Blogsford

Wahey, it's NIMBioS

2010-07-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.nimbios.org/personnel/visitors2010

NIMBioS congratulates the newest award recipients for 2010

2010-01-02T15:35:00.000-08:00

NIMBioS congratulates the newest award recipients for 2010

yep, GIS and Epidemiology.

Statistics

2009-11-17T13:28:00.000-08:00

"p-value and model probability: it's like a hamburger and a schoolbus - they're just two different things." - David Anderson, AIC workshop, 11/16/09

black and white and red all over

2009-10-29T17:55:00.000-07:00

“So, a zebra breaks out of the zoo and she finds her way to a farm. She goes up to a big fat weird brown thing and says, “Hi, I’m a zebra. What are you?” “I’m a cow.” “And what do you do?” “I give the farmer milk.” Then she goes up to a funny looking little white thing and says,”Hi, I’m a zebra. What are you?” “I’m a chicken.” “And what do you do?” “I lay eggs for the farmer.” Then the zebra goes up to a very handsome beast that looks almost exactly like her but without the stripes. She runs over to it and says, “Hi, I’m a zebra. What are you?” “I’m a stallion” says the stallion. “Wow!” says the zebra, “and what do you do?” “Take off those pajamas, darling, and I’ll show you.”

baboon skull

2009-05-05T15:40:00.001-07:00

baboon skull
Originally uploaded by cdmeliza

Sometimes people are really good to me!

Another reason to love NCEAS

2009-04-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Oh yes! The reasons keep coming!

I disorganiz'edly ensconce myself in a 'spare office' for the privacy of Skyping into a seminar at Stanford. I realise that yes, while I brought a notepad, I brought no pen.

No matter! Open the top drawer of the desk to find a Second Nature notepad (superiority reigns), a choice of ballpoint, liquiball, pencil or highlighter.

'tis fine to be here. On on.

Green light

2009-03-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

So there I was, in SF, about a month ago now, for my dear lovely fiance's birthday (Mike). We had gone out to sushi with a bunch of friends, then a subset of those friends carried on to a bar, and then, as we were rolling down the Mission, making ready to re-board the landship, I declared a need to visit a euphemism.
So we ducked into a lovely taco shop, and the lady paid her visit, and the gentlemen challenged their drinking with some tasty treats. To go. Which were presented in boxes, rather than simply wrapped in foil.
Argh!! said the greenie in me. Styrofoam boxes to pay for my visit! Oh no! But I kept quiet and babbled my incomprehensible melange of Spanishes and off we went.
Later, as I was dealing with the disposal of the 'to go' taco boxes (I mean seriously? Really?), I noticed that they were not styrofoam. The boxes were compostible, and the entirely superflous forks were cornplastic.

I have to say it was a little light of hope. A city night of drankin' with a booze-fueled snackfest in a rather unsavory corner of the Mission (16th st BART station), and they were using environmentally friendly packaging. Happiness.

New BlogPost

2009-03-04T14:01:00.001-08:00

Yes! This is a new blogpost. I'm not dead. I just don't blog much. I'm going to open this up to Mike, who will change the way this blog operates. FOREVER.

the end of the long journey - the UK

2007-10-09T18:15:00.001-07:00

Joburg, Part V
Well, it's probably no surprise that my 13 hour layover in Joburg was spent reading the new Harry Potter in close proximity to a, um, facility. I did get the book 7 hours before any americans, though. ha.

Zurich
Yes, there was another stopover, and another plane.

UK
Ah, home sweet nearly home. Mum thought I looked a bit grim, and she said my luggage smelled like Ghana (warm oily fish. not pleasant). It took quite a few days to recover, but soon I was back in action and laundered. I arrived in time for the summer floods (here's someone's pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/srahtz/sets/72157601074744062/) to really get underway... we weren't affected, since the college is built on high ground, but there was lots of people who couldn't get into Oxford and the resulting floods of the Thames was quite spectacular. The floodplain at Port Meadow (some of the remaining common grounds in Oxford) was full, and people all seemed to be drawn there to stare at the water stretching all the way to Wolvercote. The following week, once the most dangerous releases of the Thames were settling down, I watched some brave kite surfers get onto the flood. It was awesome. Only the grazing animals seemed a bit upset, since they were wedged onto a small strip of dry land, so a few of the cows and horses were being mischievous and chasing people.

That is really much of the story. Of course there are a million things that I didn't write down here, and the more ecological amongst you should feel free to ask me about all the projects and ideas I picked up out there... those of you who want to bully me about my cultural ignorance, please do - I'm only associated with anthro departments, I make no claims to understanding people at all. If anyone wants travel recommendations, I'm not much use, since I bummed around other peoples' fieldsites (thanks to everyone again); but I can recommend the guidebooks that I used. Yes, you can borrow them too.

Ghana

2007-10-09T18:14:00.001-07:00

Ghana
I found Ghana to be weird and wonderful in another new way. I'm sure I'll get in trouble for anything I say about it, but the word corruption doesn't even begin to describe the system of favors and mixed allegiances that seems to govern most of life there, not just the wildlife world.
Accra was overwhelmingly busy and city-like, not to mention utterly confusing to me. Fortunately, I was being whisked around by a couple of people who really knew what they were doing. Cole and Justin. We ended up staying in the Hotel Shangri-La, which had a nice swimming pool, an earsplitting frog chorus in the evening, running hot water for showers (after a while in Africa, this really is a treat), and decent food.

I was tagging along on a summer expedition, which for Cole, was to check up on his camera traps and ongoing data collection in Mole National Park in the north of Ghana; for Justin, this was his big spotlight hollywood moment. The National Geographic people were making a documentary of his high-profile Science paper and ongoing study of the links between the fisheries and bushmeat trade and the general ecological upset that results in more baboons than anything else in national parks.

Having realised that perhaps not everyone they were looking for was going to partcipate in the documentary, the crew quickly twigged to the fact that Cole is a tall, good-looking and good-natured guy (sorry folks, it's the truth) that could stand in as a wildlife researcher extraordinaire in the film. Alas, I don't quite qualify, so I was definitely excess baggage... but no matter. I still had a chance to see how these documentaries get created and tweaked, and I saw bits of Ghana that I don't think I would have, left to my own devices. Here's their blog about doing documentaries http://www.seastudios.com/behindscenes.php

There is a part of Accra on the coast called Jamestown, which is where the fishermen come in. This was one of the most beautiful sights around Accra - seeing the big fishing boats pulled up on the shore; and watching one being hollowed out of a huge tree trunk. However, it was also here that I discovered something very disturbing to me. There were no seagulls. There were no cats. There was lots of refuse and bits of fish muck around (as well as discarded underwear and human feces). We asked where the seagulls were; the answer? They ate them. I know that there is a bushmeat crisis, but I didn't really cotton on to the idea that a society that will eat anything, eats everything. They ate all the damn seagulls.

