Ah, grad school

Too many papers
Not enough time to read them
This calls for time warp

lol oh dear

Dear Vivarium Staff,

Please check the mice before deciding to leave nesting material in their cages. Those male mice are not pregnant, they are just obese. Allowing them to make giant nests that stuff up half of the cage will not solve their case of dystocia, since they don't have dystocia. Baby mice do not come from nesting fluffs.

Sincerely,

S

Le whhhhhhhhyy

I was originally going to write a post about the new Opera browser that's coming out and how shiny it is, and possibly something about the scientists petitioning for more areas of the ocean being allocated as national parks / conserved areas (along the lines of the coral reef near Australia). Then I got on the bus (came home early to organize things and make lists) and saw one of my classmates that I haven't seen in a while. Turns out? Her lab moved to Germany. She didn't advertise the information and all, so most of us just assumed that she's banging her head against a manuscript or something (given that she's one year my senior academically, it's about the right time frame to start doing that), but that is very much not the case. She had the option of either staying on campus or moving to Germany and chose to move, which meant that she had to accept a terminal masters from our program and is now starting a PhD program in neuroscience at a university in Germany.

She was back for the SfN conference and is staying until just after Thanksgiving, since her family is here. Germany, I was told, is cold. It's already started snowing there. (Admittedly, after south Cal, weather anywhere else in the world is going to be worse in comparison.) I was also told that I should take advantage of the lovely whether here and do something, such as go to the beach. (This was said with no irony of whatsoever, despite of the downpour last weekend, so I am proven once again how utterly spoiled I am by the climate here.)

Mostly I'm still trying to process that she is now attending grad school in Germany. This is the sort of thing that, in our grad program, has the status of being the story that you heard from someone who's heard from someone. Encountering it so directly, as it happens to someone I occasionally hang out with during the program gatherings, is very disconcerting.

Come to think of it

Organizing music files. I wonder if there is such thing as a music tagging system that functions like Delicious or Blogspot, in the sense that you have one item, be it a web page or an entry, that has multiple tags so that you can pull up that one item multiple times depending on which tag you're interested in. That would make more sense than my attempt to organize things by artist or album, because rather than playing everything by an album or an artist, I'm much more prone to be in the mood for a specific type / theme of music. I'd like to be able to pull up, for instance, "The Promise of the World" on a day when I feel like listening to soundtracks from movies on shuffle AND on the day when I feel like listening to different types of waltz. And then Bon Jovi will probably get sorted under "loud" and "road trip" and possibly "Lunatics" while the Animaniac's "Ingredients" will get filed under "sound track", "nerd songs", and "ear worms" (the last along with the songs "Cows In the Morning" from BLACK BOOKS and the ...whatever that song is called that goes "Buono tomato buono tomato buono buono oh! Tomato!" -- because it eats your brain). That would be nice. Does that exist? Because right now my searches for tagging systems via the Magic of Google only gives me "tagging" as in via artist or album which is...still useful, but not what I have in mind.

Got caught in downpour earlier this morning. Everything's wet. Still coughing.

Postdoc's baby's born! Healthy baby girl. Everyone's fine.

Wait, I'm confused

Considering that I am doing dissertation on biomedical science, I consider myself to be, when compared to the general public, relatively well-informed on matters having to do with -- well -- biomedical science.

This appears to not help at all in instances where I flip through the catalogs in the mail and find ones advertising all organic food stuff of some Very Healthy Name or other, proclaiming to feature both probiotics and prebiotics as part of their ingredients.

My first thought was: "What the hell is pro/prebiotic?" Probiotic, by its roots, should mean "for life". I like life. That is something I can get behind. But what is "before life?" Hot magma and UV radiation? On a pizza? I think I'll pass.

Being the good little (obsessive-compulsive) grad student that I am, I immediately went to look it up on the magical all-knowing internet. Wikipedia informed me that probiotic is a term coined to refer to microorganisms that are thought to benefit their host, so...a kind of mutualism like our lovely gut bacteria that digests fiber for us to provide some vitamins. Okay. Prebiotic, on the other hand, seem to mean indigestible components of food that stimulate those probiotics and make THEM healthier (which theoretically will also make us, their hosts, healthier). Sounds good, but this brings me up to a very puzzling discovery:

There's a particular food ad that claims to blend grain and prebiotic fibers, for nutrition and taste, which is all very well. Then it goes on to describe its ingredients as consisting of cheese, veggies, meat, and probiotics.

