(Not Quite) In the Emperor's Footsteps
According to Roman lore, Julius Caesar once conquered an entire city in four hours. I’ve been working hard for six weeks, which, at Caesar’s pace, would give me enough time to conquer the world. As you probably noticed, I’m not yet the supreme chancellor of Earth, so what have I been doing with my six weeks?
Well, there have been a few setbacks, but I’ve managed to make decent progress in my research. I now have over six hundred tree cores, and barring thunderstorms, I should be able to finish up in the field tomorrow. I still need to turn those raw cores into useable data, though, so if I want to get enough data for my poster, next week will have to be a marathon of gluing, sanding, processing, and analyzing. Luckily, thanks to the guys at the machine shop, I got the stage fixed a lot more quickly than I anticipated (as I mentioned in my last blog, the stage what I use to measure the distance between tree rings). I just want to plug the machine shop for a second, because until last week, I had no idea it even existed. The machine shop is in the basement of the Physics building, and if you ever have a mechanical problem with lab equipment, you can bring it there and they’ll probably know how to fix it. Check it out if you’re interested: (http://www.phy.duke.edu/facilities/shops.php).
Anyway, I spent this week coring trees with help from some of the lab techs. Coring goes so quickly with a four-person team! Some days we got over a hundred cores. We also got a new shipment of corers to use, but most of them turned out to be pretty terrible. We have to send them back, which is frustrating. Part of me is glad, though, because it means I get to keep the corer I’ve been using, which I borrowed from the forestry supply closet a few weeks ago. It works much better than any other corer I’ve used, and it has a blue handle, so I nicknamed it “Old Blue” (because only cool people name their scientific equipment).
Peter testing some of the new corers and making the tree into a pin cushion
Thanks to Old Blue and the lab techs (what a great potential band name!), I did a lot this week, but I have even more to do next week, and realistically, even Caesar wouldn’t have been able to get it all done (although I doubt Caesar would have been all that into ecology). It looks like I won’t be able to get all the data I want, but I should be able to get a fair amount. Definitely enough to make some sort of presentable conclusions. Six weeks ago, I came to the Howard Hughes program, this week, I saw what was left for me to do, and hopefully, after next week, I’ll have conquered the poster.
