submarine_bells

I'm going through data in the backlog of stuff from my data collection sessions that I've yet to transcribe, and am delighted to discover that two of the sessions have no voice track. (One of the tasks I get my research subjects to do involves responding verbally to sounds played over a headset that they wear while they drive.) Checking my booking schedule, I realise that these two sessions occurred one directly after the other. It looks like the mic switch on the headset got turned off by one of my helpful subjects, who DIDN'T BOTHER TO TELL ME (??!!??) that he'd turned it off. GRRRR!!!

Luckily another (helpful! observant! wonderful!) subject spotted that the switch was off when he put the headset on, and pointed it out to me before I lost too much data. At the time I thought it must have just gotten knocked to the Off position as I got it out of my bag and set it up in the car then, since at the time I was almost-up-to-date with my data prep and hadn't had any problems with the voice tracks thus far. But in retrospect, that seems unlikely since it's a tiny recessed switch that is quite fiddly to adjust.

What on earth would posess someone to turn off the mic and then not bloody tell me they've done so? Is there some alternate universe where this might be a helpful or sensible thing to do?

So Martindale dragged me out to the movies this evening. Apparently someone had suggested to him that "2012" was worth watching, in a "cool special effects" sort of way, so since our local cinema does cheap tickets on tuesdays, we went to see it tonight.

My reaction, summarised: "Well, that was definitely a comedy flick." Martindale's comment: "I bet those Mayans are embarassed about their calendar now."

The basic premise is that a huge solar prominence (or something on the sun, anyway) causes the sun to emit lots more neutrinos, which mutate (!?!) on the way to Earth and heat the planet's core, causing the centre of the Earth to melt and the tectonic plates to slide around like dodgem cars on a glacier, thus creating The End Of The World As We Know It. Hijinx abound.

...Um, wait, what?

Yeah, well. Best not look at the plot too closely, if you know what I mean. *taps finger to the side of nose knowingly* Never mind the width, feel the quality. Check out those special effects, yeah!

Actually, the special effects were probably worth the price of admission. Hilariously goofy concepts gorgeously realised. Oh, and lots of Oliver Platt, too. That's never a bad thing. He plays some high-up US politician, and winds up being the voice of Cold Hard Rationality in the face of the Forces of Sentimentality And Glurge Everywhere. It's interesting seeing him play a hardass - that's not usually the sort of role he gets cast in. And gawdknows, this movie could do with a few hardasses. Its writers have clearly been drinking from the same Kool-Aid that the creators of "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" supped so liberally from. Sure, lets put all of humanity at risk to save puppies, kittens and ponies everywhere - everyone knows that the cold cold hand of physics pales into floopy insignificance next to The Power Of Love. Also, it seems that in the world of "2012", if you're female you don't do anything except stand around and Look Worried (or maybe be rescued now and then) and if you're a Foreign Person you'll almost certainly die (or get maimed) as you heroically perform your Plucky Foreign Sidekick role.

I give it 1 out of 10 for plot (it had a plot, even if it was a terrible one), 9 out of 10 for special effects (very well done, suitably awe-inspiring in spots), 9 out of 10 for accidental humour (... the neutrinos mutated??????) and 9 pukes out of 10 on the Vomitrocious Sentimentality Scale.

Oh, and they get a few extra points for including a huge Antonov jet in a starring role. They claim in the movie that it's an "Antonov 500" but I think it's actually supposed to be an AN-225 or something close. I'm sure Artyem could tell us it for sure when he gets a chance to check it out.

Mister Miles is not making himself popular at present.

He's a large, hefty cat and always has had a tendency to jump up onto high surfaces. Up until recently he's been really good about being soft-footed with it, and not knocking anything off - which in some cases has been an astonishing feat. But not lately. Recently he's become a bit of a destructo-cat, and not always by accident.

For example, I was (until recently) attempting to grow rushes in the smaller of my aquariums (the one with locally-collected critters in). Miles decided that clearly the rushes were there for his benefit, and he repeatedly clambered up, navigated around the roadblocks I'd set up there to prevent him, and pulled the rushes out with his teeth, dropping them on the floor next to the tank. It wasn't a wanting-more-greens-in-his-diet thing either, since he cheerfully shredded an old lettuce I put out for him, distributing it in small pieces all over the kitchen floor but not eating any of it. *sigh*

Yesterday he excelled himself. That aquarium I was trying to grow rushes in was a re-purposed terrarium, with a big fancy cover shaped like a hipped roof. This is not a small or light object. I had removed it from the tank and it was sitting on top of the big aquarium nearby, where it had sat quite happily for the last few weeks. Somehow Miles managed to push it off. I don't know how, since I was in another room at the time. The first I knew was a godalmighty CRASH!!! and I came in to see that fancy glass lid shattered in a zillion pieces on the floor, and Miles (obviously culpable) scampering off in the other direction.

If he was just damaging the occasional item (which could, I suppose, be accidental) I could live with it. I'd be annoyed, but I could shrug it off and just come up with new and creative cat-proofing techniques. But recently he's started getting aggressive to Shansu as well, and I'm really not happy with that.

There's no obvious trigger for it. Shansu and Miles have never been best of friends the way she and Ivan are, but they've always gotten on ok. No trouble, just companionable existing in the same space without hassle. Not now. Miles growls at her. He bails her up in corners. He chases her down the hallway. He's started coming into my bedroom, which is definitely Shansu Territory and a place he never normally visits. This morning I saw him actually beating her up. This is Not Acceptable.

I've been dealing with Miles's bad attitude (on the occasions that I actually catch him at it) by grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, yelling at him, then picking him up and bunging him in the bathroom for a Time Out for an hour or so (which gives me a chance to cool off before interacting with him again also). Yesterday, when we let him out of the bathroom a while after the Smashed Glass Incident, he hopped straight up onto my lap while I was watchcing TV (which he NEVER normally does) and was downright solicitous. Martindale thought he might be apologising feline-style; my impression was that he knew he was in Deep Shit and was grovelling at me (which I suppose is much the same thing, for a cat).

