Well I'm back from the Great Beyond (aka Texas).

I'm hoping the inter-personal relationships of my co-workers will quietly return to status quo ante conference, but we can't always get what we want.


HGIR: I am from Berlin
Me: Oh, I love Berlin!
HGIR: Why do you love Berlin?
Me: Oh, there's so much history there!!
HGIR, morosely: Yes... I know...
Me, in an effort to recoup: You know, like Fredrick the Great!

Sam: I'm always taking pictures of [the Welshman].
The Welshman: Yes, he's always taking pictures of me, especially when I'm in the shower.
Distinguished British Professor who we didn't know was listening: Oh my.

on a teleconference
Mercury Researcher 1: We found another crater with a pit in the middle that looks like a telephone
Mercury Researcher 2: You found another telephone crater?
Mercury Researcher 3: What are they doing there?
Mercury Researcher 4: Maybe they're calling each other.

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I'd post more Enrique Iglesias music videos here except that they're all pretty racy. Tsk, tsk, tsk, Enrique, not every music video needs to have you practically banging some hot chick in order to get your point across.

Unless that is the point of the music video.

Ah, 12:17am, a little YouTube, a little Enrique Iglesias (Somebody's Me), a little finishing up some work at the office... it's life, you know, life.

I'm leaving tomorrow for Houston so it will be another week of quasi-silence from me.

I will leave with a wise quote from Thalweg:

"I know why french people are so miserable and they're lives are so complicated-- they're always banging each other all the time! When people don't bang each other all the time, life is much more simple."

--After seeing the movie 'Les Chansons D'Amour' which deserves its own entry to truly explore how terrible it was. And by terrible I mean entertaining. And by entertaining, I mean TERRIBLE.

"Je suis beau, jeune et breton.
Je sens la pluie, l'oc�an et les cr�pes au citron"
-Gay high school boy from Brittany, right before banging depressed mid-twenties Parisian guy trying to get over the loss of one of the members of his m�nage � trois. No, I did not make that up.

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So Muffy was wondering what it was like to be inside such a ship. This is sort of what it was like for us...

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In the spring of 2005, I was on the ship the MV Explorer when it was struck by a rogue wave and disabled in the northern Pacific. Here is some video footage of our sister ship, the MV Voyager, which, in a freak coincidence, was similarly disabled in the Mediterranean two weeks after our ship. It is exactly the same model of ship, our weather was worse, and we were farther away from land by several hundred miles. So this footage can give you an idea of what it was like to be inside a ship our size with no engines in a stormy sea....


Cruise Ship Caught In Cyclone - Watch more free videos

Pay special attention to 1:02!

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I'm SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I mean, spending my day making hotel reservations in Iceland doesn't hurt. And I decided that in addition to summiting Hekla volcano I'm also going to attend a workshop on volcanic ash dispersal on the top of Askja volcano, right next to the caldera. They're like, "bring everything you need [including food] with you! Prepare as you would for an alpine expedition! Strenuous hiking will be involved!"
BWAHAHA! ADVENTURE! EXCITEMENT!

But it isn't just that... my research is going splendidly! Everything I read about my research makes me so excited I can't sit still enough to read it! I want to highlight everything on the page and read all the background research! It wasn't so long ago that I would fall asleep reading all of these exact same papers. But this time when I read them, I know what they're talking about, and they're basically all saying, "look at me, and how much I can help your research!" HOORAY!!! FORTRAN! HOORAY! FLUID MECHANICS! HOORAY!! CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM! HOORAY!

Side note: Conservation of angular momentum gets a hearty thumbs DOWN.

BUT CONSERVATION OF LINEAR MOMENTUM GETS AN ENTHUSIASTIC THUMBS UP!! *jiggity jig, jiggity jig, dancity dance*

It almost makes up for that really ... [insert adjective here]... dream... I had... last... night... about... this... one... person....
treacherous dreams!

But anyway, HOORAY! SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY! HOORAY!


::edit:: it occurs to me, as someone who never consumes caffeine, that the giant handfuls of chocolate-covered expresso beans that I've been eating every time I go into my office could have something to do with my extreme and anomalous level of excitement::

::edit2:: I think I'm going to puke now ::

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Well, I met the woman who wrote Longitude and Galileo's Daughter (Dava Sobel). She also has another book called The Planets. You can see why I went to see the talk. To think my own Grand Tour of the Solar System is still stalled at Mercury (but oh, what I have in store for you on the Moon!!)

Reading Longitude has been on my list of things to do forever (I remember when it trickled through the family), and of course I love the history of science (i.e., my obsession with the River Rhine I, II, III, IV, V after reading the book The Rhine: An Eco-Biography.)
I've been especially interested in Galileo's relationship with the Catholic Church of late, because I've been reading "What's So Great About Christianity?". Which is a topic for another entry, but you should read it!
It made me think about what being an author would be like. I'd imagine you'd go to these book signings and meet all of these strange people and they'd tell you all sorts of things about themselves... maybe things they don't usually tell anyone, about their hopes and dreams, about their secret interests, their goals for the future and intense inner ponderings.... why do they tell you?

I think it's because when you read a book, like they say... the author provides half of the book, the story, and (even if it isn't about him) a kind of deep insight into the workings of his mind. Then you, the reader, must rise to the occasion and provide the other half of the experience. This is why the same good book is completely different to everyone who reads it, because each person's internal resonances are different, shaped by their different life stories. So when you meet the author of a book that has profoundly touched your life or ignited your passion for a subject, that person has come into your life so personally, has sat with you in your room for hours on end, has literally shaped the person that you are... that you feel like you can share with him that inner chord that he managed to strike with such a compelling and harmonious note. And that moment, that meeting, is so very important. It would be so easy to kill it with impatience or carelessness, and the impact on the earnest reader would be devastating.

That's why, if I were ever an author, my primary goal at a book signing would be to be extremely kind to everyone there, like Sava Sobel was to everyone tonight. And even if people had to wait in line forever, they wouldn't mind in the end, because they'd appreciate the slow and measured way that I would by necessity greet the many other halves of my story. And I'd hope that some day, I would talk to someone at a book signing, and when they left the room they'd go running back to their library or laboratory or office set alight with ideas and excitement for the future, just as I have tonight.

I even told her about my nutang and how I love to write about science here. I don't tell anyone about my nutang! Why did I do that?

Anyway, I don't think she'll find it...
I think perhaps the only thing she'll remember about me is the pseudonym "zanzibar". But perhaps in a way zanzibar is more truly me than anything.

And zanzibar has half of many stories left to tell you.

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