Thieves, Communists and Wine

"All around the world,
we can make time,
roppin' and stompin'
because I'm in my prime."
~ All Around the World, RHCP

Thieves
Or, An Expensive Tale to Tell
The other day some of the girls got robbed. Darimar and Julie were coming back from the bank, or a restaurant, or something (I'm not real clear on the details). They got stopped by an old lady and a some guy telling them that a bird had crapped on them or something and in any case apparently Darimar had some sort of substance on her clothes. The pair of strangers offered to help and then proceeded to produce a bottle of water and some napkins or cloths to help clean the substance off. That done, they hailed the next taxi that came by and left.

Odd behavior, no?

Awhile later Julie was planning to head out and checked her purse, then noticed her wallet was missing. She carries one of those purses that doesn't zip up. Luckily, she didn't lose that much; credit cards are easy to deal with (if annoying), certainly had that problem myself before. Nothing else major but the cash in her wallet, which was only AR$150. Annoying, but not really much more than US$40.

On a similar note, Aisha also got swindled by a taxi driver. She made the (often cited) mistake of paying for her cab with a large bill, a AR$100 in this case. But then she realized she had enough cash to pay in small bills instead, and payed that way, asking for the $100 bill back. The cab was quite dark however, and Aisha is, it seems, a little too trusting. When she went to pay for her meal later at a restaurant, she found only $2's in her purse. Surprise!

Communists
When I reflect on it, it's amazing how much the concept of communism has actually shaped both my personal life (mostly in terms of humor) and my academic life given that I've lived the majority of my life in the post-Cold War era, and even then, the part of my life that was technically in the Cold War era was really quite cold as far as wars go, even cold ones, and I was too young to really be influenced by the impact of the "looming threat of communism". If that was even around anymore.

That said, I've grown up with jokes about the source of every problem being either communism or a lack of sex on someone's part (and in my experience, this holds true quite often!) Then consider that a large portion of my education was centered around the concept of Communism. This is not as odd as it sounds, as much of the modern culture of the US is also centered around communism, specifically, the US has defined itself as the opposite, even the enemy, of Communism. In my own life, much of my humanities education has directly or indirectly been influenced by Communism, whether it's been the explicit study of communism and the Bolshevik revolution in history, followed by the Cold War (possibly the defining struggle of the modern US), or the indirect study through literature of communist era struggles and certainly the study of literature about both times and fictionalised events in military revolutions (I'm thinking specifically of House of the Spirits here, for any of my IB English compatriots who may be reading).

That said, Communism has always been an idea, with examples shown in class and discussions of the theory (and often it's flaws) in History classes. Then there's the occasional nutjob on my college campus who spouts such silly things (and I'm no hard-line right-winger). But that's been my experience with communism prior to landing in Argentina.

Imagine my surprise the first time I came to the campus and found not just one, but entire boards filled with political posters (also common at UF) for the communist party, complete with hammer and sickle! (Not common at UF) And they're not even a fringe group! Actually, I have been informed that the equivalent of my views in the US (centrist, more or less), would be the socialist party. Meaning that the actual position I would take probably corresponds to the hard line conservatives of Argentina.

I've gotten used to the communist posters, but it's still a little surreal walking by actual posters for a real, legitimate, not crazy fringe communist party.

Wine
Okay, I got Julie to play translater for me today, and I now officially hold a ticket for a bus ride to Mendoza this weekend. That's right, wine country! And I'm going with four girls, how much better could it get, right? If only we had time to hit the slopes as well, maybe I could learn to ski or snowboard.

Off the topic of wine, work is going quite well now. We're really starting to dig in, and I've surpassed my professor in my particular area, as he's now relying on me to understand, interpret and even ask some questions about the biochemical network we're studying. I've managed to learn a great deal about both simulation work and some complex network dynamics. Furthermore, my background in mathematics and physics is really helping here, as I've been able to rapidly understand and make (often quite accurate) predictions about the complex network dynamics we're trying to understand. I'm not top notch at the biology portion, but I've already suggested to Adrian (and he legitimately appreciated) network based reasons why certain mutations in the phosphotase proteins responsible for MAPK-cascade dephosphoralation would lead to cancer pathologies (and note that, in fact, they do!) I figure that's pretty legit, yeah? Anyway, the nice thing is that my work load is still rather light. I'm doing my best to keep it that way, balanced against returning interesting and high quality results. So far it seems to be working. I'm not working hard or really all that much, but I always have interesting ideas and results to show, so everyone I work with seems quite happy about my work. I like it that way; I figure I'm not really going to gain from working super hard, but if the work I do is top quality, then I'll get the recognition, respect, and reference letters I really want (plus some publications!) while keeping with the mathematician's work ethic. You know, laying on the couch, eyes closed and claiming to be working. Hey, I've done it that way before!

Okay, that's enough for now. Also, even though I don't really respond, I do read and appreciate everyone's comments. Even the one's about my foul language ;P

-J