Dam, Bruxelles, La Ville-Lumière, Capitale de la Paix

AMSTERDAM

So flat.

Mom, I'm playing with fire!

Dudes in the back are about to stab us in Dam Square.

Local game is to throw bikes into the canals. Very fun.

Secret garden, Begijnhof

See, couchsurfing ain't so bad.

Into the Dutch country.

Clogs, cheese, and more cheese.

I wonder if these are better than modern windmills.

Probably not.

BRUSSELS

Night photos are difficult to take without a tripod.

Yup, very difficult indeed.

I'm supposed to be lucky now.

I am indeed very lucky. (to have her). **AWWWWW**

I Lol'ed when I saw this picture.

PARIS

Chillin like a Frenchman at Luxembourg

Pantheon #2 (Paris) < Pantheon #1 (Roma)

If a man puts out the eye of a patrician, his eye shall be put out

If a man knocks the teeth out of another man, his own teeth will be knocked out

OMG OMG!! Everyone rush into this room to take a picture with this awesome thing!

"Brad Pitt!!" "Tom Brady!!" "Madonna!!"

"No.. actually.. guys.. It's the Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo - a 30"x21" painting valued at over $800million."

"Oh... well, whatever! It's famous and I love following hordes of people! I want to take a picture of it so that I can be like the 6 million people who visit it every year. Wait, so how did it become so famous?"

"Because it was stolen in the year 1911"

"Whatever, I'm still gonna shove 50 people out of my way to get in front and take a picture of it."

"You know you can find prints and copies online for free, right?"

*Shove* *Shove*

My reaction to the steaming hot pyramid.

Do I look triumphant?

Le Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile - celebrating all of French's illustrious military victories. [Sarcasm intended]

My secret spy camera in use. "I waited 4 hours in line for this!!" (Seriously.. I zoomed in from the picture on top)

Pretty sure my feet were hurting real bad at that point.

Oooo glitter!

Versailles was less than impressive. Fountains weren't even running.

A French military ceremony impeded our way into seeing Napoleon's tomb.

Worth it? Had some nice duck outside of Montmatre

GENEVA

Good times, good times.

More Geneva (maybe), Barna (Barcelona), Roma (+Vatican), London (Fish n Chips), Helsinki (Huh?), and Tallinn (Disneyworld) to come.

More Recent

Right: yes, at the start of July I went to France for a few days... got to see the end of the first stage of the Tour de France at Les Herbiers. It was legit! I was there with a politician from South London who knew all about the history of it, too. About half a kilometer past us was the 60-person bike crash. Spectators need to pay attention!!! People die on the Tour almost every year. Pretty intense sport. Oh, and they were cycling UPHILL at over THIRTY mph!

Below: I stayed one day in Paris with my Aunt Michele, and met up with former Emory Provost and good friend Santa Ono, who was in Paris for a science conference. Amazing company in an amazing place! The Bastille was truly beautiful - wish I had more time to spend at the Champs d'Elysees and the Louvre. However, I had an amazing picnic dinner on the steps of Montmartre my last night there - July 4th. Last night, I watched the French rom-com Amelie, which is filmed almost entirely in that part of town.































Other pictures include the Top Right: picture of me on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. Couldn't be a happier tourist. Absolutely lovely! Bottom Right: Clifford Tower in York. I took an amazing trip there with friends from Sheffield, one of whom lives within 15 minutes of me in Virginia - but I never met her until I got to England! Bottom Left: Julie Whitehead, one of only two certified Laughter Ambassadors in the UK. Here we're demonstrating the pain threshold assay with a blood pressure cuff. Great way to kick it off!

I've now been to three different Laughter Club sessions, all of a very different nature. A month's time is a reasonable span for collecting pilot project data, as this is the first being done. The economic game that subjects have been playing afterward as a control, combined with the modified ultimatum game which I will detail on the poster - present some provocative suggestions about human nature, again contradictory to rational economic theory.

Even more interesting has been the participant feedback in interviews afterward, and the amount that it teases the brain to think this way on a micro-cosmic level. Almost all subjects indicated it would likely affect the way they approach how they handle money on the macro-cosmic level in the future. I can't wait to summarize this in a paper - I'm sure that's where it starts to get more sticky, though.

Since Blogger is still being annoying, I might have to do one more post to get a few pictures up...

August 1 and Done

Left: back in June, I got to show Olga Alexeeva, an Emory SURE grad from my lab last summer, and friends around Oxford. This is us in front of the historic Sheldonian Theatre, where I saw my PI (Robin Dunbar) give a talk at a Veritas Forum on social networks when I first got here.








Below: Luke Reimer, another rising Emory senior, is preparing his thesis at the Wellcome Trust this summer and showed me around London for a few days. Here we are at the gate of Buckingham Palace. I have been back on other trips for:
1) week-long conference at University of Greenwich on Social Network Analysis.
2) the unveiling of the 2012 Olympic medals by the Royal Princess at the "One Year to Go" ceremony. Afterwards, I went to the local pub with an Ernst & Young investment banker who just moved here from Canada. Lovely chap looking forward to enjoying the UK culture as much as I have!



