What this also means, though, is a great deal more work for our poor postie, who already has to put up with our ninety-trillion magazine subscriptions. See, we made the fatal mistake of both subscribing to magazines that might indicate we have an interest in politics and donating to charity. This has opened us up to a really astonishing quantity of what we’ve taken to calling “the begging letters”.

This is about a week's worth. An average week.

Some of them I pretty well understand – we’ve given money to a specific charity, there’s a decent-to-good chance we’ll do it again. Or we’ve given money to a charity that’s close to your charity, so…how the second-level charities get our names and address is more of a concern, but I basically understand what’s going on. (I would prefer it if giving money to charity didn’t result in being importuned by every other vaguely related charity, but “privacy” and “personal information” are not really concepts you could illustrate with a Venn diagram in this country, so far as I can tell.)
It’s the political begging letters that I find fascinating, though. The Democrats – in all flavours of variety, from the presidential campaign to the Wisconsin branch and their campaign against Scott Walker to our local Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren – would really really like us to send them some money. Which I am not in principle opposed to, except for the thing where it’s all sorts of illegal, I’m pretty sure. And the lengths they go to in order to try and convince us are elaborate. My favourite is this:

Are we supposed to frame it? Put it in a shrine? Photoshop ourselves in? I'm not really seeing the point, here.

These aren’t just one-page letters, you understand; these are thick packets of information, in faux-personalised detail. Trees are crying somewhere, I’m sure of it. (Actually, come to it, I’m surprised we haven’t heard from any flavour of the Green party, I know one exists here. Probably they just don’t have the money to do this sort of mailout.) I was a paid-up member of the Labour party for most of my student life in New Zealand, and door-knockingly, envelope-stuffingly active for a good part of it; I never got anything like as many requests for political donations as we do here, even in election years. It’s just relentless.

What this tells me is that there must be fairly large amounts of money donated to the infrastructure of fundraising from people found on magazine subscription lists and the like. Add up postage, paper, printing, even writing and design; this sort of barrage can’t be cheap. And I have no way to judge how useful it is. Mike and I are going to be politically involved (or not, see “all sorts of illegal” above) regardless of how much mail we get; we get our political information other ways. But assume there’s a bunch of politically curious but not active people out there, getting these letters. Do they work? Do they generate more money than they cost? Do people actually believe Michelle Obama is personally writing to them? Do they just serve to raise awareness, a calculated exchange of money for potential votes later on, whether or not it brings in funds? How much of the USPS is kept in business this way? How many of those letters even get opened?

I expect the letters to grow thicker and more numerous the closer we get to the actual election (still over six months away.) I should probably just toss them, but I’m tempted to see exactly how big the pile can grow before election day.

Besides: I’m still hanging out for a begging letter from the Republicans, for comparison purposes. Okay, so the Nation and Progressive subscriptions probably give the game away, political-inclination-wise, but Fortune and Forbes should make them figure we’re worth a shot – right?

But there’s one big catch with this sort of access – whether it’s a book on an e-reader or music on a streaming service – and it’s that we’re losing actual ownership of content, even when we’ve paid for it. Things that are hosted on cloud servers can be pulled without warning or notice. This happened most notoriously with the Kindle 1984 incident, when Amazon deleted copies of Orwell’s “1984″ and “Animal Farm” remotely from the Kindles of customers who had been sold them by a publisher that did not have the rights to the work. In this case Amazon refunded the customers – though they later admitted deleting the books at all was a mistake. That’s better service than you can expect from some.

Back in October, I was really pleased to discover that despite rugby having about the same profile in the US as curling, I could stream the World Cup online for a not-totally-horrendous price. And my friends and I had a blast watching it. When the same people – Universal Sports  – also offered a package deal on the latest Sevens season, I was happy to shell out for it.

I was therefore a bit miffed when I had a friend round a couple of weeks ago to watch rugby, logged onto their website, and discovered it had been replaced with a new and much less functional one with no obvious way to access the content I’d paid for. The site was clearly buggy as hell, so I figured they were still uploading things and it would appear eventually. My mistake.

