I'm an uncle! Sydney Rocetha Kapolka was born at 10:25 am on May 24, 2009. (yesterday morning) She weighed 7 lbs 9 ounces, and measured 21.5 inches long.

Her middle name was the name of Erin's grandmother, and I don't know how they chose Sydney, but I like it. The Penguins better not win the Cup this year, though, cuz I don't want to associate her with Sidney Crosby for her entire life. Although I do kinda wanna call her Syd.

I'll be sure to get some pics up later.

I feel that as an ecologist I need to say something about this popular facebook application. I added it a while ago just to see what it was about, but shortly afterwards forgot about it because I realized it really wasn't worth my time. But for some reason, it's become the most popular app on facebook, boasting over 5,700,000 users. So you'd think...with so many users sending so many electronic flowers and plants and whatnot, they must be saving a lot of rainforest, right?

Wrong.

If you look at the numbers, what this app is saving isn't even a drop in the bucket in the greater scheme of things. They've saved 9 square kilometers of rainforest total...that may seem like a lot if you're unfamiliar with landscape level ecology, but if you look at just the rate of deforestation in Brazil alone, which has an average rate of 50,000 square kilometers of rainforest lost each year, all they've done is save one fifteenth of one day's rainforest loss in Brazil. (I pulled that number from a slightly out-of-date student project at http://kanat.jsc.vsc.edu/student/callahan/mainpage.htm#defrates, I don't particularly feel like searching the literature for a rant)

I don't want to say this thing is bad, I just don't want people to give it more value than it actually has. From reading some of the comments, it seems like the users think that by wasting their time sending invites to everyone on their friends list, they've done their civic duty and helped saved the environment for one more day. And that's plain stupid. There are much better ways to conserve energy and preserve the environment, and if anything this app should be trying to promote those kind of habits rather than promote a silly gimmick that makes people feel better about their own wasteful lifestyles. And with 5.7 million users, they could be doing a whole hell of a lot more good!

In my opinion, the whole idea of buying up rainforest is the wrong approach. We need to educate the public about why it's important to preserve it, and in that way we may see societal changes that allow for sustainable harvests in those areas and greater protection of intact ecosystems. The biggest problem we face is the rapid conversion of forest land to pasture and agricultural fields, and a solution to the need for those areas would bring about a solution for the preservation of the forests that now stand where they would be. That is an economic and political problem and is outside my range of expertise, but I do know that trying to chip away at the problem rather than address the heart of it is absolutely the wrong way to solve it. It's gonna take a lot more than tree hugging and half-hearted 'go green' BS to make things happen.

I decided to give this interview meme thing a go and asked Lys to interview me.

Here be the rules, yarr:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on...

Questions:

1. How did you wind up getting a tarantula?

I actually didn't expect this to be one of the questions! Diane, my boss, is terrified of tarantulas. She can't even look at a picture without getting scared! So when our invertebrates professor (Prof. Trier) asked her to order a new preserved tarantula (bolded for a reason!), she took a quick look at the catalog, wrote down the number next to the terrifyingly terrifying picture of a tarantula, and called in the order.

-a week later or so-

Diane gets this big box full of packing peanuts, which she assumed held the pillbugs and preserved tarantula she had ordered. As she dug through the peanuts, she hit a small plastic container and started to pick it up. And the tarantula in the container moved. She started screaming, ran out of her office and apparently sat on the floor in hall holding herself, then dashed down to Trier's office, gave him a nasty look, and went into Prof. Strickler's office. I hadn't seen this happen, but later in the week Trier brought the tarantula in a terrarium back to the lab core. I picked it up to see what she'd do, and she was visibly terrified of the thing. So apparently she was so scared of the picture of the tarantula in the catalog that she had written the wrong number down and ordered a live tarantula instead of a preserved one. Diane is just too awesome for words.

Now it's living in Prof. Strickler's office, and we have to keep crickets with our other critters in the core to feed to it. I actually have a small phobia of crickets, (bad experiences in childhood) so this ended up sucking for me, too. And tarantulas live for a long time, so we may have him for quite a while.

2. What is your least favourite invasive species?

Well...we have a lot of nasty ones right here in Michigan, and from an ecological perspective the zebra and quagga mussels have been the most destructive, but my least favorite overall would have to be kudzu. Entire southern forests have become coated in kudzu vines, and there's no effective way yet to get rid of it. Purple loosestrife we can somewhat contain, garlic mustard and spotted knapweed can be effectively herbicided if needed, but kudzu just grows so fast and behaves so horribly to its neighbors that I have to give it the top spot.

