Fun With Calculus

I recently had my first calculus quiz of the semester and it reminded me that even as the years go by, some things stay the same. The last time I took calculus was in high school, so I was a bit worried about this semester's class. After the first few lectures, however, methods of integration and derivation were emerging from the various corners of my brain they had been hiding in. I also remembered to forget to add "+ c" to all my integrations on the quiz.

Fun with Experiment Setup

I began work this week in the medicinal plants lab I'm a part of. To get back into the swing of things after a year away, I started simple with an MIC-- a test that determines how much of a chemical it takes to kill 50% of a population of organisms (in this case bacteria). It's a delicate but repetitive process and accuracy is key.

The experiment I was setting up today took about an hour and a half of measuring, calculating, and mixing liquids in a 96-well plate. I worked row by row, going slowly because measurements need to be accurate to a hundredth of a microliter but also because I'm not very fast with micropipettes in general. At last, everything was set up; I measured the optical density of the wells, prepped the plate to be incubated, and then accidentally dropped it on the floor.

I wasn't sure whether I should be upset at the waste of work or if I should just be worried that a broth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria had gotten on my shoes. I certainly had time to think about it as I set up a new plate. In the end, I was happy with the comedic timing of it all and content that my shoes were sterile after treatments of ethanol, bleach, and hot water. Hard work and fixable complications make a good start to the year.

Laundry in a Bucket

My apartment for this year has many amenities, but laundry hookups are not among them. A nearby laundromat offers wash and fold services at $1.40 per pound, but I remembered vaguely from history books and from childhood in the village that it is theoretically possible to do laundry by hand. A bit of research and experimentation landed me with this method:

Materials
1 bucket
1 plunger
1 bottle dishwashing liquid
20 feet of clothesline
Clothespins to taste

Cut several small holes in the rubber part of the plunger so that water can run through. Put clothes in the bucket, fill it with water, and add a spoonful of dishwashing liquid. Plunge up and down and stir the clothes from side to side for about 5 minutes; this produces a similar agitation to washing machines, washboards, and beating clothes on rocks by the riverside. Pour out the soapy water and fill the bucket with new water to rinse. Plunge and stir for another 5 minutes. Pour out the water, wring out the clothes, and put them on the line to dry.

This method still has to be optimized, and isn't great for large loads of laundry, but I'm hoping it will keep my laundromat expenses modest through the year. It's also nice to be able to use the balcony for something, and nothing looks more homely than lines of drying laundry.

Fun With Customer Service

Over the past couple weeks, I've been in contact with several companies to set things up for my last year of college. There's been a lot of phoning and emailing and some meeting in person, and while customer service politeness has been pretty even across the board, helpfulness has been a real rollercoaster between companies.

The natural gas company was by far the best-- when an online application failed to go through, I gave them a call. In addition to processing the application for me, they explained my options for the coming year, how natural gas distribution works in Atlanta, and what to expect in fees and service over the next few weeks.

A problem with my bank's website led to a 40 minute phone call where the person on the other end very much attempted to be helpful, but we could never get past the point where the buttons present on his screen were absent from my screen. I was trying to wire money internationally to St Peter's College where I studied for the past year, but the phone call ended with the bank representative promising to get IT to fix the website.

The St Peter's financial office was really great to work with; after a few weeks of emailing I worked out with them that I could pay my bill internationally by buying a meal plan from the college cafeteria. The mindset at St Peter's seemed to be that a student's main source of stress should be their studies, not finances or other logistics.

With no laundry hookups in my apartment, I decided to test out a local laundromat where you deposit your clothes in lockers and they are returned clean in a couple days. It's a sleek facility and I set up an account and delivered my first order with zero human interaction. About half an hour later, I got a call from a customer service rep to confirm my order and to answer any questions I had starting out. It was a nice gesture.

My recent visits to the Emory Financial Aid office have been illuminating in their own way, but I can't help but feel that some of the problem-solving flexibility that comes with human customer service has been lacking. When I run into problems with online forms, I'm referred to the same forms to find a solution for myself. In a way, I suppose, it makes sense because I'm hoping to receive money from Emory Financial Aid while I'm paying money to all the other companies I mention here.

In summary, thanks to customer service, I feel at the moment a great deal of goodwill towards my natural gas provider and varying degrees of satisfaction and frustration towards the many other companies and financial institutions that are a part of living life on the grid.

