Thanksgiving is a unique American holiday. However, since I am not a huge football fan, I spent some time this weekend building a fence. It is only 9 ft long (about 3 meters) but it is essential in that we stack firewood and keep our compost behind it. It is all Cedar and will weather to a nice grey color.

I also celebrated 'black Friday' by conducting NO COMMERCE. To some, the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest retail day of the year. To others, it is "buy nothing day." Being the father of teenagers, I was quickly reminded of the fact that I did purchase electricity, natural gas, and water.

11/19/07

In the aftermath of the USDA/APS national culture collection workshop, I have learned of additional efforts being conducted in the US Government regarding collections. The Office of Science and Technology has carried out a survey of existing collections, including collections of everything from arctic ice cores to zebrafish genes. The Federal Register description is here.

I am pretty sure that I did not receive such a survey. If I did, I filled it out without giving it a second thought. In general, that is how I tend to deal with such things. Fill them out (as time permits) as soon as I see them. This keeps things from piling up on my desk.
 

11/16/07

I went to the USDA in Greenbelt, Maryland this week. There was a 2 day workshop sponsored by the American Phytopathological Society and the USDA to discuss the future of culture collections in the US.  The workshop focused on developing a new culture collection system in the US that would allow for the maintenance of large numbers of isolates of a variety of plant associated micro-organisms. 

The workshop was pretty much what I expected. There were people there from the USDA ARS and from the National Mycological Collection. There were even people there from National Program 301 which is the program charged with maintaining important genetic resources. While their mission includes microbial germplasm, there has historically been little motivation to fulfill that mission.

My trip took me through Washington DC National Airport where I noticed an acute gender bias. It was around 7 pm on a Wednesday evening and there were about five men to every one woman. Most of the Men appeared to be Road Warriors: they all had laptops and a vaguely exhausted professionalism about them. I had also noticed when riding the Metro in DC that around 5 pm there appeared a strong cultural shift of the ridership. Earlier it was more tourists and a wide variety of locals but at 5 pm there were hoards of wonks, geeks and nerds. The difference is whether they were policy workers (suits), science workers (shirt and tie) or information technology workers (t-shirts and jeans). They ALL had their little ID badges on lanyards, pocket clips or around their necks.