I had my first really successful day in the molecular lab yesterday.

This is a gel from a PCR reaction of beta fibrinogen intron 7 for eight cockatoo species.

While I promise not to show many more of these (it gets boring pretty quick), it’s exciting because everything worked. Lanes 1-8 have a single band, which shows that I successfully amplified the gene I’m interested in. Lane 9 is a negative control. It’s empty as it should be, showing that I didn’t have DNA contamination in the reaction. Lane 10 is a ladder. It has known sizes of DNA so that one can judge what size fragment the PCR reaction returned.

Now I just have to figure out how to sequence DNA…

So start to things off well, I’ve put up a photo gallery as a penitence for my absence. In March, 2007, I and several others accompanied a friend to Starr County, Texas, where he was conducting research on an endangered cactus, the Star Cactus1 (Astrophytum asterias).

The study involves marking as many cacti as we could find in a quadrat, and then revisiting the areas occasionally to monitor what’s eating the cacti. Other efforts included trapping for small mammals to get a picture of what’s in the area, and using cameras that are triggered by tripping an infrared beam to catch herbivores in the act…

While reaching out to place a flag near a cactus, I noticed an odd rock at arms length. Turns out it was a Common Poorwill sitting on the nest. I had to sprint back to the car to grab my camera, but the shots were pretty amazing.

I’ve put up a handful of pictures of this bird and some other neat highlights from this trip in the photo gallery.

I’ll put up other shots of other trips as time allows.

I want to start using this site again. But instead of providing commentary on the culture wars surrounding evolution, I’m going to simply provide commentary on me. I’m going to use this site as a place to post write-ups and pictures from my various travels.

Hmmm. That sounds familiar.  Perhaps because I wrote almost exactly the same thing on March 29, 2007. I’ll quote myself.

Why did I stop blogging?

The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.

I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.

I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.

So what’s different this time?

Nothing if I don’t keep posting. But after amassing lots of good pictures, having many excellent adventures, and a likely move within the year to start a doctorate, I really would enjoy a place to share these experiences.

A really cool new way to view pictures

One last word before I put up new pictures. You can now view pictures in the photo gallery using Cooliris. Never heard of it? Follow that link for a flash animation of how it works. It’s a free FireFox plugin (you’re using FireFox, right?) that allows you to view images from the web in a very compelling way. I often use it to search for images with Google and now it works with my own photo gallery.

Once you install Cooliris, visit any of my albums or pictures in the photo gallery and then launch the program. I recommend clicking on the first image to enlarge it, and then using the down arrow to go through the images one by one. This way, you can see the image titles with the images. (You can also view the images full screen or as a slide show, but the title disappear.)

To make the experience even better in Cooliris, I’m going to start uploading larger images in the albums. These larger images will only be visible when in Coolirs, and while you can still view older albums with this tool, the pictures get stretched and may look a little grainy.

Finally, if you’re on a slow connection, you might want to view images just on the website (and not with Cooliris) so they’ll download quickly.