3. What inspired your interest in biology?

Blame My parents. We would go camping every summer all over the state and occasionally beyond, and I fell in love with the different biomes and landscapes that we would visit. I also went to almost every MSU home football game until I graduated from high school, and I always loved walking through their gardens. I used to get intentionally lost on campus so I could find new parks and gardens and things I hadn't seen before. Just a couple years ago I stumbled into their arboretum, which is simply incredible. I could have gone to MSU, or even Michigan if I really wanted, but there were just too many people and I heard that it's better to go somewhere smaller for undergrad, which is very true.

I remember when I was really young and I was wandering through one of the gardens, and I found a statue of an old professor, possibly a founder of some sort. I don't know why, but I decided then that I was going to become like him, and here I am. Not nearly on his level, but on the same path. I thought about all sorts of other careers in high school, but ultimately I always had a love for living things.

4. What is your favourite food? (and don't you dare say hot pockets!)

Hot pockets are my favorite cheap food. Hmm...I usually say a cheeseburger from O'Brien's, my neighborhood market & deli, but I also LOVE a really good steak. Ooo, or a freshly cooked bratwurst. Actually, all three of those come from O'Brien's, I even helped in the production of all of them in some way when I worked there in high school. Nobody can beat our bratwurst, I seriously have yet to taste one even close to what Tom (the owner) can make. You'll have to try all of them sometime! :D

5. How did you come up with your lj username? (sorry if you've explained this before and I missed it)

miranatu is a portmanteau of mirri and nantuko...kinda. I think it was my sophomore year in high school, and I had just learned what a portmanteau was after reading the wiki entry on Toonami.(I already knew the concept, but not the word...portmanteau...it's just so cool!) I needed a unique personal username, and I had recently picked up playing Magic: the Gathering again, and I kinda liked the names mirri and nantuko that I had seen on some of the cards. Somehow or another, I combined the two into miranatu, though the anatu doesn't quite match up with nantuko, but that's what inspired it. Kinda random, but it worked.

and bonus question: What was your favourite book as a kid?

Depends on how you define 'kid,' I suppose. My brother and I loved the 'The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks' series when we were really young, and our mom would read it to us when we went camping. I was an avid fan of the Redwall series when I started getting into reading by myself, (which was around the 2nd grade, I picked it up quickly) and I think I read Redwall 3 or 4 times. By middle school I would say it was Sabriel. I don't think I was ever into traditional children's books.

Choose Your Own Adventures were pretty awesome, too. I used to cheat, though, and they aren't exactly normal books.


That's aaaaaall ~ thanks for interviewing me, Lys! :D

That was one hell of a day. I was groggy most of the morning and really didn't pick up on anything in my classes, then failed so miserably in physics lab that I didn't even finish on time. I didn't get some of the instructions at all, and I had to explain some concepts to my partner so I didn't have time to get through one part. I have to finish it up and turn it in tomorrow.

When I got home, my key card wouldn't open my apartment door, so I had to borrow a physical key from the front desk. When I tried to unlock the door with that, I realized that the deadbolt was locked, which automatically rejects all card keys. I was so frustrated that I kicked open the door, and saw that the police tape was gone from Dan's door. His family had come to get his stuff and had probably locked the door without knowing that it automatically locks on closing.

By that point I only had about half an hour before I wanted to be in Lake Michigan Hall to prep the Toonami event, so I just grabbed a few things, dropped off the key, and headed over to the Hall. I sat around for half an hour there waiting for my officers to show up, and Jon didn't arrive until 15 minutes before the scheduled start time. We spent a fair bit of time hooking up his laptop and making sure all the video files worked, and by the time we got everything working, it was 6:15.

For the hour before we started, two people had shown up. I was worried for most of this past week that only a few people would show up, but for that hour I was really nervous. When I looked up at 6:15 to start things off...there were just over 20 people in seats. Considering the date and the nature of the event, I was ecstatic with a decent crowd. Things were a little rocky at first, I had to cut a few things out and adjust how I was showing promos and episodes to make it flow properly, but the folks who were there were so into what was being shown that it didn't really hinder things: they had created an atmosphere I haven't felt before at one of our events. Almost every clip I showed got an 'OOHH!' or an 'Aw, I remember that!' I can't think of anything that really flopped, though my random questions were kinda tough for most of them to answer, which was kinda disappointing. Still, by the final hour whenever I had a question for them they'd all quiet down and listen. (there was manga to be won, after all!)

