Longwood Garden pictures

In my recent Philadelphia trip post I promised some pictures of my visit to Longwood Gardens (also called DuPont Gardens). I finally had time this afternoon to sit down and edit some of the pictures, so here goes.

Longwood Gardens is located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and is about a 45 minute drive south-west of Philadelphia's center city. They've got more than a thousand acres of land you can stroll through outside, and have multiple conservatories (with 4 heated acres of space) to enjoy inside. Every time I've been there, which is three or four times now (a lot considering I live ~3,000 miles away), I've found something new and beautiful to enjoy.

On this past trip it was pretty cold, at least for us California pansies, but we still perused many of the trails before heading inside the greenhouses. They've planted more than 2 million bulbs throughout their grounds, and so most places you looked bulbs were starting to pop up and bloom.


They have some very nice manicured outdoor gardens; the one in the picture below is the main fountain garden. The fountains were turned off while we were there this time, but judging by the picture on their homepage (which is currently of the same garden), they're spectacular.


If you wander through a forest on the grounds you're rewarded with this view of a serene meadow, which you can hike through. We didn't walk through it this time due to the temperature, but have on prior trips and it's a neat area.



But naturalized bulbs and pretty views outside aren't the only reason to go to Longwood; there are also tremendous heated conservatories that house an amazing variety of plants. They have greenhouse areas that specialize in bonsai, palms and cycads, orchids, roses, ferns, Mediterranean climates, and tropical climates, to name a few. Walking into the greenhouses is just amazing, as you're presented with views like this:



Now if only I could get them to build a Longwood Gardens 2 in California, complete with the moist climate and seasonal variation in environmental temperatures, living in California would be complete.

Note: these pictures were taken on April 3, 2004.

Semantic Compositions Shines

Semantic Compositions took my challenge (or gentle nudging, as I prefer to call it) and posted a hilarious, pun-filled story based on Melissa Kaplan's Beastly Garden of Wordly Delights. I suspected he'd click with that material, I just didn't think he'd dazzle me by doing it at such a fast pace.

Next time I'll have to give SC something more difficult to work with; that page was like a slow pitch down the middle of the plate for him.

Irrational fears, pt. 2

And the most pathetic fear for a biologist is ... drum roll please ... reaching into the cavity of a store bought chicken [cue wild cheering], which received seven votes; 44% of the total. Chicken-reaching was followed by both spiders and cleaning up moldy food, which received four votes each (25%), and closing out the list was looking at dissected humans with one vote (6%). If we count Pharyngula's inability to decide between two choices as half votes for each, then the final totals are

• Chicken-reaching: 7 (41%)
  
• Spiders: 4.5 (26%)
  
• Moldy food: 4 (24%)
  
• Dissected human looking: 1.5 (9%)

Now my SO and I will both have more data to back up our respective claims that the other person's fears are more pathetic. To be fair, neither of us is so afraid of these items that we can't work around them; we just prefer that the non-fearful one of us deals with them whenever possible.

Thanks much to everyone who participated!

She's dead, Jim.

The title says it all: my office computer's hard drive is no more. The tech folks tried their best, but she'd flat-lined long before they put her on the table. The drive won't even be recognized by a known-good BIOS.

To give you a bit of the back story, I found that my computer wouldn't boot on arriving in my office this morning, but had to give a lab exam so called the tech folks and ran. After the lab exam I confirmed it was still dead, called the tech people again since they hadn't shown up, and biked home to get my backup CDs (lesson learned: offsite backups make sense, until you actually need them). I made my earlier post from home while copying my backup CDs to my home computer's hard drive (to ensure I had a working copy of the files somewhere), and then rushed into work to rewrite my lecture on a borrowed laptop. On Tuesday of this week, after my backup, I'd reworked a good fraction of today's lecture, adding a lot of in-class response system questions, and so in the hour I had before lecture started I gathered my slides from last semester's files, reorganized them, and tried to remember my questions. I got the file ready by the time lecture started, minus a few elusive questions, and everything went relatively well except that I wasn't nearly as smooth as I like to be. On the other hand, it was far better than the time the projector became indecisive in the middle of a lecture and kept switching between two resolutions every fraction of a second.

Sadly, much as I'd like to gloat about being prepared, my Monday backup was not part of a regular backup regimen. The only reason I backed up the files was because I was writing a test and didn't have my USB drive with me, so I burned a CD with the questions to bring home. Since I had extra space on the CD I figured, “Oh, what the heck,” and added all my files from this semester. My most recently backup before Monday was completed in December. I think, in some perverse sense, I just rolled a 20 on some cosmic luck roll.

