Bodies and books

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve explored a couple of events in our town. It started with Body Worlds 3 at Science World-Telus sphere. I got there around 3 pm, so the entrance fee was $25.00. Apparently it’s cheaper later in the evening, because admission doesn’t include all of Science World at that time of day.

It was quite the graphic science/art show. Anatomist, Dr. Gunther von Hagens has plasticized donated bodies so that every bit is preserved. He’s placed several bodies in sporting positions and opened up areas of each so that key muscles and organs are visible. Some parts are identified with accompanying labels to help you navigate. That’s good, but I wish there were a few more labels. Usually it was just the muscles on the posed bodies being named.

Other displays contain separate dissected systems, like the male and female reproductive systems, the digestive system, and the nervous system. It reminded me of biology 101, but much better than pictures in a book. Hard to believe it’s all crammed in the little sack we call a body.

Even as a biologist, I found the show somewhere between grotesque and grand. It was weird thinking of all the time and energy put into the plastination process. Find a few donors and go from there, I guess. At the same time, it opened up my eyes again to the wonders of the human body. Not for everyone, but good stuff overall.

Word on the Street happened on Sunday Sept 24. I travelled down with a neighbour via Skytrain and arrived about noon. Surprisingly, the book bags were all sold out by the time we got there. I usually enjoy purchasing one and collecting all of the swag that comes with it. Just as well they were all gone this year, I guess. There is still a bunch of stuff sitting around my apartment from last year.

We went to a couple of lectures in the Word Under the Street section. That was the last I saw of her. She stuck around for one more early lecture than I did, and we never did connect again. Probably followed one another clockwise around the library (heh). I stuck around for one final talk on storytelling at 5 pm and got home around seven.

What I like about WOTS is the free-for-all atmosphere of the event. There are talks, displays, and performances going on everywhere. As you stroll around, you can stop for a minute or thirty to enjoy on-going sessions of poetry, book readings, comedy, music, and serious discussion about books and magazines. Most of the book and magazine publishers of BC are there, so there is ample opportunity to sample products you might not normally see.

Time permitting, the next events are the SOHO conference to celebrate Small Business Week, and the Surrey International Writers Conference. They’re both in October, so there is still time to get some work done before that.

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SFU opens up in Surrey

Yes, SFU now has a campus in Surrey. In Whalley, er…City Center as a matter of fact. And that’s a good thing.

I’ve watched the city try to bring this area to life for over 10 years now, and an institution like SFU might just be one of the catalysts they need to pull it off. Especially when you combine the new campus with close to 5000 more people coming to live in the area, once some of the new housing developments are completed.

The opening ceremonies on Friday were nice. After an inspirational introduction from SFU President Michael Stevenson, we had a letter from Stephen H, read out by one of the local MPs. The Premier was there, and so was our Mayor, Diane Watts. They all had positive things to say – natch.

The one frustration with Friday’s event was that the Bing Thom lecture -the reason I went in the first place- got restricted to those that registered ahead of time. Wish I’d seen that note. I did register and say I was coming to the open house and ceremony, but there was nothing that I remember about exclusive lectures. Sigh. Perhaps some other time.

On Saturday, they held an open house to show off some of the new digs and let people know what students and faculty are working on. As usual, it was quite inspiring. There was everything from high-tech computer imagery and interaction, to clothes that reacted to your environment. There just wasn’t enough time to get around and give the displays the attention they deserved.

There were a number of lectures during the day, but because of time constraints, I only fit one in. Gail Anderson was talking about Murder and Maggots. As a bug guy in the past, I just had to hear what she had to say. Surprisingly, there are very few forensic entomologists around. Well, I guess that really doesn’t surprise me. The last entomology meeting I went to consisted of multiple iterations of ‘how we identified the pheromone for (insert your favorite pest insect here)’. That’s important work, but it’s nice to see that there are other reasons to be interested in bugs.

Good job, folks. We’ll look forward to hearing more next year.

