Oh, the thinks you can think!

Frequently, when I meet people and they ask me what I do and I reply that I'm a budding Marine Biologist their first reply is (especially if they're female): "I totally wanted to do that when I was a kid -" I generally finish their sentence with "because you wanted to work with the dolphins?" and generally am right in that assumption.
Speaking of dolphins, I came across an interesting website today advertising a symposium to take place in Hawaii next summer. From what I can tell these people are perfectly serious and this an actual even to take place (once you've taken a look at the website you'll understand why I'm assuring you of this!).
It's a symposium on teleportation and apparently dolphins do this all the time so that if you swim with them you can experience it as well. There will be several experts there to guide you through these experiences.
Check it out: http://www.joanocean.com/SYMP011/index.html

Bless You update

The other day I walked into my office. I had barely set foot in the room when my office mate spun around and said: “Shay-non, I have question for you”, I expectantly held my breath, since as we’ve already established these questions could take us anywhere, “today in class I sneeze and somebody say bless – is this okay?”
We followed up our previous sneezing/blessing/thanking conversation by running through this case study. Apparently he sneezed in class and was quite surprised that somebody said bless you. After our previous lengthy discussion of that convention I was a bit surprised at his surprise until I realized that he thought that this breaks the other convention of not talking during class (though how strictly that one needs to be laid out is debatable). We agreed upon the fact, that with somebody sneezing, class had already been more or less disrupted so that a friendly “blessing” is not adding insult upon insult.
Then we got back into the whole issue of saying “Thank you” after somebody saying “bless you”. This one had been quite confusing for him in our previous exploration of the subject because I couldn’t give him an exact protocol on when to say thanks and when not, though I assured him that it wasn’t offensive not to say anything.
At one point, during the Thanking-non-Thanking part of our conversation I realized that he probably didn’t know what bless you really meant. “Do you know what ‘bless you’ means?”, “yes, when somebody sneeze –“, “No, the word blessing, do you know what a blessing is?”.
Turns out he didn’t. So I tried to explain it to him as simple but accurately as possible: “A blessing is a good thing you get from somebody that you didn’t earn for yourself and maybe don’t even deserve. When blesses you, they are giving you something good. And if somebody is giving you something good you didn’t deserve or wishing a good thing upon you – we should thank them, shouldn’t we?”
Shouldn’t we?

Happy Thanksgiving

There’s a tall, good looking guy looking for me

I walked into my office the other day and was greeted by a “Shay-non. You here. There was a man looking for you”.
Ha. Thought I. Who? Said I.
“Uh, I don’t know. Tall. Tall man.”
Ha. Thought I. Well, what did he look like? Was it Pete? Tall guy, glasses, red hair? Said I (Pete being tall and having red hair he’s quite distinct – even people who don’t know who he is, generally know who he is.)
“No, no red hair. Tall man, Tall good looking man.”
Ha. Thought I. Thanks. Said I.
I checked with all the usual suspects (in this case, any male I could possibly think of who might have been looking for me), none of them came by.
Well, good news is, there’s a tall, good-looking guy out there looking for me… he also matches the description of “my boyfriend” in a friends dream a while back (she only saw him from the back – she didn’t want to be nosy, and figured I would let her know I was seeing somebody when I was ready, but from what she could tell he was tall and good-looking) –
Now if only I could figure out who he is…

