Sleep is for chelonians

One mixed-up bird

That's me, migrating North for the winter. Seriously, check out this weather forecast for the next few days in Brookings, South Dakota. Which is where/when I'm going in the name of Science and, you know, stuff.

Dress me up in black and white and call me Dr. Penguin.

(Hey, unintended continuity with my previous post!)

Sorry New York, it's just not working out

I want to say "It's not you, it's me" but yeah, it is you. Your greed for air traffic, your hubris of hosting UN summits. You wanted Air Force One on your tarmac? You've got it. You're the Big Hub of the North, the drama queen of the East Coast.

And you're out of my life.

Hey, I liked having the little flight before the big one each way. Boston - New York - Brussels worked pretty well --- when Obama's security wasn't putting the freeze on the whole airport for ages. And Brussels - Amsterdam - Boston was a super concept --- apart from the timing from hell.

Speaking of which, that's two more things that I won't be doing again: booking flights by telephone and flying KLM. The first because telephones interfere (severely) with my brain functions (freely choosing a departure at 6:20 AM, me???), and the second because KLM people suck at following up on cancelled / rescheduled flights. Or was that just because of the KLM - NorthWest co-operation? Do you really think I care?

It's too bad about KLM, because Schiphol isn't half bad as airports go, and I had a good walk in downtown Amsterdam and along the canals (killing a fraction of my, wait for it, *6 hours* of layover). It's darned pretty in the morning sun, though the scents of warm pastry and weed fumes mingling in the narrow winding streets make for a rather heady mix. And the accent of people, the accent! I tried practicing my Dutch on a coffee-shop waitress (and here I rush to specify that this was a shop that served coffee, as opposed to the more immediately horticultural type of establishment they also have there), but even with my throat getting sore from a budding cold, I couldn't manage the cheese-grating rasp of the locals, nor was my nose clogged up enough yet to approximate their nasal intonations.

No big regrets then.

No, from now on, when I fly to Europe from Boston, I'll be going through London. It's just shorter that way (seriously, New York, look at a map and tell me it makes sense to fly via you from Boston on the way to Europe). Also, it satisfies my chief requirement: being able to go through immigration services in Boston, where fewer foreigners disembark and staff people are friendly and laid-back.

So that's it, New York; it's over between you and me. I doubt you'll notice, but my life will be better for it.

Next on my agenda: sign up for a British Airways frequent flyer account.

The hazards of fieldwork

I believe I was introduced (in book form) to the much-missed comedic genius of Douglas Adams, author of the "Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" (HHGTTG for short, a trilogy in five parts) and good friend of Richard Dawkins, some 12 or 13 years ago while on an archaeological dig in Wales, where I was training to not become an archaeologist. 

Unbeknownst to me, I had already met Douglas Adams (in televised form) and his HHGTTG on one of the episodes of the Christmas lectures Dawkins gave for the Royal Society in 1990 (which have now been semi-immortalized on DVD). Dawkins had invited Adams to read an excerpt from Part  2, "The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe", to illustrate a point about evolution and the domestication of animals -- I think. At the time, as I recall, all of us in the family watching the lectures on TV were so charmed by Dawkins himself (or, for some, by his shirts) that we rather failed to remember Adams' contribution. Though I have to say that as lasting impressions go, the prize probably goes to the model of Mount Improbable and the poor nautilus that got stranded on a minor peak of the evolutionary landscape.

Some time after discovering the wonder that was, is and always shall be the HHGTTG, I found myself wandering the streets of a Welsh town that was probably not Cardiff, in company of several other disreputable prospective archaeologists, one of whom is now... a rising star on the green blogosphere, I kid you not (I'm personally more of a fan of his travel writing, and I have great hopes for his sci-fi / fantasy, but there you go). Anyway, said gentleman probably doesn't remember the epsiode, but I believe he was the one who first ducked into the second hand bookshop where I found a tattered old copy of "Last Chance To See" by Douglas Adams and biologist Mark Carwardine. 