When I checked back a couple of weeks later (ironically, the International Day Against DRM) I discovered that I was never going to get access back to the games I still hadn’t watched, let alone those that had aired while the site was semi-functional, because Universal Sports had deleted all content aired before April 1st. They apologised for the “inconvenience”.

This is, of course, not an “inconvenience”. I’d have still paid for time-limited access to the Sevens, had I known in advance it would be time-limited. I hadn’t watched a lot of games because I thought they’d still be there – and had no reason to believe otherwise. Worse yet, after they posted that “explanatory” message, it took several days for them to sort the site out so that people could watch things they’d already purchased livestreaming access to – and the best they’ve offered is a suggestion to ask for a refund. There hasn’t even been an email explaining what was going on with the site, and that message went up a good month after all the pre-April content disappeared – during which they didn’t respond to inquiries. In essence, due to their screwups I’m going to end up seeing perhaps a third of the rounds I paid to see, because they chose to take it away without warning. (And because their IT people, judging by the state of their website over the past two months, are a) understaffed, b) overworked, c) grossly incompetent, or d) all of the above. My money is on option D.)

This is precisely the danger of the model I’m moving towards, in terms of how I consume media, whether it’s sports, music, film, or books. If I buy a CD or a book, it’s mine; I have to lose it or give it away to lose access to it. As things stand, my books, music, movies – they can be taken away without warning. I’m OK with temporarily renting some things – in particular, TV and movies, if it’s a rental, rather than a purchase, price. (Books, I’m not. The idea of moving to a rental model for books – and you know people will try that – really concerns me. There’s a reason hardcopy books are piling up in our house, even after we swore to try and keep them to a minimum since we were here temporarily.)

I’m really hoping online methods of purchasing content gain a decent foothold in NZ by the time we get back permanently. But I want them to be methods of purchasing content, as well as renting it – and the limits of time need to be clear, when it’s a rental. And to be clear: purchasing means, preferably, DRM-free – DRM-bound content is just a rental in another form, given the pace of technological change. Otherwise we’ll all end up paying over and over again for things we might have just bought and owned – or, more likely, moving back to less-legal methods. And that isn’t optimal for anyone – in terms of convenience and quality for consumers, or profits for content providers.

Like Universal, who, despite being the only legal providers of rugby online in the US, so far as I can tell, aren’t getting any more of my money, because I have lost all faith I’ll get what I paid for – and there is, it turns out, a lot of rugby on YouTube.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried at all, although I wasn’t sorry to have the modern wonder of a GPS-enabled phone so I could see where I was and where I was going; Atlanta’s train and bus service  is excellent, and very well-integrated. It’s the only major city I’ve been to so far in the US where they use RFID-enabled cards to load public transport fares onto (like the Oyster card in London, or the Christchurch Metrocard or Wellington Snapper card) rather than disposable paper magnetic-strip cards; they’re definitely superior, at least in terms of durability. The most difficult bit was walking around with my wheeled luggage – the public transport system in Atlanta may be good, but the footpaths are, in some places, near as bad as pictures I’ve seen of Christchurch, slabs tilted against each other in a miniature mountain range – and all within the center city, too. Wrestling a wheeled bag and a poster tube made me glad it was only ten minutes to the closest subway station.

One of the major differences I did notice in Atlanta was the advertising in the subways; it almost exclusively featured black and Hispanic faces, in stark contrast to the northern East Coast cities. This is an obvious feature of the city’s demographics, but I was a bit startled to see ads for drugs to deal with minor side-effects of HIV – assuming that the HIV itself was “under control”. The implications of that are not particularly good – and worse when you consider that my fellow grad students who help teach our university’s Cancer and AIDS course say that most undergraduates start out the course thinking that HIV infections and AIDS are restricted to the gay community and Africa. The economics of advertising suggest that this is decidedly not the case.

If you can't quite read it, it's an ad for drugs to deal with excess abdominal fat caused by HIV. I'd never seen it dealt with as a cosmetic issue before.

