If you imagine a beard and no glasses, the resemblance to Abraham Lincoln is remarkable, don’t you think? Thanks to Sasha Karczmar for the hat loan.

I spoke with Dr Marie McNeely of People Behind the Science about my path to science, my laboratory work and well, I don’t know how else to put this: about me. I really enjoyed talking with Marie and found her outside-the-box questions to be entertaining. These questions made me think of events that I have not thought of for a while and allowed me to talk with reverence about Charles Darwin – always a good thing. And I was so pleased to see that the picture published along with the interview shows me doing an Abraham Lincoln-imitation. I did not get a chance to talk about heroes outside of science (Marie did not stray that far from scientific topics). So I will take this opportunity to share a (non-exhaustive) list of people that I seriously admire:

• Abraham Lincoln: Principled, smart, writes “like an angel”
• Ernest Shackleton: Leader, genius, able to maintain social cohesion under the worst of circumstances
• Eve Ensler: Compassionate, able
• Elaine Scarry: Compassionate, open to all peoples’ pain
• George Washington: Leader, decisive, insightful, person of few words but those few were doozies

In case you are wondering, the There are not 10x more glia than neurons post that I refer to in the interview is still not ready. Keeping up with NeuroMOOCers takes most of my time… but one day, I’ll finish it and post it.

Finally, here is a weird panoramic shot of last year’s biomass. Bad tomato-year is evident on the back right. Everything else did well.

What’s not to love about lots of biomass?

Although the tomatoes went in yesterday (June 1 = very very late in Chicagoland), hopes are alive for a good tomato-year.