I wander through lab areas so frequently that the construction crew recognizes me. By "recognize" I mean commenting bemusedly that "Hey, you work here everyday!".

Yes, yes I do.

I just wrote "dismal cause" instead of "distal cause" by accident. Brain needs break and it's still morning. WHY.

Does anyone else think that "the optic density of your sneeze" sounds like it could be some kind of a band name?

Mini blow-torches

I often have many things going on at once, and this turned out to be one of those weeks where it felt like too much, with this kind of result. (I will, I fear, have to be lab both days this weekend, which feels like a minor tragedy at this point.) --it is a frustrating week too: I made two really really stupid mistakes, which caused two separate experiments to fail, and the thing that I was sort of painting on my off time as a way to distress just refused to out right (I mean that it's much much worse than the usual "it looks nothing like what it did in my mind") so I ended up starting over for the third time. 

Darn

Okay I'm switching Ivy from Fedora to Ubuntu. The latest version update had an issue with SE Linux that just drove me crazy and made me realize that everyone I know who uses Fedora are comp sci people for a good reason -- I have neither the time nor the energy to learn Linux "properly" (as opposed to via google whenever I have more than 30 minutes free and feel like it). I'm not comfortable enough to operate a computer via command-line and basically eschew 90% of the GUI -- I mean, I haven't kept up with the coding side of things since when C was popular. (Oh dear God I'm so outdated -- who still uses C these days??) and all the mods that I want to do just isn't going to happen on my schedule.

So: Ubuntu it is. Still Linux, still good enough for small projects should I ever find the time, still open source, but a whole lot more user-friendly for none-code-savvy.

Career choice should not be an exercise in Dadaism

I have traumatized yet another grad-student-to-be, methinks.

Couple of things

These things relate to each other only in the sense that they relate to me. Though there's a sort-of book review at the bottom.

Well that was fast

Parents have already killed off one of the guilt-lavenders.

One of those days, apparently

Today I got a ticket for a vehicle registration sticker that I carried in the gloves compartment but utterly failed to put on the license plate on time. 

This is why I shouldn't be allowed to procrastinate -- I'll end up forgetting things and then get fined by the police.

Also, here's the exciting scoop from the campus!

Power to the campus was disrupted ... The cause of the disruption was a transformer, which caught fire at the east campus power station. The switching equipment in the station was severely damaged.

Another thing people don't really warn you about: halting all lab work because something suddenly caught on fire. 

This is me, emoting

As someone whose research (and stipend) comes from NIH, I'm required to go through regular "ethics training" which, for someone at my stage of career, means discussion / seminars. This morning we had one on retractions and authorships and make no mistake, it was a good talk, but.

There was this one area of the discussion that bothered me. Enough to post about, even.

To be fair

First of all, I would like to link to this comic. (Thank you, Lucy, for linking me.)

The other week when I went in for my physical I saw the same person that I asked about whether or not there could be something physiologically wrong with me, to result in asexuality, and was told "no". (I will not lie: I was relieved. Terrified, but relieved.) She wanted to know how I was doing (well) and whether or not the LGBT center she recommended was helpful and I was trying to explain to her that the LBGT people are very nice but the focus is still on SEXUAL attraction that's outside the norm, rather than the lack thereof. (Though I think she did make a note when I told her that I found the online community for ace to be very supportive. I can only hope that if someone comes to her, in the future, with the same questions she'll now be able to provide an additional resource.)

People are confusing with their naming of peppers

Dear all,

Today I have discovered the recipe for vegetarian chili. I have no idea what it's actually supposed to taste like but I like my version, so I'm going to count it as a win.

I also watched The Illusionist (2010 one) and my God, it's depressing. Think Mary and Max, but without the death and the hopeful ending. (Yeah you'd think it'd be happier without people dying but there's no redemption...just the slow fall of the curtain. Geez I need to find a happy short story or something, now, to balance my psyche.)  Really beautiful work though -- a style as unique as that of The Secret of Kells, and if it's a little slow paced -- well, it suits the mood. (Though it does make it feel even more like I'm steeped in melancholy.) (And now I'm going to imagine the rabbit went off on its own and learned magic tricks to perform for other rabbits and it was a success to make myself feel better.)

Earlier this morning the air was strangely warm and saturated with droplets somewhere between a mist and a drizzle.

My mind supplied: "Today the weather is like the kraken!"

I laughed all the way to the bus stop.