At any rate, this behaviour is Not Acceptable. I don't know if the destructive-toward-objects behaviour is at all related to Miles's recent aggression toward little Shansu, but I guess it might be. I'm baffled as to why cats that have got on quite companionably for a couple of years are suddenly starting to have difficulties like this. Is there anyone out there who has suggestions as to what might be going on here, and/or how I might productively deal with Miles's aggression before Miles stars in his very own special episode of Will It Blend?

Following on from the Racefail debates earlier this year, I've been reading a lot of really interesting articles on the topics of racism, cultural appropriation and privilege. It's a big and complicated issue, and there's a lot of really eye-opening material being written on these related topics. One issue that strikes a chord with me is the problems of trying to live in a world where there's a dominant narrative about oneself and one's culture that was written by others. deepad wrote the memorable I didn't dream of dragons that started off talking about the "cultural fractures" that occurred as she grew up, a child in India growing up reading books and watching movies about a culture alien to her, and then went on to expore wider issues of privilege and colonialism in literature. Here's a snippet from that essay:

When I was around thirteen years old, I tried to write a fantasy novel. It was going to be an epic adventure with a cross-dressing princess on the run, a snarky hero, and dragons. I got stuck when I had to figure out what they would do after they left the city. Logically, there would be a tavern.

But there were no taverns in India. Write what you know is a rule that didn’t really need to be told to me; after having spent my entire life reading books in English about people named Peter and Sally, I wanted to write about the place I lived in, even if I didn’t have a whole bookcase of Indian fantasy world-building to steal from. And I couldn’t get past the lack of taverns. Even now, I have spent a number of years trying to figure out how cross-dressing disguise would work in a pre-Islamic India where the women went bare-breasted. When I considered including a dragon at the end of a story, I had to map out their route to the Himalayas, because dragons can be a part of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition—they do not figure in Hindu mythology.

With that in mind, I was very interested to see what Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichi had to say on much the same topic when deepad posted about her, saying that Adichi had made the point she'd been trying to make in her Dragons essay a lot more clearly. Adichi's main point is that creating "a single story" about what consitutes "an African" or "a Mexican" (or any other Othered group) ridiculously simplifies the nature of the world - as a Nigerian, she would never have described herself as "an African" until she spent some time in the USA and started discovering the laughably cartoonish "story" that a lot of folk she encountered had of "Africans". I can't really do her engaging and entertaining account of this justice, so I suggest you go listen for yourself. It's 20-odd minutes long, and very much worth it.

I don't have time to do a full update of Noteworthy Stuff Wot Haz Happened Lately, since I've gotta go collect more data in a little while. Still, here's a potted summary of a few things that spring to mind, just to let folk know that I'm still alive out here in the Land Of Eternal Data Collection:

• A weekend or two ago I attended a Spinners & Weavers Guild weekend retreat in the Barossa Valley with my friend Maz. Had a ball, did lots of carding & spinning, hung out with nifty folks.
• Still trying to get more subjects so that I have a decent sample size for all of my groups. L-platers are hardest to come by. Am considering trying my luck by contacting local schools and asking permission to recruit there. If that doesn't work, am considering giving up research and becoming a street sweeper.
• If ever you hear me saying things like "my recent exercise program has really helped my back and it's feeling good now, so maybe it's worth coming off anti-inflammatories" please pound me over the head until the urge goes away. These exploratory urges to drop my med doses don't end well (understatement of the year).
• the Endlers Livebearers are breeding so prolifically that I've started referring to them as "Endless Livebearers", and am considering using a few of 'em as a solution to the "what to feed the gudgeons who will only eat live food" problem when the daphnia culture's running low.
• I have a backlog of creative projects promised to folk that I find myself worrying about not making progress on; if you're one of those folk, rest assured that it is not forgotten, it's more a matter of not having spare time to so much as scratch, these days. My life will settle down eventually, I'm sure of that. *crosses fingers*

And just to finish things off, here's a rather charming link, found on Shamus Young's ever-entertaining blog, Twenty Sided: One Australian boy's contribution to the space race. In 1957, a small boy earnestly attempted to contribute to Australia's space effort by designing a rocket ship and mailing his design off to "top scientists" at Woomera. The letter was kept, and the National Archives have dug it up and brought it to light as part of their Find of the month program.

Well, Our Idiot Government has done it again. Replica and imitation firearms - which is to say, non-firing ones: toys and costume accessories, that sort of thing - now have to be registered as if they were the type of firearm they pretend to be.

Up until... well, just now, it was the case that if the type of firearm that a re-enactor needed to complete a particular impression was impossible to get a license for (e.g a semi-automatic rifle) then we could get a replica one and use that. They don't go bang, they're made of soft pot-metal and they look plausibly like the real thing when viewed from a distance (and sometimes, when viewed up close, depending on the quality of the replica). In fact, Artyem recently spent some hundreds of dollars acquiring one of these replicas to use when re-enacting. I guess that's $600 or so down the toilet now, since it's going to be illegal for him to own come the new year, and the chance of re-selling it will be negligible since nobody else will be able to own it legally either.

I was about to say "once again, firearms owners are given the shaft", except this one's not even about firearms. It's about replica firearms. You know, toys and costume accessories. Non-functional things-shaped-like-guns-wot-don't-go-bang. I've yet to see a detailed definition of "replica firearm", so it's hard to know what that even covers. Obviously Artyem's pot-metal tommygun-look-alike will be affected; but what about my plastic AK-47 that I got from a toy shop and that makes space invader noises when I pull the trigger? What about solid plastic "replicas" that have no moving parts? I've seen some re-enacters use those for public shows, and the idea of anyone mistaking one of those for a real gun up close is ludicrous.

