Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for point framing
It honestly was beautifully done.
“So,” Bob said. Those acquainted with our illustrious leader will be able to see this word in their minds’ eyes and hear it in their minds’ ears. Those who are not will be satisfied to know that “so,” from Bob, is packed with potential caricature.
“So. What some… colleagues will do is enter the data twice and run the spreadsheets against each other so you can fix the places where they don’t match.”
I squeaked. “Oh.” Pause. “Should…”
He was staring at my laptop with his formidable critical eye, the completed point frame data spreadsheet displayed on the screen. “No, you’re just going to do quality checks. For at least an hour. Go.”
I checked it, by golly. Did I find even one mistake? No I did not. My work has fewer mistakes than most.*
The rush, you see, was because of the ITEX conference that is going on this week… in ICELAND. GV will be represented by Rob, Bob, and Papasaurus, and I was meant to prepare this information for them- well, for Jeremy, mostly. There isn’t sufficient time to analyze the information in order to present it, but they wanted to be able to “play with the numbers” before they left. I felt bad accepting their thanks for impressively finishing on Friday afternoon, because even though last year this same task wasn’t completed until January, I cannot with good conscience characterize the early part of September by any sort of self-destructive fervor and industry on my part, though the last week and a half certainly was. I was at the point that I felt guilty taking 10 minutes to heat up something to eat.
More than one observer has brought up the point that if the data was just entered as we collected it this summer, then I wouldn’t have had this headache now. It’s true that a couple hours per evening could have knocked out the data entry over the summer, but I would challenge anyone to be able to find those two hours in the schedule we kept. Between the endless biomass sorting and the small amount of non-negotiable socialization and movie watching time, I put in probably only half a dozen solid nights of sleep for the entire 70 days. I will not ever complain about this.
I don’t mean to complain about the data entry I just finished, either. I LIKE having tasks like that: making lesson plans and writing @&^%$ discussion board posts most emphatically do NOT fall into that category of “pleasant tasks.” Take Marathon Atqasuk Weekend, for example. Though I admittedly would have preferred to spend those 48 hours in Barrow, I was smugly pleased with both the impossibility of the undertaking and with our stellar performance.
Happily, my work isn’t over. Now I have the 24 plots of biomass data to enter, and biomass data is incredibly similar to point frame data, so it should take me roughly a quarter of the time the 96 point frame plots took. Then I have to consult the Important Textbook lent to me by Bob as a starting point on my own presentation that I will, in theory, be giving on the first of November right here in Grand Rapids.
The flight leaves tomorrow at 2:30, and the three of them will get back on Monday. I trust that they will have a marvelous time… and they better say hi to Paulo and Craig for me, because I said so.
*Bob’s words, not mine. This is not to say that there were no mistakes, for I did not and could not examine every cell in the spreadsheet, but Bob’s good faith and my reasonable confidence proved to be satisfactorily accurate.
Go on until you come to the end
All those days that we were out in the field this summer we were armed with colorful folders containing pages and pages of spreadsheet printouts to fill in. All those days I recorded point framing data I was charged with the care of a two-inch three ring binder that simply could not hold any more pages if you put a gun to its head, er… spine. Our madcap total season days produced four completely new folders in the space of thirty hours, not counting the four folders that the Barrow team toiled over.
We ran all these folders through the copier before we left; one oughtn’t to leave such things to chance, and any number of scenarios could have separated the folders from the trusty research assistants who transported them in their carry-on luggage. Then what would we have to show for our ten weeks away?
What, indeed. The actual copying took forever, since weeks of tundra exposure left even the all-weather paper curled and cranky. In the case of the Atqasuk folders, the copy machine would only accept so many dead mosquitoes before it became cross and finicky. In the end, however, we had a delightful pile of shiny white data, suitable to shipping back to the lab in Michigan.
The point is that the data is more or less useless in binder form, and the computer has been hungrily accepting the efforts of the ITEX team as we try to transfer everything into the electronic versions of the spreadsheets. This takes much more time and patience than one might imagine, and is the reason that I haven’t unpacked everything in my apartment as satisfactorily as I might…
Two blokes and a ****load of cutlery.
The official report read: Today the ground squirrel succumbed to high-velocity lead poisoning. I hope I am not stealing Jobby’s thunder here, as those are his words and his deed, but I do enjoy reporting things! Bob told us to shoot it if it was messing with the Science, and as it was seen digging up the graminoids and eating Jeanie’s bugs, some of us felt that it qualified for a special delivery bullet. “Some of us” are not vegetarians.
That’s about all there is to report. We are in Atqasuk. The kids came to visit… I tried to count, but cannot get a more accurate count than “14ish.” In other words, too many.
Speaking of killing the ground squirrel, we killed a few other things today. Plants. After point framing a 70 x70 cm square, we snipped them off at ground level and packed them into environmentally-unfriendly Ziploc bags. This is called “collecting biomass.” In the dry sites we refer to it as “making tundra cake,” and we get much pleasure from carefully removing delicious slices of inch-thick sod from the mighty tundra, but at the wet sites the act is more like a haircut, and the five-and-a-half inch blades of the kitchen knives we purchased from the trusty Stuakpaq are not nearly as useful as the bumble bee scissors.
I don’t know about my teammates, but I always feel a bit guilty desecrating the plants in this fashion. We also, at the request of Bob, are helping out some scientists that we’ve never met from across the country. These people have asked us to do things like insert soil probes into our plots, probes which made a horrendous tearing sound as they sliced through the root structures of our science. The other audacious researcher told us to pick leaves from plants inside the plots- the very idea! However, we grimly did as we were told… weeping all the while.
I’d like to go back to Barrow, but I am getting work and sleeping done here, so what more can I ask for? I have my health. Well, I do now. There are little to no lingering effects of my illness of last week. I’m sure the bulk of the credit for my return to health should go to Hiroki, who kindly presented me with a water-resistant paper crane. I feel ever so much better. Well, my finger hurts a bit, but that has more to do with the fact that I cut it with the bumble bee scissors than with my general health.
