Blog of the Little Bonsai

Personal Blog of Steve Baumber

One more rant today. I was recently in a poster session for a research night here at UBC. I developed a lovely poster (click on the image to see a larger version) and thought it to be a pretty good graphical presentation of my research. There were prizes given for the "best" posters of the evening. I didn't make the top three. Now, I don't want to give the impression that I'm a sore loser (and yes, there was money involved), but three days later folks are still commenting on my "Forester with the Meatgrinder Head", and have therefore taken away the essence of my research, but they can't recall any details of the research in the winning posters. A poster with that kind of graphical impact should at least have warranted third place, darn it. Yes, I respect a poster that can distill a complex research problem down to a 35" x 40" bit of paper, but impact on the viewer has got to count for something as well.

It can't have helped that I was the only qualitative researcher surrounded by the much more "scientific" quantitative studies of seedlings, aphids and sparrows. All with the hallmarks of "real" research such as pictures, tables, and graphs. But in the end I feel that I'm studying the one thing that makes or breaks any of their research; the foresters themselves. Do all the research you want, deliver all the computer modeling tools you can, but in the end the practice of forestry is at least 75% social science where professional people are charged with balancing society's resource values, economics, and the needs of the environment. I'm sure that I'll calm down in a week or two.

posted by Steve @ 10:32 AM

3.13.2008

I realized that I used to Blog for fun and then it became linked to traveling with pictures and all, and it was hard to go back to just writing the everyday stuff.

So here we go with just writing a couple of everyday rants.

I have a beef with people who carry umbrellas on rainy days and subsequently walk down the sidewalk under the awnings of the buildings fronting that sidewalk. The awning is not for you. You are carrying your own awning. The awning is for people like me who don't have an umbrella. Move to the curb umbrella people, I'm cranky enough with wet feet on rainy days.

Second rant, I recently went shopping to try and find a pair of casual pants. I hate button-up flies on men's pants and jeans. The button fly was invented by a jerk. The fashion industry people who are now putting button flies on every pair of men's casual pants out there are also jerks. It's impossible to "quickly" try on a crisp pair of button-up pants. And any fellow who has had to go really badly in between commercials hates these buttons. I'm going to loose a button in the mad rush to relieve myself one of these days. Because in the rush one doesn't daintily open the lower buttons, you unhitch the top button at the waistband and pull. Which is another problem, because as a guy I actually don't need to undo my waistband to pee, I have the ability to stand up and "produce the tap" (as it were) external to my clothing through a localized opening in my pants which was previously provided by a zipper. Woman of course need to lower their pants. Men do not. Button flies that force us to undo the waistband suggest that we do and I strongly suspect that this fashion trend is just women getting even and forcing long line ups in men's rooms as guys try to unbutton and re-button at the urinal while several gents shift from foot to foot behind them. The only good thing about button-up flies is you can't get "caught" in them which must relieve long line ups at the ER. Or something. Long live the zipper.

posted by Steve @ 10:00 AM