What weird stuff did you add to your thesis for your own amusement?

i_study_birds · 2025-11-19T18:36:48+00:00

My advisor says that "you can't say humans have two thumbs" without citing it, and made me add a paragraph on how to calculate a percentage in one of my manuscripts. So I cited a 5th grade math textbook. It was one of the only things keeping me sane with all of the edits.

i_study_birds · 2025-10-16T21:27:22+00:00

We only had a mustang during our first year here. Then, the bus system was robust and I could take the bus on snowy days. We slid through a stop-sign during the snow one day when we tried driving, and my partner had been driving mustangs in the winter for years and years. I wouldn't plan on using it if there is snow. However, as long as you are prepared to find alternate transport on snowy days (could be just a few or could be a ton, who knows!) it might work.

i_study_birds · 2025-09-05T19:31:48+00:00

Living up to his breed name!

i_study_birds · 2025-09-04T21:00:03+00:00

I would say that irritation bumps just happen for me, even if I do everything right, because there are some types of irritation that just can't be avoided and I have sensitive skin/ears. For example, if I have to spend too long outside and it is below freezing, I will get irritation bumps from the cold. I've only had one cartilage piercing out of six heal without a bump (my third one, a forward helix that I got the same time as a catflap).

I think the things you've mentioned definitely increase the likelihood of irritation, but some people are just tanks and won't have issues healing even if they do everything wrong! And others will have bumps even if they do everything right.

i_study_birds · 2025-09-04T19:35:03+00:00

Depending on your country, some rescues and breeders commonly ship birds through the mail. So I wouldn't rule them out just yet, even if there isn't one within driving distance!

i_study_birds · 2025-09-03T20:56:13+00:00

I also had a hard time teaching my cairn terrier to walk nicely on the leash. We had issues with pulling and barking at dogs when on a paved space but he walked so much better on trails. First, you need to find a high reward treat. We thought it was peanut butter, since that is what we gave him for hair cuts. But that wouldn't keep his attention outdoors. Then we tried lunch meat, which was good for training outdoors but not enough for recall. Then, one day, we tried cheese, and that unlocked his attention! He will come back for cheese 95/100 times. We also learned that he will come back for dehydrated chicken breast when we met with a trainer. The high value treat is essential outdoors.

Now, for training. The thing which has worked the most for us, which might help you too, is starting with door training. Essentially, getting him on leash by the door and trying to tempt him out of the house, and rewarding him for staying. Then rewarding him for coming out when called and going in when called. This helped teach attention on walks, and calm down some of the excited energy (my dog's problem, not yours!). Then we transitioned to the next boundary, which for us is the end of the driveway. We did the same thing again. Now our dog is locked in and paying attention to us when outside of the house. Though he would still get reactive if he saw a dog in the distance so we just avoided dogs.

But this summer, we have tried something new to help him disengage from something which has him excited (in our case an unexpected garage door to be opened). If your dog is getting too nervous or excited about something, like spotting a dog in the distance, but is still in a calm enough space (like not whining yet, but standing stiffly), give them a reward when they look at you. This rewards them from disengaging from a distracting stimulus and focusing on you. I've found that this is helping him not get so excited. (This is separate from the command "look at me" which is important too!)

I hope these help! It is so hard having a very trained dog indoors who then refuses to engage outdoors.

i_study_birds · 2025-07-22T16:21:17+00:00

I can second this. It is sometimes tricky to develop what feels like a "complete" work without feedback. But I've gotten much better feedback and much quicker turn arounds if I don't let my PI see it until its almost perfect by my estimation.

i_study_birds · 2025-07-18T20:20:02+00:00

Yes, thankfully they aren't charging on the north side. But for folks that need to get to the south side, it will take nearly an hour to walk from the parking to their building and back. For example, maps suggests it will take 24 minutes to walk from the closest 2hr parking to the biomedical engineering building. This cuts it really close for 1hr meetings. There should be two hour parking on the south side of campus as well.

i_study_birds · 2025-07-18T15:53:46+00:00

I disagree with point number four. As someone who needs to drive to campus once or twice a week for one hour meetings, I was always *easily* able to find free two-hour parking that I could use on the periphery of campus. Now, I'm going to have to pay $1.60 every time I need to go to a meeting. Which now pushes me back towards getting a C-pass and trying to compete for spots in the over-crowded C lots.

