Saturday, July 31, 2004

It's Saturday night ... I must be in Utah

My mom and I are now in Logan, Utah, where we'll spend the night and some of tomorrow before heading on to the Black Hills area of South Dakota. It turns out that our hotel here has free net access, so I just have to make a blog post (and yes, a computer in the lobby was the first thing I looked for as we checked in).

So far the trip has been relatively normal for a move: a rather hectic wrap-up of packing and running errands Friday morning, a traffic-delayed drive out of the San Francisco area Friday afternoon, and then lots of driving through open, unpopulated areas.

This evening, though, we had a delightful meal with some relatives at Maddox, a restaurant in Brigham City, Utah (that apparently doesn't have a website). The restaurant was a favorite of my mom's family while she was growing up, and she was waxing rhapsodic about it as we approached (it did not disappoint). My mom's favorite dish (and apparently my great-grandmother's as well) was their turkey fried steak, which is ground turkey that is breaded and pan-fried. My mom ordered it tonight, and the few bites I had were indeed tasty.

What made the evening very special, however, was that by almost random chance my great-aunt, an incredibly kind and caring woman who now lives in Tucson, Arizona, was in town for her 50th high school reunion. When we learned that we'd both be in town the same day, it was a foregone conclusion that we'd meet for dinner at Maddox. So, here at a table in Brigham City, Utah, we had my mom, who lived in the San Francisco bay area (~800 miles away) but is now moving to New York (~2,200 miles away), myself, who lives in southern California (~750 miles away), and my great-aunt and her husband, who live in Tucson, Arizona (~850 miles away). The meeting was especially poignant because my mom almost certainly won't see my great-aunt for another two years, if not more, and my great-aunt is the only close family relative of my mom's that's still alive (excluding me). A very neat night, and a fun way to start this cross-country trip.

Friday, July 30, 2004

On the road again

I'm leaving today to help my mom drive across the country to New York. I won't be back until the 10th of August, and won't have any certain net access before then, so I probably won't be able to post much, if at all (no laptop, no cell phone ... whatever will I do?)

We'll be heading to the Salt Lake City area first (where my mom grew up), then up to Mt. Rushmore, and finally over to Niagara Falls before we arrive in the Albany area. We'll finish the coast-to-coast trip by driving to Boston, where I'll catch a plane back to Southern California.

My mom's buying a condo in New York, and I was planning on spending a few days there helping her fix it up after we finished the drive, but unfortunately the close of escrow has been pushed back more than two weeks, so we probably won't have access to it while I'm there.

Oh yes, considering that I still haven't finished posting my hourly pictures from my Canada trip, don't expect any hourly pictures from this one.

Thursday, July 29, 2004

Pharyngula discusses the SDB meeting

Pharyngula just got back from the Society for Developmental Biology meeting, and he's writing a lot of neat stuff about it (and I'm sure there's more on the way). One thing that caught my eye was his discussion of one of the education forums, including a good discussion of the in-class response systems I've written about before.

The presenter that Pharyngula discusses got relatively unexpected answers to two questions he asked using the in-class response system. Instead of following up these unexpected answers, the presenter just continued on with the presentation, which caused some audience grumbling (though in his defense he may have had a tight time constraint). This is a good illustration of just how much flexibility is required when using in-class response systems: as an instructor you need to be willing to throw out your planned lecture so you can discuss the results of questions you've asked. If you don't, it's likely the students will learn that their answers are meaningless, and you'll probably stop getting thoughtful responses. And, after all, the whole point of the system is to get feedback on how the students are doing, so using the system while ignoring the data seems self-defeating.

Kerry's speech

I just finished watching John Kerry's Democratic convention acceptance speech (on TV), and was impressed. I'm no political commentator, but just thought I'd say that I enjoyed the speech as a whole, thought his positions were agreeable, loved all the jabs at Bush, and, this being the first Kerry speech I've watched in its entirety, was very pleased with his speaking style (though he's no Tony Blair).

Daily show clips

Semantic Compositions has recently said that he was baffled why the Daily Show was so popular, and while I admit to not watching it with any regularity, BoingBoing has linked to some good Daily Show responses to recent events that make me very tempted to chalk myself up as a fan of the show.

"Re-vote control" and "Delayed Elections" (mov link for both clips) both discuss the recent proposals to delay the election in the case of a terrorist attack. Quite possibly the best line is that, according to Jon Stewart, the administration is just "spitballing the idea that the president of the United States could, under certain circumstances, declare himself Caesar."

