Public Service Announcement

PEOPLE! By M's (the british chick I live with) recommendation I bought some garlic scapes at the farmers market. These are the shoots that garlic bulbs send up when they attempt to flower.

Stir fried them with some bok choy. They are like a bean with a garlicky bite. DELICIOUS.

If you see these at the farmer's market or store, BUY THEM. You won't regret it.

Not my image but hopefully I'll get around to taking pictures sometime soon.

Field day #2 of 300.

Glass calm morning on Tomales Bay. Beautious. This is why I like bays!

But I would be wrong if I said all bays are created equal. By early evening it was averaging 32mph winds with gusts up to 42mph. Sometimes I miss Mission Bay. But then again, it's nice to be reminded that you are mortal.

Next post: I only thought we were going to capsize once...

I have my life back

Been out of the blogging game lately. But I'm back. Hopefully I can siphon off some blogging traffic from the Bucket O' Hank.

Here's a pic to start (nice and easy, you wouldn't want me to write an amusing essay would you? WOULD YOU?)

The world's most perfect avocado. Behold.














And a very tasty beverage.

4 Months! Whooops. I was busy?

Seriously though, a lot has changed in 4 months. Lets see.

1) I went to Jamaica for 2 weeks.
2) I defended my thesis. Please call me 'Master'.
3) I moved to Davis to start school.
4) UHHHHH, OBAMA WON!
5) Went to the annual meeting of the Occidental Association of Naturists in Vancouver, Canada EH.
6) 80 oz to freedom defended her thesis. Please call her 'Master'.
7) Successfully completed quarter numero uno of my PhD.
8) Global climate change has caused snow to fall in Davis and will likely result in the downfall of civilization over resource wars.
9) UHHHHH, OBAMA WON!

That about sums it up.

the not so Air Conditioned Lounge

I thought that I would inaugurate my brief return to San Diego with some pictures of my last night in San Diego prior to leaving for the Santa Cruz PISCO class that some of you know is over because I am now in another country. Confused? Damn straight you are. But I’ll bet you aren’t quite as confused as I was when we partied it up at the Air Conditioned Lounge.

This story goes waaaay back to our Black and White party of '07. As some of you may recall we had a drink competition with several categories. The best of show drink was awarded to Boy Robin who created a concoction known as the Incredible Hulk. It was a tasty drink that started out mild mannered and quickly turned green and angry when you dropped the bomb in the glass. Fair enough. Great drink right? Well I happened to have the foresight to enter it as drink of the month at the Air Conditioned Lounge (the AC Lounge as the locals call it). Sure enough, it won and I was to report to the club to claim a free bottle of champagne. Sweet! (Boy Robin still curses me for stealing his drink, though I'm really just trying to spread the love)

Now with a name like the AIR CONDITIONED lounge that you would expect the place to be frigid. Maybe with some ice sculptures and little baby penguins running around and what not. Well you would be dead wrong about that because when we went to there it was hot. Like back of your knee pits sweaty. Like Nelly, take off all your clothes it's getting hot in heeeeeeere sweaty.

Anyways, I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Here's the whole group kickin' it in our own little dugout.

Here's Cove showin us he's done this before.

Even Neeners thought it was hot in there.

And finally here's Stinky Pinky demonstrating her zero-gravity hair with Beaner.

Today's topic: Barnacles

We had another fun day on the water in Santa Cruz. Under the threat of reported heavy 6-8’ seas we set out on the R/V Paragon and were welcomed by clear skies and flat calm waters. On the way out I noticed 1 of 2 Team O’Neill catamarans. You know O’Neill, famed wetsuit and surf apparel manufacturer. Well here is where your money is going. Apparently I’m in the wrong biz.

But Team O’Neill doesn’t get to play with nifty machines like this thingy called an Acrobat. I’m going out on a limb and I’m going to say that the reason oceanographers have so much training in physics and calculus is so they can justify buying expensive toys.

The acrobat is towed behind the boat and can adjust its wings to surface and dive in the water. Slap some instruments on there and you can measure all kinds of stuff in 3 dimensions. Check out this graph that our team produced from the acrobat data. Cool! Bright colors and lines and fancy stuff!