One of the most epic and complicated parts of the documentary was trying to film anything where bushmeat was being sold. It is sold everywhere. It is sold as good chop at good chophouses (places where you get some stew and starch and chow down; these can be shacks on the side of highways, or more established cafes in towns). You can buy bushmeat in the markets in the cities and towns, if you know where to go. You can buy it on the side of the road. I saw a Royal Duiker and a Pangolin for the first time, upside down, alive, in someone's hands on the road. However, they know it's not okay to be filmed. In the major markets, there are "bushmeat queens" who are the women who chop up the meat and sell it. They are in charge. You don't mess with them. If they say you can't come and film, you can't. End of story. I don't know what would happen to someone violating this, but it wouldn't be safe. At all. So there was a lot of days of the crew trying to get to places with all their gear, only to find out they couldn't film. It got quite exasperating, as it meant rearranging travel all the time.

One trip went out to Shai Hills Resource Reserve, which is a pretty well established park. The website will tell you that there are animals there. There are not many. There's some Kob (big antelopey things), and a lot of baboons at the guard station. Otherwise, it's a very pretty rolling savanna plain. I think most of the wildlife was eaten a long time ago.

We went from Accra to Kumasi, which is the center of the Ashanti Kingdom, and also the location of a HUGE market that is really impossible to navigate and mostly smells of oily fish and exhaust fumes, but is absolutely fascinating. I spent a day wandering around the city, went to the historical touristy center, where they have all kinds of seriously precious artifacts in a 'museum' that is just some cabinets around the edge of a courtyard like enclosure. They have the king's various totems in there, including a pot, held down by pillows that contains the spirit of the Ashanti. I mean all the power of the kingdom, is in a little cabinet, without a lock, in a courtyard. I and another eager fellow were urging them that they need more security as well as better information about their artifacts. The woman just politely recited her stock tour material for us again and said she might tell someone else about our ideas.

I saw how they make the weights that are symbols of ashanti, which are used in trade (similar to money, but also, not really); I also went to a drum maker's shop and watched part of the process of making a big skin drum. I watched the kente cloth weavers; men sitting at looms that are about 12 feet long stretched out, and they carefully feed the thread and run the comb. It's only really done by men, apparently, and there is no photography allowed. It was intriguing, but I felt slightly invasive, despite it being set up as a tourist attraction.

I managed to walk quite a way up one of the arterial roads of Kumasi and get up on a hill. I looked down on the market from above, and realised quite how much space it takes up - some people just spend their whole lives in it. I also saw the edges of town, the roads where things are fixed, or just stay... like cars and trucks. There was one corner where the retaining wall was built of all kinds of junk, but one part was a car that had rusted beyond recognition and had no engine or wheels, but the door worked, so some guy was hanging out in the car, just sitting, as part of a wall.

On we went up to Mole National Park, in the north. Mole is a savanna park, it is fairly huge, and clearly harder to access than other parks. I think this is partly why there is still wildlife there. We stayed at the Mole Motel, which is the only place you can stay at the park, or really even the only place you stay near the park. They lose reservations all the time. People show up after 7 hour taxi rides with nowhere else to go and are told they have no beds. They are kind of obnoxious about it too. It's quite a remarkable place. But there it is. It overlooks a nice big waterhole where the ellies come in. It has huge baboon problems, patas monkeys like to take food off the tables, but they don't physically attack people - mostly.

I was standing at our breakfast table, and a big male patas was walking along a railing in front of me, clearly after the sugar or jam sitting on the table. All of the waitstaff were indoors, so I was literally pacing this monkey along the rail, trying to bodyblock him. So his buddy grabbed the butter dish while I was at the other end of the table, and I ran over there, and the big male shoved his hand in the jam and rammed it in his mouth, then hopped back on the rail. So of course I got annoyed and said "get out" and waved my hand in his direction - at which point he jumped and slapped my hand with his. So yes, I have been slapped by a monkey. It was a little bit scary, but they're not that big, so I wasn't too terrified. The baboons, on the other hand, they are truly scary. Apparently they respond to male voices (like the ones in Kibale) and just aren't afraid of women. They grab people's belongings out of their hands, they rush you with fangs bared, and apparenly have attacked female tourists at the Mole Motel. I naturally managed to piss off a couple of males who were working an open door, and Cole had to come along and shout at them before they backed down. It makes it hard to see how I could do research on them, but I figure if the waitstaff can use slingshots to scare them off, that'll have to be my technique too. I'm not lugging a big man around just to rescue me from the scary animals. Nope. No.

Again, the electric. Ghana likes selling it to neighboring countries too, and as a result, at Mole, there was a 36 hour rotation of 12 hours on, 24 hours off. In addition to this was a drought and general lack of water. Which meant being sweaty and gross quite a lot of the time. At some point, one of the crew started getting cramps and fever... which gradually made its way around everyone. I won't bore anyone with details, but my birthday was spent in the back of a truck on a bumpy road for 7 hours trying not to hurl. Swiss Air tried not to let me leave Joburg, offering me the Joburg hospital. NO WAY... I staggered onto the plane, much to their disgust. I arrived in England looking a bit rough; it's the first time Africa has made me ill. And the last, of course.

Namibia

2007-10-09T17:02:00.001-07:00

I went to Etosha National Park in Namibia to join some old friends from the Getz lab at Berkeley - also known as the Anthrax crew. Yes, they are studying anthrax epidemics in Etosha. They were also organizing a centennial conference in celebration of Etosha, so I demanded to be put to work on sampling and more practical conference organization.

Once again, I seemed to be a fecal sample totem. This time I went out with Pauline and Olivier, collecting zebra feces. On the first day, Olivier turned to me and said "do you know how to sex a zebra?" - I, of course, started envisioning all kinds of things, but it turns out that you really can look at the back end of a zebra and tell pretty easily. The boys have, um, tight white buttcheeks. Females, particularly after they have had a foal or two, are more distinct. It was definitely exciting driving around the Etosha pan and pausing to wait for the huge herds of zebra, just keeping an eye out for a lifting tail and then keeping a close eye on the location while confirming the sex of the individual. I also watched the realization of legacy in wildlife biology - the technique that Pauline was using to collect DNA from the feces had been passed on to her by another friend of mine, Clint Epps. So this was known as the Clint technique. I'm not sure I want poop drying and scraping named after me, but Clint should be proud of a named methodology.
One interesting zebra factoid - in Etosha, they have quite a few melanistic zebras. They are simply zebras that are all black (or rather, dark brown); they just aren't striped. It looks slightly odd, but there's no real reason why they shouldn't exist, and apparently it doesn't really affect survival, because they are there. Anyone who has thoughts on this, feel free to air them.

