September 5, 2010
I.
I dreamt that I was a terrible person. I don’t know what I did or the reason why, but I just remember everyone thinking I was awful. Then I saw Mr. Schwartz and he sternly lectured me about how I should be a better person and I felt guilty. Immediately afterwards, I woke up.
II.
I felt extremely thirsty so I went up to a water fountain to fill up this plastic jar-like container with water. I drank jarful after jarful but my throat still felt parched. I continued to drink and then finally I had a realization: I was in a dream so no matter how much I drink, I’ll still feel thirsty.
September 4, 2010
Perspectives
When I went home in August this summer, my dad looked skinny for the first time.
It’s not that he went on a diet or has been exercising more than usual. I’ve just been growing and gaining weight so I finally reached that point where my perspective changed.
From when I was little, I always thought that my dad was huge and a lot bigger than me. My perspective shifted for the first time when I went through puberty and ended up being around 6′ 1″. I was bigger than my dad for the first time in some way.
I always thought 180lbs was a lot and I think that’s what my dad weighed throughout my childhood. Now, I weigh 190lbs and probably will continue to add mass for a while.
My dad is still bigger than me in almost every non-physical way, though.
December 21, 2009
I can’t be consistent about blogging…
So I never had time to blog this fall, and I let an entire semester pass without writing in this once. Actually, it’s not true that I didn’t have time, I just didn’t prioritize it much so I picked more important things to do.
Anyway, I was just talking to Anthony Hsu, and this was our conversation:
Ken: dude
Anthony: what’s up?
In case you haven’t talked to Anthony, he had already taken his CS final, but still had an assignment due after it that he was putting off in the typical Hsuman fashion.
Anyway, since the summer, I’ve put on some mass and all my lifts have gone up. Here are my current stats:
Bodyweight: 175lb
Squat (1RM): 295lb
Bench (1RM): 235lb
Deadlift (1RM): 345lb
The most recently “tested” lift was bench, and that was like a month ago I think. All the other maxes are more than a month old, and I’m fairly certain the other two lifts have since gone up. Other than that, I’m just at home, waiting for my grades to come in, haha. Super satisfied with orgo (CHEM 3570/357). I studied consistently for it (except for the final… where I only studied like 4 hours the night before because I had a java final that night until 9:30) and ended up with an A+. Can’t ask for much more.
Hope to relax this winter break, and catch up with some high school friends before going back for the spring semester.
July 21, 2009
I think in one of my previous posts I talked about my progress on bench. Although yesterday was supposed to be DE bench, it was more like RE/ME.
For me, benching is difficult because I have long, skinny arms. This disadvantageous leverage means that I have more distance to travel and that I really have to work on pushing through my sticking point just above my chest. The most weight I ever lifted before this summer was 165lbs for three reps last year. Two weeks ago, I think, I repped 165lbs for 4, which was a PR.
Yesterday, I obliterated last year’s PR. I first started by doing the barx20, then x12. Then I proceeded to do 95×6, 115×5, 135×5, 150×5, and 165×5, a PR. Since I snagged that PR, Alex suggested I just go for 175lbs. I wasn’t sure if I could do it after all those reps, but I decided to do it anyway and I got it for a double with some energy left in the tank. After that, Alex said I might as well try 185lbs to get that goal out of the way. I was tentative at first, and I told Alex I wasn’t sure if I could do it. He simply said, sure you can; I can do it, just watch me. And he jumped under the bar and did it with bands. (The bands are connected to dumbbells that are lying on the ground to create the highest tension at the top of the movement and least tension at the bottom). It wasn’t encouraging, but I decided to do it and spent a few minutes to mentally prepare myself.
A lot of times, when I try a new weight, my arms shake and I feel really unstable. For some reason, when I unracked 185lbs, it felt heavy, but stable. I started the descent and gave it all I had. The bar went up so quickly I thought I could have had 190 or maybe 195. However, I stopped there because I had already handled two weights that I had never handled with full range of motion, and I had just set three PRs.
No mattter how many times I see other people benching 185lbs (or like, 400+lbs), I still feel satisfied that I was able to bench my goal. Because increasing my bench has been such a struggle, it meant a lot to finally meet one of my goals.