Actually that big red blob in the middle is a big patch of phytoplankton, microscopic plants that float around the ocean and feed barnacles which by chance is today’s topic! Actually it’s not today’s topic, but it is the title of this handout that my sister got me from the local pirate store in San Francisco.

Anyways, I thought I would flex some of my photographic might and show you this nice picture of a dolphin that I saw while towing the acrobat. Isn’t it a nice shot? That water looks positively spectacular too! You might even think that the dolphin was actually in captivity at Long Marine lab and was actually curious about these strange hairless apes staring at it. But you would be wrong. This is a wild dolphin.

So I’ve officially left Santa Cruz and actually been back to San Diego for a few days and then left again. Where did I go? Stay tuned to find out where I’m at!

(most of you know already so it’s not that exciting but it makes for some better writing if there is suspense ya know?)

I’ll leave you with this parting picture of Team Upwelling/Relaxation, the group that I worked in while in the PISCO oceanography class. Props to our TA Olivia who is bunny earing Margaret (one of the instructors).

spatial interpolation and filtering of surface current data based on open-boundary modal analysis

...is the title of some of my light reading for the night. But before you begin thinking that I actually understand this stuff I'll just stop you right there and tell you that I have no idea what that means. As described by bloggers before me, scientists have a tendency to use fancy language. We'll get back to that...

So I moved from San Diego but only sort of. I'm taking a physical oceanography class in Santa Cruz. It's offered through the research consortium PISCO which is strangely also named after the national liquor of Chile or Peru (depending on who you talk to). Yes, ecologists are smart and crafty but they also like to drink ...some might say... a lot (see Bucket-O-Hank for proof, he just got a job as an ecologist, congrats Bucket!). Anyways, I highly recommend that you marine folk look into these classes offered by PISCO because they typically cover most of the costs for you and they are taught by some quasi-famous people (in our world they are famous).

The class is comprised of lectures on the physics of various things important to oceanography such ocean currents, upwelling events, internal waves, etc. But we are also conducting a class experiment linking physical aspects of the ocean (temperature, density waves, current velocities) to the biological (also known as the interesting stuff) in the intertidal. Check it out, we'll be using these barnacle settlement plates (the grey squares) to catch little baby barnacles (above) as they settle out from being larvae.

All the ecologists are groaning because that's already been done before. However, the neat part is that we'll be using some cool moorings deployed offshore of the barnacles to measure the physical stuff. You would think that this has frequently been done before but early marine ecology often didn't measure this other stuff. Why? Well first because measuring stuff in the marine realm is a pain in the ass in the first place (you gotta get up early to hit the low tides or strap a scuba tank to your back) and also because measuring all those physical things is usually expensive. It's getting cheaper to do that and it's obviously important so now we're doing it.

Did I mention that I found eelgrass up here? Yes, it grows in Santa Cruz too! Yay eelgrass!




So we've also deployed these moorings in the ocean as well. Some might notice that the anchor at the top of the picture is made from battleship chain. Yes! That's awesome! For the mariners in the group, the chafing gear (that protects the line) is made from firehose. Those little black cylinders are thermistors (fancy oceanographer talk for thermometers) that can sample the temperature once every half second or some such ridiculous rate. The red thing at the bottom is a subsurface buoy which keeps the "thermistor chain" vertical (note the use of fancy language, I'm becoming a better scientist already!).

After deploying the mooring we conducted some additional measurements. One pressing question we wanted to answer was "What is the velocity of an object leaving a cylinder with thrust generated by the mixing of hydrocarbons ignited by a peizoelectric ignition? Specifically, what is the velocity if the object is a potato?"

Charles here demonstrates the use of this sophisticated sampling instrument.

We'll be picking up our moorings and other equipment early next week. Then we'll process and analyze the data and give oral presentations to wrap up the course. Unfortunately I've got to get to my homework which is to figure out how normal mode and open-boundary mode current decomposition techniques produce smooth two-dimensional current fields (forecast: it doesn't look good for this ecologist).

I'll go ahead and leave you with a nice bowl of ginger garlic string beans made by my classmate Mya. Derishous.

Here's a lil teaser pic of a post to come, can anybody (who wasn't there) guess where it was taken?