Kateroni’s blog

First and foremost - I passed my prelims!  Woo!  And of course, like what everyone says, it was pretty anti-climatic.  The written part was HARD and I don't think I've thought that intensely pretty much ever.  And I was absolutely terrified going into the oral exam and just about peed myself.  But my committee was kind and my advisor was very supportive and they apparently thought I did "very well!"  Though this is just the first step into my prelims - I've now passed my general exams but still have to pass my proposal defense and then I will finally be considered a Ph.D. candidate.  My proposal defense is planned for the beginning of the fall semester 2010 so still a little bit to go. 

Other news, I have my Christmas shopping all done and am very excited to go home to see my family and buddies!  I'm driving home tomorrow which should be interesting considering that the east coast is getting about 18" of snow today!  I wish I had some friends in Ohio or somewhere halfway in between that I could stop at.  Someone move there!  So I'm driving home to Maryland on Sunday and then on Tuesday, me and my parents are driving to Florida to see my grandma and Evan and Celina since Evan can't get off work.  I'm not too upset about enjoying 70 weather for a week!  Then we come back to Maryland and Alex flies into Baltimore and then we'll spend New Years in Baltimore hopefully with Leanne and bunch of my other ladies.  And then we go to Lindsay's wedding on the 2nd and are going to rock all night (and part of every day!).  And DENNNN we drive to Ann Arbor to Alex's parentals and then we finally finally make it back to Illinois.  Whew. 

And for your viewing enjoyment, here are some funny videos (make sure you have the sound turned up):

And then this little kiddle is singing Jason Mraz's "I'm yours" but he has no idea what the words are.  Adorable!

First update:  Natalie came to visit me!  Woo!  It was way awesome to see her again and catch up with her life in the big NYC.  She's so New York now, dark colors, curly hair, cute boots.  I'm jealous.  I'm still living the scrubby grad student you're-lucky-if-I-even-shower-before-coming-into-lab life.  To each their own I suppose.  Anywho, it my intention to reintroduce her to world of ridiculous fun...though of course, I think I ended up going overboard.  She arrived Friday and we immediately embarked on the traditional happy hour/bar crawl thingy.  Great fun!  We had some adventures playing kings at the house and even more at the downtown bars.  We even threw in a small dance party to end the night with. 

Saturday dawned to a delightful breakfast with Natalie, myself and Ember.  We've decided to start our own new radio show "Tales from last night"  where we discuss and giggle about our adventures from the drunken night before.  Lines would include "Was there tounge?", and "Oh yeah, I'm gonna marinate you all up in that shit" among others. 

Unfortunately however after the greasy food coma started to wear off, we realized the night before had done more damage then originally anticipated.  We were thinking about heading over to a pumpkin carving contest, but instead ate chinese, mike-n-ikes and watched Twilight.  Worst.  Movie.  Ever.  I only saw it because both Natalie and Ember said the 'sexual tension was palpable'  Pretty sure by sexual tension they meant complete awkward silences with no conversation or character development.  So Edward likes this stupid girl because she smells different?  Really?  That's a good basis for a relationship.  Stupid.  And newsflash, vampires do not sparkle in sunlight. They burst into flames.  How about you read a Stephen King or Ann Rice novel once in awhile.

Other update:  the docs finally figured out what's really wrong with my hip.   After trying out McKinley here on campus, it became obvious I needed some more specialized help so I went to an orthopedic hip dude.  Got an MRI and some other stuff.  Turns out I have two problems.  The first one is bursitis, or inflammation of the bursa which is the big muscle that runs down the side of your leg.  It's all pissed at me probably because I have a goofy stride.  No surprise there.  So I got a steriod shot in my tushy for that and some more rehab to go to.  Big problem is the impingement like I said before - but what's really causing the pain is a labral tear.  The labra is the cartilage in the socket of you hip joint and the impingement has ripped it all up.  So uncool.  So I have an appt with an hip surgeon in a few weeks and will likely get some arthroscopic surgery to correct that shit.  But the good news, is that I'm allowed to start light running again (assuming I get surgery eventually to correct the problem), so I'm pretty stoked about that.