In fact, this whole bloody thing is ludicrous. Police Minister Michael Wright says "I am told that SA Police have recently seized a number of imitation firearms that have been converted to fire live ammunition from known criminals.” I suspect he hasn't been told this by anyone who knows what they're talking about though, since putting live ammo into a replica like Artyem's faux-tommygun (which is, I believe, the kind of thing they're talking about here) would be a quick route to a rather messy and explosive suicide. I mean, sure, you could do it. And it would go bang. But the same could be said for stuffing a firecracker up your nose, and the end result would be rather similar.

Hmmm. Now, there's a nice thought. Why don't Minster Wright and Premier Rann try stuffing firecrackers up their ministerial noses and let us know how that works out for them. I for one will be waiting with bated breath to hear all about it.

Paging epi_lj (or anyone else who knows about MIDI and digital music creation):

I have a digital piano (a Technics SXP-50). I have a laptop computer (well, two actually - a semi-antique Toshiba Satellite 1410 from late 2002, and a 2 year old Dell XPS m1710, both running WinXP Pro). I have recently acquired a USB to MIDI cable to connect the two, so that I can practice piano using Adventus Piano Suite Premiere, a piano tutor program I recently purchased that provides real-time feedback on your playing as you play. Sounds like a great plan? Well, I thought so too, but I'm having some difficulties getting it all to work together.

I have everything connected up correctly, I'm sure of that. There are three little LEDs on the cable pod that light up when stuff's happening, and they do light up, so clearly the basic connection's there. The problem is that what I'm playing on the piano doesn't seem to be what's being passed through to the computer. A lot of notes are dropped, the timing's all wrong on the ones that do get passed through, and even for the notes that get passed through correctly, there's about a third of a second delay between my keypress and the note being played back through the laptop speakers (and registered visually on the screen). I've tried swapping laptops around, in case it might be a hardware-related issue, but it behaves exactly the same way on both machines.

After swapping around the laptops, my next thought was that it might be a driver-related issue. Now, the seller of the cable claimed that it is plug-and-play, no drivers required. And that is a theme that is repeated on every other website I've seen that sells cables of this type. However, a bit of googling found me a website providing drivers for a very similar (but not identical) device, so I tried installing them to see if they helped at all (nope, not a bit). I tried updating the device drivers using the Windows device manager, but it said that the drivers I had were just fine, thank you very much.

Some more googling found reports from some folk who had difficulties with this kind of device, but mostly of the "device not recognised" sort (not my problem). Some problems have been attributed to using them on dual-core machines running WinXP - that seems unlikely here, since it didn't work right on either my dual-core or single-core machine. Other folk suggest that the problem is with Windows MIDI drivers being sucktastic, and I guess that would mean I'd just have to live with it. But that wouldn't explain why the cables DO work for many folk using Windows.

I've tried several different music programs with this, and they all show similar problems - Adventus Piano Suite Premiere, Noteworthy Composer, and even VSTHost. I'm quite bamboozled.

HELP!

Does anybody out there have any experience with this kind of problem, or any suggestions re what to try next?

Shansu's a strange cat.

She won't sit on my lap when I'm sitting on the couch. I can pick her up, carry her about in my arms and she'll be quite content, but the moment I sit down on the couch, she's outta there.

Put her in a shopping bag and put that on my lap when I'm on the couch, though, and she'll curl up in a fuzzy ball of contentment and purr her head off for as long as I remain there. Go figure.

I just sent the following email to my supervisor:

I've been thinking about my research topic, and have come to the conclusion that it could be improved somewhat. I realise it's a little late in the process to be talking about making sweeping changes of this sort, but I think that if you give the matter a bit of consideration you'll come to see the benefits of the new research topic, both to myself and to future researchers. I propose to change my project to the following:

An investigation into the effects of high-voltage electric shock on participant attendance at data collection sessions, comparing the effects of electric shock applied to various body parts on participant attendance rates.

I'm sure that there could be many benefits to pursuing such a course of investigation. What do you think?


(Next time round I'm gonna use lab rats. Skinner had the right idea. Rats. In boxes. Nailing the boxes to the floor is probably optional.)

I thought I had a nice busy week ahead of me, with almost every slot in my schedule full of data collection sessions. But such was not to be.

Of the two subjects I had scheduled for yesterday, the first was a no-show... and when I rang them to enquire about re-booking, they informed me that they'd changed their mind about being in my study, and also cancelled their other two sessions later on this week. The second one turned up (more-or-less on time) but the data collection session took twice as long as it should have, due to his English skills being only slightly better than those of Juno the Whippet.

This morning I was just packing up my computer and equipment prior to driving down to the "lab" for another session, when the subject for that session called me on the phone. Apparently her life's a bit chaotic now, so she's cancelling this session, and also the other two I had her down for on Friday. She's sorry, and hopes that's not too much of a pain. Ah well, I replied, at least you phoned me to let me know.

*big sigh*

So it turns out that my previously-packed schedule for this week now consists of two data collection sessions - the Monday one, and someone on Thursday evening who hasn't yet cancelled (but the week is young).

This is one of many reasons why my PhD is taking so bloody long to finish. I will be sooooo glad when it's done. The delights of human experimentation are much overrated.

You may recall my post of a couple of months ago enthusing about the triops I had raised from eggs I bought off the Intarweb. I've been meaning to post about their progress, but, well, I haven't. :-7

The typical lifespan of a triops is around 1-3 months at most. So when one of my two triops expired at the one month mark, it was a little disappointing but not all that surprising. Still, the second one lasted for quite some time longer, producing copious tiny eggs each day as it zoomed around the tank, and it finally kicked the bucket at the grand old age of two months, after attaining a respectable size of around 5cms (not including tail spikes, which it had clumsily divested itself of a week or two previously in some triopsian misadventure).

