Where I've Been the Past Couple Weeks

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If you check the archives of this blog (which I know all of you do on a fairly regular basis), you'll see that I haven't posted anything in over two weeks. Those kind of blog hiatuses can't be good for traffic, but I have a legitimate excuse: I was out of the country. Readers with a keen eye for international architecture will recognize the picture attached to this post. Those without, may not. Either way, I figure I should tell you that it's one of the facades of Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi's best known unfinished church.

Why post a picture of this famous tourist spot? Because I was in Barcelona for the SMBE meeting last week. I met up with John Logsdon (among many other people), and apparently John Dennehy was as well. It was an excellent conference, as SMBE meetings usually are. My only complaint: too many sessions that I wanted to attend that were scheduled concurrently.

Anyway, I intend to blog about a couple talks that I attended that discussed some interesting published results. I may also blog about some other Barcelona/SMBE stuff if the spirit fills me.

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I'll second that. This SMBE meeting was awesome! A great place to host it in always comes in handy. >1000 participants, 800 posters. Pas mal! Many interesting simultaneous talks, indeed, but that comes with the field: molecular evolution is interesting. A great deal of posters could be talks, too, while there were maybe a few talks that could be posters. The 2006 SMBE meeting (ASU, Tempe, AZ) had more simultaneous talks, so I'd say this was an improvement. Lots of genome-wide analysis talks, drosophila talks, popgen/phylogeography talks. Good stuff! I'd have liked more disease/epidemiology and immune system talks, as well as a couple of research policy talks - someone from NIH, NSF, ERC, ESF, EMBO, et al. telling us where the money's at.