Would this be post-modern something or the other?

Photo from mother, title of which loosely translates to "Your dad's strange sense of aesthetics."

For those who are wondering, the vase contains green onion.

That's right. Green onion. Of the variety that people sell in supermarkets that is usually harvested well before they start flowering. Also? It's giant. I see a running theme here with my father and giant fruiting bodies of things that didn't get harvested on time. Like that giant turnip-seedpod-tree. Seriously, what is he doing that the flower stalks always ends up huge??

The construction crew (from the group that's remodeling our lab building's ventilation) came through today for a quick survey of the grounds. I promptly lost all will to regard the remodeling with anything other than a sense of impending doom.

I also think no one's ever explained "shared lab space" to the workers before.

Guilt plants and sudden genetic

For those of you who are familiar with the term "guilt plants", some of you may recall that my parents accidentally killed the lavender I had in the backyard and so were very eager to make amends. After asking me which type I preferred and I emailed them back the species & cultivar names (common names are kind of iffy for all plants because people tend to just call things whatever) they realized that they had trouble finding the type we had or the types I wanted and so I just told them to not worry about it. Except.

Rambutans are strange.

And how many grams of reagent is this worth, exactly?

Roughly two weeks ago my lab got a trial sample of a new formula for a common reagent from a vendor, which my labmate tried out and then recommended for me to try out.

I ran an experiment with it, it worked really well, and in a fit of data-induced ecstasy (or possibly I was just giddy from the beauty of those melt curves) I sent back a quip to the labmate via email -- something about magical properties, I believe.

Turns out? Labmate thought it was funny. In fact, labmate thought it was funny enough that she forwarded the email to the vendor sales rep. Who somehow decided that he should forward it to the marketing department.

So today, in a completely novel and unexpected turn of events, the sales rep turned up while I was mid-experiment, holding a sample in each hand, and wanted to know if the company can use my email for their product advertisement. 

I blinked at him slowly over the tabletop centrifuge while my labmate made apologetic faces and other labmates looked on in confusion and decided that, "Wow, this is really awkward."

He was very smiley and left me his business card (which was was shiny as his teeth) and said I should get in touch should I decide that the answer is "yes." I'm left wondering what the hell just happened -- or at least until I remembered that oh right: two samples still need to be processed.

The lab's opinion so far seems to be that if I'm allowed to remain anonymous as the source, I should see if I can somehow leverage this to get more free or reduce-priced reagents for lab. I should mention that the professor is not aware of any of this. Yet.

On one hand: What. 

On the other hand: this is really hilarious.

Today the thesis adviser asked me for something that I threw away last Friday afternoon.

Note to self: pippeting all week + balancing giant camera on weekend = bad idea.

It's really hard to write / draw without bending my wrist.

At this rate I really will need to by a wrist brace.

Professorial duties and tests of limit

Quote from friend on why she's not planning to become a professor: "I don't want to my goal in life to be making other people feel stupid."

(...well, considering the job of a professor in training scientists is, in theory, to find where our limits are and to push us past them....) (In our program it seems to be, by consensus, a yearly pushing until we fall flat on our face and then wait, and then setting the point where we fail to get back up as the new limit.) (Have I mentioned that it's almost time for my yearly committee meeting? I'm told that I'm being pushed harder because I can "take it", which has yet ceased to be equally flattering and terrifying.)

It's a perfectly valid goal.

A strange form of feminism

I've had too much tea, am in a writing mood, and am sick of people saying that feminists are "just" women who are bitter because they don't have a (good) boyfriend, are not "real" women, etc. I realized that I've never talked about this explicitly before, but I'm going to attempt to explain what my definition of a "feminist" is, why I would refer to myself as one, and why I think it's necessary. And then I will ramble off target and be confused at what some people are saying because, what? People. Seriously. What. 

Right, here we go.

Well that was...enlightening

Considering that half of the plasmids in lab contains the promoter of a member of herpes virus family (cytomegalovirus, in case anyone's wondering) and that all non-undergrad members have to do regular animal husbandry, breeding, and colony maintenance, it's a wonder that I haven't posted anything more risque up to this point.

Well, time to amend that, I suppose.

Okay, parents have decided to treat me this birthday with a cruise. I can take a week off maximum and the port will have to be from LA or SD. Ideas? (We're thinking Mexico.)

