Week 34 of Sketches: Purple Vines
I am absolutely wiped out after this last week's conference, so today you just get a simple, whimsical sketch that sprouted (ha) from messing around with the path averaging and joining tools in Illustrator.
This one was originally going to be a very determined little plant sprouting out of a crack in a piece of concrete (somehow this came to mind after I saw Inception last week; no, I'm not sure I understand that train of thought myself). However, once I started doing the curling vines I kind of liked them on their own and decided to leave them as-is. [Actually, I had another sketch I wanted to do for today, sparked by an... uh... interesting tourist attraction we stopped at on our way back from the conference yesterday, but I realized that that one is going to take way way more time than I have the patience (or energy) to put into it today, so you might have to wait a week or two for that.]
Anyway, as we were driving back from Minneapolis yesterday, I was thinking about the two conferences I went to this month, and what I liked and disliked about both of them. They were both about the same size (~120 people), but the "feel" was very different. At the one in Maine, all of the students and faculty were living in the same dorms, ate in the same dining hall, etc., and it felt like it was really easy to walk up to a student or a professor from a different university and introduce myself and chat about research. At the one this last week, we were all living and eating in different places, and while I got to know some of the students from other schools, it felt like the faculty clumped together and just chatted amongst themselves (though I'm coming to appreciate how much effort my adviser puts into promoting his students and his research program - it was pretty impressive to watch him work the room at the poster session and make sure we were all introduced to the faculty he thought we should meet!). This conference also had shorter talks (though more of them) with very little time for questions, and I think that discouraged students from really participating in the science sessions.
So between that, and the fact that I wasn't quite as interested in some of the subjects discussed at this conference, I think the one in Maine was a more rewarding scientific experience. However, I still learned a lot, and this one was a lot of fun, too - one night, we sat around playing card games (euchre, of course; this is the midwest, after all); we taught our Korean student about the "in bed" game for fortune cookies (we had a field day with this because his went something like "your lucky numbers are odd numbers", and we had to explain why we were all cracking up); and someone came up with the brilliant idea to play the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus board game (and of course, pick out all the most embarrassing question cards we could). So lots of fun, but also exhausting - a 5-hour drive to get there, very long days of scheduled talks and such, and my entire research group was living together in a rented house (with 11 people sharing six bedrooms and two bathrooms), so we didn't get so much sleep. Definitely glad to have nothing planned for the rest of the weekend, at least!
This one was originally going to be a very determined little plant sprouting out of a crack in a piece of concrete (somehow this came to mind after I saw Inception last week; no, I'm not sure I understand that train of thought myself). However, once I started doing the curling vines I kind of liked them on their own and decided to leave them as-is. [Actually, I had another sketch I wanted to do for today, sparked by an... uh... interesting tourist attraction we stopped at on our way back from the conference yesterday, but I realized that that one is going to take way way more time than I have the patience (or energy) to put into it today, so you might have to wait a week or two for that.]
Anyway, as we were driving back from Minneapolis yesterday, I was thinking about the two conferences I went to this month, and what I liked and disliked about both of them. They were both about the same size (~120 people), but the "feel" was very different. At the one in Maine, all of the students and faculty were living in the same dorms, ate in the same dining hall, etc., and it felt like it was really easy to walk up to a student or a professor from a different university and introduce myself and chat about research. At the one this last week, we were all living and eating in different places, and while I got to know some of the students from other schools, it felt like the faculty clumped together and just chatted amongst themselves (though I'm coming to appreciate how much effort my adviser puts into promoting his students and his research program - it was pretty impressive to watch him work the room at the poster session and make sure we were all introduced to the faculty he thought we should meet!). This conference also had shorter talks (though more of them) with very little time for questions, and I think that discouraged students from really participating in the science sessions.
So between that, and the fact that I wasn't quite as interested in some of the subjects discussed at this conference, I think the one in Maine was a more rewarding scientific experience. However, I still learned a lot, and this one was a lot of fun, too - one night, we sat around playing card games (euchre, of course; this is the midwest, after all); we taught our Korean student about the "in bed" game for fortune cookies (we had a field day with this because his went something like "your lucky numbers are odd numbers", and we had to explain why we were all cracking up); and someone came up with the brilliant idea to play the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus board game (and of course, pick out all the most embarrassing question cards we could). So lots of fun, but also exhausting - a 5-hour drive to get there, very long days of scheduled talks and such, and my entire research group was living together in a rented house (with 11 people sharing six bedrooms and two bathrooms), so we didn't get so much sleep. Definitely glad to have nothing planned for the rest of the weekend, at least!