When we went to Otakon last year, there were thirty thousand people. JordanCon is several orders of magnitude smaller, perhaps three or four hundred attendees at most, but no less fun for that. Coming on the heels of an academic conference, though, it did remind me of one thing: no matter how fantastical or weird sci-fi and other genre cons sound, a lot of what goes on comes down to a bunch of people sitting in a room watching a panel have an argument in which textual evidence is cited. It can be curiously like sixth-form English, actually. Although everyone is much more enthusiastic about the source texts. Okay, and there’s probably somewhat more drinking.

A panel. I tell you what, if we'd been discussing the Wheel of Time series instead of Catcher in the Rye in sixth-form English, I would have been indescribably happier. You think epic fantasy characters are whiny? They have nothing on Holden Bloody Caulfield.

JordanCon is mostly focused around the Wheel of Time series by the late Robert Jordan, which you’ve definitely heard of if you’ve engaged with the genre of epic fantasy any time in the last twenty years and probably haven’t otherwise. Jordan achieved some notoriety for managing to drag the series out so long – the first book was published when I was two – that he died before he could finish it. I was mad about them in my early teenage years, and was a bit surprised to discover last year when I finally picked up the next books – written by an author hired to finish the series up – that I actually still quite liked them. The keynote event of the con was a reading from the prologue of the very last book, due out in January, by Jordan’s widow – the kind of thing that was hugely exciting if only because I never would have got the chance to attend that sort of thing in New Zealand. Fourteen-year-old-me would have been through the roof at the mere idea. Twenty-five-year-old-me was pretty chuffed as well, honestly.

And, of course, I made a costume, because the only way for me to get less incompetent with a sewing machine is to practice.

The only bit I can claim credit for is the dress, but, hey, it didn't fall off. And I managed to button the back all by myself, which, with twenty-three tiny buttons, was something of an accomplishment. Especially after I realised that with that shawl, no-one would be able to see them.

I sadly didn’t manage to get any good pictures of the many other fabulous costumes, but luckily someone else did. Check ‘em out – the level of work some people put in was truly amazing.

I had to miss all the Sunday events because my flight was at 1pm, and I was an hour’s travel from the airport, which sounds like nothing but is something when you take into account that flying domestic in the US is worse than flying between New Zealand and Australia, security-wise. Unless they’ve started routinely using those annoying body-scanners for that. (Not annoying on a cancer-causing or modesty level; annoying because they’re slow, and also taking off knee-high boots while walking forward in line and juggling a backpack, coat, and poster tube is very very awkward.) Cons, unlike conferences, start at civilised hours like 10am, which was when I was heading out of the hotel. (AbSciCon: 8am talks, every morning. True, no-one was making me get up and go to them, but other people were paying me to be there, so.)

The really scary thing, though, is that I’ve been back from Atlanta for over a week and it’s now only three weeks until my preliminary exam. That’s worse than airport scanners, public transport in strange cities, and letting other people pass judgement on my sewing skills combined.

The big thing on Monday night at AbSciConn was the finals for FameLab, a new competition for early-career astrobiologists (“early-career” is a science-speak term meaning “still in postgraduate study or in your first job after it”) where they have to explain a science concept in three minutes, using only a prop they can carry. I briefly considered entering during the preliminary rounds back in January, but there was way too much on my plate this semester to practice as much as I would have had to, and I would have had to practice a lot, because the people who made the finals were very, very good. Most went for straight astronomy concepts rather than astrobiology per se (“X is Very Big” came up a lot) but they were explained innovatively and with enthusiasm.

I’m afraid the contestants got a bit upstaged, though, when they introduced the MC for the evening – Nichelle Nichols. (If you live under a rock, she was Uhura in the original Star Trek.) Being a geek isn’t technically a requirement for being an astrobiologist, but the room went crazy. I have never seen that many people spontaneously do the Vulcan salute. Ms Nichols also got landed with the job of entertaining everyone while we waited for the judges to declare a winner, and she told a story I’m sure she’s told a million times before about how she got the role of Uhura and helped Gene Roddenbury name the character. She’s definitely an extremely talented lady – she was funny, charming, and gracious. Apparently her association with NASA goes back quite a ways – they asked her to help recruit women and people of colour for the astronaut corps in the Shuttle programme. She clearly has a lot of affection for the space program and space science and exploration. We were lucky to have her there.

