Pursuing praxis

The foregoing logistics aside, my trip has started off quite badly, actually. When I unpacked my microscribe, I noticed one of the joints sounded a bit crunchy (nnnnnnnnot good), and two parts of the accuracy tests it failed, one horribly so (on the wrist joint). I spent all weekend fiddling with calibration blocks, power supply and adapter configurations, re-reading the manual, you name it, trying to characterize how it was off and if I’d be able to apply a correction factor to my data afterwards. No such luck. It’s off by a good 10% on each measurement, and that’s regardless of size. Up from about <0.2% error a couple weeks ago. You name it, I probably tried it. No go. The MS is belly-up for my purposes. Which sucks, cuz I came to digitize stuff.

It obviously got damaged in transport, and what I think happened was security people opened up the case to have a look, then didn’t put it back together properly, and the joints traveled in a bad position and got tweaked with the rough and tumble (despite the Fragile tag and my request to have my bag plastered in Fragile stickers, which they didn’t do.) I also think they were rough or careless, because they ripped off about a quarter of the lining in the bag, and one of my calibration blocks was out of its spot in the foam. Of course, the airline absolves itself of responsibility for baggage (unless they completely lose it, which now I wish they had), especially for electronic and fragile items. I spent the weekend feeling extremely incompetent and a waste of good air, but hammered out a string of options and strategies for making the most of my time here, and for the next 4 months too.

Long story short, I’m sending the MS back to California for diagnostics and (hopefully) fixing, at which point they’ll charge me an arm and a leg and send it back to me (if it’s repairable at all). I can probably get it back in a month, which is just enough time for them to send it to the museum in Kenya, where I’ll meet it when I get there on March 1^st. Then, I should have a functional MS for the bulk of my collections work there and in the museums in South Africa in May. The collections here are good, but small compared to the other places, and I’ve only got a shed of springbuck skulls to get through in Namibia, as it’s mostly field and observation work out there. I’ll gather qualitative data on specimens here, as well as some old fashioned linear measurements with the trusty old ruler and string (and calipers, though using a 12 inch ruler I can get to within 2-3mm on larger measurements, and 1mm on smaller ones with just my eyeballs, and the ruler is often faster), as well as photograph some of the more important ones, like juveniles, on which I can hopefully do 2D morphometrics later on (the MS lets me do 3D morphometrics). If you haven’t heard me yabber on at length about my work yet (or in a while): morphometrics is the study of shape. It captures all the same data as linear measurements (if you do it right), but also captures the location of all the end-points relative to each other, so you can study shape and not just single linear measurements. It’s kind of a glorified connect-the-dots. Yeah, that’s what I’m getting a PhD doing: playing connect-the-dots. Dear lord. I won’t be telling the insurance people that or they’ll never take me seriously.

The excellent news came in tonight: I talked to KP, explained what happened and what my strategy was, and asked if he had any suggestions for getting reimbursed for this prohibitive but unexpected research expense. In about as many words, he said have them send the bill to me, I’ll pay for it out of my research funds because you really need to have this fixed, and your plan of action for this and the intervening time sounds great, carry on, give my best to James. Whew! It’s funny how not being out a thousand bucks, and not having your advisor think you’re a useless idiot, will really put the spring back in your step.

Now, I just have to find a better camera, cuz mine totally sucks. To my knowledge, it has taken one good picture out of (now) hundreds. For the life of me I cannot get it to alter the shutter speed or exposure time. I think I’ve tried every combination of buttons; it is permanently stuck on 1/16^th s shutter speed and 1/20^th s exposure time. The good pic had 1/64 and 1/81. I don’t know what happened. But it’s useless, and I need to avoid image distortion in addition to poor quality if I’m to document specimens and do morphometrics, so tomorrow I’m going camera shopping in Bloem. Hopefully they have something, and hopefully tomorrow morning the South African rand takes a nose dive and I can get more buying power with my struggling US dollars (man I wish they were in pounds! It’s over $2/lb right now). Yet another item I should have been more prepared on, and thought ahead for, a good camera for back-up 2D morphometrics, although 2D is such a poor substitute for 3D in bovids, it’s perhaps a lost cause. It’d be different if I was studying piranhas or blades of grass or sand dollars or fly wings or something existing mainly in two dimensions. Curly bovid horns just don’t fit the bill very well, and like hell I’m surrendering to the world of tooth-specialization and forget what the dorsal surface of my critters looks like. I will not spend all my research time labeling, counting and measuring tooth cusps. I’d rather splice a gene into bacteria, and there’s a reason I’m no longer doing that.

So, tomorrow I make my first trip into town and, re-remember how to drive a stick, but on the other side of the car and the other side of the road. Good thing bad driving is the norm here; I’ll be going grandma-slow and checking every direction three times. And, given the habitual nature of driving, I’ll be going to bed now so that I don’t make tired, automatic US-driving decisions and crunch the tin can of a car they’re lending me. I don’t need whiplash or more paperwork at this point in my trip. To say the least.