Even in Kyoto

I am currently reading Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes because while teaching General Biology I got to thinking I could stand to learn and think some more specifically about prokaryotes. Sure, I'm a biologist, but I definitely don't know everything there is to know about biology! Far from it.

Somewhat hilariously, some of the earliest parts of the book turned out to be exceptionally ho-hum to me, but I think this is just because I spend a lot of my waking hours thinking and reading about a wide range of topics in biology, and those already often include a lot of the big Microbial Gee-Whiz concepts/discoveries/facts. So I appreciated how Yong can write eloquently and enthusiastically about the topics, but they land a little differently for someone who is going, "Okay, and now what?" I mean, aren't Wolbachia kind of old news?*

But last night I got to the chapter about milk. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but I learned things, and it was really fun to read because I'd just read about how seal milk contains even more complex oligosaccharides than human milk. (okay, small spoiler, Yong pokes at the question of, "Okay, but what are all those oligosaccharides in milk actually doing, because they aren't directly nourishing the baby, turns out!").

Somewhere in the midst of it all, I also only just learned that milk is basically modified sweat. That actually made a whole lot of things make a whole lot more sense to me, finally! Like specifically, how there are animals that can produce milk, except not with mammary glands? I believe there are even some insects that can produce milk. Also, isn't it both hilarious and gross to think about milk as modified sweat?

Fun things to think about over lunch.

We shall see what the next chapters of Yong's book bring. I'm glad I continued reading.

--
*If you're an insect biologist, you need to know about Wolbachia. But yes, Wolbachia are weird and complicated to think about, so I'm definitely not teaching about Wolbachia in an introductory course!

People here in Albany, NY have been feverishly checking the weather and school closure lists since yesterday afternoon. When I headed over to rowing practice, my institution hadn't canceled anything, and everything was quiet and clear. Promptly at 8 am, while I was finishing a cup of coffee with teammates at our favorite local coffee hangout, the snow started.

My institution still hadn't called it, so I started to head towards campus. By the time I reached the end of Van Rensselaer Boulevard to turn onto Route 378 by the Albany Rural Cemetery, it was snowing hard enough that I could barely see where I was going (glasses-on *or* glasses-off), and I wasn't relishing the thought of climbing up and then flying down curvy, narrow Schuyler Road while not really being able to see and in increasingly slippery conditions.

So I pulled over and messaged my students to let them know that we'd be pivoting to video instruction. It wasn't even so much the immediate conditions as the thought of how much worse things were likely to get for the eventual trip home.

I'm pretty sure my students are fine with this decision. I'd messaged them yesterday anyway, to tell my commuting students they should use their best judgment about whether or not to come in to campus, and to note that we'd pivot to video if classes were canceled.

And so I'll spend the rest of the day at home, with some Zoom meetings interspersed, playing the Lofi Hip Hop channel and grading student papers while the cats snooze on their heating pads.

This heating pad is a new acquisition, but a little catnip seems to have persuaded George to give it a try.





Cozy AF in here. Dunno why my institution thinks it's a good idea to have students and employees out on the roads today.

...the bad news is that Gari the Gerrhosaurus major has squamous cell carcinoma, aka skin cancer. The vet says chemotherapy could be an option, but I'm not sure how realistic that would wind up being.

The other two things:

1. When I woke up this morning, I noticed that the thermostat display was off. Hmm, must need new batteries. I had woken up early to try and get to winter training early to finish up a side quest, so I hurriedly tried to swap in some new batteries. Nothing. Ugh. I gave it up for dead and went off for the day, figuring I'd need to get home early for more troubleshooting and probably a phone call to the landlord.

When I got home tonight, thankfully the house didn't feel *that* cold. Not pleasant for the cats, but not wretchedly bad. Further inspection of the thermostat revealed that the old AA batteries must have started leaking and corroding the connection. With some cleanup, we have heat again, hooray!

2. Rowing practice itself was...interesting. Most of the time, we use what we call "static" ergometers (rowing machines), but they don't fully simulate the rowing stroke. So to get something closer to the real deal, sometimes we'll set up our ergs on sliding tracks. It's possible to get ergs permanently configured for this function, known as "dynamic" ergs, but the slides are what we've got.

Well, when I tried to do the rowing pieces for the morning, which involved trying to maintain low stroke rates between 16-20 spm...I had very little luck. For context, someone new to using slides will find themselves crashing around back and forth because you have to control the momentum of your body weight to use slides properly. I rather quickly figured out that I wasn't actually crashing back and forth, I was crashing forward, despite trying all kinds of different little tricks. Hmm, that could mean that I am try to row on slides on a sloped floor. We did 3 15-minute pieces altogether, with 3 minutes of rest between them, so during the first break I went off in search of a spirit level to test my hypothesis, but came up empty-handed. So, on to the next piece, sigh, with lots more crashing back and forth and very little productive rowing.