By the end, we still had almost everyone there, which was surprising considering the event lasted 4.5 hours on a Tuesday night. We had a nice wrap-up with Tom's final message and a short interview clip with the creators of Toonami on Youtube, and it looked like everyone was leaving pretty happy. I thanked Jon by giving him the 3 volumes of the Densha Otoko manga, (probably the only valuable manga we had, and it's the complete series!) which he more than deserved, with all the help he gave me in setting up and running the event. I'm happy that this was my last event as OnA President, and I feel it did some justice to all our memories of the animation block that defined a lot of young lives. The best part of it, though, is that I gave our crowd a night to remember. As I was leaving the room, Will (one of out future officers) commented that the flyer I had put on the door outside of the room was gone. Maybe a janitor had grabbed it, but I hadn't seen them around, so I'd like to think someone took it home as a memento. I have a couple flyers stored away already, and it feels really nice to think that other people might do that, too.

Now to do a Forestry report that's due tomorrow. Hooray!

(it was worth it)

Later.

I'm watching Jon Stewart debate Jim Cramer about how CNBC delivers financial news, and it is truly amazing. He's been calling out Cramer's bullshit with very little comedy to veil his jabs, which is far more than most news networks would ever dare to do. It's well-known that Stewart and Colbert probably deliver the most honest news on TV, despite the fact that it's comedy, and I'm still awed when they go out and do something like this. If you have the time, go watch the interview at the Comedy Central website.

Sometimes only the jester can tell the truth.

I whipped together a flyer for OnA's Tribute to Toonami next Tuesday, so tell me what you think about it.

( Toonami Flyer )

It's just a cropped wallpaper with Toonami font text, nothing complicated, but I hope it's at least passable for promotional purposes. Does the font work? I really want to use it, but I'm used to reading it and it is kind of a weird design.

If you're free next Tuesday night, please stop by and have some fun with us. I've put quite a bit of time into planning the programming, and I intend this to be my last hurrah as an OnA officer. After this, I'll be effectively turning things over to Devin. We'll also be giving out some manga that was donated by a friend of the club, so if you're one of the old Toonami faithful you'll probably be able to answer some of my history questions and win some stuff.

RRRUUMMBBBLLEEEEE...

First t-storm of the year. :D

This semester isn't looking too bad, besides having to suffer through another section of Physics, (damn you, Physics!!) and getting up for an 8:30am class twice a week. Which...I failed to do today. Yes, I missed the first day of class for my most important course this semester. (Plant Structure and Function) I tried, I really did, I even got almost 7 hours of sleep last night. But I am just NOT a morning person. I guess I did the hit-the-alarm-without-waking-up thing, cuz I woke up at 9:30, 15 minutes before the class ended. I managed to get dressed properly and run out the door to make sure I at least didn't miss my class that started at 10, and I ran into my Plants prof on the way there. She's an awesome lady, I've known her for a couple years, so she was understanding about it and gave me all the papers I needed. I just feel like crap that I screwed up this bad this soon. Even when I had an 8am class, I haven't outright slept through a class since I was in Japanese.

On the bright side, no Physics lab the first week, so I have all afternoon to relax and get some reading done.

Sophomore year I had a roommate (suitemate, technically...) in Laker Village. He wasn't around much at all, he pretty much lived with his girlfriend at the time. But I thought he was a pretty cool guy, from what I could tell he was a very skilled trombonist and was pretty laid back. I got to know him a little better after I had moved out, because we were two of the few students who stuck around campus during the summer. On quiet summer days I could hear him playing his trombone from far away all around campus, from his favorite bench in front of the PAC. Every time I saw him we'd have some short banter, in which we always referred to each other as our 'former roommate.' It was kind of silly, but it was a nice little thing we had.

Doug died on Wednesday. From what the police could tell, he and his girlfriend were up north camping, and had stayed in their car rather than pitching a tent due to the cold. They had a gas stove in the car, which apparently had a leak. The two had a few drinks and passed out in the car, with all the windows rolled up. They died of asphyxiation from the gas.

I didn't know Doug that well, but knowing that I'll never see him again and never have short, funny little conversations with him make me tear up a little. He was a musical whiz, and an incredible and just downright good person. It's a terrible tragedy that he died so young.