Other update:  Prelims are now 4 days away - they start on Monday.  I've learned all about the history of the field of animal behavior.   Apparently way back in the day, the old rich dudes in England would study animals since they are a part of nature and that's an 'appropriate' pasttime because nature was created by God, so it was a Godly pasttime.  Whatever.  Anyway, apparently they didn't believe in that whole 'objective science' thing because their 'articles' are just riddled with anthropomorphisms.  Rats are fearless and mischievous, ants are thoughtless slaves, bunnies are terrified worryworts and lions are courageous.  Man oh man, what passed for science way back when.  But then our heros Lorenz and Tinbergen came in and were like 'Whoa kiddles, let's put some quantification on this shit and actually test some hypotheses'   Fascinating stuff.  I suppose someone will look back on what we're doing now and probably think how naive we are too!

Other update:  Halloween!  Big success.  Pics all over facebook - I think they tell the story for themselves =)   

As I'm sure most of you have heard me complaining (excessively) lately, I'm studying for my stupid prelims.  It's hard, but it's actually kind of cool.  I like the idea that (theoretically) I'll know just about everything about biology when it's over. 

I'm going to write you a little story about how a major field of biology came into being.  Namely, the field of population genetics.  Who cares about population genetics, you ask?  Well, I do.  And so does every other biologist in the world, because without the creation of population genetics we probably wouldn't have the unified framework of how evolution works that we do today.  It essentially brought together all these contested ideas that were being viciously argued about and showed that instead of being opposite, they were actually complementary.  It put an end to incessant bickering among the famous biologists of the time so they could actually get down to work and start discovering some really cool shit. 

In the beginning:  Darwin came up with this awesome idea about how evolution works.  The idea of evolution wasn't completely new at the time (contrary to popular belief) but no one had come up with a real good mechanism about how it works.  Remember Lamark - that was one attempt - not an awful one at that, but it did miss the mark at bit.  ENTER: natural selection.  This was Darwin's pretty revolutionary idea - the idea that individual variations could be passed on to their offspring and the individual's with the "best" variations would have more offspring and so come to dominate the population.  That's natural selection in a very small nutshell. 

The major problem is, Darwin didn't know how these variations were passed on.  At the time, he believed in 'blending inheritance' basically founded on the observation that kids normally look like a mix between their parents.  So based on this, theoretically, eventually all these variations that are so important to his theory would disappear because they all get blended together.

DRAMA!  So now, we have these biologists at the time who are trying to figure out exactly how this natural selection thing works.  In one corner, you have the 'biometricians' (named so because they were very mathematical in their methods) who staunchly believe Darwin's idea that evolution works by the accumulation of small gradual changes.  These dudes were right in theory, but they were going about it all wrong because they too, believed in the whole blending inheritance thing.  
Now in the other corner you had the 'Mendelians' who rediscovered that funky monk Mendel's work.  When they saw Mendel's work about how some alleles are dominant and others are recessive and you get the classic 3:1 ratio of phenotypes they took this to mean that evolution proceeded by leaps and bounds since they thought that a single gene was responsible for each trait.  Therefore the only way you can continue to get the variation needed for natural selection is through crazy mutations of huge effect.  So they were right about the method of inheritance (alleles don't blend, but are inherited independently) but were wrong about how a trait is only controlled by one gene of huge effect.

These dudes were seriously passionate and way vitriolic to each other in their correspondences.  Or at least as mean as you could be way back at the turn of the century.  "My dear Mr. Bateson, while I understand your intentions at elucidating the mechanisms of Mr. Darwin's theory are most admirable, I must firmly disagree with your interpretation of your results."  Hot shit at the time apparently.

Oh no so what do we do?!  The field of evolutionary biology is divided and no one can agree!  Will we ever find resolution?  Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster really the one responsible for all this?!