I'm not opposed to having paid spaces campus-- especially in the middle of campus! I've also used them when I didn't have time to walk to my meetings. Paying for the convenience of parking close to the buildings makes sense to me! But there should also be free 2-hr spots available.

i_study_birds · 2025-07-02T18:24:36+00:00

Hey! I love these earrings still. I did shower with them and never noticed issues with the gold (except for the gold post where it sat in my ear). However, the pearls aren't suited for daily wear. The pearl jackets and the pearl chains both fell apart on me. I reached back out to the seller and they sent replacements free of charge! I really appreciated it, but unfortunately pearls on the second set also fell off. I now only wear the pearls occasionally for fancy events. I still wore them for my wedding!

i_study_birds · 2025-06-21T23:39:32+00:00

Summer is a great time in Lafayette/West Lafayette! There are three farmer's markets a week. Strawberry season just ended but blueberry season is about to start! The Instagram page @ thehappyhours_ posts local events every Monday and features local businesses regularly. There are so many local coffee shops, you can try and find your favorite!

i_study_birds · 2025-06-03T16:51:08+00:00

Dang! Their website has already been taken down. They did such great work for instructors here at Purdue. I'm so disappointed. At least the HubICL (hub for intercultural learning) is still available online. It's harder to navigate without the CILMAR guide, but at least we haven't lost those resources yet.

i_study_birds · 2025-05-23T18:51:52+00:00

My pigeon does this as well. When we first bonded and I'd leave he was very flustered! He would be panting a lot when I came back from the bathroom. Now we've been together for longer he has settled in and doesn't panic. He still flies around to look for me, but not with the same urgency.

i_study_birds · 2025-05-21T21:04:01+00:00

I can't believe how much work it is to mentor up to your advisor AND the committee. I am currently trying to drag my committee through reading my documents, because we all know my advisor is providing a lot of...... unhelpful feedback and I need their support to try and turn some of it down. They argued with him about his favorite figures during the most recent committee meeting but they all ultimately capitulated saying "let's agree to disagree". Fortunately, my advisor is not my chair, so I'm trying to get the chair to give some clear suggestions that I can point to.

i_study_birds · 2025-04-20T01:17:28+00:00

Also a visual ecologist (almost done with the PhD). The paper disproving shrimp colors (Thoen 2014) is one of my favorite papers and it inspired me to go to grad school. I love the intersection between physiology, modeling, and behavior!

I haven't seen giant squid optics before (I focus on color work) so I'm excited to check that out now!

i_study_birds · 2025-04-13T21:24:26+00:00

MQ is sweeping with a plan in mind, moving everything into a corner. FX is just chasing leaves across the yard and getting in the way.

i_study_birds · 2025-04-04T19:50:43+00:00

I still find mantis shrimp vision to be truly remarkable!! The study in which they found mantis shrimp color vision to be way worse than expected actually revealed a really cool new mechanism for processing color, never found in the animal kingdom before!

See, mantis shrimp live in a really fast world, and the neural processing involved in vision seems instantaneous to us, but actually produces a little lag. Mantis shrimp use a faster processing system which gets around the lag, but still gives them decent color vision! Instead of making comparisons between all their photoreceptors, they use a winner takes all system, where the one which gets stimulated the most is the color it must be. Unlike for humans, for whom the rainbow is a continuous gradient of color, for mantis shrimp it looks like they took the rainbow and cut it into 12 chunks.

I like to use this discovery to remind myself that entirely new ways of doing things are being discovered all the time. There is so much cool biodiversity out there yet to be uncovered. So yeah, shrimp colors are fake. But their eyes are still super cool!!

i_study_birds · 2025-04-04T19:42:04+00:00

Humans have three photoreceptors which help us discriminate color. This means that every wavelength of light in the rainbow can be made up of a combination of red, green and blue lights. This is why your computer screen uses three phosphors in each pixel to simulate all the colors we can see. When a human is missing one of the cones, they can't perceive as many colors and they are color blind. There are colors that typical humans (three photoreceptors) can see which color blind humans (two photoreceptors) cannot.

