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?

sad day...

For all of my love of an academic lifestyle, sometimes I hate it. I really really hate it.

In particular, I've never enjoyed the transient nature of student life. People come, people go. It seems that just when you've settled and developed a good network of friends, some of them leave. Or perhaps you leave.

As most of you know, I left southern California yesterday. But for as much as I've knocked Socal, I'm really going to miss it. It was a sad day.

So here are some pictures of the people that I am so grateful for becoming friends with. My apologies in advance to some of whom I did not have good digital pics of.

Ecology cohort '05













SDSU grads et al.












Of course MJ and Beaner










Vic, J9, and Tony



















C and Robo



















the persian doc













Carrie #1 and Sean Deese













and even though I've got things to look forward to in the bay area








I'm still really gonna miss it.

sponsored by Cheez-It ®

This post should really be called "Abuse of an Asian Mussel Part II" but I have to keep the sponsors happy if you know what I'm sayin'.

No sooner than after finishing my fried rice breakfast was I back in bed to catch some sleep due to round 2 of lobster tracking in La Jolla the next day. Mind you, this was not overnight fine scale tracking hell, this was a different form of tracking that doesn't involve grad student torture (or so I thought). Our task was to recover listening stations anchored to the sea floor from depths of 20-50 feet. These devices "listen" for lobsters that have little back packs that emit pings (barely audible to human ears). The great thing about them is that you can put them in the ocean (or wherever) and have them do the dirty work for you. No inhalation of carbon monoxide fumes necessary. This mussel is a big fan.

However, you still have to go out there and retrieve the data from them. This means driving up in a boat with a GPS and diving down and tying a line to the device. Then you surface and pull the station up, with its requisite 30lb block of cement. Somebody tell me why I went into marine biology?

That morning; Shakira, Beaner, Julia Guliah (no relation to Glenn Guliah), Princess Leah, Nelly (our new labbie), and I rally at the marine lab to assemble our gear. We break up into two teams, lets call one of them the "fast" team and the other oh....I don't know... the "slow" team.

Princess Leah, Julia Guliah, and I are on the "fast" team and we take my favorite boat (the one that almost killed me) out to La Jolla. We arrive quickly at the sites and recover our stations with relative ease. You can take a guess at how the "slow" team was doing. I'll keep their identities anonymous to preserve their dignity. No matter...we have to dock with the other boat anyways because they have the computer necessary to download the data from the receivers.

After docking, the "slow" team reports that they are low on air and ask us if we have any tanks we can spare them. We do (because we're so dang efficient) and we offer a trade. Air in exchange for food of some sort. "What do you got?" "Cheez-Its" replies Beaner. Uhhhhh...JACKPOT!



If you aren't in the know, Cheez-Its are the grad student equivalent to barrels of crude oil. Marine scientific research revolves around these tasty little baked crackers. How do they get all that cheesy flavor inside? Not only did we get Cheez-Its, they were BIG Cheez-Its. NICE.

After I finish doing some Cheez-It lines, it's time for a group picture. Little did I know that it could have been my last (even though I'm not even in the picture).

After we depart from the other boat we proceed to the sites where we picked up the receivers to deploy them again. This is a much easier job because you don't have to find them, you can just put them down and record the location. Julia Guliah jumps into the water at the first site and I begin handing her gear when a cell phone rings. I pick it up and its Beaner.

Beaner: "Heya, the lifeguards just came by on their jet-ski. There was an unconfirmed but reputable report of a white shark in the area. It might have been eating a seal."

Me: "Oh right, I saw some seals earlier, but there was so much blood I couldn't really see them that well. Haha. No really, where is the alleged shark?"

Beaner: "Uhhh, right about where you guys are right now."

Me: "Hey Julia Guliah, you might wanna get out of the water."

Nice... the tax collector is here and he's hungry. Julia and I quickly huddle and discuss our options. The problem is that we have deployed a receiver but there is a line attached to it. We could either do the wise thing and A) pull it back up and untie the line and devise another way of lowering the receiver without diving or B) dive down and untie the line (the preferred method in the absence of the man in the grey suit).

For some reason (perhaps it was my Cheez-It induced euphoria) we decide on plan B. I don my gear, while noticing the peculiar absence of the Harbor seals I had spotted at this very site 40 minutes prior, and join Julia in the water. On our descent I'm practically spinning like a corkscrew, keeping my eye out for you know who (no, not he who shall not be named). After what seems like an eternity we find the receiver, untie the bowline knot and get the hell out of dodge. Forget the safety stop, I might die here! I swear, every kelp bass I saw looked like it could have been jaws, ready to strike and eat me. I briefly think, with all the cheese in me right now, I bet I taste pretty good.

Upon reaching the surface I fling my gear into the boat (that I don't hate anymore) and hurl my body, like a salmon going upstream, onto the deck.

Great success! (insert Borat voice)

White shark - 0 Asian mussel -1

We deployed the rest of the stations without incident by lowering them down using lines in a sort of "cradle" fashion. However there is a clincher to this story. Later the Beaner tells us that the lifeguards now think that the shark could have been "a large bull sea lion".

Thanks.

I had a great story but now I just look like a wuss.

Well... at least I got some Cheez-Its.

As promised, here is a nice pic of Rothomabobo and Shakira.