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Tatoosh crosses the border

(Update: Sorry, many of the lovely links I had in this post went dead.) Well someone’s tatoosh has crossed the border, and it could cause real problems in Manning Park.

Mountain Pine Beetle has been in the park for many years. While they’ve been working hard to keep the beetle under control, there is a lot of beetle damage.

Just picture it: large areas with clumps of dead trees, standing red or grey, or down on the ground. All drying up in the summer heat. And now with an approaching fire, all that dead, dry material could act like kindling.

The BC Forest Service, Canadian Forest Service, and some other partners did some testing a couple of weeks ago with fire in MPB damaged stands near Prince George. They wanted to study how fire behaviour might differ from that in normal forests. I hope they learned something they can use to help get this fire under control quickly.

I guess the other option would be to let nature take it’s course. After all, fire is a natural part of the lodgepole pine ecosystem. My fear is that we’re not dealing with a ‘natural ecosystem’ any more. Fire protection has changed that. And so has warmer temperatures over the last many years.

What we’re left with is large areas littered with dead trees. Sure, not *all* the trees are dead, but we’ve got a lot of standing kindling. That will probably result in fires that are more intense than normal, making it harder for anything to survive.

That’s scary.

The good news today is that North winds are in the forecast. Those should push the fire back into itself and give those firefighters a chance.

Happy Birthday, Blog

You’re one year old, dear blog. As of July, that is. Hard to believe, but congratulations.

So, what have I learned?

I havent posted much: 60 some odd posts; around one a week for the most part, and that was in spurts.

I’ve gone from 0 to around 434 visits. I doubt many of those are regular readers, given the frequency of posting. Might help if I selected a niche instead of just posting what I’m thinking about. But I don’t seem to be there yet.

Through the comments, I’ve run across a couple of blogs that I wouldn’t have experenced. Thanks guys. theBizofknowlege and dragonspeed.

The visitor count jumped over the last 6 months or so. Not sure why.

I have lots of work to do if blogging is going to be a part of my life. Less time reading, and more time participating. At least that’s what I’ve heard from too many bloggers to link to. But here’s a popular one anyway. It’s a good place to learn.

Onward and upward as they say.

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Dinner with friends

Out to dinner with some friends/relatives on Saturday nite. They live a different life than I do. They’re hard working, hard drinking, hard living, hunting, fishing, give-me-mosquitoes-to-traffic-anytime type people.

I’ve been there, but I’ve tempered significantly since the 1980’s. Life in the city does that to you. On the other hand, they live as much as they can up at Chuchi Lake, about 2 hours north of Ft. St. James. Now that’s where you find mosquitoes and fish!

Anyway, what a meal! BBQed steaks, corn-on-the-cob, baked potatoes, garlic prawns, and coldslaw for the main course, followed with a lovely light birthday cake for my sister-in-law. Not sure if the meat was a result of hunting last year or not. Didn’t care, it was great.

I haven’t had a dinner like that for a very long time, and it was quite a treat. Thanks to Sandi for cooking it up, and to Sharon, Duke, and Rod for the conversation.

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Emblings in our forests?

According to Business in Vancouver (pay wall link) last week (August 22-28, 2006), a BC seedling producer is in the news (link is dead). The company is talking about using their biotech product to help BC’s forests recover from the losses caused by the Mountain Pine Beetle. We’ll need lots of trees to do that, and the company could ramp up production pretty fast.

Still, I expect they’ll get some pushback from the very foresters they hope to help. And unless they’re careful, the company will run into lots of opposition from the public – can’t be helped with a production process with the unfortunate name of somatic embryogenesis.

The technology they have is not all that new. It was developed late last century as a way to reproduce trees. While it *is* biotechnology, it doesn’t change the genetic structure of plants. It involves chopping up very young seed embryos and treating the pieces with various lab and chemical tricks to form undifferentiated masses of cells, or calluses. You can harvest plantlets off those calluses for years and make trees. (As a very loose metaphor, just imagine a sourdough culture in the fridge that you use periodically for pancakes or bread.)

