13 June 2020

1100 sleeping
1211 sleeping
1440 working on Accipiter
1743 working on Accipiter

Food: pizza and Caprese salad for an early dinner

Fact: Copper has been worked with since ancient times.  Copper jewelry in Iraq have been dated to 8700 BCE while amulets found in Turkey are dated to earlier than 6600 BCE.  Those were produced without heat and instead were created by shaping native copper at room temperature.  Annealing and smelting copper emerged sometime around 5000 BCE (probably in Serbia) although the exact timing is debatable. 

Woke up and got to work on Accipiter.  That was pretty much my entire day except going with mother to pickup the pizza.  Luckily I went since I ended up having to go inside and get it since they weren't answering their phone.  Mother did some work for me getting figures ready and I did mitochondrial genome assembly.  She and I also went on a walk and then I took Dumas on a walk just as the sun went down.  When I got back I put on the Yankee/Rays game (we lost on a walk off in the 9th after Hick tied it up in the 9th even though they turned him around to his right side and he hadn't had a righty homer all season).  

12 June 2020

0404 getting all the Accipiter libraries ready to download
0507 sleeping
0912 sleeping
1715 post assembly processing of the Accipiter seqences

Food: ham for lunch, scallops and shrimp for dinner

Fact:  At the end of Star Wars: A New Hope, only Luke and Han get medals from Leia.  As time went on the fact Chewy got shafted started raising eyebrows and so in 1977 George Lucas said as a wookiee Chewy wouldn't have cared about a human medal and was instead recognized at a different ceremony by other wookies with the rebel alliance in attendance.

Woke up for the louse people zoom hang out.  Drew's tarantula is about the size of a half dollar now.  We also got to hang out with Steph's turtle.  After that wrapped up I did a little bit of work and then went to pick up the groceries at Walmart.  Talked to Jason on the way back to come up with a final plan on which samples I'll add to the Caribbean Sharp-shinned Hawk paper.  Once I got back I got the groceries unloaded and then spent the rest of the afternoon working on the hawk stuff.  I got the alignments started just before dinner.  After dinner I took the puppies for a walk and then did a little bit of work until it was time for Trivial Pursuit.  We played with the same rules as last week (once you are on a pie piece you don't leave until you get it right).  We got stuck on our first pie piece (yellow) forever, but once we finally got that right we were able to knock out a bunch of pie pieces pretty quickly until we got stuck on our last pie piece (pink).  It wasn't as bad as the west coasters though.  They were having a perfect game and then got to their last piece (also pink) where they got stuck for the rest of the game.  They even missed the star wars question about how many medals were presented at the end of Star Wars since Zac and Ania didn't think there would be discrimination against Wookiees.  They took so long on pink the Kansans came from behind and managed to get 4/6 questions on a card correct (on their 3rd try).  So they the kansans asked us both pink questions until one of the teams got one right (which we did, so we came in 2nd).  Afterwards we talked about plants and met some of Ania's new plant friends.

11 June 2020

0448 trying to fall asleep
1229 sleeping
1329 sleeping
1841 finishing up louse IDs

Food: ham and my leftover baked potato for lunch, scrambled eggs, bacon, and potatoes for dinner.

Fact: The Mayan Empire lasted about 3,000 years, and their collapse could have been due to drought.  Based on soil core samples taken from Lake Chichancanab.  The core samples revealed a layer of gypsum occuring at the same time the Mayans started their decline.  These layers are deposited during long running, extreme droughts.

Woke up for my 1400 meeting with Jason and Matt about the Accipiter paper.  We came up with a plan to incorporate some of the data (the Caribbean samples and also a couple of mainland tissue samples) from the new plate.  We also are going to try and drive hope the fact that the biological species concept should not be the only species concept that is used, especially since it doesn't work on allopatric species.  We ended up talking until after 1630.  Then I started getting the new data ready to incorporate with the old data. Finished up the evening listening to the first Yankees/Rays game of the 4th of july series (yankees won even though they didn't make it easy) then watched some house hunters while finishing up the last of the louse IDs. 

10 June 2020

0035 working on louse IDs

0932 sleeping
1658 picking up the mixer
1735 at Lowes

Fact: Steven Sasson was the inventor of the first self contained digital camera in 1975.  Pictures were saved onto cassette tape and the entire camera weight about 8 pounds.  He also is the recipiant of the highest award given by the US government to scientists- the National Metal of Technology and Innovation which he was awarded in 2009.

Food: ham for lunch enchiladas for diner with fruit and veggies

Woke up and did the ANSP orn zoom lunch.  Nothing very exciting going on, other than finding out about a long power outage some of them had.  After 24 hours Dan went to borrow a generator from Janice only to have the power come back on while he was picking it up (and insult to injury being gone for those hours meant 3 of his fish died since he couldn't manually arraite the water).  I also sent out the Auk reviews to the rest of the authors and worked on finishing up the louse IDs from south Texas.  Mother sent me to go pick up her new mixer and some stuff at lowes.  While waiting in line at lowes I noticed two orphaned plants.  the person in front of me picked up one of the orphans but left the other.  So of course I had to adopt it.  It was a Morning Glory and even blue!  We ate dinner and then I took the puppies for a quick walk before trivia time.  Ron called in and we did ok other than the bonus round which was identifying kid pictures of actors.  We didn't come in last though so thats all that matters.