adventures in china

My experiment is coming to an end. I’ve grown different amounts of tadpoles with other kinds of tadpoles, now it’s time to euthanize them so they can be weighed, measured, and staged (find out how close to becoming a frog they are). Some have grown more than others, and it will be interesting to see in what treatments this happened.

But this shit is tedious! The scientist in me has calculated the amount of time it will take to finish collecting all the data for every tadpole and the results are not encouraging. Over 100 hours of pulling tiny dead animals out of jars of ethanol, placing them on a piece of paper, measuring them, looking at them under a magnifying glass to count their toes, lifting them carefully onto a scale, waiting for the scale to agree on a weight, and then putting them back. This must be done for each tadpole in my experiment, so somewhere between 3000 and 3600 times! I think Jocelyn’s assistant (me) needs an assistant. This kind of science is not as glamorous as hiking through remote forests, jotting down notes and taking photos of rare frogs. I’m going back to just natural history observation type stuff after this.

But, once I ignore my future here for the next month and concentrate on what I’m doing in the lab during one moment it doesn’t seem so bad. I have an MP3 player again, and the lab is air conditioned (my room at the dorms is no longer, I broke the air conditioner somehow), so basically I get to hang out in an air conditioned room for 3-5 hours every day listening to music. If I bring in some coffee, it will go fast. Maybe.