Going into summer

So my third year at Brown is over and summer is about to begin. I've been thinking about going beyond making graphs and actually writing about some of the things I do, especially because every time I talk to people, they tell me that "I am doing such cool things!" - by which they mean that I go to cool places to do things, because the same people are a lot less interested when I talk to them about my algae and barnacles and snails.

This blog is an experiment: Hopefully it will allow me to show everyone (especially family and friends back home) a little bit more of the great big world I work in, and maybe take people from just the "you work in cool places" to a slightly better understanding of what I am studying and why it matters. It is also an experiment to see if I can sustain a blog that isn't about random graphs for at least a summer.

Barnacles are awesome. This is Balanus nublius from Friday Harbor. It is about the size of my fist.