Deluxe Crackers

Ingredients

Peanut butter crackers

Grape jelly

More peanut butter

Nacho cheese

Make deluxe crackers by spreading jelly, peanut butter, or nacho cheese onto already peanut-buttered crackers. Each mouthful is an explosion of flavor, except for the peanut butter peanut butter crackers of course, for which every mouthful is an explosion of peanut butter.

Happy Returns

I told myself that I would return to blogposting when I returned to Atlanta, and now it's all happening together. There's no telling what the future will hold, but with any luck this will keep going.

Returning to the US in general has meant getting a new phone, switching back to Fahrenheit when talking about temperature, and enjoying the services of websites (like Pandora) not necessarily accessible in many other parts of the world. It also means getting back in touch with familiar people and places.

One such place is the Walmart Supercenter near me, and on the subject of returns, I saw at the cash register a sign saying that non-defective airbeds in opened packaging were not eligible for cash returns. Fair enough, I think, in the grand scheme of things.

The weather is hot and the roads are long, but air conditioning is plentiful and I know the bus routes. It's good to be back.

Fun With Packing

In my current stage of life, I move around from year to year and it may be a while before I have a long-term residence. My parents are moving soon as well, so there's no such thing as storing things at their house until after college. In order to travel light, I have a few thought experiments to go through whenever I need to pack:

How Bad Would I Feel If Everything In My House/Dorm Was Consumed By Flame?
It would be a big setback, to be sure. I'd have left whatever clothes I was wearing, my wallet, my phone, and maybe my computer and some books if I had my backpack with me. I'd probably need to go through a lot of red tape to replace official documents like my passports and birth certificate. I'd also lose the envelope of sentimental objects important enough to take along through every move. However, most of my digital files are in the cloud, and getting new clothes and other stuff would be pretty easy. I'd also have a good story to tell in the future.

How Bad Would It Be If The Suitcase I'm Packing Got Lost?
For the first few days of my year in England, this was the case, and by the time my suitcase finally did arrive, I was happy but didn't need it quite as much. In my carry-on backpack I had brought my documents, my computer etc, and a change of clothes; I had to buy cheap suit and some household items to get through the first few days, but was pretty much set from that point on.

With these thoughts in my mind, I feel more free to get rid of unimportant or easily replaceable items before I travel. I'm sure things will change once I get furniture and more permanent, expensive household items, but I like to think that the concept at the heart will remain the same: the destruction of my material possessions isn't as bad as it may seem.

Walking in the Rain

As I've mention before, I like to wear raincoats in the rain so that I can experience the elements without getting my clothes wet. I like the sound and feel of rain, and also the mood it brings wherever it falls.

When it rains and I'm out in nature, I listen to the sound of rain on leaves and watch water dripping from the trees and running along the ground. Insects seem to go into hiding during the rain, which can be nice.

When it rains and I'm in a city, I like watching the streams that form on sidewalks and roads and (hopefully) show an efficient drainage system at work. Rain can have an isolating effect on pedestrians-- people are less likely to stop and talk to me when I'm walking in the rain. On the other hand, sheltering from the rain in a bus stop or something with other people seems to make folks more friendly.

Sometimes it seems a bit strange that water falls from the sky, but I suppose that's the world we live in.

Fun With Tutorials

The tutorial system at Oxford involves students meeting one on one with professors and discussing a particular area of knowledge. In the biology program, among others, the student will write an essay in advance of the tutorial, and in the meeting itself, the professor will give feedback and bring up areas or angles the student might not have considered.

Different professors, of course, have different styles. Some have done fieldwork all around the world and use lots of examples from their personal experience. Others like to take the conversation to areas not covered in the reading (I see you've written about global warming; what's your favorite type of sustainable energy and why?). I've had tea to drink during exactly two tutorials, which was nice.

It's not a bad system.

Second Language Descriptions

Many cultures around the world eat insects, so any study of these practices involves reading research from a great variety of locations. Fortunately for me, English seems to be the main language of research; many of the papers I'm reading were either translated into English or written in English by people for whom it is a second or third language. I very much enjoy reading these papers because while they have the same tendency towards facts and the scientific method, the language used is often less clinical and more engaging than in papers by people used to reading and writing boring things in English such as this explanatory paragraph.

My favorite quote yet comes from an Indian researcher: "Although man suffers and benefits from the insect legions ... the suffering outweighs the benefits." I personally would have never thought to describe insects as legion, but it gives the paper's introduction an exciting sci-fi feel, and the dramatic discussion of man's suffering doesn't hurt either. Given the technical correctness of the actual content of this paper, I don't see why science writing can't be a little less frigid.