"The Boys in the Ban" is a response to the Senate debate about the gay marriage amendment, ending with a hilarious analysis of Senator Cornyn's speech-writer's comparison of gay marriage with the marriage of a man and a box turtle (though the senator apparently did not include that portion of the speech in his final speech).

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Brief house update

I've left a few loose ends with my recent house-related posting, and thought I'd wrap them up for those who are interested:
  • The in-common-laws were able to sleep in our newly created guest bedroom last night, which we brought about by putting the books that were on our "library room" floor into new bookshelves, moving the mattress we've been sleeping on from the guest room into the library room, and then moving the futon from the garage into the guest room. We'd normally just have our mattress in our master bedroom (as I imagine most people do), but we're using the master bedroom as a construction supply area for the master bathroom project.
  • The fourth coat of paint was enough for the master bathroom walls, which was a big relief. While there are still a few thin spots (especially on top of some of the textured areas), the walls look very nice.
  • The electrical finish installation went well, and we're psyched to finally have working lights in our bathroom. We have four lights around the mirror on one switch, two on the ceiling controlled by a separate dimmer switch, and a third switch for the fan. This is the first time we've had hard-wired lights in a bathroom in our house for almost a year; turning on the lights after they were installed yesterday was incredibly satisfying.
  • The plants in our new bed in the front yard are growing like crazy. Eleven of our 12 roses have leafed out (10 have flowered already), almost all of our cannas have sent up leaves, and all of our calla lilies have sent up leaves, with one blooming just a few days ago. The front of our house is much cheerier now (and hopefully I'll have many more flower pictures to taunt Minnesotans with this winter).
Next up for us is to install the master bathroom floor (tumbled marble, which we can afford because it's a small area), and then put in crown and baseboard molding, all of which we're going to do ourselves. Unfortunately we're going to have to hold off on both projects since I'm leaving on Friday to help my mom drive cross-country to New York where she'll start her ministerial internship in late August.

Tangled Bank #8 is online

Tangled Bank Blutton
I've been so busy with our visiting relatives that I forgot today was Tangled Bank day! Reagan Kelly at ReaganK.com has posted up Tangled Bank #8. I'd say more, but I've got to head off to the store to buy things for dinner.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

The in-common-laws are coming!

My SO's parents are driving out from the east coast to visit, and last we heard they were in Florida, planning to leave for here a few days ago. We hadn't heard anything until an hour ago, when they called from Gila Bend, Arizona to say that they'd be arriving at our place tonight. Eep!

We've got a futon for them to sleep on, but it's still in our garage, our spare bedroom has books piled up on the floor, and the rest of the house isn't exactly spotless. So it's off to IKEA to buy some bookshelves, and then time to dust off the ol' biceps to do some furniture moving.

Tangled Bank: Call for submissions

Tangled Bank Blutton
The next Tangled Bank is coming out tomorrow, so be sure to get your submissions in to Reagan Kelly over at ReaganK.com.

Monday, July 26, 2004

Painting progress & tips

My SO and I just finished putting the fourth coat of paint on our bathroom walls (five if you count the tinted primer). We think this coat should do it, but we won't know for certain until morning. Our electrician is scheduled to arrive at 8am tomorrow to do the finish electrical work (attaching our light fixtures and electrical outlets to the "rough" wiring that has already been installed), so this coat better be enough.

Astute readers will realize that it's taken us more than a week to do the painting. We started off painting the ceiling (white), which went incredibly smoothly. One coat of primer the first day, one coat of paint the next day, and we were done.

We're painting the walls a rich reddish-purple, and even though we used a tinted primer, the first coat didn't cover well at all. For the second coat we decided to try to put the paint on a bit thicker (since some of our books mentioned that most people put paint on too thin), but this backfired as we found numerous drips the next morning (even though we did many "drip patrols").

We let the paint dry for a few days and then tried to sand off the drips. Unfortunately the paint was still somewhat elastic, so instead of nicely sanding down the high points, the entire drip would usually just pull off the wall, leaving a spot of bare drywall texture visible. We sanded off the most egregious drips (leaving the less noticeable ones since we had no idea how patches would look), and then set off to re-paint the sanded areas. We put primer on all the areas that had large sections sanded down to the drywall (>1-4 square mm), and let that dry for a full day. We put two more coats of paint onto the primed areas (or any other area needing touch-up after sanding, being sure to feather our edges), and let each coat dry thoroughly.

