Belated posting

Here's the stuff I typed for the Arizona trip, written Friday night and Sunday morning. Due to life and, more specifically, a presentation (the last one of this kind I'll have to do in grad school!) due this morning (adviser dropped by afterwards and told me "kudos for doing well under pressure" and I have yet to figure out if that means that I actually did well or if he thought I looked nervous presenting and wanted to cheer me up afterwards), I haven't gotten around to posting it (Ivy was lying abandoned on my bookshelf, with the posts, until just now). But now, without further ado:

Am back! Trip was not perfect but it was very good. Will elaborate later. Probably after photos.

This reminds me of my experience with Linux. A lot.

Amazing grace

Because it's a wonderful world that we live in, with many wondrous things in it.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Is expecting things to make sense too much?

Dear Security Sages,

I have received your mysterious email, as forwarded to me by my thesis adviser, which indicates that the entire school of med must have their building access cards replaced and which provided exactly zero explanation as to why. I have even heeded the odd little office hours that I need to obey, in order to obtain my new badge, and waited in (the DMV-hell-flashblack-inducing) line patiently for it.

Dear Security Sages, I have obtained my new security badge. It is very shiny. It also doesn't work and will not let me into my lab when it's after hours. My labmate suffers from similar issues. Please advise.

Sincerely,

Disgruntled Grad Student

Thoughts from a deranged mind

If English were a more regular language, we would not have jokes about liquified moose.

Because see, the conjugation of plural forms in the English language has always been something of a source of confusion for me and, as someone on Tumblr pointed out:

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? 

So my labmate and I had a moment this morning trying to figure out how to pluralize some words (oh God the scientist-invented-words) before we figured that maybe somethings can't be pluralized, because they're in liquid form and, you know, water can't be pluralized, so that makes sense, right?

Except then my brain immediately pointed out the moose problem. And then the deer problem. And then we pondered whether that means that moose is actually secretly a type of liquid, which we found hysterical, because it's that kind of week.

So you see, I have concluded that occasionally I can be grateful for how utterly inane the rules governing this language is because, as much as it regularly drives me mad, it can also provide an unexpected and much needed laugh when we needed it. (It is, after all, very easy to poke fun of.)

Aspiring minor geological miracle

Dear Firefox,

Are you aware of the fact that with your latest update (version 8), there are now a bunch of incompatibility issues with add-ons & plugins, especially with gmail, such that a) the rich text editor sometimes won't load and that b) the gchat applet never loads correctly unless I turn off my add-ons & plugins?

Veteran's Day = free on campus parking = ability to drive to campus = 90 extra minutes to spend on something else during the day = \o/

Because life in the academia can be stressful

A poem for the days when you're too tired / jaded / terrified to bet your bottom dollar on that elusive "tomorrow"...

Telepathic insanity? It's surely contagious.

The professor came up with the idea last Friday that he wants to get a grant submitted by next Thursday. The grant will be based on a project that all but two of the people in our lab work on, with one labmate in particular being the key contributor of preliminary data.

This means a total of 13 days to complete a grant. Counting the weekends.

This is somewhat insane. Everyone in lab except the professor agrees.

This means that there's a lot of the professor coming out and randomly bugging people for data and analysis, despite of the two paper that are nearing the final stages of experiments currently going on in lab.

As of last evening, the amount of hysterical giggling has been steadily increasing in lab, including an instance where a post-doc thought someone was calling her when no one was. (How many emails can one professor generate in one day, anyway?) And now...well, nine more days to go.

Does not compute

At the health food store, in the checkout aisle, there is a stack of magazine that boasts, in one of its headlines, something along the lines of "little know type of vitamin B: kills yeast, powers up immune system, releases fat." Ignoring the obvious issues with "releasing fat", why yeast? I just--.

Have brought strawberries even though it's blatantly not strawberry season anymore (but it's strawberry) and yes, did end up regretting the decision. The fruits are kind of terrible eating so I'm dumping them together in an effort to make cupcakes instead. (This being my usual solution to things that I like to eat raw when the quality is not quite good enough to eat raw.) Last week labmate brought in pumpkin-spice cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting, which are amazing, so the being spoiled by nice people with cupcakes continue in our lab. Which is probably a good thing since I got my numerical scores for my NIH proposal on Monday, and though the actual interpretation and comments won't be available until end of November, I'm ranked at the 44th percentile, so I"m definitely not getting funded. (On one hand, woe; on the other hand, I don't actually know anyone who got funded without already having a publication under their belt --and yes that's ironic, considering that we're asking for money to fund the research for publication-- so I'm utterly unsurprised.)

I think grad school is the first place in the recent decade where I'm "average". Still not too sure how I feel about that.