Research and Modding Programs

Over the next few weeks, I'll be working on a paper about various aspects of insect farming. Among other things, this involves a lot of online research: looking up papers, saving them to some sort of reference bank, and citing them properly in my paper. It's a task that takes a lot of time and effort, especially if it's not done right.

Fortunately, I spent a large part of last weekend modding Skyrim-- searching the internet for good mods, downloading them to a mod organizing program, and making sure files are where they need to be and are used properly. It's a lot of work, but it's the only way for me to meet Frodo and his companions in every compatible game.

There's a great satisfaction that comes from installing several dozen mods and managing to not have the game instantly crash on startup. Time and effort are rewarded, but also careful planning. In a similar (but hopefully less complicated) manner, I got great satisfaction from setting up a reference-managing program and being able to save papers and their metadata with just one click, as cliche as that is. I'd like to thank the creators of both the mod-organizing program and the reference-managing program for making the technology so accessible.

Sweaters and Seizing the Moment

A few months ago, holes started to appear in the elbows of my favorite sweater, the navy blue wool that's kept me warm since high school. It was only a matter of time until the holes became more substantial than the sweater itself. I tried learning how to knit a replacement, but after making a simple hat, it was clear that knitting a good sweater is a lot easier said than done-- by the time I had enough practice, I would be back in the Georgia summer.

Fortunately, there was a shopping centre nearby with a reasonably-priced clothing store. They had shelves of sweaters in every color, but I kept putting off the purchase, thinking that tomorrow would be more convenient than today. In January, the shopping centre closed and the clothing store moved to a smaller location nearby. I didn't think anything of it, but when my old sweater finally bit the dust and I commited to a shopping trip, I found that the new location only stocked three colors of sweater. It was a tragedy.

It wouldn't be the end of the world, of course, to have a sky blue, teal, or olive green sweater, but it made me think of all the other things I could miss by putting them off until they're no longer an option. Over the next few months, I'm trying to do things in the today rather than waiting for the tomorrow. There may be some conflict inherent in that sentence, but at least I'm not writing this tomorrow.

I did eventually get a new navy blue sweater-- better today than tomorrow, but better late than never, also.

Raffles for Research

Part of being a college student is being the target of many emails about surveys, studies, and other students' psychology projects. In general, I suppose, it's easier to get college students to participate in a research study than a more representative sample of the human race.

Imagine the scene: you have access to the student mailing list and your study about how carbonated drinks affect concentration is all ready to go. Out of the hundreds or even thousands of students who will get an email, how do you get twenty or fifty to show up? If you have a lot of friends, you could ask them personally, but "n = my friends" would likely not go well when defending your thesis.

The answer, of course, is incentives, and money is the most effective (or Amazon gift cards, which are essentially money at this point). The larger the incentive, the more representative of the population your subjects will be-- if you're asking for volunteers, you will be studying people who like to volunteer for things, but if you offer $100 per hour, you will be studying a much wider variety of people.

The problem, then, is that research funding is limited. One common work-around is entering participants into a raffle (for an iPad, for example) instead of paying each participant individually. Whenever I see that the incentive for research is a raffle, I assume that it's less expensive for the researchers than paying people individually. I'm not generally optimistic about my chances of winning a raffle, so I usually just ignore any studies that leave most participants empty-handed.

I recently got an email about a psychology study with both fixed pay (five pounds for half an hour) and a raffle for prizes of up to fifty pounds. Usually, I would consider this a good deal, but the study involves completing speed and accuracy tasks while receiving "mildly painful electric shocks". I suppose you could luck out and be in the control group, but I don't need five pounds quite enough to take that chance.

Headache Medication

There's a sequence of steps I follow to get rid of headaches, and while it may not be the best approach, I've never had a headache that didn't eventually go away. If step 1 doesn't work, I go on to step 2, and so on. The steps are:

1. Drink something-- maybe the headache is caused by lack of water.
2. Eat something-- maybe the headache is caused by lack of food. This often happens on days I find something to do that's more interesting than meals.
3. Try to sleep-- if I wake up and still have a headache, I'm probably just sick.
4. Try to sleep with a damp cloth over my eyes-- I don't know what this does, but it's what my parents taught me and it seems to work.

I would assume that step 5 is to find some painkillers, but I just finished with step 4 a few minutes ago and I don't have a headache anymore.

Jar Size Reasons

The local grocery store sells both jelly and peanut butter at very reasonable prices, but each peanut butter jar is roughly 2/3 the size of a jelly jar. If, by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you consume peanut butter and jelly at a roughly equal rate, you'll have 1/3 of a jar of jelly left over when the peanut butter runs out.

