Interzone People: Ben and Lydia

So I've added another tag, "Interzone People," to highlight some of the folks that make me feel at home here. Iris was first, a couple of posts back, and Bill, her husband, really should be second, but I haven't seen him around today.

So this is Ben, a grad student in mathematical modeling, with a focus on ecological issues. He started out in the department of mathematics, but is switching over to a more biologically-oriented department. Here, he's trying to pretend he's ignoring me.
Here, he says he's trying to pretend that he's "crazy happy." I think it looks like he's either crazy scared, or just... crazy.
And this is Lydia. She's a horticulture major, though my perception is that her interest is shifting to horticultural entomology (bugs that interact with plants, and appropriate ways to deal with them). I'm not even going to mention how she was describing that root tip she's posing with.

I think Ben and Lydia started going out last summer.

One of the things I love about this place is the atmosphere of anti-anti-intellectualism. In other words, most of the people that hang out here are smart, educated, and proud of it. You can learn a lot in casual conversation. Ben showed me how to prove my conjecture about divisibility by eleven, for all number bases. And he's got some terrific math-themed t-shirts, which I hope to stick up here sooner or later. Lydia has filled me in on sampling techniques used to determine insect populations. She and I also share lots of bug pictures and links we come across. "Bug," in this case, referring to arthropods generally, not just insects.