News and Views

Back in July, I got to present at the Animal Behavior Society (ABS) virtual conference. ABS is always a bit intense, not because the people are mean or intimidating, I feel like ABS is one of the most welcoming conferences I’ve participated in. It’s just so much. Most of the talks are 15-30 minutes, and they have about 4 parallel sessions going at once, So you spend all day, for several days, running around the venue trying to get to the talks that you want to catch, and inevitably you are faced with some impossible dilemmas and you just have to choose. A friend of mine described it as a “science bender”, which I think is pretty accurate.

I love exploration. When I was a kid, I spent most of my time wandering around the roads and woods near my house. I would leave after school on my bike and or roller blades and try to find roads parts of my neighborhood I’d never seen, or I would walk along the creek that ran though my backyard all the way to where it met the Pearl River. I still am always hoping to find new ways to get from place to place in Philly. Exploration is the best.

When I was 13 or so, I started a Livejournal. I don’t remember who got me into Livejournal, but I spent hours writing updates, working on my background, color scheme, and profile pics. (I think if you had the unpaid version you got a total of three profile picture slots. Memory was pretty sparse back then it seems.) When facebook came around, I gradually transitioned over. (I remember feeling strongly about the fact that facebook was stupid and would never catch on.) Like all of us, as Facebook got bigger, I stopped updating by livejournal, or the blogger that replaced it. And then I moved to Twitter. Oh, and then I got married, and I had someone to talk to, so I didn’t have this compulsion to write down all my thoughts on a carefully designed page. So this all feels like a return to form, albeit 18 years later.