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Alison Kraus:

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Lay down sister!

Here we are at the dress rehearsal for Tour de Fat. It was an awesome practice, with a fridge full of Budweiser, homemade goat tacos, and chocolate chip cookies. Plus human-powered rocknroll. Afterwards we went out for hamburgers and decided on our band name, since Gutpile was already taken.




So that's Lay Down, Sister: Dane (guitar), Eric (drums), me (bass), Dani (guitar) and Pat (band leader, vocalist, bike builder, guitar)
Who looks better in this outfit? We're going to be well costumed for Tour de Fat.

Brazil photos pt 1

The view from my room

Hens...they're everywhere

The horse palace

A piglet!

Brazil photos pt 2

First day of school!

I had class this morning. Last class ever! (Any others will be purely voluntary.) A colleague said once the best part of getting a PhD is that you don't have to take any exams any more. True dat!

This is the first and only class requiring a textbook. There will be quizzes every class to make sure we do the assigned reading. Bleah. But Eric is in it too, so we only need one textbook, and we can make fun of everyone together.

After class I went to the lab and checked my DNA sequences. I have a guaranteed, bona fide positive clone! Whoop! Then I talked to Amy for an hour, until she went to lunch, and then I waited for Eric and we went to lunch.

After lunch, I talked to Shelley for a long time about our various conferences we've attended. Then I cleaned all the glass slides I used this summer. I met with Pat and we talked for an hour about all I've been doing like going to Brazil and the beach and moving. And Eric and I came home!

We stopped at Jamba Juice - they have specials every day. Today it was all-fruit smoothies, which is what I like anyway. The smoothies were cold and refreshing.

And then, the real stuff started happening. Eric and Dane got on ebay and started bidding on equipment for the recording studio they're setting up in the garage. And I got out the loppers and the gloves and most importantly the clogs, and went to war in the backyard on the shrubberies. There is already a giant brush pile, complete with broken wooden chairs on top, and I made a new pile of equal size in about two hours. Tomorrow I will collect it all into an actual pile. It felt like cutting someone's hair. And now it looks really good! Go me! Time to go get some beers!

Last conference day!

Today was very special. I skipped the engineers' talks (particularly that of one Ken Reardon, although it wasn't deliberate) because I went for a walk during the coffee break, and during the walk I met up with Marie-Pierre and Annike. We went up to the farm and explored all over the resort campus.

I signed up for the eco-tour tomorrow, and I signed up for horseback riding. The riding happened this afternoon from three to five, so I missed the talks from selected abstracts. Fortunately those abstracts are published in the conference book.

It was the best ever. I was the only one signed up, and so it was me on a donkey and the guy from the farm on a fancy white horse. We rode down a dirt road, and then into a forest, and then galloped down a stream bed and through a tunnel and into the eucalyptus plantation. There was a lot of galloping and dirt flying and splashing. The guy stopped wherever the scenery was nice and had me hand over my camera so he could take my picture. He spoke no English, so all I could say was saodage and obrigada.

When it was done I took a nice shower and laid down and watched crap TV until it was time for dinner. At dinner I talked to Rowan Sage for a long time. He is a photosynthesis guy, particularly C4 photosynthesis. He loves thinking about it and knowing everything about it.

I love horses! I love horsie things, I love everything about them.

Brazilian Barbequeueueue!

Dinner was an exciting event. There was a new squash sculpture in the shape of a sailing boat. The tables were set up banquet style, so everyone got to talk to everyone else. The samba players were back, with the projector screen behind them.

I sat with Marie-Pierre and Annike from Quebec, Sharon Doty from Washington State University (who works on bioremediation and soil microbes living with poplar and willow), and Julie Plummer from Australia and her husband Greg. Later Margie Gowan joined us, and Mattie from an NGO (who will speak tomorrow).

It was very loud and very fun. Annike ordered a bottle of Chilean wine for the table, and we discussed what all we would do on Thursday. Sharon, who looks meek and wussy, has already used the pool, gone walking around the resort campus, and gone horseback riding. She said the riding went very well, they got to gallop through a stream and in the eucalyptus forest. Maybe I will try that tomorrow morning.

