Lab 9: The Dog Park!

Yay! Puppies!

Unfortunately, for the second section of this course, going to the dog park was just not in the stars.
(I theorize that someone offended Zeus.)

We did not get to go as a class because of the incredible monsoon that overcame the city.

I have been to the Macon Dog Park before, though, with my friend Apryl and her black lab Maggie.



This is a picture of Maggie playing in a creek.

She's so cute!
If you do your fingers in a shooting motion and say "BAM!" she'll lay down like you shot her and play dead.

She loves the dog park, mostly because she seems to get incredibly excited at every prospect to play with another dog.

Although, if she was a puppy, she couldn't go to the dog park. Because dog parks tend to have dog diseases-- for instance, parvo.
And parvo is super deadly for poor little puppies!

Lab report 8: Darwin's Dilemma

We watched a movie about the Burgess Shale during lab.

The Burgess Shale is located in Canada. It's a big ol' shale, or a sort of monolithic... monolith. It's a fossil field day! People love it!

The thing is, this shale shows a serious leap between the Precambrian and Cambrian Eras, via layers in the sedimentary rock.
In the layers from the Precambrian Period, there are very few-- if any-- fossils suggesting the existence of complex organisms.

In the layer above, however, bam! all sorts of complex critters!

The movie we watched, "Darwin's Dilemma," basically screamed for an hour that the stark difference between the sedimentary layers of the Precambrian period (complex-organism free) and the Cambrian period (all sorts of complex creatures) is evidence for intelligent design.
And if you believe in intelligent design, then, yeah, it doesn't disprove it.

The movie continually referred to some quotes plucked out-of-context from Darwin's Origin of Species.
If I remember correctly, it was something like "...highly problematic." or "I cannot be certain..."
(I don't usually take notes during movies, but I'm beginning to see that I probably should.)

The movie suggested that the appearance of complex organisms can be pinpointed not only to a single day, but to a span of two minutes wherein a "burst of creativity" occurred.
I would have liked to have seen a video that was not produced by the Discovery Institute (who have produced such other blockbusters as A Case for a Creator and The Intelligent Design Collection.

Lab Report 7: Hitchiti Experimental Forest

This lab required that students arrive at the parking lot of the forest no later than 2:15 pm.
According to google maps, the forest is located 35 minutes away from campus.
I had Spanish the class period immediately preceding this lab (as I did every day that labs happened).
That only left me 25 minutes to drive to the forest (which already would have required that I sped).
I already believed that it was inappropriate to require students to leave for a lab 20 minutes before the lab period began.

The day of the lab, I had a Spanish test.
The test ran over 10 minutes. (I also think this is inappropriate, but those ten minutes made it possible for me to finish my exam (and make an A!).)
This left me with 15 minutes to walk to my car, drive to this forest to which I had never been, and park. The drive is 35 minutes.

By the time I got to my car, I only had 11 minutes.

There was no point wasting the gas to drive to a parking lot that would doubtlessly be abandoned by the time I arrived.

I'm sad that I missed it, and I've stalked facebook photos. It looked like fun!
But I could not go, and I don't really think I should be punished for it.

I'm sorry this was so short and snippy. I've got a lot of blogs to do.