Still looking for the sun

Made it to California just fine.

The weather was good about half the flight over, which was cool because I love watching the land change below when I fly cross country. I find the regular grids imposed upon organic terrain to be strangely fascinating. The patchwork quilt of the Midwest is beautiful that way. I love the rugged, untamed beauty of the Rocky Mountains. I changed planes in Phoenix, and observed the difference in vegetation in the Southwest versus the Midwest. There were these odd rectangular patches that stood out from the rest of the terrain because they were bright green, almost teal, in contrast to the brown land around them. Also, they were extremely uniform in texture, but maybe that was just the effect of my vantage point. I had to wonder, what are they growing out there in the desert, and where are the getting the water from?

It's cooler than I expected it to be here in SoCal. I had to wear my jacket to the reception+dinner that was held on an outdoor terrace. So much for my sun.

I'm putting my game face on and getting ready to pretend to be an extrovert for the next three days. As meh as I'm feeling about having to travel for this conference, I have high hopes. The VP of the NAS said a few words and dinner tonight, and one of her comments was that previous meeting reminded her why she got into science in the first place: it's so much fun! So here's hoping for some inspiration.

Here comes the sun

I've been awful negative lately in my posts, and it occurred to me that I ought to try to lighten things up a bit.

So instead of agonizing over how much I need to get done before my trip tomorrow, I'm going to try to get excited about it instead. It's the Japanese-American Kavli Frontiers of Science (and no, I am not of Japanese descent).  Basically, I got an invitation out of the blue to attend this symposium, whose premise sounds a lot like, "let's throw a bunch of smart people in a room together and see what happens."  So I said, sure what the heck, as long as they're paying for it. And who doesn't want to go to California in December?

It occurred to me last night that this is the first conference I'm going to where I pretty much won't know anyone else there. Who will I hang out with? Will I find people to eat dinner with? What if they all hate me? ...oh, but I was going to be positive.

I guess the advantage of going to this type of meeting is that it's a lot easier to get excited about my science when I'm talking to people who aren't experts, because I'm always terrified that the experts will see through all the holes in my models and rip it to shreds before my very eyes.  The non-experts tend to ooh and ahh more, which is always gratifying.

And I'm looking forward to seeing the sun, too.