Saturday I accompanied my chemist sister to UCI's Science Library.
In a disconcerting turn of events, I found myself in a library unable to find a title I could understand. It was kind of like Lionel and Ulysses in chapter 28 of Saroyan's The Human Comedy.
The sparse shelves in the "Current Periodicals" room were occupied by titles like Bulletin of the California Lichen Society, 67th Porcelain Enamel Institute Technical Forum, and Annals of Probability. (This last one looked promising until I opened to the table of contents and found "Analytic Urns" and "Blow-Up for the Stochastic Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation with Multiplicative Noise" [I've heard of Schrödinger -- does that count?])
Then my eye lit upon Annals of the Entomological Society of America and took on the peculiar gleam of one who believes he may soon be party to the secret workings of his nemesis.
No luck.
AESA was running a special feature on insect transmission of plant pathogens, unfortunately not a specialty of the bedbug (which is partial to humans). I did discover from the table of contents that "Intracellular Salivation Is the Mechanism Involved in the Inoculation of Cauliflower Mosaic Virus by Its Major Vectors Brevicoryne brassicae and Myzus persicae."
Lawyers never give away the ending like that.
Then, in one moment of extreme happiness, I found a title I understood: "Blogging the Bird Flu."
The cover even had pictures. Turns out that Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is quite an interesting publication. Even if it is written for laypeople.
They do publish articles by lawyers, though, so I guess it's okay.
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