Jet Noise + Dolphins = Home

Jess, Bless, Whatchamacallit, McGUESS!

I'm home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I returned from my Indianapolis conference Wednesday, studied all day Thursday, took a final on Friday, studied ALL day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, drove up to Austin for the exam Sunday night, arrived at my brother's super hyper and bouncing off the walls with nerves, woke up at 6am, went and (hopefully) rocked my board exam, returned to Houston, took my other class Final, and CAME HOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I signed a non-disclosure agreement for the board exam and I skimmed the fine print but I'm pretty sure it said if I talked about the test, I would have to give up my first born child and be banned from eating nutella for the rest of my life, so instead lets discuss... SHARKS!

My hotel was across the street from the Indiana State Museum which had giant banners advertising their exhibits and this...

Jess! You know I'm (unreasonably) terrified of sharks (one of the myriad of reasons why you're the marine biologist not me) so OF COURSE I wanted to see this documentary and see how scary they were up close and IMAX gigantic. So I skipped out of the conference a little bit early one day with a friend to go check it out...

It was fantastic! and scary! and educational! (Just like our old biology discussions which I really miss). So the point of the movie was to educate people about sharks so they are less afraid of them and have a better understanding. Except almost everything they told me about the great white just scared me more!
Here's what I learned, for posterity...

1) People go free diving with great whites (no cages, just swimming around with sharks like its no big deal)
1.5) (watching them do it is enough to make me nervous)
2) Great whites are extremely intelligent animals
3) They can tell when you are/are not watching them what your field of view is
4) They will attack you if you are not looking at them so you have to keep circling them as they circle you
5) Younger (teenage in shark years) great whites will be less hesitant and actually come at you while you are watching them.
6) A slight bump on the nose with what looked to be a long stick is enough to send them on their way (but they'll come back)
7) Sharks fall asleep if you flip them upside down (I wish it was that easy for us)
8) Sharks can sense electromagnetic pulses from your movements in the water.
9) By 'chummng' the water to bring sharks up to the surface for tourist shark boat tours and/or documentaries we may be teaching them to interact with human boats more often, i.e. they may start associating boats with easy food and this could make them start coming in closer to shore and be overall less wary of humans.
10) I'd be the world's worst marine biologist.

Enough about sharks! I'm supposed to go to the beach later today and this conversation isn't helping.

Your awesome internet clip of the day is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiUStj7C1X0&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DiiUStj7C1X0&nomobile=1

( I don't want to hype it up, but I literally could not stop laughing. My brother was there so he can back this up, later that night and at lunch the next day I kept thinking about it and cracking up more. )

As for big news: Did you hear about Elon Musk (creator of Tesla cars and SpaceX) idea for a hyperloop transportation system? super futuristic and apparently not the first time something like this was proposed but one of the boldest things I've heard lately. If you want to know more...
http://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-unveils-hyperloop-transport-concept-224638943.html
A lot of people are immediately jumping in to say why it won't work and could never work, but that's probably what people would have said about plane transportation 200 years ago, so who knows? I think it'd be crazy if some of our engineering buddies ended up on the ground floor of this project.

Have another lovely (hopefully Dengue free) week in the Phillippines! I know your beach is probably white sand gorgeous but here's a picture of mine because its got the beautiful simplicity of being home.