This

Letter to young rodent behaviorists

It could be weirder

Tested yesterday and passed. Cannot help but be deeply grateful for the run through of the mock exam at 8am in the morning, though the exam isn't until after 10am and it was a very long morning. Ashley came by today and had lunch at Broken Yolk, which was good though one has to wonder if the gravy was quite meant to cover everything on my plate. Am, for reasons that don't need to be explored at this juncture, researching board games. Two have caught interest: Clue (reason obvious) and Game of Life (the Bradley game, not the Conway one, though that one is interesting too, for different reasons) (figured given how many fictional characters I know, with slight modification I can play an entire game by myself and then document the development to read over later for the laughs.) (Sims is still best for house and interior design -- it's much easier to draw things if there's a reference after all, though the random Sim generator is entertaining -- but the board game seems to offer more potential hilarity, plot-wise) (Yes that's what my involvement with Sims is reduced to now.)

Point is: have anyone ever played those two games? And if so, what are the impressions?

Ugh getting numerical score for NRSA (an NIH fellowship thing) at the end of next week*. Rumor says current pay rate is at 5%. My research is more basic science than clinically relevant. Adviser seems to have decided that I'm not going to get it and is going to try to put together an R01 (large grants such that the labs are made of) for my project instead in December. Cue insane rush for MOAR DATA.

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*Note: the interpretation of the said score will not be available until, I think, the end of November. Yeah this makes no sense to me either.

Re: what it means to be a grad students

Dear all,

Mother has forwarded me some editorial someone wrote on creaders about graduate school and academia, asking me how accurate it is. More specifically, she added, she's curious about what it's like to be a graduate student. After the initial moment of blankness where my mind gibbered to itself in mild hysteria, the second response my psyche provided was, "It's complicated", which frankly sounds more like how people would describe an ambiguous, occasionally awkward, occasionally frustrating relationship that they just don't know how to walk away from, rather than a system of education.

And then I realized: oh wait. It's exactly like that. 

Ugh

Dear all,

The Powers That Be are tightening the securities are workplace and several of the programs (anything that syncs across computers, pretty much), don't meet their "security requirements" (though attempt to read the exact specifications leads me to a dead link and a file that no longer there). I know some people who are just going to ignore it. I and a few of my colleagues  are going to play it safe and get rid of syncing for a lot of things and removing personal info from a lot of things and because I'm paranoid, I'll be editing out some of the stuff from both recent and old blog posts in between experiments these few days as well.

This decision having been made, I realized that unlike some of the bloggers I know, I never bothered asking people if it's okay for me to blog about them / include their names. I mean my blog is fairly low traffic and I only ever use first names (and half of the time they're nicknames as well), so I don't THINK there should be any issues. But.

Common courtesy in blogging world: if I have blogged about you and you want to remove stuff about you from the blog / remove your name / come up with a new nickname email me. I'll send out an email reminder as well to those who may not necessarily be following this.

(I've gone and locked a lot of stuff for lj, which also uses usernames as pseudonyms sort of by structure, so I think I'm fine there. Le sigh.)

No pixies were harmed in the making of this post

Dear all,

The title of today's blog (while my sample is incubating) is based on this comment. Those who know me knows that I adore open source and file sharing and all that good stuff and, given my field, it comes as no surprise that I continue to follow PLoS in my spare time (or in this case, because the paper assigned to me about miRNA screening is so dull that I have failed to finish reading the first page over three times already).

For the most part, PLoS and its associated journals, publish decent quality stuff. However, there are occasionally articles like this that leaves me feeling pretty indignant as a scientist. (Go on, click the link: you don't need a subscription to read it and the people did a pretty good job of summarizing the research in the paragraphs that has a blue bar on the left.)

Surely it's not supposed to be that difficult?

Dear all,

I did feel badly enough last Sunday evening to take some meds, and ended up skipping work Monday because by the time I woke up it's around 10:30 already (and then take into account the hour long bus ride and that I definitely was not up to staying late to make up for the hour that I missed, I emailed in sick and then, much to my surprise, dropped off to sleep again. I think I slept for the majority of the day somehow without penalty, because I slept fairly soundly that night too. By the time I staggered in on Tuesday I was much recovered and found a note from my labmate instructing me not to come in until I'm "no longer contagious". This prompted me to wonder, at which point in catching a cold / flu virus, exactly are we no longer contagious?

There are already spores everywhere

Dear all,

I am blogging this as I am eating my lunch today, indoors, because it was drizzling out when I last checked and there are bits of trees flying about and it all seemed a bit hazardous and unfriendly. So: indoors with the computer and internet (and the lab and the equipment and experiments and sales reps from which I have not been able to flee, alas.)

Does mind warping count?

Dear all,

After discussing with Wendy last week regarding the flu season, or the approaching thereof, during which I was convinced it couldn't be arriving this early, it looks like I'm coming down with something. The irony is not lost on me.

And things were very historical

Dear all,

The Dead Sea Scrolls have, apparently, been imaged from the Israel Museum and are now available online. Those of you who remember my quarter with the History of the End of the World class are probably not too surprised. It's pretty cool.