Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

Although I've been attending talks and lunches since I arrived, today was my first economics department event involving mingling. It was a barbeque on a lovely, lovely day. I split a ginormous burger with a woman I'd seen in most of the seminars. (Can you tell I'm thinking about going vegan? I knew this guy once who claimed he was a freegan. He ate no animal flesh or dairy products unless someone else had paid for it.) Anyhow, the woman who ate the other half of the dead cow. She seemed welcoming and not at all disturbed by having no idea what she'd be starting writing over the summer. Met an even friendlier woman from the South who promised to go hiking this summer and watch basketball this winter with me. Met guys, also, although those conversations seemed less grounded somehow. All of the first and second year students were giddy with relief at finishing their oral examinations. I felt very far removed from that intensity of pressure and then release. My coworker said it made her nervous. Should it make me nervous? I don't know. I feel like that's the kind of thing that's best dealt with as it arises. Stressing three years in advance seems oh-so-counterproductive.

Now I have this link here at the bottom of the page I obviously meant to do something with and I don't quite know what.

How to Do Social Network Analysis

Pick any person in my academic (and possibly personal) life and they can probably tell you something about it. Boss relies on social networks as part of financial services. Friend does computational methods of social networks and whose most recent post conveniently is about networks. Other friend (update your blog already!) will someday do network analysis. Probably three of the people I met today rely on some aspect of social networks. Ohoh, I think it was related to this article about tagging, but that's a much longer post.

I'm in Pittsburgh until Sunday with unpredictable internet access and also lots of partying. Graduation! Belated Mother's Day! More birthday! So 'til later.