January Berry-Go-Round

January 2013's Berry-Go-Round, the latest botanical blog carnival, is posted over at Agricultural Biodiversity with it's usual excellent round up style.  Once again TPP has neglected to submit a post; my bad, my loss. 

This is not an endorsement

In order to produce high quality/resolution illustrations, TPP has been learning/working with the Adobe Illustrator.  In retrospect TPP wishes he'd kept track of how many programs he's taught himself to use resulting in a range of aptitudes from expert to toddler.  The number would be impressive because he's was part of the vanguard of PC users.  So take my observations for what they are that of a reasonably compentent user who is pretty adept at figuring things out.  Let me say this first about AI: this software is quite impressive in terms of what it is capable of doing.  However, this is one of the least intuitive, most obtuse pieces of software TPP has ever learned (OK begun to learn) how to use.  Here's an example.  A lot of programs allow you to import files from else where.  In virtually ever single one of these you find an IMPORT function under a file menu and it asks you what you want imported.  This is one of those universal features of software.  Look around AI in vane for an import function.  Oh, there it is, under the terribly non-descriptive term PLACE.  Parking place, park place, play place, carefully place, no bells of recognition went off, so you resort to very obtuse an online help resource that does not seem to believe in step-by-step instrucions.  All of the previous illustration programs TPP has used allow you to resize an image or object.  So does AI, but it's called "scale" located under the Transformers menu.  You keep waiting for your printer to convert into something else.  Now once you know these features, all is well, but the learning curve on this program is remarkably steep because there are dozens of such querky things.  Naturally our institution provides all sorts of technical assistance, but they have never been much help because TPP always manages to get beyond the introductory level on his own, and they teach/instruct you on everything as though you were a slow learner, and none of them then know more than you do.  Sigh.  So on you go on your own; that's been the way of my computing career.  TPP tries to learn one new AI function with each illustration, and presently illustrations can now be attempted that were technically beyond my ability just a month ago.  Those people who have mastered this beast have my admiration;   the interface designers not so much. 

Crazy weather

Here in the upper midwest, if you don't like the weather just wait a day and it'll change.  Fortunately the predicted ice storm failed to fully freeze leaving the predictors' record of failure for major weather events intact.  Yesterday the high temperature was 64F and new record for January 29th by 3 degrees.  Thunderstorms swept through the region giving us about an inch of badly needed precipitation.  This mid-winter thaw came immediately after the coldest week of the winter.  This morning the temperature was still in the 50s but the low tonight is predicted to be about 28F, and the low tomorrow around 2 F, a change of 62 degrees in a bit over 48 hours.  As for my snowdrops in flower, this is not good news because as tough as they are single digit freezing temperatures may be too much for them.  Lots of bulbs are pushing up, and if covered with a layer of snow they would be fine, but sticking up bereft of any insulation some leaf tips will get damaged.  The lily pond is now quite full and while almost completely frozen over previously, most of the ice has melted.  Whoosh.  The sound of battling fronts, warm, moist ones from the southwest and brutally cold dry ones from the northwest, some of that imported Great White North weather.  So what's our border policy on letting in this foreign weather? 

Today's Laboratory - Survey of algae

Surveys, breadth without depth, are hardly ideal, but watcha gonna do?  TPP's classroom is over 800 miles from seawater at a public university that cannot afford stools for students to sit on let alone paying for a nice shipment of seaweeds from a coastal area.  So you have to make do with small ones, immature ones, pickled and dried specimens, and prepared slides.  Lots of other green beasties get covered in this survey too: cyanobacteria (formerly called blue-green algae), diatoms, dinoflagellates, and euglenoids.  No chloroarachniophytes though.  Too bad.  Little green spidery organisms are kinda cute.  This survey is an observational challenge for students because many of these organisms are small, very small.  Some are motile and more agile than are students at the controls of a microscope.  Too often students get too much material on a slide for observation; if you can see it with the naked eye, you don't need a microscope.  Less is often better.  Patience helps because you have to look around, a lot to see what you can see, and students today are not practiced observers, and they aren't very patient.  Instant gratification is more the norm.  It doesn't help that their instructor can usually observe more in a glance than they have in several minutes.  You can make it look too easy, but then again, you're dealing with a dozen and a half students, so you can't tarry long to pretend it takes you a lot of time.  Still a few will observe some nifty things, and others will be motivated to shop for more images on line, and slowly mental constructs of these organisms begin to form.  Rome wasn't taught botany in a day.

