Cell phones and water don’t mix

more funny cat pictures

I seem to be hard on machinery. I drop cameras, carry running laptop computers, and drop cell phones. Small shiny objects are too slippery for me. But most cell phones can stand being dropped a few times. What they can’t tolerate is water. I ruined one by walking in the surf in California. The salt water splashed on my shorts, the shorts got damp, and the cell phone in my pocket discharged its battery and got hot, hot, hot! It may have steamed a little. And that was the end of it. I was carrying it so exposed only so I could hear incoming calls over the ambient noise. Hint: if you have to have your phone handy in a damp environment, put it into a sealed plastic baggie. (Experience is what you get just after you needed it most.)

Now I’ve done it again: spilled water on my new cell phone. Actually, I shoved a bottle of water into my purse. I wanted a refillable bottle so I grabbed a new bike bottle. Being unfamiliar with the bottles, I took a red lid for a bottle decorated in red. The top screwed on but it wasn’t watertight. When I checked a minute later, I found my cell phone at the bottom of my purse, instead of the side pocket when I put it when I’m not so rushed - along with half a cup of water. I fished the phone out and dried it off. I opened it up and dried it off. I took the battery out and dried off the interior.I shook it. Bad sign: little drops of water came flying out. Water trickled out of the hinge. I left the battery out and let the phone dry for hours, but it was too late.

It receives messages but I can’t display them. None of the buttons work except the On/Off.

I’m off to get a new phone again.

Computer problems

Now that I’m home with my 2500 new pictures, my laptop computer is having technical problems. All I get is the Blue Screen of Death. None of the starting modes work. I have to dig up some original disks and do something about it so I can get access to recent files and photos.

So I can’t start culling and uploading the pictorial essay of my trip. I’ll get to it when I can.

More LOLcats

Back in Toronto!

I’m glad to report that we got a good start from West Chester, Pennsylvania, this morning. The skies were grey and there was some rain, frost, and signs of snow but never ice on the roads, which had been salted. With ten hours of steady driving got safely back to Toronto.

Longwood Gardens conservatory, orangery, arboretum, etc.

Today my friend in West Chester took me to Longwood Gardens, which is a an estate with a large, stone greenhouses. It’s a former du Pont estate with a world-class conservatory. I’m sure something scientific is going on here, whether it’s the banana collection, the 3,000 species of orchids, the carnivorous plants, or something else.

Arrived in West Chester, PA

I had a great time yesterday looking at all the exhibits at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C.

Then we drove to West Chester, PA. We arrived safely around 7:30 p.m. after driving through rush-hour traffic, then onto twisting highways, and finally small, winding roads through hills.

Heading for Washington, D.C.

We’re on the road again, heading for Washington, D.C. Among the roadkill I counted three or four hawks, half a coyote with a dead vulture beside it, and a yellow-crowned night heron.

We’re taking our return to Toronto in easy stages. This one allows me to visit the strange new dinosaur Nigerosaurus in the National Geographic Museum and Richard to run along the old C & O Canal.

Another travel day: Georgia to North Carolina

Yesterday, we got up in Savannah, Georgia, and went to bed in Wilmington, North Carolina. You’ll find a description and a larger map on my personal blog.

To my dismay, my friend here is treating melanoma with naturopathic and homeopathic “remedies.”

Travel day: Florida to Georgia

Today we drove north from Coral Springs, Florida, to Savannah, Georgia. We took the scenic route part of the way: up some of the coastal islands from Daytona Beach.

On the way up the coast, we saw a couple of sandhill cranes. LotStreetWiz spotted and a roosting osprey by the side of the road.

We reached St. Augustine, Florida (founded 1635) about the time it got dark. There’s the remnants of an old and grim fort there.

We switched back to the main highway. It was dark enough between cities that I could see a lot of stars; in fact I thought I could see the Milky Way, but we didn’t stop for a look.

Florida travel: Key West to Coral Springs

We’ve arrived safely in Coral Springs, Florida, after a leisurely trip up the Florida Keys. (”Key” seems to be a corruption of a Spanish word for “island.”)

As long as we were in the Keys, we saw numbers of vulture-like objects.

We stopped at the Key Deer Refuge on Pine Key and saw four or five of the deer.

Durham, North Carolina to Key West, Florida

We drove from North Carolina to Key West, the tip of the Florida Keys, in one day. It’s do-able; but I can’t say I enjoyed it. I was ready to stop in Jacksonville, Florida. After that it was just a slog: 15 hours of driving plus a couple of hours for breaks and refuelling and a half-hour traffic delay in a construction zone.

