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This is all over the place at the moment, but this newly discovered hairy crustacean is so cute that I had to link to it. Even its name is adorable: Kiwa hirsuta. Appropriate too.

But am I the only one who thinks that it looks like a distant albino cousin of the Hug-in-a-Mug blue Hug Monster?

Prizes, obviously¹.

But aside from that, I wrote nearly a month ago about David Seah’s Printable CEO; it’s a system for tracking your progress by assigning more points for completing things that progress your career the most. I’ve been using the sheets to keep track of the things I’ve done for about a month now, and I decided that it was about time to draw some graphs and have a look at the pattern. They’re a bit rough and ready and were knocked up quickly, but because I want to bore the pants off you, here’s the mean number of items per points category, plotted by day of the week:

The interesting thing from my point of view is that it reflects exactly the opposite pattern than I thought it would. Before I started this, I imagined that Mondays and Fridays were my most productive—-Mondays because I feel rested after the weekend, and Fridays because I’m trying to get things done in time for the weekend. What I can see from this graph is that I feel busier on those days because I’m doing a lot of fiddly little things rather than important things. Actually, in terms of important things, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most productive, as you can also see from this graph (there’s also a lot of variability, as you can see from the whopping great standard error bars):

It’s been quite an interesting process, and has definitely changed my approach to work a bit.

¹ While I’m on the subject of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’, last night’s ‘One song to the tune of another’ was an all-time classic: the words of ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’. ↑

[First published 09/01/2003]

This week’s bravery award goes to the camera people involved in the “Omnivores” episode of The Life of Mammals. First there were the grizzly bears. Big, hungry grizzly bears. I feared for the cameraman on that one, not to mention David Attenborough. I was on the edge of the sofa shouting, “Look behind you - there’s a big hungry bear!” David’s such a pro that he carried on with his effortless, unruffled delivery while, barely 50m behind him, half-starved bears galloped about after salmon. I wouldn’t fancy my chances of out-running one if it decided I was coveting its fish.

Then there was the bat cave. Paul Stewart (the cameraman) must have really picked the short straw for that particular assignment. I can imagine the scene: they draw lots. “Yay! Platypus in Australia!”. “Woohoo! African savanna!”. Then Paul picks his assignment. “Oh bugger.” The others are all laughing and chanting, “Paul’s got the bat cave, Paul’s got the bat cave…”

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I’ve nearly finished the book The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford¹. It’s a very involving book, and beautifully written. Francis Spufford manages to explain some rather complex concepts in a simple and engaging way, without ‘dumbing down’, and he captures the characters of the people involved very well.

The chapter on the British Rocket programme (‘Flying Spitfires to Other Planets’) was very interesting, and I won’t quickly get rid of the image of Ray Dommett—one of the main people involved in Britain’s nuclear defence programme—taking part in Morris dancing in his spare time:

Another of the rocketmen I talked to spotted him by chance in Bristol. ‘These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder—and I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’

I also liked the chapter on the Human Genome Project, ‘The Gift’. It’s also an important story. For those who don’t know the background, in 1998, a consortium in the US (later to be called Celera) fronted by Craig Venter announced that they would be forming a private company to take over the sequencing of the whole of the human genome—a task that had been started by various labs funded by the National Institute of Health in the States and by the Medical Research Council and The Wellcome Trust in the UK. They were going to throw huge resources at it, and aimed to finish the sequence two years or so earlier than the projected public effort completion date. The real stinger was that they weren’t going to make the results freely available to scientists, but to charge a subscription fee for access to the database.

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Several weeks ago, the Plecostomus fish in our tank at work died (it seems to be a difficult time for fish), and the tank has been getting progressively more obscured by algae growing on the glass. Plecostomuses (or perhaps Plecostomi?) feed on algae by scraping it off with their sucker-like mouths, and are ruthlessly efficient at keeping the tank clean. David has a nice picture of his pleco, George, doing just that here.

When I came in this morning, I was surprised to see a huge (well, 15 cm long) new pleco in the tank, busily suckering its way around the glass. It’s a mesmerising sight from the other side, watching the mouthparts working away at a frantic pace. I once had to catch our former pleco when we had to drain the tank temporarily. I don’t recommend it as an experience; it suckered itself on to my palm and started rasping away, making me go “Yeurghh!”. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it was a mildly unpleasant surprise.