Consult a botanist - we're cheap!

How much would it cost people to be botanically correct?  The magic of many movies has been ruined by recognizing a plant that does not and could not grow where the scene is allegedly taking place.  Granted no one else in the theater noticed, but what would it have cost to get it right?  And the CSI shows are just down right botanically stupid, ludicrous even.  Oh, to have $10 for every mistake they make!  Most of these botanical mistakes are easily correctable by simply consulting a botanist.  Sometimes making botanical errors can be quite costly, yes, especially in denominations of $20, $50, and $100.  Citizens of the Great White North use the maple leaf as a national symbol, but it's not just any maple leaf, it's a sugar maple leaf, and any botanist worth the label could have, would have noticed that the engraver of their new currency used a Norway maple instead.  Yes, botanists notice things like this; it's what we do, eh?  Now what would this have cost?  A case of decent Canadian whisky and a gallon of maple syrup at most.  So when you need to have your botany fact-checked just drop TPP a note; if he doesn't know the answer, he knows the people who do.  So, if your currency features some plant, send a few thousand notes along for TPP to check.  Or else, you risk being ridiculed by some obscure botanical blogger. HT to the Garden Rant. 

Fungal fruit mummies

While having dinner and drinks with friends, TPP was shown this image, on a little cell phone screen, and asked, "What is this?"  This question has been asked, and answered, before, but at the time the name of the fungus would not pop out of the memory banks.  These are fungal fruit mummies, and when first you see such "fruit" they do look quite strange.  They have been totally parasitized.  The organism that does this is Taphrina pruni.  The problem here is that it is uncertain what the fruit is supposed to be, and the picture was taken in San Diego, so that doesn't limit things very much what with all the exotics that grow there.  The tree certainly looks like a Prunus, a plum perphaps, but those ain't plums no more. No, it can't be a plum with the floral remnants at the end characteristic of Maloideae.  Hmm.  Second guess, a quince, Cydonia, or some sort of Asian member of the Rose family?  Anyone got a better suggestion?  

Misunderstanding science in Louisiana

In a recent hearing on science education, Louisiana state Sen. Mike Walsworth was questioning a science teacher about the teaching of evolution. He asked if there was an experiment that would prove the theory of evolution “without a shadow of a doubt.” 
How do you answer such a moronic, ignorant question?  TPP would be tempted to respond, “Wow, I don’t know how to respond to someone who understands so little about science that  they would ask that question.”  Actually, the Senator probably knew the answer, and this is the sort of gotcha question lawyers like to use, so attempting to answer it is playing his game, and he’s picking on a high school teacher not an evolutionary biologist.  You’d be tempted to say, “Senator, given that more than enough evidence exists to convince virtually all biologists of the factual nature of evolution, and yet you remain unconvinced, clearly one experiment of any kind, on any subject with any result isn’t going to convince you of anything.”  And when the teacher told the Senator of Richard Linski’s quite amazing experiment in bacterial evolution, a good example for a single experiment, the Senator asks if any of the bacteria evolved into a person.  Yes, and they became a state legislator.  Any biologist who claimed or suggested such a thing would be a certified loonie, so again the Senator is playing games to try to get a proponent of evolution to admit that the experiment didn’t show bacteria could evolve into people even though the theory of evolution never would predict such an event.  What the experiment does show amply is that natural selection can generate surprising amounts of genetic modifications in a very short period of time.  What evolution does say is that much, much earlier in Earth history both humans and bacteria shared a common ancestor. 
It would probably be useless to try to explain to this fellow that science doesn’t try to prove anything; science falsifies the alternatives.  Over 150 years ago Darwin said that evolution was descent with modification and he proposed that natural selection, differential reproduction of genetic variants, was the mechanism by which this modification occurred.  So ever since then, biologists of all sorts have been trying to falsify the idea of descent with modification, and they have failed.  Along the way a lot of hypotheses about specific descents have been falsified, but nothing has shaken this hypothesis at all.  And biologists have been examining natural selection in the lab and in the field such that now thousands of examples of how selection works are well documented, and not only that but biologists have found additional mechanisms that also generate modifications.  So Senator, once you know about all of this mountain of evidence, biologists are quite justified in saying that evolution is true “without a shadow of a doubt.” 
TPP will be in Louisiana this summer and we'll have a special symposium on evolution for people like the Senator where we'll ask the question, "Can people like this demonstrate any ability to learn science, and if they can't, can they just learn to leave the teaching of science to the people who can?"

