High School Reunion

Ladies and gentlemen, your time is up, so please put down your pencils and make your way into the cocktail lounge. We're going to be having a little high school reunion. Who got fat? Who lost hair? Whose skin turned blue from drinking colloidal silver?

Tomorrow I find out what ten years has done to my classmates, and they get to see what ten years has done to me. All this in flyover country, for most of you - Northbrook, Illinois, and points east.

I am strangely giddy at the idea of going back to all this, and to Chicago. I've been trying to remember names off of the graduation coffee mug ( yes, a small school ), figuring out the Woolite system for washing fancy sweaters, corresponding nonchalantly about logistics with my long lost best friend. Thank God I had that reunion movie marathon to prep me all those weeks ago.

And if reunions weren't exciting enough, the good people at O'Reilly wrote to say that they've accepted our proposal for a talk at the bioinformatics conference this winter. The topic is latent semantic analysis and its applications to computational biology. What those are will hopefully become clearer to me when I learn something about biology - for now, I'm just reveling in the mysterious-sounding excitement of it all. I hope I find a way to fit dinosaurs in.