Science Junkie

No training ride today, as I had to be at work early for a fun day of meeting with faculty members and one of our grant proposal consultants. No, really. This is fun. For a frustrated science junkie like me, what could be better than having a steady stream of (mostly young) faculty members coming in to discuss their draft research proposals and how to improve them? Our consultant comes in every few months and does this for our faculty, and I just love to sit in on those meetings. Sometimes you can just see the light bulbs go on above their heads when they start to figure out how the review process works, what they need to say, and not say, in their proposals, what the reviewers are likely to think about them and their research projects. I wish everyone could spend some time in a research lab and get to understand the way scientists think, and maybe get a small glimpse of how important their work is to all of us. The thing that is most important for our national defense isn't how many smart bombs we have or how many security guards there are at our airports, it's our science and technology capability. And yet, our politicians don't have the slightest clue what that means. I'm sure they would all have happily criticized the guy who was studying the enzymes in bacteria living in hot springs. I doubt if any of them realize that those discoveries laid the foundation for all of the DNA "testing" and many of the technologies that modern biomedical research has come to rely upon.

So anyway, I figured I could use a day off. I'm planning on racing Rocktoberfest on Sunday - at least the master's race. It looks like the weather will cooperate this time around, although it will probably be warmer than usual. It's been quite a while since most of the area riders have raced, so I hope that too many of them don't chicken out this weekend. I think we should have a good turnout, but you can never tell this time of year. The Rocktoberfest course isn't really my kind of course. It's basically two 1.5 mi. sections of straight, flat, fast road with loops at either end. The fast and strong riders like it. Although I won it a few years ago, and have made it into the lead breaks a few times since then, I usually suffer when the speeds get real high like that. It's actually better for me when it's windy on this course because I can benefit from my experience and it doesn't come down to a drag race. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to it because it has gotten to be kind of the official end-of-season race around here. It's the last race of the LCCS points series too. It looks like the Tiger Cycling club from Baton Rouge has the team trophy pretty much in the bag this year. Being a new club, they had a lot of enthusiasm and got a lot of people out to all the races. The LCCS series really does reward consistency and participation more than results, so the team with the most women, juniors, and/or masters usually does well.