the trouble with biofuels ... and the thesis that isn't writing itself

It's time for an update - seems like the last ten days have gone by in a flash... yet it also seems as though I just wrote an update yesterday!!! Definitely feel in some sort of time warp these days.

Let's deal with the thesis end of things first! I am happy to report that I've been working hard AND making progress... yes AND as it often feels that I am working hard but 'running to stand still' or actually move backwards even! Progress is slow - isn't it always when we're talking of a thesis?! - but we're moving in the right direction. My main challenges in the past 10 days have been to try to ascertain the biomass, productivity and consumption rate of coral (yep, they do eat, small floating plankton), a whole variety of urchins and crown of thorn starfish. Doesn't sound all that dramatic, but believe you me it has involved quite the intense literature trawls - to come up with not always very satisfying bits of info. It has certainly involved LOTS no LOOOOOOOTTTSSS of conversions -- for example from wet weights of urchins to joules!!!, I frowned and looked at the equations three times: who on earth thinks of weight in joules!!?
So after much fact checking and paper reading I think I need to be ok with my values (or mad ranges of values) and move on. This is all only to give me starting points anyways - the real tricky stuff starts once I have to 'balance' my model, i.e., make sure that the system as I define it can sustain itself.
What's next on the agenda - algae, all the little critters that live in the benthos, zooplankton, and phytoplankton. I need to be done with these this week, otherwise I am going to start lagging behind my scheduled outline for the year ... and we don't want to go there.

So now on to what's happening in the world at large. The word definitely seems to be a rather troubled sphere... Two topics caught my eye this week: biofuels and the fact that seas may rise much more than has been predicted so far. I've been reading a few articles about the food riots that have been taking place in Haiti and the Philippines for e.g.; very distressing.... to think we're diverting food to fuel cars?? That's right very disturbing, madness.... as George Monbiot suggests: one step forward is to eat less meat (and travel less). In the same vein, but as a friend of mine pointed out, perhaps more 'grounded' is an article by Paul Krugman. He points to the Chinese eating meat, rising fuel prices and biofuels as the culprits for rising food prices.
... and to add insult to injury, some of the nations that already suffer among the highest poverty rates (e.g. Bangladesh) are now threatened with increased loss of land due to rising seas of up to 1.5m!!!!

All certainly puts the pains of thesis writing in perspective .... that and the news that a friend of mine who holds a very special place in my heart recently had a car accident that very nearly killed him.
Life *is* short:

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~Abraham Lincoln

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. ~Japanese Proverb