When I was home last weekend, my mom showed me some children's books she had bought as gifts for friends who have just had or are expecting babies. All were classics, and one was Where The Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, a book I hadn't read in years. In case you can't quite remember, it's about a little boy named Max that travels away to a faraway land inhabited by these giant, outlandish beasts, who try to terrify him, but eventually they make him his king, and after Max rules over them for a while, he decides to leave. The beasts put up a great protest, and exclaim that they love him so much they could eat him up, but Max says "no" and sails away back home to his bedroom. Apparently I, like all small children, loved this book, but rereading it as a graduate student, I found the appearance of the semi-human beasts, with their chicken legs and horned, expressive faces, strange to the point of disturbing. I couldn't help but wonder if they were drug-induced. Maybe it was late and I just needed to go to sleep, but I was amazed that a child could be unperturbed by something that disturbed someone in their twenties.

On Tuesday I went up to a seminar at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Up in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus is a national research laboratory, almost the size of the University itself, funded by the federal government but administered by the University of California. The seminar was by Jo Handelsman (University of Wisconsin) on using metagenomics to assess bacterial diversity, and fearing this might be out of my range and interest, I went almost just because I wanted to see what the national labs were like. The answer is that they are a sprawling complex of unremarkable modern buildings surrounded by redwood and eucalyptus groves, bearing a slight resemblance to the UC Santa Cruz campus. After the shuttle dumped me off at the auditorium, I found myself in the middle of a reception full of people I had never seen before, so I drank a Coke and tried to look intelligently absorbed in the nanotechnology posters on the wall. The talk fortunately turned out to be an ecology talk that just happened to involve bacteria and a lot of genetics terminology, and was fascinating. The research was motivated by the idea, increasingly supported by anecdotal evidence, that communities of different bacterial species in nature function more like an organ than like a set of individual organisms, and that signals (small molecules) released by some individual bacteria can induce all bacteria in the community to show the same behavioral or physiological response. This has some pretty interesting evolutionary implications (natural selection at the community level?) if it turns out to be an accurate assumption.

The interesting thing about our department is that there are enough formal opportunities for the first- and second-year students to meet one another that by this point I feel like I have 60 new best friends that I keep running into all over campus. After the required first-year class yesterday afternoon, a bunch of us headed to Jupiter for drinks. I sat down next to two Québecers, which turned out to be really fortunate because they politely forced me to speak French again for the first time in about a year and a half. It was indeed possible to speak French without slipping into Japanese! I was very proud of myself. When I told Canadians at Harvard (usually Ontarians) that I was born in Calgary, I usually got somewhat disparaging reactions, but all the Canadians (for the record, all non-Albertans) I have met so far at Berkeley speak positively of the city I was born in. Apparently it's doubled in size since I was last there (1988). I'll have to go back sometime.

It's not really fall yet, but today I noticed that the native bigleaf maples growing along the creeks that run through campus are starting to turn yellow. Apparently I missed my first Berkeley protest yesterday. The Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, the International Socialist Organization, and others protested that the university's response to victims of Hurricane Katrina was inadequate.