Yes, the forklift and why I’m hauling so much cement

I ran into a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while on campus the other day and as we were having a quick catch up she said, you know, we’ve been wondering about the forklift that is popping up in your facebook status. Are you referring to driving around an actual forklift or is this some sort of analogy/inside joke that I don’t know about?
Well, I’ll my jokes about driving around in my forklift and hauling cement are centered around the fact that lately I’ve been spending a lot of time driving around a forklift and hauling a lot of cement. And yes, I probably would have been just as good at this before I decided it was time to become part of the highly educated elite of the marine science community but then again yes, my new found passion for lugging around cement sacks more than half my own body weight is, in a way it is very relevant to my making it into that distinguished group.
For the sturgeon project I’m currently working on, acoustic tracking plays a central role. We catch the fish and pop a tag into them and toss them back into the water. The way we track them, is that we deploy receivers in NY Bight and when they swim past them the receiver picks up the tag signal we know which fish is swimming were.
Now, getting those receivers placed onto the bottom of the ocean is a bit more difficult that it sounds and imvolves huge cement blocks that hold them. And somebody, somebody you see has to make those cement blocks, and it happens to be me!
We’ve got to huge metal molds with a hole in the bottom. To get set up, I line them with a cut open garbage bag (yeah, as I continue this description you’ll soon notice how highly sophisticated the whole process is!), then take a PVC tube with a reed bar inserted in one end and wedge it into that hole. The PVC tube is the center piece of our little work of art – this is what will later hold the receiver. Then I start prepping a couple of red plastic cups with reed bars that will later make various anchor points for ropes and straps.
Once I’ve got everything set up, I start setting up to mix cement. Each mooring is filled with seven 80 pound cement sacks. I lug them to the boathouse door where I’ve already set up the cement mixer (at least I’m not mixing all this by hand!) and start mixing cement to sacks at a time. I fill the finished cement into a wheelbarrow to shovel into the molds. Mixing cement involves a lot of deadlifting cement bags. I’m too short to lift them cement bags into the mixer, so I use a cinder block as a stepping stone. Once I’ve filled the molds I make sure we’ve got a nice flat surface which I engrave and then let the whole thing dry for a day.
I’m usually covered in cement but the time I finish so I head home for a long hot shower. Getting cement off is not an easy task. All the cement dust settles in my hair, and it usually doesn’t come out properly – actually I’m fairly sure that it turns to cement which is making my hair do even weirder things than usual.
The next day I go to get the moorings out of the molds. This is the tricky part and also the part that involves the forklift. I maneuver it around in the boathouse until I can slip a strap looped through a reed bar in the mooring over the forks. Theoretically, I should be able to lift I straight out, pull out the strap, but it through another loop, flip over the mooring and store it outside next to the parking lot.
In practice, that rarely happens. Instead I have developed a new method, in which I take the entire mold out into the parking lot, flip the whole thing over (at this point the mooring will usually still insist on staying in the mold instead of giving into gravity) and then continue lifting and dropping it onto the curb until it drops out.
I have learned not to use that method during “rush hour” when everyone is leaving school because people give me really, really odd looks… my friends are convinced that I’m having withdrawal from rugby now that the season is over and are suggesting alternate forms of anger management.

COLD and WET

Ah, yes. Summer is over. Just like that – from one day to the next. One day sunshine and beautiful weather – the next day sunshine and beautiful weather and I stayed out past sundown, and on the ride home became nearly convinces that my fingers where going to freezer right off.
Things went downhill from there. Two days later, not only had the temperature dropped a good 20 degrees or more, the floodgates of heaven had opened and we had our first major fall storm. I was kinda miserable. I guess I was prepared for the cold, and prepared for the wet but the combination of the two is just not a happy thing for somebody who gets places on their bike.
But the weather to a change for the better and I am currently enjoying a beautiful Indian Summer falling into Autumn. The foliage is breath-taking, I’m doing my best to stay out of the rain when it does come and to get out on long bike rides and walks when the sun is out.
I got a pocket, got a pocket full of sunshine,…

Well, bless you!

My office mate is from Taiwan. My office mate asks me the most random questions at the most random times – even when I am using the international signal for “I am extremely focused on my work” (i.e. wearing headphones while frantically typing into my laptop with several open books/stacks of papers on the table).

The two of us have the desks at the window and there’s a huge bookshelf between us. Yes it’s possible to have a conversation “through” it, but due to my office mate’s limited English (it’s getting better though!) he usually does this thing where he pushes his chair backwards, and says: “Shay-non, I have question”. This question can be anything ranging from some announcement our department has made (not so random you think,… but wait!) to “Shay-non, I hear German and English very similar language” (I made the mistake digging back into my knowledge of the development and history of various European languages which has encouraged him to use me as an Encyclopedia) to “Shay-non, I hear in German (he never says Germany) students don’t pay for lense” (it took me a while to figure out he has an odd obsession with the fact that Germans make the best lenses for glasses), he also tried to rope me into discussions about the German welfare system, the fact that I play rugby not football etc.

One day, he asked me a question that apparently has been sitting on this chest for a long time and had come up again at a recent event, where he sneezed in the library and somebody said “bless you”. It turns out that he has noticed this before and was a bit confused of how it actually “works”. I spent about 20 minutes explaining the convention and answering his many questions. Like do you only say it to people you know, if there are other people in the room who says bless you, etc. Just goes to show you how complicated small every day things like that can be for an outsider.