But we’re here, enjoying the feral chickens (cute but a mixed blessing, like raccoons), birdlife, and bicycles of Key West. It’s the southernmost point of contintental U.S. and has the start of U.S. Highway 1.

Adopt a cat!

My friend is giving up her two cats because she doesn’t think she can take proper care of them when she comes out of the hospital.

They are two spayed females:

• Daisy is a brown tabby about four years old with beautiful green eyes.
• Nelly is a plush grey cat about two years old.

Both are healthy, friendly, and well-behaved. They are used to staying indoors. And they get along well together. Daisy, at least, is used to dogs; I’m not sure about Nelly.

If you are in the general area of Toronto, Ontario, and have a cat-shaped hole in your life, please get in touch.

Driving to the science-blogging conference

I made it! After a late start in Toronto and a 14-hour drive, LotStreetWiz and I arrived at Durham, North Carolina and Research Triangle Park at 2:45 this morning.

Saturday is a blogging skills session and a lab tour: for me, behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Nerd Test

I have my Nerd Test results:

(thanks to Cory’s Boring Life)

On the road again!

I’ll be travelling tonight, spending four days in New Orleans for the Advanced Technical Communication and Project Management conference, and then travelling again Tuesday night. So posting might be sporadic.

New Orleans is on the south side of the large Lake Pontchartrain. The Mississippi River winds through the city, and downstream the river spreads into an elaborate delta.

I’m planning to spend Saturday working at a Habitat for Humanity. I found a relevant blog: Rebuild New Orleans.

I’ll get back to my client just in time to see the results of the IT department’s pumpkin-carving contest. I’m always amazed at people’s ingenuity, and I’ve volunteered to take photographs.

Evolution of the vertebrate jaw

This earlier article came up today in “A Taste of Pharyngula.” PZ Myers wrote a detailed article, with illustrations, of how Hox and Dlx genes help to guide the development of both the lamprey’s suction-cup mouth and the jaw of a fish. It’s called “Evolution of the jaw .” He cites

…a new paper on the molecular evidence for the origin of the jaw, which describes gene expression in the lamprey pharynx. And as a plus, it contains several very clear summary diagrams to show how all the bits and pieces and molecules relate to one another.The short summary is that there is a suite of genes (the Hox and Dlx genes, which define a cartesian coordinate system for the branchial arch elements, Fgf8/Dlx1 genes that establish proximal jaw elements, and Bmp4/Msx1 genes that demarcate more distal elements) that are found in both lampreys and vertebrates in similar patterns and roles, and that vertebrate upper and lower jaws are homologous to the upper and lower “lips” of the lamprey oral supporting apparatus.

Start here. This is a simplified diagram of the pharyngeal structures of a typical embryonic chordate— there is a series of repeated, similar bars of mesenchyme and developing cartilaginous frameworks and other tissues, from a mandibular arch (MA) in front, to a hyoid arch (HA), to a chain of branchial arches (Ba). These are tissues that contribute to a cage of supporting elements that will form various features of the face and neck as development proceeds, with each getting modified in characteristic ways. MA, for instance, will go on to form the core of the upper and lower jaws, while HA contributes to the hyoid bone in our neck, and the Ba structures make gill supports in fishes and diversify into other features in us gill-less tetrapods.

As the diagram illustrates, the information that specifies the identity of each pharyngeal arch is defined by a Cartesian grid made up of the overlapping expression patterns of a set of well known genes. The anterior-posterior identity is set by the array of Hox genes; no Hox genes are turned on in the mandibular arch, making that a kind of default state, while more and more Hox genes are activated farther and farther back.The dorsoventral identity is encoded in the pattern of Dlx gene expression.

And that’s just for starters. Read it, take it slowly, and see if it makes sense to you. It’s a lot more detailed than Stuart Pivar’s book Lifecode about the hypothetical development of balloon animals, about which Myers has written:

I had to point out that Pivar hadn’t actually addressed any biology, and that his modeling was little more than an extended flight of fancy, unanchored by any connection to any embryology…..Much of the book is filled with sketches in which he starts with something like his toroidal tubes, and then imaginatively transforms the tube into some animal. These transformations are completely unfettered by data or even the slightest familiarity with the embryology or evolution of the organism in question. Here, for instance, is a tube transformed into a polyp like creature and then into a spider.

Nothing in the development of a spider comes even close to looking like that. No evolutionary intermediates looked like that. Chelicerates did not evolve directly from some kind of collapsed coelenterate, and the intermediates don’t even make functional sense. The radial tentacles of coelenterates are not homologous to the legs of spiders. This is artistic self-indulgence, nothing more.

Quite a contrast in styles, wouldn’t you say? Data vs. fancy. The spider even has the wrong number of legs. Lifecode isn’t science.