I also had a chance to see a site that I had only previously seen in talks - Mushara. A professor and her husband have a very remote site in Etosha where they study the accoustics of elephants. They have challenged some of the widely held beliefs about rumble calls and are collecting some amazing data on social structure and demography. Their site only exists during part of the year, and is simply a tower made of rebar. They have a fence erected around it so that lions don't get in at night - but have anyway. It is only accessible by firebreak roads, which means you have to be fairly confident about driving quite quickly through light sand. Sort of like real snow driving. Essentially, there were some fecal samples that needed transporting, so I had a unique chance to see the site and talk to the O'Connell-Rodwells http://www.utopiascientific.org/.

The centennial conference was amazingly well organized (I'm not taking credit, Wendy did a lot of work, and all the rest of the Anthrax team did a great job managing the flow); the talks were varied and interesting, and people did a lot of networking. Etosha is an amazing place, in a country that has the second lowest people density in the world (after Mongolia). They are on the edge of getting into bioinformatics (to manage data resources in ecology) and are facing the conflict of getting tourist dollars and managing a natural resource as a wilderness-like area.

The conference was in a nice lodge just outside the park, and so there was quite a few opportunities for drinking a few and chatting. One such evening, I had decided I was quite exhausted, and stopped after the first beer and wanted to get an early night. I wandered off towards my room, came around a corner, and suddenly had the feeling that a tree had just moved. I turned around and saw several skinny trees in front of me; then a few of them swayed. Hang on, what's going on here? I only drank one beer. I looked up to see a huge bull giraffe noshing on the treetops - all I could see was about 8 feet of legs! He looped down out of the tree and looked at me when I laughed, then walked over to the next tree a few feet away and started going to town on that one. Giraffes out of context are really tall.

Uganda

2007-10-09T17:01:00.001-07:00

I landed in Uganda in the evening, the plane coming down over lake Vic. What a treat to see fishing boats and sunset over such a large lake; welcome to Uganda! I got out of the plane, found my massive bag (packing for 2 months with 3 different climates including field and conference is an art), and lugged it all outside; I bought the visa, changed my money at the desk as instructed and was ready to find my ride to the hotel. Which they promised. Over email; they had all the flight details. After about a half hour and much refusal on my part of other less savory offers, I agreed to take a taxi to the hotel. I really appreciated their response to my query about the emails we had exchanged - "we weren't sure you were real". At this point, I wasn't sure either, so I happily went up to my awesome room with four beds, mosquito nets (but no shower), a gecko to keep me company, and sure enough, the next morning, I met Tony Goldberg at breakfast. In all, about 7 of us were heading to Kibale from Entebbe, so we split a bus trip there...

I cruised around Kibale and the local area with the Kibale EcoHealth Project for the first few days. We hiked through forest fragments, learned how to smell colobus monkeys on the trail, how to navigate the small grid system within Kibale NP and did some sampling in plantations, fragments, streambeds, wells and villages. The EcoHealth Project is a whole system of looking at disease, wherein they (Tom and Tony) are sampling people, livestock, monkeys and the water that connects them. Since they are veterinary folks, and had vets with them, they had some very exciting equipment - lots of BL2 protective gear for looking at blood samples, and all kinds of drip bags and collection cups (yes, urinary) for looking at the water supply. Once I understood that crypto and giardia are pretty much what they were looking for in all the water we were dipping our hands into, and yes, people had managed to catch them in the past, I started paying a little more attention to my hand-to-mouth contact. After a lot of chat and hiking and more discussion about models and GIS work in the project, I realised that there are so many scales that are important in the project and that it is a huge undertaking. More than that, it is a great model system for looking into other locations with similar structure and set up... hmmmm.

The EcoHealth house at Kibale has the wonderful nickname of Mango Palace (due to mango flies, not luscious fruit). What is a mango fly? Well, if your clothes are wet and you hang them up outside, these lovely flies lay their eggs on them. You put on the clothes, the larvae burrow into your skin, you itch and swell and have wiggly things under your skin. Rather unpleasant. Lesson is: dry your clothes under a mosquito net and keep your sweaty junk indoors.

I had been eating all my meals with the folks at the Mango Palace - pretty much mooching off them entirely. The food up at Kibale is fantastic - there are some local cooks who are employed through the field site, and they make wonderful vegetarian food, with whatever you bring in from the nearest town. Since food comes in irregularly, due to trips out being a bit complicated, there's a lot of repetition, but there's nothing that some Top Up (hot sauce) won't fix. Mostly we ate beans and stewed matooke (ma-to-kay), which is a banana starchy thing like plantain, and is the "national dish" of Uganda. There was sometimes g-nut sauce (groundnut), and some squash, and other green vegetables when they were around. The best part was the chapatis. Big leathery chapatis, which are great with matooke and beans, or with some honey. Main course and dessert in one.

One of my favorite Uganda traditions that is common to other bantu language cultures is the use of mpacos - a sort of pet name. Whereas Swahili or Kiswahili is the official language of Uganda, local bantu languages persist. Near Kibale are a couple of tribes whose languages are in the region; I was mostly in contact with Rotoro, the language of the Toro or Mutoro (Mu is people). There are around 12 mpacos, and when you meet someone, you ask how they are, what their name is and what their mpaco is. I tried asking about mpacos, but got mixed answers on some obvious questions. I think there are some male and female specific ones, but not all of them are; some of them have meanings, but I couldn't get consistent results on that, either. I was given Akiki, which may imply something princessy or tall, but that might have been someone making fun of me. The Ugandans I have met are, to a person, happy, laughing, kind and communicative. So I spent a lot of time having half-english, half-rotoro and totally giddy nonsensical conversations while I was there.

After a few days, the Chapmans got to Kibale. For anyone unclear on this, Colin Chapman is my supervisor at McGill. He's my boss. Even though he hates any titular notions of responsibility, the fact is, he is my boss. His wife, Lauren is a phenomenal fish biologist, who works on aquatic systems and morphological changes in fish - at least, that's the parts I had the pleasure of finding out about. I am sure, like Colin, that she works on many many things.

I had a sort of switch of allegiances from the EcoHealth project over to the McGill folks at Chap House, and started going along with students collecting monkey data more intensively. It turns out that I am quite a totem for fecal sampling. Imagine, if you will, that you are walking through some really nice jungly forest, looking for groups of monkeys up in the trees. They are not totally happy to have you follow them, so they sometimes move away, but mostly, they're just looking for some good leaves to eat. So they settle down to some eating; and pooping. In order to study monkeys via their fecal samples, you want to collect freshly fallen samples, preferrably from identifiable individuals (as in, the large male or the small female with a baby). So, you stand under the tree until you hear crap raining down. Quite literally. Then you look for fresh pellets. It's often hard to know which tree is about to rain down crap, or whether a monkey will pee from great heights as you're standing there. Until now. Guaranteed, if I'm standing there, it'll happen. Is this a good thing? It certainly helped Stacey collect a few samples.

Aside from that hilarity, I got a chance to see both colobus species (black-and-white and red) for more than a few minutes (sitting there for hours while they sleep can inspire some crazy conversations), and to hear chimps roaring at 100 feet and see their nests; I also saw another 5 species of primates, a duiker, lots of butterflies and even a scared farming lady, who thought we were raiding baboons and came running out waving her arms yelling "Enkerebbe" (baboon).