I walked around today not really knowing what to do. I hate just mourning death, it always feels wrong to end your memories of someone with crying. So I gave my roommate from sophomore year a call (my actual roommate, not suitemate) to see if he wanted to head to Main Street Pub for a drink. He didn't even know Doug had died, but he had a project to do so we couldn't do anything.

He called me back a couple hours later (around 9), and for whatever reason he didn't have to work on the project anymore. So we went out to the bar, reminiscing about Doug on the way there. We toasted him to send him off, and spent the night catching up about what's been going on. It was the most fun I've had in a long while, and I'm glad we were able to honor Doug like that.

It's kinda common knowledge, but I don't believe in heaven. What I believe is that we should hold dear to us the memories we have of people who have left us, and remember them so that they may live on in some effect through us. So rest in peace, Doug. We'll be working hard to honor your memory.

Yay, I was wrong! Looks like elections officials have learned from the past 8 years.

I'm also happy that Prop 2 passed, because the only industry that's significantly growing in Michigan is health sciences. Stem cell research could significantly help our economy if it produces some results. And Prop 1 won by a landslide...I really expected it to get beaten down, I didn't think our state was that progressive. But I guess it is, so toke up bro's! (if you have a medical condition...)

And Ottawa County FINALLY got rid of that ancient restriction on beer and wine on Sundays. I really wanted to buy my friend some Guinness a couple Sundays ago cuz he was having a rough day, but that stupid ban...

But Al Franken lost. Boo.
EDIT: I spoke too soon! Al fell behind by over 40,000 votes, so I gave up, but they had yet to include some of his strongest precincts, and now's he's ahead again! GO AL!!!

For those of you who are sick of the election and don't want to hear any more about it, don't bother reading this. (ahem, lys...) It's a bit of a rant.

Obviously, I'm voting straight Democrat. Until the Democratic Socialists actually have a chance on their own in the US, I doubt I'll vote any other way, so take this with a grain of salt. (the DSA just back the Democrats in every election anyway) But I seriously think McCain's going to win. Not by honestly winning the most votes, oh no, but by winning the same way GWB won the past two elections. By cheating, of course!

To refresh your memory, in 2000 Florida was given to GWB by the Republican state government in Florida when they threw out tens of thousands of votes in heavily Democratic districts for no good reason. Add that onto obviously corrupted electronic voting machines, and the election was stolen. Fast forward to 2004, and this time it's Ohio that was stolen. When precincts ended up having less votes for Kerry than they had registered Democrats...something was seriously wrong. Exit polling is not a fatally flawed practice, Fox News just spins it that way. Basic statistics makes that abundantly clear. So when a dozen districts have swings of over 20% for a certain candidate, something's wrong.

With electronic machines still severely flawed, and voter suppression efforts already showing up, I've given up on a fair election. Before I started writing this I came upon an ad from the RNC that offered to direct me to my polling place. Too bad they don't know where it is. I know where it is, but just in case something's changed, I went to Barack Obama's site to double-check, and...it's right where it should be. I wouldn't say this is voter suppression, I'd say they aren't putting much effort into this kind of thing because they don't want people who don't already know where to vote to vote.

So watch Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Things are going to go seriously awry and people will just accept it because the GOP and Fox have already laid out explanations for seemingly impossible swings in polling numbers.

I hope I'm wrong. But if I'm not, don't just sit back and accept that your vote was potentially stolen.


'The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.'
-Thomas Paine

My VAIO laptop died again. It's survived for three years, (kind of...it's been limping for a year) and I think it's time to let it stay dead. My iMac is still running fine, but it's old and can't function more than as a word processor and mediocre internet portal. I'd like to buy a MacBook, especially since Apple updated their models and made them cheaper, but they're still $1300 and I'm gonna be broke once I pay my bills for next semester.

What to do...

Erin's pregnant.

I'm gonna be an uncle in May.




...weird.

In trig today our professor threw us a curveball and made our weekly quiz a lot more challenging than usual. I think I'm developing more of my dad's traits, because while most of the class was crying foul over how difficult some of the problems were, I was actually enjoying solving them. I used to tease my dad about how he'd spend his time just sitting around doing math problems for fun, but now I can kinda see why he did it. I'm not about to change majors or add a minor, I still hate physics (which is entirely math), but I do enjoy having a little of my dad's gift.

edit:

I just came upon this site, and I know Lys in particular would probably love it. http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

Make sure you have the sound on.

