Post-orals, part I

Two days after my orals, my adviser sent me to a conference in Washington, DC. The whole trip was kind of a blur in retrospect, but the conference was held by the NSF for all recipients of its GK12 grants. These grants pair faculty and grad students at universities with teachers in neighboring public schools, so that the public school students gain improved science education and the grad students gain teaching experience in the classroom (and big stipends). I am not one of the grad students doing the teaching, but I have been involved in the program by writing online keys to identifying California insects, which are then being used in the classrooms. I presented a poster with two other grad students, which was unfortunately scheduled for the 8-9:45 am time slot on the Sunday morning of the switch to (or from?) Daylight Savings Time. We spent most of it drinking coffee and chatting with the people from the University of Hawai'i whose poster was across from ours.

In three days I managed to go to the Smithsonian, attend most of the conference, and meet up with four different groups of people. At the Smithsonian on the first day I met with some lepidopterists and checked out moth specimens; I even managed to find some from the genus I work on in a box of unsorted moths from Micronesia, and transferred them to a box of their own with in a different drawer and a label saying "Epicephala, sp. nov., det. David Hembry, March 9, 2007". The Smithsonian has one of the world's largest insect collections, and various departments at the Smithsonian have different views from their visitor rooms. Apparently some get nice views of the Mall, but the view from the moth and butterfly room is of the IRS.

I met up with various friends over the course of the weekend. I think this left me more exhausted than the conference. On Friday night I took the metro to Falls Church, Virginia to meet my friend Linda, who was at Harvard and then overlapped with me in Japan, for excellent Korean food, and then after that went back into DC to join one of my Berkeley colleagues at her friend's nerd rock band's show at a local bar. On Saturday I met my mom's childhood friend Harlan and his wife Martha for dinner. Harlan grew up across the street from my mom in Nebraska, and then went to Stanford, to the Peace Corps in Thailand, to Harvard Business School, and then to the foreign service in Laos in the sixties and Japan in the seventies. He had fascinating stories about Southeast Asia and postwar Japan. Then I went off to see high school friends Aaron and Todd, who I hadn't met in one and about five years, respectively. Sunday afternoon after the conference got out, I went to the National Zoo with another high school friend, Alex. They have a cool new Asian exhibit, but somewhat predictably, I was more excited by a mural of extinct Hawaiian birds and an exhibit on molecular phylogenetics that was in the bird house.Tree clan reunion: Aaron, Todd, and I at Brickskeller's.

Asian small-clawed otters asleep in the sun at the National Zoo.
The extinct Hawaiian birds mural. Alex made fun of me for being more interested in this than in the live animals, but if you do your fieldwork on Pacific islands, you understand!
The National Portrait Galleries--I had not realized this museum even existed until I found it while walking to my hotel. It was awesome to see the original portraits of George Washington, and George Catlin's Native American portraits.
At the end of the conference they held an Iron Scientist Competition. It was a very faithfully done takeoff of Iron Chef (料理の鉄人), with teams from various universities being asked to present a science lesson in 6 minutes using a special ingredient (in this case, paper cups). Some of the lessons were really funny, and really creative.