Over the river and through the woods

It's a wet, gloomy Saturday morning here in the upper midwest, and nothing much to do outside anyways.  Mrs. Phactor has run off to participate in a fund raising event with her professional group thus leaving TPP to his own devices.  She also left a honey-do list as if the Phactor would actually waste the whole morning blogging rather than accomplishing something useful.  So perhaps some multi-tasking is in order.  Let's see.  Item one: in the category of foraging, find and purchase aji amarillo paste.  How interesting.  A trip to Peru will take a lot longer than a Saturday morning, but it sounds like fun.  You'd think yellow chili paste would be at the local Kroger's along with Vegamite, but no.  So time to finish this, and get moving.  First, another cup of coffee and a newly made nutball cookie (my Mother's recipe) made the last time the Phactor was left to his own devices. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Gesneriad edition

Let's end the semester in style with a nice Friday fabulous flower.  Another one of our tropical epiphytes that provide so much winter color, in this case a gesneriad (Aeschynanthus) of uncertain hybrid ancestry.  And for an added bonus you get some of Mrs. Phactor's holiday decor; you generally don't find these in the wild with ribbons, but bet this would help attract more hummingbird pollinators.  This plant gets cut back early every summer to grow new shoots while outside, mostly in a partially shady location.  It generally flowers quite readily and for quite some time during December and January.  The only problem is that the nectar present as a reward to hummingbirds remains unconsumed, so when the corolla drops, so does a big drop of nectar.  So don't hang one of these over a carpet or nice piece of furniture.  The foliage is actually rather handsome on this variety showing a purple variegated pattern, and although looking delicate, this plant is quite tolerant of dry household conditions. 

TGIF Big Time - Introducting students to research

Today is the last class day of the semester; how appropriate it's a Friday.  It always seems to work out that way.  One of my classes was an introduction to research, a seminar with the goal of introducing 2nd year biology majors to real science, a new class.  Firstly 18 students is too many for a good seminar because it lets the passive students be passive no matter how hard you try to force class participation.  So the class dealt with misconceptions and definitions of science, and things like science denialism, opinions versus reality, and science news and the media.  When asked about their opinion on fracking, and what they'd heard and where they heard it and how their opinion was formed, none of the 18 knew what fracking was.  One fellow who opposed it said, "Fracking, it just sounds wrong."  Does that make you feel good about the future of our country and world?  How many earned extra credit for attending a public forum on fracking held immediately adjacent to campus two days later?  None.  They had a hard time wrapping their brains around denialism.  "How can you deny facts," asked one?  Indeed.  However, some of them did a quite credible job of critiquing research posters and research seminars often showing some real insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the presentations.  Wonder if my colleagues will want to read them?  They did a good job when conducting an interrogative interview of a professional scientist, yours truly, TPP.  They really liked looking for cartoons that made fun of science, and explaining why they were funny.  But best of all, most of the class now thinks getting involved in research while an undergrad is a good idea.  They have a better idea of what types of research their "teachers" do, and what it takes to be a successful researcher.  On the whole the class was pretty satisfactory, pretty successful, from the instructor's perspective.  Now to see what the students think.

Dealing with drips

The ladies over at the Garden Rant recently posted about pantless gardening, which sounded exciting, but TPP read it wrongly, and it turned out to be potless gardening.  Plants don't really need pots, but gardeners do especially when gardening indoors, where pantless is more doable, but potless isn't.  For years the indoor part of gardening has been a problem for TPP's tropical epiphytes who really like being out of doors for 4-5 months.  It really promotes their flowering druing the winter.  But watering plants when potless, or even when in hanging pots, can be quite a problem.  Mostly these plants grow in a loose bark or very porous soil mix so water flows through quite readily.  No problem outside, but inside it's a drip, drip, drip problem, one that fascinates one of our kitty girls who seems puzzled and fascinated by getting plunked on the head by water drops.  At any rate, Mrs. Phactor recently stumbled upon these plastic drip catchers that hang on the outside of your hanging baskets and the sell for the outrageous price of $2.  Sorry, no brand or store endorsements allowed, but the product works great.  Still every couple of weeks its a good idea to put all these plants in your shower and give them a nice 10-15 min soft, tepid showering, and then allow them to drip away in the tub before rehanging.  The only trouble is that a couple have gotten so big they take up too much room.  The image shows one on the outside of a pot holding the Queen's tears.  No, it's not in flower; just a bit of holiday finery added to the pot by TPP's personal Martha Stewart. 

Got an iPhone? Who you gonna call?

Other than to make fun of iZombies, TPP has little interest in iPhones, but every now and then something grabs his attention.  Now you can get a ghost hunter attachment and app for your iPhone.  Yes, the Ghost Busters would definitely approve, so if you want a stocking stuffer for the favorite scifi geek in your life, this could be a hit.  No question about it you need this as much as you need another hole in your head.  Now if they come up with an Proton iPack for zapping supernatural demons back into their own dimension, or for jamming every iPhone signel within 30 meters, well, that may be another matter.