Have gleefully discovered that shimejis are still visible on screen even when you put your powerpoint slides to presentation mode. Am currently entertaining visions of presenting my data with little Sherlock scaling up the side of the screen (though I don't think anyone in my lab would recognize the BBC reincarnation of Holmes & Watson) during the informal lab meetings.

10:55am
Attacked by protein sample.

...well I'm not buying that brand of flip-cap tubes ever again.

Fandot

Gave a impromptu lecture to personal banker at the banking center on campus today, on the topic of genetic mutation. He displayed gratifying interest. Or at least he said that it was cool as opposed to giving me the glazed look that so many undergrads demonstrated when I tried to explain nearly the same thing to them a few years ago.

Sometimes I feel like being in biology is like being in an obscure fandom. There're a decent number of people who's heard it in passing but only a small number of dedicated fans and you know it'll never be "cool" enough or "mainstream" enough to catch on, even if you think it's the greatest thing in the world. And then in the rare occasions when you manage to share your love with someone without scaring them away in the process, and then that person shows interest (or fakes interest due to personal agenda), it makes your day.

Careless handling is not a cause for rejection

Found ancient vial of dead pupa and two tennis balls behind desk. V. curious as no one before me in our lab and no lab who has occupied the same space prior to our lab has ever worked with flies.

The title of this post is taken from the wrapper of a part of an equipment. No one's quite sure of what it means.

This used to be a longer post started yesterday that I accidentally "deleted" (it's not actually deleting that I did) and now can't retrieve so I'll just summarize it this far and add that one of my classmate's graduating this June! Or at least he's defending. He's from a comp-bio lab so it's not that surprising that he's the first from my class to graduate (not having to wait four months for mice for each experiment will speed some things up). However what this means for the rest of us is this:

The countdown towards graduation for the entering class of 2008 has officially started.

Whiplash

Have started using this bar of fancy triple-milled soap this week and have just discovered that the soap has fused itself to my bathtub. Application of water has failed to dissolve bond. Current strategy: dry for a minimum of 12 hours before applying knife.

Sometimes, life is forcing bacteria to express a mouse gene and finding an isoform where no one in the world has found it before.

Other times, life is...soap fused to the bathtub.

(Or, in my friend's case: finding the causes of cerebellar hypoplasia and getting spaghetti sauce smeared all over you by your excitable but uncoordinated toddler.)

And here I thought we're past the age of George Eliot

I'm cross-posting this a bunch of places because feminism happens to be one of those things that I feel strongly about, and here's another reason why I think it's necessary:

One of my favourite children’s authors is J.K. Rowling. Her Harry Potter series are some of the most successful children’s books ever written, so much so that as many adults as children have read them. But, as a woman writer, Rowling struggled to get these books published. Initially, despite the fact that her main character is a boy, publishers rejected her manuscript because they were worried boys wouldn’t read a book written by a woman. This biased perception continued even once she secured a contract, and she was ultimately made to conceal her sex by use of the two initials J.K. -from Jump!

Which brings me to the A Mighty Girl site. This is essentially their mission statement:

After years of seeking out empowering and inspirational books for our four young nieces, we decided to create A Mighty Girl as a resource site to help others equally interested in supporting and celebrating girls.

Girls do not have to be relegated to the role of sidekick or damsel in distress; they can be the leaders, the heroes, the champions that save the day, find the cure, and go on the adventure. It is our hope that these high-quality children’s products will help a new generation of girls to grow and pursue whatever dreams they choose -- to truly be Mighty Girls! 

Okay so "Mighty Girl" is kind of a tacky name, but I really like what they're doing and an easy way to show them support is just to mention them in your blog / twitter / tumblr /whatever or "Like" them on Facebook, so I'm doing that and hope that those of you who are still following this will take a moment to do so as well.
 

Ah the Monday morning Facebook check

Seriously, I think I spend 90% of my time waiting for things to reach the right temperature. But anyway, here are two quotes that I will share from my classmate:

"I've never been this excited to run a PCR before except I know the result has a 99% chance of being negative because science is a bastardy bastard coated in bastard icing and filled with bastard filling."

To which her friend replied that that was why success tastes so sweet....  

And  then there's the part where she commented that the results will cause either extreme elation or extreme depression that will "resolve itself into apathetic acceptance by tomorrow". 

With that feeling in mind, I invite all my non-PhD friends to take a look at the PhD movie site (and trailer). Online streaming is available now and I highly recommend it because it's got both heart and humor and explains the life of a graduate student better than I ever could. (Also I like the soundtrack.)