Remarkable Saturday

Remarkable!  The Phactors actually don't have anything particularly pressing, no actual, events or appointments or anything on their calendar.  What a Saturday!  It's also a quite nice day for January, a high temperature right around freezing, sunny, with no wind. None the less things were found to keep us active and amused.  Having perused the most recent issue of bon appetit magazine, a couple of recipes caught our attention, so a trip to a grocery store was needed to buy a few items needed so that those recipes could be made during the coming week: a mushroom, leek, and fontina frittata, and shrimp and wilted escarole salad.  A wedding gift was picked out and shipping arranged, a set of dishes with a very tasteful floral pattern, for a niece in Florida.  Framing was chosen for a small print purchased at the end of last semester from a student sale.  A stop at the local pet store was necessary to get kitty kibble and admire the latest bunch of cats for adoption.  A very handsome patterned and slightly cross-eyed orphan got some oohs, but another adoption is out of the question right now.  Mrs. Phactor set to making a batch of double-chocolate (white & regular) cherry cookies.  This is definitely a keeper recipe although it only made 71 cookies not the 72 cookies it said it made!  Me thinks someone snagged one.  Winter always take a toll on the estate and although all the winter storm warnings so far have been duds, sooner or later one will be predicted correctly, so if the predicted ice storm hits tomorrow, it will be a mess.  Precipitation just never comes in the form you'd like.  But the pleasant weather did allow TPP to police the yard and gardens taking several wheel barrel loads of limbs and twigs out for pickup.  Might as well start with a clean slate if an ice storm is coming.  Later dinner is planned with friends at an Indian restaurant with a southern menu, and then betides out for drinks.  On the whole not a bad day at all for having nothing to do.

No idle hands around here!

Part of TPP's job is to keep students from being idle.  Students learn about science and how to do it, how to become a biologist, by basically apprenticing with masters, the faculty.  Fortunately, my research is rather non-technical in the sense of instrumentation and techniques, so there are lots of questions and jobs for students to pursue.  Let's see what they're up to.
Oh, this is really almost unfair, but you never know.  A hort/botany student is working with environmental parameters and plant hormones to see if he can get a particularly stubborn seed to germinate on cue so to speak.  This problem is keeping us from doing several experiments.
A student is interning in the herbarium to learn the basics of curation.  This is not something very many students get interested in, so at times you worry where the next generation of curators is going to come from.  Joining this student are about a dozen mostly retirees who have become master naturalists and are embarking on project to conduct a floristic inventory of local conservation areas, a quite worthy task.  A group of students are doing a live plant growth assay of soil fertility collected from different areas of a prairie dominated by different plants.  Another pair are setting up an experiment to determine if an invasive plant chemically inhibits the growth of other plants. TPP has students interning at a science museum, a zoo, and a nature center.  Now if only there were more of me to go around.  Oh, and then we have people, especially legislators, who think we are only teaching when we are in the classroom and that research plays no educational role.  One does get weary of clueless critics.  

Old fashioned cocktails

As TPP has mentioned before one of his favorite cocktails is an Old Fashioned, and he is not particularly impressed by supposed new fangled twists on this cocktail using tequila, or gin & Campari,  or other spirits.  When you drastically change the basic ingredients the drink actually becomes something else, call it what you will, but an Old Fashioned is made with bourbon.  Would you take a tomato soup recipe, leave out the tomatos, substitute some other fruit, and then still call it tomato soup?  Would you change the beef to chicken and still call it beef stew?  The thing about an old fashioned Old Fashion is its utter simplicity.  The best Old Fashioned TPP was ever served in a bar or restaurant was at the Girl and the Goat in Chi-town.  They made two minor, but excellent changes to the recipe; they used orange bitters and rubbed the rim of the glass with a strip of orange peel rather than muddling the fruit.  Being a bit hard core, and not liking things overly sweet, TPP suggests you try one without the sugar or simple syrup.  A dash of club soda is a waste of time and water, and although colorful, maraschino cherries are nothing but a sweet, red-dyed zombies of the former fruit.  Nothing is left except the "skeleton" of the cherry.  Creepy!  The cocktail craze is actually rather a refreshing trend of late, and Mrs. Phactor is having fun trying various recipes to find drinks to her taste.  The latest involved muddled tangerine and campari.  It was not to my taste at all.  Perhaps she'll share some of the better recipes.  Check the comments after this post for the recipe for very nice Aperol cocktail, or reading on, its Campari counterpart.