Enter our heros, Ronnie Fisher and Sewell Wright  Sir Ronnie Fisher was way ahead of his time - he's the guy who basically invented statistics.  Seriously, who does that?  It's mind-bottling.  Obviously, developing the field of statistics was a pretty big step, but more importantly he was the guy who figured out that there really isn't a divide between the Mendelians and the biometricians - they're both right.  The Mendelians had the idea about the method of inheritance right, but the biometricians were right about the fact that evolution generally occurs through small gradual changes caused from continuous variation.  Fisher was like "Whoa dudes, calm down, let me throw down some knowledge - traits can actually be affected by more than ONE gene (you stupid Mendelians) which creates continuous variation that is NOT blended together (you stupid biometricians)"   Absolutely brilliant.

Then Sewell Wright (who actually went to U of I for a year before trying out bigger and better things) figured out that things other than natural selection (ie. drift, migration) could play a role. Wright figured out that genetic drift might be important in evolution as well, mainly based on the fact that not all populations are just these big super-populations but are rather fragmented into smaller sub-populations.  That's an important idea, it basically influenced almost all of ecology and had big impacts on the development of the study of speciation.  And finally, Wright developed this idea of the 'adaptive landscape' which hopefully anyone with a college biology class under their belt has heard of.  Imagine if you will:  a landscape covered in peaks and valleys.  A group of individuals (or a species or whatever) is hanging out on this landscape.  Natural selection works by drawing the species up these peaks which are 'adaptive optima.'  In a very simplified way - it's good to be on the peaks and it's bad to be in the valleys.  It was a major metaphor at the time that really helped people to conceptualize how natural selection works.

This was the birth of the field of 'population genetics' - or studying how allele frequencies change over time in populations due to the effects of selection, drift, mutation, migration etc etc.   There was a bunch of other bros involved, but in my mind, Fisher and Wright were by far the most influential and coolest.  Fisher apparently had some serious eye problems and so learned math and calculus just by talking about it and imagining it in his head. 

And that's all for this posting of "How Biology Works."  Maybe next time I'll talk about how the development of population genetics led to The Modern Synthesis.  Another very cool and super important topic that I need to know about.  No one really wants to hear me talk about this stuff at the bar, so I figure this is a good place for me to think out my thoughts.  Sorry for the nerding =) 

This is what I intend to be for Halloween:

I'm actually wearing the nude bodysuit I ordered for it right now. 

I posted awhile back that I was determined to start running again.  And I did!  I ran a 5k AND a 10k in April and just ran another 5k about a week ago.  And I was going to sign up for another 5.5m run at the end of the month.  Woo!  Success!  I'm finally a runner right? 

Wrong.  Ever since I started running, I also noticed that sometimes my right hip would start hurting during and after running.  And unfortunately it's gotten progressively worse.  So I finally went to the doc, hoping that it was tendonitis or thinking that my pelvis was out of alignment or something and some physical therapy would take care of it.  Unfortunately, the x-rays they took showed instead that I have 'femoral acetabular impingement.' 

Which means, I have too much bone in my joint - basically there's excess bone (like little bumps) on the ball and socket of my hip joint.  Because of this, it causes there to be bone-on-bone friction in the joint pretty much every time I run/exercise/move.  Here's a website that shows what I'm talking about: http://www.hipfai.com/

Also, because it's a bone problem (and possibly just a congenital thing, though the jury's still out on that it seems), it's sort of un-treatable.  The physical therapist gave me some hip strengthening exercises to try out to see if they help.  But she pretty much implied that continued high-impact exercise will just further degrade my hip joint and can lead to premature arthritis and might eventually necessitate the need for a hip replacements.  REALLY?!  Shit. 

Mega. Ultra.  Lame.

I eat way too many jellybeans to keep this hot bod just doing the stupid elliptical.  I'm pricing out swimsuits, ASAP.   