And as I and many of my classmates can tell you, part of the appeal for those of us who are in the middle of our dissertation process (I have another presentation this Wednesday) is that so many of the jokes in both the comic and movie are sad but true, and this is an on-going reminder that other people have gone through what we've gone through and that we're not alone. It's less of a "misery loves company" thing at this point and more of a feeling of solidarity. Solidarity is nice. 

New bottle of soy sauce has a pull-to-open seal with a ring attached for pulling. The ring detached when I pulled it.

Hypothesis 1): I am bad at pulling these sort of rings in the intended direction.

Hypothesis 2): These ring-things are flawed in design.

(Eventually the bottle was opened by abusing a small-medium-ish screw driver by inserting the flat tip against the raised area of the seal and exerting force down then up. Couldn't help but feel opening a bottle should require less effort than this.)

Maybe I'll learn tailoring someday

My long sleeve tees are developing holes in them. Given that I've had some of them since high school, this is probably not surprising. I could just order more long-sleeve tees online, except I like nice dress shirts and would like to get more of them but that would mean the horrors of Physically Shopping.

Heaters are good for drying shoes

So many facets of my life seems to boil down to "don't know what I'm doing, but keep going anyway" and then somehow, things magically get better. (Well, to be fair, occasionally pivoting helps provided I don't accidentally elbow someone in the face.)

Tried to get rid of the last of the wine by making wine cake. Sadly the batter tastes much better than the actual cake. (Get rid of the leavening agents and  use it as mix for gelato instead, y/y?) 

Have discovered that when I turn on the heater (what's with the weather, by the way?) the carbon monoxide light will flash. Not red or green, but white. The alarm doesn't actually sound however. Hunted up the instruction manual left from that day and discovered that the only copy left for me was, incidentally and inexplicably, in Spanish. And contains no information on what does the light mean if it's not red or green though now I know the words for "digital display".

In the meantime, have a song about Nicola Tesla. 

Dear property manager (not landlady, note) came in at some time today and installed a carbon monoxide alarm. Given that our building already has a series of fire alarms that gets set off accidentally about every week and that I need to disable the fire alarm in order to bake anything over 375F, hopes of peace and quiet is probably futile at this point.

Absolutely hysterical:

(From here. )

Have discovered green tea with peach and ginger. This has been a very good morning.

Also to add, randomly, that my current phone doesn't have a timer (have checked a while ago, yeah). It has an alarm clock that I suppose you can use as a timer but it's just not the same. 

Random post

You know what I miss? A watch that comes with a built in timer.

Undergrad asked me if sodium hydroxide makes an acid or a base.

I asked her to repeat the question because I thought I'd heard wrong.

Nope, I didn't hear wrong.

There are so many things wrong with being asked this question by a bio-major who has been working in a lab regularly I don't even-

For knowledge! ...Or something....

Time-point experiments are truly awful things that we do to ourselves in the name of science, but they're even more ghastly, I've discovered, when the scientist happens to live an hour's bus ride away from her lab.

It's far too early in the week for me to feel this tired.

Though to be fair, it could've been much worse -- if it weren't from Anita I might've had to crash overnight in the student's lounge in the library basement. (Better option, still, than the couches in the lobby area, given how our lobby area's all glass and there are all these lights that I'm pretty sure can't be turned off.)

...if this experiment doesn't work I'm going to be so incredibly frustrated. 

...okay?

So for some reason it's April Fool's day and the English (or at least the American?) version of Google is perfectly normal...but the Chinese (or at least the Xiang-Gang / Hongkong) version is...um...

...underwater. (As Neil Gaiman directed, click on the "I feel lucky" button, repeat 3x.)

(April Fool's definitely not a Chinese holiday.)
(Google why are you so adorable?)

But while speaking of stuff that Mr. Gaiman's posted, I wanted to share this Dalek relaxation tape.

Yep, you saw that right, A Dalex relaxation tape. 

...thought I must confess that they have one of the least soothing intonations I've ever heard. (Don't tell me you didn't spent the entire clip waiting for the word "exterminate". I know I did.)

But I fear she's not really paying attention

Dear Undergrad,

Yes you can borrow my stuff. In fact, I told you you that you may, without asking me each time but, as I've also told you multiple times now, please put back the stuff where you found it. This is not a difficult concept. Stop stashing my scissors and reagents and what-have-you in your drawers and yours boxes (where no one can find them when they're in the middle of their experiments and need them) when you're done. They're not yours, they are mine and mine to share with the lab. It's been over two years' worth of reminders and I know you're leaving lab this June but for the love of God or science or whatever you believe in, please show some common courtesy until then.