Well, that's it for tonight; I need sleep.

Not the best of weeks ...

I found out earlier this week that the adjunct we have teaching the Friday Zoology labs has to head out of town for a funeral, so instead of having a day to grade and catch up I now get to spend all Friday in lab.

Then, this morning, I get into the office and find that my computer isn't booting. The hard drive is making funny noises, and I haven't been able to get past the bios screen. Considering that all my lectures, e-mail, and other teaching materials are stored on there, this is, to put it mildly, not good. Thankfully I made a partial backup on Monday, but I now get to frantically try to recreate my lecture for this afternoon, since I worked on that on Tuesday.

Well, the CD's done copying here, so back to working on lecture ...

Beastly Words or Wordly Beasts?

If you've ever wondered why pens cry, jack asses are always male, siverback bands aren't something attached to watches, and finding a rhino crash doesn't necessarily mean that you'll find any dented rhino bumpers, Melissa Kaplan's Beastly Garden of Wordly Delights is the place for you. The Beastly Garden of Wordly Delights contains, among other things, a list of the plurals, collective nouns, sounds, gender descriptors, and offspring names for a wide array of animals.

After perusing the list I'm not sure which I'd rather see: a cloud of bats, a sleuth of bears, a wake of buzzards, a clutter of cats, an army of caterpillars (hah!), a peep of peeping chicks, a gulp of cormorants, a rag of colts, a convocation of eagles, an elk gang, a skein of geese, an exaltation of larks, an owl parliament, a rattlesnake rhumba, a snake rave, or a dazzle of zebras. One thing I have seen recently, however, is a cawroboree of cawing crows on campus.

Oh my, this is just too much fun. Take it away, Semantic Compositions (nudge nudge).

The Tangled Bank

Pharyngula has started a biology and medicine version of the Carnival of the Vanities, calling it The Tangled Bank. The Tangled bank is designed to give biology and medicine bloggers a chance to highlight their recent work. Every week participants will e-mail their most interesting post of the week to the host of the week, with the host putting up a summary of all the submissions. Hosting will rotate around blogs, with Pharyngula organizing things for now.

Phanyngula is asking for volunteers to contact him. He's interested in finding more hosts for the project, as well as submissions of posts for inclusion in the first edition (to come out Wednesday the 21st). If you're worried about being of a high enough caliber to be included, keep in mind that he's invited me to participate, so he must be letting anyone into this thing. :)

Since you can't be anything in the blogosphere without one of those nifty little 80x15 buttons, here's some I whipped up with the button maker:


And since everything can't be white text on a grayed out background, here's some that are a bit different:


My favorites are probably the upper left two, though all of these break the convention of the bar being 25 pixels from the left, and are about as original as Wonder Bread, so more work is probably needed.

Where is Invisible Adjunct?

This afternoon I chatted with one of our adjunct faculty, and was reminded how grateful I am that I'm no longer an adjunct. At my campus we're in an odd position with respect to adjuncts currently: our budget for the fall has been cut, and thus we'll be cutting the number of class sections offered. Normally this would mean we'd lay off adjuncts, but a state retirement incentive program (if offered) may lead to a large number of faculty retirements. If those faculty retire we probably won't lay off anyone, and may even hire a few extra adjuncts. While this uncertainty is frustrating for the professors who want to retire, it's worse for our adjuncts as they have no idea whether they'll be employed here in the fall.

The California State Universities, who also hire a large number of adjuncts, aren't doing any better. The adjunct I talked to this afternoon said there is a good possibility that no adjuncts will be rehired this fall at the Cal State department he or she also adjuncts for, even though some adjuncts have been there as long as fifteen years. Even though this adjunct works at multiple campuses, there's a possibility that he or she will either not have a job at all next fall, or will have only one position.

Considering that our district limits the number of classes any individual adjunct can teach, living on the adjunct salary from just our district isn't easy. A faculty member at the highest pay scale for adjuncts (5+ years service), teaching the maximum load allowable (9 contact hours), earns almost exactly $10,000 a semester in our district. Adjunct faculty at the lowest pay scale earn approximately $7,500 a semester for the same load. Adjuncts can teach summer classes as well, but those are highly sought after by full time faculty, who have priority for assignments. In this summer's schedule there is only one adjunct employed across all my campus's science departments (including biology, chemistry, physics, geology, and astronomy). So, assuming an adjunct can't get a summer assignment and only teaches in our district, the maximum they can earn in a year ranges from $15,200 in their first year to $20,000 if they have 5 or more years of experience. Not exactly what you hope for after getting a masters degree or Ph.D.