When I went for dessert, I decided I would try to eat a guava. They reminded me of when I tried to make quince edible. The guava has hard, rock-like seeds throughout the inside, and hot pink flesh. It looks like a small hard Bartlett pear. So there is not much flesh once the seeds are taken out, and I suppose these were ripe or they would not have been served, but the flesh itself is hard and there is not much to recommend about it. However, at the dessert table was also guava candy and queso fresco, and Julie recommended that we try them together. She read about it in a travel book. It was very delicious. The cheese by itself was much better than the guava candy, which may have contributed the majority of the deliciousness.

Also I talked to Greg (who is American) about Colorado, and the wedding, and traveling to places like Greece. He had a lot of advice and was very silly. Once Greg and Julie went to bed, though, the conversation turned to Canada, because everyone left but me had lived there. We had a long discussion about winters. Margie, from Saskatoon Saskatchewan, let us have our say but I could tell she was being quietly proud of her real winters.

Meanwhile, a couple danced the samba and was applauded when they were done (the room was too crowded for everyone to dance, but we all wriggled in our seats a little).

I told her how the talk of the Canadian climate reminded me of Robertson Davies, and she said also another good Canadian author is W.O. McNeill. I will look him (?) up. Somehow she got to talking then about the university in Saskatchewan, and how they are establishing a place there in the curricula offered etc. for the aboriginal people. She told all about a student who had worked for her who is now defending a master’s thesis about the changes in the caribou migratory patterns, and the changes were documented by talking to elders throughout the aboriginal communities in the province. It sounds like a pretty interesting and difficult thesis project.

But once she had her diatribe the light conversation was over and so we departed for bed. I laughed a lot this evening. Being with French-type people (those Kanucks!) helped a lot. They will try anything since they are in Brazil.

Today I craunched the marmoset.

I had toast for breakfast which is always a good start to the day. Also I ate with one C. J. Liu, who works at Brookhaven National Labs on lignin degrading enzymes and also pectin acetyltransferase enzymes. He is from Shanghai, and speaking to him reminded me very much of Iron and Silk. He is the least stuffy professor I have spoken to yet. He told me how in Tokyo, everything is so vertically oriented that even the bathtubs are longer than they are wide, so you sit more upright in them.

The first speaker of the day was Margaret (Margie) Gruber from Canada. She was very proud of how cold Canada is, which made me think of Robertson Davies and the diaries of Samuel Marchbanks (who is always fighting with his furnace and regretting the climate). She was an amazingly bad speaker: coughing into the microphone, unable to manage the clicker and insisting that the A/V guy must advance the slides for her, turning her head away from the microphone to look at the slides so she sounded just like Lina Lamont. Also she had been almost obnoxious on the previous day, questioning people’s statements that Miscanthus was an acceptable energy crop for Canada – because there’s cold and then there’s Cold. And her evidence was that she had seen Miscanthus in Canada and it was not impressive.

Then Maureen McCann spoke, and I liked her talk very much. She is a clear thinker and a clear speaker and I hope to interact with her more. (I think that everyone who knows her and Nick Carpita likes them very much.) She is at a newly established center proposing to transform biomass into fuel via direct catalytic conversion, similarly to how the petrochemical industry makes many interesting materials from a few starting molecules by choosing the appropriate metal/synthetic catalyst.

At the coffee break I saw Ken Reardon, who was trying to work out a tricky travel arrangement. The conference proceedings are over on Wednesday night, and most of us don’t leave until Thursday night. So he wants to spend Wednesday night and Thursday day in Sao Paolo, sight-seeing. This is very difficult for the travel agent to understand. He invited me to come along, and I said I would consider it. During the next set of talks I realized that instead I could go see the sugar cane plantations, as had been promised when the conference was first advertised but later disappeared (because there are too many of us.)

And so at the next break I talked to people and found that the hotel offers an “eco-tourism” trip in a South American-style jeep, which visits waterfalls and souvenir shops and the sugarcane fields. I will sign up for it tomorrow – it sounds like a very relaxing way to experience this area.

At lunch I had rice and beans! Wonderful! And a new steamed vegetable, and lots of fruit. I like the food at this hotel. Also, all or most of it is from the nearby farms, and the irrigation is from the natural mineral water of the area, with no agro-toxins (says the hotel brochure). The water is really tasty. Lots of mineral flavor. A professor from Santiago ate with me, and he was a very awkward man. He sat at dinner the night before as well, and was responsible for making the conversation focused on earthquakes. I remembered how it happened because he tried to do it at lunch also: Chile has few energy resources, and some people are proposing nuclear, but Chile has earthquakes, so that won’t do. Luckily at that point in the conversation Ken had joined us, so he suggested even further alternatives for energy, like tidal fluctuations.

