PI's quote regarding the not-really-a-bomb-incident from yesterday is a quote from Woody Allen (Allan?): "I don't plan to achieve immortality through my works, I plan to achieve immortality by not dying."

Am utterly failing at writing right now. My brain feels boring. I feel crazy.

Labels

Just had convo with labmate regarding an article about the US census finally updating the ethnic options and realized I've never really thought about all the issues there, since it's always been fairly straight forward for me. I mean for her son would that be like...Caucasian-Asian-Hispanic? But is Hispanic only in the sense of Spanish descent? What of the non-white Hispanics? Some Filipinos feel strongly against being called Pacific Islanders, others put that down because it makes more sense than Asian or Caucasian. It makes me think of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness and wonder what on earth do the Europeans do for this sort of thing.

My favorite past responses from people have been the people who wrote down things like "human-being". I choose to interpret it less as a sign of being smart-alec and more of a gesture toward universal solidarity.

“I Mean, Is Sexism Really Still A Problem In 2012?”

Shortened from an article here:

Many of the women expressed discouragement at how many comments they have received that, while seemingly complimentary, somehow still felt wrong. These comments may have focused on appearance rather than content, or called attention to the relative lack of women in science. They can cause a feeling of unease, particularly when [the woman] is in the position of trying to draw attention towards her work rather than towards personal qualities like her gender or her appearance.

This phenomenon as benevolent sexism, which is a subjectively positive orientation of protection, idealization, and affection directed toward women that, like hostile sexism, serves to justify women’s subordinate status to men (Glick et al., 2000, p. 763) For women in male-dominated fields, or those who simply want to be seen as strong – it creates a damaging stereotype. It is a significant predictor of nationwide gender inequality, independent of the effects of hostile sexism.

When the women read statements illustrating benevolent sexism, they were less willing to engage in anti-sexist collective action, more likely to think that there are many advantages to being a woman, and more likely to engage in system justification, a process by which people justify the status quo and believe that there are no longer problems facing disadvantaged groups (such as women) in modern day society. 

In my experience the people who do this are doing this subconsciously, with zero malicious intent. It's almost charming how they seem to think calling attention to a scientist's femininity is a compliment. Almost.

To be fair, I don't really feel that strongly about it either. It's mild irritating and tends to be drowned out in the tsunami of frustration that I encounter on a daily bases from other quarters.  

Excitement today

Please be on alert. On January 30, 2012, at approximately 12:50 PM the Police Department received information of a suspicious package at the L------ Building at the School of Medicine on campus. The building is being evacuated.

Individuals should stay away from the area.

There is no additional information available at this time.   

We were wondering what the fire-alarm is about. 

Did you know they apparently have bomb detonating robots?

[edit 4:51pm] 
All clear! Though I'm probably not going to get the results from the bioanalyzer today. Darn it.

Memorable quotes today

Professor: It's hard to survive being eaten.

Labmate: Time passes weirdly in grad school.

Seminar speaker: And we can put electrodes into things... .

Invented words in noticed today:
"morningness"

Taken from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival:

The iconoclastic Irish physicist John S. Bell had long nursed a private disquietude with quantum mechanics.The "ask no questions" attitude frustrated Bell, who remained unconvinced that Niels Bohr had really vanquished the last of Einstein's critiques long ago and that there was nothing left to worry about. At one point in his undergraduate studies, his red shock of hair blazing, he even engaged in a shouting match with a beleaguered professor, calling him "dishonest" for trying to paper over genuine mysteries in the foundations, such as how to interpret the uncertainty principle. 

...guess this is what they meant by "colourful". 

The publication of a paper denying the link between HIV and AIDS in an Italian anatomy journal has prompted a member of its editorial board to resign in protest. ...
The paper’s lead author, Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley, is well known for denying the link between HIV and AIDS, and six of the paper's nine authors, including Duesberg, are on the board of Rethinking AIDS, a voluntary group campaigning for “scientific reappraisal of the HIV–AIDS hypothesis”.
The paper is a reworked version of one published in the journal Medical Hypotheses in 2009, which at that time did not use peer review. Following a storm of protest, publisher Elsevier sent the paper to five external reviewers, and it was unanimously rejected. Elsevier permanently withdrew the paper on grounds of quality and concern for public heath²....

Article from http://www.nature.com/news/paper-denying-hiv-aids-link-sparks-resignation-1.9926.

I realized that those not in the field of research may not be as familiar with this, but as my professors like to tell me, just because it's published, doesn't mean it's true. You have to pay attention to both where it's published, because not all publications are equally trustworthy, especially in this age of internet, and you also have to pay attention to the actual data, because believe it or not, even for journals like Nature and Science, the retraction rate is fairly high (especially since the name-brand journals tend to publish on what research is "hot" and not necessarily on what's the most robust).

Behind the curtain, scientists are surprisingly colourful. The world-changing ones are, by definition, anti-authoritarian, risk-taking rebels. The history of science is littered with instances of fighting, disregard of authority, dogged determination in the face of scorn and even that staple of teenage rebellion, wilful intoxication. Such behaviour seems to be inseparable from the creative pursuit of a breakthrough.