Of course, if you introduce genetically engineered material, that’s what you get in the callus. Many scientists hail the process as being a great way to beef up numbers in transgenic tests. But most of us won’t like that for forestry use. The thought of engineered trees from labs lends itself to all kinds of imaginative meanderings. I’m sure there would be a big push back on the idea, and not just from environmentalists. I think the producer knows that.

I suspect the Ministry of Forests wouldn’t like it either. Their own excellent geneticists argue that because of the diverse BC ecology, our forests contain a lot of genetic variation. We can breed trees to suit and keep a lot of the natural variation intact. Why alter the tree’s genetics. It might make some sense in private timberlands down south; it doesn’t make sense in BC’s public forest. I think the producer knows that too.

Actually, back in the 1990s I had a hand in developing nursery practices for somatic seedlings of interior spruce. The material came from regular seed, from normal trees. We affectionately called the plantlets ’emblings’ (from embryos), rather than seedlings (from seed). Actually, we went as far as trying to take rooted cuttings from older emblings too. Heh, we called them stumblings (aka stuck emblings, ’cause you had to stick the cuttings in peat to get them rooted). That term didn’t (ahem) stick.

I also helped set up some of the initial plots to test the growth of emblings in the forest. There was a lot of concern about long term performance, as well as with maintaining genetic diversity in the resulting crop. After all, the research lab had only selected a few original seeds from a few original trees. All the technology the young plantlets were subject to, from callus formation, through lab extraction, through nursery, could easily result in some selection too. Those plants that could endure all the manipulation survived. Those that couldn’t endure didn’t last.

Was there enough diversity in those that were left? How were we to deal with that? Were the original trees the ones we wanted to be using as ‘parents’ for these new trees? Did the original seeds represent the ‘parents’ good traits, or were they going to produce the sickly runts of the family? So many questions were being asked that the Ministry of Forests decided to wait. They wanted the answers from field testing before allowing emblings for reforestation programs. And of course, any genetic trickery was out of the question.

The cost was also an issue. I expect it’s has come down with time, but back then a finished embling cost 60 cents to $1.00, depending who you talked to. That was expensive when most seedling costs were below 40 cents. The cost will have to be comparable if foresters are going to consider planting them over large areas. Buying and planting seedlings is a big cost consideration in reforestation.

Those were some of the issues early on, and I expect things haven’t changed too much since then. Transgenics aside, the technology has some niche uses, but the research results are not in for wide scale forestry use. Most of the test plots are not even 15 years old yet. The trees are just getting started. Without those test results, I doubt we’ll see any large scale production of emblings for reforestation in BC anytime soon.

Do we always follow the lede?

I got to thinking about that last post and why I felt I needed to write it. Here’s what I’m thinking:

When we get one kind of phone call, we immediately think about the worst that could happen. An example is the call I got when I was out of town, about a leak in the apartment roof that was letting water in. It was affecting the smoke alarms in the building. Rather than accept that at face value and think about how little it could mean, I started imagining a dry wall ceiling full of water collapsing into my apartment, only to bury my computer and furniture.

The result was actually quite different: a small ring of discoloration around a smoke detector.

Why did I immediately think the worst? Why didn’t I just think it was probably a minor issue to begin with? One that I could deal with in good time, after my short holiday?

I guess a lack of information at the start may have played a part. I got the message from my landlord, who’d heard from the building manager at the end of a long day. We all know how stories change as they pass from person to person. Information gets added or lost in translation.

But if the call had been from someone telling me I might have won a million bucks, that would have been different. No matter how many mouths it had gone through, I would have thought about all the neat things I could do with the money. I wouldn’t have thought about all the scam artists that were going to haunt me and all the things I’d need to do protect myself.

Wonder why we do that?

Extreme examples, I know. But it makes me wonder: do we always follow the lede? A positive lede results in positive thinking, and a negative lede starts negative thoughts? That’s something to think about when we communicate with others.

