I was unsure what to expect of the Fulbright midyear meeting. The common ground for everyone is being an American in France, which doesn’t seem like all that much to go on. Fortunately, it’s a very interesting group of people, broad-minded and engaged. The main meeting was held in the building where the Marshall Plan was hammered out. The meeting opened with a tour of the building, a tour that closed with a photo of the courtyard in the days after the liberation of Paris, filled with debris from the bombing. Highlights of the meeting for me included conversations with a philosophy of biology student on a causal criterion for natural categories (including, of interest to both of us, the category of species); an electrical engineer working on signal processing, about stochastic computing, the uses of graphs in both signal processing and evolutionary biology, and the rise and fall of Bell Laboratories; a photographer and poet who is working on a book of poems about the first person ever to take a still photo; a chemical engineer, about the importance of learning to be an outsider. The meeting ended with a concert of 20th century French organ music. There was an amazing piece by Messiaen that rattled all of us.
I spent yesterday morning at the Paris herbarium with Béatrice Chassée of the International Oak Society, getting a sense of the oak collection as a whole and working through some of the eastern North American Lobatae. I got through all of what I wanted to today and have a good sense of what material I need to go through when I’m back up here in two weeks. Then Béatrice and I had lunch at the Paris mosque and talked about IOS, Journal of International Oaks, oak collections around the world. Then off to the train, and back home.
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