A good early morning to you all, from A203 at the University of Chicago.  It's cold outside, the snow's still falling, and the sky is an unnatural shade of red.  When it really snows it's a brighter yellow than any moon could ever be.  All that sodium light bouncing back and forth like the inside of a laser.  Flying into our fair city at night you can always tell where the borders are, because the lights here point up.  Chicago doesn't hide its light under a bushel, no.

I don't know what you're doing up at this hour.  I hope you're inside somewhere warm, but if you're not I wish you safe travels.  Here in A203 I'm spinning dials and flipping switches, listening in for transmissions from the underground.  I'm talking about nature, as deep underground as you can go without running into God.  I've got nine channels and three of them are speaking to me.  Three neurons clicking away in the darkness.  They like what I'm playing for them.  Some process connects the sounds I play and their throaty rattles.  Speaker strums the air, the hammer stapes anvil, cochlea and cranial nerve. Ions flood through channels.  From there it gets fuzzy.  Chains of neurons branching, converging, rediverging.  Like the network of streams in a waterfall. It's an exquisite machine.  It's so much more than a machine.  I trace it out with my sound waves, looking for echoes.

Right about now I don't mind pouring myself a little slug of gin and turning up the Orchestra Baobab.  I've got nowhere to be.

I look out the window and think of the John McPhee book I've been reading, where he catches a ride on a freighter down the west coast of South America.  He's on the 4 to 8 watch, and in the pitch dark they watch the radar and listen to the shortwave.  Somewhere in the ship's library he finds a book (sometime after the pirates, I think) with a passage I paraphrase here:

If you can put your hand on the rail and feel yourself a part of a living thing, and the ship as a part of your self, something that responds to your every touch, then you are on your way to becoming an expert ship handler.

It's what we're trying to do right here, my friends, in A203.  You might think it wouldn't be possible to be a biologist and not feel yourself a part of a living thing, but the quest for knowledge is easily transformed into a quest for power, and you find yourself with nothing but an empty system.  We're not going to do that here, though.  We keep on listening, and when there's something good we send it right out to you.

Couple more hours and this hombre's headed home.  I'll be back soon enough, though.  Until then, you all keep warm, and keep those hands on the rail.