And I have photographic evidence.

On Tuesday afternoon I presented my poster. I made a tactical error by not grabbing a bottle of water beforehand (this convention was extremely well-catered, may I add, free alcohol every evening oh yes don’t mind if I do) and by the end I could barely get through my two minute This Is What My Poster Says speech, but that’s probably a good sign – enough people asked me to go through it that I got that way! The hydrothermal vent community didn’t seem overly represented at this conference – it’s small enough that you get to know at least the names of almost everyone who works on your vent sites – but I did touch base with two of my PhD advisor’s academic siblings, people who did or are doing their PhD with his advisor. I’m not sure people outside the scientific community realise how much those things matter – assuming you don’t have a massive falling out with your advisor, who you did your PhD with marks you for a long time; you inherit extended academic “family”, friends, and occasionally enemies from them. (I have, of course, only inherited connections with fabulous and interesting people.)

On Wednesday night we had the conference social at the Georgia Aquarium, which was amazing – they gave us the run of the place for two hours before dinner. It was a little eerie being in this place clearly meant to hold thousands with only a few hundred of us, all the shops and stalls closed for the night, but the displays were astounding. They had beluga whales, dolphins, sea otters, whale sharks, manta rays, jellyfish, reef fish, hermit crabs – everything from the largest of aquatic life to the smallest.

This window into the main saltwater tank was as large as a movie screen...

...and showed us whale sharks, manta rays, and twenty or thirty other types of fish.

Other tanks had beluga whales...

...jellyfish...

...an alligator...

...and frogs. As well as a bunch of other things my photos are too crappy to show.

The bulk of the talks of interest to me were on Thursday, as well as a lot of posters, and then a few final talks on Friday morning, for those who were still awake, sober, and in town. I managed to hang on long enough to catch a presentation on a proposed lander for Europa, because, yes, my field is awesome enough that I get paid to go and watch people talk about planning spacecraft to go to a moon of Jupiter. And then I headed out to my next destination, JordanCon – but I think that’s going to have to wait until I regain a bit more mental acuity.

From the air, the only real difference as we flew south was the soil getting redder and redder, visible in new subdivisions or on dirt roads. On the ground, though – it’s still the earlier part of spring in New England, half the trees not quite budding yet despite the warm winter, and Atlanta is green, and hilly, which I hadn’t expected for some reason. There’s a building with the Coca-Cola logo visible from my hotel window – I presume it’s their headquarters. (The stuff really is everywhere, here; shame I mostly gave up on it years ago, when it stopped tasting good. Except as an amendment to bourbon, anyway.)

It's actually much more impressive at night. But the really big building in town is the Bank of America tower, which I walked past on my accidental GPS-induced detour.

I’m presenting a poster on Tuesday, and apart from that there are more talks I want to go to than I can possibly manage, as well as focus groups and social events – though I wasn’t sure I’d be managing any after last night. I went to bed early with a headache, in the presumption that plenty of water and a good night’s sleep would see the end of it. It was quite the opposite, to the extent that I stumbled into a local supermarket the moment it opened – before sunrise – to get painkillers, after spending the night waking up every hour to discover that, why, yes, it did still feel like my head was going to explode. Once that was taken care of, I was ready for the opening session at 8am (scientists believe in efficiency and early hours) and it’s been non-stop science since then. There seem to be a few Australians around – they have an astrobiology institute affiliated with NASA – and it has been positively pleasant to have people ask questions like “Are you with GNS?” without any more prompting than discussion of hydrothermal vents and my accent, rather than having to explain that I am not English.

Today's plenary session was with scientists from the next Mars rover, which is landing in August. Nothing about this was not cool. (Okay, I may have dozed a little during details about the spectrometry, but x-ray diffraction is not my thing.)

Right now it’s time for another couple of talks before I wander through today’s posters. The social event on Wednesday is at the Georgia Aquarium. Apparently they have a pregnant beluga whale; I will endeavour to get pictures of it. Until then, I have science to go hear about.