So now I'm attempting to raise Triops: The Next Generation from my previous pair's eggs. Fortunately they left me a lot of eggs to experiment with, since juvenile Triops australiensis are delicate little critters. The original pair were produced from Little Packets Of Stuff that came in the mail-order kit, and other than the eggs, it's anybody's guess what the Little Packets Of Stuff contained. So I'm trying to figure out a reliable triops-raising process myself so that can produce triops whenever I wish. Which is a lot easier than it sounds, since baby triops are miniscule when they hatch, and with their turbocharged metabolisms (and lack of brain) they pretty much need to be swimming in a soup of ediblestuff all the time or they'll die of starvation in a day or so.

Producing said soup of ediblestuff in such a way that it remains constantly suspended in the water without fouling it is rather a challenge. The method used by many folk who raise other species of triops is to create a soup of infusoria by suspending a little baggie of leaf-litter-etc detritus in the water that the triops hatch into. I've been doing that, but it doesn't seem to produce enough food to keep them going much after day 2 or 3. So I've been supplementing the infusoria with baker's yeast - a few grains dissolved in a teaspoon of water, and tossed into the water whenever it starts looking clear. This approach seems to have a fair bit of promise - several times now I've managed to get the little triops hatchlings to last for almost a week or so; but calibrating the exact amount of yeast required to keep 'em fed without fouling the water is a juggling act I've not quite mastered.

And of course, the triops don't help either. They're not very bright. I did succeed in getting hatchling to last for two weeks - it had definitely graduated from "tiny hatchling" to "small triops" and I figured I was past the hard bit... then the damnfool critter wound up digging itself into a spot it couldn't get out of overnight, and I found it, dead, the next morning. *sigh*

So the experiments in triops raising continue. It's just as well that I have a lot of eggs to play with.

Speaking of eggs, I have another cool development! Remember the fish I caught from a local waterway a few months ago? Turned out that it was a flat-headed gudgeoen, and on a subsequent fishing trip I caught a second one that went into the little river tank with it. Well, they've been doing quite well in their finicky way since then - they insist on live food only, but since they'll happily eat copepods as well as their preferred tasty treat of glass shrimp, I can keep 'em in munchies since I seem to have copepods in vast abundance. (My copepod culture is doing just fine, and they seem to thrive on neglect as long as the little tank they're in gets enough light to keep a bit of algae going in it.)

Anyway, I'd noticed the bigger of the gudgeons change colour a bit lately - specifically, its hindmost third or so went very dark-coloured. This didn't seem to match up with any description I could find of their supposed breeding colouration, so I remained baffled. But today I noticed that the big gudgeon had wedged itself into the back corner of the tank and wasn't moving from that spot at all, which is rather unusual behaviour. So I applied a Carefully Calibrated Scientific Fish Behaviour Probing Device (i.e. I poked it with a stick) to check that it was ok. It turns out that the reason it won't leave that corner of the tank is that there are a gazillion tiny gudgeon eggs plastered to the glass! They're not visible from the front of the tank unless I turn off the filter and rearrange the lighting, but they're definitely there! How cool is that?

Of course, getting them to spawn is the easy bit. Raising fry is a lot harder, and flat-headed gudgeons are, um, enthusiastic eaters - if it moves and it'll fit in their mouths, in it goes. So I don't rate my chances of raising the fry to adulthood as being very high. But we shall see. :-)

One of the things I really like about my local supermarket is that the fruit and veg section tends to stock a few uncommon fruit and veg as well as the regular sort. If I see something new there that I've not encountered before, it's become my habit to grab one or two of the unfamiliar thing, and then when I get home google them to find out how to prepare/serve/eat them. I've discovered some delights that way - dragonfruit and mangosteen, to name just two. So this week, when I observed a fruit I was unfamiliar with (bitter melon) I jumped at the chance to try something new and potentially nifty.

A bit of googling suggested that stir-frying it was a plausible thing to do with it. So I followed the prep instructions (de-seeding, par-boiling then tossing in wok) and stir-fried it up with other stuff as per some of the recipes suggested on the web - in this case a mix of stir-fryable vegies, some turkey strips and a bit of garlic, soy, balsamic vinegar and sugar for flavouring. And the result?

Mmm, tastes like alkaloid. *pulls face* You can tell it's medicinal.

I think bitter melon and I are not destined to become good friends.

When they said that Endler's livebearers are prolific breeders, they weren't kidding! I've had a little group of them in my aquarium for less than 24 hours and already they're producing babies!

Since they're not a common or well-known fish, here's a pic of an Endler's Livebearer. It's not one of mine, but mine look a lot like this. The vividness of the colours in this image are pretty true-to-life; they look as if someone had dripped day-glo reflective paint all over them.

So by popular demand {*koff*), I would like to present to you the sequel to my last video opus ("Stuff From My Aquarium: Blobules I Have Known"):

Stuff From My Aquarium 2: Return of the Rotifers

And to up the ante, this time I did a voiceover track for it. So prepare to be awed by my fabulous microscopy video skills and dazzled by my insightful commentary!

Still plugging away at the seemingly never-ending data collection, and trying to keep on top of the commentary transcriptions and data prep as I do so. I sent a quick progress report off to my supervisor yesterday, and got a response from her that included the following:

...the fact that you're keeping a lid on the transcription/data prep stuff is totally amazingly good. Never managed that myself, I must admit.

I think I'll just sit here and re-read "totally amazingly good" over and over for a little while. :-)

I've been having a lot of fun over the last week or two with The Sims 3 (in between all the mad dashing about that data collection entails, anyway). I'm finding it sufficiently amusing that I'm going to inflict pics of the Sim family I'm currently playing with upon you all, but in the interests of at least a modicum of awareness that not everyone will be as captivated by them as I am, I'm putting 'em behind a cut tag. :-) ( Onward for the McFluff household... )

So there's my Sims household in all its dysfunctional glory. Have I bored you all to tears yet?