While I was in Kibale, there was a chimp conference that celebrated chimp research in Kibale, but also gave me a good idea of the park itself, the history of research and how the various projects had come together. It was quite amazing, and I wished that I'd had a similar introduction to other study areas in the past. Part of the conference involved being entertained by a local school's singing group. I had somehow managed to be persuaded by a local man with a briefcase and a plastic recorder and an exquisite singing voice, to teach him the US national anthem. Irony is not wasted on me. It was a wonderful experience, because he didn't know notation per se, but knew do-re-mi notation. For someone who neither spoke English very well, nor had the background in western tonal structure that is jammed into our heads, he caught on really quickly. It was a little disconcerting to hear the bits that he didn't quite get - like some of the rhythms as the words get mashed into the tune, and the modulation that occurs. I also realised again how totally unsingable the star spangled is. The reproduction of our morning's lesson and transcription was proudly displayed through the voices of local school children. I hung my head in shame. I wish I had insisted on the Canadian anthem instead (McGill loyalties run strong). Fortunately, they know the British anthem because QE park is nearby and they've been having Liz celebrations galore.

Another delight a the conference was hearing about the Kasiisi project - the rural school has been doing teacher exchanges and penpal programs, among others, like feeding kids so they can go to class and providing boarding facilities. http://www.kasiisiproject.org/index.htm

One afternoon, I thought that a baboon had got onto the tin roof of the house I was in... it was shaking and shaking and crashing and crashing; then I realised it was an earthquake, so I stood in the doorway. It seriously lasted for over 3 minutes, just rocking and shaking. Even the monkeys kept quiet. Kibale is subject to the movement of the Albertine Rift, so earthquakes are quite common. After it calmed down again, the monkeys started calling out to each other, checking that the groups were still around. Everything else was still - it was quite creepy.

In addition to following monkey research, I also had a chance to play with the fish people. When a large sampling effort goes into effect, more hands are better. So I joined in with Lauren's project with her students, and we all loaded up the truck with wire basket fishtraps, boots, waterproofing, coolers for live fish to come back in, other containers for less live fish to come back in, and so on... and we set the traps in the river, wading into the edges. The local villagers were very curious as to what we were doing. We spent a while poring over trays of bottom muck, trying to see if there were invertebrates that the fish might be eating. My favorite moment was when we were ID-ing the fish coming out of the traps, and a student would inject them with formalin to preserve stomach contents (diet analysis), but some of the ciclids were allowed to be freed at the end. Lauren said "oh, you might like to see this one" and she gave the fish's mouth a little squeeze, and lots of little wiggly tails came out! Live mouth-brooding ciclid! Very cool.

After Kibale, I went to Jinja with the Chapmans for a couple of days - Jinja is at the source of the Nile. We went over a very heavily guarded dam, which provides much of the hydroelectric for Uganda. To control it would be to control a considerable resource. Photography of it is illegal. I'll take a moment to point out that Uganda has a wondeful system of selling electric to neighboring countries; in the process it actually turns off electric inside Uganda for rather long periods of time. So it's always good to ask what the schedule is for electric where you are.

I spent a day being a tourist in Jinja; it's a really nice old colonial town, with great old houses that are either tenements, US NGOs or falling down. Apparently, since it was the economic hub of the country for a while, there were lots of Indians and other Asians living there. Then they were all thrown out of the country during the great scourge. In the 90's all the shopfronts were closed in Jinja, and only now is it starting to come back. Parts of the residential roads reminded me of the Panama canal zone in the late 90s - lots of empty colonial housing with a backdrop of re-emerging jungle growth.

I decided I'd like to go to whatever tourist spot was the "source of the Nile", so I followed some signs along some empty dirt roads. I was convinced I must be on the wrong route, or going to a municipal controlled version of the source. But no, I got there, on a nice afternoon in the height of the tourist season, and I was the only person there. They opened up the bar for me, and a nice friend I made showed me the fastest flowing part coming out of lake Vic and took my tourist posed picture. It was very nice to see something that dramatic being very undramatic.

Joburg, Part I.

2007-10-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

I first flew into Joburg at the beginning of June - I had exchanged a few emails with professors I had never met, and agreed to meet them in Entebbe, Uganda, at a hotel for breakfast. Some people might flinch at such chancey ideas. I was just ready to go.
I spent a day in Joburg at the Ritz backpackers (not highly recommended, but if you are working within a budget, they do at least get you from the airport safely). I thought I'd go out and buy some supplies, so I wandered down the street, slightly jetlagged, to the nearest Spar. It was a nice day, the leaves were changing, I was strolling and breathing autmnal air. It probably should have occurred to me to notice that, as usual, everyone was in their car/SUV, not on the sidewalks. I noticed a charming sign in a parking lot explaining how much they weren't responsible for its users, and thought it would make a nice picture. A man walked past me as I was taking the picture, and I thought perhaps he might think I was a bit nuts. About 3 yards later, an old lady stopped me, in great alarm "Did you not see that black man? Were you not so terribly afraid?" - I suppose different cultures operate differently (ok, so I'm not quite that naiive, but clearly jetlag makes me forget the delights of post-apartheid reconciliation efforts). Ah, Joburg. Of course, in my attempts to actually get to Spar (the grocery store over there), there was no pedestrian route, because nobody walks to the shops, so I had to navigate a high-rise carpark just to get inside. (!)
I also greatly appreciated the artistic intertwining of razorwire and wisteria growing at the youth hostel - time to get out of civilization.

just prior to running a 1/2 marathon

2007-10-09T13:22:00.001-07:00

Bizz Johnson - 04
Originally uploaded by rwheeks

13 miles. Yep, I ran the whole thing.

Faceborg

2007-08-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, I know, where are the Africa stories? Fomenting, that's where.

For now, I'd like it to be known that this is a genuine email I just sent someone

"I can believe you left my Zombie army and stole all my pirate coins! I'm going to start chucking books at you next..."

am I spending too much time on Facebook?

sneak preview?

2007-05-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

Ah ha ha yes... on Friday I'm off to Uganda - here's the mammal list for Kibale.

Who's excited? I am.

Hooded

2007-05-23T18:21:00.001-07:00

Squashy hat and VLSB
Originally uploaded by sjryan3.

Almost a year after filing, I decided to go back and get the official "walk" done... I think the outfit quite suits me, don't you?

i am in ur dictionaries

2007-05-23T18:14:00.001-07:00

i am in ur dictionaries
Originally uploaded by thewbert.

I'm still all in on the ur meme.

my d00ds are all about Bayes these days. I should talk to them more.

Here we go; where are we going?

2007-05-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

I'm going to go and grab my doctoral scroll tomorrow at Berkeley - just because I want to wear the squashy hat and have my mum take pictures. They will be posted. I'm sure they will be frightening.

