Voting Peevement

Let it be known that I am peeved that Arizona voters registered as Independents have no say in the Presidentiary Primaries on Super Tuesday.

As someone who votes regularly in every single election (even the ones where the only measures are approval of bond measures for funding for local schooling), I'll be keeping this in mind when I vote for my state leaders.

I'm tempted to show up to the polls on Feb. 5 to see if there's any way of leaving a record that I tried to vote and failed.

Cupcake Ride

In a shameless act of self-promotion, consider:

Miniature Archaeology

This semester, my awesome undergraduates and I have devised a scheme to keep ourselves on track with the research we hope to accomplish. My objective for this week was to complete some measurements on samples of leafcutter ant trash heaps, and I was moderately successful today. But I thought you'd probably be amused to hear about what this work entails.

First, I should explain how leafcutter ant colonies work, from the perspective of materials management. The ants harvest leaves (hence the name leafcutter), and bring these leafy bits back to their colony. Once they bring the leaves underground, they are carefully licked clean and chewed up into tiny fragments. These freshly cleaned fragments are then attached to the ants' fungus garden, and oftentimes new strands of fungus are carefully planted on the fresh material. The growing fungus is used as food, mostly for the developing young.

Eventually, the fungus uses up all of the accessible nutrients in the leaf fragments, and grows old and dies. At this point, the ants carefully trim out the dead bits, and carry them off for disposal in a trash heap. If they were to leave these bits in the nest, they would attract unhelpful, weedy fungus species. Colonies vary in their garbage management systems: some opt for open-air trash piles, while others create underground dump chambers.

In the laboratory, the ants can't be too choosy about where to leave their trash. The species that I work with generally throws out its garbage in piles in external foraging chambers, which is nice for me because then it's fairly easy to collect. The only trouble is that the ants don't sort their garbage by type: dead ant bodies and minuscule fragments of plaster get incorporated with the used-up fungus. I'm only interested in the used fungus for the moment, so I've had to develop methods to get only what I want. My solution so far has been to develop a miniature sieve to sift out much of the plaster bits, and then to go through the remnants carefully by hand with a dissecting needle and paintbrush, separating chunks of plaster and dead ant bodies from the old fungus bits. Fortunately, a dissecting microscope has aided me considerably with the process, but altogether it's painstaking work. I can only hope that the ant trash will be as informative to my questions as human trash is informative to archaeologists.

Further Precipitation

Hello again, rain. We missed you.