...so um, are they actively blending in gut microbes and such with their food ingredients? How do they decide which microbes because let me tell you, incorrect sampling and administration of the microflora our bodies carry can cause a lot of problems. (For example, since we were talking about the gut: traveler's diarrhea is a fairly mild case of something going wrong.) Further more, given that this is food that needs to be cooked, and cooking (thoroughly) kills of most of the microbes, if people are going to eat this cooked, the dead probiotics aren't going to be doing us a whole lot of good on the account of them being dead. Unless they sprinkle on probiotics with your mustard and mayo at the end ("I'd like pickles, no onions, and a dash of probiotics with that, please."), which strikes me as, well, surreal. Wholly impractical. Also, going back to point number one above, somewhat dangerous.

Am I missing something here?

Dear diary

Dear Diary,

I have just noticed this by my Fedora 13 install Firefox spell-checker appears to think that it's British. It keeps insisting on the "u"s. I am pretty sure that I'm doing USA English with the OS, so I am, as of now, mostly confused. (Firefox here has a spell-check option but I don't know where the reference dictionary is, or how to change it.) My spelling is shaky to begin with, dear Firefox. Please stop confusing it.

Sincerely,

S

Carry on, gang

Today is a national holiday, which means that my class was canceled and that the labs will be locked for those without access cards. However, that does not mean that experiments have stopped or that people associated with experiments get the day off. Consequently I'm going to lab soon and there's a seminar that I'm attending at noon today but hey, free parking on campus!

...which is why I'm currently at home still. I meant to get a bit more sleep in, but when I first woke up this morning I wasn't able to pull out "Today's a Holiday" out of the foggy recesses of my mind and so automatically started blocking out my day in terms of what I must do, when. By the time I got to afternoon and class I realized that there's no class today, my memory caught up, but all gears are running already and my blood pressure is high enough (did I mention I missed the poster printing deadline by 15 minutes yesterday, partly due to an unexpectedly long lab meeting? And that today the printing services are closed?) that I ended up getting up early anyway.

The direct consequence of which is that now I have time to drink tea and... ponder about life. Or something.

(Erk erk I hope the incubation I started last night went okay and I'll have to leave the conference early Monday after all to go to lab to image something and possibly pick up my poster.)

For those of you that I'd initially contacted about FoldIt, today is three months after that round of email and the original deadline for everyone to go through the tutorials. I only know the usernames of two others and no one besides me seemed to have finished the tutorials. Given that I do (to varying degrees) know what everyone's going through right now and I am also aware (to varying degrees) that the years after this will, for most people, get even more insane, not less, I think the most reasonable thing will be to just drop this group project bit. If anyone ever finishes the tutorials within the next few years (at some point at least three months before I start writing my dissertation -- and trust me, you'll know when that time arrives because of the verbal flailing I will commit here) and still feel like giving this a shot...you all know how to reach me.

I have discovered that I definitely now own more than two gigs of music, as that my mp3 player declared itself to be full. I should probably go through and delete all the ones that it doesn't play but that requires more dedication and patience than I can spare at the moment. I have to deal with mice today. I wonder if any will try to bite me?

Off and away! (And maybe if I go to work a bit earlier than usual I can leave a bit earlier than usual? Not that it works that way, but a girl can hope.)

Salsa; the answer is salsa

Today is the start of Radioactivity, Round II. In between all the stuff I went over my poster with my PI and he'd like me to move around and change about half of the figures. Given that the conference technically starts Saturday, I want to be able to pick up the finished poster on Friday. Given the on-campus queue right now, that means I will have to finish my poster by...tomorrow.

I wasn't very happy with this and, at one point where the PI was suggesting other ways for me to analyze the data I flat out told him that I was just going to toss out the other two figures because I don't have the time to deal with them on top of the experiments that I'm running this week. Astonishingly, he didn't lose his temper then, either. I have passed the "talk about data without releasing sensitive data" part, at least -- all the information that could theoretically lead to limelight-stealing has been censored.

Now I just have to shuffle stuff around and make sure all the fonts are the right fonts and size and everything lines up properly. Dammit. I have spent far too many hours doing formatting on powerpoint slides this quarter. I haven't spent this much time eyeballing alignments and making sure the hues of background match since when I did web-designing back in the days. And that was without juggling two classes and four different experiments in three different species. It makes me long for the days when our frustration can be relieved by hauling paper out to the barbecue place by the pool and setting them on fire. I can't set Daemon on fire -- there's too much useful stuff on here and not to mention I'm quite fond of Daemon, what with it being my first laptop. I can draw things burning in graphic detail -- but that requires time, which I'm a bit short on. Thus, as of today, I'm mostly reduced to glaring murder at my slides and sighing.

