Made it to Cape Town!

2 hour flight to Portland + 9 hour flight to Amsterdam + 11 hour flight to Cape Town and I'm here!  With free, very spotty wi-fi in our hostel, so I'm going to quickly write something and then get it posted.  The back to back flights were actually not that bad, though I was exhausted when we got here.  I watched something like 7 movies and 5 TV episodes to pass the time.

Anyway, today we (5 students from OSU, one of their friends, and me) basically did a LOT of walking: exploring some parks and squares and the waterfront (which basically felt like Pier 39 in San Francisco). It's pretty hot and somewhat humid and I think I gained a few freckles.

A couple of observations:

• Pigeons are very abundant and content (i.e. fat) here.
• It doesn't really feel like a foreign country- everyone I have to interact with speaks english, fashion seems similar enough, and I could easily be in some American big city.
• Except that there aren't lots of obese people, meaning it couldn't really be America.
• The exchange rate makes it such that everything sounds expensive (30 rand for a small sandwich, for example) and I haven't quite wrapped my head around the conversion (somewhere around 8:1 rand:US$- I think) so I'm never completely sure if I'm paying a lot or a little for food (since food's the only thing I've bought so far).

We're going to Simon's Town tomorrow meaning penguins!! I'm super excited for that, of course.

5 Things

Five things I will miss while in the South Atlantic:

1. Facebook. Because let's be honest, I spend a LOT of time on the Internet (ie partaking in social media).

2. Pub quiz. Monday nights (of all nights) is my most social night of the week and I enjoy my trivia and of course my teammates' company.

3. Beer. Also wine and any liquor, really. The ship is dry, and while that makes sense and I don't actually need alcohol, I do enjoy me a glass of it (or two) on the weekends or during pub quiz.

4. Running. Because 279 ft is not quite the distance a former marathon runner can be satisfied with when it comes to exercise.

5. My family. My friends too- I live with my parents and at the touch of ten buttons I can be in contact with any of my friends, but 3G does not exactly cover the entire Atlantic ocean.

Leaving on a jet plane (or 3)

Saturday morning, I will be boarding a plane to fly from Sacramento to Portland, where I will board a different plane to Amsterdam, where I will then board a third plane to my final air destination: Cape Town.  I have three full days in Cape Town before having to be at the docks on the 9th (though we don't depart for the open ocean until the 11th).  As of now, my plan is to see the penguins and write postcards.  As long as I can do that, I'll be satisfied.

49 days at sea later, I'll be flying back to the states with a 24 hour layover in Amsterdam!

I'm told I'll have some internet access on the ship, so you can contact me via email while I'm offshore.  I will also try to update this blog as much as possible.

This will be the cruise's website (not currently up- if you go to the site right now it has information about a different research cruise): http://earthref.org/ERESE/projects/MV1203/  It will probably be more focused on the scientific aspect of the cruise.  There's also a page about the ship I'll be on (http://shipsked.ucsd.edu/Ships/Melville/ which has a link to a map with the ship's current location.

Call me Kimmael

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick chapter 1

Art, Science, and the fusion thereof, Part II

I realize that my last post on this topic was not some of my best writing.  I probably should have edited it a bit before posting.  So here is a summary of what I think was the point I was trying to make (in oh, so many poorly written words):

There is a place for art inspired by science.  In fact, that art is usually some of my favorite.  But there is an important difference between science art and art/science fusion.  Macro pictures, realistic sculptures, paintings inspired by DNA sequencing are all science art.  Judit(the artist from the talk)'s installment of calcite heart and lungs disintegrating in increasingly acidic water is art/science fusion because there is a a science-y message behind it.  Her talk, however, was more a historical fiction that mentioned science.

In other words, art and science can both be great in their own right, or together, but I like it better when there's a point.

And in conclusion, here's a picture of rum and coke viewed under a microscope (thanks FSU chemistry):

In which my high school French came in handy for something other than crosswords

Tonight at de Vere's Irish Pub Pub Quiz, my team placed 7th and actually won a prize for the first time:

Yes that is a single packing peanut in our shot glass.

Yes, we won one shot glass for five people and it was decided I should keep it and bring it to South Africa with me as a reminder of the 9 pub quizzes I will sadly miss.  But I will be on a ship on the ocean doing geology, so I think I'll be ok.  And there was a geology question tonight, albeit an easy one (what is the name of the super continent during the paleozoic? a super continent that apparently has a myspace?).  Anyway, pub quiz was a good time as always, but that much sweeter since we won something!

TWO WEEKS

Only two weeks left in the states!  I'm mostly excited, but a little overwhelmed about what I want to get done before I go.

In other news, the sunsets sure have been pretty lately.

My room is definitely a room with a view!

Art, Science, and the fusion thereof

My mom and I went to a talk sponsored by the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion program as part of their "the Consilience of art and science speaker series."  The talk was entitled "Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer" by a self-described "process-based visual artist," Judit Hersko.  It was more a story and slideshow than a talk, really.  The overall story was one of using art and the humanities to investigate antarctic ecology.  I don't think I can remotely do the presentation justice by trying to summarize it here, so I'm not going to try.  After this story, Judit went on to talk about her efforts in bringing science, in the form of art projects, to students who were otherwise difficult or just plain didn't want to learn about science.

The audience was clearly moved and enamored of her presentation and ideas.  And to some degree I agree with all of the feedback from the audience.  By using a multi-disciplinary approach to education, I think kids, as well as adults, can get a lot more out of the subjects they're learning.  The real world doesn't separate subjects in neat little boxes; everything is connected.

An example of art/science fusion in the oak grove in the UCD arboretum- I made the bird!

Ok, so now I'm going to ramble tangentally on and on about art, science, and ocean acidification, so continue after the jump and read at your own risk.