Episode LXXXII: Wisconsin

After traveling to California in June, I took a flight directly to Madison, Wisconsin for a C. elegans science conference, similar to ones I have written about in the past.

Once again, this meeting was half pleasure and half work. The pleasure part included the fact that summertime in Wisconsin is beautiful, and that the university which hosted the conference was built right on the lake, with vast outside space to sit, eat and enjoy the outdoors.

This time some of us decided to do something unique, renting out a sail boat and sailing around the lake. The good thing is that it was a beautiful day, and I had a lovely time reclining on the boat and feeling the sun and the water. The bad thing is that we were over the maximum capacity of the boat, we didn’t have anyone on the boat that actually knew how to sail, and we began our trip by going backwards and running directly in to the dock. However, we eventually made it out and then back in, safe and sound.

We also had enough free time scattered here and there to go to the art museum, which housed a couple of paintings from one of my favorite artists (as previously mentioned, Thomas Hart Benton) and to go to the geology museum, which included, among other things, this large and beautiful fossil of a bunch of sea jellies. Who would have thought that little flimsy pieces of jello could make such beautiful fossils?

And then of course there was the work. I learned a lot during this meeting, and I also presented my work as a short talk, just as I did last year at UCLA. This year my boss and my labmate Rafael also gave talks, so our lab was quite well represented.

Finally, it was possible to mix work and pleasure, such as this guy, who was supposed to be explaining his research displayed on the poster behind him. But instead he did card tricks all night. Perhaps the idea being, if he distracts everyone with magic tricks, no one will ask him any difficult questions about his research.