Immediate Left: Me, also in London, out in front of an old library @ the School for Oriental & African Studies. I've been extremely impressed by all the libraries in Oxford as well. Underground tunnels connect the tourist-magnet Bodleian Library in Radcliffe Camera to some of the others. I've spent most of my time at the Social Science Library, but have also been to the Missions & Union library.




Left: At a proper British Bar-Be-Que, eating Bangers & Mash followed by chocolate digestives w/ marshmallows (instead of a s'more). All the parties in England I've gone to in England, especially with church folk, are better than any I've ever been too - the quick flow from everyone chatting to organizing a game of "spin-around-fifty-times-then-stand-on-a-chair-without-using-your-hands-and-without-falling-off," to eating dessert and singing happy birthday or congratulating friends on an engagement, then dancing, and back to chatting away... is incredible.





Left: def my best night of the summer (though many others have come close). It's hard to compare to the honor of sitting at the High Table in Magdalen College with Professor Dunbar and colleague Cathal Power (Irish postdoc), enjoying a lovely dinner, retiring to another room for dessert & port/madeira, soaking in history of former fellows in the common room, then walking beautiful grounds - deer park.

Dublin, Sweet Dublin

Hey guys! So I'm posting some of the pics from my trip. If you want to see all of them, you can go to my facebook. I'm leaving out parts of Rome and London because I want to go to bed and I'm tired of waiting for the image uploader to load everything.

This week has been pretty awesome; I've just been haning out and enjoying Dublin. It really is a nice city:) I'm glad I came here. I was messing with the FRAP stuff this week, and I decided to increase my bleaching power, which means I have to start over collecting data. Honestly, though, it doesn't matter that much because I just found out that the mutants I have been using aren't the ones they want me to use....they gave me an RNAi line so that I would have something to do before the mutant line was finished....so all of the data I collected with the mutants really doesn't matter. So I went in on Sunday and finished all of the images for the controls. Today was a bank holiday, so there was no work, YAY! I was quite happy since it is also the first day of Ramadan. It wasn't too bad; I distracted myself with the news, HP, and Captain America. The new movie isn't too bad, but for some reason I keep seeing movies with my German friend that take place during WWII...I don't know if it's awkward for her...but it's kind of awkward for me, especially Captain America....there's a lot of American pride in that movie. Anyway, I heard more about the famine in Somalia, which makes me happy Ramadan is here because it allows me to feel as those around the world feel who do not have food and water, although their strife is much, much worse. I have food at my disposal, they don't...and I only have to do this for a month; their strife has been going on and will probably continue to go on for a while. Just keep those people in your prayers. I do have to say, though, that fasting in the U.S. is a lot kinder than fasting in Dublin since it's so far up north. Those two extra hours of fasting really do you in.

Hopefully I'll get my final cross for my short term habituation project finished this week. I do have my dysbindin mutant flies. Dysbindin is a Schizophrenia-related gene. I can work with those while I'm waiting for virgins to eclose...those darn virgins. You even stick them in the 25 degree incubator and they're still stubborn. WHY WON'T THE RIGHT GENOTYPE ECLOSE?!!! I'm telling you man, the flies know what's up. I just want to tell them, look...I'm not looking to sacrifice you...just your grandkids.

The Colosseum

Gelato!!!! Yummy. It's not even slightly overrated

First meal in Italy:)

Barcelona!

Sagarda Famalia, Gaudi architecture. Absolutely magnificent

Casa Mila, more Gaudi architecture

And again, more Gaudi. I'm in love with his style:)

Hall of Mirrors, Palais of Versailles

Beautiful chandelier in the Hall of Mirrors.

Hall of Mirrors entrance. It really is mesmerizing.

I have never seen so much gold in one place in all of my life. No wonder they got their heads chopped off: must have been a fortune to build this place

J'amie Tour d'Eiffel:)

Pictures really don't do it justice. It's absolutely gorgeous at night.

On the Bateaux River Cruise

Panoramic view from atop the Parthenon

The Parthenon!

Notre Dame

The Mona Lisa:)

The Louvre

Belgian Waffle in Bruxelles, Belgium...nothing better

At the Belgian Chocloate museum

Tribute to science in Belgium: the Atomium. It's shaped like an atom, with its parts. You can see me jumping for joy on the dirt path....thank you science for bringing me to Europe!!

Dam Square lights up at night...it's really magical

Dam Square

Bruxelles is beautiful at night

Grand Palace, Bruxelles

Haha..Amsterdam

Van Gogh and I go way back

Anne Frank House. If anyone ventures to Amsterdam, they have to go here. It's really touching.

Next week I will put up pictures of London. I really enjoyed my Western Europe trip. It was remarkable, but I do also enjoy my times un the parks here in Dublin, enjoying the days that it doesn't rain. haha.

Until next week, take care.