Blu-Glo one ups Crimson Tide

The Crimson Tide in the Sydney vicinity was pretty amazing, but here's the Blu-Glo (Good name for a team.  Anyone?  Anyone?) photographed at the Malabar Beach, presumably the one in New South Wales (The original Malabar coast is in Kerala, India, and there are several Malabars in the West Indies too).  Again there's a bloom of phosphorescent phytoplankton, countless microorganisms that give the water a Blu-Glo.  That would be something to see.  Especially with a nice cold Tooheys Old.  Thanks to Bend for calling this to my attention. Couldn't leave this buried in the comments. 

We're number 2!

You take your bragging rights where ever you can get them.  In this case, and to our utter amazement, Linconland is not the worst run state in the USA (You go California!), but actually the 2nd worst run state.  Now we keep trying to improve our ranking, and the thing we seem best at is locking up governors (at this we're number one).  But maybe ours are just dumber and therefore easier to catch.  It's as if the gangster era never really left, but now the favorite targets for theft by politicians are state retirement funds, which not only lack the state contribution completely, but the principle paid in by workers has been used like a checking account by the state.  Is that legal?  Probably, but it's still theft.  So at times you have to wonder how anything gets done at all.  Lincolnland has all but done away with public higher education because the state contribution has dropped to an almost insignificant portion all the while blaming the universities for raising their tuition and not controlling their costs.  And never once did voters get to decide if this was what they wanted or not.  Unfortunately, the grass isn't very much greener on other sides, so you just don't have a good place to move to.  But come visit anyways.  Chi-town has some really good restaurants and lots of museums, oh, and it's the Second City of course.

Monday, December 3 - End of the semester blues

The first Monday in December is the last Monday of the semester (exam week doesn't count really).  TPP has about 10 lectures worth of material to cover in 3 lectures, so something is amiss.  A number of students have made appointments this week.  Some of them will give me a lot of excuses for their poor performance, but no good reasons.  This distinction will be largely lost on them.  Now having been one of those students myself, albeit many years ago when the prospects of graduating more or less equated into being drafted to fight a war in Vietnam, how this happens is something TPP understands, but with one important distinction.  TPP knew perfectly well that the explanation was quite simply my own decision, my own actions, and nothing else.  So far, and typical of today's students, it's never their fault.  One young lady admitted that her mother has always called her "last-minute Lena" because she always did work at the last minute basically never studying just cramming for exams.  How's that working for you now? inquires TPP.  Answer: a D.  Lots of students suffer because their study skills fail to advance, to improve, beyond high school, and after the first couple of years of common curriculum and introductory courses, they can no longer do the work and their grades fall off.  This is very discouraging, and many of them, even when their admit they understand the problem, don't want to do anything about it (and professional help does exist).  They just want to graduate and be done with it.  So you figure you'll never have to learn anything again? asks TPP.  Do you understand that your ability to learn is your greatest skill?  This is a bitter pill to have to swallow, but it is becoming more prevalent of late affecting about 20% of students based on my samples of juniors and seniors.  The digital age has done nothing to improve grammar and spelling in fact those skills are definitely in decline along with vocabulary (Confusion over "very" and "vary"!  "Our" instead of "are"!  Lots of wrong words period.) and none of them seem to think this is important at all sadly.  Those letters of application and those little essays about "career goals" they are showing me are not going to impress anyone, but maybe the bar is now set much lower.  Hint to job applicants.  They don't care about your hobbies or your career aspirations; those are little writing exams.  This comes as a shock to some; others express their disbelief.  Ah, that's at least a different excuse.  They had their wisdom teeth removed and immediately felt their IQ decline. Sigh.     

November 2012 data

Wow!  Just took a look at the old blog stats and November 2012 was a new record for TPP.  The blog averaged about 700 page hits a day for a total of 20,746, the first month the blog traffic has ever gone over 20,000.  That included a new record day of 920 hits, the first time the daily total has ever gone over 900.  Sorry the weather was so bad and you had so little to do. 

More leaf windows

It’s a sunny Saturday morning, and one regular chore is watering the house plants.  The sunlight was hitting a nice little Haworthia, a succulent member of the lily family (although recent phylogenetic shakeups may have changed that), and the leaf windows were pretty obvious.  They tend to look darker green, but you're really looking down through the leaf tissue.  Thick leaves are good for conserving water, but their very thickness means light penetration is limited.  Having transparent areas on the upper ends of their leaves not only allows light to penetrate deep into the leaf, but it also allows a plant like this to grow almost buried in soil.  Keep your eye out for similar features on other thick-leaved plants, you can never guess where they might appear.  And of course TPP's usual reminder; being a succulent is not the same as being a cactus.  The former is an adaptation for xeric environments that you can find in many groups of plants.  Cacti are a specific family of plants.