The book, which I originally picked up just because Douglas Adams was on it, was a write-up of a documentary the pair had done with the BBC to highlight the plight of endangered species. It turned out to be hilarious as well as touching and informative, and I read it many times -- to the point that by the time I was in college training to be a biologist, the poor thing was literally falling apart at the seams. Then I lent it out to a fellow student and never saw it again (at this point you may picture, if you will, a little tear of regret plopping sadly onto the keyboard).

 
Flash forward to last June when I heard that Stephen Fry, whom I adore for many many reasons and who I'm told was also a good friend of Adams', had gone off and done an updated version of "Last Chance To See", a sort of "where are they now?" with the original Mark Carwardine (accept no substitutes). Well, if anyone was going to do justice to Adams' role, so to speak, Stephen Fry would have to be the one. I'm putting the DVD on my Christmas list.

And so it happens that this morning (all terms being relative) I stumble onto a YouTube video of poor Carwardine's uh, encounter with Sirocco the frisky kakapo parrot. I can only imagine how Adams would have written it up but I'm sure he'd have been laughing like a whale. Watch it below and enjoy Stephen Fry's humorous narration!

Fly, flew, flown

Oy vey, here we go again... This is me flying off once more into the sunset, though in this case it's more like flying into the sunrise since I'll be heading due East. Well, I say due East, but it'll be quite a bit northwards too. Although technically I start out my journey by flying straight to the South.

Gah, I always feel like flying out to Europe from Boston through New York is a complete waste of time and resources, since the plane from New York flies back over Boston. Damned inefficient, I say.

Anyway. My connections are rather poor this time around -- and by that I don't mean my friends have no money, not that they have a lot of it particularly, that I know of -- largely because Delta messed with my schedule, with the general result of spacing out my flights much more than they need to be. Bottom line is, I'll be spending lots and lots of quality time with my teeny tiny Ideapad S10 laptop in JFK airport, attached to a wall socket by the umbilical cord of the charger...

And the upside for you masochists out there is that I should finally finally finally be able to catch up on my writing. Although I just downloaded the first season of "How I met your mother" on iTunes courtesy of my brilliance at laser tag last weekend (upcoming post) so productivity may fall somewhat short of optimal. 

Here's to hoping there'll be no Bad Travel on this trip, so I can concentrate on writing up the last episode of that!

Motherland of mine, I'm on my way.

Aaaand we're off again

Adios, Santa Fe, it's back to Boston for me. Shuttle to Albuquerque, flight to Atlanta, second flight to Boston, ETA 10:45 Eastern time... that's the plan anyway. Of course it could go horribly wrong and I'd end up in Texas or something, like on the way here.

Me (and a pencil) against the world

I spent much of high school and college doodling in notebook margins, inside binder covers and occasionally on tabletops. Said doodles sometimes featured objects or characters (one memorable Latin class was illustrated by a classic rendering of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, for example), but most were composed of geometric patterns, ranging from simple shapes to fairly intricate designs. Somehow (cue misunderstood artist whining) I could never quite convince my teachers that I was paying attention to whatever they were saying despite the doodling. Well, scratch that "despite"; the thing was that doodling helped me concentrate better on the lessons, because it kept the part of my brain that's obsessed with patterns occupied and out of my way, so to speak. Yes, that's weird. What can I say, call me an asparagus and I'll tend to agree.

Over time my doodling led me to experiment with textures, shadows and different drawing tools. It probably also helped develop my eye for small details and sense of proportion (graphically speaking only -- sadly, it has done nothing to diminish my tendency for hyperbole in speech and writing).

If nothing else, that gave me a valuable edge in college for everything that involved technical drawing -- histological slides, anatomy of bugs, you name it, I can draw it. (But not people -- unless you're 100 microns tall or have antennae, no, I can't do your portrait.)

These days I don't have much to draw by hand -- even for work, I either make schematics on the computer (Adobe Illustrator, I love youuuuuuuuu) or take pictures of my bacteria with the microscope camera. I miss doodling. I can still doodle at seminars and conferences, but it's not enough. I need more.

So I've undertaken The One Doodle To Rule Them All. Showing what, you ask?

