My apartment here in State College is quite small, but it’s still the first place I’ve lived where I can make it (along with Benjamin, of course) my (our) own. Long hours at campus mean I want to make the most of my time at home enjoying the space and using it to explore any outside interests I try to maintain throughout graduate school. We use this space to develop some of our shared interests, and this is reflected in how we attempt to arrange the living area in a way that extends our tiny, tiny nook kitchen out into the rest of the room. We try and cook for ourselves as often as possible and we relish our weekly CSA deliveries of local produce, dairy, eggs, and bread. However, this produces a LOT of food scraps that we don’t want to end up in a landfill somewhere. I really wanted to have a compost bin somewhere outside, but we don’t have a lot of space available to use around our apartment building and I wasn’t sure how well it’d be received. An indoor possibility was on my radar for a while, but, as I’ll discuss, I had some reservations. Having a bin full of worms in one’s apartment seems like something that should be filed under “You know you live with/might be an ecologist when….”, but in my research before I found that they are way more popular than I anticipated! Continue reading “Crawly Cuties and Apartment Composting”
Life Update: Where the heck have we been?
Oh. Hi there. It’s us, Meridith and Rachel (this is actually Rachel). If you follow us on Tumblr, you know we didn’t drop off the face of the Earth. Life on Earth just got hectic for a moment, and we took an unplanned break from blogging. When we posted our first long form blog on May 6th, 2014, we had grand schemes of always having a backlog of posts for just these sorts of crazy life situations. For a good little bit there, we were posting once a week, then that dropped back to bi-weekly. Even with the slow down, only four of our 17 months of existence have passed without a post. Not too horrible, really. The problem actually was that almost all of those four months were contiguous. But, we’re back! We are recommitted! We are hoping to get back to weekly posting, but you can look forward to at least bi-weekly posting for the foreseeable future.
Alright. We were gone, and now we are back. But what were we actually up to during this period of radio silence? I’m so very glad you asked.
STS Blog Update: Shiny and New!
Most obviously, but also most recently, we have been working on transitioning Sweet Tea, Science from a Blogspot to a WordPress format. Check out this slick new format. So fancy! We are also a dotcom now, which is exciting. We decided to make the switch for a few different reasons. First, fresh new starts can be motivating. Like getting a brand new lab notebook or a never-been-touched whit
eboard, sometimes new things just make you want to get to work. That’s the hope, anyhow. Also, nearly all the other science blogs we follow are WordPress blogs, and we felt like we might be missing out on a layer of interaction that the platform allows, such as being able to like and comment while providing a direct link back to our own blog. Last, Meridith suggested it, and I tend to defer to her in all things technological. So, here we are.
Continue reading “Life Update: Where the heck have we been?”
Why I Went Full Stats Stud
In honor of World Statistics Day 2015 I felt motivated to write about my own experience with Statistics and my decision to switch career paths from Ecology(ish) to Statistics for my PhD program. One could argue that my current position as a statistician is a result of an intense desire to avoid any more Chemistry courses as an undergraduate student in Biology. My Chem 2 experience was the roughest of my educational experience (the last year notwithstanding) and when I crawled out on the other end I vowed never again. Since a minor in Chemistry was out, I decided to go the Mathematics minor route instead. Why not? I took AP Calculus. I was “good at math”. My second grade teacher told me so. Let’s do this.
Sweet Tea, Science 