You know you live in Berkeley when your voting place is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Matt has returned to England, but we gave him more of a Bay Area tour last weekend. On Friday, Matt, Zack, Drew and I drove down to Stanford, where we met Vince Chu, and then had dinner at my parents' house in Los Gatos. We dropped by the Los Gatos Brewing Company so Matt and Zack could try their microbrews. Craig joined us on Saturday morning and we did a crazy day of driving to Pinnacles National Monument, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and back up to Berkeley. The Pinnacles were spectacular, as always, an eerie and moving lanscape of pink granite spires and cliffs. We went through the cave, and saw plenty of white-throated swifts, but no condors. :(

School has been going well. I'd been focusing a lot on mutualisms and coevolution, but lectures in my evolution course have gotten me interested in speciation again. Yesterday's Bay Area Biosystematists meeting up at UC Davis was a grad student panel about doing taxonomic monographs, which has really got me wondering whether I want to head in this direction or not. I certainly don't want to just do alpha taxonomy, but if I want to work on groups that include many new species, is it really fair to just do evolutionary/ecological stuff and then leave the taxonomy for someone else to work on? What if there is nobody else? Taxonomy takes up a lot of time and could prevent me from doing more other research that I (and people who might hire me) would find more interesting. There were a lot of people who had made a career choice one way or another, and they had a lively debate about their decisions and regrets, and it was useful for helping me organize my thoughts.