HT The Beach Boys.

It’s a long weekend here in France. Anyone who still has vacation days left, and most do, has put one down for Monday, as Tuesday is our national holiday. This strategy, known as an extended long weekend on the west coast of the Atlantic, is known as a “bridge” on its eastern edge.

Hubby and I spent last weekend sorting and labelling and lugging boxes. We will be moving house in a month, and need to dump a lot of things we have brought with us to, and acquired since, we moved to Toulouse, that old and ornate city.

I finally paid attention when Richard mentioned in his blog post that it is possible to see the ISS and plenty of other satellites passing overhead nowadays, not too late at night, either. Although Karen has been excited about the ISS for a long time, now, in addition to more terrestrial voyages. Speaking of which, I encourage you to vote for the same person I’ve voted for : GrrlScientist, who is competing against folks with >1500 votes so far to be THE expedition blogger on a trip to Antarctica.

(It’s winter, there.)

I’m never on the crest of this sort of wave, but following more gently behind in its wake…

Do waves leave wakes? hmm. bad metaphor. And lots of bad grammar above, that I’m not bothered to edit.

I’m trying to store up my psychological strength to affront a summer in flux – I know I hate that – and three years ago, when we first moved here and things were sufficiently stressful as it was, my mother suddenly died. Well, it was sudden from my point of view. So moving is now associated with all sorts of memories of profound shock and change.

My newsweekly, Le Point, has reported on its science page this week that aging worker bees do not learn new paths as well as younger ones, at least in remembering how to get to certain flowers. They get specialized. However, Ricarda Scheiner and co-workers from Berlin have found, and apparently reported at the recent Society for Experimental Biology, that changing social roles help them improve learning performance.

Well, I initially read that as “kids keep you young” since (a) I subscribe to that view and (b) the other social role was a nursing role, for the bees. But it’s more like, moving home and changing jobs keeps you on your toes and your mind from settling into a rut.

Thank goodness there are advantages to this.

I found it quite interesting that without too much pain, I was able to get back to the source material from a print paragraph in that generalist publication, just by following the name of the researcher, the subject (bees) and figuring the press release must have been recent. This tends to be true as well when newspapers or journals cite a journal in which an exciting paper has appeared. So I don’t really think print must be dead (at least, not because journalism can be better performed by science bloggers), just that editors should be careful to make sure that a piece or two of necessary information is still present for their readers who prefer to trace the “story” back to its source and learn more. That going back to the source is an advantage for science pieces, rather than loss of an advantage as for other types of news.

The word in French for this style of writing is: décousu – not well stitched together. I’m short on transitions and hoping it will rain soon, as it went down to a chilly 81F (26C) at midnight last night and temperatures are rising again as I type. Time for some liquid form of caffeine.