Glad to be home on the internet!
Apparently, much drama has happened in my absense (damn, I can't leave you guys for a week without the whole internet seeming to explode in flames!), which may be expanded on later (disclaimer: if/when I feel like it); also a few interesting papers out, including a phylogeny of Noctilucoids, that may also be covered later, if I get around to it.
By almost back, I mean there's a bit of a problem with regards to blogging this week:
- Catch up on seminar course stuff... o_O (esp. marking schemes, assignments, etc)
- Dept seminar talk by this guy =D
- Midterm #1
- Midterm #2
(above three events on the same day, immediately following one another!)
- Make a poster. For Saturday. This is my first time ever. I usually do talks. Shit.
- Prepare a talk. For Saturday. Completely unrelated to poster.
- Freak out over the entire panel for aforementioned talk, since we're doing it together as the seminar class. As a coordinator, everything and anything will be automatically my fault...
- I have a job, apparently. Right. Try to remember what the hell it is they pay me to do at said job... and srsly catch up on my research. I can't fall behind any further!!!
- Guest lecturers for aforementioned seminar course.
- Readings for said seminar course. Which means, find them again, distribute them, and read them myself too.
- The loathsome coursework thing.
And of course, extracurricular plans + obligations, which all seem to congregate at the same time as 'intracurricular' plans + obligations.
Oh, and all those emails I've been rather abysmal at replying to in a timely manner. Sorry!
Then I'll post some protists, and update both the Tree of Eukaryotes, and the Foram Expansion Pack. I haven't been ignoring the comments, honest!
Oh, off topic: I own Grell's (1973) Protozoology now. It cost me an arm and a leg, but well worth it! Also, someone can get his copy back now, after I've been hoarding it for about a year... ^.^ But yeah, I can now blog about the awesome stuff in that awesome book! =D
Ok, back to remembering what it is that I do here. Must. Not. Look. At. To-do list... AAAH!
Welcome back! You sound insanely busy. Thankfully my term is starting to wind down atm...although of course the revision pile never gets smaller...
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to new posts about protists. They have been gone from the internet in your absence :D
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ReplyDeleteSo, you missed the RDF forum outrage/apology fuss, then? Don't know if you'd tired of the thing or just too busy. Speaking of RDF forum (a circuitous way of getting to the point, since this was the thing that has led me to here):
ReplyDelete"I argued on a forum once with this...strange person...who insisted unicellular life were all 'one species'! (Seriously, what the f***!?) "
That wouldn't be susu, perchance? Only LGT stops each asexual cell being a species on its own. With LGT, they are all one???
I have been tearing hair out over the 'other end' of this Grand Unifying Theory - speciation as an event that only occurs at the death of the one of the last potentially interfertile couple between any two populations. eg, they stopped fancying each other 500,000 years ago, but if you could find the last two and stick 'em in a cage with the lights out they might prove to have a fusable pair of gametes between them ... if death has not yet sundered the final such hypothetical pair (such that there remains a possibility of fertile hybridisation at however minuscule a level), then it's still one species. Please try later.
Yeah, some of susu's arguments were...'peculiar'.
ReplyDeleteSee what happens when you try to shove weird special cases from animal evolution onto the other 99.99% of life? *facepalm*