Kitty drives me to the airport at 3:45. Despite my hours of packing and gathering, I still have to stop by Tech one more time to grab my missing Arduino ADK. Get in to Panama, meet nice older biologist couple in the Inmigration queue. As someone described, the airport looks like the 1970’s.

Found a cab to Smithsonian headquarters (Tupper), and met up with Bill Wcislo. What a great guy. Sat me down and gave me thorough, elegant descriptions of the most pertinent and interesting research projects and animals around Gamboa. He brought me to get registered and find housing, when, suddenly, all the power in the entire building shut off. Luckily for me, he got his assistant to drive me into Gamboa. Bumped serendipitously into Peter Marting who gave me a place to stay for the night.

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Peter shows me around a bit. The roaring vivacity of the jungle is so evident, palpable. Everything is moving and screaming. After so many equipment failures already, the humidity here has me terrified. GoPro1 was destroyed by idiocy. Hopefully Amazon takes it back. Battery Backpac is not quite functioning. 64GB SDCard is being very flakey. Andy T2i (AT2I) scare this evening. Just bad batteries. GoPro + T2I work well together as a reviewing mechanism.

Sawing into a strange tree tumor

List of neat animals that I was told about that run around here: Tapir (Macho de Monte), agudi, basilisk, gecko, sloth, leafcutters, azteca ants, Bullet ants, bats, hemipterans (stinkbug looking order with sharp dagger probiscuses). Stingless bees, howlers, toucans, giant eagles that attack people, jaguar, ocelot.

Peter explains the Azteca+Cecropia relationship. Ants are an external defense kept by the tree. I go to one scientist’s going away party on my first day here. Someone rushes in to the party with a strange bug. Creature has a false, hollow facepart. vibrates. back is like a moth. sharp sucking tube. Face looks like it’s trying to be a tiny lizard head to me. Sort of like Yoshi.

Morning lecture by Danielle McNamara from ASU. Preaches for “games” (she speaks incredibly broadly about this topic) to be used as educational tools but argues adamantly that games themselves have NO LEARNING VALUE. She proves this by administering pre- and post- examinations to groups who play a (pretty shitty-looking*) game vs. watching a powerpoint presentation. *[they admit to this, saying they didn’t have the money to make good games so they just “gamified” stuff]

I got riled up. Still bummed about my camera. Bugs in our tracking program are keeping me down too. Cash is leaking out of me in fat streams as I prepare for this panama trip. I’m also battling against the dwindling business days in which I can purchase equipment and have it before setting off to panama.

Have to keep reminding self that I’ll be fine no matter what and that money spent prepping for ULTIMATE BADASSERY is always worth it. Decided to upgrade to a full 3D gopro. Need to capture and share footage that the world has yet to see! Who knows how well the system will actually work though.

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Dropped Maria off and had to miss the rest of the evening’s activities. Found my way to barefoot beach. Giant gopher tortoises crawling everywhere! Manatee reserve on one side, beach on the other. Signs everywhere saying beach closes at dark, but no one comes to throw me out. Get caught up taking weird long exposure pictures anyway.

Dissembling and trying to clean the broken camera

Get scared by monkeys(?) in tree. Things in woods. A little scared of armadillos.

Finally set up camp. My tent is fantastic. Up in just 5 mins. Large, airy, and cool inside. Fist time lying down fully reclined all week! saw shooting stars and fell asleep against the sky, sand, and waves.

First day of my first Academic Conference! Weirdly laid back conference. Everyone’s in shorts and loose shirts. Topics are
AI conferences seem odd in that there is a huge spectrum that individuals seem to cover between theory and practice. At one end, I spoke with some german researchers about several diagrams of crazy just-pure-math, probabilistic conditionals and the rules governing translations from different state spaces. Their chart looked like this:unnerving in that way akin to the hardest of science. Much research in AI seems to be focused on using CGI monsters from the depths of the uncanny valley to stop real humans from trying to kill themselves.

On the other end of the spectrum, were applications so embedded in shear practicality. Using AI to determine optimal shared conditions for a thermostat.

Drove back up to for Myers to pick up Dr. H. She’s always fun to hang around. It’s pretty adorable how opposite her and Dr. B’s personalities are!

Ate cheeses and chatted with AI people. Met Tucker’s old student Gita.

Got my GoPro camera submerged in water, sea water, totally destroyed. It was great talking to kitty on the phone, which made up for the lost brand new camera.