This would have been my entry to our photo contest. America: the great melting pot (mmmm fish and chips and Mexican sodas…)!
Today’s post is dedicated to the photo contest Cobalt and I hosted on the Fourth of July. Basically, we were inspired by a similar photo contest that we held a few years ago so we sent out texts to ~20 or so of our friends asking them to text us a picture of something they thought best represented America. As usual, we enjoyed getting responses and I think it helped make our Fourth of July even more fun! Sooooooooooo without further ado let’s announce the winners!
Grand Prize
Cobalt and I were both mesmerized by this one. So pretty…
Second Place
This one came with a caption: “light shining on the bridge of opportunity.” Also points to whoever can guess where this bridge is! I’ll give you a hint: America :D
Third Place
Yummmmm! Here’s a secret about me and Cobalt – we love our barbecue so much that we will grill food year round! We cooked steaks in the snow earlier this year…
All of the other pictures were fun too so I thought I would post them all below. There was a large selection of photos that fell under the food and drink category (we all know we looooove eating here in America!) so it gets its own subheading.
The food and drink category
This pic and the next one are titled “boys with food.”
The last (but certainly not least) photos
This one came with a caption too: “America is education and freedom enough to talk smack with this hippocampal neuron!” (that’s an electrode in the top left corner)
This one is kind of creepy and also one of my personal favorites.
Well, what do you think? Which one is your favorite? What do you think best represents America? And most of all, how was your Fourth of July? Awesome I hope. Cobalt and I went to the beach in California. The weather was perfect (this does not often happen at the beach in Northern CA, despite all you might think you know about California beaches) and we went running around in the waves. :)
I took this picture during a storm a few years ago in Boulder…
Hey everyone, sorry about the crazy post schedule this week. Anyway, today I wanted to talk about lightning because last weekend, Cobalt and I were driving home from a movie (Joss Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing) and a vicious storm was moving into town. There was lightning everywhere! It was pretty cool actually – it was like nature’s fireworks show just in time for the 4th of July! The storm turned out to be pretty epic too. As soon as Cobalt and I got in the house, it started pouring and then hailing with this HUGE marble-sized hail. We had to run back outside and rescue our little plants from death hail!
Plants hanging out in the kitchen during the crazy storm…
Does anyone have any fun plans for the 4th of July? We have a 3rd of July fireworks celebration here in California that we will be attending tonight. Exciting!
Yesterday my blog friend Jenn posted pictures of her garden and asked about ours. So I decided to make today’s post about our garden!
I am pretty proud right now. This is the biggest little garden we’ve ever had! The plants have come a long way from starting out in their mini greenhouse back in March. Now they’re all big and flowering. I went out to photograph them and I got totally obsessed with the cantaloupes. They totally took off this week. Tons of leaves and flowers and these crazy tendrils! I didn’t even know if cantaloupes would even like the crazy Colorado weather we have but apparently they’re happy. Little guys!!!
Some more cantaloupe pictures…I love how fuzzy they are…The basil wanted its picture taken too…
One thing I am super jealous about is all my friends who own houses now! I can’t wait until we have our own house and I can have a real garden instead of little pots everywhere. I am sure my plants will like it too because I won’t be constantly moving them from pot to pot as they grow. At least we have this mini backyard here for our little plantys to enjoy…
In other news, I have a crazy weekend ahead. First I going white water rafting with the SMART students tomorrow. It’s going to be epic. I have to get up really early (~5 am or so) so I can go pick up one of the university vehicles we’ve rented to drive the students out to the rafting company! Once we get out there, we spend a good part of the day on the river. They even prepare us a delicious lunch in the middle! Then on Sunday, Cobalt and I are headed to Denver for a baseball game (Rockies vs. Giants!) with my lab. Exciting! You know what else is exciting? Next week, we are going to visit my family! I am really excited because I haven’t been to California since Christmas! Yayyyyyy… Okay so this wasn’t the most exciting post but here are some questions for you anyway –
1) tell me about your gardens. Do your cucumbers get powdery mildew like ours often do? Hopefully not this year… we’ve been looking into solutions for this problem!
2) What are you doing this weekend?
