Tiger Tiger...

The Tiger Blogfest 2010 is a week where participating blogs write about tigers and the challenges we face if these magnificant creatures are something we'd still like to have gracing our planet in years to come.

As a little lead-in to a tiger-tastic week, I've decided to post a classic poem, 'The Tiger', by William Blake who is far more capable at describing such a majestic animal. Throughout the week will be various tiger-related postings, so check back for a selection of tiger-art, facts and features.

The Tiger
by William Blake

Tiger, Tiger, Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Pigeon Dance

Due to coursework commitments I have been unable to write anything at all coherent that doesn't involve titi monkeys/nocturnal song-bird behaviour/bats/climate change so I thought I'd tide you over with this incredible piece of television. Enjoy:

How to lose a bed

I've been away on camp helping to 'supervise' twenty-eight teenagers, although they probably should have been supervising the staff if we're honest.

Despite arriving several days late due to a wedding (and may I say what a splendid wedding it was too; congratulations to Diana and Adam!) I still managed to witness bowling, swimming, visits to various sections of an RAF station, tackling a high ropes course and a football match in which I scored a goal. Okay, so the goal-keeper may have let the ball past everso slightly on purpose, but we won't mention that bit. Thanks to National Rail's flawless logic, I also had the chance to visit five different train stations to travel what would have been a straight trip up the M40, had I driven.

One particularly tiring day, having just returned from the high ropes course at 10pm, I was quite looking forward to going to bed. It happened to be the night I was on overnight duty, sleeping in the office, and I'd just about made sure that everybody was in the correct accomodation and had ten minutes until 'lights out'. I returned to the office to flump down onto the less-than-comfy-but-perfectly-adequate-bed, to find that my bed had completely vanished!

The bed frame was stood on one end without any sign of a mattress, or for that matter the desk, chair or bedside cabinet that had been in the room quarter of an hour previously. Slightly puzzled, and cursing certain other pesky staff members, I went on a mission to recover the stolen goods. The majority of the furniture was retrieved from a utility room and the mattress eventually sprang out of a cupboard at the unsuspecting reverend!

The moral of the story? Constant vigilance! (And that means you too Bed-Stealers!)

Medical Students

Cardiff University has a new publication dedicated to healthcare students to join the student newspaper gair rhydd and magazine Quench in our successful little student media world.

Parklife is to be printed every two months and the March edition features piece written by yours truly, dedicated to 'my medics' who I've had the pleasure of living with for the last few years.

Here it is for those of you who dont have access to the facilities at the school of medicine:

Medics verses Non-Medics
I’m quite fond of medical students.

Words such as ‘cliquey’ can be banded around the outside world when talking about medics, but having lived with two for the last four years I can’t say that I’ve found this to be the case at all. They do, however, seem to come from another planet. Before I’m lynched, let me explain...

1. The acronyms. I imagine that this is the main reason that there’s any kind of perceived distance between medics and non-medics. There’s no chance of ‘us’ keeping up with ‘them’ if they insist on speaking gobbledygook. I get around it these days by making sure I’m only talking to one of them at once. The last time I made a cuppa for both of my medics the conversation was “NSTEMI, Lap and dye, BCC, HCOM,” Seriously, WTF?

2. Medics drink us under the table and live in the Live Lounge. In a few years from now I wouldn’t be surprised if stethoscopes came readymade with a built in wine glass.

3. If you sustain a minor injury, medics will talk about it using long words, leaving you with the feeling that they know something you don’t. This is probably what leaves people with Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words) to Iatrophobia (fear of medics).

4. I feel stupid watching medical programmes with them on telly. My Mum, who’s a nurse, used to do it watching Casualty and Holby City, a friend who is now in her final year of medicine used to do it to ER on the school bus and now my housemates do it whilst we’re watching Scrubs. I really don’t care if in reality ‘he’d be dead by now’ or ‘it actually looks more like ’ to you, I just want to relax in front of the TV! The final straw came whilst watching Glee earlier in the month when a medic friend started a conversation by referring to “the woman with exopthalmos”. I’ve come to the conclusion that medics shouldn’t be allowed televisions. End of.

There are some things I’m envious of though; medics tend to have some idea of a career path for post-graduation, they get five years at university rather than the majority of us who are unemployed after only three and they don’t seem to be a bad lot really. Nevertheless, biology students are better...

