Annalisa en Panamá

A woman who coordinates Fulbright gatherings at the U. of Panama told me about an embassy guy named Juan.  Juan apparently organizes informal adventure trips for people somehow connected to the Embassy (like me, because I'm a U.S. citizen supported by a branch of the Embassy that does public outreach).  As I'm a big fan of random adventure trips, I was excited to connect with him; he's super energetic (as in, kinda hyper energetic).   And so when Sunday, he asked if I wanted to go hiking in the Parque Metropolitano on Monday, I pushed my math projects aside and said "yes!!"  (Technically, I said, "Me encantaría eso.") The Parque Metropolitano (link,  here ) is a green space in Panama City.  Said even more accurately, it's a green stretch that the city wraps itself around --- kind of like the Mediterranean Sea wraps around Italy. I've tried in the past to go hiking there with friends, but every time we tried, it rained.  ( Panama , amirite?!) So, ...

 Forecast:  84°/76° with occasional rain continuing through 11 a.m.  Humidity :  89% Sunrise  6:10 am.,  Sunset  5:54 p.m. I got to visit the Amador Causeway again this past weekend -- a strip of land that has a military history and a tourism/ecological present.   The old history of this causeway is that it was built out by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers during the building of the canal.  Here, toward the end of the causeway, you can see pillars that used to support a quarantine building, housing victims of Malaria and Yellow Fever. A different kind of fever--dance fever--is part of more recent history.  In the 1980's, a music video called "Mi Cocha Pechocha" (My beautiful one) was filmed along the causeway. The (5:32 min) video is here  -- just want to warn you that it's a slimy kind of sexist by today's standards, and maybe even by 1980's standards.  Nowadays, the causeway is one of the most walkable/bikeable stretches ...

I got a bit closer to ñeques, people!  (In English, we'd say these are "agouti"s, but I only talk about them with locals, so ñeques it is.   They are as common here as squirrels are back in Pennsylvania,  but they're hard to photograph. Also, down the street, we saw a Tiger Heron.   This picture isn't great (I'm learning why other people pay so much attention to the quality camera on their phones, let me tell you). I'm clipping in a screenshot of "Tiger Heron Images".  This bird was big -- these herons can grow to 30 inches tall, especially when they reach their heads up, which this one did a bunch of times for the women who showed up at this yard before I did.   Tiger herons with necks tucked and raised. How do I know about the height of Tiger Herons, you ask?  Last week, I went to a bird watching tour at the BioMuseo.  (I'd written about a previous BioMuseo trip here ). It's a funky and fun building designed by Frank Gehry, built ...

[It is hard for me to know what to say about news from back home.  Words about that, they seem inadequate.  I have made an extra donation to the Environmental Defense Fund, and am trying to think about the best ways to be a calm, non-anxious, and supportive presence.  I guess that's all I trust myself to say about that situation right now, so instead I'll write about palm trees. ] For this Pennsylvania gal, nothing seems more symbolic of being in the tropics than seeing palm trees all around me. The sheer diversity of the kind of trees that grow here in Panama is truly amazing, but for me, palm trees are the ones most visibly different-from-Pennsylvania trees, and so I spent a lot of time looking at them. I am so not a biologist, so I don't entirely understand why palm trees are the way they are. Maybe Dr. Seuss would have better explanations and photographs of them, but I'm going to tell you some of the things that I've seen and learned (or mis-learned, maybe) ab...

As context for what follows, the local U.S. Embassy asks all Fulbrighters to send monthly updates of what we've done in country, I guess so they can document some of the good things the Fulbright program does.  Over the course of my career, I've pulled together lots of annual reports -- and unlike many of my colleagues, I actually look forward to doing these.   Since there's so much going on here, it makes a lot of sense to do these updates more frequently than I've done them in the past, and I figured I might as well include a version of these updates into the blog.    General professional work For my research project, I have continued work on Double Take , the book on Optical Illusions that I proposed to write here.  I've finished drafts of the introduction and first two chapters, and am very close to finishing on Chapter 3 ("Anamorphism").   Here’s one of the pictures I made for the book: it’s a view of the Statue of Liberty that only looks cor...