Dawn til Dusk

23 September 2008 @ 12:00 am

No, this isn't a real update. Because I suck. However, in a conversation this evening about spiders, such internet phenomenon as Clock Spider came up. And I remembered that we, too, have a photo of a huntsman, one that I think the internet might enjoy.

I can haz flyspray?

Leave a comment

02 July 2008 @ 06:15 pm

Life as a Research Student, or, how I stopped thinking about the Real World

So, you've graduated from your undergraduate degree. Well done! To get to this point, you've surpassed a great many others in your degree - those who started with you but soon decided that the degree wasn't for them, those who transferred to other fields or other universities or joined the work force with cadetships or apprenticeships or, heaven forbid, failed and gave up. Chances are, many of them are earning a lot more money now than you are, and possibly ever will be, but that's neither here nor there.

So you've spent the last three years (or more) of your life in this institution, learning how to write essays with a modicum of thought behind them, learning occasionally pointless facts, memorising formulae and quotes. Perhaps you tried your best, and learnt a great deal from your courses... or perhaps you didn't, and have forgotten most of what you learnt except the best sources of caffeine for overnight assignment-writing sessions, who to go to for advice on tough problems, and how to pass exams with a minimum of effort. You've suffered through subjects that you found incredibly boring, and lecturers who couldn't teach if their lives depended on it, and exams and assignments seemingly specifically designed to strike at your weaknesses. And, after all that, you've come out of it with a shiny piece of paper saying that you have performed well enough to have this degree awarded to you. Perhaps you have a photo of you in a funny outfit shaking hands with Important People - personally, I couldn't be bothered attending my ceremony.

And now, after three years when your years have been set for you, the question remains... what now?

The way I see it, you have five options:
*You can continue with your Bachelors Degree to obtain your Honours. (Note, the honours system is different in Australia to most other places, so this may not apply to you). In many ways, if you are a bright student, this is a smart option - apart from adding the nice-looking (Hons) signifier to your degree, making you far more appealing to employers, it also gives you a jump-start straight into a PhD if so inclined. On the other hand, it tends to be very intense, with both a large amount of hard coursework, and also a thesis component, for which you have insufficient time to acheive a great deal of original research. Still, not a bad option.

*You can join the workforce with your newly acquired skills, and potentially get out there to earn Real Money and make an independent life for yourself. This is quite a popular option, and has a lot going for it. After several years as an impoverished student, either living with your parents or flatting it and trying to make ends meet in an increasingly expensive renting world, it would be a relief to live the 9-5 life and be able to afford luxuries. And have weekends, without the stress of assignments.

*You can do a graduate training course with some company, which will give you money as you earn more qualifications, as well as give you a guaranteed employer (in many cases, since they're spending so much money on you to learn in the first year or two, they require a minimum length of time to work for them). This kinda combines the advantages of honours and the workforce, so is kinda cool.

*If you're in a suitable field, you can enrol in a coursework masters. These often look quite good on your resume, superior to honours, and in some fields are crucial before being certified. They are, however, quite expensive... and I don't know a great deal about them.

*You can do an MPhil or, as I call it, masters-by-research, as many people haven't heard of it. This is basically a shortened (2-year) PhD. This requires a longer time period than honours, and if you're looking to get a PhD, may be unnecessary; furthermore, it precludes acheiving prestigious awards such as the university medal. However, the advantages are:
-It is pass-fail, so no more marks. However, perhaps does not have the same prestige of getting a very high honours and subsequent university medal.
-As it is two years long, and predominantly research, you acheive a much larger research output, including at least one or two published papers in peer-referreed journals.
-It is a postgraduate qualification, rather than undergraduate, a great advantage if you're looking for jobs in research.
-In Australia, at least, there are no fees for research degrees, but a fairly good chance of attracting at least some funding (if you're lucky and bright, possibly a scholarship), which eases the pocket a little.

When I was finishing up my undergraduate degree, I had my eyes set on a very particular future - a graduate traineeship with the Bureau of Meteorology, to become a forecaster. However, when this failed to eventuate, due to the fact they decided not to run it this year (to my utmost dismay), I went through all of those options when trying to decide what to do next. Would I do honours, either in Physics or Meteorology? No... I was tired of the expectations I held myself to, the constant struggle to acheive top marks. Would I get a job, or travel? I actually applied for a similar traineeship in New Zealand, and was offerred the job, but eventually decided it wasn't quite for me, especially combined with the necessity of living in Wellington for the next few years of my life. And, along the way, an opportunity to do my MPhil with the Bureau of Meteorology fell into my lap, giving me both research experience and helpful contacts, and i took it.

