Hullo from Sutherland

[SutherlandDesmids]

Here's my ugly mug!



A young serious and extraordinarily dull amateur phycologist. I have Asperger's Syndrome, unfortunately my prose style is a bit strange and over-formal and my attempts to be funny, as above, are usually worse.

I am sadly very ignorant about photomicrography but eager to learn. I've always made very bad sketches with my student microscope and am particularly fascinated with image-stacking software, which seems to me to remove the principal disadvantage of photomicrographs in that they only capture one optical plane and in the past it was perhaps better to draw slowly across all the planes using the fine focus.

What shall I say about myself? I was fortunate enough to study botany and zoology under the late Alan E. Joyce, a noted amateur desmidologist, and the desmids are my great love.

Apart from scientific interests, I am very fond of country walks, of dogs in general (my grandfather showed Old English Sheepdogs) devoted to my family and to my ''home county'' (I was born in Glasgow, but have been in Sutherland since I was one). I
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Patrick J.K.C. Gray

[Harald]

Hi there Patrick,
Welcome to the forum. There are a lot of great people in this forum.
Hope to see some images from you in the near future...
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Kind Regards
Harald

Lier Fotoklubb / NSFF
AFIAP / CPS
BGF / GMV
http://www.500px.com/blender11

[rjlittlefield]

Patrick, welcome aboard!

I will let other people answer your questions about microscopy.

But I personally will assure you that your prose style and sense of humor, as shown here, will fit in just fine at photomacrography.net.

--Rik

[Alan Wood]

Hello Patrick

Welcome from another microscopist who suffers/benefits from Asperger's Syndrome.

You live a long way from most meetings organised by the Quekett Microscopical Club, but perhaps you could get to Windermere? In 2017, we had a joint weekend with the British Phycological Society:
http://www.quekett.org/about/reports/2017-windermere-public

We are repeating the event in 2019:
http://www.quekett.org/about/programme#sep20

Alan Wood

[Ulrik Tønnesen]

I'm an Aspie myself

[SutherlandDesmids]

There seem to be quite a few of us !

@ Alan Wood -- I shall join the Quekett in the New Year once the Christmas festivities are over (not my favourite time of year -- an unrepentant Grinch who just wants peace, quiet and no bloody lights !) and shall certainly get down.

A slightly clearer, but no less hideous, photograph:



I don't know if any of you were put through the meat-grinder of high-school Latin (I loved it -- reams of systematic information, a situation found in no other 'artistic' subject [I was appalling at literature, with the curious exception of 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by Thomas Hardy, my essay getting my only ever A in that subject] and still prefer read textbooks in bed], but catnip for the Asperger's mind!), but if you were, I'll include the title I put on the back of this photograph -- ''monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens''!
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Patrick J.K.C. Gray

[ChrisR]

[SutherlandDesmids]

Oh, I don't know -- Greek and Latin have their uses: my first reward for slaving was to immediately understand the meaning of 'epilimnion', 'hypolimnion', 'thermocline', oligo- and eutrophic when I first picked up T.T. Macan's volume on freshwater biology in the Collins New Naturalist series.

Also Linnaean names and scientific vocabulary in general -- off the top of my head cephalothorax (Greek, head-chest), latissimus dorsi (a muscle, broadest of the back) and for sheer charm 'Fratercula arctica' (the Atlantic puffin, little friar of the Arctic).

But as for use in day-to-day life, I'm afraid as you found it's claptrap!
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Patrick J.K.C. Gray