Lookin' good gals.

abuse of an Asian mussel

---Rewind three weeks---

In our first weekly lab meeting to set the field work schedule I sit.... fading in and out of direct contact with the world. For the most part, these meetings don't really apply to me (because I've finished my data collection), and I ponder why I am here.

I am asked what my schedule will be like for the next two weeks. With a spurt of excitement I say "Well, I'm turning in my first thesis draft next week, then I'm off to Minnesota for a wedding. After that, I'll have two weeks of time to help out....."

The excitement quickly wains. It dawns on me. What the hell did I just say? I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, but it's too late... I hear the pens scribble furiously, no doubt writing something to the effect of "Abuse the Asian mussel before he leaves".

---Fast forward to this week---

It is 7pm and I am on a 18' center console boat. Weesa and Shakira are my comrades on this epic journey that will last about 12 hours. Our task is to determine the fine scale movements of spiny lobsters within the La Jolla Ecological Reserve. In other words, we are cheap labor employed to follow lobsters around all night. A reputable scientist in the field of remote tracking (see telemetry) calls this "grad student powered". Akin to those decals that you see on tricked out rice rockets that say "Powered by Honda" or "Powered by rice". Just throw a couple grad students at this labor problem and you've got a cheap solution. "They'll do anything."

Indeed.

We arrive at the site and quickly locate the first three lobsters. No problem. But as we navigate to the fourth lobster I have the urge to throw up. Now those of you that know me know that I am no stranger to the worst affliction a marine biologist can possibly have, but this was not it. It was the inhalation of the exhaust fumes from the ancient two-stroke engine that I was sitting next too.

That's cool, we only have 10 hours to go.

I feel nauseous and I volunteer to take the first sleep shift (3 hrs) hoping that the sleep would eliminate my urge to fertilize the ocean with partially digested cheez-its. Sleeping on this boat means curling up in a sleeping bag on deck and pulling a beanie over your eyes. This usually works well, for the waves rock you as if you are inside a fiberglass crib. A nice gentle crib that occasionally sprays engine exhaust in YOUR FACE. It seems that the engine is determined to take others down with it, aided by occasional southerly breezes which waft fumes toward me. I drift off to sleep, thinking I should have brought my carbon monoxide detector with me. Will I ever wake up?

---Midnight---

I wake to hear the quiet chatter of voices and the occasional 'ping' from our machine that tells us we are near tagged lobsters. How soon my slumber ends. I take the helm as Weesa curls up for a wink.



Shakira and I ponder the virtues of graduate school and speculate what people in La Jolla do to afford such grand homes. They probably don't track lobsters.

6 am rolls around quickly and we decide that the lobsters have stopped moving for the night. We motor back through calm seas and get to the dock and clean the boat by 6:45. I'm back in my real bed by about 7:15. Real sleep with real sheets!

I awake from my deep slumber at about oh......3pm. Nice. I earned it. I also earned this veggie fried rice that I made with edamame, red and green peppers. I topped it with a veggie patty and splashed some Braggs Liquid Aminos on there for a nice afternoon breakfast.














See I told you I would blog about food.

hello...

It seems that my I reflect the most upon my life when I should actually be doing something else. In other words, when I procrastinate. Recently I have been immersed in writing my MS thesis, the subject of which is the title of this blog. This involves long hours spent at the computer with tedious data management, analysis using fancy statistics and graphing programs, and of course scientific writing. What better time to start a blog?

However, I promised myself (really my faithful partner Weesa, at left) that I should probably finish my first draft before I begin blogging the world. The astute reader will then recognize that this of course means that I handed my first draft into my advisor! Essentially he'll have it for two weeks and return it to me bleeding red with edits like a stuck mock pig.

Mock pig? This leads me to another part of my life that I will invariably be talking about...food. I like to think of myself as a foodie but nothing like some of my friends who lust over $550 Shun knife sets, or have essentially lived in poverty to maintain their expensive culinary tastes in New Orleans, or those that have mastered Massaman curry recipes in Thailand. As my good friend Sean Deese says, "I think I am only friends with you because you like food so much." Thanks, love you too.

Ahem.... the mock pig? Right, well I like to call myself a vegetarian though I have been known to dabble in carnivory while intoxicated. For the technically minded folk, I like to classify my dietary habits as ovo-lacto-pescatarian. I once was a vegan for a while, but a deal with my sister and a slippery slope ended that one (more on that later). Mock pig because....well... I love mock meat. I actually do love real meat but there is a whole lot of reasons to eat less or even none of it.

That leads me to another topic of this blog, the environment. Or rather, what I study (ecology) and other things that I find interesting. I suppose you could just read the scientific literature (the means by which scientists communicate) but I can't remember the last time I saw my mom pick up the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lastly in this public diatribe of mine, I will be talking about YOU, the faithful reader. That's the people part of the blog. Because lets face it, you're really narcissistic and you want to see yourself made famous on the interweb. I know, I know, you have an illness and I've got your drug. But really, my motivation for beginning this blog is to document, to communicate, and to show embarrassing pictures of my friends.

Being a scientist, I must give credit to those who have influenced my thinking or given me ideas, in other words I have to cite others to escape being called a plagiarizer. Indeed, this blog was notably influenced by others before me (Chiaro 2004, Carson 2006).

So welcome to my blog.


Oh right, and here is a nice picture of the Bucket and Stinky Pinky.