Premise nº1 : I love maps. I have a poster of a world map (showing altitude levels) but it looks a bit crap now because it got unstuck one night and my ambulatory document shredder (Gus the Mighty Chinchilla of Doom) chomped through a sizeable chunk of the Pacific Ocean.

Premise nº2 : My bedroom wall is just about the right size for a cylindrical projection of the Earth.

Hypothesis : That's like, Fate, dude.

Thus was born the incredibly creatively titled "World Map Mural Project". I'll be documenting its progress over time with pictures on this blog, and the whole lot of them will be grouped in my Picasa web album here. As it stands now I've set up a grid of longitudes and latitudes covering the whole world, and used it to pencil in the outline of all major bodies of land. I've refined the outlines of Europe and Africa, and am currently hard at work on Asia. It's a tricky bugger, as most other European would-be emperors have noticed at some point or another. 

Don't wish me luck -- send me pencils, paint or gift cards for Blick's Art Materials ;-)

Bad travel (no biscuit)

I'm usually a very cheerful traveler, but on this latest trip events conspired against my natural bonhomie to make the whole experience lousy and needlessly tiring. Nothing like the frank, unmitigated "disaster" of missing the night's last flight out of China last year, but the kind of seemingly endless string of annoyance and frustrations that makes molehills seem like mountains.

I originally planned to rant and rave about how awful it was, but it's been over a week now, I've had my therapy (oh blonde bubbly goodness, I salute you) and I can now write this up without going into fits of screaming all-caps. A skill that TV host Glenn Beck has yet to master, ESPECIALLY IN HIS NEW BOOK -- stay tuned for a review of his mangling of the message of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense".

Happy ending

The day started out rather badly (stay tuned for the full story of everything that could go wrong and did) but it had the right ending: I'm home, so is my luggage, and I'd forgotten how comfortable my high-backed leather chair is, and how big my iMac screen is.

Heaven and a half.

Plus, guess who was really happy to see me: Gus! He even let me pet him! Poor little guy must have been lonely on his own for twelve days... But he looks healthy and active, and he's busily re-exploring every inch of my room in between fits of rolling frantically in his dust bath. Which means that I'll need to vacuum the whole place thoroughly tomorrow.

Now I'm off to bed!

Aaaand it's back to Boston again

Wow, time really went by in a flash (for a change-- NOT).

Great first week, working on plasmid stuff with my favorite Idahoans, then an interesting but somewhat uneven four days of Evolution conference. I did learn a lot of things; among others (on the whole more scientific), that I'm not crazy about large meetings with concurrent sessions. Too little coherence, too much running around and getting frustrated by the scheduling. I have some other gripes but nothing worth blogging about, really (now THAT's a stringent measure of insignificance).

Now it's off to the airport (HOURS ahead of time because the conference organizers screwed up the shuttle bus scheduling) and on for a day of air travel. Yay (not). Hmm. Will sleep for most of it anyway.

ETA in Boston : midnight EST.

Boston Bacterial Meeting tomorrow.

Start brewin' that coffee...

Evolution comes to Idaho

Last year I spent a very enjoyable month at the University of Idaho (in little Moscow, ID) doing some freelance work, helping out on a plasmid sequencing project, that resulted in a publication. Now I'm flying back there for some follow-up work with my collaborators at the Top lab and to attend Evolution 2009, a big meeting on, you guessed it, evolution. It's going to be fun! Eugenie Scott will be giving the first ever Stephen J. Gould Award lecture!

Heh. Looking at the program just now I realized I've never been at a large meeting with concurrent sessions, and I'd better work out a schedule of what talks I want to see beforehand. There's just so much to choose from, this is going to be great for my evolutionary biology culture. I'm expecting a lot of the hardcore computational stuff to fly well over my head, and of course the topics are hugely biased towards eukaryotes (so-called superior lifeforms; snobs, more like), but that's okay, I'm open-minded enough. Some of my best friends have nuclei, you know.

--

Addendum: one announced talk has a title that opens with "The small Tree of Life"... In Pythonesque spirit, I propose that the authors change it to "The Shrubbery of Life". Bonus points for using a herring as a prop during the talk.