Let's put this in perspective. If I, a non-tenured full time faculty member, hired two first year adjuncts to teach my full load of classes for me, paying their contract salaries out of my pocket, I would have more than $30,000 left after paying their salaries. If my most experienced colleagues did the same thing they'd have more than $56,000 left after paying the adjuncts. Even if my most experienced colleagues hired the most experienced adjuncts, they'd still have more than $48,000 left. Any way you look at it, adjunct faculty pay is paltry compared to full time pay.

Transit of Venus

The astronomers among us should like this: a reanimation of the 1882 transit of Venus from 147 still images taken by David Peck Todd. The next transit of Venus will occur on June 8, 2004; it will be completely visible in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, will only be partially visible in the eastern US, and those of us here in the western US will miss it completely. (Via BoingBoing)

Sea Star Lunch

Yesterday morning I helped our resident ecologist conduct a field-based lab in the rocky intertidal zone at a nearby beach. The students measured the relative abundance of organisms and quantified abiotic conditions in both the high and mid intertidal zones. Due to staying up far too late with Semantic Compositions the night before watching Scooby-Doo 2 (it was pretty good), I spent the start of lab pondering whether barnacles, mussels, or rockweed would make the better pillow. I concluded that rockweed would probably be best.

Shortly into the lab one student spotted a sea star (starfish) enjoying a meal of a mussel. Sea stars are voracious predators, and they're some of the most feared animals in the intertidal zone. Simply placing a severed arm of certain species of sea stars into a tide pool will cause nearly everything in that pool to go running for cover. However, sea star mouths are pretty small, often less than half the width of their central disk. By examining the picture it becomes clear that the sea star cannot possibly fit the mussel into its mouth.


Sea stars get around this size problem by digesting prey outside their body. Sea stars have two stomachs, a cardiac and a pyloric stomach, and can push their cardiac stomach outside their body so that it surrounds a prey item. In the case of a bivalve, such as a mussel, they use their arms to pull open the bivalve's shell wide enough to push their stomach inside, and then digest the bivalve in its own shell. Once the food is partially digested by the cardiac stomach it is moved to the pyloric stomach to finish digestion.

Sea stars are echinoderms, as are sea urchins, sand dollars, sea cucumbers, feather stars, sea lilies, and brittle stars. Echinoderms, along with hemichordates (acorn worms and pterobranchs), are humans' closest evolutionary relatives outside phylum Chordata. Why? Besides molecular data, echinoderms, hemichordates, and chordates share many characteristics of their embryonic development, and thus are classified as deuterostomes, while most invertebrate phyla are protostomes (e.g. mollusks, arthropods, and annelids).

Excuse the mess ...

I'll be playing with my template settings for a bit this evening (primarily to try and add a search feature), so things might look chaotic for a bit. If I break something, or things just look wrong, please let me know.

[Update: The template editing is finished for now. I've added a search feature powered by Atomz, some link buttons in the side bar from gtmcknight, and changed the style sheet a bit. Enjoy!]

Introducing Gruff

This is Gruff, the new occupant of my SO's parent's house. In this picture she's sitting on her favorite chair, probably wondering why this weird human keeps flashing lights in her eyes. She's taken a liking to my SO's mom, and on most evenings could be found curled up next to her on the couch.

Sorry for the delay

Those who read my blog regularly will probably have noticed that it wasn't updated until well after my previous post was time-stamped. I apologize for any confusion; I've been trying to publish my most recent post for the last 3 hours, but Blogger isn't publishing my blog.

At least I'm not alone, as other people appear to be running into the same problem.

[update: Gee, I guess posting a message about the delay did the trick; ten minutes after I first tried to post this message I was able to successfully publish my blog.]

Friday night review

It was with a bit of trepidation that I decided to have a review session yesterday evening. My students have a test in both lecture and lab next week, so a few had asked for some extra lab time. Since Friday evening was the only plausible time (for a variety of reasons), I scheduled the review for 6-8 p.m. I made it clear that I wasn't going to lecture; this was going to be time for them to ask questions and review the lab specimens.

Considering that it was a Friday night, I figured few people would attend. I'd been on campus since 9 a.m. for a department curriculum meeting, and brought a few magazines with me to occupy myself as the one or two students I expected to show up wandered around the lab.

Waiting for me at the door were ten students, and at least thirty five students showed up throughout the evening, with most staying for at least an hour. The students all got right to work looking at lab specimens, kept me running around the stockroom searching for more materials, and asked me dozens of questions throughout the evening. My original plan was to host the study session for 2 hours, but given the response I continued it for three. It was a blast.