The real mall in the area is the Holyoke Mall. We’d never been, out of laziness rather than anything else – it’s about a forty-minute drive away – but last weekend we decided to mount an expedition and check the place out. And ‘expedition’ turned out to be much more accurate than I was expecting.

The Holyoke Mall is in a town that’s part of the larger Springfield metropolitan area and in large part shares Springfield’s dubious reputation, especially when compared to the Northampton/Amherst area. But you don’t actually have to go near Holyoke proper to go to the Holyoke Mall; it sits just off the interstate, surrounded by several hectares of carparks. (“Several hectares” is not metaphorical, either.) It’s a pretty unattractive building from the outside, with a few scruffy pine trees breaking up the concrete, but then again: the outside is not the attraction.

The Holyoke Mall made me understand exactly why zombie movies (and that one Terry Pratchett book) are set in malls.It’s designed to pull you in and not let you out again; entrances are poorly marked, signs pointing to shops are everywhere. It has anything you could possibly want, as long as, say, eighty percent of what you want is shoes and clothing. (I didn’t see a bookshop. I don’t think there was one.) After an hour in there, what I really regretted not bringing was some tramping boots and a large bottle of water. (I staggered up to the juice shop in the food court and felt intensely grateful they were selling cold water for a reasonable price.)

The place is two full stories for most of its length and three at one point; it feels like miles (and if you go up and down each side of each floor, is, literally, miles) of shops, all selling variations of the same product. It’s one of the times America has produced exactly what I expected of it. Miles of shops selling things I either don’t want or don’t need, all of them apparently having sales, and no signs to the exits. Or sunlight.

It did have its dangers, mostly in the form of a Williams-Sonoma, which is one of those kitchen shops that sells all the things you didn’t know they made separate tools for. Mike and I had a conversation which went roughly like this:

Me: Let’s go in there, I’ve heard about it. It might be interesting.
Him: Really? Sure, why not.
Him, after five minutes: I WANT EVERYTHING.
Me: Even the, uh, what the hell is this…burger pattie press?
Him: Especially that.
Me: …this was a tactical error.
Him: Yep.

We escaped with only a spice rack, which I’m going to call a victory for the moment.

All that being said, the Holyoke Mall is probably a pretty logical destination in future if we have a) a specific list of stuff we need that they sell, b) time, c) sturdy shoes, and d) water. If it was a town centre and had a couple of attractive cafes, I’d be quite fond of it. It’s the package – a building designed to keep you wandering in circles until you die of thirst or run out of money – that concerns me. (I know I’m harping on about the water thing, but there were also an awful lot of pretzel shops, by which I mean more than one.)

(Also, if I’d stayed any longer, I might have started to agree with Mike about the burger pattie press.)

About ten years ago everyone got very excited when the sequencing of the human genome was announced. All three billion bases of DNA decoded -but, of course, not every base is the same in every person. The variation is what makes us individuals. Well – that and the course of our development and upbringing, in and out of the womb. Identical twins have identical genomes, but they’re not identical people.

The sequencing of the first human genome was a rather expensive endeavour. Advances in technology have brought the magic $1000 genome closer and closer, but we’re not there yet. In the meantime, there’s an alternative: genotyping. This focuses on very specific points on the genome (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, or “SNPs”) at which the particular base an individual has is linked to particular variants of nearby genes. For example, there’s a SNP nearby a gene controlling eye colour – one variant makes you overwhelmingly more likely to have blue rather than brown eyes, but it’s not the SNP controlling your eye colour, it’s that versions of the SNP tend to be inherited along with versions of the gene.

Companies like 23andMe will take a sample of your DNA and tell you what variants you have at about a million SNPs. This can tell you things about your health and genetic traits – if you have an increased or decreased risk for some diseases, if you’re a carrier for a genetic disease you may not know about, or just if you’ve got the gene for dry or wet earwax. (Presumably you know this already, but it’s cool to see if your genetics actually predicts your reality – most genes aren’t 100% predictive, just pretty close.)

It can also be used to see which stretches of DNA you share with other people, who are almost certainly – if those stretches are identical – some sort of relative. (Obviously you share more and more with closer relatives – it trails off very quickly after you get to about third cousins.)