The talks the rest of the day were not as interesting, but I did ask two excellent questions. The first one I asked got me a thumbs-up from Nick Carpita, so I think I righteously craunched the marmoset. There are not many graduate students here, and the ones that are here do not seem to attend the afternoon sessions so much. I think people generally have less interest in attending talks that are not directly related to their area of research. They do not have the same great interdisciplinary attitude…

I realized that I had submitted my abstract twice, because when I tried to resubmit the website was being recalcitrant, so I tried making an entire new submission. Well, both abstracts were accepted, and since I put them in different subject areas, they are both printed in the conference program, and I got two certificates of participation. So that’s the second way I craunched the marmoset. And I realized that the electricity here is the same as the US, so I can recharge all my devices! The computer was almost out of power at the moment I made the realization.

There was a small poster session this evening as well, so I thought I might as well hang out by the poster and see what people say. Ken came and examined it – it is very nice that he is being so interested in the project. At different breaks he keeps interrogating me about it and trying to understand it. (He told me this morning that in Pat’s different grant proposals she is not always very clear about the end goals of the project, so he appreciates that I am having to figure that part out myself.) Also I talked with some Brazilian students. The ones that talk to me are very friendly and full of smiles, and happy to be doing biofuels research. The conference is starting to feel like a self-affirmation session. I don’t mind!

Tonight there is the Brazilian barbeque, out by the pool. It is starting soon I think. I don’t plan to stay long – I want to read more of Grapes of Wrath and lie in the comfy bed – but we shall see!

Brazil day 2

I am still in Brazil.

It was cold last night and I had bad dreams. Also, I turned off my alarm and woke up just after the first presentation, on the sugarcane system in Brazil. But I got to enjoy a little coffee break on my own.

During the coffee break I met Nick Carpita and his wife, Maureen McCann. They are both very friendly and easy to talk to. They went to the ASPB meeting in Montreal, and then to the Cell Wall meeting in Portugal, and now they are in Brazil. Nick is in charge of reimbursing the students sponsored by ASPB, including me, so I thought it important to introduce myself.

I wore my American flag pin.

Before the next set of talks I met a Canadian involved in miscanthus and fiber production, who was very excited to talk to me about pretreatment and the new pretreatment scheme he is involved in. They grind particles to 2 mm lengths and then pass them through a pump which causes cavitation. The material enters at 50 C and exits at 80 C, after only a second of residence time. Also, the material is now dissolvable and the hemicellulose and lignin are no longer an obstacle. We both agreed that the economics are unfavorable, because of the grinding and high pressure required, but he was still very excited that cavitation could have such an effect. I think he speaks tomorrow.

All the talks have a very general attitude towards the science, which is frustrating because I think all of us are well acquainted with the generalities. I want to see particulars! I will understand what they are talking about! There were short talks in the afternoon selected from abstracts, and these were far more specific about research results rather than scientific trends.

I was able to have rice and beans both for lunch and dinner. Whoop! There is always an impressive array of antipasta – meat and cheese cubes and olives (but no nuts! And this is Brazil!). Also there is a fine assortment of desserts of different fruit flavors. They are all gooey and creamy, not many cookies or cakes or chocolates. Also there is always fresh pineapple and fresh mango.

There is a giant fruit sculpture present at every meal which appears to be two phoenixes or other winged creatures, carved out of a green-skinned, orange-fleshed melon, with beet rosettes for decoration. I hope it is still up tomorrow so I can take a picture of it.

I hung my poster during the afternoon coffee break, when I realized that I had interpreted the dimensions backwards, and the poster should have been taller than it was wide. I later discovered I was not the only American to have made this mistake, which made me feel less embarrassed. As it was the poster seemed to be huge, because it had to have a spot all to itself on the back wall – none of the normal poster locations could accommodate it.

The poster session was right before dinner, and was very poorly attended. It also was not noted on the program schedule. However, I got to explain the idea to several cell wall biologists, and they understood it, and they didn’t think it was bunk. This was very encouraging. Nick Carpita pointed out that the size of Tdtomato might be responsible for the signal retention after SDS treatment – the fluorescent protein may be too large to dissipate through the cell wall pores regardless of whether it is anchored.