This has happened to me several times. One solution to this problem is buying 2 jelly jars and 3 peanut butter jars at a time so that everything evens out in the end. An interesting question, then, is whether the jar size discrepancy is a coincidence or a purposeful move to increase bulk purchases from the peanut butter and jelly sandwich demographic. I'm not sure if PBJ is the same cultural phenomenon in the UK as it is in the US; maybe the extra 1/3 jelly is meant to be spread on scones or something like that.

Funnily enough, the jar of peanut butter costs more than twice as much as the jar of jelly. Are peanuts that much more expensive than strawberries, or is it something about the processing or other ingredients? The speculation never ends.

Comparing Buses

Pretentious statements are in italics.

I've had a few experiences with intercity bus travel both in the US and the UK, and while these encounters can't be generalized to sweeping cultural statements, my liberal arts education drives me to make sensationalist statements qualified by words like 'may' and 'might' that give plausible deniability.

The first difference is in the names: intercity buses in the UK are 'coaches'. National Express and Greyhound seem to be the major companies in the UK and the US, respectively, and they have the same system of acceptably comfortable seats and 3am stops at gas stations for snacks and smoke breaks.

In my experience, Greyhound buses are more crowded and noisy than their UK cousins. Could this be indicative of the more reserved nature of passengers in Britain?

Travelling with National Express was stressful for me because the bus driver did not announce the names of the multiple stops in each town or even the names of the towns we were stopping in. Since I usually travel at night, it was very difficult to tell when my stop was or if I had missed it. This lack of announced information could be rooted in a culture of unwritten rules and traditions.

I should probably say that I've enjoyed travelling on buses in both countries, and, as one might expect, the experience improves with experience.

Reasons to Not Get a Haircut

It's been a couple months since my last haircut and the time has probably come for me to get another one. Here are some of the reasons I don't look forward to haircuts:

1. I have to find a barber shop. Generally, I try to get each haircut at a new barber shop in case I offended someone at the last barber shop by breaking an unwritten rule of customer etiquette.
2. It costs money, and the added element of tipping makes payment ambiguous and confusing.
3. I still don't have a good answer for the "how would you like it?" question. The best I can usually come up with is "like it is now, but shorter."
4. The two options for conversation during a haircut tend to be (sometimes) forced conversation with the hairdresser or a ten-minute silence punctuated by "hold still" and "tilt your head, please." Neither of these tends to be much fun; my favorite outcome is the hairdresser talking to another hairdresser the entire time.
5. I'm worried that I'll walk into a barber shop and ask for a haircut and it'll turn out I'm actually in a shoe store or somewhere else where they don't give haircuts.

As I'm sure you can see, most of the issues I have with haircuts are on my end. If grocery shopping and getting fast food are a 1 on the social difficulty scale, a sit-down restaurant is a 2 and getting a haircut is at least a 3. In the end, I suppose I'm thankful that haircuts are more stressful than anything else that usually happens in my week.

Fun With Climate Change

I'm writing an essay this week that involves climate change and two of my main sources are the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change). From what I've read so far, these groups disagree on almost every point in the climate change discussion, drawing very different conclusions from the available data. They even use different language to talk about the same concepts: the IPCC says 'acidification' and the NIPCC says 'declining pH'.

Another highlight of my reading time was my struggle with vocabulary; I spent about five minutes reading about 'sulfur and nitrogen deposition via precipitation' before realizing that the paper was talking about acid rain.

Serial Television

One of my favorite TV shows is Vikings, a historical drama set during the Viking invasions of England and France and featuring the family of Ragnar Lodbrok. The fourth season of this show premiered today and I resigned myself to waiting until the season was released on Amazon Prime. Usually seasons of shows will be released a year or more after they first air.

When I checked Amazon Prime, however, I saw that the premier episode was already up and available for viewing, and each subsequent episode will be hosted there as well. For the first time, then, I'll have the experience of watching a show week by week as episodes come out. I'm looking forward to this new and strange aspect of TV and hoping that the cliffhangers won't drive me crazy.

Science Facts: Underground Succulents

In desert environments, water is a resource of primary importance, so plants tend to take up as much water as possible and lose as little water as possible from day to day. Most water in plants is lost through transpiration, a process that cools the plant.

One type of desert plant keeps cool by having not only its roots underground, but most of its leaves as well. This may seem counterproductive to the purpose of leaves, but in this plant the tips of the leaves are heavily coated with wax and emerge just above the ground's surface. These wax tips serve as little windows for sunlight to reach the rest of the photosynthetic tissue in the underground leaves.