London in San Diego

A couple of weeks ago Vicki attended the annual meeting of the International Association for Identification in San Diego. She gave a workshop to train other forensic scientists in her method of determining the season in which someone died from their teeth.

Sounds crazy, right? But every year you are alive, you lay down a band of cementum around your teeth, like rings on a tree. And the part of the band laid down in the winter is dark and the part laid down in the summer is light. So by counting the number of bands and looking at the thickness of the outer band, you can tell roughly how old someone was when they died (roughly because you may not know exactly how old they were when a particular tooth came in), and by looking at the color and thickness of the outermost band, you can tell with a high degree of confidence what season of the year they died in. This is a handy way to cut down the number of possibilities if you are trying to match a dead body to missing persons reports.

People have been doing this with animals for decades, but Vicki was the first person to ever think of determining season at death from teeth in humans. You can read her abstracts about it here; her first paper on it is in press at the Journal of Forensic Sciences.


Anyway, she brought London and me along for a family vacation. We honeymooned in San Diego 11 years ago but we hadn't been back since.


Right after we got to our hotel we had to get some calories in the kid. Here he is chowing down on his favorite food: "Cheeseburger!"


While Vicki was setting things up for her workshop London and I went to the zoo. We got there right when they opened. All the animals were out and about but the humans weren't, which is easily the best way to visit the zoo. Here London has a close encounter with a "hangatang".


We also saw a lazy bear.


This tortoise was also pretty relaxed--and, as you can tell from the angle of the photo, pretty close to the fence. Almost all the animals that we saw were right up at the front of their enclosures. Just in terms of the critters, it was probably my best zoo visit ever.


And of course it was even better because I got to watch my little man see some things for the first time, like these elephants. When we first walked up they were only about 10 feet from the fence, so London was looking as much up as out to see them. One of them exhaled loudly through its trunk and London jumped back and held my leg. He was really spellbound. Took a while for him to relax enough to get this picture.


I was a complete idiot and ran off to San Diego without the digital camera or the camcorder. So all of our photos from that vacation were taken with our digital cameras. Fortunately I traded in my old busted joint a few weeks ago and my new Moto Razr ($20 at Circuit City, can ya believe it?) has a megapixel camera. Not a substitute for even our cheap digital camera, but a lot better than nothing.


We were headed out of the zoo when we saw these goldfish, and London asked me to take a picture of them. So here you go--the first photo on this blog taken with London as the director.


The next day Vicki was actually giving her workshop, and London and I went to the Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park. They layouts are immense--the largest ones are probably 70 feet long and 20 feet wide. And they aren't just made-up piles of train stuff. Most of the layouts are based on specific stretches of California rail line, and modeled from aerial photos and topographic maps. I think I was almost as impressed as London.


Downstairs there is a model village with several toy train lines. Here London is pushing a button to makes one of the trains run. Needless to say, that button got pushed more than once.


The next day we all went to the San Diego Museum of Man. Here are Vicki and London with some other primates.


We went to Seaport Village for some shopping, too. Here are the lights of my life in front of the aircraft carrier Midway, which is now a floating museum. The Midway was launched in 1945 and retired in 1992, making it the longest-serving aircraft carrier in history.

Here's our favorite London saying from the trip. The freeway onramps and offramps we used to get to and from the hotel were really tightly cranked, so even at moderate speeds inertia made us lean in our seats. London didn't like this at all, and he would yell, "Don't make me fast, Daddy!"