NDBT

Hanging around the hostel today, catching up the blog and reading (Alias Grace, which is fabulous so far – I love Margaret Atwood). Tomorrow I’m heading to the Aquarium, and the next day I’m going on a day tour to the treetop walk. Then Wednesday I leave for Adelaide, arriving the morning of the 8th.

I went ahead and bought my plane ticket home. I’ll be flying Air NZ back to SF on November 20th, assuming I decide not to change the date. That will give me almost 3 months to work and 1 month to travel around (like Ireland), so it should work out well. Then I can spend some time with my parents, look for a job and an apartment and get my stuff from Boston to SF.

A couple amusing tidbits:

What happens when a cloned cat is killed? A copy cat crime. (ba DUM dum!)

The Top 10 places to visit pre-global warming (from Cosmos): Hudson bay, Canada; Tuvalu/Kiribati/Niue/Marshall islands etc.; the Great Barrier Reef; Bwindi National Park, Uganda; Venice; Manhattan; the Aussie snowfields (well – it is an Australian publication); Mediterranean Spain (Majorca, Ibiza, Costa Dorada). I’ve seen 2, I’ll be seeing the reef later, and Uganda is high on my list of next places to go. Canada would be cool – it and Alaska…

I liked this bit of an article on toxicology, by Richard Cooke: “The words in the phrase ‘study links chemical x to cancer’ have specific meanings. Here ‘to study’ means to ‘to study an unfortunate rodent’ and ‘to link’ means ‘to inject said rodent with vast quantities of chemical x until it gets cancer’. Based on carcinogen studies with volunteer rodents (all of whom signed release forms before being subjected to experiments) about half of all tested chemicals – natural and synthetic – cause cancer. Based on this, we shouldn’t base anything on rodent carcinogen studies. Hit a rat with a hammer enough times without killing it, and its chances of a cancer-related death rise sharply (though not as much as its chances of a hammer-related death).”

Also- I read about a bar in Cambridge (near MIT, unsurprisingly) called the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill, where their menu is up on a big blackboard, and written as the periodic table of elements. I think I have to visit.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.