While standing in an elevator does not exactly qualify as an environment condusive to scientific study, I did find out something interesting in one of my many trips up and down one particular elevator in our science buildings. Regardless, this little observation can be applied to any elevator you ever ride in, and I recommend it to stave off violent cases of Elevator Boredom (EB). See, everyone feels the acceleration and deceleration of an elevator moving in a shaft, but all one really senses is a slight increase in pressure on the bottom of one’s shoes. So, when you get the chance, give this a try.
Take a pen or pencil in your hand, and hold it out, pointing the end at an elevator button. Note that while this ‘experiment’ will work with your hand, a loose object at the end of your arm enhances the effect. When the elevator starts upwards, you’ll notice the pen or pencil dip down, and stay there, as the elevator accelerates (remember to hold out your arm loosely, hulk). When the elevator ceases acceleration and moves at a constant rate, your writing instrument returns to pointing at the button. Finally, when the elevator slows, watch as your magic wand drifts up above the button, and then return when the elevator stops. I’ve found some elevator accelerate harder than others, and some are so rickety that the experiment is pretty inconclusive about what’s going where.
Oh, and think up a good excuse for pointing at elevator buttons.
Poetry won’t do it. Pages and pages can’t describe it. I’m even nearly numb to music right now. Originally, I was going to cover the facebook craze currently sweeping St. Thomas - we just got it yesterday. That does not seem important now. This is much more real life than any sort of online social networking, and really more real than most of the things that have been happening to me as of late.
It’s about relationships. It’s wondering if uncertainty is real, and whether reality is being ignored. Have I lost touch with the realistic? Am I supposed to have answers? Should I even have questions of this sort of depth? What I mean is, what issues are we even caught up in? Compatibility? College social life? Is not knowing what to do a sign that we should do something out of routine, or a signal that the fork in the road hasn’t truly been reached?
Sometimes, I am searching for a line. A line that marks one side “you really don’t have to worry about that right now, it hasn’t been that long,” and the other “danger alert, pull it together.” Of course, it’s never that clear. But why don’t I have a better picture? What don’t I get it? I don’t want to be too different to be together. Maybe I sound stupidly sophomoric in saying that.
Yeah, we’re trying to decide what to do. Because, to tough out something we don’t entirely understand is to make an investment in the unknown. This investment can be painful and wrenching - I don’t want it to end up being unnecessary. I’ve come to see something though, something Mykala unknowingly helped show me, something I will not forget: it will all be ok. It’s anything but apathy: it’s embracing the life we all are presented with, and enjoying the ride in all its ups and downs. So yes, it will all be ok.
Sometimes, collegiate level labs do not work. In some ways, this can be funny, and in others, not quite funny. Simply put, you do not get the results you needed, wanted, or hoped for, and therefore you lose some credit for doing the lab. In fact, at the Universtiy of Minnesota (and probably most places), the TA’s are given a range of acceptable lab result values that will result in full credit. If the numbers are outside of this range, you do not get full credit. Some way to review the “scientific method.” They encourage us to use scientific reasoning and ignore “right and wrong” while we grapple with finding a solution, and then turn around and grade result accuracy. I have yet to see if this applies to my Animal Behavior lab, in which we visited the zoo and observed Japanese snow monkeys. We accessed primary source literature (a lot of Japanese people study the Japanese snow monkeys, believe it or not), formulated a partial ethogram, and then promptly watched our experiment crash and burn.
You see, while Macaque fuscata are called snow monkeys, they do not love cold weather. Thus, during the course of our observation of their behavior, they were mostly concealed in their heated feeding den.
Woo.
Reviewing the pages of timestamped graph paper is an exercise in futility - there is no appreciable amount of data. No data, no trends. No trends, no conclusion. No conclusion, no point. Yes, we sat there for 70+ minutes, and gathered three data points. Three. The resulting bar graph is yet another piece of pointlessness - three categories total, zero data for two of them and three hard earned points for the other. What a conclusive trend. Soon, we will see if this astoundingly small amount of data is enough to merit credit for a 300 level Biology lab.