There are currently 150 students officially enrolled across all 6 lab sections, so a fifth of the registered class attended. However, there are probably only around 100 to 120 students regularly attending, so at least a quarter of all my students showed up.

Tonight was a reminder that my students are, by far, the best around. They seemed to really appreciate my being there, and I loved their questions. What a great job.

The Silmarillion in 1,000 words

The Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien: It's beautifully written, it's filled with compelling tales, and it's the best book ever made. Period.

The Silmarillion is a book (or, more appropriately, a compilation of stories) written by Tolkien that covers the major events leading up to the third age of his world, ending at approximately the time the Lord of the Rings begins. It's one of the saddest books I've ever read: it makes me mourn for the beauty and beings that never were. One of the reasons I believe the Lord of the Rings stands above all fantasy (and other) books is that Tolkien took the time to create an entire history of his world, and by reading The Silmarillion you get a glimpse of that history. The Lord of the Rings takes on a whole new depth after reading The Silmarillion.

So why hasn't everyone read it? Well, it's long, it's filled with names, and it hasn't been turned into a series of movies yet (though it should be, darnit). Now, thanks to J. the Honourary Canadian, there's a solution to all that: The Entire Silmarillion of JRR Tolkien in One Thousand Words. It's a hilarious summary of the book: if you've read The Silmarillion you'll laugh hysterically, and if you haven't read The Silmarillion then you should go read The Silmarillion immediately (if only to appreciate the humor of J's summary).

A hearty thanks to Semantic Compositions for forwarding me the link.

The Uninvited

I'm having dinner at my desk, and while reading Jill.txt found a link to The Uninvited; it's a unique flash site (that has nothing to do with science, in case you're curious). When you go there select "Truth" and then explore the options under Truth. I'd like to echo Jill's recommendation that you explore the site before reading more about it.

If you're still curious what The Uninvited is after exploring the site, Jill has posted a good discussion.

Moodle first impressions

Our campus has not provided online course management systems, such as Blackboard or WebCT, for on-campus instructors; they've been reserved for online course instructors due to the high cost of licenses. I and a few other on-campus instructors have managed to squeeze our way into the system, but we're the exception.

That's all about to change because our campus is testing Moodle, an open source course management system. Since our tech folks have installed Moodle on local servers we have no license limitations, and they plan on allowing all instructors to use Moodle in the fall. I've just created a Moodle site for my zoology lab course, so thought I'd share some first impressions.

So you know where I'm coming from, I currently use WebCT in my lecture class to administer weekly knowledge checks and post handouts and lecture slides, but have not had an online course management system for lab. I've used WebCT for about 2 years, and before that was trained in Blackboard.

I found Moodle's interface to be very intuitive, and have created my course page containing PDFs of handouts, discussion forums, a live chat, and a mini-survey with a minimum amount of background reading. Moodle courses are usually organized by either topic or week, and you can add as many activities to each topic or week as desired. Possible activities include:

• assignments/lessons
• live chats that are recorded for later viewing
• threaded discussion forums
• quizzes
• non-graded surveys
• choices (single questions you can pose to the class)
• glossaries
• journals
• "resources" including uploaded files, wiki pages, web links, and much more
• a scheduler
• a workshop peer assessment tool

Here are some of the positives I've found in my short trial:

• It's easy to access just about everything in Moodle. Very few things are more than one or two clicks away from the main screen as a designer, and for students the root page of any given item should never be more than one click away from the homepage.
  
  
• The menus and navigation are simple, at least compared with WebCT. Even though uploading and posting a file requires about the same number of clicks in Moodle and WebCT (around 10), the menus are clearer and the process feels more intuitive in Moodle. For example, the initial menu to add a file in Moodle has 7 menu options, two dialog boxes, and three navigation items visible on the page, whereas in WebCT the initial menu to add a file has 26 menu options and at least 14 navigation links displayed, with my course displaying 29 navigation links on the page.
  
  
• Tracking individual student activity is easy with Moodle. In WebCT it's difficult to get detailed log information for students; most of the logs are summarized as hits per type of material or total counts of discussion board posts. In Moodle you can easily see what each student has done down to individual page loads, and can also see which individual resources have been accessed by which students.
  
  
• With our campus's setup the students create their own accounts on their own time, and course enrollment is controlled by an easily-set registration key given to the students. In contrast, to create a WebCT account for a student anytime after the first week of class I have to e-mail our tech support staff. Note, however, that this enrollment system can vary, as I've worked at other campuses that let students create their own WebCT account.
  