After the second coat on the patches dried, we finally were able to put on third and fourth coats of paint yesterday and today. After the third coat yesterday none of our sanded and patched areas were visible, which was a relief (but also made us wish we'd sanded off more drips). The patch-hiding is probably helped by our wall texturing, which already makes the surface look a bit uneven.

While doing this painting we've picked up a few good tips from various sources, which I thought I'd pass along:
  • Paint pour spouts are a useful (and cheap) tool; they fit onto an open gallon can of paint to help you pour neatly.
  • To save roller covers between jobs you can put the cover, filled with paint, into the freezer (in a sealed bag, of course, unless you want to paint your freezer). Then just give your roller cover a few hours to defrost before you want to use it again, and you're ready to go.
  • Use low-adhesion masking tape (the blue stuff here in the US) to pull out loose fuzz from the roller covers before you start using them (just put the tape on the roller cover and then pull it off). There's a lot less roller fuzz on our walls this time than on any of our previous jobs.
  • Using a work platform (a long, low bench) makes painting high areas much easier. Ours is 20 inches high and about three and a half feet long (link to Home Depot's page on it), and was much more convenient than our old six foot ladder.
  • Singing "Crown molding, crown molding" and "We can always do a faux finish ..." keeps your spirits up.

June 16, 2004: Travel Note

While hiking across Lasqueti Island we started seeing signs for the Lasqueti Internet Access Centre. My last blog post (and net access) at the time had been many days earlier (June 13), and I knew I wasn't going to get another chance until much later (June 21 was my next post). Thus I was excited that I might be able to make a live, on-the-road, post to my blog from an island, but I figured that we wouldn't be going near it so didn't think too much about it. Well, as luck should have it, our path across the island took us right by the driveway of the internet cafe:

 Sign showing net cafe entrance

I walked excitedly up to the sign, visions of a blog post from Lasqueti Island flashing through my head, only to be let down when I read the hours of the cafe:

 Hours of internet cafe

I was there on a Wednesday.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

BugMeNot

I find sites that require registration for no good reason quite annoying, and will almost always leave the site rather than register and login. However, I just discovered BugMeNot.com (I'm slow, I know), a site that provides login information for sites that require registration to access otherwise free content. Since this seems like an insanely useful little tool, I've added a blutton for it on my sidebar.

Saturday, July 24, 2004

06-16-04: Hourly Pictures

Today started with breakfast followed by a talk, after which we headed out for an afternoon of island touring with some pack lunches.

We took a boat to another island, which was reputed to have rather liberal occupants, and hiked across it. About halfway across the island, while walking through a wooded area, we noticed what looked like a glorified lemonade stand up ahead along the side of the road. We walked up and saw that it was a "cookie stand" that contained fresh-baked cookies, cinnamon rolls, and other treats, along with many types of seedling plants. There was nobody tending it (though it was on a driveway, so it was probably near a house), and there was just a little sign with prices and a tin to put your money in. Luckily my colleagues all decided to buy something, so we hung around long enough for me to get an hourly picture (1300) of the stand. We were all relatively shocked that such a stand would exist, though after we walked further we saw at least one more (dedicated to breads), though it was sadly empty. That stand made our day (and the cinnamon buns were quite good).

After our hike we stopped by an aquaculture facility; the 1600 pictures were taken at this facility, and are of algae rearing tanks.

In the 1900 picture you can see our makeshift curtain, which we erected because the cabins completely lacked curtains. We didn't erect it for privacy, but instead to counter the afternoon sun that shone directly onto our bed while we were napping. While cats basking in the sun sure do look comfortable, I quickly learned that napping in the sun is not all it's cracked up to be.

We also discovered today that the island has a view of cruise ships as they head north from Vancouver (see the 2000 picture). We were quite depressed to see that there was nobody visible out on the deck of the ship; everyone seemed to be inside ignoring the beautiful scenery they were sailing past.

Our hourly pictures from the day are below. (This text was written after returning from the trip).


