Long time no see

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I last posted. I've been incredibly busy, working overtime nearly every week on the whale watch (my typical workday is 11 hours, and sometimes longer), and the beginning of the month was much taken up by moving and the High Holidays.

On the personal side of things, my housing situation is much better than anything I'd hoped for. Having left Brighton, I'm realizing what an awful place to live it was: far from the city and my friends, surrounded by yuppies-in-training with what I think of as malignant senses of entitlement, and a never-ending stream of roommate problems. I've moved across the river to Somerville, within walking distance of Porter and Harvard Squares (among many other interesting places), and my neighbors are great -- not to mention my absolutely wonderful roommates. I was never really in love with Brighton, but I hadn't fully realized the emotional rent I was paying there before now.

The whale watch has been going well, too. It's tiring though, and frankly cleaning up after seasick passengers is the most unpleasant work I've ever done -- on a scale of 1 to 10, where spilling concentrated herring crap on my head was about a 6, and having Chrysaora tentacles wrapped around both forearms was about a 7.5, wiping up a half-digested hot dog that I sold someone a half-hour earlier is easily a 9. At least.

But the naturalizing goes well. We saw some incredible finbacks a few days ago, that were lunging along the surface at a very high speed. The other day, a humpback calf was doing some chin breaching, where it smacked the surface of the water with its head, but it was doing this upside-down. We haven't seen as many birds, but I've seen more tuna and a dogfish or two in the past week. I'm hoping gannets move into the area soon; I've seen a few loners, or individuals traveling with gulls, but no actual flocks yet. More terns than last month, though.

I also just finished reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It makes a very lucid, solid explanation of how evolution works by selecting for populations of genes rather than organisms. Genetics has never been a burning passion of mine, but rather than focus on how they influence an organism's development, Dawkins discusses how probability and selection act on their indirect effects, which I do find interesting. Essentially the book's main idea is that a gene whose expression leads to a greater number of copies of itself than its competitor genes will, by definition, become more numerous in a given gene pool, and it's therefore useful to think of the genes themselves as "acting" in their own best interest towards that goal when thinking of evolution.

It's a tongue-in-cheek anthropomorphism, a tone I found very interesting since it's something I deliberately avoid when teaching natural history. Assigning human motivations or consciousness to a natural process is simply inaccurate, and misleading, but Dawkins takes great care to remind the reader that the idea of "selfishness" in this sense is simply a convenience rather than an actual explanation.

So that's what I've been up to. Things should be calming down in the next week or two, and I expect I'll be able to post more of actual interest then.