Hey folks, there's someone nifty who I'd like you to meet. Her name's Sky. We met on Second Life ages ago, and became good friends. She's had a livejournal for a while (which she got in order to comment on posts of mine) but has never really used it for much else; some of you may have read her occasional comments to posts of mine. Recently she mentioned to me that she was interested in becoming more involved in the blogging community and was thinking about posting some of her thoughts and artwork and so on to her own journal to share, but didn't really know anyone out there in blogging-land and wasn't sure how to start making connections. So I offered to introduce her to my friends to get the ball rolling.

So... I'd like to introduce sky_hye! She's an awesome person and a good friend of mine, and also an astoundingly good artist. Her introductory lj post gives a bit of background, and I'm hoping she'll post some images of her artwork soon to show you all as well. She does some of the most gorgeous portrait art I've seen outside the National Gallery, and her ink-sketches of her kittycats are to die for. :-)

Please, folks - head on over to her journal, say hi and make her feel welcome!

I'm not enjoying this week. I'm in the middle of a multi-day migraine so bad that even my eyelashes hurt. (No, I'm not kidding.) And to top it all off, yesterday my car broke. I think I definitely want to trade this week in and get one that works. Since my brane is so full of porridge at present that I can't work usefully, I've been consoling myself with The Sims 3. Oh, and Martindale's been working stupid-long hours again, so between that and my evening data collection sessions I've hardly seen him in weeks. And Artyem's in Hong Kong all week. Bleugh.

Next week has to be an improvement on this one, right?

What's the best thing ever for a cat who (a) loves crawling into any bag left unattended for more than 30 seconds, and (b) delights in being carried around the house with me when I'm doing random stuff?

A Kitty Bag!




I scored it off Freecycle last week, and since then Shansu has spent more time in her Kitty Bag than out of it. I leave it on the kitchen table with the opening facing my work area, and she crawls into it, makes herself comfortable then spends hours upon hours snuggled up in her Baggie contentedly while she alternates between dozing and watching me work. And if perchance I should pick the bag up while she's in it and sling it over my shoulder while I potter around the house... well, that's just Fun Onna Bun as far as Shansu is concerned. :-)

As you may recall from previous posts, I recently obtained some Triops australiensis (Australian tadpole shrimp) eggs via mail order and have been attempting to hatch them. Well, my attempts have met with success, and now that they're big enough to photograph with my rather dodgy digicam here are some Triops Action Pics! ( clickie for 4 piccies! )

I spent some of this afternoon (between data collection runs) playing with my microscope, and found some intriguing wee beasties lurking in a fragment of algae from my aquarium. So I edited up some video footage of them, and offer for your viewing pleasure (?) Stuff from my aquarium: Blobules I have known.





David Attenborough I ain't. The video quality's a bit average, not least because I didn't realise until after I'd filmed the critters that I'd failed to position the microscope condenser correctly. Also, I'm still working out how to set things up so that critters like this are exposed correctly so as to show plenty of detail. Still, it's intriguing what I'm finding living in my fishtanks that I didn't know was there! I thought I had a pretty good handle on what's what natural history wise - but each time I look at stuff under the 'scope, I find all sorts of creatures that I have no idea about, ID-wise. In this video, I think Blobule #2 (the hairy one) is probably a motile single-celled alga of some kind. But what about the others? Blobule #1 is kinda squirmy and wormlike, but those two prongs on its rear look a bit un-wormy, don't they? *scratches head puzzledly* I *think* that Blobule #3 is probably a small arthropod of some kind, but I have no clue what sort. (Isn't that "bubble helmet" it has on its head cool? What's with that, anyway?)

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions regarding what these things might be, or has encountered anything like them, I'd be fascinated to hear your guesses/theories/stories. In the mean time, I shall call them GeorgeBlobules.

Update: A bit of browsing on Wikipedia suggests to me that Blobule #1 might be a bdelloid rotifer, which were first described (in 1696) as "an animal like a large maggot which could contract itself into a spherical figure and then stretch itself out again; the end of its tail appeared with a forceps like that of an earwig". That sounds like what I have here, right?

Blobule #2 could be Frontonia, or something similar - a protozoan related to the more well-known Paramecium.

I'm currently inclined to suspect that Blobule #3 is another kind of rotifer. The body shape looks similar to some I've found images of, but I've yet to find a pic of a rotifer with anything like the "bubble helmet" that Blobule #3 appears to be wearing. Of course, it might be an artefact of my crappy lighting setup or some other thing rather than an actual dome of some sort over its front end. But I've not spotted anything that looks even vaguely like that yet on Google Images.

Update 2: I've identified Blobule #3! It's a rotifer called Squatinella, and it does indeed have a transparent dome over its front end!

I have a microscope! This is a quickish post so you'll just have to imagine all the bouncy squeeing, but I got it on eBay, wound up paying much less than I expected to and so had some money left to buy a decent ccd camera to use with it! It's an old Olympus E model binocular 'scope with Koehler illumination and a bunch of other bells and whistles. Here's a pic of the scope: ( click for a pic of the 'scope and 3 pics of stuff seen down the 'scope... )

My data collection is being... difficult. The fact that the uni laptop that I'm using for some of the on-road tasks has a habit of running out of battery power mid-task even when it should have plenty of juice is deeply aggravating. (Auto power adapter is now on order for it.) But what's really pissing me off right now is the software that I'm using for this particular task, a little gem called DirectRT. Unlike a lot of the software I'm using it wasn't custom-written for me - it's a commercial app that a good number of researchers use for this sort of thing. You'd think it'd be reasonably reliable, given that. Which is why I'm just delighted to discover a joyous little undocumented quirk - if the subject ID # is larger than a certain rather arbitrary number (32000), the software fails silently. It appears to be working, but helpfully fails to record the data.

*spit* *fume*

This POS app has now cost me data from two collection runs. I only worked out what was happening at all because I happened to recall a mention made of this, um, quirky behaviour on the official DirectRT user forum. It's not documented anywhere else that I've found.

What on EARTH led the programmer to think that this is reasonable or sensible behaviour from an app like this? At the very least, how hard would it have been to make the app throw up an error message if the Subject ID was out of the acceptable range? But SILENTLY FAILING??? Is he brain-dead????