I guess my next immediate goal is to bench 205lbs, then 225lbs. 225 is a milestone because it’s two 45 pound plates a side, and there’s just something magical (and psychologically intimidating) about that. As a sidenote, Alex says he’ll sto calling me “McLovin” and come up with a different, [possily more embarrassing] nickname when I bench 225lbs and weigh 175lbs or more.
With that out of the way, hopefully I’ll meet my other goals, too:
- Squat 315lbs
- Deadlift 315lbs
I’m not sure which will come first, but I suspect the deadlift will. I haven’t free squatted in a while so I’m not sure how much progress I’ve made on that.
July 19, 2009
“Damn, McLovin is squatting himself retarded!” I hear as I struggle to decide whether a ten or five pound plate one each side on top of 365 pounds makes 385 pounds. I’m so disoriented from finishing my previous set, but I laugh anyway while checking to make sure I didn’t misload the bar.
Friday was a second day of lower body, and we did Zercher squats for the first time. Simply put, it was brutal at first and when it was all over, I felt really tired. If you don’t know what a Zercher squat is, here are two pictures. You may or may not be able to see why it was one of the most painful exercises.
So as you can see, the bar is held in the crooks of your elbows. Alex and James are significantly bigger than me so they had no problem holding the bar in their elbows. For me, the metal was right on the bone and up to 95 pounds, I was able to withstand the pain. However, when we loaded it to 135 pounds, I felt a searing, burning pain through my right forearm and up to my thumb. I tried to just work through it, but I knew I couldn’t. It felt like the bar was pinning my nerves against my bone. Part of my thumb was already numb from using ~12,000 pipette tips between Thursday and Friday, but the numbness was all around my forearm, too.
Anyway, I decided to wear a long-sleeved shirt and roll up the sleeves to my elbows so there was some padding on the inside of my elbow. That helped immensely and I was able to build up to 235 pounds for a triple. Not too bad, considering I did 225 for triples onto a box on Monday.
I went to the field for work on Friday. One of the main reasons was that a postdoc’s plants had been purple several weeks ago, possibly due to phosphorus deficiency, so I was going to take pictures. But when we got there, his plants were totally fine and had “grown out of it.” Whatever the problem was before, it wasn’t an issue now.
Anyway, since I had my camera and Sara was going through the field, looking at other plants, I decided to take pictures of the field and some corn. So for an hour or so I just walked around taking pictures. Sara approved of this, of course, and said maybe we could use some of them for our web site. After that we collected 3 plates-worth of leaf tissue and went back to the lab.
So here are some of the pictures.
July 12, 2009
I forgot to update this after I set a PR in the gym on Wednesday, but I think I remember it well enough to write about it. Originally, we had planned to do Zercher squats, but instead we decided to box squat onto a high box instead. We hadn’t squatted heavy in a while and high box squats allow us to use heavier weights than we can use for Zerchers. Since I’m fairly tall and have different proportions from Alex and James, who are shorter than me, I had to add a 25 pound bumper plate on our “box” so that it was a half an inch to an inch above parallel. The box was actually four 45lb bumper plates and one 25lb bumper plate, so I used an additional one to get above parallel. This lets me get used to using higher weight so that when I free squat to parallel or lower, I won’t be feeling the weight for the first time on my back. Also, my depth wasn’t too shallow anyway, so I didn’t mess up my movement pattern.
When I squatted onto the box, I could feel that I was several inches higher than normal because I usually go several inches below parallel. I figured that I could easily do 225lbs for a triple. After a bunch of warm up sets, I did 225lbs for a triple and it was clean. Alex approved and told me 275lbs should be doable, too. I then did 250lbs for a triple, which was also pretty easy. When I tried 275lbs, I felt like it was heavy, especially because the fatigue was setting in. Regardless, I got 275lbs for a pretty clean triple. Alex suggested 295lbs, but after 275lbs, I was pretty spent so I told him I’d take 285lbs. It felt a lot heavier than 275lbs, even though it was only 10lbs heavier. I got it for a double; the second rep was a grinder. I went for a third, but I couldn’t get it up so Alex had to help me a bit. He told me he barely helped, but I definitely could not have pushed through it by myself. I call 285lbs for a double a fake PR. It’s a PR because it’s the best I’ve ever done, but I’ve also never done high box squats before. However, it’s the most weight I’ve handled on my back, so it’s a PR in that sense. The next day, my legs were mad sore.
