Appel Mania and Hungry Sharks

 The day went exactly as I expected. Got up, went to a buffet breakfast, and then sat for 8 mind numbing hours of science talks punctuated only by lunch. I was glad to get the hell out of there at 6:30pm. And with nothing better to do, I went for the gym for a bit. I've always scoffed at it before, but TV's on the equipment=genius. I did 10km (6miles) without even realizing it (minus the gross sweat pouring from my brow. I felt like Becca I was so grossly sweaty). Maybe I'll go buy some overpriced hotel dinner after I finish this post.

It's everywhere! (P.s. This goes out to Matt, so damnit MB, get him to follow my blog or at least read this post) There's 150 people at this conference, so we all fit in one large conference room and a good 30% are on their laptop at any one time during the talks. THEY'RE ALL APPLES. It's almost creepy. I was sitting near a table and of the four around it, there were three white laptops like mine and one macbook pro. I look to the left and see two more pros, a head of me- some early generation pros. There have even been a couple ipads. And the 0.5% who don't have an apple? They have netbooks- which hardly count as computers at all. I bet you Apple makes a lot of money off the astronomy community. I'd really like to give them enough for a new macbook pro myself... oh well.

During the AAS conference in December I didn't go to many talks so I didn't get any exposure to the astronomy community in a science-y way (which was dumb of me, but there you have it) But today I realized that scientists can be mean, criticizing, hungry sharks! A guy was giving a talk about the Era of Reionization and how it'll be possible to get observations with the new low frequency arrays that will be coming on line in the next decade. During the questions portion another old white guy (OWG) mercilessly shot him down, essentially proclaiming that his hopes were completely far fetched and he was wasting his time and should never have been given money for his research. That was awkward. So then the next speaker gets up and talks about a related subject, and the same OWG does the same thing! How freaking rude. I understand why so many recent studies show women leaving/not being encouraged in the sciences. Of the 90 bazillion (=24) speakers today only 3 were female. I look forward to when the dominate scientific attitude is no longer just that of OWG. *cough* Shull *cough* Stocke *cough* Duncan *cough*

Anyway, I think I'm going to go to bed early tonight. Pretending to listen to weird accents talking about science way over my head has worn me out. Plus, it's a long day tomorrow. After (free) lunch I'm headed to Assen proper to get my Eurail pass validated to get to Brussels. Wish me luck! Or at least that I find my way when I get lost without too much trouble. kthnxbai.