Having fun at the public fun bath

Today, and for the first time since I came to Australia three years ago, I went to a public indoor swimming pool, or perhaps one should rather say an aquatic family fun centre if that is a valid term. This was one of those occasions where I cannot help reflecting on cultural differences between Germany and Australia.

Here, one gets a strong feeling of being on Ferenginar because one has to pay for everything extra on top of paying an entrance fee. Want to use the water slide? Pay extra. Want to have a box to lock away your clothes and valuables? Pay extra. In Germany, these things are included. On the downside, in Germany one has to pay for use of the facility per hour while here it is the same entrance fee regardless of how long you stay.

Strangely, it is considered normal for people to walk around the entire pool area in their street clothes and, crucially, their dirty street shoes. This would be completely unacceptable in Germany.

In what is surely a complete coincidence and without any connection to the previous item, the pool area as well as the changing rooms here are significantly dirtier than any swimming hall I have seen in my home country. You can actually feel sand and sometimes even small pebbles under your feet in parts of the pools, and the floors of some of the male showers were beyond description.

Interestingly, there is only one common changing area for each gender, no one-person changing rooms, which might be difficult for more bashful people.

There are signs at the entrance indicating that taking photographs is forbidden but a at any given moment a good number of people is walking around the pool area with clearly photograph-capable smartphones or even tablets. Why anybody would want to take their tablets with them when they go swimming is another good question.

Well, at any rate we enjoyed ourselves. Should do that more often.

Botany picture(s) #100: Riccia

Hooray! The 100th botany picture post on this blog. To celebrate, there are actually two species although I don't know the name of either.

In two weeks I want to start field work, and a bryologist colleague has asked me to keep my eyes open for Riccia. So that I recognize the genus, she has shown me two species in the lawn in front of my workplace. Having graduated from a department of systematic botany whose research focused on liverworts and ferns, I knew a few basic facts about Riccia, but before I came to Australia I never actually saw it alive.

So, what is that genus? You may know that the bryophytes, the paraphyletic "group" of non-vascular land plants, consist of three clades: liverworts, mosses, and hornworts. Within the liverworts, there are again three rough groups although as far as I know only one of them is monophyletic: simple thallose liverworts, complex thallose liverworts, and leafy liverworts.

The research in my former institute focused on the leafy liverworts. Simple thallose liverworts are, as the name indicates, really quite simple in their structure, with the thallus consisting mostly of an undifferentiated bunch of photosynthetizing cells. Riccia, however, is a complex thallose liverwort, a small group that builds thicker, more drought resistant thalli with several highly specialized types of cells, although admittedly in that group Riccia itself has one of the least complex morphologies.

Although I had never seen Riccia in Europe or during my field work in Latin America, the genus is actually quite easy to recognize. The thalli have a very typical dichotomous branching pattern, clearly visible in the picture of the larger species above, and they do not build stalks to raise their sexual organs above the ground. Instead, the sporangia remain embedded in the thallus of the mother plant, and the spores only get released when the mother dies and rots away. One would think that this is not conductive to wide dispersal, but I assume that they are happy being dispersed with mud sticking to animal feet or with dust being blown around by the wind when the ground is dry.

Lab equipment

Recently I bought a shiny new piece of lab equipment. It is essentially a strong neodymium magnet with 96 holes, so that you can place a 96 well reaction plate in it.

It is used in DNA purification: You bind the DNA in the wells of the reaction plate to tiny metal beads, place the reaction plate on the magnet plate and presto! within seconds the beads are drawn to the walls of the wells. Now you can remove the liquid that contains everything but the DNA and the beads, wash the well, and then put pure water or elution butter in each well. You remove the reaction plate from the magnet, let the DNA go back into solution, and then you use the magnet once more to separate the metal beads from the water which now contains your cleaned DNA.

Two things are remarkable about this magnet plate. The first is how heavy it is compared to its small size (and considering the fact that a lot of it is holes). If you pick it up, you really have something in your hand.

The second is the product description slip that came with it. Because this magnet is really super strong, it contains a lot of colourful warnings:

Individuals with pacemakers or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators should avoid contact with this product.

Not surprising. I remember that the university where I studied had entire corridors with warning signs telling people with pacemakers to keep out because strong magnets were being used.

Do not allow the unit to come in contact with metal objects or other magnets. Damage will occur to magnetized media, such as diskettes or credit cards, near the plate. Damage will also occur to computers and CRT-based monitors near the magnets.

Unsurprising again, and clearly I will not use it on a bench where we have cyclers or other expensive equipment.

Under no circumstances should two magnet plates be allowed to "snap" together; the magnets are strong enough to cause injury and separating them is almost impossible.

In other words, anybody having fingers between two of those plates would find reason to regret it. However, I would assume that most average labs do not need more than one of these plates anyway.

Obviously this item needs some thoughtful handling. But at the moment I am mostly impressed by the strength of its magnetic field - and by the fact that we measly humans are able to manufacture something like it.

Mulligan's Flat, and botany picture #99: Acacia dealbata

After lunch today we had a very nice walk through Mulligan's Flat Woodland Reserve, part of the Canberra Nature Park system of protected areas.

As mentioned a few days ago, spring is in the air. The weather was beautiful and there are wattles (Acacia) flowering everywhere. The reserve was in fact full of the scent of wattle flowers.

That being said, unfortunately the part we went through is not that terribly diverse, and the only species in bloom were a heath (Melichrus urceolatus), the aforementioned species of wattle (Acacia dealbata in this case, picture directly above), and a lilac pea flowered Fabaceae whose name we did not remember (and no, it is not Hardenbergia). This means that I once more amused myself photographing lichens, such as these:

Odd sights like these feeding traces on dead wood:

And these weird looking fungal fruiting bodies, also on dead wood:

They really remind me of mollusc shells. Unfortunately I don't have names either for them or for the lichens above. Not my area, I'm afraid.

Botany picture #98: Erica arborea

Erica arborea (Ericaceae), France, 2010. This heath is, as the name implies, quite impressive in size, growing up to be a small tree. This picture was taken in south-western France but the species has a very wide distribution including parts of eastern Africa.

Australian voting system explained

Not that I can vote or anything, not being a citizen, but here can be found a nice little comic explaining how the voting system works in Australia.

Personally, I consider it regrettable that nearly all Anglo-Saxon countries are still saddled with some form of single winner system and thus with some form of two-party system, but at least the Australian one has preferential voting. In place like the United Kingdom you could theoretically win all the seats in parliament with only 10% of the national vote as long as there are so many other parties that nobody ever gets more than 9% in any district. And in case you think that these distortions are only a theoretical concern, I give you the parliament of Papua New Guinea from 1975 to 2001!

Hat tip to Jim Croft.

Botany picture #97: Phlomis viscosa

Phlomis viscosa (Lamiaceae), Botanic Garden of Zürich, 2010. As mentioned before, the mint family Lamiaceae is one of my favorite plant groups, and in the case of Phlomis I am not alone. There are several ornamentals in the genus, and apparently some people collect the species, although it is of course nowhere near as popular as cacti or orchids.