During the second piece I got to thinking, if the problem is a sloped floor, what about if I try turning the erg around 180 degrees? So during the second break, I did as much.

Night-and-day difference, I tell you.

My side quest was also successful: several years ago I bought a mirror so we could watch our form and self-coach during erg pieces. However, the wheel brackets for the mirror made the whole mirror too low to the ground. So I added some extender pieces of wood to elevate the mirror. It's much more helpful now for correcting my form!

I personally love it when people turn their front lawns into fake cemeteries ahead of Halloween. This morning out in front of our closest fire station, I observed a tombstone for Chris P. Bacon. Maybe someday I'll have a more extensive Goth Garden to call my own, complete with fun statuary.

Meanwhile, I suspect that my own eventual epitaph will NOT read, "Her only regret is that she didn't do more grading!"

Which is to say, it sure feels like the middle of the semester right now. Ugh. It's sometimes hard to keep my eyes on the prize when there's this much grading to be done. I just have to keep telling myself that every little concrete bit of progress on SOMETHING, matters.

Gari is looking better today, doing more running around again. She has eaten all of the banana chunks I gave her yesterday and today.

I am currently in Newark, New Jersey, with my research students. We took the train into NYC yesterday, where a colleague very generously gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the insect collections at the American Museum of Natural History (!!!! I took billions of photos to post later). For me it was all cool, but more than that I hope it was eye-opening for my students, who are all at various stages of uncertainty over the future. Almost even better and more important than that was having my colleague tell them about his origin stories, because he got his start in the lab where I got my PhD and has been highly successful as an academic. On top of that, he is currently the graduate program director at his institution and can speak about grad school from that standpoint.

Today we will go visit his institution, which is in Newark, so we took the NJ train over and stayed in an Airbnb on this side of the border. Which leads me to…ahhh, New Jersey. Our sleep spot is in a very Latinx neighborhood, which in a lot of ways is a lot of fun (although I had to get creative about the food options at a small Ecuadorian restaurant last night). But in the whole realm of “travel as imagining alternate lives,” what a contrast to sleepy upstate Albany!

For instance…our spot is on the ground floor of what looks to be a typical 3-story 3-unit dwelling. I stayed in the smallest, cutest room, but woke up abruptly at 3:45 am when the upstairs neighbor commenced with tap dancing lessons directly above my head (the kitchen, I suspect). The room I was in barely fit a twin bed; no room for woodworking projects at this house!

I love walking around cities, and here it is interesting to observe where and how people garden. If a person wants to grow plants here, they have to be pretty determined to do so (and many are!).

I find some of the contrasts with Paris interesting. More litter here. More space carved out for hosting giant American automobiles. (Although I’m sure there’s still a ton of groaning about parking, likely a fond New Jersey pasttime). Almost no bike lanes, and every person I’ve seen riding a bike so far has been wrong-way sidewalk riding.

I have failed to find decent coffee, and I have to admit I don’t really care for Latinx pastries. (Do LOVE the arroz y frijoles, though!).

It has also been neat to see my two students who are city/LonGuyLand people encourage my rural Connecticut student through the hustle of the subway and Penn Station and Penn-Newark. My rural student is also coping well with the overwhelm, all told.

It is already abundantly clear to me that this is an excellent student research team to work with this summer. I am so grateful; I am learning a lot from this group, just as they are clearly already learning a ton from me. It is reaffirming my love of research and teaching and mentoring.

I don't like to write much on public forums about people who don't know about the public forum, so I should leave it at that.

And in the meantime, I would really love it if this sinus/barometric headache could die already, kthxbai. Ibuprofen last night, allergy pill this morning, ibuprofen this afternoon; the ibuprofen briefly dulls the pain, but that's about it.

This research team was more than happy to curate a music playlist for our lab work, which I love so much. Rocking out weighing ants and measuring their heads!

Ahh, the glorious Monday after finals week. I was able to get grades submitted for 3 out of 4 obligations. The sticking point this year is the Bicycling class.

The challenge is that it's hard for students to tell how seriously one should take a 1-credit pass/fail Bicycling course.

Dear students, as outlined in your syllabus provided at the start of the semester, your assignments are all posted to our college's LMS, which conveniently informs you of upcoming deadlines, and deadlines you've missed. It might be prudent to look at the assignments and do them. Just a thought. You know, if you actually want to pass.