I've just got home from a dental appointment with the Marquis de Sade. You'd think that even if he didn't hear the muffled "ow!" noises from the dental chair, he might have noticed the shivering and hyperventilating, right?

I think I will just sit here and shake for a while. That was not pleasant.

There have been some pretty peculiar music videos done, and the 80s is responsible for many of the most grandiose, pompous over-the-top efforts. Right at the top of the list has to come the clip for Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", a mishmash of bizarre imagery, wind machines and draped gauze. But what if, instead of the lyrics and video imagery only intersecting occasionally, the song lyrics reflected what was in the video clip? How weird would that be?

Well, wonder no more, my friends. Some Very Warped People have rewritten the lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart to more accurately reflect what you see in the video, and here's the hilarious result.




(Thanks to elynne for pointing this one out!)
</site-embed>

If ever you were naive enough to think that the phrases "battle of the sexes" or* "war on women" were just hyperbole and rhetoric, consider the recent murder of Dr George Tiller for the heinous crime of providing perfectly legal late-term abortions to women in dire medical straits who in their desperation could turn to few others for help.

If you feel the urge to try to tell me that it's not really that bad, this is an isolated incident, and really we live in a world where women have full equality to men and feminism is obsolete, I cordially urge you to STFU and keep your ill-informed clueless dribblings to yourself. I don't wanna hear it.

As usual, vito_excalibur hits the nail on the head when she says:
Mostly I do have friends who are anti-choice. Because I think it's important to connect with people who think differently from me. So yes! I can disagree politely with a friend about whether it should be legal for me to get life-saving medical care. I can disagree respectfully about whether my life is worthless if I ever get pregnant. I can disagree in a friendly manner about whether my body belongs to me or the state. You know. Usually.

Today, I am afraid, I must insist upon a little fucking self-respect. Today I'm not your friend. Today you can go and die in a fucking fire, and I would cheerfully go to your funeral, and yes if you think I'm talking about you I am, and if you don't like the way that feels, well now you know a little bit about what it usually feels like for me to be friends with you. I don't want to hear from you about it. Not today.

And if you happen to be a person who believes that a girl should be forced to carry her dying fetus until her uterus ruptures - because let's be clear - if you think late-term abortion should be illegal, that's what you're advocating - and I'm not currently aware, could you let me know? Could you speak up? I like to know these things. I can probably be friends with you anyway. Later. Not today.

*ETA: OK, there's folk of all sexes on both sides of the fight. So maybe that one's a bit misleading in this context. But it bloody well feels like it a lot of the time. Still, I stand by the other phrase.

My little coldwater aquarium of locally-collected critters is burbling along quite nicely. The gudgeon is noticeably bigger than it was when I collected it a week or two ago, and the glass shrimp are doing just fine. A second collecting trip earlier this week produced more glass shrimp and daphnia (the latter of which the gudgeon eats with enthusiasm), along with some more river sludge, algae-covered rocks and a few local water plants to put in the tank with them. It's starting to look pretty decent (in a messy, non-aquascaped, local-creek sort of way); when the water fully clears after the recent addition of Stuff, I'll see about taking a pic or two and posting them here.

Inspired as I've been recently by freshwater invertebrates, I ordered a Triops-rearing kit online a week or two ago, and it arrived in the mail this week. Triops are nifty little freshwater crustaceans that look like a cross between a trilobite and a shrimp, more or less. Actually what they really look like is any number of Cambrian arthropods that one might find fossils of in the Burgess Shale. However, while they're certainly living fossils, they've survived unchanged from the Triassic era, not the Cambrian era. Still, they're dead nifty, and so I set up a little hatching tank for my Triops australiensis yesterday. And now they're starting to hatch! *happy squeeing* I'm seeing one or two tiny little white dots moving around in the tank. I have no idea how many I'm going to finally get, but one of their nifty charms is that even if I only succeed in raising one to adulthood, they're (mostly) hermaphroditic and they self-fertilise, so I should manage to get eggs from that one to raise a subsequent generation of Triops from. Yay!

Also following on from all this recent interest in small watercritters, I'm now in the market for a decent microscope. I did try looking at a Daphnia with my little kiddie microscope that dates from the 70s; unsurprisingly, it was rather limited in its success (the 100x magnification seemed to work more or less, but the others didn't at all). So I've joined a microscopy yahoo group and am pumping them for information on the buying of microscopes. They're full of great advice, but a lot of what they suggest is more relevant to folk in the US than in AU. Still, I've also done a ring-around of microscope dealers in the yellow pages (all two of them that I could find). One told me that nobody sells used/reconditioned microscopes in Adelaide, perhaps I should try Cash Converters (*spit*). The other was a bit more useful, as he does deal in reconditioned 'scopes, and he offered to bring me a particularly promising one to have a look at next week when he comes into town (he's located in Clarendon, which is rather a hike from where I live). It sounds promising, even though I'm a bit unsure of what the quality of its optics will be - it's a Tasco, which is a cheap Chinese brand, but the seller maintains that he's checked it thoroughly and he thinks its pretty decent. (Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?) Apparently it was previously owned by a vet, who found it acceptable for his needs. So we shall see.

But if any of you who might be reasonably local to me know of any decent, cheap used microscopes looking for a new owner, do feel free to let me know! I'm looking for a trinocular 'scope with (hopefully) decent optics, condenser, illumation of some kind (duh!) and ideally the possibility to upgrade it down the track if I need to, at or under AU$600 or so. I also want a CCD camera to go with it, but if necessary I can get one of those later.

Recently I've aquired a couple of different species of freshwater shrimps for my aquarium, which I find to be a charming addition. I discovered when reading up on them that several kinds of shrimp (including one of the species in my aquarium, glass shrimp (Paratya australiensis, I think)) can be found in local creeks, along with a variety of other interesting things. Obviously the thing to do was go on a Collecting Expotition!