If you’ve read my other posts, you know that a lot of what I’ve been doing at work has been manual labor. I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, because I’m helping out the lab, I’m making money, and Andy says I’m building character. However, I felt like I wasn’t using my head enough and most people could do what I was doing. I think that’s something I’m not comfortable with: doing something that anyone/most people can do. That may have been why I took linear algebra and am going to take multivariable, even though I had the option of never taking a math again. I’m not satisfied if I only know as much as everyone else, or just the minimum.
Anyway, on Friday I actually used my brain and when Sara told me to do something and I was confused. This confusion was actually a good thing, because this meant that I was trying to understand something new. What Sara asked me to do was test out some primers. The first task I had to take care of was to prepare two 96-well PCR plates with the right DNA in the wells and the primer mix. We wanted to use one type of forward primer for one plate and another type of forward primer for the other plate, but keep everything else the same (i.e. corresponding wells on the plates would have the same reverse primer, same DNA polymerase, same solution, etc.). What amazes me about PCR is that we use such small amounts of DNA, but when we run them on gels, we still get images. The protocol we use calls for 5microliters of green taq polymerase, 1 microliter of a forward primer, 1 microliter of a reverse primer, 1 microliter of deionized/distilled (or sterile) water, and 2 microliters of 10nanogram per microliter concentration of DNA. The total volume is 10 microliters and we still get usable data.
Anyway, the part that confused me was interpreting the gel images that we got after we ran the DNA for about 40minutes on a gel. Sara asked me to pick out primer pairs that “worked.” She asked me to look for double bands on the heterozygotes and primers that are allele-specific to B73 or P39/Tx303 (lines of maize). I was totally confused and had no idea what to do. I sat there scribbling things on a piece of paper while looking at the computer screen for a good ten minutes and I was lost. I asked Jason, a Ph. D. student, if he could explain what I was looking for. Sara told him to explain to me what we had just done by using the primers and running them on a thermocycler. He explained how we had a QTL with two markers on either side of the region of the chromosome that we suspect contains the gene for the trait we’re studying, and hopefully the polymorphism, too. Our primers that we picked anneal to the markers when we run them on PCR and amplify that segment. Depending on the primers that we run them with and whether we have homozygotes or hets, when the amplified segments are run on a gel, we can see whether the primers have amplified the region we want, and only the region we want. If the primers are not allele-specific enough, they’re not useful to us. We also need the primers to amplify the hets. This was why when I put the DNA in the wells of the PCR plates, I created “fake hets” by mixing the DNA of two different lines of maize. We are interested in the hets, because if we find hets, that means that between the two markers that we picked, there was an instance of crossover. This helps us narrow down where the gene (and SNP) is in the region we’ve identified. Then, we can pick new markers for next year and cross the offspring to further narrow down the region.
When I was at work, I was still really confused and asked Jason and Sara for some reading I can do. Sara lent me one of her textbooks that she used last semester, so I’ve been reading that. It’s on population genetics so only the introduction to genetics is useful for me. She also gave me a title of another genetics textbook that might be more relevant to what I’m confused about. The more I learn, the more I’m interested, so maybe I will continue working in this lab during the semester. I haven’t completely decided yet, though, because I’m already expecting to have more work than last year.
July 1, 2009
Lately I’ve been waking up before my alarm clock. On Sunday night I remembered to set my alarm clock and woke up to my Pikachu alarm clock at around 7:15am, but I forgot to set it on Monday night for whatever reason. I woke up at 7:24am, which was when I needed to wake up on Tuesday. I set my alarm for 7:40ish last night, but I first woke up at around 7:00am and I went back to sleep and had a weird dream (more on this later). I then woke up at 7:33am and got up and turned my alarm off before it could ring. I have a feeling that I’m waking up early because the window in my room faces east so when the sun rises, my room lights up.