On June 1st I'm heading out for two months to Uganda, Namibia, South Africa and Ghana. This morning I looked at my tickets and realised that I'm flying from Ghana to Johannesburg the day after I leave Joburg for England. Complicated. No matter, I don't even have my passport right now, so it's not that relevant. Perhaps I might want a secretary one day.

I'm also swimming in a sea of vaccinations... It turns out that a full 10 years have elapsed since the first time I needed to get all shot up for Africa. Oh Joy. The Stanford travel clinic claim that I now hold a record of some kind for shots in one shot... for $800, I should damn well think so!

In addition, my discovery of pyrethin (Permethin?) treated bednets at Boots in England is still the prime source. Fortunately one can import them with mum.

However, every blog needs some meat to chew on: there's some interesting debate afoot:
In the community assemblage debate, wherein one looks at presence/absence matrices and tests some kind of model to see if competition is shaping the community, or "random chance"; there is huge debate. Raging for the last 25 years or so.
Solution: find a post-doc at Santa Fe Institute who actually knows about traditional probability and statistics and let them have at the argument. PHEW!! So instead of saying that the models and the tests are wrong, it's now "what's the question?". Yes, we never considered that! The process should determine the questions and actually be laid out as such. Hmph. Is this philosophical? Highly. (and don't even get him started on definitions of words like "random" and "chance" - apparently we ecologists are much too glib and don't really know what we're up to!).

So we should ask: where are we going? Enter some answers and set it up right, and Here we go!
However, the current state of affairs certainly makes for wonderfully snarky conversations in the sunshine down here in Bucolia.

If you have any null models in ecology that might posess similar qualms, I'd be delighted to hear about them.

on-on

Notwords

2007-02-05T23:22:00.000-08:00

Aha! Yes, long time no see... but this was worth a blog. I have found another notword that I LOOOVE:

Temporarely

What is this word? Is it a misspelling? Unlikely - this means that something happens rarely, but sometimes, and only fleetingly.

It is a cousin of automagic - something happens and there's a black box of some kind involved.

and How are We doing? The royal wee is learning to program in Java. It's quite a treat to be a decade older than my classmates, and to be learning the code in the silicon valley... oh yes, the industry still needs programmers, and they are bred as high-class software enginerds right here at Stanford.

I absolutely adore my professor. Yes, you heard it here, I think that Eric Roberts is the best teacher I could ever hope for. He wears Hawaiian shirts and sports the balding ponytail of a true programmer. He has all these amazing historic annecdotes about computer science, and loves telling us how he met people at conferences and then he giggles - ah, it's perfect!

I'm not very good at it yet, but it's already made my Matlab code a bit tidier. Oh yes, hello, Sadie is talking about for loops. Good Lord. Please may we iterate? Nyak nyak nyak.

sheesh. At some point I'll understand how to wrap the caboodle into an applet and publish it right here.

Oh, and in case we're worried about the progress of things, here's a sneak preview...

what's in your closet?

2006-09-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

closet organization is math

it's very exciting multi-dimensional spatial ecology

there are multiple stable states and quite a few unstable equilibria

such as stacking pairs of shoes.

they won't stay stacked.

they will migrate from the closet

but there are some very predictable areas over medium range time and space

such as camping gear shelves

roller coaster with sharp angles

2006-07-25T10:01:00.000-07:00

I was ready to relax. No, really. I was.
Somehow, being the completitor and having dissertatinated was enough.
But then, there was some kind of SNAFU with some paperwork in DC, and the NSF gave me a post-doc fellowship. Off we go again!

Here's an abstract blurb:
The goal of this bioinformatics project is to develop a spatially explicit, agent-based framework of interactions between human mediated landscape change and primate social ecology. This will provide a means to assess potential risks to primate population viability due to nutritional stress induced by social disruption and susceptibility to disease, especially novel pathogens. The framework will establish a tool to assess the human-wildlife interface in many systems wherein the large scale impacts of geographically explicit interaction between the landscape and individual behaviors of humans and wildlife may be poorly understood, but must be managed – for example in establishment of transfrontier park corridors...

At least they give you a chance to honestly state that you will have to learn some software in order to pursue such projects.

In case you didn't see the word PRIMATE in the first sentence, oh yes, we are back to the primates. Yea!! Post-dork begins.

things you can file

2006-07-12T16:56:00.000-07:00

nails
metal bars in jails
dissertations.

Yes, I filed my dissertation. The doctor is in. I am now Sadie Jane Ryan, PhD.

In addition, Holly and I managed to get a band on the gel. Yay PCR.

Farty fish

2006-06-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

I knew that herring are spectacularly weird in that they communicate via farts (FRTs), but this article was sent to me on Gmail as Whales Slap Flatulent Prey and I have to say that it is something special to light up anyone's day.

what does a herring fart sound like, you ask - oooo tee hee

living in a snotty neighborhood

2006-06-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

So we have the delightful designation of living in a Potrero Hill zipcode. However, we definitely live in the Mission. I stumbled across something billing itself as a neighborhood guide to Potrero Hill, and enjoyed immensely the picture of a stretched limo reaching understanding of "hill".

the value of alpha - this is a rant for sure.

2006-06-11T20:52:00.000-07:00

I find myself wrestling with nerdly things... stats until 2 in the morning. No, the quality of my work does not actually improve with reading too many articles about stats, rather I become less and less enamoured of the habits of 'good scientists' who use overly complicated models of strangely transformed parameters to fit the data with a good p value. (sorry that's p value).

Having followed some methods to derive an interesting measure, one famous author publishes in Ecology saying this was above 0.9, and is thus close to 1, whereas 0.85 is not. I dutifully use 8 times the data and ooh, throw the same idea at a t-test - is it different from 1? p says no. But are the other measures that are similar but different also different than 1? p says no. So are the bigger ones (0.88, 0.87, etc) closer to 1 than 0.83? Can't tell. Therefore reviewers will throw me out - this is not significant. So should I thus just report that things are 'closer' or 'farther' from 1? Should I bootstrap, jackknife, simulate and monte carlo my way to significance? Is it okay to say wwwwell my friends, a p of 0.06 is hella less likely than p of 0.3?

Non parametric you say? I saw the sign, and it opened up my mind, I saw the sign... thanks, Ace of Base. Wilcoxon, he says this is much more sensitive. I find the article "the allure of nonparametrics" most pleasing.

Or should I instead befuddle my reviewers and put it all in a likelihood framework? Ah well, yes, friends, let us be brothers, my AIC value is much smaller when this model is used, rather than this one. Do you not know that this is therefore a superior model of what is going on? Even better, shall I disregard any significance and use F-ratios?

And many of my more egg-headed stats-loving friends will say - go Bayesian dude, it changed my world - as though it's some kind of tripped out drug where you achieve knowledge of the prior and thus have universal visions of ecology.

There's a time and a place, my friends, but I'm still a fan of saying hey, this could be a really interesting story. Go out there, collect more data, prove me right or wrong, or find a more sophisticated way to probe this. But wouldn't you like to know?

