Until We Meet Again (Closeout Stats)

My maternal grandfather refused to say goodbye.

Instead, his words of farewell were "Until we meet again."

Sunset on the Waimakariri near Arthur's Pass National Park. The river forms
a classic winding braid over its gravel bed, an important habitat for many
native New Zealand species, including insects and some nesting birds.

Those are the words I always repeat to myself as I pack up shop at Landcare Research and leave New Zealand once again. Just as every trip introduces me to new wonders that make me love this spectacular country more, every departure makes me long for the next return more than the last.

Eyes glued to the dissecting scope in my classic work pose.
Photographed by I.A. Dickie.

Following tradition, here's a numerical summary of this trip to New Zealand:

Root tips counted: 138,755

DNA samples taken: 3,435

Chocolate consumed in this endeavor: At least 4kg

(Did you really think I was bringing some of my chocolate home to share?)

A visitor in the lab!

Kilometers driven in rental car: 1217

Wipers-instead-of-turn-signal errors: 2

American (counter-clockwise u-turns): 1

"Correct" U-turns: 3 (I'm getting better!)

Bottles of NZ white sampled: 4 (plus a Californian pinot by Cline Cellars enjoyed with J)

Servings of fish and chips: 3 (Yeah, I'm enjoying my social omnivory... :)

Time until return to NZ: hopefully a matter of months...

Closeout Stats

We may not be able to trust Mayan numerology again (or at least not our doomsday interpretations of it), but you can sure trust these numbers!


Number of earthquakes felt in J's presence: 1
J's guess at said quake's magnitude: 3.6
Actual measure of quake's magnitude: 3.5

Total chocolate consumption by Holly: 7.86 kilograms
Rate of chocolate consumption: 1.43 kg / week
(...and accelerating. Sometimes I impress even myself.)

Root tips counted: >200,000
Bird bone photos taken: 201
Papers in press at Ecological Applications: 2 (woo hoo!)

Number of pages filled with meaningless algebra: 8
Number of models for tree-fungal interactions attempted: 4
Record lowest biomass of tree (in a badly broken model): -1 x 10^(76)
(Happily, my trees are behaving better now!)

Months until I return to Landcare: ~11
Grant money I must spend before then: ~$9,200
Thesis chapters that must be accepted before then: 2
Thesis chapters presently written up: 0.71394



Whether it's been driven by chocolate, good company, or successful science, this trip to New Zealand has been a spectacular one. And while I'm looking forward to getting back home to my practically-beachfront-apartment, I'm also so excited to come back next year and let you know how the wee seedlings fared!

Thanks for coming along on the ride!

Miscellaneous Harvest Stats

A longer post updating you on the current status of the soil survey will be forthcoming, but here, a few amusing (and perhaps terrifying) numbers to sketch the picture. All values are accurate to three decimal places. Totally. We're doing super-precise science here!


Number of able-bodied assistants: 2
Hourly wage of able-bodied assistants: Higher than NSF pays graduate fellows
Enthusiasm of able-bodied assistants: Off the charts
Volume of music played in the lab by able-bodied assistants: Dunno, but it's *loud*

Max number of soil cores processed in one day: 39
Soil cores processed to date: 163
Soil cores remaining: 91
DNA samples taken: 1632
Anticipated end date: Wednesday -- two weeks ahead of schedule!

Hours per day Holly spends at the microscope: 8
Car Talk podcasts listened to at the microscope: 7
Number of times Kid Cudi's "Up, Up and Away" has played on repeat on my iPod: 217
       (Yes, I can get a little obsessive.)
Number of Rutgers football games listened to on the radio: 1
Number of Rutgers wins listened to on the radio: 0
Percentage of workday calories comprised of chocolate: 97%
       (Also I think I ate three plums and a banana.)


I was starting to have dreams about meat again, but luckily J. arrested my rapid degeneration into protein deficiency by suggesting Indian takeaway on Thursday night.

In other adventures, I have learned that the proportion of drivers who like to honk at running girls is substantially higher in Chch than in SF. (Today's mile times averaged 7:45 so I'm heading in the right direction!) And that, according to J., I drive a standard transmission "better than expected," but "can only improve from here."

Have I mentioned that J. is a pretty laid-back and super-accomodating guy?

The Squeeze Theorem

If you haven't heard me talk about the navigational applications of the Squeeze Theorem before, you've been missing out.  (Hey watch it, I can see your eye-rolls!)

For those of you who didn't take, or don't remember, first-year calculus, the Squeeze Theorem is a mathematical nicety that helps you if, say, you need to know what value a function (a particular type of equation) will have as a variable on which it depends goes to infinity (i.e., as you take the limit).  If you're lucky, you don't need the Squeeze Theorem, and you can calculate the limit directly.  But if you can't perform that calculation, you might be in luck if you know that your function is bounded (i.e., always bigger than one thing, and smaller than another thing) by two other functions that go to the same limit.  That is to say, your function of interest gets "squeezed" to its limit by the bounding functions.  Ta-da!

