I’m going to tell you a story now and it is not intended to disparage anyone in anyway. Back in 2005 when I had learned a tiny bit about mathematical ecology from David Hiebeler he shipped me off to the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute to learn from one of the best, Carlos Castillo-Chavez. So here I was, 23 and having just completed my first year of grad school, and I was learning about infectious diseases.

Now if you don’t know me then you may not know how excitable I am. I get super into things.  I read wikipedia pages on things like Theosophy for hours for no reason; I’ve researched the honey output of bees, the composition of mead, and the economics of a meadery in Dungeons & Dragons for hours just so a player could run one while getting honey from these crazy things; and I’ve worked out precise models for gas mileage as affected by load weight for a group of vehicles my friends and I were taking on a road trip. What I’m trying to say is I get excited about things. So I was like “communicable diseases are awesome. But what about Lycanthropes, Zombies, or Vampires?”

I spent a little bit of time drafting the compartmental models for each mythical disease and showed CCC. In not so many words he informed me that “No one will care about those.” and that I should devout all this effort and energy I had to studying a real problem. I listened, put the models away, and modeled things like species competition, habitat fragmentation and disease susceptibility, and forest fires. It was okay, I’d get to those other models eventually because I knew in my heart that someone would care about silly stupid stuff. And then it happened.

Robert Smith? is a really cool guy.  I met him in Cuernavaca Mexico at a conference we were both invited to. I liked him and thought he was funny.  This was in 2011 though and I had hated Robert Smith? since this happened in 2009. I had been scooped (not really) by a model identical to mine (no it wasn’t) and the dude was super famous now and interviewed by Wired (well super famous may be stretching things out a bit). His paper is actually really cool, and so isn’t this one by another set of folks in 2014. I got over the missed opportunity for fame, but I’ve never actually grown up (with respect to liking dorky things).

So this gets me to my point, I swear there is one, and that is to never give up on the thing that makes the stuff you do fun for you. At the time I’m writing this I happen to be formulating a project just for geeky students who want to make a difference in the world through small, silly increments: What can we learn in modeling the complex ecology of Pokemon.  Stay tuned. I’ll have some papers here eventually.