  
• Text editing in Moodle is easy, as the program auto HTML formats everything for you. Surprisingly, WebCT doesn't do this (or I just haven't figured out how to tell WebCT to do it, which is probably more likely).
  
  
• I haven't created a live quiz in Moodle yet, but have explored the options and it seems to have just about all the features available in WebCT, if not more. I should be able to easily move my knowledge checks to Moodle.

If you're looking for an alternative to WebCT or Blackboard I'd highly recommend giving Moodle a try; so far I'm quite pleased with it. However, I'm only just now letting students access the Moodle page, so we'll see in the coming weeks what kind of problems appear. Also, I was not involved with installing and configuring Moodle on our servers, so have no idea how difficult (or easy) that process was.

For more information see Moodle's official page at Moodle.org, and Moodle.com which can provide Moodle hosting and installation services. Moodle.org is designed using Moodle's software, so when you go to that site you're entering a live Moodle course as a guest.

Bush photomosaic

Joe at American Leftist has created a photomosaic of George W. Bush using pictures of soldiers killed in Iraq. It's generating passionate responses across the political spectrum (e.g. see Joe's comment thread), some of which Joe has responded to here. I recommend looking at the large resolution version (~1900x2200 pixels and 4 megs) if you have a chance. (Via BoingBoing)

Shipping Frustrations

In biology we have pretty specific shipping and delivery requirements, since a lot of what we deal with is either live, toxic, or temperature sensitive (or in some cases all three). Unfortunately, at community colleges the shipping staff usually isn't familiar with biological shipping, and to make matters worse most of the materials are extremely time sensitive because they're used in teaching labs.

A few weeks ago two shipping problems occurred nearly simultaneously:

• A package of very temperature sensitive enzymes was hand-delivered to a co-workers office one afternoon. The box was stamped in bright red ink on every side "Freeze upon arrival." Unfortunately, the shipping staff at our campus held the box at room temperature for at least 24 hours before delivering it, so the ice in the package melted and the enzymes were destroyed. Better than this, though, is that no-one will be held accountable, and we'll have to pay for new enzymes out of our own budget (which is now nearly nonexistent).
  
  
• I ordered a large number of live items for my zoology lab through our purchasing department at the beginning of the semester; each item was scheduled to arrive on a different week. The caterpillars I ordered for the fourth week of the semester never arrived. Then, the hydra, flatworms, and sea urchins all arrived in the same box. This would have been fine, except that we didn't need the flatworms for 3 weeks or the sea urchins for 7 weeks. Our aquarium folks had offered to help us keep the urchins, but they weren't planning on them arriving for weeks so no tanks were setup. Thus, the sea urchins have died and the flatworms are likely to be in horrible shape by the time we need them since most of them died during shipping (two of their containers broke).

Back from Philly

My trip to Philadelphia was quite relaxing: it was cloudy and cold most of the time, so we had lots of encouragement to stay inside. Spring was springing, however, so we braved the cold and took a trip to Longwood Gardens. Longwood's grounds are beautifully manicured, complete with millions of bulbs, and they have some spectacular conservatories. I took a number of pictures, and will try to post some up in the days to come (I just got into town a few hours ago; what do you expect?)

The culinary highlight of the trip was, by far, getting an authentic Philly cheesesteak the first night I was in town: it was deliciously full of greasy thin-sliced beef, fried onions, and melted cheese food product. A good Philly cheesesteak is the one exception I'll make to my typical avoidance of beef, and I mourn along with Pharyngula that they're not available outside of Philadelphia.

The only bad thing about the entire trip is that my SO is staying in Philly for another 3 weeks to spend some time with family. I occupied myself on the flight home with grading; it's a good thing I brought a lot, because the meal was not enough to keep my interest for long:


Ignoring one additional small glass of tomato juice, that's all the food I got for the entire 5 hour flight. They did have lunches on sale for $10, but paying for airline food just seems wrong (and my SO's mother nicely stocked me up with snack bars for the flight).

Thanks to a lot of luck and SeatGuru I ended up getting a great exit-row seat on the plane, which more than made up for the meal. Here's a picture of my leg room:


My knee is in the lower-right corner of the picture, and the white square at the bottom is a standard letter-size manila folder (8.5x11") on the floor with a red pen clipped to it. I couldn't even reach the seat-back pocket in front of me without getting up. For those who care, this was row 21 seats D, E, and F on a US Air Airbus 321.