Home again, home again, jiggity jig

The trip home yesterday was basically a straight, as straight as the Mississippi River allows, shot north up I-55 of about 800 miles.  The weather was good, the traffic was light, so it was just a 13 hour trip to Lincolnland's maize and soybean desert.  New GPS map toy was great fun, and that was good because the car radio went dead just north of Memphis.  Maybe it channeled one to many horrid on-air preachers (it was a Sunday AM) and died of depression whilst scanning for news or decent music.  The kitty-girls were pleased to see us; in our absence they were over fed and starved for attention.  Be interesting to watch their reaction when this situation gets reversed.  Several reasons exist to explain why TPP is glad to be home again.  First, TPP is totally fed up with fresh seafood.  OK, probably not, but this far from the ocean it's best to tell yourself that.  Second, the weather in New Orleans, although quite typical for late July and early August, was beastly, oppressive 90+/90+ heat and humidity.  To protect your health you had to duck into some AC'ed bar every hour or so to "rehydrate" and snack on some oysters.  Third, somewhere lurking here in August is a new semester, and it would be a good idea to figure out when that is and prepare.  Nah.  Fourth, TPP gets positively claustrophobic living in a hotel's artificial atmosphere.  Open windows, real air, familiar sounds of the night, your gardens are comforting, and without these his spirit withers.  How TPP pities shut-ins, prison inmates, and high-rise condo dwellers even though only one of these sensory deprivation experiments is self-imposed.  Too many people spend too little time out of doors.  Fortunately the weather was good during our time away, and the F1 did a great job of watching after house and garden.  For that she gets some Abita Springs beer.      

New Orleans restaurant limited time review

New Orleans is one of those cities for eating out; lots of very good restaurants and lots of seafood.   So TPP has done his best, mostly with the help of Mrs. Phactor and the recommendations of others, to sample several restaurants that are well above average.  Our choices included two well established classics and two up and coming restaurants: Mulates, NOLA, SoBou, and Kingfish. Take these comments for what they are worth; but TPP would not steer you wrong.
Mulates is old New Orleans, Cajun home cooking and live Cajun music.  Definitely family friendly and a reasonable value; you will not leave hungry; the portions are big, too big really.  But it is a classic.  You can't get a better value on food and music especially if you have kids.  Who's in the kitchen?  Someone's Cajun mother.  Here's the near perfect red beans and rice with Andouille sausage.  NOLA - This is Emeril Lagasse's casual restaurant, and it too is now a classic.  This is a good as Cajun food can get.  A few more progressive elements do sneak onto the menu like blueberry-lavender sorbet (quite memorable).  Without question this is fine dining based on Cajun classics.  TPP had a garlic-parmesan cheese crusted filet of drum.  Wonderful, although two decades ago no one would have thought of eating drum, but so it goes in a world of overfishing.  Mrs. Phactor had smoked duck, a very rich dish.  SoBou (south of Bourbon) is a relatively young restaurant that in terms of ambiance seems a bit out of place in the French Quarter.  It's décor would be more at home in New York.  The menu is sort of a New Orleans fusion.  The BBQ pork ribs came with a habanero infused cotton candy that was pretty funky, but very good.  TPP had an heirloom tomato salad with beans and corn that was excellent.  Also his Old Fashioned cocktail was the best he's ever been served, although Stephanie Izzard's (Girl and a Goat) was a close second.  Last, but not least, Kingfish is only 4 months in business, but you would never know; it was running on all cylinders. TPP would call this modern New Orleans from the nicely renovated but period décor, the Huey Long memorabilia, and an up-dated menu.  Rather than sports, the TV over the bar was playing old Doris Day movies.  Go figure, but a nice change of pace.  TPP got the best mint julep ever.  All four of us rated our meals superior, flavorful, attractive, nicely presented, and just plain excellent.  It was impossible to pick the best dish.  A warm loaf of fresh bread came to the table in its paper wrapper along with a zesty pimento cheese spread.  This was a thoroughly enjoyable dining experience.  The heat and humidity this week have been a might oppressive, but NO remains irrepressible.  Love this place.  TPP should mention that the waiters and waitresses here are the most personable, friendly, and professional you will ever experience, and it seems quite genuine, not just smoozing for tips.  Let TPP know if you've been in any of these places.

