Talk Stress

Tomorrow at 10:00 I have to give a talk on what I have done since I got here. A month is not a great deal of time to have actually achieved anything, so the talk is mostly an overview of the mathematics behind the analysis of oscillatory networks that we are doing. Since I have had to learn a lot of the math in the past few weeks, I'm not feeling particularly confident in my full ability to do the topic justice (especially since the Ph.D. student who I am working under and who has spent several years developing an intuitive grasp of the subject is also going to be in the audience, likely cringing at every other sentence as I subtly butcher the actual explanations). The presentation still has a fair bit of work to go, but I thought some pictures of small furry critters might help set my mind at ease. In case any of my readers happen to be stressed as well, I thought I would share the pictures with you.

A baby and adult capybara - the largest extant rodent species.

A pika - a small lagomorph (not a rodent) native mostly to mountains in North America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

A cheetah cub. Cheetahs are unfortunately suffering from a dangerous lack of genetic diversity due to a population bottleneck from about ten thousand years ago. This means their population is drastically inbred, resulting in low fertility levels and other health problems that threaten their survival.

So, there you have it. Three adorable pictures with a little bit of trivia to go along with them. Now it's time to go back to preparing my presentation...