NOAA

Today we went to NOAA. Pretty heavy snow, we had a brownout this morning, but we made it anyway. Met a Hiram alum who was a student of Denny's, no surprise there, and then heard a series of talks from scientists there. Very interesting stuff, some cool work especially on salmon and seals, at least those pertained most directly to my interests. We had lunch and a brief lab tour followed up by more talks, including a woman who had done diving in the arctic, a man with Alaska Fish & Game who talked mostly about king crab, and other invertebrate fisheries, and a guy who had worked on arctic offshore fish. All very interesting. During the second of those three, however, the power went out, so he had to do the rest of his presentation in the dark. The third managed to get the screen working again on generator power, but unfortunately we didn't get to see any of the Science on a Sphere stuff. I mean, you can see it online, but it's not nearly as cool as it would be on the sphere itself. At least we got to see some at the state museum. So we're back at the shrine now, at least a few of us are, the big van is out at the post office and store. Power's restored, so we've got the stove going and all. What grabbed me about the stuff at NOAA today was what one speaker said, that the fun thing about working up here was that a lot of basic questions haven't been answered yet. Basic questions in biology, eh? You mean, exactly the kind of work I want to do? Not that I'm desperate to move to Alaska and do research. I'm just reassured every time I find a place, any place, where this kind of work is still going on and we don't already know all the answers on the macro scale.

Wednesday, January 13th, Roughly 4:30 PM local time