I also have a handful of bikes that haven't been returned yet. But they're gradually coming back now that I've gotten the cattle prod out. The cattle prod is: if you don't return the bike, you'll wind up with an Incomplete grade, and good luck explaining that one to your financiers, especially if it turns into a failing grade for a 1-credit pass/fail course if you don't turn it into a Pass by the Incomplete deadline.

Shrug! Other than that, I'm over it and turning my attention to summer tasks.

Today's summer tasks have been other fun things, like filling out hazardous waste disposal labels for chemical disposal, some chemical receiving, making more cricket egg cup soil, feeding the fish and crabs, and putting away a small handful of the larger number of things that really need to be put away.

I should also work on the list of things to work on with my research students in June. As one of several lists that need to be worked on (e.g. also the List of Manuscripts Requesting Attention, Please).

Whee. At least typing this all out has been enough to get me to focus and actually draft out some of these initial lists on the whiteboard in my office. Progress!

Oh yeah, and get Facilities to fix my office. That could be a tough sell. Hmm. (floor tiles peeling up, paint damaged by various forces that aren't entirely me, damaged ceiling tiles, a couple things that could stand to be moved a foot one way or another, if the walls actually get repainted). I think I may have to frame it all around the point that it would be embarrassing to meet with prospective students because of how shabby the office is. (other than the point that one can shout, "Safety!" as regards the floor; I don't want to pull that trigger prematurely, though).

I have to be careful about this item, though, because college budgets are a funny topic, and it isn't clear to me whether this is all inexpensive because it taps mostly just existing labor, or expensive because the labor is stretched too thin already and the floor tiles are made of gold (they aren't, really, but you get the idea, I hope).

It feels like my subconscious, or maybe consciousness, is rebelling today. I made a list of tasks for myself today, mostly grading, and finished all of them by around 1 pm. After that, I did a little bit of tidying in the Animal Physiology lab. But also, I was cold. We went from having no building chiller, to maybe having one that is set to be a little *too* effective on the ground floor. Not conducive to lingering around while thinking through the "what's next" list.

So I went home early.

In theory I should now continue to work on some informational signs for a science open house happening on Saturday.

In practice, I think I'm deep in the burnout phase of the end of the semester.

It always takes time to reorient, anyway.

That did mean that George and Martha have gotten some extra attention and outside time today.

And it meant that I finally went around to the side of the house to learn the identity of the plant I am constantly staring at through the back bedroom window while I work.

Japanese barberry.

There were several big bumblebees all skirmishing with each other and other insects, I suppose for access to all of the barberry flowers.

It sounds to me like Japanese barberry might be a plant best grown in a container, if I ever want to grow it sometime in the future. It does look rather attractive year-round.

I definitely need to develop some self-reflection tools to use along with future writing assignments.

I'm thinking:

1. Rate how confident you feel right now about having met the standards and expectations for this assignment (5-point ranking scale from "not at all confident" to "very confident").

2. Did any specific issues come up for you while working on this assignment? (e.g ran out of time, confused about expectations, struggled with concepts, didn't have certain specific pieces of information needed, other life factors got in the way, had a hard time getting motivated to work on the assignment, etc)

3. Is there anything you might do differently when approaching a future assignment of this type?

4. Is there anything else you'd like me to know while I'm reading and evaluating your work?



What else might I include? This might be enough. If nothing else, it would help me with exercising compassion while reading student work.

I thought this person's commentary on one of the biggest issues with use of LLM's in teaching settings was both interesting and useful:

https://arthropod.social/@jonny@neuromatch.social/114349952609247815

Right now I have clauses in my syllabi that say "No LLM's." But in a lot of ways, I think the LLM situation mirrors what happened ages ago with the appearance of Wikipedia.

At this point, most of my students at least grasp the notion that they shouldn't just use Wikipedia and take what it says at face value, even if they don't fully understand why they shouldn't do so. Kind of like how you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the radio. Meanwhile, I definitely use Wikipedia all the time, and find it exceptionally useful and helpful! But that's only the case because I have some sense as to how the information on Wikipedia is curated.

There was a workshop on our campus not too long ago about the use of LLM's in business settings, where the idea was raised that people who don't figure out how to successfully use LLM tools are going to wind up falling behind those who do. Again, a rehashing of concepts about technology adoption - maybe yes, maybe no, depending on the importance and quality of garbage one deals with in one's paying work.

Anyway, the hardest lab reports to grade are the ones where it's clear that the writing and logic are bad. But how to explain why they are bad, let alone how to explain how to think and write more clearly and better?

I am not going fast enough with grading these. Sigh.