Your very irate labmate,

Me.

Blue nerds

Quick post to share this link. (It's...flash comic about industrial pollution in China at this point, I guess. I think the author explains it better in the notes.) It works as a stand-alone.

...that nursery rhyme from the beginning...I must've learned it before the age of four (because it pre-dates boarding school) and my parents know it because of me, and I just realized that I knew the first two lines of the second stanza...for some reason I've forgotten that until I saw the comic.

Last time my mother went to Beijing and stayed for more than two weeks she got asthma because of the air quality. Thankfully there is a movement toward environmental awareness and pollution, which got a large boost because of the Olympics (needs, must) and so there's some improvement these days. (Though if you're in Beijing you still can't really see the stars due to light pollution.)

There's definitely seratonin around now

So: the science fair was awesome.

That being said, there were some issues of communication between the volunteer transport and the police (they had to cord off part of the streets for the fair but they were supposed to let the volunteer shuttles through) so that the shuttle drop off/ pick up point for us kept getting changed while we were waiting for our transport. So there was a lot of walking and crankiness.

But, an hour later, I finally managed to get home and rewarded myself by making French toast stuffed with cream cheese and strawberries and honey (idea from the super fancy mango-mascarpone-toast that I had last time Lucy and I went out for breakfast) to go with heavily honeyed tea so now I'm adrift in a sea of carb-induced bliss.

Have to go and deal with chores in a hour, but in the meanwhile: exercise + loads of starch & sugar = at peace with the world.

Key points of fair this year as noticed by me: elephant-brain-hat, live owl, live reptiles & tarantulas & squirrel, DNA extraction from strawberry, analysis of your snot, make-your-own skateboard (by lottery) booth, basket-ball-sized maze-navigating robots, something mysteriously small but definitely aerodynamic. Oh and balloon animals. Er. Molecules.

Why does our lab have cheesecloth?

It's like a sneeze that doesn't come

After spending all of yesterday (as well as part of the evening) obsessing over my cloning experiment, my subconscious provided me with a dream that involves baking. Very specifically about putting shredded coconut in frosting. The baking part I understand because, all jokes aside, baking is  really a lot like setting up an experiment in a molecular biology lab. Even the frosting I can understand. But why, I wondered during breakfast this morning, why coconuts? Not knowing bothered me.

Possible explanations, I concluded while brushing my teeth, are the following:
Zebrafish >> tropical >> coconuts
Fruit fly >>coconut oil (via information retained from classmate's talk) >> coconuts

What makes somewhat less sense is the connection with mice, because:
Mouse>> ??? >>coconuts

(For the record, the mice I work with are black in color.)

The mind is a truly mysterious place.

I am losing feeling in my fingers

I have learned a new word today: empfindsamkeit.

In addition to reading, I should not be allowed to draw things while cooking. I will burn food. Badly.

Anderson predates the 8th, but does Disney?

About half way to falling asleep last night, I find my thought turning to the Disney sequel to the Little Mermaid, more specifically, to the fate of the villain. (Villainess? Villainette?) I was horrified to realize that what effectively happened to her is that she is trapped, alive and with full-awareness, in suspended animation (no pun intended), for presumably all of eternity somewhere in an abyss of the ocean.

I reflected that, if I were trapped in my head but with full awareness of my surroundings, I hope someone would have the mercy to kill me. It is cruel and unusual punishment. It is a fate, I think, worse than death. I would go mad from it, in the clinical sense, and given how the villain (villaine? villaina?) wasn't exactly the most mentally stable to begin with, this strikes me as an Extremely Poor Solution. Forever, in a chunk of ice, can easily be translated to "bidding her time". And as various stories done by other authors can tell you, there's nothing quite so terrifying as someone who's mind is broken, who's vengeful, and who's willing -- and can afford to -- bid his / her time.

Triton is immortal, but forever is a long time. A lot of things can be done in forever. Glaciers have crept across continents and melted in less time than forever. How long would a block of ice (even magical ice) last, in the face of forever?

Unless this is a hedged bet on another sequel, in which I applaud the writers for a job well done.