3) Any plans for the 4th of July? I’m soooooo excited to be home for the 4th of July. I think it’s been almost 10 years since the last time I was home for it. :D
One of my favorite pictures that I took of “Larmes d’Albâtre”
I was going through all my Paris pictures this weekend and I was getting jealous of myself! They reminded me about how much fun I had and about how many pictures and adventures I have to share with you! Today’s post comes from the fact that I really liked how this picture turned out (you’re getting the version that has been played with on Photoshop but the orignal is cool too). :)
So the European Night of Museums happened the first Saturday I was in Paris. Basically that meant that a lot of Parisian museums were free after hours! Cobalt and I had a huge list of museums that we wanted to go to using our Paris Museum Pass the next weekend so I picked a museum that wasn’t on our list – The Museum of Middle Ages or Musée de Cluny. My new friend C and I had spent the day on a walking tour (involving getting lost multiple times – more about that later) of Paris and then we headed to the museum. We got there about 15 minutes before it reopened and there was already a line snaking around the museum! Luckily it moved pretty fast and we were soon inside.
The museum was really cool – such neat old art in such an impressive building. The architecture was awesome! C and I had fun trying to read the descriptions of the art since they were mostly in French and I had fun trying to photograph cool works of art without using my flash. Anyway, I learned that every museum in Paris has some sort of traveling exhibition on display in addition to their normal set of art. In general, I found that I liked the exhibitions more than the rest of the art… :-/ The exhibition on display that night was “Larmes d’Albâtre” or “Alabaster tears.” I really liked it. First of all because I liked the statues (and how they were displayed) and second of all because I thought the hooded ones looked like dementors. :D C liked that too. Anyway, things got even better as we got further into the museum because they had people dressed up as the statues and other people sketching them! How cool!
Anyway, that’s all for today. Sorry this post was kind of short. There’s so much to say that I decided to break it all up into short posts again. Any France requests from you guys? More museums? Paris landmarks? Paris streets/graffiti? Adventures with new friends? Adventures with Cobalt? Food? Anything else? Also tell me about your weekends! Cobalt and I had a nice relaxing weekend and we got a lot of things on our to do list checked off (plants taken care of, house cleaned, lease resigned, etc).
I swear not all of them looked like dementors… I just loved how creepy and haunting the whole exhibit was…
This is the scene where something amazing happened! Let me tell you about it…
What do you do when someone seemingly out of the blue does something really nice for you? Are you like me and you spend the next few minuteshoursdays months going over the situation piece by piece and wondering what exactly you did that convinced that person that you were worth it? Do you just say Thank you and go about your day? Is it something in between? It’s always so amazing to me when something awesome happens to me and it makes me kind of sad that it surprises me…
Anyway, maybe I should go about telling you what happened and then we can revisit this topic afterwards.
So this particular instance happened in France (though another one just happened to me this week and it is currently consuming all my thoughts with amazed wonder about what I did to deserve it… :-/). To get to the instance, you need a little back story. So I have this friend F. I met her last year when she was doing her post doc here in Boulder but now she has a fancy industry job in her home country of France. A few weeks before I went to Paris, we got to talking about whether she would be around while I was there and it turned out she would only be around for my very first day. It turned out to be really awesome to hang out with her then because I was totally culture shocked/jetlagged/tired from talking about my project with my boss by the end of that first day. We met up at the institute where I was working and it was so great to see a familiar face (I guess besides my boss…). She took me on a mini walking tour of that area of Paris and then took me up the Montparnasse Tower, which is HUGE and has this crazy fast elevator that takes you to the top. At the top we got to pose for a cute picture (they green screened in Paris behind us) and now I am sad we didn’t buy it (even though they wanted a lot of money for it). ANYWAY. At the top of the tower, you can see ALL OF PARIS. It was a great thing to do on my first day because I could see everything I had only heard about or seen on maps previously. Sooooo cool!
I tried to take a panorama from the top of the tower! Look at that Eiffel Tower dwarfing all the other buildings around it!F and a jetlagged Potassium at the top of the tower with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
After we got down from the tower (elevators were not so fun going back down… there was much ear popping), we walked to a restaurant to get crêpes. They were kind of amazing. Like the best crêpes I had ever had. F told me that they are specific to the part of France called Bretagne (or Brittany for us English speakers) and she ordered their cider for me to try. It was AMAZING and totally ruined any cider I could ever have here… Anyway, it was a really great day and I am so happy I got to see F.
