For the past year, I’ve been trying to get into a graduate school. My grades are excellent-I’m one of the top in my class…it’s been a solid three years since I wasn’t on the Dean’s list. However, my references are a bit shaky because of some of my personality quirks and my GRE scores aren’t exactly spectacular. There’s also been some RL stuff going on which ties everything together.

Oh, where to start, where to start?

When I applied to graduate schools, I applied to four schools. I got rejected from three and until the last two weeks of school the fourth prospect didn’t look good. I applied to a few more, and then the fourth prospect came through. The fourth prospect (which I won’t name…the whole pseudoanonymity thing) is actually a lab I’m quite estatic about because I’ll be doing work that’s straight out of science fiction for a professor whose work I’ve been following for awhile. I’m essentially a fanboy working with the producer of my favorite body of work. Wh00!

So, shortly after this I found out that I was diagnosed with Asperger’s when I was like 5 years old and was essentially never told about it. Well, I was but can you really expect a 5 to 10 year old to understand the psychology behind ASDs? A little heads up before I entered high school or college would have been nice.

I ended up doing some research into the subject and found to my pleasure this diagnosis explained quite a few of my personality quirks…I basically challenge people because I have difficulty reading social structure and fall back on my applying own experiences and projecting my own personality quirks on to others because I have trouble reading folks who aren’t me. This caused a whole lot of introspection and looking back on certain events like my entire undergraduate career and the breakup with my abusive ex. It came out as a mixed bag…I feel the same way about the ex (even more negative, actually), but there are definitely some things I’d change if I could in the way I interacted with folks in my undergrad career. I can’t change them now, but I can avoid repeating the same mistakes now that I’m in graduate school.

Oh, and as for the Asperger’s diagnosis? Found out that I wasn’t immunized against polio or measles, mumps and rubella. Had conversations about autism with my dad which ended up with me headdesking quite a bit. It’s not the fucking vaccines. I love my parents as much as the next person, but I’m quite surprised they dropped the ball on this one because they both have some serious education under their belt.

My graduate school is in another part of the country…about as far away from Iowa as you can get. This has caused me some internal struggles as a father because this means I won’t be seeing my kid as much. Financial struggles, as well because graduate students aren’t paid a whole lot and I have an extra burden to bear in child support. It’ll be a struggle but I think I can make it. I’ll just have to be really careful about what I spend my money on, and I’ll see my spawnling every so often on travels home.

So…yeah. That’s what I’ve been up to. Moving out of a place (rented house) that you’ve lived for 5 years is surprisingly difficult and I’ve been packing and cleaning to prepare for this move as well as working 40 hours a week and participating in research at ISU. I’ve been uber busy moving and introspecting.

I’d really like to return to blogging. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll have a chance to until I settle into a new routine. I’m moving at the end of this month, and will be starting my new job at the beginning of next month.

Expect posts to pick up again late next month. Ish.

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If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading my blog

I haven’t posted a youtube gem in awhile and I normally post music. So let’s switch something up for a change. I’ve recently been getting more and more into stand-up comedy, and Patton Oswalt is one of my favorites. Here are two of my favorite jokes that he performed.

There are certianly many different directions societies could go. Just look at the various subcultures here in the US and then imagine how many there could be in the world. Ask a group of biology students if they would be willing to eat a GMO, and you’ll get some enthusiastically raising their hands, some expressing reservations and some flat out saying no. There’s a lot of variation within us, and that variation will probably be a part of any society no matter what stage of cultural evolution it’s at.

I think it’s dissappointing that Hawking thinks first contact would be disastrous, but I won’t disagree. I don’t think we’d have much to fear in terms of disease transmission because organisms which cause disease tend to have adaptations to thwart various parts of the immune system so they’d need to be pretty well adapted to whatever they were infecting. We’d be very different and would probably be different down to the biomolecules and genetic code which comprises us. There are many other amino acids than those which comprise us, and there are probably different molecules which could be used in terms of Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, Uracil and Thymine which comprise our genetic code.

I also doubt they’d attack us with germs as PZ Myers implies. We’ve been categorizing different microorganisms from nematodes to fungi to bacteria and viruses…some of which cause disease and some of which don’t. Since their biology would probably be vastly different than ours, they’d have one hell of a catch-up game to go through in order to create those bioweapons. Their technology would be undoubtedly more complex than ours, but with a potential of millions of species with a completely different molecular setup than they’d be used to there’s still a massive learning curve no matter how awesome your shit is. I do, however, think that engineering microorganisms to terraform the planet and kill us in the process would be a rational system for them to use.

