Today's highlight was a lunch seminar in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology by Rosemary Grant, a really important biologist at Princeton who has been investigating the evolution of Galápagos finches for the past 30 years with her husband, Peter Grant. Both were on campus to receive a medal (the Grinnell Award) for their research, and the room where she gave the talk was packed. It was a brilliant talk, and I was amazed by all the stuff you can do when you have every bird on an island identified and under constant observation. I almost joined the grad students and the Grants for lunch, but the sandwiches had already been bought and there was no way to ascertain if the bread contained eggs. So even though I had asked for last-minute permission to come along, I realized I couldn't just sit there in a group not eating for an hour while everybody else was. It's one of the few times in my life that I've thought of my egg allergy as a disability.

This evening Zack and I went to a Graduate Student Social. Everyone's a lot friendlier than they were at Harvard undergraduate parties, and much to my surprise, it seemed like everybody was in ESPM. Zack chided me for exaggerating.