So this morning I dragged Martindale out for a trip down to a promising spot in the hills. He obligingly carried my collecting jars and so forth while I clambered around on riverbanks and rocks and got thoroughly wet and muddy in the pursuit of Interesting Small Water Critters. I had hoped to find glass shrimp, but I got a lot more than that! I'm still trying to identify some of the critters swimming (or squoodging) around in the small tank that I've put them in, but here's a non-exhaustive list of what I've identified so far:

- glass shrimp
- fairy shrimp
- a fish! (probably a flat-headed gudgeon or western carp gudgeon but I've yet to see it clearly enough to get a positive ID since the water in the tank's still pretty turbid;
- water boatmen
- planarians
- ostracods (?)
- small black snails
- caddis fly larvae
- dragonfly nymphs
- damselfly nymphs
- small water spiders (?)
- mosquito larvae
- small filter-feeding worms half-buried in the sludge on the bottom
- a lot of tiny dots too small to clearly see that are probably larvae of somethingorother
- something I-know-not-wot that emits occasional quiet creaking chirping noises from the tank. Don't think it's a frog (surely I'd have spotted it if it was?) but I haven't a clue what's making that noise at this point.

I made a point of getting a good few litres of the water they were found in, as well as a pile of riverbottom sludge and a couple of small algae-encrusted rocks to go in the tank with all the critters. I think that was a good move. So far I've seen the glass shrimp eating algae off the rocks, the filter-feeding worms crawling into the sludge and setting up new homes there, and the fish swimming around eating tiny unidentifiable critters in the water. So it looks like my little tank of local waterlife is going to do ok at least for a while. I may see about slowly acclimatising the fish and the shrimp to the water conditions that my main aquarium has (the water they come from is harder and more alkaline) but I think that'll be a slowish process if I want to be sure of not killing 'em off in short order. Or possibly I'll see if I can keep a "local creek life" tank setup that is stable and sustainable over a decent period of time (without having to keep on going back to get more water and microcritters from the creek, anyway). I'm not sure yet. But either way, I got a lot more than I expected when I went trawling for glass shrimp this morning. Yay!

I've just blown a chunk of last month's SL store profits on a copy of Guitar Hero World Tour. What fun! I'm really loving these music-based games on the Wii, and GHWT looks like it's going to be a total blast, based on one evening of fiddling with it. I shall take my mighty band, Deth Newt, to world stardom, and the world will quake in its boots at the mightiness of my rocking!

Well, that's the theory, at any rate. I'm having a hiccup or two with interface. I know there are some among you who are Wise In The Ways of Guitar Hero, so I'm bringing my problem to you.

One of the things I want to particularly do is multiplayer with 2 players (which is the total number of Wii remotes I have at present). I gather that the game's capable of it, but when I come to set up a band (or attempt to set up 2 players in the explicitly 2-player cooperative improv mode, Mii Freestyle Mode) it doesn't quite work. Now, I know all the controllers and instruments work fine, since I've tried them all in single-player mode and they're fine. In the Mii Freestyle mode it just recognises the instrument of the first person to plug in their details then switches straight into the playing. It says to press the + key to register the second player, but pressing that key (on either remote) doesn't seem to register or do anything. Likewise in Band mode, we can set up two characters in the band with their instruments, but it stalls there. Again it says to press the + button to finish the process, but the + button (which does work fine on both remotes) fails to do anything when pressed, regardless of which remote is being used.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions re what we can do to get the multiplayer working properly with 2 players? Is there something obvious I'm missing or doing wrong? Help!

It's probably very naughty of me to test the miniature r/c submarine I found at a garage sale yesterday in my aquarium, wibbling it up and down the tank, startling the fish and getting it tangled in the plants. But damn, it's fun!

Now I'm finding myself wondering about the practicality of installing a mini-camera in it so that I can get a fish-eye view of my aquarium from the inside. :-)

So I've emerged from my nice warm bath. I probably would have stayed in a while longer yet, but Miss Shansu had things to say about it. Things like Haven't you been in there for quite long enough? It's all wet and icky! Why on earth would you stay in there when you could be in a nice warm bed? Come on, bed's much nicer, you know it is! Etc etc etc.

It's amazing how clearly cats can communicate despite their limited verbal accomplishments. One doesn't need to be a telepath to work out exactly what Shansu wants when she decides to get vocal about it. She's very clear.

I guess I'd better go to bed now, or Shansu will continue scolding me. :-7

Well, my no-show subject from this morning failed to show again for her session this evening. (This cold, wet, rainy evening. Where I waited, freezing, in a car park for her to not-show.) And just to put the icing on the cake, when I rang her to ask if she wanted to reschedule, I got as far as announcing my name and she hung up on me.

Feeling downright missubjectthropic right now. Gonna retire to a nice warm bath with some nice comforting chocolate. Bah humbug.

The very first subject for my data collection was a no-show.

On the bright side, I got to have a pleasant chat with the driving instructor I'm working with while we waited for her to not-show.

What pea-brained cabbage-headed numbskull thought it'd be a good idea to include a feature in banking software that truncates long names????? When would that ever be a good idea? *rolls eyes*

The data collection phase of my research is now starting, and my life is about to go bonkers. The subject recruitment ad is appearing in today's local paper, and with any luck I'll soon be up to my eyeballs in perky volunteers. [/optimism mode]

I'm doing the last minute organisational stuff at present - printing out 50-odd copies of all the info sheets, questionnaires, task instructions etc, sorting out scheduling stuff with the driving instructor I'll be working with, organising room hire for the lab-based bits of the data collection, printing up checklists to make sure nothing gets missed, etc etc etc. And for the next couple of months or so I'm going to be running around in tiny, tiny circles doing three data collection sessions each with some fifty odd subjects, each of which last for 1-2 hours and have to be scheduled for specific times of day... wooo. I get exhausted just thinking about it. Truly. Yesterday afternoon I came perilously close to getting a stress migraine from all the last-minute trying-to-get-everything-working-together figuring-out I'd been doing (cleverly averted by an evening of cathartic orc-stomping on the PC via Battle for Middle Earth 2, my favourite "comfort gaming" game).