Animal Health for the Environment And Development

2006-06-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

sometimes you go to meetings, and people say lots of stuff, and not a lot ever comes of it. I went to a great meeting in March in South Africa with the WCS AHEAD people, and it got written up in the Kruger Park Times as heralding a new vision and good things to come. Read the article here. This is crazy times for transfrontier park issues.
Also, I found out that I'm in this book - buried amongst co-authors on an abstract. Does this lend me cred?

Cats in Sinks?

2006-06-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

No, now it's kittenwar it's like those ugly baby contests

You can look okay in ski boots

2006-05-31T22:06:00.000-07:00

ah yes, the season is well over, but here's a nice shot of me doing my best to look all bad and stuff, while probably pretty drunk off one of those moreliquorthancoffee drinks.

for those following my story, the cholesterol is a little high... dagnammit. Genetics+Grad School. But just to be clear about those ads on TV, they might want to look at a family tree sometime about their laws of inheritance.

Academic vanity

2006-05-24T22:03:00.000-07:00

Feeling vaguely useless as I stick around for another year of this unglorious life, despite having written a dissertation - yes, I am smugly holding onto fellowship funding until the next thing wanders my way - I decided to see if I could download my citations into Endnote, because I am intolerably bad at entering references properly.

We all know about these academic women, who, upon finding a tolerable man, are whisked off to wed, but don't change their name anywhere noticeable. This is not a refusal of a new name, a sharp feminist rebuke to the man who dared ask, simply that you must keep publishing under the same name, or your dear followers get confused.
But oh, as I discovered, you can get in trouble with initials too. I happily assumed that the ISI Web of Science gods had deemed my early record beneath their contempt and thus Ryan, SJ is wowing the world with an astounding three co-authored pubs. But then I realised that something didn't add up. So I went back into WoS, snorkeling around, armed with some keywords (there are a lot of my doppel gang working in the strange world of clinical statistical papers with a high spewjargon factor) - didn't I work on Gorillas? Wasn't that Oecologia paper likely to show up somewhere like this? I may be buried in co-author lists, but I did my part. Who is this Ryan, S and who does she work for?

So call it vanity, call it my unpreparedness, but I now appear to have two academic names already. Shame.

Ah, yes, the CHE has a nice one about my nemesis, the impact factor:

It always takes forever

2006-05-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I finally decided to do something about turning 30 soon. I went to the doctor for a checkup. All went well, but it turns out you can't just show up to get cholesterol tests, you have to fast for 12 hours beforehand.
So today is the blessed day. I dilligently stopped consuming anything but water from 8pm onwards last night. I forewent (nice verb, eh?) my morning coffee. The agony. The horror. But all was well, I decided to drive over to Berkeley and make a nice trip of it, stopping in some shops.
But I can't get the car out of the garage. Some casual has parked his truck, windows rolled down for all the world to enjoy, right between the two garages. Now, you might think that this is a bit silly - if you're going to park all over the sidewalk in an illegal and inconvenient way, at least try to only get in trouble with one garaged car owner. But no, right in the middle.
So I look at the truck a bit, go to the liquor store next door and ask if it belongs to anyone (in English), walk up the block and ask the various drunks and strange crazies if they know who it belongs to (in English and Spanish). Then I stand by the truck and practice my French a bit. I notice that there is already a note on the steering wheel saying "Next time I will tow you". Yea! Power to the little old lady with the disabled sticker on her car that was clearly procured by one of her numerous offspring and not remotely necessary.
However, I still need to get my car out. Now I'm getting hungry. I'm fasting - we're on around 14 hours now. No coffee. The last thing I need is to be trapped in the house where food is. So I think, okay, time to call the tow people.
The lovely parking enforcement lady shows up in her mandatory bike helmet in the golf cart and proceeds to use as many of the codes as possible. We've got a ten-niner-forty-two at nine fifteen cross twenty one, charlie mary charlie niner twelve, maroon (ah, she's talking about the truck color), dirty parker seven four. Turns out one of these is her nickname and one of them is the nickname for "call the tow truck". So I'm excited, there's action, but not too much. Half hour will see me out and on the road. I can do a bit of busy work. There's a shapefile or two that needs editing for confusion.
"come back, niner charlie mary charlie nine three nine?"
What's happening... or do I have to say seven niner? Two four-four? (there's a wonderful word used in Tsonga - it sounds like Sharp and you say sharp or sharp-sharp and it means yes yes, great sure, absolutely, yes I did - and many other positive affirmatives, I think that ## fits into the parking lady's lingo well).
"oh, they got some outstanding parking tickets or something" - goody, I think, the tow truck will come sooner, the people will be less likely to come here in the future, they'll learn their lesson.

some time goes by. Everyone in the street carefully parks their huge trucks on the sidewalks - it's street cleaning time. I'm hungry.

The truck is stolen. This is no longer the purview of traffic and parking, now it's The Police's job. Apparently, this truck is from Berkeley. It ran out of gas. Great place to abandon a stolen car. Really great.

One cop car with one cop shows up. He gets out the big cop flashlight and shines it onto the windshield (in full sunlight) to read the VIN. "Yep, this is stolen".

Another half hour passes. I'm starving. I start explaining my story to him. He smiles. He doesn't care much. I'm so hungry. Not that I can't wait this long without eating usually, but this is enforced. Oh the indignity.

Finally the tow truck comes.... ah, and I'm off to get needles stuck in my arms.

Is your credit card any gooder?

2005-11-15T16:32:00.000-08:00

So, about 2 weeks ago, I activated a new credit card and talk to the woman in India who kept wishing me a good evening.
Part of her script was to make me sign up for a purchase protection plan at 89c on $100 balance;
ME: no thanks,
HER: I will send you the information and then you have 30 days to cancel it,
ME: I don't want it already
HER: Yes, but I will send you the information, THEN you can cancel it
ME: Um, can I cancel it now?
HER: Not until you have the letter confirming it. Is there anything else I can help you with.
ME: um.... no thank you?

Today, I get the letter, so I call the number to cancel the plan within my 30 days. This time the company is clearly US based and is called the Purchasing Protection Plan - I get an American chick on the phone.
HER: thank you for calling, may I have your full 16 digit account number
ME (totally calm and normal): I got this letter and there's only 4 digits, can I give you those?
HER: Can you verify your name for me?
ME: I am Sadie Ryan
HER: Can you verify the last name associated with this call?
ME: Ryan
HER: and who am I speaking with
ME: Sadie Ryan
HER: what is the address associated with this account
ME: Blah blah
HER: for security purposes we need the zip code
ME: Blah blah
HER: How can I help you?
ME: When I activated this credit card, they activated your protection plan and told me I could cancel when I got the letter. I got the letter, I'd like to cancel.