And so I find myself today. Two days a week, I work part-time for the Bureau of Meteorology (totally unconnected to my masters research, but a nice source of income). Three days a week, four when I'm feeling proactive and have nothing else to do on a saturday, I go into the university, to my office on the top floor which I share with three very nice postgrad students from the year before, who are working in soils. Technically, I'm supposed to be there full-time, but as long as I get my work done, nobody cares. Periodically, I take paid trips to Brisbane or to Melbourne to mingle with my supervisors and see the rest of the project in action, beyond my own little section of research. The rest of the time, I sit in my office at my computer, working on programming and data analysis, writing up reports when I have to, but mostly left to do my own thing at my own rate. It's a fairly good life, so far as such things are concerned, and deadlines are few and far between, which makes it hard to focus at times. Today I ended up spending most of the day on the internet with little actual outpout; other days I have major breakthroughs or will be working well into the evening or weekends. It all depends. And it's strange to think that my next eighteen months or so will be much of the same thing, hopefully culminating in a thesis and being able to decide my next steps from a slightly more qualified position.

I don't know if I would ever keep researching the same thing after I've finished my masters; probably not, for as good as the opportunity was, this isn't the field of meteorology I'm most passionate about. But this is where I am now, and this is what I'm doing. And hopefully I'll get a scholarship next year sufficient to allow me to move out with a friend, beginning to establish ourselves as independent adults.

Chances are, this was incredibly boring to whoever decided to read it. But still, there it is - a summary of the choices post-bachelors degree, and why I chose what i did. Maybe, if you're finishing your degree soon, it'll even help. Mostly, however, I'm feeling guilty about how little work I've acheived today. But that's how these things work, and it'll all balance out in the end.

Current Mood:

thoughtful

Leave a comment

26 June 2008 @ 09:27 pm

(no subject)

Well, that last attempt at posting in the journal regularly didn't last very long. I follow some people's journals who seem to post nearly daily, and yet always seem to have something interesting to post about, and i wonder how they do it. Much as I think my life's probably not that interesting, perhaps it's equally that I enjoy the moments but never get around to writing them down, so I let them pass as the days do. There are always interesting things (for me) going on, from auditions for my local musical, to the happenings within my job and studies (which I am ever so interested in), to the eternally interesting goings-on within my family. But it's been a long time since I've been a writer.

In the meantime, I shall do that meme that's going around, purely for my own interest/records, while i think on something interesting to write about.

Current Mood: lazy

lazy

2 comments | Leave a comment

18 April 2008 @ 10:13 am

Stories...

It starts like this:

Once upon a time...

I've got your attention now, haven't I?

One of the very first things I can remember, is stories. When I was very young, my father and mother would read to me - Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, The Diggingest Dog; simple stories, mostly, but long before I could follow the words I would memorise the stories, know every page, and yet still ask to have them read to me, again and again. As I grew older, there was Dinotopia, the Magic Pudding, the Hobbit, and I learnt the beginnings of reading by looking over the pages as the simple black letters transfomed, somehow, into an entire world of mystery and awe and fascination. I don't remember all that much from my preschool years, but I remember stories.

By the time I was five, I was reading; by the time I was seven, I was devouring YA fiction; by ten, I was reading Lord of the Rings. It was always fiction that attracted me, and fantasy in particular, worlds so different to ours. I would get lost in a book for hours, unable to hear anything outside, as my mind became part of a world so different to that in which I lived my day-to-day life. I gained the reputation of a bookworm, reading incessantly, holding a book while walking home from the train station, reading by the light of the kitchen long after I was supposed to be asleep. Even now, I need to read for at last a little each day, and my automatic response to sadness is to escape into a good book, where things go right.

There are many people like me in the world. Others like different genres, or Literature, or younger fiction. Some people find their stories from movies, or television, or even stories of the real world, told by friends or papers or the news. Some people find their stories through history, some through religion, the tales of that man who died and lived again. But no matter where we find them, everybody seems to have a need for stories. In children, it's obvious - Storytime, and sudenly previously rowdy and disobedient kids are listening intently, and believing. But it's there in adults, too, the way communication between friends, telling and listening to each other's stories, is one of the most crucial things to our relationships. It's why people can maintain friendships and relationships over internet and phone, at excessively long distances with no physical contact, as long as there is verbal - as long as there are stories.