14 March 2010

Dissertation and coursework have been forcing me to work of late, so I haven't had a chance to write anything worth reading. Rather than post something nonsensical and tired I've decided to share a poem that I found today. Full credit goes to the poet, Robert Frost.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robin Stalking

Whilst standing in the centre of Gabalfa Roundabout at 01:30 am, in the freezing cold, waiting to hear if an insomniac blue tit would respond to our bird-impersonating calls, I momentarily envied humanities students. Actually, I envied anyone on the planet who was tucked up in bed, sat in a pub, drinking tea, or doing anything slightly sane or warm.

The thirteen other people, standing silently whilst listening to pre-recorded blackbird sounds, looked like they might be thinking similar things at Cosmeston Lakes two hours later.

We weren't completely bonkers though, we were testing out the perfectly reasonable idea that some birds will respond to simulated intruders in their territory, even at night-time. Some researchers (Fuller et al., 2007, spring to mind) have looked into the possibility that noise pollution in the daytime is causing robins to sing at night. There's also the possibility that street lighting in urban areas confuses their body clocks.

We tested out a few things to see if four species of songbird were more or less likely to sing at night in different areas, with various degrees of light and noise pollution. It looks like robins and blackbids are quite prepared to sing at night, whilst great tits and blue tits are somewhat reluctant to wake up from a good night's kip. The light pollution verses noise pollution debate still rumbles on and is causing one of my current coursework headaches.

Insights into animal behaviour aside, the 'moment of the evening' was at approximately half past midnight, outside The Woodville pub. Fourteen people were silently stood, dressed in woolly hats and welly boots, in a circle, with red-light head torches focussed on an enormous megaphone-shaped speaker playing bird noises at quite a loud volume. We were already feeling quite conscious of strange looks from passers-by, but it was impossible not to break the silence with a giggle when a group of students returning from the pub stopped to ask our lecturer if we were performing a ritual as part of a satanic cult.

For the record: We weren't.

Winter Olympics and Aqua Aerobics

"Aqua aerobics is not only a great way to get fit but it is also one of the safest. It keeps the heart and lungs healthy whilst toning the body and reducing fat, and also provides a good opportunity for a splash about in the water." - http://www.safewatersports.co.uk/AquaAerobics.html

This year was supposed to be an energetic final year at university, but I have to admit failure in that department. Back in October, I enthusiastically joined the kayaking club, begrudgingly paid the joining fee and disappointedly realised that however much I wanted to, I didn't have enough spare time to devote to floating in a boat.

Since then my regular exercise has consisted of running between lecture theatres at high speeds, feeding the ducks and sporadic bursts of energy leading to various one-off adventures.

Take, for example, my trip to Zwiesel in January. The aim was to learn Nordic cross-country skiing with a large group of air cadets.

The technique was actually surprisingly easy in terms of moving on skis. The part I found more difficult to master was stopping. This was inevitably going to end in disaster, especially when coupled with a particular 'Top Gun' quote deeply imprinted on my mind:

"I feel the need... the need for speed!"

And rightly so! Being human allows us to experience life at a faster pace than, say, a sloth, but we're still far removed from the league of the cheetah, and it's only natural to be curious.

So with this in mind I set off at the top of 'The Arber', one of the more popular cross-country skiing mountains in the Bayerwald, on an especially foggy day, having first encountered a pair of skis only four days earlier. It's easy to pick up speed on narrow, cross-country skis. Marvellous stuff!

Predictably I crashed about 200 m from the top of the mountain and went head-over-ski with a rather loud crunch.

What I didn't realise was that a handy gondola-type-contraption was waiting to take injured parties safely back down the mountain, if I were to ascend to the summit and hop on board. Instead, I opted to hobble/ski/fall down a further 10 km or so to the bottom, where my foot was screaming at me enough to warrant a trip to hospital for an x-ray.

At this point, I have to mention that the German A&E system is exteremly efficient. I was in and out in no more than 35 minutes, having had an x-ray and been through the complicated issue of discussing the results through a bilingual translator. It took me three hours just to get seen at Poole Hospital when I tried to get an x-ray in September!

The bottom line is that however much I like adventurous sports, it's extremely likely that I'll come home with an injury. It's not my fault; I get distracted. If I hadn't been trying to remember the second verse of 'Back in Black' as I rounded the fatal corner in Zwiesel, I wouldn't have joined the pile-up of cadets who had already hit the snow.

With this in mind, I've decided not to enter the Winter Olympics this year. Instead, I've taken up a potentially safer option: Aqua Aerobics.

But there's always Sochi 2014...