It’s not as telling as you might expect. There are very few things, in all the variation of humanity, that we can tell for certain from your genes. Development and environment can affect some things as much as inherited traits. Other things are controlled by so many different genes that it’s hard to parse out from your genotype what your particular variants do; take height, which in the absence of environmental factors like malnutrition as a child is almost entirely controlled by your genetics, but not enough by any one gene (or small set) that you can point to it and say what a person’s height will be. On the other hand, there are a number of things that are controlled by a one or a small number of genes and possible variants of genes.

The actual testing kits aren’t that impressive – just a tube to spit in and a box to send it back in, really.

Okay, and some proprietary stuff to stop the DNA degrading while it winds its way through the postal service.

Mike and I duly spat into our tubes 23andMe (Mike on the grounds that “It would be weird if you got your genotype and I didn’t”) and posted them off. Then we waited.

Firstly, the results included the raw data – not just the nifty tools on the 23andMe site that tell you the percentage of your increased and decreased health risks or your percentage of Neanderthal DNA (I’m 2.6%, the Northern European average) – but the actual genotype data for every SNP, which is cool from a playing-with-bioinformatics-tools perspective. And stuff like finding out which variants I had at the SNPs from this paper (Stewart et al. 2010, oh yeah. Which is only interesting to, like, three other geneticists and me, but kind of a cool callback to that summer studentship and all the time I and my right thumb spent getting very friendly with the multi-channel pipette.)

All the predictive tools were kind of cool, too – my genes are correctly predictive of my eye colour, blood type, and that sort of thing, although laughably inaccurate in others. A good lesson in statistics and probability; when it tells me I have a “reduced chance” of having a photic reflex (that’s the thing when you sneeze in bright light) it reminds me that a “reduced chance” is a reduced number of people across a population of people with that genotype, because for me personally the chance is 100%. I have a massive photic reflex.

Health-wise the results were pretty boring, with one quirk: I’m a carrier for Tay-Sachs, a recessive genetic disease largely known for being prevalent among Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews, due to high rates of endogamy, a.k.a. inbreeding. This isn’t totally odd; Tay-Sachs is carried by 1 in 300 Northern Europeans, hardly world-beating odds. It’s associated with Ashkenazi Jews because their rates are more like 1 in 30. (They aren’t actually the only Northern European group this is true for, either; just the most well-known.)

But it also so happens that there’s a family story that my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother and her family were Russian Jews who emigrated to Australia. It’s pretty light on detail, but there’s nothing to suggest it’s wrong. The aforementioned endogamy makes it easier to spot even small amounts of ancestry from this group, because you’re far more likely to share identical stretches of DNA (or, in the case of genotyping, identical runs of SNPs) even with distant relatives.

As it happens, the “relative finder” on 23andMe, which checks to see if you share significant identical stretches of DNA with other users – who are almost certainly your distant cousins – brings up a few people with Eastern European and/or Ashkenazi ancestry. They’re small stretches, but still identical. I also ran my entire genotype through the EuroDNACalc tool, an R script devised to search for Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry in Northern Europeans, and it came back at 6%. This is near exactly the amount of DNA you’d expect me to share with a great-great-grandparent – i.e. my grandmother’s grandmother. The 95% confidence interval is 0-22%, so it isn’t conclusive, but it’s intriguingly congruent with the family story.

Right now I’m looking around for other bioinformatics tools I can use to analyse my raw data – I think playing with it is going to be an interesting hobby for some time to come. (Until those genome sequencing prices get to below $1000, though. Then the real fun happens.)

Our department requires all PhD students to give a seminar as part of the weekly departmental seminar series roughly once a year from their second year on. I was technically up last semester, but escaped by virtue of being still deep in data-collection mode (they do, ideally, prefer that talks are more “What I Did Last Semester” rather than “What I Will Do Next Semester”) and the fact that my supervisor was the one organising the seminars and thus easily convinced of my lack of data. The jig was up this semester, though, and I had to present.

