Kids do and publish science

A class of 8-10 year old students in the UK designed an experiment to understand bumblebee vision. The paper was published in Biology Letters, and you can read an article about it, the paper itself, and more commentary on it for free.

The main scientist involved in the project, Beau Lotto from the University College London, has a webpage like I've never seen. This group is really, seriously sharing science in creative and novel ways (check out their Street Science and Flight of the bumblebee cubes). Kudos to them! What an inspiration!

The "Blackawton bees" project really sets a new bar for teaching science by doing science, and I expect we'll see more articles published by elementary and secondary school students in the near future. What do you think?

Puppy pic

Because you asked!

Anyone want to guess what she is? The shelter said "lab cross" but what is up with those ears? Usually they are practically overlapping on top of her head they are so high set. I think they might stand up, but who knows? She's 15 weeks now.

Numbers

We had a party on Saturday and then left on Monday to see family. Here are some numbers from the past few days.

Guests at our party: 17
People bleeding at our party: 3
Time party ended: 3:30 am
Guests who spent the night: 4
Beatles songs listened to on the way to see Jon's family: 213 (that's 9.6 hours- listened to chronologically by recording date)
Pounds of dog food brought along for puppy: 0 (oops- this is why we got a dog before having kids)

Tranformations!

For years now I have thought that there should be an easy way to capitalize or de-capitalize selected text. I always imagined it would be a key on the keyboard, but I just discovered that it exists in the magic world of right-click!
If I'm composing or editing text and I right-click, one of the options is "transformations" then the options are "Make upper case", "Make lower case" or "Capitalize". This is SO useful for editing the title of journal articles so that each letter isn't capitalized (this is often the case when I download the citation, but most bibliography styles require lower case).
For how long have I been tediously changing one letter or word at a time? Is this a Mac-only thing, or can my non-Macophile readers do this too?

We finally did it!

After years of talking about it and putting it off because the timing wasn't right or we didn't have enough money or whatever, we finally got a dog. We adopted a 3 month old puppy from a shelter. She's adorable!
Since I'm capable of doing most of my work at home (though I almost always prefer to work in my office at school), I've been mostly home with the puppy. My work is now often interrupted by stopping the puppy from peeing inside and keeping the puppy from doing other inappropriate things.
After more than 3.5 years of being car-free, it seems time for us to get a car since we can't take the dog on public transit. Then Jon will be able to bring the puppy to work with him, which will be important when I go back to Ukenzagapia.