Alabama 21, LSU 0

Dammit.

Nine Days of San Francisco

At 6am on Christmas Day (my Grandad's birthday - Happy 98th Birthday Grandad!), I got on a plane to San Francisco, California to take a much-needed holiday with my good friend Darko who I met the first day I arrived in Baton Rouge. We were to stay there for eight nights which we thought would be plenty of time to take in all the main attractions of the city.

Overall, the trip was great. San Francisco reminded me somewhat of Auckland, with the really steep hills, tall buildings, central-city parks, and marina area. The weather was amazing, with only two days where the sun didn't shine, and it only threatened to rain once. This made for excellent sightseeing and we managed to check out so many attractions including the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the cable cars, Yosemite National Park, and a number of museums. The only bad things were when both our cameras ran out of battery before we even got to Yosemite National Park (because we were taking so many photos of the amazing scenery) and we had to buy disposable cameras as you can see from the quality of the photos. There were also lots of homeless people in the city and so many tourists that it was hard to get around. I can't imagine what it's like during summer.

Instead of writing a massive essay describing what we did, I thought I could tell the story through posting a slideshow of pictures from each day. With over 1,400 photos between us this was a bit of an effort. Check them out and see what an amazing place it was!

Day One


Day Two



Day Three



Day Four



Day Five



Day Six



Day Seven



Day Eight



Day Nine

BCS National Championship

College Football is a huge tradition in America, and has an massive following of obsessed fans, not least the fans of the LSU Fighting Tigers. On Monday, January 9th, LSU will face the Alabama Crimson Tide in the BCS National Championship game, to decide who will be crowned the greatest team of the 2011 season. LSU is ranked #1 in the nation and has not lost a game all year. Alabama is ranked #2 with just the one loss - 9-6 to LSU.

A smart Alabama fan...I don't believe it

Despite these rankings, Alabama are considered favorites, probably because of their domination in the previous game, which they should of won if their field goal kicker hadn't missed more than he hit. I think LSU is being totally underestimated and has many players who are able to pull off big plays at critical times, plus playing in the New Orleans Superdome means they will have some sort of home advantage.

By far the most exciting player for the Tigers is #7, the Honey Badger, Tyrann Mathieu, a player capable of entirely changing the course of a game in a matter of seconds. Playing on the defense and relatively small in stature, the Honey Badger takes what he wants: blocking passes, grabbing interceptions, creating and recovering fumbles, making huge tackles, and unleashing unbelievable punt returns, including three stunning runs in the all-important last two games of the regular season. Check out the awesome video below to see him in action.

My pick: LSU to get the job done by 7 points, 27-20.

As True as Troilus

I haven't heard a band this good for a long time. Their name is FareWell Poetry, and they hail from Paris. The music they play could be described as very experimental, combining many instruments with spoken word and fairly unconventional songwriting. Their debut album Hoping for the Invisible to Ignite is an outstanding collection of four songs which flow seamlessly into one another, creating an ethereal sort of mood, especially when combined with the arty visuals they employ to complement the music.

Below is a video of the first song from the album being performed live at Eglise Saint-Eustache, a beautiful church in Paris. It's a long song, but all 20 minutes of it is pure quality.

1443 Brightside Drive: Apartment 1132

This is my apartment I have been living in for the last four months and which I will be living in until July 31st next year. I've been living with my French friend Fab and two American roommates we were randomly selected to live with. The apartment complex is huge with something like 15 buildings housing a few hundred people. It's only a 45 minute walk to campus from here, but thankfully it's right on a free LSU bus route meaning just a 15 minute ride on a packed bus. The apartment came fully furnished and with a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, oven, fridge etc. There is also a basketball court, tennis court and sand volleyball arena along with a gym, pool, hot tub, and BBQ area. Pets are allowed, which sadly means you want to avoid grass areas. However, all in all it's a fairly nice place to live.

Living here also hasn't been without its dramas, particularly involving one roommate. First, food from the fridge would dissappear. Later on in the semester we would arrive home to find that our rooms looked like they had been searched through and some loose change had disappeared. Next, Fab's French credit card had mysteriously been used to buy €150 of pizza, Chinese food, and other takeaways which could be traced to being ordered from our roommate's cellphone and which we were told had been delivered to our apartment. Our suspicions confirmed, we called the police, who promptly did...nothing. Thankfully, this particular guy was evicted a week later for not paying rent, but not before threatening our other roommate Mo with a gun...

The day after a tropical storm

BIOL 7800 - Biodiversity & Macroecology

My first semester at LSU is quickly coming to a close. It has gone really fast and the work so far has been enjoyable but at times a bit overwhelming. The highlight so far was the final class of my biodiversity and macroecology course I talked about in an earlier post. The final class consisted of a 15 minute presentation by each student on a project related to the class content which they had been working on during the semester. So, on Wednesday morning we sat through four hours of twelve really high quality presentations on some diverse and interesting topics. Now I only have my final statistics exam early next week and the semester will be officially over!

I've embedded the presentation I gave in this blog post because it's some work I'm pretty proud of. I spent many hours slaving over the data and various data analysis programs to get the results that I did. My presentation was pretty well received by the rest of my class judging by the comments they gave me, I just hope my grade will reflect that too! Hopefully the main points of my research are able to be understood by those without an ecology background, or you can even just enjoy the great photographs! There's still a huge amount of further analysis that can be done on this and the many other kinds of data we collected during the field work for this project; it's exciting to think of what interesting patterns we may uncover. However, for now it's definitely interesting to find that restoration of native sand dunes is not largely altering their beetle assemblages, although we may still find evidence to dispute this.

Make sure you view it in full screen by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the powerpoint slides.

My First Classes

Teaching is over for the semester! Yesterday and today I gave my two classes their final exams for the semester, and now I feel like I have a huge weight off my shoulders, other than having to mark the exams of course...This was my first time teaching any sort of class, and somewhat surprisingly I really enjoyed it. The interaction with the students was great, most were really eager to learn, and most of all I felt like I did a pretty good job as a teacher. The students in both classes which I taught were a lot of fun, despite those in the 6:30 - 9:30 pm class on Wednesday always wanting to get out early! I hope they had fun in the lab and learnt a lot in the process, even if introduction biology can be brutally boring at times. Here are my class photos:

Section 38 - Wednesday 6:30 - 9:30 pm

Section 39 - Thursday 9 am - 12 pm