Conferences

I attended the International Asiatic Black Bear Symposium that was held here this week.  I got to hear talks from experts on black bears from all different aspects of research.  Besides the tracking and genetic stuff you'd expect, there are also people analyzing heavy carbon and nitrogen ratios to determine what kind of foods bears ate.  I'm getting interested in what people can do with biology and geography.  Biogeography.  I want to look into that.

Conferences are great.  You get a lot of free food.  That's one of the main reasons why this office was empty during the conference: free food.  The speakers are interesting, if you can understand them.  The conference was in English, and sometimes I couldn't understand the speakers.  I don't know how much my Chinese coworkers understood.  The same as if I went to a conference in Chinese and most everybody spoke Chinese funny because it was their second language, I guess.

But you know what annoys me about conferences?  There always seems to be someone in charge of the microphone who is super paranoid about it and has to mess with it.  I have noticed this is common in Taiwan and this event was no exception.  This one guy would always creep on stage slowly and then wrangle with the microphone stand on the podium, all the while bent over as if he had something to hide behind.  I think he must have chickened out halfway through readjusting the microphone, because he always ran off stage leaving the microphone pretty much in the same position as it was before.  All the while with the bewildered speaker (and audience) watching.  And there was this one broken microphone that made a lot of static that they kept giving to people.  I think they kept getting all the microphones mixed up and forgot which one was the bad one.