Fast forward to a week later when Cobalt arrived, I suggested we go to crêpes for dinner. We headed towards the Montparnasse tower and then I dragged Cobalt up and down a few streets trying to find the restaurant F and I had gone to. We got there and, after a brief awkward/hilarious incident of Cobalt and me being confused about whether people were standing outside in the rain because they wanted to or if they were waiting for a table, we were seated next to this other group of people (two men and a woman), who just got their food when Cobalt and I sat down. I oooo’d and awww’d over their crêpes and then ordered some cider for us (IN FRENCH… awww yeah… thanks F for telling me what kind to order!). Sometime after our food arrived, one of the guys turned to us and asked where we were from. I said Colorado and then Boulder so they asked if I knew about/went to the school here. I said yes I am a graduate student! They asked where I did my undergrad and I said University of Puget Sound, which not very many people have heard about but the guy was like “Oh yeah! We’re from Seattle! UPS is a great school!” The guy who asked me the first question went on to ask me what I was studying and I told them I was getting my PhD in biochemistry. He said he had an honorary PhD but that his wife had an actual PhD. She lamented that his honorary PhD diploma was bigger than her actual PhD diploma… Shucks… At this point Cobalt and I were curious about who these people were since they don’t just give anyone an honorary doctorate…
So let’s see… Seattle… famous enough to get an honorary doctorate…
Then they asked what Cobalt was up to and he said that he managed a coffee shop on campus. The guy smiled and said “Oh I know all about that… I used to be the president of Starbucks…” and then he and Cobalt had a nice discussion about selling coffee, working in the coffee industry, how Starbucks does in Europe (bad) compared to in Asia (great!), etc. Then we got off coffee and just talked about life in general. It was really neat! He and his wife (and it turns out the other guy was a cousin) have traveled all over the world and are planning on spending the next year exploring parts of the world for 3 months at a time. Cobalt and I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Then our check came and they took it and gave it to the waiter along with their check! The former president of Starbucks bought us dinner! And when we thanked him he said “I can tell you guys are going to do something amazing with your lives!” WOW!
Cobalt and I were kind of star struck about it afterwards and totally googled him when we got back to the flat. It was so cool to see this guy’s face pop up on my screen. :)
Okay so back to the main question. What do you do when that happens? How do you keep yourself from overanalyzing the situation and just be happy that it happened? Also, tell me something awesome like this that happened to you or that you wish would happen to you? Also, any comments about this very long winded post are greatly accepted. :D Any plans for the weekend? Cobalt and I have one: SLEEP. -_-
I might be busy this summer but not too busy to tag my labmates’ benches with an ethanol version of my signature shark…
So my summers are usually crazy because I have to split my time between getting my research done and helping out with the SMART program but then there is always something extra that makes my already crazy summer even more epic (ex: last year I wrote that epic grant AND got married). So it’s no surprise that I am already feeling pretty overwhelmed by my summer because I am, yet again, involved in many other activities this summer. Because I think they are all kind of cool I thought I would write about them here for you guys.
I Have a Dream
So the first thing on my list is working for the I Have a Dream foundation. This program has been near and dear to my heart ever since I found out about it upon entering grad school all those years ago. Basically, this national foundation adopts classes of 2nd and 3rd grade students where the majority of the students in the class come from low income families. Every student in that class is promised that if they stay in the IHAD program (and in school) until they graduate from high school, the IHAD foundation will give them a full ride to the college of their choice! Sounds like a sweet deal to me! In the past, I have helped out with workshops (genetics, how your eye works like a pinhole camera, forensics, etc) for the IHAD students within Boulder county but this summer, CU is hosting a conference for middle and high school IHAD students from across the country. They get to come to CU and take workshops and check out a college campus! My friend C and I decided we would run a genetics workshop for them. A few weeks ago, I got an email asking for a brief summary of our workshop. Although C and I had decided that we wanted to do a genetics workshop, we hadn’t actually discussed the details of this workshop. So a few short emails back and forth later, C and I had come up with this:
In this workshop, we will be discussing genetics and how genetics research affects our daily lives. After an initial discussion of general genetics terminology and how it relates to living organisms, we will be isolating DNA from strawberries using every day materials. To finish the workshop, we’ll discuss implications of and current events related to the field of genetics research. Possible topics of discussion include: genetic testing, genetically modified organisms, gene therapy, personalized medicine, and evolution. Participants are invited to bring all genetics questions and a sense of curiosity and excitement about biology!
