So last night I crashed way early and did not get a chance to blog. Yesterday I did my normal gig, I looked for papers, I started the process to dissect genitals, I tried do more fly ID. Pretty typical. My day got a little more interesting when The Doc's collaborators came. The Doc is working on a huge awesome insect related paper that I will not talk about directly until it is published for sure. But this project is expansive and will definitely be the springboard for many other scientists. There was a little reception for the people that arrived last night and I attended. The food was excellent, and I met a lot of people smarter than I. Everyone was very friendly, and I did my best to understand their small talk, until I talked with Mite Dude (who actually hates studying mites) and The Doc. I wish I was better at small talk, and did not have to wait to be invited into a conversation, definitely something I should improve on. That's the end of Day 19.
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Day 20 was an interesting day. It was the first day of meetings with collaborators. I attended the morning meeting. Many concepts are way over my head because of the subject matter and because it really isn't up to my interests. I could still appreciate it thought. I left early though, because The Doc's Boss was holding the first in a series of classes on science communication. Today's lesson was on using twitter. I was not really a big twitter user before hand, I had cycles of where I used twitter for stupid thoughts, and then gave up on it. The talk today really inspired me to give twitter a chance for professional reasons. It's good for outreach and communication within your field. So hit me up @NatDoesScience where I will try my best to be a good science intern. And the great thing about this is that I talked more with TDB's interns and they're nice and it's like I have friends or something now. Hopefully my day will go by a little easier now. In other news I attempted to do a genitalia dissection today. Luckily I started with the one where I have plenty of males, because it did not go well. I emailed Bug Man, and he is going to show me how to do the others.
Other than the meeting, the class, and the botched dissection, I spent a decent portion of my day editing the species description paper.
I am pretty sure I dreamed finding a book/article of Bee Fly Anatomy. I went back through many sources, and did not find what I thought I saw before. But because of this dream/hallucination, it lead to me do some important editing of the paper. I found a source we already had cited and read the begin, and I made the executive decision to update the terminology based off of this source. It was more recent the places I used originally and it also shortened the materials section. I also think it makes the paper more readable (it got rid of a lot of Roman numerals, which I hate). I also complied a list of things that need to be completed and what we have done already. Tomorrow I hope to attend The Doc's meeting all day, or for most of it at least, the topics are a little more interesting to me. I also hope to write more scientific things on this blog instead of keeping it purely personal.
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