My plans for next summer might have suddenly drastically changed. A while back I had heard about new scholarships at Grand Valley that were focused on landscape ecology research, so I was mulling over some ideas for a project over the past month. As I was walking behind the new Honors buildings a few days ago, I noticed that Facilities/Grounds/whoever had planted a rather pathetic patch of flowers in a very nice patch of soil. Seeing their feeble attempt at basic restoration got me thinking.

There's been an awful lot of construction on campus recently, and inevitably it ends up destroying green space. While Grounds does their best to make the campus look nice, in the end it's like putting living make-up on the campus' ecology. I doubt there's any attention paid to ecosystem function or sustainability, and they end up treating the campus like a giant garden.

So I started sketching out a rough idea of how to make our green space more natural. It would be a fairly simple project, all I was thinking was taking over the green areas that Facilities or Grounds would normally just stick common flowers in, and instead install examples of naturally occurring prairie. It would make the campus more natural and sustainable, and hopefully get students more acquainted with natural surroundings.

I took my idea to Todd, since he's our restoration ecology guy, and he already had a plan in mind that would work with my idea. There's an area of old prairie by the golf course that hasn't been maintained in a really long time, and it's now very degraded. He wants to restore the old field to a more natural ecosystem, and we could use the seeds produced there to sow islands of natural prairie around campus. Grand Valley's been really pushing their sustainability initiative, so if we toss this idea at them we stand a good chance of making it work.

Obviously this will take a lot of work, and I'd end up spending another summer here. I'm also not sure how it will affect my trip to Norway, since up and leaving in August after all that work in the summer might not be a great idea. Or we might just leave it alone in the fall, since we wouldn't be able to sow seeds until the next spring. And I had just finished my application, too...

It kinda sucks that this didn't come around earlier, since if we get approval to spread the project around campus it would be a few years before it could happen. I probably won't be around to see it through, but we have a well-organized group of NRM and BIO nerds (the Soil and Water Conservation Society) that would probably jump at the chance to do something on campus.

This is still just an idea, and we'd have to go through probably half a dozen departments to get approval and funding, but seeing how excited Todd was about it makes me think we can do it. Stay tuned.

I have a cold!! How the hell does one get a cold in August?!

Someone make me some chicken soup...please?

So there's a competitive walking competition in the Olympics. I gotta say...it's one of the damn funniest things I've watched in a while. Adding in the commentators trying to make it interesting and 'exciting' is frickin hilarious. They're WALKING. Walking quite silly, too. There are like 50 guys jiggling their way around a race track at a whopping 5 miles an hour...riveting.

Honestly, this event should be restricted to the elderly or something. That might add a little laugh value to it too.

I saw the same skunk from before tonight, and I watched him forage around for a while. I got too close at one point, and it perked up for a while. I think it's a juvenile, its coat is mostly black and it's kind of small, although I'm certainly not a mammalogist.

Am I weird for hanging out with a skunk in the middle of the night? Hmm.

I finally fell on my face, too. Not really on my face, though, more like the top of my head. I got distracted heading back, and like an idiot I lost my balance and dramatically crashed into the road. I didn't really hit my head, I caught myself with my hands and my head kinda slid on the pavement, which was kinda funny. No major bleeding, but I'll try to pay more attention when I'm in the middle of the road. Normally I have excellent balance, too...

That reminds me, does anyone know what those blue rumble strips are for? They seem to be on every sidewalk end, which leads me to believe that they're specifically trying to deter skaters and boarders. Cars are going to hit the curb before they notice the rumble strip, and bikes can just roll on over them, but it's a pain in the, uh, feet whenever I have to hit one of those. Any ideas?

I'm all moved into my new apartment, aside from unpacking some bags and boxes. The new place is on the third floor with a nice view of the forest behind South B, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's kinda nostalgic to walk around on this floor, I've lived in two other rooms here before, both of which had some good memories.

When I was tired of carting boxes around last night, I went out for a ride. I saw a deer, a bunch of birds (which makes me wonder whether it's healthy to have so many lights on late at night...that many birds shouldn't be that active that late...), and a couple of skunks. One of the skunks was out on a parking lot island digging around, so I sat on my board and watched it for a while. They're really cute, apart from the overpowering defense mechanism.