Well folks, this is it. Chapter the newth.
I’ve taken the plunge and entered Mediterranean life. A new position in a new Institute in a new country. Same old continent though. After 7 years in Helsinki, you can’t ask for too much.
I’m continuing my ongoing education at the Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats. I started here this week, after a month of hectic tying up loose ends, including the successful defence of my 1st PhD student’s thesis on Ecological communities in variable environments: dynamics and diversity under coloured environmental stochasticity
Some colours, stochasticing, earlier this eon.
Congratulations, Lasse. It was an excellent piece of science, and an absolute pleasure working on this with you.
So now, to pastures new. I moved into my new office on Monday, the 2nd of November, 2009.
A steep pasture, newly, yesterday.
From the new desk.
I’ve joined the Seabird Ecology Group, in Mallorca, where I shall be working more on coloured noise (temporally correlated stochastic variation), metacommunities (spatially structured interspecific assemblages) and integrating theory with data collected from seabird populations. My new group have particular expertise in seabird demography, focusing on species of local conservation importance (e.g., Cory’s shearwater, Audouin’s gull, Balearic shearwater), branching out into reptiles and mammals if and when possible.
I just hope the gulls can count properly, no matter how endangered they think they are. They’ll be even more endangered if they don’t behave according to the theory…
Something I’ve been meaning to do on this blog is try to communicate important ideas from mathematical biology to a non-specialist audience. I’ve so far singularly failed to do that. I find it’s hard enough writing for other theoreticians, never mind other ecologists. Hopefully this will change in the near future, and with the help and encouragement of my new group.
Fins d’ara, i que vagi molt bé!
Hmm, Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats,I wish you luck, and wait the utilizing the theory…. appropriate.
Admit it, you’re already missing the darkness and the
snowblack ice.Congrats on your new position, and your PhD student successfully defending their thesis!
I look forward to some rigorously stochasticized wossnames. I’m not surprised you didn’t write about any earlier – in Helsinki in the winter you probably have to use all your neuronal power to stop your brain from actually freezing.
I think Henry has a point – still, with a more laid-back Mediterranean life style you might not get around to it anyway :) Best of luck in the new place though!
Well done you (and your student). Your new office view is making me jealous. My office view is of the back of a bioinformatician. :P
Thanks, all. As the institute is, rather idyllically, nestled1 amongst the foothills of the Tramuntana, sunset occurs for me here around the same time as it would in Helsinki.
I also prevented the old gray matter from deteriorating in the Finnish freezer by trying to preserve it as much as possible with koskenkorva]
This is easily offset by the fact that the temperature is an unseasonably fashionable 20ºC higher than much of Finland, and I can enjoy my lunch on the passeig in my shirt sleeves.
I’m also enjoying the fact that most local radio stations don’t play any tracks less than 15 years old. Now, where’d I leave me pipe and slippers?
1 not the chocolate manufacturer, although the view from my bedroom window does somewhat resemble a massive green toblerone.
2 hic
Congrats on the move!
It will be interesting to see whether the higher temperatures and Mediterranean culture affect your blogging style.
I’m not sure you could safely suggest that what I do on this blog has any ‘style’, Frank, but you lucky
listenersfashionistasreaders will remain the ones who decide that and whether it changes.I imagine the quantity of upside-down punctuation will increase, and the number of double i’s will decrease, but I’m just guessing.
¡Aye caramba! Some linguistics I’m afraid: Mallorquí, the local lingo, is a dialect of Catalan, where they don’t use the start & finish combo for punctuation.
However, the locals are bilngual (with Castillian), so things will probably appear any which way.
Not quite so sure what you mean about the double ii’s though, Richard. A Finnish reference?
What do you call a fish with no ummmm… eyes? Doesn’t work so well in text.
¡Oye caramba!, well, you might have a point.
Yes, the double ii’s thing was supposed to be a Finnish reference… a lame one it seems. :)
Richard W> I too think of double ii:s and double uu;s and k;s and triple (or rather quadruple or penta-) consunants in a row* ;)
Mike> Congrats! sounds very interesting and I too am envious of the view outside the office window. the research with seabirds seems interesting and I look forward reading more about that!
*not that there is anything wrong with this though. Swedish has a bunch of examples of the latter too…
Mike, re style. The worrying thing is that we all have a writing style ( in the sense of characteristics, rather than Vogue). But most of us (apart from those high priest/esses of style like rpg and Jenny R) don’t know it or have conscious control of it.
Congrats on the move Mike – I’ve no doubt that the move to warmer, sunnier climes will have a big — positive — impact on many aspects of your life. Make sure to stock up on sun-screen though!
Stephen, it’s a major reason I moved here in the winter – a slow, careful adaptation. If I’d moved here in the summer you’d have savoured the smell of cooking bacon from back in the good ol’ U of K as my peely wally skin crisped and frazzled.
Richard & Åsa, my language abilities are more muddled than a good cocktail at the moment, but I can’t think of any examples of double i’s in Finnish, other than Iisalmi (a town) or Iiluodontie1 (the street I used to live in). Definitely lots of double k’s, p’s and t’s though.
1 My old gaff, the Cirrus skyscraper in Helsinki
Double i’s: Kiirpis. I’m surprised you for got that one! Oh, and as well as Iisalmi, there is a town called Ii. That makes me want to rename the local river, Iijöki, Gum. Just so we could call the town Ii by Gum.
This is the view from my office window at the moment:
My new flat has a better view, though.
I really should be writing about this on my own blog, shouldn’t I?
Ahhh, Bob. It never rains, but it pours. Bad bilingual buns.
And Kiirpis don’t mean nuffink. ‘Kiitos’ would be the obvious one though, wouldn’t it? I’ve been away too long. 13 days to be precise. You’ve been away for about a week longer and your skills seem to be deteriorating as rapidly.
Did you mean ‘kirpis’ (which is slang for kirpputori, which is Finnish for fleamarket)?
Ooops, my sense of alliteration went into overdrive there. Try ‘Bad bilingual puns’.
In any case I must say Mike, that 80% of the words in Catalan are similar to Spanish.
Pot ser, Alejandro, pot ser.
Mol be!, Mike, poc a poc. Ës una vida boja.
Kiirpis is exactly right after a few hours in the A-bar (back in the days when etc. etc.).
Bob, you’re filling my eyes with nostalgic tears. Or maybe it’s just the memories of the choking cigarette smoke in the A-bar basement…