06-16-04: 0800 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 0900 Posted by Hello

06-16-04: 1000 - talk in progress


06-16-04: 1100 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 1200 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 1300 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 1400 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 1500 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 1600 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 1700 Posted by Hello

06-16-04: 1800 - Napping


06-16-04: 1900 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 2000 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 2100 Posted by Hello


06-16-04: 2200 Posted by Hello

Friday, July 23, 2004

Anime: Dubs vs. Subs

Semantic Compositions wrote a post on translations of anime into English. In the post he said he didn't understand why many anime fans preferred subtitled anime (in which the Japanese dialog remains and is translated to English as text on the screen) to dubbed anime (in which the Japanese dialog is removed and replaced with English dialog). Being one of the anti-dub anime fans that SC mentions, I felt obligated to defend my cause and list a few reasons why I prefer subbed anime. I was going to reply in SC's comments, but after writing a few pages worth (ed.: does he ever shut up?) decided to post it here instead.

1) Dubbed anime series are more likely to be edited to change content.

Cardcaptors, the American dubbed version of Cardcaptor Sakura, was horribly mangled by the dubbers as they changed dialog, edited out scenes, completely altered the personality of certain characters, and turned a character who wasn't introduced until the 8th episode into a title character. Apparently the dubbers were trying to turn this "magical girl" show into an action-adventure show suitable for boys, but the subtitled version stays much more faithful to the original (doing no edits that I know of). Cardcaptors Uncensored is an excellent website that details the changes between the two shows, including comparisons of the episodes (episode 36 is a good example).

Yu-Gi-Oh!'s American dubbed version has also been intensely edited. Again the dubbers change dialog drastically (often adding inane blabber where there is silence in the Japanese version), completely alter plot elements (e.g. turning personal quests into cliched good-vs-evil battles), remove elements that are deemed too graphic (guns are turned into threateningly pointed fingers, scantily clad characters have more clothes painted onto them), remove any "occult" elements (e.g. five-pointed stars), change character deaths into people either just disappearing or being "sent to the shadow realm," and erase both Japanese and English text from the screen (and these were just the things my SO and I could think of quickly). The Yu-Gi-Oh! Episode guide is a good website that details some of the changes made in the dub.

2) Japanese voice acting is typically superior to the dub's English voice acting.

Japanese voice actors are generally better trained and more respected than their American counterparts. Japanese voice actors also have the benefit of working with the directors and producers of the show, while the American actors do not. Even though I can't understand much Japanese (ed.: that's an understatement), by listening to the Japanese voices I can still feel the emotions and grasp the mood that is being set. My SO and I started watching Princess Mononoke on DVD with the English dubs, because we'd heard they were good, but after about 15 minutes couldn't stand it anymore and switched to the Japanese language track, which meshed with the movie much better.

3) Dubs sometimes replace the musical score that goes along with the show, which changes the mood of the show tremendously. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a particularity good example of this change.

4) Since the original Japanese language track remains in subs, it is thus possible for viewers who understand Japanese to do their own translations.
For example, I have a rudimentary understanding of Japanese honorifics (e.g. appending -chan, -san, -sama to names to indicate the social relationship between the named person and the speaker) and while watching subs I like to hear which honorifics characters are using for each other. I haven't ever heard a dub use the honorifics (which makes sense since there are no direct English equivalents, though some try to convey the same meanings), and subs rarely put the honorifics in the subtitle text.

5) Since the animation of mouth movements is designed to match the Japanese language track, dubbers must work hard to match the English script to the Japanese mouth movements (often ending up using odd constructions).

In conclusion, while subs have the limitations of any translation, dubs include many more changes to the source material than subs, and I think these changes reduce the quality of the finished product.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

9/11 Commission Report

The 9/11 commission (the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) has released it's official report today. BoingBoing has linked to a site that contains a bookmarked and fully online-searchable PDF version of the report that's much faster to download than the official PDF version (2.6 MB vs 7.4 MB).

I've only read a tiny fraction of it so far, but it appears to provide incredibly thorough accounts of the hijackings and other events of the day; it is engrossing, if depressing, reading. I highly recommend reading it.

Why I drive a small car

My SO and I got back at 8am this morning from a whirlwind 20-hour trip to the SF Bay Area to pick up some furniture from my mom. The largest item was a wood-frame futon, which we were excited about getting because it means we'll be able to have a place for guests to sleep.

However, my SO and I own small, gas-efficient cars (highway mileage 35mpg for one and 40mpg for the other), and while we've managed to transport an incredible amount of stuff in our trusty small cars (including bookshelves, our entertainment center, and 6' tall garage organizers), a queen-sized futon would have been impossible to fit. Thus we rented a cargo van from Enterprise (with unlimited mileage), and in 20 hours made a sleepless round trip to the bay area to pick up the furniture. The futon fit inside the cargo van fully assembled (we pondered napping on it at a rest stop), and was protected during transport, all for $80 including tax and supplemental insurance.

