September 2009 Archives

I began this poem during my month-long sojourn as visiting scientist on the MacArthur II in 2006. Three years later, as I'm working up plankton data from that and many other cruises, seemed a good time to finish and post it.

~

The bow of the ship is sacred on moonless nights.

You stumble up there, drunk with artificial lights,

and sway in the darkness--clinging, staring, blind.

Moment by moment, you are sobered by the black,

until your appetite diminishes. You find

that single photons from long-gone supernovas

are enough to satisfy you. If you look back,

an open porthole seems obscenely bright:

a gluttony.

Best if your voyage takes you far beyond

where city glow demarcates the horizon.

Here nothing separates sky from sea, save

the abrupt absence of stars.

                                          Or not. You see

a luminescent soup, a swarm, in every wave!

They are tiny, these planktonic supernovas,

their lifespans shorter than any star or galaxy.

But to your light-thirsty eyes, they are the same:

a single sip.

Or, An Illustrated Guide to Sorting Plankton.

First the motivation: why would you want to spend all summer sorting plankton? Especially why would you go to La Jolla, beautiful warm sunny La Jolla, just so you could sit in a basement laboratory behind a microscope all day--sorting plankton?

Because in 2006 I went on this cruise, and I sorted plankton every night, and my findings were preliminary, but intriguing.
Because as part of this scholarship, I had to do some kind of research collaboration at a NOAA facility.
Because it turns out that NOAA has been doing these cruises, and collecting plankton samples, every few years for decades, and that is an amazing dataset ripe for the picking.
Because it made sense for the fourth and final chapter of my thesis to focus on squid spawning in the tropics, and that means looking for squid babies in plankton.

So, for all of these reasons, I found myself spending the summer in a rather surreal environment.

The fume hood:



The doorstop:



The bench full of open containers:



The best thing about my working conditions was definitely the company. A hilarious and energetic undergrad helped me out on her own erratic schedule, and next door to us was the reliable, friendly and knowledgeable collections manager, Annie. I admire Annie a great deal, in large part because she can look at crustaceans and see something biologically meaningful, instead of a crunchy reddish mess, as I do. But she also loves molluscs. Sort of the same way I love worms. We actually had this conversation:

Me: I would be a worm person if I weren't a mollusc person.
Annie: I would be a mollusc person if I weren't a crustacean person.

Unfortunately for me, plankton samples tend to be mostly crustaceans--copepods, ostracods, krill, shrimp, crab larvae, you name it--if it's red and crunchy, it's probably in the plankton somewhere. It will not surprise you to hear that I was looking for squid, not crustaceans. It's not as bad as a needle in a haystack, but . . . well, sometimes it is. After a few days, this is what I began seeing on the backs of my eyelids:


So, sorting squid out of plankton samples makes you insane! Hooray!

My job was made slightly more rewarding because I had decided to sort out fish also. There were more fish than squid, but (usually) not so many more that it really slowed me down. And at the end of the day, it feels like more of an accomplishment to have pulled 87 fish and 2 squid out of a jar than to have pulled out just 2 squid. Or zero squid. There are lots of people at NOAA who are very interested in fish, so I was able to give a little back to the people who were helping me out.

Plankton sorting is essentially a grown-up, scientific version of Where's Waldo? There are two fish and one squid in this image:


See?



It's not fair, of course, because I get stereo vision through the microscope, but you're just being given a single flat picture. Sorry about that. Here, I'll make up for it with some lolplankton:

So the folks over at ScientificBlogging decided to have themselves a little contest. A contest that is absolutely irresistible to yours truly. You see, US News & World Report did a 3-year survey-based study on the nation's best science graduate programs. Scientific Blogging reported the results, then said,

Now we know what universities to attend in order to receive a phenomenal education in science. But it's one thing to know a lot about science, and another thing entirely to be able to apply it and communicate it effectively. And communicating science is what we at ScientificBlogging are all about.

So to highlight these outstanding universities, ScientificBlogging has decided to sponsor a little friendly competition between them. Today we announce our first ever "University Writing Competiton." We invite graduate students that are currently enrolled at any of these Top 10 Universities (actually, eleven) to participate. The official rules are below, but the big idea is that we are inviting graduate students to write about science - on any scientific topic of their choosing. It is our hope to discover those exceptional students that not only know their science, but can also effectively communicate it to the scientific community - as well as to the general public.