(here's where it got weird; I didn't lose it at any point during this, but man! she was fightin' for her job)

HER: You realise this is an optional plan
ME: Yes, I'd like to opt out
HER: But you do realise that in the event of your untimely passing, with this plan, your debt would be paid off in full
ME: I'm not planning on dying soon
HER: I didn't mean to imply that you were going to die, just that this plan offers exceptional coverage
ME: I'd still like to cancel it
HER: You do realise this plan is optional
ME: Yes, I'd still like to opt out. Cancel it. Please.
HER: You realise that if you cancel it, you won't be covered in the event that
ME: Please cancel. Cancel please.
HER: Okay, well you have a nice day.
ME: can you confirm this for me?
HER: Excuse me?
ME: can you confirm that I cancelled the plan?
HER: You will receive a letter that will confirm in full that you have elected to cancel this optional protection plan. Is there anything else I can help you with?
ME: (Desperately trying not to ask if she does plumbing as well) No thanks. Have a GREAT day.

looking glass

2005-11-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

Yeah Brandy used to watch his eyes when he told his sailor's story
She could feel the ocean fall and rise, she saw it's raging glory
But he had always told the truth, Lord he was an honest man
And Brandy does her best to understand

At night, when the bars close down
Brandy walks through a silent town
And loves a man, who's not around
She still can hear him say, she hears him say

"Brandy, you're a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life, my lover, my lady
Is the sea"

blog recursion

2005-11-12T16:30:00.000-08:00

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogsford

I am attempting to break the internet.

Step #1: Know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to understand (heck, it works for W)
Step #2: Build your Friendspire - "friend" people you meet at parties, then take all their friends too. Try to get that guy with the java application.
Step #3: RSS feed.

or, you can just look at indietits.com

definitely the funniest thing going on out there.

Ode to Monday, October 24th, 2005

2005-10-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

Ode to Monday, October 24th, 2005

ya know, the office people here.
They mismanage money
They make it your fault
They lie about paperwork
and generally cock around for 8 hours
until eventually they agree to do what you originally thought,
but by that point you feel so guilty and wrong for having thought it might be their jobs that
you end up thanking
Them profusely and apologise for wasting their time
and then you feel like a 2 day old tubesteak

I mean, dear lord, they want you to write papers
but woe betide if you want to use a fax machine to respond to a publisher's request
and then you are asked for page charges
of obscene amounts

who is to pay?

well, of course the university will pay (this is a lie)

who will pay?

don't you have an expense account?
can you tell me if there's any money in it?
I can't do that today. who is paying?
I'm paying. I'm the martyr. grad school is about suffering and grief.
I am prostrate, here’s a check...
and perhaps there will be a pdf
as a remaining symbol
of electronic proof
that I suffered here
one single electronic blip in the annals of science
barely semblant of the original thought
(love the copy editors - hope you don't mind that we changed everything for our own purposes)
hardly reflecting even a tiny iota of the effort and struggle
laid down
in pen
nay, in Word
and carefully crafted, tracked, revised,
with statistical proof

that here be beastes.

Dashboard Armadillo

2005-09-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

On September 4th, we went to Paul and Molly's wedding in the Adirondacks. It was beautiful, lovely in every way, the weather was fantastic, the ceremony touching and short. And there was karaoke, which is never wrong. hmm. I will post photographic evidence as it arises...

Then we went to Alex's house in Clinton to pick up another subaru, completing our own legacy (haha) as a lesbian couple. We are living in the Mission, SF and have 2 subarus. (and put subaru jokes in our blogs). BLOG THAT!!

The pictures that go along with this narrative can be found here:
The car was a trooper. We went to Niagara Falls, through Ontario, with a stop at the Labatt's brewery in the middle of the night, on to Chicago, where we went to my old department at the zoo, the conservatory, talked to my old boss, hung out with Mike P at a Korean Barbecue (!!), crashed out on his futon (thank you) and carried on to Wisconsin. There, we "paused" at the House on the Rock, which sucked 4 hours out of our lives, and left us reeling. I knew it was weird, but I didn't know quite how much weird there was. On we went through Minnesota, pausing to look at cornfields and lenticular clouds, which really makes no sense, because they are caused by mountains, supposedly. Flat cornfields shouldn't be doing that... but still they looked cool. Then we somehow ended up in South Dakota and cruised on to the Badlands which is really astounding; we then camped in a small site in Sundance. Yes, we avoided Wall Drug.
We then drove on through Wyoming, burning up roll after roll of film, and on into Yellowstone. We spent an afternoon, then most of the next morning and on through lunch poking around all the hydrothermal bits. We camped in Madison campground, and woke up to see a couple of elk munching near the tent. We went to Old Faithful and it started snowing, so we kept on driving and getting out to see thermal activity steaming away in the snow. A bull elk casually cruised across one of the mudpool areas; we fumbled with lenses, the elk paused and showed us his rack... Alex focused the lens, and the elk started wandering closer... Alex got some great shots as the elk seemed to become more curious about something the other side of the boardwalk on which we were standing... yes, this majestic bull elk, full rack, in the snowy beautiful morning air just stepped right up onto the wooden boardwalk with us and off the other side to get some better grass. Later that day, we saw a couple of moose grazing, and then a couple of redtail hawks do a courtship display and then mate in air. I'm trying to persuade Alex that wildlife watching isn't usually that easy. It's a hard sell.

Then we drove on to Bozeman to see Molly and Paul's new house; after a quick dinner, we pushed on to Missoula. Early the next day, we got on the road again.... probably a couple of miles from the Idaho border, the car gave up.

I think the hardest part was sitting in the car, on the tow truck, being hauled back to Missoula. Oh, Missoula. I'm sure it's a beautiful place, but after 2 days of Super 8 and IHOP, a 7am Greyhound with all the probies was the only way out of town. 26 hours on a bus. Fortunately, the bit going through Idaho, Washington and into Oregon followed the Columbia river closely, so it was fantastic scenery.

At some point, Alex will have to go back to Missoula to get that miserable sack o' car.

Happy Birthday to my MUM!!!

2005-08-31T18:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/kikkoman-e.php

Ah yes. We haven't watched this in a while...

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/llama.php

gayerer

2005-08-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.badmash.org/videos/videos_flv.php?v=george_bush_512K_Stream.flv

Publish in an antelope

2005-08-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

I am publishing in Koedoe. It's the journal of Kruger National Park. There is a lot of value in publishing in small, local journals. Basically, they handed me the dataset from a master's student and asked me to make something of it. It's not very good.
Will this enhance or damage my career? Is there value in publishing not very good things, or should you hold out for bigger and better? I don't know.

ha ha. HA HA HA HA

2005-08-29T17:45:00.000-07:00

http://catsinsinks.com/

Japanese Image Inundation

2005-08-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

What is the thing which puts your future?

This is what was written on a guy's T-shirt over an electric guitar image as I took the train from new Chitose Airport on Hokkaido to downtown Sapporo. It was a taste of things to come...
Whereas it is true that many things are written in English in Japan, it's a strange breed of English. I find myself speaking in a command style language, brought about by the bizzarre imperative statement use of english in logos and by my incapability to speak even rudimentary Japanese.