As a race, humanity is designed and created by the stories we hear.

Most important of all are fairytales. Once upon a time, these were the main stories. Learning tales, they were passed down the generations, and taught people how to live their life. In the form of mythology, they gave shape and meaning to a world beyond our powers of comprehension, they gave cohesion to a community, they gave a sense of past and future. Maybe some people grow out of fairytales, but i know I don't. Because the magic, he mystery, the story... we need that. It's as crucial to our existence as food or air, I think. Without stories, life has no meaning.

I don't write much, anymore; I have very little time, which is no excuse, perhaps, but a reasoning nonetheless. But the stories are there.

Current Mood:

thoughtful

Leave a comment

04 April 2008 @ 11:50 am

(no subject)

So, tonight we put the clocks back, and daylight savings comes to a finish. To me, in a way, this signifies the End of Summer. No more long sunny evenings and bbqs, no more scorching days and beach trips and thunderstorms. It's time for winter, the season of darkness and cold fronts... and of course, those beautiful high pressure systems that sit over us for days on end, with those crisp blue mornings and bright sun. Well, really, we're already experiencing that weather and, facing facts, we haven't had much of a summer to speak of this year anyway. Not that La Nina isn't a great thing for the crops and such, but I do prefer El Nino summers.

But still, Sydney has two seasons, Summer and Not-Summer, and tomorrow we begin the second. I remember, not too long ago, and in years past and such, I see Americans and other Northern-Hemisphere people complaining about the loss of an hour, wondering why it has to come so early in the year, bemoaning the very existence of daylight savings, and I always wonder... why? Every year, I await the coming of daylight savings with joyous anticipation, every year I am saddened by its end. If I had my way, it would be daylight savings all year round, really - I mean, who needs that extra light in the morning? But the darkness of the evenings, ah, it's a sad time.

Oh well, what's to do? Although, considering how they seem to extend it every year, there'll come a time when we'll spend more than half the year in daylight savings. And perhaps, eventually, this will become almost the norm, with three months of "daylight losings" in wintertime. Well, so far as we HAVE a winter. Hehe.

Still, farewell to another summer. For all your ambivalent weather, and the sad paucity of beach expeditions, it's been fun. And I'm going to be counting the months til you return.

On another note, last night I went to see the musical of Billy Elliot. It was really very good (so much better than Shout!, which I got free tickets to last week). The music didn't especially grab me, but the way the show was structured, and the acting, and the directing, and the choreography, and the staging! Oh, Capitol Theatre is a brilliant venue, I need to see more shows there. The children were astoundingly talented and, having been so long since I saw the movie that i barely remember it, I was very impressed by the plot. The way they interspersed the reality of the riots and the miner's strike of '84 with the ballet dancing was fantastic, particularly one scene where both events were happening simultaneously, in and between and around each other... it was truly brilliant. And, of course, watching it made me think of one of my very favourite movies, Brassed Off!, which is about the pit closures in '94, in the context of a colliery brass band. So I rewatched that this morning - the music, the acting, all superb, and the way it touches your heart... wow.

But between them, they make you think... coming from an upper-middle-class perspective, coal is a shocking industry, very harmful to both the environment AND the people who work there - look at them suffering and dying in the movie. It's a disgusting, thankless job, and to my perspective, they should be glad for the closure, glad for the excuse to up and leave and find some better employment. And yet... there they are, fighting to keep open the very things that are killing them, an industry which gives them no skills but to stay and die there. And yet, you almost begin to see how their lives, their communities, revolve around these mines; because, of course, we all know that when a mine closes, the town around it dies off sooner or later...

I dunno, it's just... kind of strange, realising how different a world we live in. And wondering how big an issue this still is, and things like it, which we in our happy suburban lives pay little attention to. In our fight for renewable energy, for reducing deforestation, for reducing oil, for all these things to help the environment which so desperately needs it... how many more people are we depriving of life and livelihood, of hope and purpose?

And when it comes down to it... I don't think we want to know.

Current Mood:

thoughtful

Leave a comment

19 March 2008 @ 11:12 pm

(no subject)

And so, another geat mind is lost to the world.