Now we have to think of a name for New Pleco.

There’s a great article in Thursday’s Guardian in Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column about the kind of pseudo-scientific jargon you see on beauty products. I quote:

Our noble bad science spotter Carl Brancher sends important news of PO2 Contour Cream from Laboratoires Herzog: it’s a “patented stabilisation of oxygen within a cream” that “puts oxygen back into the skin, reoxygenates skin cells, encourages natural rejuvenation”. It sounds like bollocks; but it smells like peroxide. Especially since Laboratoires Herzog point out, in the small print, that you will want to keep the stuff off your eyebrows. Now, I’m not sure that this is going to put any useful oxygen in my skin, because I’ve got a perfectly adequate circulatory system to handle that; but more importantly, I’m not sure that peroxide is quite what I’m looking for on my face. For £25.

To which I can only say–well said, that man. I’m always yelling at the screen when the latest face cream is advertised as having ‘advanced activated liposomes’ or some such thing. It’s just a fancy word for fat–you could get more or less the same effect by rubbing your face with cooking oil. Pah.

I read a somewhat depressing article in the Independent yesterday about the upcoming strike action by AUT members over pay. It reported that 2,000 teaching and research staff are leaving UK Universities every year because of the poor salary levels compared to those in other countries (particularly the US, where salaries are about 50% higher).

Most people don’t go in to academia for the money (fools!); they love the job and accept job satisfaction and slightly more freedom to do what they find most interesting, in exchange for lower pay. But now that occupational stress is increasing (relentless budget cuts, fewer staff expected to cover the teaching load of those who have left, cuts in grant funding), and house prices are soaring, people are beginning to question whether the rather dubious benefits are worth the sacrifice. Certainly, if you are supporting a family, it becomes hard to justify.

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I watched a very good documentary yesterday, based on the book “Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. It was a very interesting glimpse at Galileo’s character (the word ‘arrogant’ springs to mind), and the rather touching relationship he shared with his illegitimate daughter, Maria Celeste who had been cloistered in a convent since the age of 13. It’s slightly frustrating, because while her letters to Galileo have been preserved, his to her haven’t survived—probably because the convent was a bit wary of keeping letters from a convicted heretic. Maria’s letters reveal a woman with a very lively mind, who was in as much of a prison as her father—perhaps a worse one, as the physical conditions were so harsh in the convent. She suffered a lot of ill health and died terribly young in her mid-thirties.

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p. You might want to read “Part 1(The first part of this story, obviously)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000549.html before you start this entry. Or perhaps you don’t like linear narratives, in which case, read them in any order you like.

p. The other main activity on our field trip was small mammal trapping and radio-tracking. One of the best ways of estimating the population of animals that spend much of their time hiding, or being otherwise rather inaccessible, is a ‘mark-recapture’ scheme. The theory goes something like this:

• you set out your traps on a grid of known area and check them regularly for animals (all the traps are filled with warm bedding and food so that the trapped animal has a pleasant stay in the trap hotel)
• when you catch an animal, you mark it (in our case by carefully clipping an small patch of fur in a unique pattern)
• at the end of your trapping period, you put the total number of animals trapped, the number of animals you marked, and the number of recaptures into a “big, scary equation(see near the bottom of the page for the equations)”:http://srmwww.gov.bc.ca/risc/pubs/tebiodiv/hares/hacoml20-05.htm
• what you should end up with is some estimate for the population size in that area

p. This is all well and good, but our grid of traps was laid out on a 45° slope. All we could use to grapple our way up this slope were the wild garlic plants growing there. I can’t recommend wild garlic as a secure anchoring point, and if you add in the additional difficulty of holding on for dear life to the garlic with one hand, and holding a trap containing a small rodent with the other, it becomes very tricky indeed. We also had to go through this procedure very early in the morning, which meant that we went in for breakfast reeking of garlic. Then there was the ‘Rodent Roulette’…

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p. At the weekend, I heard an interview with a family who make and use “bat detectors(Information about bat echolocation from the Bat Conservation Trust)”:http://www.bats.org.uk/batinfo/batdets.htm and rescue injured bats, on John Peel’s [“Home Truths(Just Plain Batty - listen to this segment again)”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hometruths/20031215justplain_batty2.shtml]. It reminded me of a field trip I went on when I was an undergraduate.