I adopted a cat!  His name is Mr. Meowgi (Mr. Miyagi - Karate Kid anyone?) and he's super adorable and almost overly friendly.  He's about 4-5 months old and really likes chewing on my plants.  He also prefers to sleep as close to my nose and face as possible. 

His adoption may or may not have been spurred on by the fact that I lost almost all my data that I collected during my field season this past summer.  When I left for Europe, I still had all my data....when I returned, someone had erased the harddrive.  So after being in grad school for two years and now having basically zero data to show for it, I clearly needed something to cheer me up a little bit.  Needless to say, the past week has been one of serious high points and probably the worst low point in my graduate career to date. 

But let's move beyond sad stories.  In any case, the creepiest thing is, let's say he lives to be about 15 which is an average ripe old kitty age.  That means, I'll be 40 when he dies.  FORTY!  When did life start going by so fast?

And so at the risk of turning into a weird cat lady, here are some adorable photos of my adorable little buddy!

I finally made it back to the lovely corn desert of Illinois after several weeks of traveling abroad.  So let's recap!

1 - I think I like airline food.  No seriously, I'm horrified myself.  But the dinners you get on overseas flights are sorta cool.  You get your main dish in its own handy little compartment, then a little compartamentalized salad, and a roll with butter, and crackers and cheese and always some little dessert.  It's really quite lovely.  It's like the bento box of the skies.  Maybe it's just because I like organization, but something about the little dishes I find very satisfying. 

2 - So the whole point of me going over to Europe was to attend this conference (The Fisheries Society of the British Isles annual meeting) at the University of Leicester.  The conference's theme this year was Sticklebacks, so obviously I had to go and because it's very applicable to what I do - I was able to secure funding to basically pay for all my travel.  BUT the really cool part is that Alex was ALSO able to secure funding to travel in Europe as well.  He studies art history, specifically French Medieval manuscripts (really old smelly books) and so got money from his department to go to all the old classy liberries in England and France. 

Now we have recipe for fun: Kate + Alex + Europe = FUN!

3 - Conference:  The conference was super cool!  It was all stickleback people so I was basically able to meet and schmooze with just about every single big name in the field. AND they seemed very excited about the stuff I'm doing (I mean honestly, talking about animal personality is just something almost anyone can relate to) AND to make it even better, I won First Place Poster Prize!  Woo!  I was very surprised and very proud of myself.

4 - After the conference I returned to London and was able to meet up with Alex for a few days.  We stayed in Camden which is like the cool, young, punk borough of London.  We were even able to make some new friends!

 
We went to the Borough Market, which is this huge open air food market.  Just lots of cheese and bread and meat and olives and cakes and delicious!  I also went to the Portobello Road market which is in Notting Hill (I looked for the house with the blue door, but could not find it).   This market is all funky jewelery and vintage clothing so I was able to buy this really unique vintage ring.

5 - GERMANY!  So then Alex left to go look at books in Paris and I flew over to Germany to meet up with two friends in Regensburg.  My friends Todd and Sarah (from U of I) went to Germany last year because Todd got a post-doc there.  I stayed with them for 4 days and we ate more schnitzel (which I didn't even really think was a real thing - but it is!) and drank more beer than I thought possible.  I even saw a guy wearing a real live lederhosen.  Just because he wanted too.  The city is one of the few that wasn't destroyed in WWII so the architecture is gorgeous and old and really cool.  Here, I was able to pick up my newest pair of ridiculous sunglasses

6 - After Germany, I flew over to Paris to meet up with Alex again.  We were only going to be here for one night, so I figured we should just do the romantic tourist thing and go make out underneath the Eiffel Tower.  But instead, as we're waiting in a bar to get dinner, who walks in, but our buddy Dorsch (also from U of I).  He got a job at the American U of Paris last year and is now over there teaching economics.  So we said hi and he immediately tells us that he made a 5 kg lasagna and seeing as he's leaving to come back to the US the next day, we just had to come over and help him eat it.  So we did!  He lives in this adorable little apartment on the top floor of a classically Parisian building.  So 5 kilos of pasta and 4 bottles of wine later, we never made it to the Eiffel Tower.  But I think we had more fun anyways =)

