Author: Matt

  • The Joy of Home Ownership: Adventures in Plumbing

    When we moved to Moscow, we knew we’d be here for more than five years and that buying our own place would probably benefit us more in the long run than renting. There are many advantages to owning your own home. The most obvious is that your monthly payments go toward something tangible. When you pay rent on an appartment, all you get back is a place to live for the month. With a mortgage payment, you’re that much closer to actually owning the place you live in, which means when you move out, you can get that money back…

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    My Research: What I have been up to

    Last week, the fruits of my last three year’s work has finally come to fruition in the journal PLoS One. The premise is that the personality behavior we call boldness, or the bold-shy continuum, is not only heritable, but a genetically correlated multivariate trait. The research is essentially a continuation of a project Mary Oswald completed for her dissertation, however upon first submission, reviewers criticized the study for its lack of replication. So, in the Summer of 2010, she set up a second selection experiment which I took over and have been maintaining since. Boldness is an interesting behavior to…

  • 4th of July

    Once again, I missed the fireworks. I admit that I was looking forward to photographing them, but in the end, I was busy hanging out with friends, and we decided not to go over to Pullman. I did spend much of my nation’s birthday enjoying one of the best parts about this country: its wild side. I went back up to Freezeout to hike into the alpine meadows of Grandmother Mountain, and I brought a friend with me who had never been up there. Our goal was not to reach the summit, but to simply escape the heat, enjoy the…

  • The Garden of 2013

    Because I was laid up and out of commission for much of the spring, I wasn’t able to work on expanding our garden much this year. Last year, I built a third 4×8 foot box and a 2×4 foot box which were meant to be tiered for planting small annual herbs in large quantities. I never got that box filled with dirt, so that will have to wait until next year. In the mean time, we’ve planted our usual array of crops in the two 4×8 foot boxes with limited success. Erin had bought some tomato plants in April, and…

  • Aurora

    Once again, the skies lit up with the dancing inferno of the northern lights. The sun has been fairly active the past two months, but this is the first I’ve both been aware of and had a clear sky to see. All of the aurora events I’ve photographed have been special, and each one is different. This one happened to be the strongest storm when the K-index reached 7. It was so bright, I could make out the red band with the naked eye once my vision adjusted to the darkness. The storm peaked here a little after 11:30 pm…

  • Evolution at Snowbird

    This year’s Evolution meeting was held at the Snowbird resort in the beautiful Wasatch Mountains outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. This year, I was fortunate enough to attend this meeting and present a talk on the correlation (or lack thereof) of boldness behaviors and swimming behavior in an open field. Of course, while meetings are great for presenting research from the lab, they’re also great for learning about other research and meeting people and making connections. This was my first trip to the Salt Lake City area, and despite staying at a hotel down in the valley, I really…

  • Palouse Falls

    There seems to be a trend among people that when you live in a certain area, you tend to take for granted your proximity to tourist attractions and not visit them. Local attractions aren’t really a priority because they’re always there, so you can always visit them later. Well, later can turn into years. In this case, three years. I’ve gone three years without having visited Palouse Falls despite it being a major attraction in the area. To be fair, Palouse Falls isn’t really on the Palouse, but it’s an almost 200 foot sheer drop along the Palouse River in…

  • Spring Wildflowers and McCroskey State Park

    When I started this blog, I never intended to make daily posts, but then, I thought that maybe I could come up with enough content to post more than once a month. This month’s post is all about Spring wildflowers on the Palouse, because I’ve found some new ones and re-photographed some old favorites. To begin, I had realized that after three years of watching the Larkspur add a magnificent splash of purple to our yard, I had yet to put this plant in front of the camera. As common as it is, Larkspur might be one of my favorites…

  • Problem Solving to Victory: RLE

    Today I had a sort of “Boo-yah!” moment when I solved a problem I’ve been working on since the summer. Here’s the back story: We’ve been integrating video tracking into our behavior assays in the lab, and in order to implement this method into research, I have been working with one of the math-bio undergrads on writing R-code to import and analyze each video, pulling out variables for statistical analysis later. We’re currently tracking fish swimming behavior in two dimensions from the side with the idea that we can add a third dimension with more cameras later on. We film…

  • Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge

    I had to go to Spokane for a follow-up appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, and it happened to be a nice day, so I suggested that while we were up there, we should go to the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge and spend some time outdoors. I’ve known the refuge was there and have always wanted to check it out, but I’ve always put it off. Since it has some handicap accessible trails, this was a good time to check it out. Wildlife refuges are different than your typical national forest or national park lands. Their primary goal is to protect…