Today was an unusually warm day in Berkeley, as was yesterday. Yesterday in fact it was almost humid, very unusual for the Bay Area. I went to a class on communicating science to the public, and it became very clear that my goals as an evolutionary biology grad student and those of the mainly molecular and cell biology or environmental science grad students at the meeting were very different. Most of them seemed to regard communication with the public as simply a matter of increasing scientific literacy and improving public outreach, and the course seemed designed with such people in mind. My concern is how to convince people who know they already disagree with me to change their minds and agree with me--somewhat more challenging, and I doubt I will take the class.

I spent a while today reading and correcting the English for a manuscript written by some Japanese acquaintances of mine, a process that usually takes a few hours. It's funny, you would think that there would be nothing easier than correcting grammar mistakes in your native language, but it's actually very challenging. At first it's easy. Then, a few pages later, you can recognize mistakes but start having trouble remembering how to say them correctly in English. After a few more pages, you become unsure whether something is even grammatically correct or not. (This is particularly difficult regarding inclusion or omission of articles.) This raises the whole issue of whether you should rewrite poorly written (but grammatically correct) passages to make them more readable--and in theory, you could rewrite the entire paper in some cases. Usually I stop before I go overboard like that. Often there are bits where the meaning is unclear and can't be cleared up until I ask the author to tell me in Japanese what they were trying to say. Usually what my friends and colleagues do is send their drafts to a company in Canada that rewrites their paper, but I always wonder how many crucial points get lost when the revisor second-guesses the author's intentions.

David's link of the day:
www.exoticsguide.org
A guide to common exotic species of marine life found in San Francisco Bay. Many of these species become invasive (they become extremely abundant), often to the point of crowding out native species, destroying native ecosystems, and becoming serious pests of human activities. For many of these species it's not even clear exactly where they originally came from, since they're so widely distributed around the world. I'm particularly impressed by the account of an outbreak of "swimmer's itch" along the beach in Alameda earlier this summer. This is caused by a the larvae of schistosomes (a kind of flatworm, Austrobilharzia variglandis), that normally burrow through the legs of birds to get into their host's bloodstream. Anyway, they also mistakenly attack people, causing many small itchy red bumps on feet and lower legs that last about a week. The larvae don't survive inside the human body, but it's still pretty unpleasant. The point of all this is that their other host (the one they live in before they infect birds) is the introduced Atlantic mudsnail (Ilyanassa obsoleta). The mudsnail is extremely abundant in the bay and has largely displaced the native hornsnail Cerithidea californica.

Matt called today! He will be visiting in October after a conference. Yay!