Ironically, this happened on a day when I was having really, really bad allergies. I had spent the first half of the morning working from our kitchen table with a roll of toilette paper at hand and had only come into school because I needed to get at the internal network. Even as I was explaining the whole “issue” I was thinking to myself… this is not going to go well!

Sure enough, not even two minutes after our conversation, my nose started itching and I sniffled a bit. I heard and excited: “Shay-non! I say BLESS now?” which resulted in another 10 minutes of explaining how you only use it for people who sneeze. Then my allergies kicked in again for real. The kind where I sneeze so much and in so rapid succession that I’m sore the next day.

And every time I sneezed there’d be a super excited: “BLESS! BLESS! Shay-non, I say it right now?”

Needless to say I left early that day…

God is Green - and so am I

I was the kid who got into heated arguments with their biology teacher whenever the subject turned to Evolution. I was the kid who graduated from high school to travel to the ends of the world to share their faith. In an alternate universe I would be married with two kids living in an African hut preaching to the natives. But I’m not – you see, I also was the kid who excelled in every science class, graduated at the top of their class, studied Molecular Biology and Ecology and was one of the first of my high school class to pursue a PhD in a natural science.
Moving to the States for graduate studies, I discovered that here, being a Christian Conservationist or an Evangelical Ecologist is considered as much of an oxymoron as Military Intelligence and Microsoft Works. When it comes to subjects such as Global Warming, the need for conservation and going green, my fellow scientists put Christians in a box labeled “ignorant, unwilling to face facts & blinded by faith” and my fellow Christians seem to think people advocating these things are automatically either left-wing liberals and/or atheists bent on destroying the church.
I beg to differ. I dare say, God is green – and so am I.
Because I have never felt like I was bridging a gap desperately trying to keep a foot in each camp. Being a Biologist and a Christian never was mutually exclusive to me and neither does my passion for my faith diminish the passion I have t o conserve and responsibly manage the earth and the resources we have been entrusted with. On the contrary, the more I discover about the world we live in, the more I understand about the beauty of nature, the more I stand in awe and call it creation (debating the whos and whats and wheres of evolution put aside). And at the same time, the more I marvel at creation, the more I am driven to study it, understand it and attempt to grasp the fullness of the complexity of how everything fits together. And the more I am exposed to scientific facts of how the world around is changing and hurting - the more I passionate I become about the necessity to take action before it is too late and we have destroyed our planet.
Because the world was not given to us to mess it up. For me, conservation goes back to the Garden of Eden, when God gives mankind dominion over his creation. While dominion does mean “to rule” or “to put under the authority” of, it does not mean “to exploit”. Rather, it implies stewardship, a responsibility to make the most out of what we where entrusted with. It does not mean we need to preserve everything as it is and dare not touch anything lest we mess something up. But it does mean that we need to understand how the world works and come up with a scientifically founded management plan which would enable us to use natural resources in a sustainable responsible way.
Because our own backyard is a good place to start if we want to change the world. If we as Christians want to be taken seriously as a force toward changing the world for the better, we need to become a part of both actively participating in conservation and resource management, as well as speaking up and being an advocate for God’s creation. This could start with small things, such as throwing away paper plates for a ceramic set. Only heating the building when there is somebody in it. Properly isolating windows, making the building more energy efficient. Turning the lights off, adding power switches, asking “what would Jesus drive”– a lot of small things that should also translate into our personal lives, too. It could also mean that this year’s youth outreach doesn’t go to South American for a children’s program but strives to clean up the local forest. Using church buildings a venue for educational programs. Planting trees on church property. Supporting efforts in third world countries that are bringing water, resources and jobs to people in a sustainable way. Yes, it also means being open to work together with scientists, listening to them and using their knowledge and understanding to provide a foundation for our efforts.
There is an entire list of ways to become active. But for earth’s sake, as the church we need to get up off of the pews and do something.

so...

yes, I'm still around.
I'm currently piddling around with a lot of different stuff: Hounding museums for access to their sawfish-saws, reading, hauling cement, figuring out statistical analysis programs for population genetics, prepping and giving lectures, driving a forklift around, as well as this that and the other thing.
I'm determined to start writing up some of my late adventures - at some point or the other :-)
I'm posting an "Op-Ed" I wrote for a class a while back... Several people asked me if I would post it here so they could actually read (and not just hear) about it!
So - for some insight into the inner workings (and thinkings) of my brain....