I am pretty excited about this workshop now! It should be a blast! I hope our students are as excited as we are…
Go Women in Science!
A while ago, I headed up to main campus to take a survey our library was putting on for how people in our new building were using the library resources in our day to day research. One of the women conducting the survey was impressed with my ability to talk about my project to nonscientists and she asked me if I’d be willing to speak at a conference for science librarians she was putting on this summer. On Thursday, I will be on a panel with two other women discussing our research and what it’s like being a woman in science. I have to come up with a 5 minute little talk about my personal experiences and my research and then we will be answering questions from the audience. As such, I have spent this past weekend thinking back about my own and my friends’ experiences as scientists… I am nervous but also really excited!
REUnion
So for you nonscientists out there, all of us science majors have to do some form of independent research project, especially if we are planning on going to grad school after undergrad. Some schools even require you to perform independent research as one of the requirements for obtaining your degree (I had to perform at least a semester of independent research and write a thesis in order to receive a BS degree – I spent a year studying yeast (the kind that makes your bread and beer delicious) proteins. It was a huge fail in that I got NO results but that’s how it goes sometimes…). Anyway, if you are planning to go to graduate school, the more research experience you have on your resume, the better. So at the end of my sophomore year of college, while most of my friends were excited about going home for the summer, I packed up all my stuff, went home for a few days, and then went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO for my first taste of independent summer research (this was called a “Research Education for Undergraduates or REU program – it’s similar to the SMART program though it is smaller and specific for every department). Although I came down with mono the first week I was there (sad days…), I still managed to have a lot of fun and totally fall in love with doing science independently from the lab classes I had to take at school. A few years later, my sister followed suit and headed to CSU for her own research experience. Now we have both been invited to be on the panel of current graduate students who give advice and wisdom to this year’s summer class of undergraduates. So come late July, my sister and I will have a mini family reunion and also get to hang out with the undergrads in the same program that inspired both of us to continue on to graduate school. How cool is that?! Btw wee, I am loving how our science is helping us see each other every year. :)
Whew! Epicness! At least I am learning super multitasking skills during my PhD… What are you up to this summer? Anything epic going on? Vacations, etc? Also how was your weekend? Talk to me!!
This pinecone and its friends are the reason why I have crazy allergies right now… but I still like this pic. :)
My apologies for the short post but this week is crazy for me. I’ve got to squish 5 days worth of labwork into 3 because then Cobalt and I are heading to see his family for his mom’s 60th bday! Yay! Happy birthday to my MIL!
In other news, this weekend was nice. Cobalt and I made ricotta pancakes on Saturday. They were fluffy and delicious. See the pic below for tastiness (yeah yeah… they look like “normal” pancakes but they are way fluffier and tastier than them). We also tended to our little garden (the plantys are getting so big!!!), invented our own version of lavender lemonade (yummmmm), and went out for some tasty Italian food on Saturday night with some friends.
Tasty pancake… why did we eat all of them?! :(These mixed peppers are probably ecstatic that it’s finally decided to be over 90 degrees here. The rest of us are not so sure we like it…
On Sunday, Cobalt and I, along with some other graduate students, took some of the students in the summer program I work for on a hike near Boulder. It is really fun to take people who don’t know the area at all on a hike because they are so excited to see everything – reminds what a cool place we live in. After the hike, we took our exhausted students out to lunch at The Buff, another staple of Boulder (hint: it was on Man Vs. Food). In the evening I went swimming with two of my friends from my grad program (we all started grad school together many many years ago… craziness) and we practiced some French. It was quite a lovely way to end the weekend.
Speaking of French, look forward to more France posts coming your way next week! Something you will definitely see next week: why Cobalt and I now have a fondness for Starbucks (hint: it’s not because of their coffee or any of their products)!
