By the numbers

The key metrics for the chemistry meeting are

Beignets eaten: 10 (really, 10)
Miles walked: 10.4
Hours in meetings: 19.5
Blisters: 3 (never wear a new pair of pumps)
New hats: 2 (one staid, one not)

A lovely time, but still, I'm glad to be going home!

New Orleans Nuggets

Beignets for breakfast. I walked to Cafe du Monde after Mass today, waited in line, and ate all three (they comes in threes - very Trinitarian) while walking back.

Tonight I took my graduate student to dinner to celebrate surviving his first talk at a national meeting on his research. We walked to Cafe du Monde after dinner. If you're counting, that would 4 beignets for the day. Stay tuned. Will I get up early enough tomorrow to walk down for some?

Compare and Contrast: Conferences

I'm at the American Chemical Society national meeting in New Orleans this week. It's a large conference, there are somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 people here associated with the meeting. We're big, but not so big there are not other conferences here at the same time. This year, the meeting is co-located with AIChE (chemical engineers) - which makes much sense.

A few years ago, we shared the Anaheim convention center with a cheerleading competition. You'd come 'round a corner and find a dozen kids stacked on top of one another, smiling for all they were worth. An odd pairing - a colleague and I kept being asked in the elevator which group our daughters cheered for.

Yesterday, about 15 minutes after I arrived, I ran into one of the recent ACS presidents in the elevator. We chatted for a minute about my chemistry blog, and when I said I'd be blogging the interesting edges of the meeting, he asked if I knew what other group was here with us. "Uh...no.." "It's too much," he said, as he sped off to his next event.

Going back up to my room later, the elevator was packed with women in black t-shirts. I asked what conference they were at. "We're here for ( ). It's an in-home sale party company." Making what I thought was a reasonable guess based on the name of the company on the t-shirts, I asked if they sold pajamas. No. As one of them put it diplomatically, "we sell romance enhancement products." Oh. OH! At that moment, to my great relief, the doors of the elevator opened on my floor.

I'm not sure anything else at this meeting will be that interesting or on the edge!

Alter Eve?

I write on an Apple Mac laptop. Humanists see subtext everywhere - and one colleague recently found my writing about prayer on a machine with an apple on it somewhat ironic. An apple with a bite out of it no less. Shades of Eve...

Models of Church

The City and The World has a post about Cardinal Avery Dulles, who wrote "Models of Church". I tried this quiz to find out where I fell on the continuum. And where else should a sacramental theologian fall??

What is your model of the church? [Dulles] created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Sacrament model Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church.