Tonnerre de Brest!

Brest, weather: not too bad, 15 degrees

I just spent 4 days in the city of Brest (in Brittany), for a conference (about: guess what ;-)  !). I gave my first talk on the subject, and it went quite all right. Apart from the fact that I am working on "clean" mud for the moment: clay + water, so I had some grumpy comments: "what about the biopolymers? Real mud is not only clay!" "I know", I said. "... So do you think you will be able to include it in your model?" "Yes." I replied (and there everyone laughed, since I sounded quite determined, and my answer was quite short). And patiently, I had to tell again that my goal was to go from SIMPLE to COMPLICATED systems and not the opposite. I didn't want to add: unlike you, who spend like a lifetime measuring the devil knows what in muddy rivers all over the world and play with fitting parameters on empirical models... I was quite pleased when some people came to see me after the talk, and agreed with me that I handle the problem the right way. They also told me that "long ago" people knew the importance of soil chemistry, but nowadays it is more playing around with 3-D models simulations. Those simulations are quite nice: they predict quite well the transport of sand in estuaries. Unfortunately, mud is not sand: sand can be considered as a non-cohesive material (= sand can be modelled by little balls transported by the current), but mud just reacts strongly to pH and salinity and flocculates (= the balls aggregate while they are transported), so any model not including these effects is incomplete (if not wrong).

a part of a slide of my talk

On the fun part of the trip: the speciality of Brittany is pancakes (called "crêpes" in french), so I told my colleagues when we were in a restaurant. One of them wanted to make a compliment to the waitress and said "this was a real good "crap"!" ... the day after, we went to eat "crab" (another speciality from Brittany), and we didn't need any word-jokes to have fun... for many of us it was the first time we ate those animals (you get a hammer to crush their shell!), so I leave you to imagine the bits and pieces of crabs flying around (my neighbour got a splash of slimmy greyish fluid on his glasses so he couldn't see a thing through them anymore, and I managed to eject twice a crab-leg on the plate of the guy in front of me...) - great fun (and good cider too: 20 bottles for 18 people!) -