Thursday, March 01, 2007

Furry Creatures



So I am a bit behind posting. I have some pictures, but those will have to come later. So classes have started, almost done with two weeks now. Thus far I have had no homework or reading. A huge change from the globalization course with 5 hours of reading from day one, Chinese class with 100 characters to learn per night, or good ol’ Pomona. The students are now on campus, and that means my net access is degraded, not only in terms of available computers, but also speed. Yesterday I tried unsuccessfully for 30min to open my email. TIMED OUT.

Class is lame. Lamelamelame. I have two classes and an independent research project. Class one is ecology. I haven’t technically had an ecology class, but I have had most of the content for this class. It is lame on top of redundant. So far lectures are just powerpoints of the subheadings out of an ecology text…and the lecture gets the examples wrong all too frequently. I am in the class with what seem like little kids…way too young, and not interested in the class at all, but I cant really blame them. I will go to class a few more times..but then I think I will just spend my time reading the text book and skip.
Class two is called environmental analysis, the same as my major, but not the same content. The course has two halves. Part one is environmental impact assessments- things developed in the US with NEPA in the 70’s. Supposedly more holistic development plans, but in practice maybe more of a legal hurdle. The second half is geographic information system, GIS, basically mapping software. This class is a bit better than the first, but still very basic, slow and there is no reading….strange. the benefits are that I would not have been able to take a course like this at Pomona.

The research project. Still in the planning phases..but soon to take off. The basic plan is to catch some furry creatures, put them in cages for a few months and feed them different grasses and leaves. Then look at the carbon, nitrogen, calcium and maybe phosphorus content of their food, shit, and pee. Sounds great huh? The point is not to collect shit in little jars everyday, which I will have to do. The point is to try and figure out how much of a filter the little animal is, do their excrement mirror their diet? They will not be just any old creature, we will use rock hyrax, dassie. It is something the size of a groundhog that is not a rodent and might be related to the elephant. It just so happens that the hyrax tend to form big fecal urine deposits called middens. The middens can be 20,000+ years old. There is a guy here doing a phd on climate change in southern Africa using pollen from these old shit piles. My project should help him understand carbon, nitrogen, etc data from his middens and help identify key points in history for vegetative change. So next weekend or the next next I might go to the desert with some cages and a jar of peanut butter and see if I can come back with 10 or so furry creatures that are willing or forced to go on a little holiday retreat here at uct, where they will be fed and watered on a daily basis and all they need to do is let me have their shit.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

behold the hyrax trapper with peanut butter in his pocket!

9:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

the little guy looks ferocious

9:09 PM  
Blogger Caitlin said...

well isn't that just precious

5:26 AM  

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