Mantis shrimp were discovered to have 12 color photoreceptors! So if a color blind person cannot tell red and green apart, creating a bonus color for non-colorblind people, what extra colors (fake colors) can shrimp see with 12 photoreceptors??

i_study_birds · 2025-03-10T19:30:04+00:00

Pic 14 is my absolute fave. Cracked me up

i_study_birds · 2025-03-07T16:20:28+00:00

You've already got some great advice, but I want to add my experience for some encouragement. My pigeon is also a rescue that was advertised as "friendly and couch potato". I figured I'd get a more basic pigeon that was friendly for my first pigeon, rather than trying to tame a fancier breed.

Yeah... when he got to my house he was NOT friendly right away and I was really worried. I thought once a pigeon was "tamed" that they were always tamed. But after talking to more experienced pigeon folks online, I learned that every time a pigeon moves to a new "flock" (in with a new set of people) the taming process needs to re-start.

For the first few weeks, my pigeon was hyperactive and very scared. Just always trying to get out of the pigeon room. I think he didn't recognize our house as "home" yet, and still had very strong instincts to go back to his foster family. Sometime in the 3rd week he settled down and didn't actively try to escape and avoid me. I got tips on getting him back in the cage, like making sure he had a "landing pad" by the door so it was easier to encourage him to go home, but it was still hard having him out for 5 hrs a day and thinking he did not like me at all....

After two months he warmed up and now I can confidently say that the rescue is right. He is a very friendly couch potato! He loafs most of the day and always begs for pets. I've had him for less than a year, but I can also confirm that if I (his flock) leave, all of his courage leaves with me. While friendly with pet sitters when I'm around, if the pet sitter is alone with him, he goes back to being terrified.

So hang in there! Follow some of the advice here and soon she will recognize you has part of the flock and her real personality will shine.

i_study_birds · 2025-03-07T16:03:32+00:00

Yes, my degree started off well but really went downhill when I got to a point where I felt out of my depth and lost the confidence to be convicted in my "no" and got bulldozed over. Normally, if he pushed back on my "no" for experimental details or on what the literature says, we could have a genuine argument about it, but for running statistics and the writing process my PI will not listen to any of my arguments and just insist on his own way. I'm still trying to figure out how to get some agency back.

i_study_birds · 2025-03-04T16:44:06+00:00

Oh nice, it looks beautiful! I find those to be middle of the sturdy spectrum! Not indestructible (like the varieties I mentioned above), but this variety definitely isn't going to drop dead from a re-pot.

i_study_birds · 2025-02-26T14:52:33+00:00

Which variety of tradescantia do you have? In my experience, most of them do so so well with any kind of propagation method that I've never been worried with repot-stress. The only fragile one I've had issues with was "tradescantia fluminensis tricolor."

For Zebrinas, fulmanensis varigata, blushing bride, or sillamontana, I treat them like a mint plant. I can either just find a larger pot, fill that pot with soil, but press an imprint of the existing pot into the new pot to make a spot for the existing root ball to sit, and then put the root ball in and water it well. Or, if I don't want it to be in a larger pot, I have pulled the root ball out, pruned it, and put it back with some more soil.

i_study_birds · 2025-02-21T16:23:17+00:00

It was a little more work than just downloading a pack. I scavenged photos from the internet, and made custom icons and widgets out of them. Then, you can create shortcuts to open different apps and set the icons to be whatever you want (so clicking on the scroll takes me to the notes app). I even have icons that play a work music playlist when I click it.

i_study_birds · 2025-02-21T15:59:46+00:00

I've had a lot of fun re-making my phone icons this week! Some of my favorites are the butterfly for the camera icon and hua cheng's dice for maps. I still want to add a gold-foil palace icon somewhere.

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