On the road we were pondering that it was probably more cost-effective for us, and most other folks, to own small cars and rent a van occasionally than to own a pickup truck (and not have to rent a van), so when we got back we ran some numbers to test the idea. The difference in fuel efficiency between pickup trucks and small cars is large: the average small car gets 34mpg, while the average pickup truck gets 20mpg on the highway (data calculated from fueleconomy.gov's pickup truck and small car listings; large pickup trucks are apparently not included in the data). To make the calculations a bit more broadly applicable we found that the average employed person drives 35.5 miles a day in the US (data from US Bureau of Transportation Statistics household survey); we used this number for our mileage estimates.

Since the average US gas price is $1.92/gallon, small car owners save $1.38 in gas costs every day (0.72 gallons per day, assuming 35 miles driven); over a year this adds up to $505 saved (263 gallons of gas). Thus in only 58 days of average driving the average small car owner has paid for an unlimited mileage van rental for an entire day. This calculation doesn't include the increased purchase and insurance cost of most large vehicles, so small car owners likely save even more.

Since this is the first time in more than a year that my SO and I have rented a vehicle to haul something large, and we just got back from a 2,000+ mile trip to Canada, it's clear that we're saving quite a bit of money by having a fuel-efficient car, even though we have to rent large vehicles and pay for deliveries every now and then.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

On the road & reptile pictures

My mom's moving to New York at the end of the month to start an internship, so she's been frantically busy these past few weeks preparing. Today my SO and I are renting a van and driving up to her house (in the San Francisco Bay Area) to pick up some furniture and bring it down to our house (as well as bringing her some of our old boxes). To save money on rental fees we're going to do the entire trip in one day (~6 hours each way), so we'll be rather busy today.

To keep my dedicated readers occupied, here's a neat site that contains pictures of various "different" animals (e.g. two headed snakes, fork-tailed lizards, etc). Who says two headed snakes aren't cute? (via BoingBoing)

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Questions in the classroom

Pharyngula has a post discussing how his undergraduate students are often hesitant to ask questions in class.
"When I hear silence during a lecture, I assume the students are absorbing the material without a problem, so I start ramping up the quantity of information to challenge them --and I've discovered that it takes a major overload to blow the fuses on these quiet, diligent sons and daughters ..." (link)
Why don't students ask questions about material they have failed to grasp? We've all been students, so I'm sure that we've all been in this situation (did you ask questions every time you were lost in class? I know I didn't), but I'll detail some of the reasons I can think of here, grouping them into three major categories.

1. Students perceive that there are potential negative consequences to asking questions in class:
  1. Students almost never do the required reading ahead of time, but they don't want to make this fact obvious to the instructor. Thus if they believe the answer to their question may have been in the reading, they won't ask a question until they've checked the book.
  2. Students may think that their question has been answered in a prior portion of the lecture that they missed (while they were not paying attention, in the bathroom, out sick, etc.)
  3. Students don't want to appear ignorant in front of their peers, and thus they don't want to ask what they think may be a question with an obvious answer. In the same vein of peer pressure, students might not want to appear as though they're holding the class back by asking too many basic questions. These reasons especially apply when no one else is asking a question, which can lead students to believe that all their peers are understanding the lecture.
  4. Students may be so completely lost that they have no idea where to start. If a student hasn't understood the last three hours of lecture, the last thing they want to ask is the equivalent of, "Can you go back to the beginning of the unit and start over?"
A common element to almost all of these is that the student may feel that it is his or her fault that he or she doesn't understand the material (instead of blaming the instructor for blazing through the material in ten minutes), and thus by asking a question the student is revealing his or her own faults publicly.

2. The students believe that there are other ways of obtaining the information that don't involve the potential negative consequences of asking questions in class:
  1. Students may be hoping that if they can write everything down they can review their notes later and figure the material out then. Thus if there is a lot to write down a student's first priority will be to take notes and not to think about the material or ask questions (this can apply even when notes or slides are given out ahead of time, since then the student's time must be spent finding the topic on the notes and squeezing their own notes onto the pre-prepared notes).
  2. Students are more willing to ask a classmate or check the book than they are to ask the instructor. This also applies to the web, as I know I've had students search the web for hours looking for an answer before asking me a single, basic, question.
  3. Students may believe that if the instructor couldn't convey the information clearly the first time around, there's little likelihood another go-round will help.