So I don't honestly expect to be getting a lot of time in the near future to update my LJ with anything more detailed than "good grief this is exhausting!" or "arrrghhhh! &^$%ing data collection!" I'll be trying to keep up (at least in a skimming sort of way) with reading my flist, but if I don't have time/energy for detailed responses to your posts, please don't take it personally! Frankly, if I get through this without tearing my hair out, smashing fragile items or getting all fangorious at passers-by, I think I'll be doing rather well. :-7

The Adelaide Festival of Arts is a biennial event that includes all sorts of great stuff. Some of it's the sort of traditional artstuff you'd expect to see at an event like this, and some of it's a bit less traditional. One particularly nifty non-traditional artwork was the "Northern Lights" lightshow, which I attempted to photograph with my little digicam without notable success. However, Martindale spotted this video of it that captures the magic of the event, so I thought I'd share it with you all.


Rather than explaining it all, I'll simply copy some of the descriptive text that the maker of this video of the event wrote:

During the Adelaide Festival of Arts (29 February - 16 March 2008) more than 200,000 people enjoyed the spectacular Northern Lights.

This free event took place on North Terrace every night of the Festival between 9pm and 2am.

Before the Festival ended, the South Australian Government agreed to foot the additional $75,000 bill for the lights to stay up until March 30.

Artists from the internationally acclaimed The Electric Canvas http://www.theelectriccanvas.com.au/ transformed seven historic buildings by projecting designs onto their facades. It is the largest light installation of its type ever displayed in Australia.

Even though each of the buildings has stood for well over 100 years, this special event has allowed people to see Adelaide's cultural boulevard in a new light. Buildings in order of appearance:
Elder Hall
Bonython Hall
Mitchell Building
The Art Gallery of South Australia
Mortlock Wing - State Library
South Australian Museum
The Institute Building

Soundtrack: Porcelain by Moby

I've had my eye on the Wii console for a while now, in a sort of "that sounds interesting" kind of way. The style of gameplay it seems to encourage (social, fun) appeals to me, and the fact that some of the games that it comes with tend toward the more physically active end of the range is a big plus. See, most of my daily activities tend to be pretty sessile, and I've been a bit concerned about my lack of fitness, which is a problem given that I find exercise-for-its-own-sake unutterably tedious and boring. So the idea of 'puter games that include exercise as a by-product is very appealing to me.

Anyway, like I said, I've been eyeing the Wii up for a while now. But yesterday I got a chance to play with one at my friend Maz's birthday party, since her partner had just acquired one herself. Whee, what fun! I gotta get me one of those, sez I.

So I did! This afternoon, in fact. I'm now the proud owner of a Wii console, several bundled games (Wii Sport, World Sport Party and Sonic Unleashed), and a DDR mat (with accompanying Hottest Dance Party game). Woot! Having dabbled with all of them this afternoon, I can confidently say that I think this will encourage me to exercise more. :-)

Which brings me to the "request for advice" part of this post! I know that at least some of you fine folk reading this also have Wiis. I'm looking for recommendations for games that involve a fair bit of physical activity - stuff that will get me fit, while still being a GAME and not an excercise program (*yawn*). Stuff that will actually motivate me to get active because it's just plain fun to do. The DDR's a great example of that. What other Wii games can you recommend to get a lazy geek up off the couch and in motion?

I just got a phone call from the university ethics board - my ethics app has FINALLY been approved! *happydances all up and down the street* Now I can at long last start work on my data collection! Huzzah and hooray!

A few random moments from my week:

* Did you know that those cute friendly fishies known as Clown loaches come with hidden weapons that are sometimes called "slashers"? I knew this in theory; but today I saw them for the first time when my biggest (20cm) clown loach got Real Pissed Off when I netted her, and stuck out her slashers (cleverly entangling them in the net). Imagine bony crescent-shaped knives a centimetre long sticking out on either side of her head, and you've got the general idea. Yikes.

(In case you're wondering why I was netting my clown loaches (ok, you probably weren't wondering), it was to rehome them since they're getting too huge and rumbunctious for my aquarium, and since I have hopes of one day having a pretty aquascaped aquarium rather than a random arrangement of uprooted plants and bogwood piled in heaps to suit the whims of the loaches, I decided that it's Time They Went To A Better Place (i.e. the aquarium store at Holden Hill whose proprietor is a keen loach enthusiast)).

* Still waiting for the go-ahead from the ethics committee to get started on my data collection. Did I mention that they did finally send me a response to my ethics application a couple of weeks ago, which consisted of a page or two of things trivial and non-trivial that they wanted changed or clarified? Well, I did all that and sent them the redone info that they requested, and now I'm waiting for them to respond to that. I originally submitted the ethics app in early december. It's now early march, and I am coming to hate the ethics committee with the heat of a thousand suns. (I nearly mistyped that "the heat of a thousand nuns", which I'm sure would be interesting but not really the impression I'm trying to convey.)

* In absence of any real work to do (see previous point) I invited the ever-charming Maz around yesterday and we spent the day making books. Much fun was had by all - she made a duplicate of a soft leather-covered book that she uses to keep her (amazingly thorough and detailed) records of knitting, spinning and sewing projects in, and I made up some of the paper that I made in the papermaking workshop in January into a little hardcover book. A most satisfying day.

* Artyem has this week off work, and on tuesday he had his new aquarium delivered, a beeyootiful new one (with cabinet and all appropriate accessories) that is slightly larger than mine and a LOT prettier. So we spent a chunk of tuesday afternoon setting it up, washing gravel, installing under-gravel heating wires, etc etc etc. All hard work, but it's going to look SO good once he has it full of fish and plants and so on.