I think my dream was influenced by a movie I watched last week, “Battle Royale.” The premise of this movie is that in future Japan, society has lost its faith in its youth and decides to send middle school students to a deserted island to kill each other off. There can only be one winner after the three days of killing, if more than one survives, the necklaces that have been locked around their necks will explode and kill them. I suppose they are looking for only the determined youth to survive and want the others to die. Anyway, in my dream I was in some sort of auditorium and there were yellow books that looked like Japanese literature textbooks that I used in my Japanese school. There was some angry teacher at the front of the auditorium telling us something and I remember my arm being grabbed. I was trying to escape and suddenly the auditorium was empty. I can’t remember what happened afterwards, but since I had only been asleep for a short time, the dream didn’t last very long.
Today at work we first started by phenotyping various traits of corn cobs from 2007/2008 that had been dried and stored in the basement of a greenhouse by the USDA building. I measured the ear length, the fill length (the amount of the ear that was actually filled with kernels), the ear diameter, the row number (number of rows of kernels on the cob, usually an even number), the rank (number of kernels in a row that seemed representative of that cob), and the ear mass (if at least 70% of the kernels were present). I worked with Ryan for this task, since we usually work together. He measured other characteristics that were more subjective, like row arrangement (regular, irregular, spiral, and something else I think), 20 kernel mass, cob diameter, cob color, kernel color, and cob mass. Ryan’s job took more time because he had to shell the cob to get the kernels off. We used scanners like we did for the reed-canary grass to store data; each pair of cobs came with a tag with an identification barcode.
Yesterday when we worked on phenotyping cobs from 9-3:30, we practically went insane. We had the radio playing and we talked a little bit, but the air was stuffy with practically no ventilation, it was kind of warm, and the dozen or so freezers in the basement were all humming and either putting us to sleep or giving some of us headaches. I opened the doors to outside the basement wide open and another pair of doors from the ground floor to try to get the air circulating. I thought that the air might flow since there was an elevation difference, but we didn’t feel any air moving. I think I learned from a prairie dog documentary on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet that prairie dogs intentionally (or instinctively) dig holes at the tops of hills and interconnect them to holes at lower elevations so there’s a pressure gradient and causes air to flow. It’s a natural air conditioning system that apparently works pretty well.
Phenotyping in the basement didn’t suck as much, mainly because we only had to do it for an hour before all the undergrads had a meeting with Ed. It was also because Nick found an extension cord and a powerstrip, to which we connected 4 fans. The lab has 6 or 7 fairly large fans because last year, they used these fans to dry out the corn cobs for storage. We created a setup to get air flowing and it was much more comfortable this time.
After an hour of phenotyping, we all went to Ed’s office because he wanted to talk to us before he left town for a few weeks. Last time we had a talk with Ed, he told us to write down any questions we had or anything we were wondering about. I wrote down nothing, usually because I was always busy with something, or if I was wondering about something I was doing, I usually asked my mentor, Sara, who explained it to me. I guess I should have written down some thoughts about things on a larger scale, like what the lab has done in the project in the past, or things Ed has done before working at Cornell, or what it’s like to be a scientist, something Ed suggested last time. Anyway, each of us contributed to the meeting a little bit and since Ed likes to talk a lot, we ended up talking for a little over an hour without any awkward pauses. Ed gave us a little genetics lesson on hybrid vigor, heterosis, and pseudo-overdominance, the model that Ed believes that the alleles of maize may follow. One theory was that the genes of maize follow overdominance, and sickle cell anemia is a famous example of this. Anyone who took AP bio or an introductory bio course probably remembers this. Sickle cell anemia is a condition caused by a single polymorphism that results in glutamic acid being substituted by valine in hemoglobin. If you are homozygous for this condition, then you have full-on sickle-cell anemia. If you are homozygous for the normal condition, then you’re perfectly fine. However, if you live in Africa, where malaria is a huge problem and you are heterozygous for the condition, then you have the benefit of being immune to malaria because of the sickle cells, but you don’t have enough sickle cells to cause too much weakness. The heterozygous condition dominates over either of the homozygous conditions. According to Ed, this type of condition is rare in nature, and what he believes is happening in maize is slightly different.