C'est la vie, right?

Speaking of which: R.I.P., Ivy. The IT (finally remembered to go in today, yes) diagnosis is "most likely hardware problem" and I was informed that it'd cost more to fix it than to just get another netbook. Dad will probably want it for the spare parts, if nothing else, because that's what he does. But he might want to play around with it, back where all his tools are, so we'll see -- there is yet hope for a functional Frankenivy.

Lara sent me the transcript of the closing speech of the Steward / Colbert Rally, which was pretty awesome and also allowed me to track down the collection of truly hilarious signs people were carrying for the event. My current favorite was the one that proclaimed "Guacamole", and then included the ingredients for guacamole. I was remarking to Wendy that perhaps world peace can be achieved through food, and doesn't avocado make everything better? Then after a brief sorting out we realized that neither of us actually eat avocado, thereby provoking outrage from the guys next bay over who heard us, who demanded to know what on earth do we eat our chips with...

...random food conversations are kind of fun, actually, and currently the highlight of the day.

...well that, and the fact that the postdoc's baby's due today! We are all sort of anticipatory today but alas, unlike the other two babies, this baby's parents don't utilize Facebook at all.... (This is the last baby expected in our lab, by the way.)

...okay

Catching up on the internet between cleaning and found that underwater rivers do exist.

Really. WTF nature?

Yesterday I discovered that I left Daemon's power cord at the Lab, so despite of my resolve to Not Be In Lab At All this weekend I had to pop in to grab the charger. Fail, yes. It is, coincidentally, really hard to present data when you can't present data. (This is apparently a valid worry when presenting at large conferences about unpublished research, as that, despite of being considered unethical, people have stolen information and used it to "scoop" other's research.) (For those not familiar with the academia: your standing and survival depend on publications. Your publications is ranked by impact. Your impact decreases exponentially with each paper someone else besides you publish on similar / identical research.)

(It's perfectly possible for someone to be scooped without any data-stealing to occur, I should mention. Especially if you are working on a really popular topic, such as application of stem cells in neurodegenerative disease. Or diabetes. Heck, anything that involves application of stem cells.)

I am twitchy and crazy and the insanity is surely spreading

Dear diary,

Today we (that is, my labmates and I) discovered that our lab may have an imaginary member. You know? Like an imaginary friend? Except in lab. Listed on our approved personnel form for radio-isotopes. We have checked and this "Joseph" person is someone that no one knows and has never, at any point during the existence of our lab, worked in our lab anyway. To top it all off his name is high lighted in the form that was sent to us by the radioactivity portion of the health & safety organization on campus. We pondered this. Perhaps there is an imaginary lab member lurking around which would serve as a better explanation for the missing pens, odd incubator noises, and migrating hole punchers than simply a lab poltergeist. Perhaps he's the Canada of Hetalia, doomed to invisibility while the rest of us wondered at our vague senses of unease.

We do not know the answer yet, though we have emailed to inquire after this mysterious Mr. Joseph. Friday afternoon paperwork can be a source of intrigue and mystery (not of the confused by bureaucratic language sort) apparently. Who knew?

Sincerely,

S

Oh the weepings you'll...weep

I spent a good portion of Sunday thinking about cytosol. It is the most bizarre thing that popped up in my mind while I was drinking tea and infected itself on my brain. It's not even really related to my project -- or at least no more related to my project than anything in the field of biology is, inherently, related to the innards of a cell. Instead I found the word scrolling through my brain like one of those neon marquees that you never see outside of downtown while I drove to lab, it flashed most appalling while I was trying to spot my 2mm long transparent fish embryos floating in their clear fixative (computer no longer being the only source of eye strain these days), and bouncing around like an echo while I drove to the groceries. At which point I was promptly distracted by the fact that the music playing through the speakers seem to contain rather more screaming than usual. It took me a few seconds too long to remember that, oh right, Halloween. And then I got pomegranates, thought about Hades -- and "Myth of Devotion" is a lovely poem, by the way -- and tried to finish putting together my figures.

(I failed. I finished that in lab today, though I still haven't quite figured out how to diagram my results from Tukey's test without overwhelming my graphs with lines. I despise statistics. I really do.)

I want cake. Radioactivity is this week. The paperwork has gone through and I am now officially a Candidate and have used up 7 of my 18 quarters required to graduate. (There was a form and everything.) Also, one of my new litters of mice died, which consequently means that I have no behavioral test to run during Christmas week, so that works out (though it also means another month tacked onto the project). I am presenting in lab meeting this Wednesday.

I just realized that my paragraphs got progressively less coherent. Time to move on then!