I've always been a lover of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. It began with Lord of the Rings, when I was ten, as an escape of sorts from a pretty lousy school year. Then I moved on further - Eddings, Feist, Asimov, Card, Anthony, Heinlein; so many fantastic authors whose words have made an impact on my life, some to the point of truly influencing the beliefs I know hold. And whenever I was to list my favourtie science fiction books I would um and ah, torn between so many brilliant novels of excitement and invention, fantastic futures and brilliant ideas.

But, at the end, my answer has always been the same these many years, regardless of heinlein and Pohl and all these books others claim to be 'best'. Because, for me, it was always City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke.

Perhaps not his most known of works - people tend to know, perhaps, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or the 9 Billion names of God, a short story that many will have read, even if they don't remember it. He was a prolific author, with so many fantastic works out there. Some were true acts of prophecy, too; always a writer who strove for the plausible, he was the first person to invent the idea of a geostationary satellite, and predicted the first satellite launch to the year, some two decades beforehand. An amazingly talented mind.

But the City and the Stars was always my favourite. Diaspar, the city where no one dies, may in fact be part of the reason I, to this very day, spurn the idea of the life everlasting and choose instead the finality of death, despite its far-too-present position in the world these past few months.

And now, Arthur C Clarke is dead. And the world has lost one of its greatest minds and writers.

RIP.

Current Mood: sad

sad

Leave a comment

26 February 2008 @ 12:44 am

*geeking out*

Good Morning, Livejournal. Although you may not have noticed, I haven't actuially been around this past week, as I spent the entirety of it in Brisbane, Queensland. Why? Well, I was there, as the start of my new life as a Serious Researcher, to observe/partake in a huge fieldwork project being run jointly by the BoM (The Australian Bureau of Meteorology) and NCAR (The National Centre for Atmospheric Research, USA).

And what is this project, you ask? Cloud-seeding. Yes, that program of the 70s, that no one ever managed to prove conclusively to be true. However, in the wake of Queensland's recent water issues (slightly alleviated by the rainy summer and current La Nina phase), we are running a two-year project to examine if it works, how it works, when it works and, in the meantime, how clouds themselves work, as that's one of the least understood and most critical aspects of the atmosphere, particularly when it comes to things like climate modelling and, y'know, predicting the impacts of global warming.

And how are we doing this?

With one fantastic radar, and two planes.

Twas a most interesting week. I learnt that, on fieldwork, there's really no such thing as weekends - if the weather is good (that is, cloudy) they work, regardless of timing, so some had been a long time without a break. I also had the joy of experiencing equipment issues and how people responded, listening in on horribly long debriefing sessions, and hanging out with scientists. A very rewarding trip, and looks like they'll be sending me back in March, before another trip to the BoM head office in Melbourne, perhaps in April. Free fares and accomodation, it's great. XD

And I got to spend friday and saturday at the gold coast, as was too sunny to work. Yay.

However, tomorrow begins the hard work and research that is to be my Masters project. Two years of research and matlab analysis of radar data, cluminated by a 50k thesis, here I come. Oh dear, what have I gotten myself into?

Current Mood: geeky

geeky

5 comments | Leave a comment

06 February 2008 @ 12:51 pm

(no subject)

So, the other night I was looking at fstdt.com with a friend and laughing at the idiocy of it all, when I joked idly about whether someone could just kill them off, since the world is overpopulated anyway.

Friend: No, the world can support 12 billion, if we use everything optimally and don't care about wildlife or anything.
Me: So, you're basically saying we should kill off the natural environment?
Friend: Yeah, pretty much.

As an environmental scientist, this obviously irritated me, even though I hoped he meant it in jest, so of course I go off in a very short rant about the problems of overpopulation and environmental damage, etc etc. What can I say, it's a topic close to my heart. And his response:

"Watch me not care."

And he meant it. It made me wonder to myself, how have I managed to become friends with so many people who have so little concern about the world around them, who embody this apathy and ignorance that irritates me so. I have friends who don't pay attention to politics or world affairs at all because it's "too depressing". I have a friend who responded to the problems of global warming with, "Well, God will do something about it." I have friends with whom I have to avoid discussions about anything serious because they simply don't care, I have to pretend part of their personality isn't there, and I wonder how I managed to become friends with them in the first place.

Then I realised: I was asking the wrong question. The question is not, why am I friends with them? The question is, why are so many otherwise intelligent, educated, interesting people, so completely uncaring about the matters of the world? I mean, I know that some of them are arts-majors, but... if anything, being interested in english and such should encourage one to want to understand the world, because that's (in my opinion) the highest calling of art - to realise and reflect and redisplay the real world in new form, so that we can understand it better. What was it I read once? "Artists use lies to tell the Truth." And some of them are even scientists, just caught up in their own narrow scientific world and ignoring the bigger picture.

