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.)

I've been having some issues the past few weeks regarding my school fees. More specifically my account kept telling me I have unpaid fees for things that my grad program (and now that I'm a doctoral candidate, my PI and my training grant) is/are supposed to pay for, which confused me no end. It turns out that it's because the fees were paid by the financial manager before they increased the fees for the new school year, so I have 300+ dollars of fee increase that was no covered. Last I heard our program coordinators are taking care of this (since I wasn't the only one affected), but this made me feel bad because our program, the financial aspect, at least, is being merged with our school's neuroscience and MD-PhD program (yeeeeaaaah, you can probably feel the collective eye-tic when people got that email), which means that all our staff had to be fired first so they can re-apply for positions in the new "organization". It is messed up. Everyone is stressed. No one really knows what's going on but, sadly, I have become resigned that that is the way things work in the adult life: no one knows what's going on but you go ahead with your fingers crossed anyway and hope that things miraculously come together at the end.

But there you go: signs of financial impact as experienced by a grad student.

Which reminds me of one of my classmate's comments earlier today about how we should just double the amount of schools, school staff, and teachers, which would theoretically increase the number of jobs as well as improve education. (I'm a little sketchy on the details, having zoned-out after deciding that 8am in the morning is far to early to try to make sense of economy and politics, which has always been a bit tricky for me even when my brain's operating at full speed.) Which reminds me of complaints I've heard from certain people on the bus about how the economy is failing and the university is still building new buildings.

Had I not taken Mr. A's course in high school, I probably wouldn't thought that the complaint made sense. After the course, I know that budgets for buildings for schools are locked prior to the onset of construction, which means unless something really drastic happens, the buildings are going to be constructed no matter what. Which makes me hypothesize that perhaps a lot of budget is like that: after all, people are demanding (rightly) for all the money to be accounted for, and the easiest way to do that is to set aside funding at the beginning that are locked for certain projects. However, I can't help but think there must be a better balance between the ridigity required by bureaucracy and accountability. The current systems are just so...inefficient, and, I think, can be paralleled with the school's website, and possibly bus-lines in old cities: systems are added and scaled up as they developed, so what was efficient at the very beginning will no longer be efficient once the size of the organization triples / quadruples / undergoes exponential growth. And the thing is, the original system is what everything is built upon and it becomes locked in and the inefficiency is spirals from there, which makes the organization freak in me (which may or may not share a brain part with the pyromanic part of me) occasionally thinking about how nice it would be to just raze everything to the ground and start over from scratch.

Or, you know, we can learn from slime mold.

Everyone remember the XKCD strip from awhile back saying that what was wrong with scientists was that we do see beauty in everything, including slime mold? Well, here's more reason why slime mold is cool. It can do mazes. And figure out the most efficient routes for the Tokyo rail system. (I kid you not, the original paper was published in Science and everything.) Just put food where the cities are and voila!

In conclusion: slime mold is awesome.

I am personally convinced that once the ages of men and insects are past, slime mold will rule the world.

But before I leave you with that (very) strange thought, the "voila" part (heh, Nick grows on you) reminds me to share this clip:

I can honestly say I have never been so charmed by a giant dancing flea before.
That sentence does not read any less strangely even after knowing the synopsis of the story.

(Oh blogger, you've gotten worse at embedding videos.) The English sub'ed trailer is here.

On likelihood of watching I'd rank it between Princess and the Frog (not interested) and Tangled (tentatively curious) and I've seen both of those so, heh. Sadly I don't think this will be appearing in theatres, so we'll see what happens.

And now: to science!