Please enjoy some pictures... I will annotate better later.
I swear. If this link doesn't work, well, poo on you.

Announcement

2005-06-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Sadie Ryan has officially read both Andro's and Dan's blogs. It sort of shamed me into writing a new post here.

Also, procrastination is a fantastic motivator. Is this irony? Discuss.

What is the latest and greatest? PRIMATES!!! Yes, that's right, the buffalo have been set aside for the 'summer' in favor of returning to my undergrad pursuits - the role of social contact in disease transmission in primates.

Yes, this is a very well studied taxon, and therefore there are quite a great deal of data on them. (notice how I correctly used the plural for a change, mr. editor?).

Let's have some primate pictures, shall we? NICE.

JULY

My summer is shaping up to be a travelogue - On July 2nd, I will head out to New Jersey to be in a wedding (yes, me, in a beaded bridesmaid's dress - all the female paranoias have surfaced in ugly ways!); I will spend July 4th with Jackie in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hopefully I'll catch up with various NYC buddies out there.
Then, I will come back on the 7th and contemplate my navel, panic, etc. Because on the 13th I'm off to Brazil (Brasilia) to give a talk about primates at the Society for Conservation Biology's 19th Annual Conference and then fly back. Phew.
Getting the visa is proving to be a crazy ordeal. I had to get a postal order for the $100 fee, had to go and get passport pictures, there's a whole form and all that... then I have to go to the Brazilian Consulate in San Francisco for approval.

On the 21st, I will return. Will I move to San Francisco? The gods are giggling. Alex and I have finally entered the phase of really thinking about apartments. I click on this webpage about every hour http://www.craigslist.org/cgi-bin/search?areaID=1&subAreaID=1&query=&cat=apa&minAsk=min&maxAsk=2000&bedrooms=&neighborhood=25 We are too picky and too poor. It's a horrible combination. Plus that CAT is a huge factor. Love the cat. Love the cat. LOVE the cat. Good cat. I'll put a nice thin picture of Alley on here.

AUGUST

After that chaos is sorted out.... actually regardless of whether it's sorted out, I'm getting on another plane on July 31st and heading to Japan for the International Mammal Congress, in Sapporo, where the primates get another round.

Fortunately, after that conference, I'll get a good break. How often does one go to Japan? So I'm going to see Kyoto and some ancient culture - with an English speaking tour, so I don't try to order sushi non-stop or ask for "two red towels, please" (it's something like Akai tauru o ni mai kudasai), the only phrase I learned from the TV japanese course.
Then back I come to SF, perhaps pack and then head back out to NY state again - this time Alex's brother Joey is getting married. YEA!!! To Aisling, who I like a lot. But I have to sneak out of their weekend of wedding extravaganza to join in a bachelorette weekend with Gillian; 18 years of friendship counts for something, eh?

To come back or not to come back? Well, we shall see... If there's an apartment lined up, perhaps we'll come back. Because yes, believe it or not we are going to be at another wedding in upstate NY in...

SEPTEMBER

Yes, Paul and Molly are getting married in the Adirondacks - it's close to some old family friends of Alex's, so we're getting some nice vacation time in. Then, if all goes well, we're driving back in his car. I'm rooting for taking the Canadian roots, eh, and coming down the Northwest Coast back to the Bay Area - but the southern route could also be fun... we're happy to entertain suggestions.

2005-03-29T11:41:00.000-08:00

Jackie and Sadie boogie on down - Yeah!!

2005-03-28T19:08:00.000-08:00

Rounding out the ski season with a bit of wot-wot

NO!!!

2005-03-28T19:01:00.000-08:00

Step out of your echo chamber.

So today, UC Berkeley announced that they had (oops) lost a laptop with (yikes) about 98,000 people's SS#, Names, Addresses and you know, basically all the stuff it would take to theft my identity. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/security/grad/ Oddly enough, they didn't send us a nice email saying, hey, guess what, this happened, protect your sorry behind. No, I found out almost by accident.
I'm going to South Africa on Friday to present two posters and give a talk. Today I did my taxes; once again falling below the poverty line and claiming back every damn penny. I'm also trying to find rare crappy music on the internet that is almost embarassing to look for.
If someone thefts my identity, they'll probably give it back.

hmmhmmm

2005-03-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

gizoogle.com

TRUNK MONKEY

2005-03-01T16:26:00.000-08:00

trunkmonkey.com

(surburban chimp madness)

lego and Harry Potter

2005-02-25T15:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.lego.com/eng/harrypotter/maraudersmap/mm.asp

You know, I find pretty much anything in which lego is used in an unorthodox manner totally hilarious. I'm not sure what it is about the little lego men/women/angels/fictional characters that really cracks me up.
I think the lego harry potter is pretty spectacular.

Little jaundiced people with no knees. Or waists. But oh yes, you can give them necks. Just pull the head up a bit and BING!! automagic turtleneck.

2005-02-24T14:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you look up stats on the web; I turned up a nice one for MANOVA...

http://www.manovaintl.com/

Yep. As suggested to me by Alex.

http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/

YESSSS!!!

2005-02-23T11:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.orlandomultimedia.net/

2005-02-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/

Andro, scient.

OVERLOAD

2005-02-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

So right now I'm doing some work. But I can't tell you what it's about. Nor should I really be doing it at school. School. I still call it school; big BIG dork here.

I'm also making a very nice poster, because I submitted a very nice abstract and am going to South Africa in a month to present it. The funny part is, there's no paper written. Nope, haven't done it yet. It's about buffalo poo.

Favorite quote: ...fistulation is impractical in a wild environment.

YES!! WILD!!! So impractical, bad sadie.

2005-02-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

This is how the pros do it; this is me on Capitol Hill. Nerdy nerd nerd nerd.

2005-02-21T17:36:00.000-08:00

the cool kids like cocktails. and gillian likes playboy.

2005-02-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

Bonnie and Clyde

I am the completitor!!

2005-02-21T17:19:00.000-08:00

My advisor recently wrote me a letter in which he included the following:
"Sadie has made excellent progress towards completiton of her PhD dissertatin"

Yes, I am the completitor and I will dissertatinate!!

Wot is Blogsford?

2005-02-21T13:20:00.000-08:00

Mmmyello... So, Blogsford is the closest to being funny I could acheive after having discovered that my ultra-cool blog name, DataMonkey is already taken by some d*ck who hasn't posted in two years, but oh boy! he can program in Oracle, which *must* make him cool.

I'm from Oxford, England, a long long long time ago. See, here's my dad's website - as you can tell, it bears the horrible trademark of a Sadiedoodles Inc. product, circa 1997. But here's a very nice picture of my dad, who can't keep quiet when people photograph him.

I feel slightly presumptuous swiping Blogsford, but fairly smug. Time to customize the hell outta this thing.