The great summer job hunt, 2007
Once again, as January roles around, I start to think about summer
employment. I still need to do this, despite the somewhat more steady
nature of my coaching job, because my coaching job stops in the
summer. So, here’s my first link on this topic- Good Works Canada.
From their about page: “GoodWork is Canada’s gateway to involvement and
opportunity in environment, conservation, sustainability, peace, and
related themes. We are best known for our listings of jobs, contracts,
internships, and other opportunities. These are available on the web and
by e-mail.”
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Mathematical Notation
I found This
interesting article on notation by Stephen Wolfram, while trying to find
out when people first started using conventional equations.
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Perth
I think today Colin and I are going to check out Perth. Here’s a
webpage with some information and maps of the downtown area.
posted at: 12:55 |
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Towns near to Ottawa
Being relatively new to Ontario and Ottawa, I enjoy visiting the towns
around Ottawa and seeing what they’re like. I found this list
of towns near Ottawa (Upper Ottawa Valley, South side, Quebec side), with
an information page for each town.
posted at: 12:53 |
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Running a Salon
I’ve been mulling over the idea of starting a monthly Salon. I’m not
referring to the beauty type here (although those can be nice too), but
rather the intellectual type. I know a lot of interesting people and I
think it would be fun to get them together for an evening or afternoon
that was specifically dedicated to intellectual discussion. Here’s a
webpage that has some instructions and ideas on how to go about that.
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Ottawa valley glass
Here’s
a company that sells glazing in the Ottawa area.
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Poured Concrete Walls- High Thermal Mass, Conventional Appearance.
Here’s a
site that describes using poured concrete instead of tires for the thermal
mass component. This might work better with respsect to conventional
aesthetics than the tires. As the webpage author puts it: “Selling an
“alternative” home can be very difficult: the type of family that would
like to own a house made out of strawbales or car tires is also the type
that would rather build it themselves. You need to hit a happy medium
between environmental idealism and common sense when choosing your home’s
building materials. Building with concrete block or poured-in-place
walls is tried and true commercial style construction, which saves money
and produces a much more “conventional” structure.”
posted at: 14:37 |
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Earthship retrofit
I tend to have cycles of environmental activism. Usually what happens is
that I’m enthusiastic for a fairly lengthy period of time, but then
something will come up that discourages me, and my activity decreases for
a while. Eventually however, my interest and enthusiasm revive and I get
going again after my hiatus. I’m coming out of one of my lulls now, and
I’m thinking further about things that are possible to do to the house
(Note to Colin: Don’t worry… these are just *possible* things that we
could *theoretically* do to the house…yeah….). One idea I’ve been
kicking around is replacing our front yard (which is very small) with an
earthship greenhouse. I’ve linked to this site before,
but I’m linking to it again because it has a lot of useful information on
retrofitting. The nice thing about the greenhouse only route is that I
think it would be possible to set something up that would have fairly
conventional asthetics, so it wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb in our
neighbourhood. If all went well, it might also be financially
self-supporting, since it would significantly reduce the heating costs of
the house. We’re very fortunate to have a south facing front yard.
One of the things that puzzles me about the greenhouse aspect of the
earthship design, though, is where people get the glass for their
greenhouse, and what sort of glass it is. I might contact some people who
have built earthships in Ontario, like Tom
Wolf or Pat Potter. Here’s a report by an
architect on the Potter’s earthship.
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KidPix
Colin was just reformating an old computer and stumbled across a cute
kid’s drawing program on it, called KidPix. We thought it might be fun to
put a copy on our computers so that when our friends with kids appear the
kids can play with it. Here’s
a link to the software page.
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Slow down now
Here’s an entertaining website:
Slow Down Now: Funded by the international institute of not doing much.
It’s got 6 (plus 4) secrets of slow, and a very entertaining ad busters
flash animation on it.
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Trying to slow down- a cure for hurry sickness.
I realized recently that I’m always in a hurry. Friends who know me might
find this surprising, since it doesn’t often translate to external
speediness. Nonetheless, in my head it’s always “rush, rush, rush!” and
everything is marked ‘urgent’. Once becoming aware of this I realized
that, in addition to this mind set
causing me to feel uneccessarily stressed all the time, it also
contributes hugely to my lack of organization. That’s because I’m always
dropping all of my belongings in a heap somewhere, or stuffing them
randomly into pockets so that I don’t waste time, and can instead rush off
to do
my next ‘urgent’ task. While mulling this over, and looking around the
internet, I came across the term hurry sickness.
According to the website just linked to, “[t]he term hurry sickness was
coined back in the 1950s when the cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray
Rosenman were researching personality types. By 1959 they had refined this
to the now-classic Type A personality, a key element of which was a
“harrying sense of time urgency.”
I also came across this thoughtful article about slowing down. Here’s a quote:
“People say that modern life has grown so complicated, so busy, so crowded that we have to hurry even to survive. We need not accept that idea. It is quite possible to live in the midst of a highly developed technological society and keep an easy, relaxed pace while doing a lot of hard work. We have a choice. We are not mere victims of our environment, and we don t have to go fast just because everybody else does and urges us to do it too.
Often we may not even be aware that we are hurrying. If we have lived that way all our life and been around people who hurry, it is difficult for us to see how fast everything moves. What can we compare it to? Speed becomes a habit we do not know we have.”