Insectarium visit

On the way to the French Quarter for some oyster po-boys, there was a window full of tropical butterflies fluttering around.  This is not something you usually see in the windows of big federal looking buildings so it caught our attention.  A few yards beyond was the entrance to the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium located weirdly within the US Customs House.  OK, this made sense of the butterflies inside a federal looking building, except why that's where it was placed anyways?  Well, as the only adults unaccompanied by kids we sort of looked out of place, and a lot of the exhibits required you to bend down real low, but this was really a quite nice exhibit, so sayeth the biologists and aficionados of natural history.  Of course you saw the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Some exhibits did a great job of grabbing kids attention and directing their activity.  Some parents did a good job at helping their kids focus on things.  Some of the exhibits just didn't work.  It would take a while, watching them to figure out why, and then some ideas about how to fix them.  One thing is clear, kids don't read signs.  They don't notice them or if they do, they don't even try.  They simply ignore them and seek to investigate on their own.  This means that taxonomically organized displays just fall flat.  Even if the organism is a cool as all get out, the lesson is lost.  The Seattle Aquarium (not sure if the name is right) took a different and simpler approach.  How do fish hide?  How do fish swim?  and then each question was followed by a series of examples and a nice illustrative diagram.  To heck with the names although they were there.  The ugly was seeing adults giving eeky, icky, yucky, repulsive, physical displays of negativity, great role models for the kids. You know how hard this is for us teachers to knock this type of behavior out of students because they grew up with parents who provide poor role models?  One of the best exhibits was a butterfly room, and it was quite lovely, quite nicely done, which we'd seen from the outside.  Here's a bird wing on a feeding station.  TPP was familiar with many of the neotropical butterflies, or their close relatives.  Of course lots of kids were totally ignoring the "don't touch" rule, so not only don't they read, they don't listen.  People you got your work cut out for you to teach your kids how to be patient, curious observers and listeners. 

Conference aftermath

Scientific conferences are almost frantic activity packed into 4 days, a fevered orgy of interaction, a once a year event celebrating the social, personal aspects of our particular science.  At the end you feel a bit of relief and fatigue, however, TPP, a cagey veteran, has learned how to pace himself and not worry overly about what you missed or could not attend.  Last night was the big banquet (reasonably good, but fire the cook that made the gumbo, or fire whoever told them to wimp out), the awards, a presidential address (pretty good, but overly long - hey, there was a social  going on), and a farewell to friends and colleagues for another year.  Along the way you learn a good many things, you make some new contacts and friends, you get some new ideas (these are all creative people), you admire those who distinguish  themselves with hard work, cleverness, and sometimes luck that opens new doors.  Forty percent of the attendees were students, impressive young people, and you are glad when you can help some of them out and even surprised by the rare one who knows who you are.  But TPP isn't saying farewell to New Orleans just yet; he doesn't get here often and some friends have arrived and we'll take a few days just to mess around because conferences don't leave much time for leisure.  Maybe a drive down into Cajun country would be nice. 

Botanical meetings - New Orleans

Well,  TPP is back in New Orleans for the annual botanical meetings, back because we done this here before, so while fond and the memories are rather foggy because that was 40 years ago.  So two of my older colleagues, one seven years my senior, and one thirteen years my senior, and both still active faculty, and myself took our lovely wives out to dinner at NOLA.  Wonderful place, wonderful food.  The blueberry lavender flower sorbet was just magical.  The duck and Andouille sausage gumbo was excellent.  This is New Orleans and the food is wonderful.  The street scene is amazing; lots of costumes of various sorts, if you get my drift.  So for the next few days the blogging may be erratic, but it'll be coming from the botanical meetings, live and direct.  Tomorrow is for field trips, and meetings, and a big social mixer.  Another group is also having a conference here in NO, but they won't get mistaken for botanists, or us for them; they dress pretty fancy, black tie and evening gown type of thing tonight.  Botanists just don't do formal, except for one guy, a past-president, who once came in a tux, and everyone just figured he was weird, or making a joke, or something.  Hawaiian shirts are a more usual fashion statement in the botanical world and khakis.  Of course, after so many years, these people are my friends and it's great fun to see them once each year except what with all the science going on it can be hard to socialize with many of them.  There isn't enough time.  Science is a community, and we interact at many different levels, so socializing is a very important thing to do.  The symposium "Yes, Bobby (Jindal), Evolution is True" symposium is on Monday, and TPP will let you know how it goes. 
TPP sees elsewhere that another blogger is getting paid to report on the protist meetings out west in Vancouver.  TPP has been there twice for meetings and it's a lovely city, and again the meetings were nearly 30 years apart.  It does kind of rub my rhubarb that a science blogger is accepting money to do something that they should do anyways, and even worse that TPP hasn't been offered any such support, which is why food came first.  So now, having driven too far, and eaten too much, it's time to get some sleep because the field trip starts early.