In pseudo-overdominance, you have two genes on a chromosome in repulsion phase configuration (I think this might be easier to see: A1, a copy of some chromosome, has ——-[ ]——-[X]——- and A2 has ——-[X]——-[ ]——-, the blanks are “good” alleles and the “X”s are bad alleles). When these two organisms mate and if the chromosomes recombine to have good copies of both genes, then the offspring will be more vigorous than either of the parents. However, this is different from overdominance. Ed made a theoretical graph of the vigor of an organism that had 0, 1, or 2 copies of the good genes. Basically, because the genes are in repulsion phase configuation, you can sum the vigor of the organism and the heterozygote ends up being the most vigorous. The idea is that when “ordinary” dominance of each gene is combined in this repulsion phase configuration, it appears as though the alleles follow the model of overdominance. However, since these alleles are not always looked at at the resolution of genes, it isn’t always easy to tell whether the model of pseudo-overdominance or dominance is being followed. It was all very interesting and I felt like I was in class again.
After work I went to the gym to lift. DE bench was on the schedule for today, but since I’m a skinny bastard, I did some RE work. I PRed in the bench by working up in 5s. Last summer I think I worked up in triples to hit 165 for 3. Today I did barx15, 95×6, 115×5, 135×5, 145×5, 155×5, and 165×4. The last rep was a real struggle so I decided to stop it there, since it wasn’t ME day. I saved it for the assistance exercises. I’d never really done dumbell bench seriously before, but I remember doing 45×8 or something like that before. Today I did 40×10, 50×10, 55×10, and 60×5, so I PRed there, too. The bench is my weakest movement, I guess, even though I’m just weak all over as Alex and James like to say, so it’s good that my bench is moving along. Hopefully when we do flat barbell bench again I’ll hit 175 or 185.
One more day of work until I get to go home for the weekend!
June 30, 2009
Some thoughts that are unrelated to each other:
- One of my housemates and I were walking to go see a concert on campus and we were passing by the bridge between the campus and collegetown. It had just thundered/rained and there were clouds blanketing the hills and town below us. I wish I had my camera with me, and Gabi said, “I live in a postcard but none of my friends visit me!” Ithaca can be beautiful – particularly when not many people are around, unfortunately.
- Today was probably the worst day of work. It’s not that anyone treated me poorly (no one ever does) or the weather was bad (the weather was really nice today). The job itself sucked. One of the traits that our lab is researching is flowering time, and our PI thought it would be a good idea to tag the fifth leaf of each plant, because its senescence may be correlated with flowering time. What you have to realize is that finding the fifth leaf is an annoying task. It’s ambiguous and subjective because the fifth first leaf, which was most likely senescing, can be confused with the fraying/dead cotyledon. Or, the first leaf may have fully senesced already and we might count the second leaf as the first leaf. You get the idea. However, to make things worse, all these plants are at most knee-height. This means that we either have to be bent over (constant lumbar flexion) or kneeling the whole time. The ground has many rocks, but I decided that some scratches and bruises were easier to handle than cramped and/or stiff spinal erectors, especially because I was planning on going to the gym after work.
So after finding the fifth leaf, we had to mark that leaf with a piece of bright orange tape and another person (I) came along and stapled it to the leaf. By the end of the day our backs were killing us. The good part was that one of the grad students bought us a watermelon to eat afterwards. Another good part was that after we got back to the lab, Ed and some people had a meeting and decided that marking the fifth leaf was way too cumbersome, difficult, and torturous and they figured out an alternative method that we could use later on. Instead of flagging the leaves now, it was decided that we would count the nodes at the end of the season. Thank goodness because my back was killing me by the end of the day and it was the worst job I’ve had to do so far this summer. I think most people also agreed with me.
- After work I went to the gym and lifted. I was really psyched because today was ME day for lower body, and we were pulling (deadlifting). It was the first time I was going to pull with Alex and James and they were actually excited to see me pull, too. Anyway, after work I was exhausted but I tried my best to get pumped up for deadlifting.
So far on ME days, I haven’t been “allowed” to lift singles. Singles are a true maximum effort attempt. For squats and bench I’ve been working up to max triples, which are exhausting, but they probably aren’t above 95% of my max. I asked Alex if I’ve earned singles for today. He told me that for deadlift, it’s actually more difficult, in some ways, to pull max effort triples or doubles because of the set-up. For simplicity’s sake I was allowed to pull singles and I was happy.
