Hey, I know her...

There's always something surprising when you come across people you know in places you don't expect.

I met Sheila Patek at a Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting. She was presenting some gorgeous work on spiny lobster sounds (some are noisy; they stridulate). She endeared herself to me by mentioning that she'd read my sand crab paper. Vain, I know. But any author will attest that meeting someone that you personally do no know who has read your work is a thrill. (And by "any author," I mean Sean Stewart.).

So finding Sheila's work on crustacean biomechanics as a TED talk was a bit of a shock. While TED is about any "big idea," its initials do stand for "Technology, Entertainment and Design," and I wasn't sure how mantis shrimp attacks fit into any of those three things.

Damn cool stuff, regardless.