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I was on Vancouver Island when I got the call…

We were just sitting down to watch ‘The full monty’ at my sister’s place in Royal Oak, just outside of Victoria. I hadn’t seen the movie, so I was looking forward to an entertaining evening.

A few minutes into it, my pager went off, indicating a phone message at home. When I called, it was my landlord. It seems a repair person was working on the roof of my apartment building, and had an accident with some water. It had entered the building and was now traveling down the electrical system for 5 stories. The fire alarms kept going off because the water had seeped into the fixtures all the way down. They really wanted to put a stop to it. My landlord feared there might be even more damage.

They couldn’t get into my apartment to see how much damage had been done, or to access the smoke sensor circuit where the water was. Seems no one had a key. I said that seemed odd. Up until about two years ago, they’d come in on their own on a regular basis, while I was at work, to check all the smoke detectors. Still, I had just enough time to catch the last ferry back. I suggested that perhaps they’d find the key in the building manager’s office?

No one called back last night, so I had a tough time sleeping. In the morning, Sister asked what I wanted to do. After thinking all night about it and creating all kinds of scenarios of what might be going on back in the apartment, the 11:00 am ferry seemed the way to go. It was a few hours earlier than I expected to go, but at least there would still be time to do something in the afternoon, if needed.

It was a long ferry ride, and an even longer drive from the ferry dock home.

No one was around the manager’s suite when I got in. A good sign?? Up the elevator… key in the lock…the door opening slowly. The apartment hallway looked about the same as I’d left it. I looked up at the smoke sensor. There was a moisture ring around it on the ceiling, but it and the light beside it seemed dry. Ok, check the other fixtures, the piping, the area around my office and computers. All seemed dry. No sign of most of the disasters I’d conjured up. I mean all the drywalled ceiling was still in place, and not all over the floor in a big wet mess. That’s a good thing, eh?

There was a note on the hall table from one of the strata councilors: Please call as soon as I got home. Seems we had to remove the smoke sensor, disconnect it, reconnect the circuit. All would be well until repairs were made and new sensors installed. The company that was on the roof with the water had accepted responsibility, and repairs would be made in good time.

Whew. The good part was that the rest of the building’s smoke sensor circuit was now active again. At least we’d know if there was smoke in the building. The sad part was that my little holiday was cut short.

Pizza and a movie to relax tonight…ham, pineapple, anchovies, and feta (don’t knock it until you try it ;-), and Aeon Flux. Oh, and a big sigh of relief before a good sleep.

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Inspiring blogger stories

I hadn’t seen anything about this site before, but I’m glad I found it tonight. Here’s the blurb from the home page:

“Bloggers Stories chronicles the stories of how the blogosphere has touched people’s lives and, in doing so, opened the door to new way of creating relationships and opportunities.”

What an inspiring idea for new bloggers like me. You hear lots of advice about starting a blog and the effects of blogging, but so many stories in once place about how it can transform lives adds another dimension to that advice.

I’ve only read a few entries so far, but you can bet I’ll read through them all over the next few days.

There might be hope yet! Rock on Blogger Stories.

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Ugly email in preview panes

MarketingSherpa talks about email today (only available through Aug 14, 2006):

“SUMMARY

… if your readers use Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Mozilla Thunderbird (or a host of others), chances are your email templates need a redesign … as of yesterday. Why? Your email may look close to unreadable in more than 60% of their in-boxes.”

Aaahhh, those lovely html emails with beautiful images that don’t show up when images are blocked, or carefully layed out pages that don’t shrink to fit the preview pane. I can’t count the number I get from various advertisers of online products, office supplies, or software, that are like downloading a webpage that’s not set to fit in an email preview pane. Most of them just get boosted into the delete folder after they’re marked read.

The curious thing was that the email from Marketing Sherpa was set out in two columns – advertising and images on the left, and the content extending well past the right margin in my preview pane.

Hmm…well, it sounds like 74% of readers prefer their reading panes horizontal, under the message. I keep mine on vertical, on the right – 26% prefer that.

The article offers some help to deal with images and advertising. Worth a read if you get some time before the 14th.