Or at least, that is what Mike has always called statistics.
My first class of the quarter is a combination of biomedical statistics (one of the reading material is hugely entertaining because it's sort of "stats for dummies" except the target audience are physicians; it's published in a journal for emergency medicine) and, well, bioinformatics for dummies. Or at least for biologists. I expect that the people who do this for a living will look at the material we're reading and feel the same way about it that I did for the "biology for computer scientists" thing that was in the BMI course material Victoria sent me a while ago. (This is an allele, and this is a gene &c.)
Today's course is taught by my PI, who whilst talking to a student during our ten minute break, was heard exclaiming "jumping Jesus on a pogo-stick!". The students in the class who knew him already just gave each other a knowing look, so it looks like that the fact that my PI is strange (and entertaining) is general knowledge.
Also, he tried to draw for us today, for the mutagenesis screen in mice portion. He tried to draw mice, which when he looked at it, he decided could be a mouse, a rat, or any rodent we wanted. At that point someone said, "Whale!" and everyone started laughing while my PI challenged the student to "grab a pen". I have to agree though: my first thought when he started drawing was also "whale". (I'll leave you to conclude what the mouse that he drew looked like.)
It's hard to do three-day-long experiments with three days of class a week, I've concluded. I think I need to re-think my schedule for next quarter. Or go insane, but that would not be very productive.
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