This morning, ACUBE will finish up. I attended the Bioscene editorial board meeting and now Tom and I are attending a talk Using Technology in an Integrated Math/Biology Course. I'm interested because several years ago, I tried to get the math folks at UMass interested in collaborating on building connections between the observations and data students were collecting in the intro lab and the math that they were learning in math courses. Unfortunately, the mathematicians were never interested in trying to make connections between data and math. Here there are a biologist and mathematician working together. I need to ask them approaches that might work to try to get the math folks interested.
The next talk is about 
using microarray data sets to stimulate student learning. Unfortunately, big chunks of the presentation aren't visible unless you use IE. Too bad.
In the afternoon, Phil came to visit and a group of us took a field trip to the Pine Hills, a nature preserve in west central Indiana. I've visited the Pine Hills a half-dozen or dozen times and I have always loved it. It doesn't seem quite as impressive having visited the far west and the east and other more dramatic places, but it is a wonderful little preserve with many interesting plants, animals, and rock formations.
There is a small creek that flows through an incised meander around a rocky promentory. You enter the preserve by walking out along a narrow finger of rock and then descend into the canyon. There are a number of interesting salamanders that live under rocks in the stream. Here is Buzz looking for salamanders.
We found a number of larval salamanders and a few adults. Here is one of the adults in the hands of Tom Hoogendyk.
We were looking for long-tailed salamanders, but this isn't it. Maybe a two-lined? It's been too long since I studied my salamanders. It was a great trip anyway.