3. There may be other factors outside of the classroom environment that inhibit student question-asking:
  1. The students may be tired and overworked. At my community college more than half of my students are working at least part-time (and a select few work nearly full-time), many are taking multiple classes at once, and even if they're not taking multiple classes or working they're likely doing things outside of school that are keeping them quite busy. Asking questions requires more active thinking than just writing down everything the instructor says, and being tired makes this harder.
  2. Students may be in a foul mood due to some event that has occurred outside of class.
  3. A lack of good language skills may inhibit a student's ability to understand the lecture the first time around (many of my foreign students tape my lectures and listen to them multiple times, a very intimidating thought), and may also make the student feel quite awkward about asking questions in class.
  4. A few students may have psychological predispositions (e.g. social anxiety disorder, being incredibly shy) that inhibit question-asking behavior.
None of the reasons I've listed above include that the students don't care about the topic or don't want to learn, an intentional omission. While these reasons certainly explain a lack of question-asking in some situations, I've talked with instructors who apply them far too frequently, especially since these reasons may be the result of poor pedagogy in the first place (go ahead, call me a hopeless idealist).

The fact that there are so many separate reasons why students may not want to ask questions in class means that instructors cannot assume that students will ask questions whenever they don't understand the content. Of note, however, is that when a student has a basic understanding of the topic at hand many of the reasons for not asking questions evaporate, and thus we get the counter-intuitive conclusion that students ask more questions when they understand the material better. This also explains Pharyngula's observation that graduate students ask more questions than undergraduates: they're more comfortable with the material and thus many of the reasons for not asking questions don't apply.

Thus, in my view, the way to get questions in class from undergraduates is to cover the material more slowly and in more depth, which allows the students to understand the material and thus begin to ask questions about it. But if we stop using student-asked questions as an indicator of student comprehension, what can we use?
  1. Common sense. We, as instructors, can think back to how long it took us to comprehend the material we are teaching, and we can also logically deduce how long it should take students to understand something (and then probably double that time). The problem here is that we often forget that it took us years (or even decades) to learn what we know, and thus we can't expect a student to gain even a semblance of the same knowledge in 30 minutes.
  2. Ask questions of students. Instead of waiting for students to ask questions, turn the tables around and ask them challenging questions. But don't just wait for a student to raise their hand to answer your question, because then all the reasons above come into play again and you'll only get the one person who understands the question raising their hand. Instead either pick students at random (I co-wrote a program with a friend that did this automatically for me in-class) or ask the entire class the question (e.g. with an in-class response system, or some lower tech format).
  3. If you do insist on waiting for questions from the class (or asking the rather horrid question, "Does anyone have any questions?"), then strongly consider interpreting a lack of questions as a lack of understanding, and cover the topic again.
  4. Base your time-on-topic on end of the semester evaluations. At the end of each semester I ask every student which topic I should rework in the next semester and why. I then rework the section(s) that are most frequently listed, generally giving them more time.

Monday, July 19, 2004

June 15, 2004: Hourly Pictures

Today was our second full day on the island, and it began with an intertidal excursion led by our resident marine expert. In the intertidal we found some neat critters, one of which was the northern tidepool clingfish seen in the 1000 picture. Once we'd spent enough time among the rocks we took a boat to a nearby island and hiked across it, enjoying a packed lunch after our hike. We were then picked up and visited yet another island briefly, and upon returning "home" I promptly took a nap (hence the lack of pictures). After dinner I gave my talk on animal diversity and mosquitoes, which I had figured would go about 30 minutes to an hour, but which actually lasted about two hours (so much for my great timing skills).

One of the neatest things about this area is the very large (and relatively fast) tides. This is observable in today's pictures: compare the water levels in the 1300 and 1500 pictures; both pictures are looking out over the exact same little inlet/bay. One of the reasons we ate lunch on this island was that we had to wait until at least 1500 so our boat could come in and pick us up.

Our hourly pictures from the day are below. (This text was written after the trip)


06-15-04: 900 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1000 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1100 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1200
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1300
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1400
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1500
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1600
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 1700
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 2000
 Posted by Hello


06-15-04: 2200
 Posted by Hello