p. At Bristol, there were Botanists, Zoologists and Biologists (like me) all in the same department, but the Botanists went on different field trips to the rest of us. Their course T-shirts read “Botanists have all the best trips” superimposed on a picture of a marijuana leaf. This was something of a triple entendre—while the Botanists got to sun themselves in Corsica[1], we Biologists/Zoologists languished in the drizzle of Gloucestershire. We consoled ourselves with the idea that they had to spend two weeks staring at boring plants, while we would have exciting animals to look at, all the while entertaining the rebellious thought that it would be nice to look at exciting animals somewhere a bit sunnier.

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p. Mr. Bsag was trying to remember the proper term for baby hamsters this evening (I forget why), and—embarrassingly given my profession—I couldn’t remember either. We hit Google for an answer, and in the course of our search, found the World’s Cutest Hamster Picture [“here”:http://www.hamsterific.com/Hamsterpics/FNF/Black-Pearl.jpg]. This little smasher is a Djungarian hamster (Phodopus campbelli, also erroneously known as a Siberian hamster—”Ee’s no rat! Ee’s ‘amstair!”). The males of this species show extremely unusual behaviour for mammals; they [“act as midwives to the females”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/720421.stm], pulling the babies gently out of the birth canal, and cleaning off the placenta to clear their airways.

p. The term is ‘pups’, by the way, just in case you are on tenterhooks. Obvious, really.

My Sunday early evening treat is watching Scrapheap Challenge (and Andromeda, but that’s a guilty pleasure). This week’s challenge was a particular treat—the teams had to build a jet-propelled racer. If you’ve never seen a jet-powered go-cart zooming down a dragster track, then—by crikey—it’s about time you did! The cognitive dissonance involved in seeing something that looks like a shopping trolley making a sound like a 747 on take off nearly killed me.

The element of danger is always an appealing part of Scrapheap Challenge, and the heady combination of tanks of propane and kerosene and spark plugs in close proximity to a rather scantily-protected driver gave quite a frisson of excitement to the proceedings. Not that I want anyone to be hurt, I hasten to add—I just like to see things burst into flames, which one of the vehicles obligingly did on this occasion. Excellent.

p. While watching the Stephen Fry comedy quiz “QI” last night, a rather striking question came up:

p. ”Which has been responsible for the most human deaths—the nuclear bomb, or ducks?”

p. Of course, phrased like that, it was fairly obvious what answer they were looking for, and it was not going to be the obvious one. But I was still rather surprised; ducks, it seems were the primary vectors of the “Spanish ‘flu pandemic”:http://www.ninthday.com/spanish_flu.htm in 1918-1919, which is thought to have killed around 30 million people worldwide.

p. So, the moral of this story is that you should stay away from ducks. If they’re not [“mugging you”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000315.html], they’re giving you ‘flu.

Drawn by the promise of footage of keas¹ in the trailer, I watched a programme about the natural history of the islands around Australia. In the course of describing the arc of islands from the north of Australia to the south-east, they passed over New Caledonia, which perked up my attention while I was waiting for the keas. I always knew that it was a very small island, but it isn’t until you see it on a satellite photo relative to the huge bulk of Australia, and even the smaller swathe of New Zealand, that you realize what a tiny speck of land it is.

They presented New Caledonia as ‘Jurassic Land’, where the lizards are king. This is true in part (though there are hundreds of interesting species from all kinds of taxonomic groups there—except for mammals), but it reminded me of all my lizard encounters during my stay there.

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p. In the pub on Friday night, someone in our group came up with a great party trick. He’s a bona fide Egyptologist, and was getting lots of requests to write people’s names out in hieroglyphics. You can see the translation of my name to the left. If there are any other Egyptologists in the house, I’ve just blown my anonymity. Or you might be thinking that ‘get bent’ is a funny name for a woman. One of the benefits of having specialist knowledge is that the majority of people don’t know when you’re talking—or writing—absolute tosh.

p. From now on, I will be the biologist formerly known as ‘test tube in a Petri dish - vulture - half horizon - reed - Wellington boot with slug crawling in denoting female name’. It’s possible that some of my interpretations of the pictograms might be a bit off.