Of course, this all assumes that we have something they want. Because we don’t know anything about the biology of these aliens, I really don’t know why we’d assume they desire anything on this blue ball. If they evolved in some sort of tundra planet that never left the ice age, this planet would be far too warm for them. If they evolved on a hotter planet, too cold. There’s also the matter of gas composition…remember that oxygen is highly toxic to many forms of life and that the first mass extinction event in earth’s history was the direct result of the atmosphere flooding with oxygen.

For all we know, this planet could be too hot, cold or toxic to support any form of life except that which initially evolved here. Although I think first contact would be absolutely amazing, I don’t really think speculating about what it would be like is a useful exercise because there are simply too many possibilities within human culture and within the biota we know on earth as it is…never mind that which we don’t know.

Quite frankly, this XKCD comic springs to mind:

With all that said, if a xenobiologically curious gunman put a gun to my head and asked me what I thought aliens would be like, I’d tell them that they’d probably have exoskeletons. After all, if we’re going by statistics…

Okay…back to finals.

You know, that week where I get no sleep and this blog goes down for a bit?

Yeah…it’s that time unfortunately. The blog’s going to be shackled up for awhile.

I’m also going through some RL stuff, as well. I’m fine…nothing’s wrong with me physically or emotionally but I’m preparing to move halfway across the country and probably won’t be around the internet as much as I would need to be to run a weblog.

I’ll be back on around August, if not before that.

Thanks for reading, and add me to your RSS feed to know when I’ve restarted this shindig.

I stopped listening to them when I got to high school. I (as well as everyone else I knew) began to develop an intellect and started to develop something which resembled musical tastes. They fell off my radar, and I always assumed that they stopped making music.

I…uh, I was wrong.

We got a theory, see like, we got a theory about magic and miracles. That’s right…

If magic is all we ever known then it’s easy to miss what really goes on, but I have seen miracles in every way and it have seen miracles every day, Oceans expanding beyond my site, and a million stars way above em at night, we don’t have to be high to look in the sky, and know that is a miracle open wide. Look at the mountains trees the seven seas, and everything chillin’ under water please, hot lava, snow, rain and fog, long neck giraffes, pet cats and dogs. I have seen 85 thousand people all in one room together as equal, pure magic is the birth of my kids I’ve seen shit that shock your eyelids, the sun and the moon even mars the milky way fuckin shooting starts, ufos, a river flows, plant a little seed and nature grows, Niagara falls and the pyramids, everything you believed in as kids, fuckin rainbows after it rains, there’s enough miracles here to blow your brain, I fed a fish to a pelican and Frisco bay and he tried to eat my cell phone he ran away, and music is magic pure and clean you feel it you can hear it and it can’t be seen.
A
re you a believer in miracles? (Music it’s all magic, you can’t even hold it) Do you notice and recognize miracles? It’s just there in the air, are you a believer in miracles? (Pure motherfucking magic, this shit will blow your motherfucking mind.)

Music is a lot like love, it’s all a feeling and it feels the room from the floor to the ceiling, I’ve seen miracles all around me, stop and look around its all astounding, water, fire air and dirt, fucking magnets, how do they work? I don’t want to talk to a scientist, ya’ll motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed, solar eclipse and vicious weather, 15,000 Juggalos together and I love my mom for giving me this time on this planet, take nothing for granted, I seen a caterpillar turn into a butterfly, miracles aint nothing to lie, Shaggy’s little boys look just like Shaggy and my little boy looks just like daddy, miracles each and everywhere you look and nobody has to stay where they put, this world is yours for you to explore, it’s nothing but miracles beyond your doors, the dark carnival is your invitation, to witness that of there our explanation, take a look at this fine creation and enjoy it better with appreciation, crows ghosts, the midnight coasts, the wonders of the world, mysteries, the most. Just open your mind and in no way to ignore the miracles of everyday, that’s real.
Are you a believer in miracles? (Magic every in this bitch, it’s all around you and you don’t even know it.) Do you notice and recognize miracles? It’s just there in the air, are you a believer in miracles? (Pure motherfucking magic, this shit will blow your motherfucking mind.)

So I guess they’re shilling for creationism now? New-agey bullshit? Looking for a squeaky-clean public image while still maintaining their affinity for cursing? I mean, seriously. This is a band which once wrote a song about killing college kids and now they’re waxing poetic about butterflies? WTF?

Whatever’s happening here, these motherfuckers need to learn some basic motherfucking science. Nothing in that song could be construed as a miracle in any way, shape or form and can be explained by some fairly basic science. Of course, all scientists are evil lairs. Or something like that. So we can just dismiss what they say and pretend nothing can be explained.