Taken from here.

Not sure how I feel about being described as "colorful" (or the British version thereof). I think I'm...flattered, actually.

Yes I'm re-visiting what I'm using my various accounts for. Again.

The Adviser has this habit of strolling past all the bays in the lab when he first comes in each morning saying "Good morning!" without pausing his steps. Which usually meant that when I look up in response to the voice there's no one there. 

This, repeated now over a period of years, occasionally makes me feel like that I'm being greeted by an disembodied voice or, as the lab's alternative hypothesis goes, that our PI has somehow learned how to apparate. 

This is illogical

It takes 14 quarters now to do a load of laundry. That is a lot of quarters. The laundry place is a member of some kind of laundry association (saw the sticker) so that makes me wonder:

Why can't they have a card like everyone else so we can put money on it / use it for credit so that I don't have to keep cash in my knapsack solely for the purpose of coin-conversion?

I suppose carrying around twenty dollar's worth of quarters may be good for the health, though.

Perhaps if they didn't require coins they wouldn't meet the requirement to be a part of the Association?

What is the focus of your project?

Once upon a time, when we were young, we could've been nearly anything. Life was uncharted territory and, if we did not bleed light, as Billy Collin suggested, at least we bled potential.

Then we grew up. I can appreciate the need for focus, the need to specialize. I can appreciate the driving need to find a decent job and hopefully financial stability in  a bid for happiness. I can understand how society functions better if we each find our own little niche, how it is in fact more practical if we can describe ourselves with one event that had shaped us into who we are and how everything is neater if everyone fits into their own little neat little box. Gift-wrap. Bow. Label.

It's practical. I like practical.

But

People are complicated by nature and sometimes I forget-- that the trade-off for boxes is that people are boxed in. People become limited. In search of efficiency and neatness we would have to pay the necessary price in details, personality, and dreams.

When is the last time you dreamed of all the things that you could be?

It is all to easy to forget, when you have worn a groove in your life with your focus, that there's so much more besides. Indeed, how can anyone find it in themselves to think of what more there is to themselves, to life, if everything and everyone are telling them to narrow their vision, to focus? If you remember what it is like to dream -- that is good --that means you still have that something that, once upon a time, meant that you could've been anything. Life is no longer uncharted and people bleed red, not light, and yet

Has all the doors of possibilities been closed off?

I think not.

So I challenge you -- you who are still reading this, you who can read this and feel that vague indefinable ache -- take one hour -- no, even half an hour would do, to start with--and forget. Forget all the labels you put on yourself, that the others put on you. Forget the responsibilities and plans you carry for yourself and others. Forget that life has happened and left rules gridded out for your future. Forget the promises and regrets and then see where you are.

And then, if you still have half an hour left

dream.

Utter failure to organize my thoughts

There is a square of Tanzania chocolate that Lusine brought last weekend. The booklet on the packaging recommends pairing it with jasmine tea, so I have both.

STOP SOPA join the strike today!

Well that's not going to work out

Writing, I keep forgetting, is much more similar to drawing than I'd like, for my own peace of mind. Namely, I'd like to point to the stuff from the Artist Problems tumblr such as as the <5% overlap between what you want to work on and what you actually works on, which are tentatively labeled as "miracles". The other gem that I've referred to before is how hard it is to work up the energy to start and then, once you started, how hard it is to stop even though you definitely don't have the time for an in depth assay on the common elements on the portrayals of good versus evil across cultures. 

Which ultimately results in me awake at 11pm on a weeknight musing on the philosophies of aging on while thinking "NotimenotimewhyamInotasleepYET??" (stress does not help with sleeping, no) as well as me, currently, finally sitting down in front of my blog and thinking "...I have no urge to write about any of the stuff I thought up during random hours of the week and actually, no real desire to write at all so why don't I just bleed my thoughts onto the page for a bit to see if that helps releases some kind of pressure...?"

In which there is talk of lab

For various reasons I've been drawing a lot lately, but I think I've done more than my minimal, or even average quota for the week, so instead I'll take the half an hour to spare today and start to try, in my rambling way, to account for some of the things that have happened over the past few weeks.

It's really been weeks, hasn't it?

Well, I'll start from the most recent and go backwards.

I have internet again! So for the past week internet's been sporadic -- I'd have any time between 0 to 5 hours of internet on any given day for no reason that I can discern and after rounds of being told by ATT people to shut off and restart my router and computer (I despise how customer service does not distinguish between people of varying levels of technical knowledge) they finally sent a tech over. He arrived past seven, discovered the issue was that the phone jack itself has corroded (apparently of the pins, the two in the middle are the ones that provide the main connection, and one of mine's corroded away), which is why I've been having intermittent problems with connection. He had to replace the entire jack, which was a bit noisy and which prompted the neighbors to bang on the wall (both of us found this amusing and wondered what the neighbor must've thought I was doing) and gave me tips for how to deal with stray dogs and coyotes if I plan to go hiking up the Rose Canyon trial. And now I have internet. It is a bit too late in the day for me to do anything. But I have internet!