Ilex aquifolium

Hi all, Basically I am looking for anecdotes, mildly amusing (or at least amusingly written) about things that have happened within the field. Can be any length and from any area of the natural sciences. I'm looking for stuff that will get students/young people more interested in this field of science by opening it up, showing the funny bits behinds the scenes and hopefully making it seem less 'stuffy'. The stories will hopefully go into a blog post, for which the submitter will get full acknowledgement. If you have any, you can post them here (in their entirety or an outline and I will embellish it), or you can private message me or follow the link and submit them through there. Pictures/videos would al Some examples of topics might be an experiment going wrong, a captive animal escaping and wreaking havoc or a student wearing unsuitable clothing to a field trip and going headfirst into the mud. Further examples can be found at: https://themuddyscientist.wordpress.com/ Thanks

I am using BWTT on matlab to track the whiskers of dormice but it is taking forever at the moment because I am having to change the parameters for every single clip, and I have no idea what I am doing with them (things like Histogram Equalisation Max T, Razor size, MinD etc), so it's basically pure luck from fiddling when it highlights the right number of whiskers and not anything else. I've looked online for instructions, and there is help with the program generally but no explanation of what the specific values down the right hand side mean (that I can find anyway). If anyone has used this before I would be grateful for any tips or help at all. I have quite a few clips to get through.

I'm impressed that even your bored procrastination/time wasting is vaguely scientific. Mine tends to consist of facebook, webcomics and online window shopping

It's been incredibly slow for me (on chrome) since joining too. Good to know it's not just my laptop as I had initially thought.

That's a shame, I liked the idea of a board game on this topic - but maybe that's just me being an eccentric old lady in the body of a hot young scientist ( < entirely subjective).

This link mentions using a tool to measure the earth, I only skim read it because I was just trying to find something to demonstrate a vague recollection I had, so I hope it is useful. http://www.karlscalculus.org/measureearth.html

Bats seem to be being used a lot as an example in here so I just thought it worth mentioning that bats actually have fairly good eyesight. They are entirely capable of navigating using only their standard vision if the area is light enough and not too full of obstacles to avoid. Since their brains have their normal visual sense to deal with, I doubt the echolocation data is translated into a picture for them, but that is just my personal guess.

Are we talking computer games or physical games like board/card?