I’m sooooooo glad I grew up.

It’s kind of an interesting thing, actually. Bugs have a stigma about them, and usually undeservedly so. When they’ve adapted to living in our dewellings like cockroaches or bed bugs, they have a stigma that’s kind of deserved. Bed bugs are probably among the worst of these. They hitch-hike on personal possessions, and feed directly on our blood. They’re also incredibly hard to get rid of because they’re increasingly becoming resistant to pesticides.

I was surprised to see how much damage bed bugs actually caused to those who they bit. One of the people living in this house had some sizeable lesions on their arm from feeding…some of which were more than a centimeter in diameter and all of which were bigger than the insects I collected.

As far as infestations go, these are definitely the worst type of insect to have in your house. One of my prospective graduate schools is looking at new management techniques for bed bug management, and these guys are consistently rated as the most difficult pest to deal with…more difficult than cockroaches, even.

One of the things which interested me about this whole venture is that this was in a relatively low-income house where they were going to try to treat for the insects themselves. I’d imagine a lot of cases are like this, and a lot of homeowners try to skip out on the cost of hiring professional exterminators by dealing with the problem themselves.

Although it’s cheaper, this probably isn’t a good idea unless you’re someone like me because the exterminator’s probably going to have a better handle on what they’re resistant to than you’d be able to find out on your own.

However, I was dissapointed by the series five premeir. It seemed like Moffat haphazardly combined Girl in the Fireplace and Smith and Jones into an episode which wasn’t as good as either.

I’ll give him the baddie, though…he definitely surpassed Smith and Jones with the villain in this episode. Either way, not his best effort yet.

I know how things are for you right now. You’ve been a part of the education process for the past half-decade and it’s become all you’ve known. Now, you’re at the end of your undergraduate journey and you’re staring the real world in the face. Maybe you’ve worked the same shitty part time job for the past 5 years…maybe you’ve worked a series of crappy jobs in that time. Either way for the first time you’re threatened by actual responsibility. You started on this journey because you wanted to make something of your life, and along the way things have gotten comfortable. Now, change is an option. You hate the status quo, but change is always scary.

And you should be scared. No matter what field you’ve stumbled into, chances are life is hard and this is reflected in your various pursuits. Maybe you’re in danger of failing a required class at midterm. Maybe you’ve gotten rejection letters from a few graduate schools. Maybe you’ve just noticed a major mistake on the resume you’ve sent to half a dozen PIs. Maybe you’ve sent out a few job applications and can’t seem to get a response. Maybe you’re getting burnt out by the four years of constant classes, tests and labs.

These are all scary things. These are all things which everyone goes through, as well. Just because you’ve suffered a few setbacks doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed. Most folks don’t get the first few jobs they interview for. Most folks don’t get accepted to the first few grad schools they apply for. And everybody fucks up a resume every once and awhile.

Look…the universe tends to unfold as it should. Chances are, you’re relatively young and life gives you dozens of chances to start over again if you’ve really screwed things up. If you’re struggling through a difficult class, see if it’s curved or just spend every waking second studying. If you’re worried about your grades, stock up on easy classes next semester or take another semester’s worth of classes if you’re graduating. If your grades are decent, finding a job or internship shouldn’t be terribly difficult. If your first few graduate schools rejected you, keep applying until one clicks. This stuff is far more simple than you’re making it out to be.

Chances are, you’re tending quite a few fires right now and feel like you’re having trouble keeping track of them all. That’s a good thing. The more things you have going on at once, the greater chance something’s going to click and you’ll move onto the next level. Granted, it’s a bit scary but nothing worth doing is without risk.

Remember…you wanted to do this. You wanted to become something more than the manager of a fast-food joint. Maybe you wanted to be a doctor, scientist or lawyer and now that you have to make a life change you’re questioning whether you have the ability to make it.

Guess what?

You can do this. You’ve done it for four or five years already, and you’ve completed phase one of your goals. Granted, it’s just a start but every journey has a first leg. You’re driven…you’ve lasted nearly a half decade already through innumerable crisis and life changes. You’re intelligent…otherwise, your quest would have ended in failure long ago.

But most of all, you’ve got nothing to lose from here on out. You either step up, or keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing all along. Worst case scenario, you keep working the same crappy job you have been for the past few years.

Don’t that fear of change stop you. You’re better than that.

Sincerely,
Cheshire

Sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie, right? A Tea Party speech, perhaps?

Welcome to the world of pest management. Well, kind of. Okay, not really but I think that was a cool introduction.