Did you guys have great weekends?! Tell me about them. I know some of my friends celebrated their 1 year wedding anniversaries.. Hooray! Congrats! Also, let me know if you’ve thought of anything you’re dying to know about France, or my current life in Boulder, whatever. Finally, don’t forget to wish my MIL a happy bday! :)
Potassium and Cobalt playing with mirrors in the “Light Games” exhibit. This exhibit was pretty much all in French so we had to guess how to do all the demos…
Ooo a Thursday post! It’s been a while…. Anyway, if you recall, Cobalt and I got the Paris Museum Pass* for the four days that Cobalt was with me in Paris. One of the (60) museums that was free with the pass was the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (or the Science and Industry museum). Of course we had to go there – one of my favorite things is bringing science to non scientists so I thought it would be interesting to see how the French did it. We were blown away. First of all, this is apparently the biggest science museum in all of Europe. It was HUGE. We didn’t even get to see all of the exhibits! Second of all, I was impressed because the science was explained very well (judging by the exhibits in English…) – probably better than the majority of our science museums do here in the US. Really I mean that the explanations went into slightly more detail than ours do but they still seemed like they could be easily understood by a nonscientist (though Cobalt will tell you that their movies were too long…).
Infrared Potassium (with Cobalt behind her)
In addition, and this is my favorite part about this museum, all of the exhibits included a “so what are you going to do about it?” section. There was a whole exhibit on human biology that taught people all these terms that I use pretty much on a day to day basis. At the end, and there was a huge panel that presented important bioethical questions (cloning, genetic manipulation, etc) that inspired the museum attendants to really think about these important issues we are facing today in our world.
Then there was a huge energy exhibit which discussed where we get our energy from (fossil fuels, wind turbines, coal, etc) and how our current use of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming. At the end, there was a section about new strategies to obtain energy, tips on how the average consumer can conserve energy, and why it is important to conserve energy (there is even a game where you follow an guy throughout his day and tap on all the ways he could conserve energy at his house, on his way to work, at work, etc etc etc). I thought it was very informative (again) about the real types of problems we (as humans, not as scientists) are facing in the world today.
Then there was this really neat exhibit about new textiles that people have developed. There was a bioluminescent jacket that glows at night so people will be able to see you, a dress that cleans the air as you wear it, a blanket that glows blue for babies with jaundice so that they can be swaddled and cuddled while they are healing, and more! I thought this exhibit was cool because it kind of combined creativity with science – showing people how science can be creative (Note: I think all scientists need to be creative, not just the ones who develop new textiles, but I thought this was a good example).
This is the crazy dress that filters out the air as you wear it!!!!
I could go on and on but my point here is that this museum did a really good job making science applicable to its audience. Many museums will tell you that science is cool (and it is) and present the audience with a series of facts about each exhibit but I feel that most museums fall short of making it relevant to its audience. It’s like instead of just saying yay! Look at this crazy physics experiment! Science is cool! That’s all…, this museum really challenged its audience by reminding them that this cool science is relevant to everyone (i.e. “how can you conserve energy?” “what do you think about cloning?” “how do these things affect your life?”). Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now but seriously… I am feeling very sad about how science is explained to nonscientists here in the US now… Maybe I will have to change that. :)
Thoughts about today’s post? What do you think about science? Do you feel that what we scientists do in our labs/offices/giant computer rooms/etc is relevant to your day to day life? Why or why not? How could it be more relevant? Write me an essay no shorter than 100 words on this topic (just kidding but seriously, tell me what you think!).
*I’ll post more on all the other things Cobalt and I did with our Paris Museum Passes soon!
So last week before I found out about my grant, I wrote a huge post about some things that have been on my mind since we returned from France. It was epically long so I chopped it down into smaller tidbits. Today’s post is about the Paris metro system!