They don't have the excuse of being stupid, or having the information unavailable. They just don't care. And it's worrying.

In other matters, is it just me, or has Death been particularly present this past month. From Leigh (whom I still miss ever so much, and for whom I still haven't cried), to Heath Ledger, to relatives of online friends, to my customers at work, there seems to be an unusual amount of people dying. Unless it's just that I notice it more, now that I've actually lost someone, and I pay more attention.

I can't believe it's been a whole month since we lost him. It seems like such a short time, since I was chatting to him on msn about graduation and his trip and the job he was going for... and it feels like forever.

Current Mood:

contemplative

Current Music: The Last 5 Years: Goodbye Until Tomorrow

3 comments | Leave a comment

28 January 2008 @ 12:22 am

(no subject)

One of the interesting things about checking the interweb when you've been drinking is that you can only read things if you close one eye. In my case, the left, as it's my lazy eye anyway, and hence is the least useful in my daily endeavours.

Also, the problem with relying with friends to take you home from parties is that you arrive at said home far too early in the evening. On the other hand, once I get my Ps (provisional license) in a couple of weeks (if I pass the test), I'll have to start being dezzie and taking my friends home, as well as being sober at parties, a bad outcome in my opinion. Bah humbug.

That is all.

2 comments | Leave a comment

21 January 2008 @ 10:35 pm

Science

A week or so ago, the UAC cutoffs were released. For those who aren't abiding in NSW and may happen across this entry, after the completion of High School and the statewide exams, everyone from that grade is issued a UAI based on their marks for different subjects, how those subjects scale, etc, which serves of a ranking of where they stand relative to everyone else in the state. So the UAC cutoff value for a course is the lowest UAI you can have and be admitted into the course.

And, just like last year, the lowest UAI of any course at my uni, after IT, is Science. Which has, in fact, fallen from 75.0 last year to 73.0 this year.

This fact is a source of great annoyance to me. What it means is that Science is pretty much the least popular thing to study at university. Chiropraction gets 75.65. Arts, 76. Commerce and economics, 82.5. Development studies and culture change, whatever that is, 85.0. Even the new Planning degree has 74. But Science? No, science is the backup degree to transfer into the degree you couldn't get into. I was working at the university Pathways day giving info out in the Environmental and Life Sciences stand, and all people asked about were Encironmental Management, Health, Chiropraction, and Planning. Maybe one bio student, not a single chemistry.

This is the world we live in.

I am a scientist. At times, I've aspired to other things, but at heart science is my calling. And I know that this is a profession that garners increasingly low respect in the community, a profession that is so poorly funded that university departments have to fight amongst themselves instead of cooperating for the greater good. A profession where the only way to truly make money is to sell your soul and work for the big corporations, which is particularly abhorrent to me as an environmental sicentist. When I chose this career for myself, I knew that I would never earn any money for it, no matter how brilliant I was, because there's little money to be earned - the highest paid meteorologist in Australia earns around 80k a year, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands that tradies earn. It's worth it to me, for the job satisfaction and the ability to really acheive something with my job, make a difference to the world, even if nobody cares outside the scientific community.

But the question I want to ask is, how did it come to this? When did science become so undesirable amongst the community? When did people become so proud of their ignorance, rather than desiring to learn and grow? Why is it seen as almost a bad thing to be too intelligent (especially for a woman, of course). In ages past, people sought to educate the world; now that seems to be reversing again, with such things as the desire to teach long discredited theories such as intelligent design in classrooms. Now, people will tell you they're poor at maths as something to be proud of. They will argue science on a basis that if they don't understand it, then it can't be true, rather than attempting to learn about it to argue from an educated position. Was the world always so ignorant?

Not that I am equating science as the only form of intelligence, far from it. And I think Arts are also experiencing funding issues... but as we do bigger, more expensive experiments and this is my field, it cuts closer to home.

Excuse my rambling, but... I'm a scientist, and I'm proud of it, and I wish the world would see reason and give us the respect and funding we deserve. There is an incredible shortage of qualified scientists, not to mention science and maths teachers. And if this trend continues, with more and more scientists growing old and retiring or dying, I worry for our future.

Current Mood:

irritated

2 comments | Leave a comment