We all know how honeybees work together for a common end, right? Everyone’s seen the video of them swarming the hornets…it’s definitely a must-see for the entomological enthusiast.

Bees are social insects and quite a bit of this is mediated through hormones which tell the bees to do what and when. However, the social insects that everybody usually recognize as ‘social’ are actually a very highly derived level of sociality. Many insects interact with each other, but simply don’t have as complex of a heirarchy.

Cockroaches fall within this group. They can ‘talk’ to one another through hormones. The outer layer of a cockroach exoskeleton is made up of lipids (nonpolar molecules), and these lipids can send different messages to the cockroach. If you add the right combination and concentration of lipids to a peice of filter paper, you can actually get cockroaches to accept a very non-cockroach robot into a group of cockroaches.

The picture above is exactly that…those robots resemble cockroaches in no way, shape or form and yet aggregate around the robots as if they can’t tell the difference. They smell like roaches just as much as you and I look like humans.

Cockroaches like to rest in dark areas. They’re nocturnal and their natural habitat is quite hostile so it stands to reason that the darker their shelter, the less likely they are to be attacked by a spider or a shoe. It’s pretty easy to program a robot to seek light shelters, as well.

So here’s where it gets cool. The researchers in this paper switched the programming in the middle of the experiment and made their roachbots seek lighter shelters. Without the robots, the cockroaches stayed inside the comfort of their dark abode. However when the roachbots decided to hightail it out of there, the cockroaches followed.

It’s a pretty cool experiment, but what’s the purpose?

It’s really just a new way of looking at social behavior. If you can get a robot to be disguised as a member of a species, you can use that robot to pull apart the social signals which are going on around that robot and learn about the social interactions within that group by using the robot to violate the social ‘norms’ within that group.

Halloy, J., Sempo, G., Caprari, G., Rivault, C., Asadpour, M., Tache, F., Said, I., Durier, V., Canonge, S., Ame, J., Detrain, C., Correll, N., Martinoli, A., Mondada, F., Siegwart, R., & Deneubourg, J. (2007). Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices Science, 318 (5853), 1155-1158 DOI: 10.1126/science.1144259

Aphids can be a pain in the ass to gardeners and farmers. Although they look pretty harmless, they’re to plants what mosquitoes are to people and more. They transmit some pretty serious diseases which cause millions of dollars in damage per year. They’re also famous for their fecundity-they’re parthenogenic and their daughters are actually born pregnant. I’m going to sidestep the urge to make a deep south joke here…

Aphids are also really strange creatures. They’re semi-social and communication between individuals is actually somewhat common. Some species also have soldier individuals…not unlike ants or termites. They also have all sorts of symbionts which perform all sorts of tasks. Some make amino acids that the aphids can’t get in their diet. Some species have lost their symbionts.

A common theme here on Cheshire is that parasitoid wasps are awesome to have around. Many species kill caterpillars, and aphids have their own parasitoids as well. They’re major insect population regulators and the economy would probably collapse without them.

One symbiont, Hamiltonella defensa defends the wasp against parasitic attack. Or so it would seem. The symbiont becomes less effective in captivity, and eventually loses it’s protective ability. This was a mystery for the longest time.

It was eventually discovered that the aphids actually needed a bacteriophage A. pisum secondary endosymbiont (APSE) in order to be completely effective. In essence, the aphid has a bacterial symbiont which carries a bacteriophage which encodes a toxin which makes it good for the aphid to have around because the toxin kills the parasitoid wasp larvae.

Now, of course the bacteria contains it’s own toxins so there’s definitely a reason the aphid keeps this guy around. However, in this particular instance the virus keeps itself in play through selection. The reason the laboratory colonies became less effective at killing the wasps was most likely because the selection for the individuals carrying the bacteriophage infected symbionts stopped once the wasps stopped parasitizing the aphids. In other words, this is a mutualism. The virus gets to hang out, nomming on the endosymbiont while the aphid doesn’t get nommed by the parasitoids. Everyone wins!

Well, except H. defensa. They pretty much get screwed over by the host.

Well played, aphids…well played.

One of the things which has annoyed me through my undergraduate studies is that a lot of the microbiology instructors treated viruses as pure pathogens and parasites. This view is starting to change with the discovery of some really complicated viral ecology, but oddly enough it was my entomology instructors who first started to show students that there was more to virology than medicine.

Oliver, K., Degnan, P., Hunter, M., & Moran, N. (2009). Bacteriophages Encode Factors Required for Protection in a Symbiotic Mutualism Science, 325 (5943), 992-994 DOI: 10.1126/science.1174463