I’ve never had great trouble with public speaking, at least not in the traditional worst-nightmare way. This is probably because, as anyone who’s spent a lot of face-time with me can testify, I am perfectly happy to tell you all about what I think at great length, if you’re willing to listen. My worry is always that I’m going to fail to communicate the message I want to get across. This is particularly acute with my current research topic, where an introductory seminar requires me to get from the broad scale (“I want to study life on Mars”) to the very small (“and that’s why you should be interested in how fast the bugs in my lab grew”) in half an hour or less, without losing the audience. My test audience last week helpfully reminded me that the number of graphs and equations in my presentation usually has an inverse, not a positive, relationship to my audience’s understanding. In any event, I survived the questions at the end with my dignity (mostly) intact and my preliminary exam committee members (mostly) satisfied, so that’ll have to do.

It’s also good practice for presenting this stuff again in three weeks at AbSciCon in Atlanta, although my audience there are going to be in a lot of cases more knowledgeable about this field than I will be for some years yet, if ever, which makes it a totally different sort of presentation. (Trade secret: scientists get just as confused as you do about areas they are not specialists in. Sometimes more, if they think they know something about it, a crime of which I am often guilty, because a little information is much worse than none.) All of this can seem like a sideshow to Real Science, the work at the lab bench that produces the data we trot off to conferences to talk about; but it’s just as important, sharing what we know and finding out what other people have done.

Speaking of traveling, I have finally made bookings for our much-anticipated visit back to New Zealand in July. It’s going to be a fast-paced trip; we’re visiting Wellington, Blenheim, Nelson, and Christchurch, getting our US visas renewed so we can leave the country again once we get back here, and then stopping by Las Vegas for a week on the way back so Mike can attend his own conferences and I can…work out what you do in Las Vegas for a week that doesn’t involve casinos. (There are apparently day-trips to the Grand Canyon, which would tick off a big Things To Do While Living In The US box.)

I’m really looking forward to getting back to NZ, even briefly. It’s going to have been very nearly two years since we were last there – which is not a short time, whichever way you slice it – and there’s a very long list of people I want to see, things I want to eat, places I want to go. I’m not planning on a lot of sleep while we’re there.

Chief on that list is, of course, Christchurch. I’m of two minds about that part of the trip – we need to go, have to go, there’s a bunch of people we need to see – but I anticipate it’s going to be rather emotionally taxing. It would be easier, in some ways, to just not go back, put it off until there’s nothing left, leave the city in my head; I am unsure how much I’ll lose once I’ve seen it after the earthquakes, how many of my old memories will be overlaid for good. But it has to be done, nonetheless. And the people will make up for it, I know.

There are two signs of maple season in Western Mass: the first is the sprouting of maple buckets on trees. Like I said, I should have spotted those last year, but I wasn’t paying attention, evidently, because when they showed up this year I thought they were some kind of makeshift birdhouses or feeders.

In my defence, I'd never seen buckets stuck to trees before. (Don't be fooled by all the snow, by the way; I took it about a month ago, just after we had had the one and only semi-decent snowstorm of the winter.)

This wasn’t helped by the fact that it’s kind of hard to tell which trees are maples if a) you’re from a country where the trees stay sensibly green year-round and b) you have to double-check to make sure it’s a maple even when leaves are present. (Botany is, let’s face it, not my thing, unless it produces something I can eat. Everything else basically registers as scenery.)

The other sign of maple season is the sugar shacks opening up. I’m not sure if “sugar shack” is a regional or maple-producing-area term – either way I’d never heard it – but it refers to a farm that produces maple syrup and, during the maple production season, serves pancake breakfasts with maple syrup (as well as selling syrup and maple-related goods – turns out you can make “maple candy”, which is essentially fudge, out of maple syrup by boiling it to fudge-making temperatures.)

We visited the North Hadley Sugar Shack, which serves a very good breakfast as long as you get there by 8am. In the weekend. Get there much after and you’ll be waiting hours for a table. We are fortunate enough to live only ten minutes’ drive away, which makes the early hour somewhat bearable, but it was definitely worth the early wake-up.