It’s no secret that public transportation in the US is not amazing. Sure, big cities seem to have their act together but as a whole, it’s really hard to get around most places without a car. I know because I went through college, my year in NM, and my first year of grad school before I finally got a car… Anyway, the metro system in Paris is excellent and really easy to use. One metro pass will put you on any of the metro lines throughout the city (transfers included) or on a bus or on a tram (kind of like an above ground subway). Depending on the kind of ticket you bought, the ticket could also put you on one of the express trains that go just outside Paris to the airport, Versailles, etc. Inside each metro station, the lines that stop there are diagrammed according to direction and the stops. For example, let’s pretend you wanted to take the Chicken line west across the US. You would follow the signs for Chicken San Francisco (because that’s where the Chicken line ends up) and then right at the entrance for the Chicken San Francisco Line would be a diagram of all the stops between your current station and San Francisco. That way, if you weren’t sure if you wanted Chicken San Francisco or Chicken New York City, you could look at the stops and determine if you were going in the right direction. So easy!
I actually found riding the metro a lot of fun (I think I am weird…). I loved sitting in the car jamming to Rodrigo y Gabriela on my iPhone and watching the passengers get on and get off (and sometimes risk getting squished in the doors right as they were closing). It was fun with Cobalt too – I planned all the metro trips for everywhere we wanted to go and it worked out really nicely most of the time. Also, I also loved the variety of passes available for the metro. You could buy just one ticket, a pack of ten, or one of the fancier passes. Shown here is a picture of the two passes Cobalt and I had. He got the Paris Visite pass, which is slightly expensive but worth it if you’re going to only be in Paris for 5 days or less and if you’re going to be doing a lot of traveling on the metro (you can choose 3 or 5 days). I got the Navigo Découverte pass, which is good for 7 days and is slightly more of a pain to get (I had to speak French to the guy in the information booth to ask for my pass, I had to get my picture taken for it, and I had to pay for the smart card, which you just wave over the sensor). However, it turns out to be slightly cheaper than the Visite pass and (best part) it’s rechargable. So when I go back, I can just recharge my pass and voila! Metro time! :D Both passes are modifiable (for example, do you want to just ride the metro in Paris or do you want to also be able to go outside of Paris without buying another ticket?) and really easy to use. Once I got my Navigo Découverte pass and could stop using tickets, I was totally hooked. Seriously, I didn’t have to stress out about running out of tickets and I got to hear the machines ding brightly upon sensing my smart card sensor in my pass which never failed to make me smile. I was sad to put the pass away when we got back to the US… It’s true that, as a student at CU, I actually have a smart card bus pass for getting around Boulder and Denver too but for some reason it’s just not the same… (I should note though that the title of my post comes from the airport train here in Denver, not in Paris).
What are you guys up to right now? Anything you want me to talk about? Honestly, I have so much I could say but I am at a loss as to where to start…
because the epic government grant I applied for last year has been selected for funding!!!
We’ve named this picture “Cobalt catches a wild Potassium…” Also, I have no idea why I am wearing glasses in this picture. I do not normally wear them.
I am so excited! Receiving this grant means that the government will pay for the majority of my tuition, fees, stipend, health care, etc and that I will receive research funds which will allow me to supplement my research and attend research conferences (such as one this fall in Heidelberg, Germany that I already submitted an abstract for… eeee exciting!). Not only that, but with scientific funding being such a problem right now (seriously… it’s like super crisis panic mode around campus) me being able to have my own funding really helps out our whole lab’s funding situation.
Funny story. Gmail apparently thought that my grant funding announcement was spam so I didn’t find out that I received the grant until my boss emailed me from France at 2 am congratulating me. I was very confused upon seeing her response the next morning. “Why did she find out about my grant and I didn’t?! How did I not get that email when it clearly says “Dear Potassium” and not “Dear Potassium’s boss”?!?!?! Hrm…. Then when I finally found my version of the email in my spam folder and told Gmail to put it into my Inbox, it threw a fit telling me that this email was clearly a scam even though the sender was the woman who I have been in contact with about the status of my grant since February… Thank you Gmail for being so concerned but I think this one’s okay…
Since we’re on the topic of exciting/cool things, something else exciting for me was that I got to listen to my blog friend Jenn give her epic talk at a conference yesterday via readytalk.com. It was really cool to hear firsthand about the research project she’s mentioned on and off on her blog! Technology is awesome… Anyway, what’s going on with you guys? Any neat weekend plans? Let’s talk because I’m too excited about my grant to actually get work done right now… :-/
Potassium Photography 