The grand prize? A three-month paid writing internship. Hello! I'm in! Now, if only I could decide what to write about . . .

Just kidding. Of course I'm going to write about squid. But which squid? And what tentacular squidly aspect of squid? These are the questions that must be answered, in superb, nay, flawless prose, by me, before October 15th. And that answer must be posted on my Scientific Blogging account. Which I have just created for this purpose.

But I can't create a new blog and then post only one entry in it, ever, just to enter the contest. That feels a little cheap. I also can't create another blog like the Cephalopodiatrist, full of deep, rich, and way-too-long-for-sensible-blogging entries. So I thought: let's do something different. Something short and snappy that won't take too much time away from the Cephalopodiatrist, and OH RIGHT ALSO MY THESIS. Something that will serve a greater goal, namely, gathering fodder for the brilliant essay that I will eventually craft as my contest submission.

And thus, Squid A Day was born. I haven't decided if it should have dashes in the name or not. Opinions, anyone?

The idea was simple: Find something about squid in the news every day, and blog it, either correcting the science, or--in the unexpected instance where everything in the news article is actually correct--congratulating it. The execution was fairly simple, too--once I figured out ScientificBlogging's awful user interface.

Hi, ScientificBlogging. Do you notice how I am whining about this here on my personal blog instead of on my/your blog? You're welcome!

I'm pretty sure I am not dumb, nor technically incompetent (my advisor's snide comments notwithstanding) and yet I could not for the life of me figure out how to start posting on my new SB blog.

By the time I scrolled down to the part of their FAQ which announces, "Article creation is quite easy. Go to My Account and click Write Blog," I was already seriously annoyed. It is not "quite easy" it is "quite circuitous and counter-intuitive." I understand that UI is difficult--it should be intuitive, but everyone's intuitions are slightly, or drastically, different. So intuitive isn't always possible. But how about just "simple"?

You see, this is what happens when you sign up for an account on SB. First you find and click on the "register now" option, that's fairly straightforward--although admittedly I didn't find it on my own, I had it pointed out to me by the rules of the contest. Now you're at a page where you can provide some information about yourself, then you click "create new account." Then you get an e-mail. You follow the link in the e-mail, and it takes you to a login page. At this page you can edit more stuff: change your password, add books to recommend, and so forth. You make some edits, and click "save". Now you're still at the same page, it's just added a little note indicating that your changes have been saved. But nowhere does it have any place to actually write a post.

I stared at this page bleakly for a while, then went and did some actual work, then went back to staring at it bleakly. Finally  I noticed a little link in the corner leading to "my account". Hunh, I thought, am I not already at "my account"? But I clicked it. This took me to my "account dashboard"! This page boasts a "my friends" section and also a "corkboard" (The heck is a corkboard?) as well as a menu called "my tools."

(Was it Microsoft that started prefixing first person possessives to make everything look more friendly? Maybe that worked once, but now it is just aggravating. And ambiguous. Are you suggesting that the tools actually belong to me, the user, or are you emphasizing that you, the website, are generously allowing me to use your tools? Either way it's patronizing and a waste of space.)

Anyway, "write blog" is one of these tools, so now I'm in business! Hooray! And, SB, don't take it personally. No one can do UI properly. Not even my own school, which apparently offers the number one science graduate program in the entire NATION, can make reasonable UIs.

Check out the screenshot below. This is how I enroll in classes. Isn't it great that the exact same set of links is at the top AND bottom of the page, just to give you more stuff to look at? Also, note the instructions suggest that you "select the term and click Change." Anyone see an option to select a term? Or a button labeled "Change"? Nope, I don't either! Another fun fact: it's impossible to "proceed to step 2 of 3" as such. All you can do is keep clicking through those pale green buttons, and eventually, if you look to the upper right at the retro sci-fi "1-2-3", you will notice that the 2, instead of the 1, has become highlighted. It's like a bread crumb, indicating you're on the right track!