Aside from the food – which is decent but not mind-blowing, the maple syrup being the point of the thing – you can also go and watch them making the syrup. The maple sap has to be reduced forty times to get to a sufficiently high sugar concentration, so this involves an awful lot of boiling in very large vats. The North Hadley people do it over an actual wood fire, though I imagine large-scale commercial production would use electricity; it’s neat to see because it’s a process that can’t have changed much if at all from the way it was done centuries ago. Drill a hole in the tree, let the sap run into a bucket, boil it down. I like knowing how things like that are done.

The farm also has an area to entertain children while waiting for their breakfasts, including goats. The goats are very friendly, though the older ones are smart enough to realise that when you hold out your hand, if it doesn’t smell of food, there isn’t any. The younger ones aren’t, and in consequence get petted a lot.

Goats in the early (for us on a weekend, okay) morning.

There’s also one more sign that it’s spring: the supermarket has started to sell oxalis again. I am honestly never going to stop thinking this is hilarious(ly wrong).

It's probably related to Triffids. I MEAN IT.

There’s quite a lot of history associated with the Empire State Building, but I didn’t really get to hear about any of it, because in the rush – and this was the “quiet time” of 9am on Saturday morning, which meant we were only lining up behind a hundred or so others, not hundreds – I got given a French audio guide. My French is just good enough that it was frustratingly not quite comprehensible, rather than complete gibberish. It didn’t really matter, though, because it was a brisk but beautifully sunny morning, and we could see for miles, Manhattan and Brooklyn and New Jersey all laid out before us. The traditional trip up the Very Tall Building every major city seems to have these days seems like it should be very samey from one to the other, but I’ve found it isn’t at all; it gives you a sense of scale and geography for each city like nothing else.

Never...

..eat....

...soggy...

...Weetbix. (That's a NZ-wide mnemonic, right?)

Ellis Island was another story; the security and ferry were reasonably full, even for the second sailing on a winter Sunday morning, but nearly everyone else got off at Liberty Island. We elected not to, since the statue and fort are closed for the moment – I think until October, or it might have been since October – and we wanted to make it to the Met that afternoon. Thus we came to a nearly-deserted Ellis Island; the guided tour we took had only six people on it.

Ellis Island can’t be nearly as interesting to us as to Americans, I think, because there’s no sense of personal history behind it – there’s no history of Kiwi immigration to America through there, nor is it a place our ancestors came through – but it was fascinating all the same.

The “guided tour” was more like a forty-five minute lecture on the history of Ellis Island as an immigration center. The furniture and trappings have been cleared out, but the architecture of the place is still the same, the tiled floors and walls to allow for disinfection, the arched hall where people waited to be interviewed. Some of the immigration policies practiced there seemed bewilderingly archaic (no single women without close male relatives allowed to immigrate, because single women living away from their male relatives are always prostitutes…well, it’s archaic to most of us) and some were depressingly familiar (no immigrants who’d ever been in the poorhouse or lived on charity, because that meant you were a failure. Second and first-class ticket-holders weren’t put through immigration, just had their details recorded. Etcetera.) It also illuminated some interesting quirks of state vs. federal control; until the late nineteenth century, immigration – which you’d think of as a fundamental function of national government, no? – was state-controlled. And of state vs. state; Ellis Island was built with backfill from subway construction in New York, but is officially part of New Jersey, except for the actual original building, which was on the first, small island and is still part of New York. Just not the rest of the island. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

The "hall of waiting".

Samples of money from all the countries the immigrants came from. I have to say, currency these days is a lot less entertaining than it was.

Whoever built this place had mastered the art of the Creepy Institutional Hallway.

It’s a place worth visiting even if you’re not from America, more than the Statue of Liberty, which you get a nice close-up of on the way past; it encapsulates so much of the country’s troubled history with immigration, dependent on it, founded on it, celebrating it in history – but always wary of it in present. (You know the narrative; the one about how someone’s ancestors came to America, which is noble and forward-thinking as long as those ancestors had the sense to be born before, oh, 1900. I wonder if the line will move, over the years?) Noble in the ideal and somewhat problematic in the execution. And that doesn’t even get in to the erasure of the people who were already in America.

I seem to recall the "peopling of America" happening, oh, say, eleven thousand years before this, but I could be wrong.

But the attempt, at least, can have rather magnificent results.

(Still under construction.)