I started by warming up with just 95 pounds for a bunch of reps to try and get into the groove. Then 135 for a bunch of reps, and then 185 for a triple as my last warmup set. From there I pulled 205 for a single, which I already knew I could easily do. I then pulled 225 for one and Alex wanted to see me pull it one more time before moving on. He approved my second pull at 225 and I then did 245, which I also expected to get, since I’d done 245 for some triples several months ago. I wasn’t sure if I should keep moving up and I was fumbling with some 10 pound plates. Alex and James had been warming up with 275 and Alex suggested that I just take 275 (for their convenience and as a challenge to me). I was a little nervous but I figured, what the heck, it’s worth a shot. Once I set myself up and got a huge load of air, I pulled with all my might, and to my surprise, once I broke it off the floor, the weight went up pretty easily. This was a PR for me. After that I just did 2 sets of 5 at 225, both of which were tough to finish, and we were done with the main lift. We did some assistance work afterwards and that was all fine.
Watching Alex and James deadlift from a deficit (i.e. standing on a 25lb bumper plate) was inspiring. I’d never really seen people pull huge weight in person and here they were, pulling 465 pounds from a 2 inch deficit. Even though James missed 465, it was still ridiculous to see. I asked Alex what his max off the floor was and he told me he has pulled 635 fairly recently and also 675 a little before that. Ridiculous.
- One more thing. I was talking to Nick, the field manager, and I was saying how most of the stuff I’ve had to do so far was delicate manual labor. He laughed and agreed that that’s what a lot of this is about. Of course, the planning and analysis will take more insight and thinking, but a lot of what I’ll be getting paid to do is manual labor. It’s a good thing I don’t mind manual labor. I think it can be pretty rewarding, especially because you can see what you’ve accomplished and you’ve really helped someone out.
- That’s it for now. I’m going home on Thursday night for the weekend because Sara, my mentor, let me take Friday off. I can’t wait to have GOOD home-cooked meals. I can only eat my creations for so long.
June 15, 2009
Field Work
Usually when I do field work, I go to the maize field, about half an hour away and help out. However, today I went to the biofuels field, where we grow switchgrass and reed canary grass. I’m not really involved in the project because my mentor is most involved with maize, but whenever anyone needs hands, unrelated people can be recruited (especially undergrads). Also, the reason our [primarily] maize resesarch group works with biofuels is because one of the agreements our lab made with the USDA when we got the grant was that we would resesarch potential biofuel plants.
My job today was to take measurements of the tallest stalk of each reed canary grass. There were many rows and columns of this grass (I forget exactly how many), but fewer than the number of maize plants we have. Anyway, someone out in the field would break off the longest stalk of this grass and bring it to us with an envelope with the plant number and its corresponding barcode.
This is just some picture I found on google. Our reed canary grass is still green and doesn’t look like that, yet.
After that, I would first measure the length of the stalk from the bottom to the tip of the head, and then from the bottom to the topmost node. Then, the second leaf down from the flag leaf (topmost leaf, usually small) was ripped off and its length and width were measured.
All of this was done and made easier through the use of barcodes and scanners.
We would first scan the envelope with a barcode for that plant. These scanners had some sort of flash memory to record this number. After this, we recorded the other measurements by using ”rulers.” These rulers had no numbers, but had different barcodes at different intervals. For example, the plant height ruler was probably about 2.5 meters long and the very first barcode at the leftmost end coded for 000 for 0cm. This barcode was printed out to be exactly 1cm long so that the next barcode coded for 001cm and so on and so forth. So to easily measure plant height, I took lined up the bottom end of the plant with the 0 end and then lined up the head of the plant as far up as possible. Then, I scanned the head and moved the scanner up until it reached the end and scanned the first fully readable barcode. I then scanned the first node, but since the plant was in the way of the barcode, it wouldn’t scan. This was planned because it can be difficult to aim the scanner. You can only see the laser when it is scanning, so unless you are scanning, you can’t see exactly where you’re going to scan. So once I found the correct barcode, I moved the plant out of the way and it immediately picked up the right number. We did something similar with the leaf for its length and width. Afterwards, we put the leaf in the envelope and put it in a cooler so that it could be frozen in s a -80 degree freezer and so its DNA could be extracted later. The top end of the plant, starting from the first node, was cut off and then someone else put it in a “plant press” (pieces of cardboard with newspaper in between to preserve the heads). I’m not sure exactly what it does or what’s going to happen to them, but we also put a sticker with the plant’s barcode around the stem so we could track it later. All the data will be uploaded to a computer later, and organized according to each plant. Since we scanned the corresonding envelope to each plant, we will be able to figure out which data points correlate to which plants.
