There has been a distinct lack of updates around these parts lately. That’s not to say that my life has halted and absolutely nothing interesting has occurred. I mean, I saw Kingdom of Heaven which, frankly, is getting better the more I look back on it (I had a similar experience when I went to see Phantom of the Opera). Some of the fighting in there will blow you away, if the rapid choreography is of interest to you. There have been other things, too - our piano at home got tuned and adjusted and now is so amazing to play I think that, were I home, I wouldn’t even be typing this right now. So, I could list out the laundry list of reasons I have been so busy, spanning from the recent Mother’s Day weekend to the rapidly approaching end of this sophomore year of college, but I will focus on one rather pesky section of the latter - our guppy experiment.

Yes, as a part of Animal Behavior (a class I am in simply because I have to graduate with a Biochem major on time), we were required to design, execute, and report on an animal behavior experiment. For reasons of simplicity and easy quantification, we choose to test the idea of ideal free distribution in guppies. What is that? Why, I am glad you asked and by glad I mean really tired of the whole concept. But seriously, what it says is, animals will distribute themselves in such a way to maximize resources: where there is more food, there will be more animals. Great, huh?

So here we are, in the lab dumping blood worms into these tanks and recording the position of 15 stupid fish every 10 seconds. Incomprehensibly dull, of course, but the real insult to everyone’s intelligence is the statistical analysis that follows. We’re performing a Chi square test on this data?! So this is the take home message: no matter how inane your experiment, using a complex statistical package to obtain numbers describing what you did is enough to justify it. Utter ridiculousness, I tell you.

That said, I am working on the guppy report right now. I’m afraid you’ll all know when it’s over - which better be soon.

Stupid fish.

UPDATE: It’s over, I am saved.

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