You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