I had dinner with Nick Carpita and Maureen McCann and Ariel N--- from Santiago. We talked mostly about earthquakes and tsunamis, and a little bit about exo-glucuronidases. At that point in the conversation I excused myself to go to bed. It feels very late very early, because the sun starts going down between 5:30 and 6. There are no clocks anywhere, and I am keeping my cell phone off to save the battery, so it is hard to know what time it is except when they announce it is meal time. At any rate, the sun was totally down before 7.

Now I know a few more conference people. Tomorrow I hope to meet even more. It is very enlivening to describe research to people who are understanding it. For example, I now have the idea to submit my onion gene gun technique to JOVE, the journal of online visual experiments. Hurray for the Congress!

Brazil day 1!

Hello from Brazil!

First, I got to Atlanta. The flight from Atlanta for Sao Paolo had been cancelled the day before, so the boarding area was in chaos. But everyone important (me) made it on to the plane. The fellow sitting across the aisle from me helped me put my bags up, so we made conversation for the beginning of the flight. He is an auditor for a company that sells car parts and batteries to car companies.

The flight was long, of course. My legs were most uncomfortable, and somehow there was no tonic water available. I ended up watching an awful movie starring Mel Gibson as crazy Boston detective. His daughter works in the nuclear industry and is dying of radiation poisoning. Mel Gibson eventually dies of the same. He gives an excellent repeat performance of a grieving William Wallace in Braveheart.

Then we were in Sao Paolo! The line for immigration was long, and in it I spotted Ken Reardon. Yay! I also kept spotting the chatty fellow from the flight. Once he pretended that he was going to trip me as I walked past. He was with his girlfriend, too.

Once the lines were all cleared I met up with Ken and the drivers to the hotel and the other speakers. My name was on no list for any shuttle, but Ken had arranged a private car for himself, and agreed that I could ride with him. Yay again!

The drive out of Sao Paolo was incredible. There are really shantytowns there. All the apartments had laundry hanging outside, and the walls were brightly colored. From far away, though, the apartments looked like so much trash littering the hills. Right up close you could see water-carved channels going down the hill, full of real trash. People were riding bikes in the shoulder of the highway – like Lance Armstrong style, not going to the beer store style. I also saw many kites. They had great long sparkly tails, and the kite-flyers made them dance like birds.

Ken and I chatted about our impressions of Brazil. He was a little disappointed to be staying at a resort the whole time. I was amazed that most of the signs were hand-painted, and the different fonts used were all sans-serif. Then we napped.

We awoke to a scene a little like driving through rural Maryland – big hills, with fields on either side of the road full of some crop. The hills are bigger here than Maryland though, seeming more like baby mountains than grandparent mountains. And the crop was all sugarcane. Some fields were full of tall cane; others were burnt to the ground, and others still were just beginning to regrow. We saw one sugarcane processing plant in the middle of the fields. It just looked industrial.

And we got there. Aaaaah. The hotel is enormous, many small buildings on a large campus. There is a swimming pool, and a swimming pool bar. There are horses to ride as well. My room has three single beds and a private balcony. The weather is not very humid here, surprisingly, and it was only about 70F today. Right now it is much cooler, and good sleeping weather. I wonder if my worries about bugs were goofy since it is winter now, or maybe the bugs are year-round biters.

There are trees covered only in neon yellow or neon orange flowers. There are others that seem to be overgrown azaleas (pink), and rhododendrons (purple). Also some commonly grown houseplants, like philodendron, are growing in the wild here.

Once in my room I took a shower (with solar heated water!) and a nap. When I woke up I couldn’t get out of my room because I couldn’t figure out how to unlock the inside lock. A hotel lady came and stood outside the door until I did figure it out.

Then there was the opening remarks, and a talk about sugarcane, and dinner. In the dining room was a samba guitarist and a drummer (with hand drums). Behind them on a big projector screen was movies of other musicians playing, presumably also playing samba. Ken ate with me, and I finally got some tonic water. Here it is delicious, flavored with lemon as well as quinine. There were only meat and cheese and fruit, and no vegetables at all. We had a very pleasant dinner anyway, and now I am back in my room again, getting ready for bed!

Tomorrow is a long day of talks. I am excited but also lonely. I wish I could come back to Brazil as a real tourist. Portuguese is nice to listen to. I say “obrigado” as often as possible (“thank you”), just to practice a little Portuguese.

You engrish is fuking seek.