What I really wanted to talk about was this little game I had with Ryan, one of my co-workers. It wasn’t so much a game as it was just a fun way to mentally keep track of the samples without dying of boredom. As you can imagine, as the day wore on, we got really tired of standing around and continuously scanning measurements, one after the other. We started the keep a mental list of the tallest plants and the longest/fattest leaves. It was something that excited us to keep going, to try and find the next plant that could break our records.
When we first started playing this game, we knew there were some abnormally tall plants but leaf width was relatively consistent. Most of the leaf lengths were between 17mm and 21mm and I think I had at least 100 with 20mm-wide leaves. Regardless of the plant height, most of the leaves were within this range. We would get excited when a leaf was 24 or 25mm wide and I think the fattest leaf was 26mm. I think there was only one of them.
The most exciting measurement was definitely plant height. When we first realized that there were some plants that towered over others, we started keeping track of the heights. We realized that it was fairly rare for a plant to grow above 2 meters and after a while, just by holding the plant by its end, we could tell whether the plant was in the 180cm range or the 190cm range, or above 2 meter range. There were probably 30 or 40 that we measured that were above 2 meters, and for a while, our record plant was 219cm tall. We found a few that were in the 210-219cm range but we decided that 220cm was the barrier.
After a while, another field worker who was much older than us (who was also named Ken), started paying attention to our game, too. So when I went to get my next plant from him (he put on the stickers near the head of the plant, above the first node), he said, “This one might break your record; it lies almost end-to-end on this table!” The table was about 2.3meters or so, so Ryan and I got excited. I paid special attention to aligning the end against the 0 side of the ruler and I scanned the top of the plant. It was 224cm! We probably got more excited than we should have, because it’s not like we had any control over the heights of the plants, but it was still something fun to do during a monotonous task. I think in the end, there was one 224cm plant, one 219cm plant, one 217cm plant, two 214cm, and maybe one or to others above 210cm. Even though Ryan and I agreed it was kinda geeky to get excited about something like that, it probably made the work go a little bit faster.
We also had a barrier for the leaf length, but in that case, the barrier was never broken. The average leaf length was above 200mm, but below 300mm. Anything above 300mm was a pretty hardy leaf, but it was difficult to get into the upper 300mm. The longest leaves I remember were 393mm and 394mm. There were some notable ones in the 380s, but we were never able to hit 400mm. It was our goal all day, and together, Ryan and I must have measured 500 plants or more and we still never found a plant whose second leaf down from the flag leaf was more than 400mm long. There were, however, leaves that were longer than 400mm. Maybe another day.
June 14, 2009
Apartment Life
I appreciate some little things after living in a dorm for two semesters. Here are a few of them:
- Being able to walk around without shoes
- Having a place to put things in general (aka having a living room)
- Not having my door close on me all the time or not having to prop it open (one time, Myron asked, “Why is the damped harmonic motion of your door not working?”)
- Not having to deal with the particularly heavy door that was on our bathroom
- Having a large refrigerator
But my current living situation isn’t perfect either. Things I miss about being in a dorm:
- My friends being a short walk down the hall
- Having access to a dining hall
- Having Gabe as my roommate
- Having my bathroom cleaned regularly
- Air conditioning
Living in the dorms was definitely more lively and I was able to socialize more. Now I have to seek people out because for I don’t know too many people staying here for the summer. But the good part is I have a ton of free time. For example, today I spent several hours cooking food for sandwiches for the rest of the week while listening to music. Even though it’s kind of a chore, I get to have good food later and it’s not like I have other things to do. One thing about my job is that I don’t really have anything I can do after I leave the lab/office/field. So when I leave work I go to the gym and cook dinner. Then I watch a movie or read a book or do something that’s not very stressful.
Some things haven’t changed, though. The laundry is still a couple floors down and there are twice as many dryers as washers, even though the dryer’s capacity is greater than that of the washer and there’s virtually no situation in which you would need to use the dryer without using the washer beforehand.
