Monday:
I arrive at Bar Harbor airport, and Clare drives me back to MDIBL (Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory). After lunch at the MDIBL Co-op, we sign in and head out to hunt down our lab.
Yup, that’s the lab. It looks more like a shed of some sort than anything else, but fortunately, the insides are in much better condition.
I’ve just completed a class in C++, but I’ve never learnt C, so today, I’m reading a C textbook and making a list of the major differences between C and C++.
Tuesday:
Clare gives me a website with some C exercises that she uses on her students and I spend the rest of the day working on them.
Wednesday:
I’ve finished the C exercises and so I spend the day looking at some slides for a presentation Clare did on Genetic Algorithms and poking around with Genesis.
During lunch, we listen to a talk on thermal regulation in lobsters and crabs. Most of it is beyond me, but I do learn that lobsters adapt to drastic temperature changes much more quickly than crabs do. Also, the reason there are more lobsters during certain seasons seems to be due more to the fact that fishermen prefer to do their lobster-catching in better weather.
Thursday:
I spend the morning poking around more with Genesis, and the afternoon wading through a Bioinformatics text. I make the most of the sun’s brief appearance and take the textbook outside, where there’s an amazing view of the ocean.
Friday:
Pretty much the same as Thursday, only with a different Bioinformatics text.
Summary:
This week has mostly been about settling in and getting to know what I’ll be working with for the rest of the summer. All I’ve been doing is reading and absorbing, so I don’t really have anything to report as far as findings or results go.
