Networking

I'm on my way to the Political Networks conference in Ann Arbor. I was signed up to take a day-long course on exponential-family random graph models (I'll explain another time) with Garry Robbins, who was flying in from Australia to teach it. However, he can now not fly to the States due to volcanic activity in Chile, which has sent soot into the air all over the southern hemisphere. Luckily, Carter Butts, who has written a good deal of software on the course topic, has agreed to fill in. 

This is actually the second conference I've attended in the last year that has had to make substantial changes to the schedule because of volcanoes. It's an interesting lesson in the interconnectedness of our world, and also more evidence that the Earth really does want us to leave.