* My research-work schedule has become "Monday evening, do reading" (because I can't seem to manage to sneak the hour in during the day). I read more on the Bernd Heinrich bumblebee book last night. Two observations:
- queen bumblebees incubate their broods. Yes, they sit on top of them and transfer heat from their abdomens to the developing brood. They even have a patch on their abdomen that does not have "pile" (according to Heinrich, the fuzz on bumblebees is not "fur," which is a mammal thing, it's "pile"), which is analogous to the brood patch that develops on birds. In fact, in the early season, the queen places her eggs/brood right adjacent to the honeypot she builds (I talked about that last week) and she will spend the night lying on top of her brood and drinking honey as needed to keep her metabolism going. There is something endearing about that, I think.
- He goes through a discussion of "how bumblebees fly" (and points out that the old saw about their wings being too small to support them in flight is not true; that assertion assumed that bee flight was like that of a fixed-wing aircraft, and actually the mechanics are closer to something like a helicopter - so bees' wings ARE strong enough to support them in flight). Anyway, I'm no physiologist, but it sounded like to me that the various contractions and relaxations of the muscles would make the thorax accordion in and out.
So I immediately thought, "Bumblebee's got a squeeze-box." The strange place one's mind goes. (video, in case someone doesn't get the allusion. That one actually happens to be a cover of the original)
* Last night/this morning was a real Weather Prediction Fail here. They were warning us to expect snow, cold rain, ice, all kinds of stuff. I was actually half-hoping for a snow day. (The one class I teach today, we are ahead of the syllabus, so missing a day would not be a big deal). Nope. We didn't even get rain. I know that just as soon as I start discounting the forecasts we will get a bad weather forecast that will actually be accurate, and I'll be caught without an umbrella or something. (I'm just glad I didn't have to go to the grocery store last night).
* There's a new study out saying the Mediterranean diet is better at preventing heart disease than a low fat diet. With the exception of the fact that I DO eat red meat (but not that often), and I eat some "baked goods" (the claim was "people on the Mediterranean Diet don't eat baked goods" which makes me wonder - do they include bread in that? I thought the Mediterranean diet included bread?), and I don't eat much fish, I pretty much follow that diet these days (lots of vegetables, lots of salad greens, lots of nuts, olive oil as the main fat....). I don't eat much fish in part because it's darn near impossible to get decent fish here. There's catfish, which I just can't bring myself to like, and tilapia, which I can't eat after knowing someone who worked in a fish farm and told me about how they're raised. (It's ironic. I live near a lake and find it hard to get decent fish; I live in ranch country and find it hard to get decent beef.)
* I will say I'm cycling around again to the point of "wharrrrgarrrbllll, VEGETABLES" when I fix myself dinner at night. So tired of salad. So tired of green beans. So tired of red cabbage. Can't eat carrots or celery or most squash (allergies, or they give me "gastric distress"); don't like broccoli or cauliflower. Someone needs to invent some new vegetables, ones that I am not allergic to and that don't make me gag.
* One of the "suggestions" on my rejected paper was to ordinate the stands. Now, I know ordination from way back (it was the main analysis technique of my dissertation). I did not think of it here because I have eleven stands, and that seems far too few to me. But I'm trying it. I managed to open the years-old version of PC-Ord on my machine, and I'm trying to make a data base for it. But of course, Microsoft in all its wisdom, no longer supports the Lotus file format as an extension in Excel 2007. (Apparently 2013 does, but I'm not going to shut everything here down for three days or more to let Computer Services upgrade). So I'm doing my best and hoping it works, and failing that, trying to find work arounds. But gah. This paper BETTER be accepted the next time I submit it. (I even looked into buying the newest version of PC-Ord. It would be $300. While I MIGHT use it again some time, that's awfully steep when you have no grants, and so would be paying out-of-pocket for it). I hate doing things and feeling like I might be wasting my time, like making the data base only to find there's NO WAY to convert it to a .wk1 extension so I will never be able to open it in the analysis program. (A lot of the specialized stuff we use is, well, specialized. And that means you have to figure out all kinds of workarounds.)
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