I think this describes my mentality- speed is a habit I don’t know I have. To become more conscious of this, I’m going to try to use my stopwatch to build in a few minutes of pause between activities. Maybe it’s ironic to use a watch to slow down, but we’ll see what happens.
posted at: 16:34 |
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Common dimensions of fish tanks
Here’s a page that
lists common dimensions of fish tanks.
posted at: 12:34 |
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No Kneed Bread
I was talking to my mom on the phone yesterday when she mentioned a new
york times article that explains how to make bread that doesn’t need
kneeding. I was immediately interested, because I’m on a wheat flour
experimentation kick. I found
this
interesting discussion on culinary chat site that weighs in on the recipe
and makes additional suggestions. The recipe itself is supplied on the
second page of the discussion.
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Some leads on mail order Daphnia
I’m not clear on whether or not animals like Daphnia can be shipped from
the US into Canada. But L.F.S.
Cultures carries them. Ward’s Natural
Science also has them.
posted at: 16:02 |
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Getting Daphnia
Now that I’ve learned about Daphnia, I actually have to get some. It looks
like mail-order might be my only option at the moment.
Here’s
a page with quite detailed information about Daphnia raising, with some
information on how to transition them from arrival to happily living in
their new home, including some useful info about water preparation,
temperature and light. I also found a site with some short
videos. However, I’m having a hard time finding a place to order
Daphnia.
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Colouring Daphnia
One aspect of Daphnia that gave me pause, on the video front, is their
see-through nature. Apparently, however, it is possible to colour the
Daphnia by feeding them coloured food (makes sense, since they’re
see-through). I found this tantalizing snippet on google: “Eating the
stained yeast will color the Daphnia red. For changing other Daphnia to
different colors, prepare the yeast solutions with different stains or
…” but unfortunately I don’t have access to the actual page because it’s
through a subscription site. I found another
question and answer
page that talks about feeding them paprika.
Here’s
an article that suggests basically dipping them in a dilute dye solution.
And
here’s
a page that does specifically mention dyeing the yeast with a red food
dye.
Here’s
someone asking about using something to permanently stain their carapace,
which might be a good plan, since I suspect the food moves in and out
fairly
quickly.
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Videos of Daphnia
Here’s a website
that has some videos of Daphnia. This is reassuring, since one of my
outstanding questions at the moment is: “Will I be able to trace Daphnia
movement using digital video and my processing programs?”
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Daphnia- the water canary
As an interesting aside, daphnia are being used to
detect toxic water levels in industrial waste water before the water
is released into the environment.
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More on Daphnia and Green water
I’ve been reading more about raising daphnia and also using daphnia to
control algae blooms in tanks.
Here’s
a series of questions and answers on green water, some of which deal with
clearing green algae with daphnia.Here’s
a site on raising daphnia by feeding them on green water, bacteria and
yeast. And here’s an
extensive article called “Daphnia: An aquarist’s guide.
posted at: 14:10 |
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Algae- pulling a rabbit out of a hat
Every once and a while I have a moment where something that I kind of
understand intellecutally becomes much more ‘real’ and ‘true’ to me- and
usually much more astonishing. This
happened to me while I was reading the article about raising algae in a
tank. I found myself thinking about how that would work, and what I would
have to feed the algae. Then I realized that I would not have to feed the
algae anything. That’s because the algae takes things that are totally not
alive- sunlight and minerals- and turns them into something that is
totally alive- itself. Wow. That’s pretty mind boggling.
Algae has a bit of a bad wrap, due to all those algae blooms, but its
reputation is starting to improve quite a bit, because it’s becoming seen
as a source
of biodiesel. So that could be promising. Here’s a bit of
information on types of algae commonly found in aquariums.
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More on aquarium plants
This entry probably shouldn’t be under ‘school’, but I can pretend, can’t
I? Here’s another article on
aquarium plants.
posted at: 13:19 |
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Exciting Aquaria
I’m feeling very excited about aquaria at the moment, because I’m getting
into setting up the aquarium for my animal aggregate experiment. I’ve also
been thinking about getting my own aquarium at home, because the more I
learn about this stuff, the more I think I would enjoy having my own
personal fish school in my house, that I can stare at and think
about while I’m trying to inspire myself to write my thesis. But now,
things are getting even more exciting. It all started because it looks
like I may be doing some work with water fleas, which are
actually a species (Daphnia) of very small crustaceans (up to 5mm in
size). They also swarm, and it’s easier to look after them and house them
and get ethical approval to shine lights at them than it is to do the same
for fish.
“So what?”, you might ask. The ‘so what’ is that I’ve started doing some research on water fleas, because I need to know how to raise them and take care of them and now I’m getting excited. Daphnia can usually be bought in pet stores, because they are food for fish. In the process of searching for information about this, I came across this page on how to raise daphnia to feed your fish by also raising a tank with algea in it, which you feed to the Daphnia, which you then feed to your fish. And what sort of fish? In a very happy making turn of events, it turns out that Giant Danios- the schooling fish I was planning to study- happen to eat daphnia.
At which point, upon learning this, my head happily exploded. Can you say
ECOSYSTEM! So now I’m
reading about aquatic
plants. Joy! I can’t wait!
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Cyberbass
Last night we participated in the CAMMAC Come Sing Messiah event. Fun!
Kringen, Colin’s mom, found this entertaining site that
has midi versions of all the parts of the Messiah, along with midi
versions of many other choral works.
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All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.