Botanical Meeting - Early Planning

The annual botanical meetings are at the end of this month in New Orleans, the combined memberships of the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, the American Fern Society, and the International Association of Plant Taxonomists.  Pretty exciting, huh?  Well, this is for purposes of communicating all manner of things with out colleagues, and mostly it's the only time each year we get to see colleagues from different institutions and countries, former students, and collaborators, both past and maybe future.  People present talks and posters highlighting their research and teaching.  You learn a lot and get a lot of new ideas.  But it's a marathon, a jam-packed few days of solid botanical science.  Participation planning had to take place months ago to get on the program, and even earlier than that if you were organizing some aspect of the meeting.  Travel planning also had to be done already to get reservations taken care of.  Now you begin to decide on a day-to-day schedule so you're where you want to be when you want to be there.  You see, so much is going on, all manner of sessions are going on simultaneously, and for us generalists who have interests spanning more than one field, it's a particular problem because you want to hear this and that over there and back here.  TPP's basic approach is to just check off anything and everything he's interested in seeing and hearing, all the meetings he's supposed to attend, and all the rest.  This spans fields of systematics, paleobotany, structure and development, ecology, pollination, tropical biology, and evolution, but only particular bits of each.  More specialized people just plunk themselves down and stay put.  After you find everything of interest (it took 2 hours to read the whole program) you print out a custom schedule, except then you find out 8 of your "likes" all happen at once, so then you finally have to decide.  The first scan shows quite a few "problems" to resolve.  Some fun things look to be in the offing.  One symposium, a group of invited speakers, are presenting talks on "Yes, Bobby [Jindal], Evolution is Real".  Doubt he'll show up. And where was the seminar on Cajun food?  

The unified theory of gumbo

The Botanical Society of America is meeting in New Orleans Louisiana about a month from now.  The fact that it will be hot and humid hardly matters because botanists are basically cheap-skates and they like the off-season rates.  Besides, convention centers are always AC-ed to near meat-locker temperatures anyways, and you rarely get to see daylight at meetings so condensed are the programs.  Since lots of us are field workers anyways, you do get used to dealing with difficult conditions, but some of the lab people can be kind of wimpy.  TPP hasn't been in NO in a long time, actually since the last time the botanical meetings were there, decades ago, and it's always nice when the area offers food and music as a sort of bonus.  Now here's a freebie for you (don't think this is behind a fire-wall), The unified theory of gumbo (a pdf) (complete with Mrs. Elie's gumbo recipe!).  Don't miss out on this one.  None of this "new-voh" cajun food, oh, no.  This one is authentic!  TPP does anticipate eating well; to those ends reservations have been make at NOLA. The results will be blog fodder for certain.   

Planning a symposium in Louisiana

Next summer the botanical meetings will be held in New Orleans, and TPP is looking forward to the food and music, oh, and the botany.  Good planning, go to Louisiana in the summer, but probably that's when academic types, especially students, can better afford it with off-season rates.  So some of us been thinking, how about a symposium on evolution titled "Yes, Bobby (Jindal), evolution is real".  It's hard to believe Jindal falls for the "it's just a theory" line; it's easier to believe he that he would play religious conservatives for political reasons, but why not take him to task?  So we can have some fun with this.  Maybe we invite Dr. Donald Aguillard to speak.  He's the superintendent of the St. Mary Parish School District, but if his name sounds familiar it's because he was the lead plaintiff in the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court Case in 1987 that ruled the teaching of creationism in public school science classes is unconstitutional.  Jindal has made news by giving vouchers, public money, to private religious schools who are under no such prohibition.  They can teach all the anti-science stuff they want.  So maybe the botanists get a bit uppity for a change.  If you want to know what botanists think about all this, here's the link to the Botanical Society's statement on evolution, which is pretty good even if TPP was the primary author.