7 - Whew this is a long story, bear with me.  So after our drunken night in Paris, Alex and I went and picked up our rental car.  We decided instead of taking a train to our next destination, we would rather drive - so we did!  Our next stop was Valencia Spain, so we had two days to get from Paris to Perpignan, which essentially means we drove across the entire country of France!  Below you can see our route.
The first day we drove from Paris to Dijon.  Dijon is a super cool city and I really liked it there.  We were able to find a cheap little hotel right in the center of the city and so we were walking distance from everywhere.  They have this really old, really bizarre church (It's also called Notre Dame).  It's weird because even though it's gothic, the facade (front) of the church is square as opposed to the usual rounded pointy arches you see (or at least this is what my art history boyfriend tells me).  We also got some mustard.  Of course. 
So after Dijon, we then had to continue to drive south to Perpignan which is right on the border with Spain.  If anyone ever gets an opportunity to go somewhere and really wants to see a country, I'd highly recommend renting a car.  It wasn't super expensive and it allows for so much more freedom than taking a train or flight or whatever.  We made sure to avoid the highways and we were able to take country roads through all these little towns and have picnics whenever we wanted.  It was really a great experience.  Just make sure you know how to drive stick.  And manuever traffic circles, dear god they love their traffic circles. 

8 - Okay we're getting there!  Next stop - VALENCIA!  We were going here because Alex's buddy Fernando is originally from Valencia and Fernando offered to let us stay at his apartment while we were there.  But first, let me tell you about our sighting on the train

That's right boys and girls, it's a Man Purse.  Let me first describe the dude: Classic Euro Douchebag.  He had his nose pierced.  He wore baggy sweatpants.  He wore a tight black tee.  He listened to Sean Paul on his ipod way too loud. And.  He wore a bedazzled black man purse.  What a gem! 

Anyway.  We finally made it to Valencia and Fernando failed to tell us that his apartment is basically AWESOME!  He lives exactly 1/2 block off the main plaza of the town.  It'd be like staying a block away from Times Square in NYC.  So it was incredibly convenient because we could just walk everywhere and anywhere. 

While we were there, we were lucky enough to meet up with my friend Kelly (who was doing an internship in Spain for the summer) and her bro, AJ.  It was very cool to be able to hang out with them for two nights.  We drank wine on the balcony, went to the beach (where we looked at old topless ladies), and ate lots of good food!

After Kelly and AJ left, we mostly went around with Fernando and his gf Marta.  It was great having local guides.  They were able to show us all the cool places to drink and eat and go.  We went to the Zoo one day and to these weird futuristic musuems another. 

We also partake in the classic Spanish drinking traditions.  Fernando took us around to all these different bars our last night.  Apparently what you do is only get one or two drinks and one small plate of food per bar and then move on.  So we did!  We ate some delicious sardines and calamari and cured pork and fried fish. 
And then, we came home. 

Just returned from my second field season up in good ol NorCal.  That place is. so. weird.  But lovely nonetheless.  And this year, my field season was actually successful - well at least this year I didn't kill each and every one of my fish.  They all (well mostly) made it home alive and well!  And I was able to collect twice as much data as I originally thought I would.  Now let's just cross our fingers that I actually find some significant results between my treatments so I can publish and become a world famous scientist. 

Highlights:

1 - My undergrads once again, rocked.  Dave came for a second time and it was super helpful to have him back since he knew the basic idea of what I wanted to do and is just, in general, a fabulous worker and fun dude.  Then Jackie was my new undergrad and she's just super positive and the dynamics between the three of us were way fun - which is good considering we were together 24 hours a day for 28 days!

2 - We saw slugs mating - I think this is included as a highlight for obvious reasons

In lieu of writing a real post I'm just going to upload some of my new fav videos. 

Shit! They're on to me!