All right, that whole paragraph was utterly useless (and probably not mathematically accurate).  But the Squeeze Theorem, that most glorious concept, is not!  Because, you see, the Squeeze Theorem is vitally important to everyday life -- specifically, to finding your way around in strange places.

Consider the following:

• You are Holly.
• You want chocolate.
• Chocolate occurs in discrete patches.  For example, in Ghirardelli Square, at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula.
• Therefore, if you head generally North while in the city (creating your own wandering function as you do), and do not swim across any bays or oceans (your bounding functions), you shall reach chocolate.

I've used the Squeeze Theorem to find chocolate, and also to burn it off (it worked remarkably well during long marathon-training runs in Boston, which, like any decent city, has a river to aid in bounded navigation).  And my friend Adam has reported that it works rather nicely in Minnesota, where the land is so flat that you can see your boundaries for miles (never mind that those boundaries happen to be ten miles apart).

And, wonder of all wonders, it turns out that Canterbury plans are the perfect for some Squeezing.  Allow me to present photographic evidence:

Imagine you are biking along a perfectly anonymous road.  You are surrounded by cropland, and it's very flat (i.e., the plains of Canterbury).

Perfectly Anonymous Road

 You might think you are lost.  But no!  Simply look left, then right!

To your left, some power lines (which are a useful North-South
bound once you get the hang of the place), but more importantly,
the Southern Alps!

To your right, the Canterbury hills!

Now securely bounded, you know you are traveling Southward!  Don't ask me how far apart the hills and the mountains are... that's why I've memorized road names. :)

Home Life in ChCh

Thanks to my amazing Kiwi friend Liz, who is also working on her Ph.D. at Stanford, I've gotten a head-start on some of the common abbreviations and turns of phrase used here in Aotearoa (the Maori word for New Zealand).  For example, "ChCh" is short for Christchurch, "cheers" is pronounced "chiz", and "tea" can mean pretty much any meal, as well as friendly mid-morning and mid-afternoon tea breaks during which we all sit around and chat about life and science, and, as the new kid on the block, I get ragged about American politics.  (I'm going to need to start a glossary pretty soon!)

But before I get bogged down in linguistics, the purpose of this post is to pontificate (OK, Holly, that's enough alliteration for one day) about daily life in New Zealand.  I arrived on Tuesday, January 17, 15-or-so hours after leaving San Francisco on Sunday, January 15.  Wait a minute!  How does 15 hours turn into two days?  Well, New Zealand is both across the Equator, and across the Date Line.  That's right, I'm in a whole new quadrant!

Technically, New Zealand's time zone is GMT+13:00.  But, as I prefer to think of it in relationship to being home in California, I'm a day ahead and three hours behind (or 21 hours ahead, if your brain prefers to compute with double-digits).  If it seems surprising that New Zealand should be only three timezones away (the same amount that Hawaii is during North America's summer), remember that here in New Zealand, we're on daylight savings time, while the United States is not.  So, the time change between California and New Zealand can be five hours (during CA summer and NZ winter), four hours (when no one's on daylight savings), or three hours (right now; NZ summer and CA winter).

But the great thing about the Internet is that time doesn't matter!  Though I have to be careful not to Skype-call Dad (back on the US East Coast) in the evenings here.

Anyway, back on the ground here in NZ... I'm staying with a wonderful (read as: slightly irreverent, incredibly hilarious, and truly warm and generous) couple in Halswell, a suburb of Christchurch (which is the largest city on the South Island -- sometimes shortened to Southland -- of New Zealand).  They've built a beautiful home to their own design, with room for a garden, lots of glass sliding doors to keep the place feeling airy and light, and a couple spare bedrooms for guests.  Since their son just moved to Australia, they had a room free for a tenant -- albeit an orange and black room!

My brilliant orange-and-black bedroom (with baby blue and pink sheets).
The walls not shown are painted black, and the curtains are all black, too!
Since I won't be doing a whole lot of decorating, it's great to have a bright
room to keep the walls occupied, especially since I've been stuck in white-
washed dorm rooms for the past couple of years!

So far, I've really been enjoying my stay, and am starting to feel like one of the family -- as I should, since we're all so casual around here!  (Almost) every day, I find time to go for a run around the neighborhood, and am slowly discovering local gems like a little park frequented by ducks and schoolchildren.  (Because this is New Zealand's summer, most of the kids are off from school until the end of January.)

What a great use for a right-of-way!  (You can see the infra-
structure for the high-voltage lines in the top-left corner.)

A twenty-minute walk (shorter jog, and much shorter bike ride) down the road, there's a shopping centre with banks, a post office, lots of ice cream vendors, and a supermarket.  Luke says one of his favorite things about visiting foreign countries is checking out the different stuff found in the markets, so that's what I did on my first day in town.

Clearly Americans and New Zealanders have very different
taste in their spreads!  But my favorite thing about shopping
here is the chocolate!  It's so much cheaper than in the States.
And naturally, that's why I bought only chocolate on this trip.

So that's home life!  Not too shabby for a graduate student!