do nothing. You spend all your time acquiring knowledge and little time applying it. But in an academic career, you have to be able to do and to learn, so this is a real problem I have to overcome, and soon. More on this struggle later, perhaps.

I'm better at doing in real life, and depending who you talk to within Academia, that's a good thing or a bad thing. A professor at my last school once told me he suspected he was the only faculty member in our department that changed his own oil, and that it was every bit as important to have skills that real people would respect as skills that academics would respect. This was during a conversation about the need for a life outside of school. But later that week, another professor in the same department told me I should enjoy my non-academic friends while I still could, because I would eventually outgrow and become bored by them (he predicted they would become intellectually nonstimulating by the time I finished my MS). The least-unbalanced academics I know seem to have a foot in each world and ignore the latter piece of advice, but I often think the latter view is the more common one among academics.

Anyway, I think Wayne was right to remind the audience that knowledge is most valuable when it informs your actions and experience. And also, if gaining knowledge is what you love, it can be valuable in that regard as well.

"And so as you go out into the world, be aware of those inexperienced fools who offer easy, exotic solutions to painful and complicated problems."

This is just good advice, and I don't say that because it's the academic way to completely ignore anyone you think is an inexperienced fool. The last part, about avoiding easy solutions to painful, complicated problems, is the best part, and the part that is easiest to forget when you're the most desperate.

This leads in nicely to the second media clip of Wayne Coyne Wisdom, an essay for NPR's "This I Believe" series that can be heard here. My favorite line was:

"Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living."

because it is not a command---just a suggestion---and also because it works whether you see the world in a glass-half-empty/"this is as good as it gets, I guess" way, or if you're genuinely satisfied in all areas of your life.

Nova ScienceNow

The PBS program Nova ScienceNow had an interesting piece on Mary Schweitzer's work on dinosaur soft tissue preservation. The whole segment can be watched online for free here.