What I Did On My Summer "Vacation" #WIDOMSumVac

At the behest of my Dean, and a behest she may soon regret, I’m writing a series of daily blogs from about May 15^th through August 20^th about my summer research experiences. What could go wrong? I will be in China and Okinawa in May, Tokyo in June, California in July, and Australia in August and return one day before classes start. I will be supplementing the blogs with twitter posts on the same topic @jpdowling. At the end of the summer I’ll compile all the posts into a manuscript and submit it to the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Many congressmen and women of Louisiana think LSU professors are lazy, as they only have to teach three hours a day and get summers off. I remind them that it is three hours per week, and our summer “vacations” are not paid vacations like theirs. I can take the summer off without pay or do research, which does entail work.

So join me on this un-frivolous (but possibly libelous) adventure around the world and see what the life of a research professor is really like on their summer "vacation"!

Highlights from previous summers:

I started an email flame war with Deepak Chopra.

I fell asleep on the plane to Sydney and began screaming, “What have you done with my dog, Cecil!?”

And I worked with really smart (and mostly younger) scientists and we published tens of publications together in the journals of reproducible results; and some of these scientists now have PhDs or even tenure.

To make this unique — the hash tag I will use for both the blog and the tweets is:

#widomsumvac

Follow me on my adventures around the world including a 24-hour flight to Okinawa, where I meet with an experimental group for 48 hours before the 24-hour flight back. Will I survive? Will they serve me enough wine on the plane? Will my talk be ready after drinking all the wine? Who knows so stay tuned!

A disclaimer for my cousin Bobby: In all cases the cost of the trips are payed for by my prodigious grants or the host institution but not by LSU.