Last week, it was discovered that my home was host to a swarm of bees. The exterminator estimated that they had been there about a month. Here's a picture of the area.
So now that the bees have been taken care of, they need to go up there and remove the hive. Even though it's not very big, it's bigger than I would feel comfortable with if I just sealed it in and left it. That should be taken care of on Monday morning.
My various summer projects are underway, and they're going well.
I've got about 2/3 of my notes set up for my Real Analysis course, and I'm going to use a colleague's course structure for the Precalculus course, so that's going to be a bit lighter on the prep.
I've got data on about 250 horses in my horse racing database. It's actually only from three days of racing (a total of about 30 races), so it's not exactly a great sample, but it's enough that I can start asking questions and probing it for information. Mostly, the challenge is still for me to figure out how exactly I want to use the data to help predict outcomes. At this point, there's not really a difference between having 250 data points and 2500 data points. If I don't have a good idea for how I want to set up the model, I've got nothing. I'll hopefully spend some time over the weekend thinking about that one.
The EdReady problem writing has been coming along. Over the last couple weeks, I've completed a couple more sections, so I feel on track to finish by the end of the month.
My drone is also in a good place. I can control it from the components that were sent as part of the kit, plus I found out there's an app that does a pretty good job with it. So now that I'm pretty comfortable with this part, I need to come to a better understanding of the actual flight parameters so that the programming part becomes a bit better. There's apparently a low resolution camera on the drone, but they haven't released the code to access it yet. But I think I have enough other things to do with it right now that I'm okay with that.
The Oaxaca trip is about 5 weeks away now. I'm probably about 70% prepared in terms of the various science activities we might do. One of my colleagues is going to buy us a bunch of lab coats for the kids to use, which will be great. I think it will make things feel more legit (even if I am just a mathematician trying to pretend like I'm a microbiologist). She also gave me some ideas of things we can do with them and gave me a bit of basic biology training. Our lab manager has also been a great source of random little bits and pieces of things to take with me from campus. A lot of this stuff is either something we get in bulk (so we have a whole lot of it on campus) or stuff that has been sitting around unused for a long period of time. Thinking about this stuff reminds me how incredibly lucky I am to be where I am and have access to the people and things that I do.
I've also backed into an interesting side project that I hope to do sometime in the next month. A standard gummy bear, when submerged in tap water overnight, will absorb enough water to at least double in size. The end result is an extremely jelly-like gummy bear. This is a basic osmosis lab, and the water enters into the gummy bear because that's where the higher concentration of solute is located. Well, if it works with a small gummy bear and it's a basic physics principle, then there should really be no reason it shouldn't work with a 5 pound gummy bear, right? I've got some emails out to some of the other campus folks to see if we can't get a time-lapse going on it. If things go well, we'll then submerge the gummy bear in salt water and watch it shrivel up, too. I'm not entirely sure how well the gelatin will hold together under those conditions, but the best way to find out is to do it!
The book project is waiting for the person I'm working with to write up a proposal. She has gone to writers' conferences and that sort of thing, and she thinks we have a shot at getting published for real. I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical, but since I've never really considered non-academic publishing before, I have no idea how hard it is for something like this. But since she knows about this sort of thing and I don't, I'm going to defer to her and we'll give this a shot. What's the worst that can happen?
The church search rolls on. Last week, I went to a smaller community church that's about a couple miles away. It was an interesting first visit because the youth were running the show. It's the sort of thing that you really don't do unless you're a community church. It went kind of how you might expect it to go. There were some confused awkward moments, some technical flaws, and things like that, but it's all perfectly acceptable. I'm definitely going back to get a "normal" service. Based on other observations that I made while I was there, it feels like a church that is searching for an identity. It has a very traditional vibe, all the way down to the hymnals in the pew and the organ and the recitation of the Apostle's Creed. I kind of wonder if they're in that mode of trying to figure out how to bridge the tradition with something more contemporary. Maybe I'll find out over the next few weeks, or maybe I won't. We'll just have to see what happens.