Admittedly I can pretend that the Lord of the Seas tracked down that block of ice some time later on, preferably before she went mad, thawed her out and gave her a fair trial. Certain to my knowledge no canon exists to contradict me. And then she will probably serve time in an underwater prison, but maybe they'll have craft classes (complete with the underwater equivalent of safety scissors) and she can learn underwater basket weaving.

And then I fell asleep.

I need an econ refresher

Dear all,

Would someone please explain to me how it is that the .mobi (ebook) version of a book costs around 13$ while the used paper copy costs 0.01$? Is this a case of supply-demand? Because then...how is the supply limited? It's digital. Making a copy of a digital book doesn't take that much resources or energy, even compared to the making of mass-market paperbacks (which still requires paper making and binding and such). Most authors these days have their final transcript in digital format, anyway, and it's not that hard to convert .doc to ebook formats. I've done that before too. There are even free online software for these sort of things.

Perhaps it's because the paper-copy is "used"? But...it's digital. I mean how do you even tell apart "used" from "new" copies? But if that were the case, where can I get used digital books? Because seriously, I don't mind used books. Either paper-copy or digitally.

This mini-rant is brought to you by my visit to the library website. I'm one of those people who prefer not to buy a book until I've read it and know that I like it. I read fast. To entertain me for extended length of time requires something either massive or going to the library (whose schedule overlaps with mine by only two hours every week) every week. I have a kindle. I have gone through the entire SD library ebooks collection. There're just over 2000 books. There are five that overlaps with my to-read list (121 books so far). They all have wait-lists ranging from 6 to 36 people. Hunting on the internet has not helped much.

Help.

[edit 11:00]
New thought: I hate to default to thinking the worse of everyone, but I realized that it's possible for it still be a supply-demand situation where, because the supplier knows the demand is high, they can purposefully limit the supply in order to charge higher prices and therefore obtain more profit (and they don't even have to subtract printing and distribution costs for ebooks).

Thoughts? 

Some sounds go straight to the subconscious

I was pretty tired last night due to the length of my day and sadly, it also was one of those rare days when the neighbor had a few and then fell asleep in front of his tv with the volume on full blast, which meant that I could hear the dialogues, not to mention the music and other sounds, perfectly clearly. Even more unfortunately he was watching something with a lot of gunfire.

Eventually I was forced to get up, grab a jacket, and knock on his door until he woke up and then request he turn down the volume. Then I returned to bed and proceeded to have an extremely lengthy semi-science-fiction nightmare where I was sent off to war. I spent nearly the entire length of the dream feeling ill-prepared and terrified and now I feel a bit like my eyeballs are going to fall out of my head.

Please tell me this isn't going to turn into one of those days.

Last night I had a dream during which I was helping Sherlock Holmes troubleshooting the wireless connection on his laptop. Looking back, he was probably more patient than is canonically accurate.

Also, this is probably the record for early arrival to work since I moved to PB. Awful, isn't it? I'm tempted to ask Santa to 48 hours of nothing -- no chores, no obligations -- to just sit around and sleep except, rather like the lyrics from the song "Stress" suggests, I'd probably hate it.

That's the tragedy of being a self-aware workaholic. You are very aware that you really have no one to blame except yourself.

Oh well.

Common sense fail

Sometimes the Thesis Adviser seems so genuinely interested in the details of what I'm working on that I forget common sense and try to explain the details to him. I usually realize the mistake thirty minutes later with either a vague memory or no recollection of what I was working on before the discussion started and uncertain predictions as to when the discussion will actually end so I can go back and figure out what I was supposed to be doing (possibly when the timer went off ten minutes ago).

Today, for instance, I tried to explain to him why I stagger experiments a certain way to be efficient, and why that kind of efficiency works for me. Looking back I suspect I may have had better luck trying to convince him that genes are made of green cheese.*

--------
*A famous geneticist (possibly Nobel laureate -- I forgot) once made a comment along the lines of "the principles of genetics would still hold true even if genes are made of green cheese". (Yeah IDEK.)

I wonder what will happen in the fall

Dear all,

Today I encountered the most novel explanation for daylight saving I've ever heard: tomorrow an hour will be taken out of our day to be given to the Easter Bunny so it'll have time to go around the world to distribute candy to everyone.

Also, as per the song, "Raisins", I discovered that people do indeed wear orange pants outside of detention centers. Sorbet-y orange. It's...ghastly, actually, when paired with a shirt in an even more vivid shade of orange.

I don't understand fashion. I am better at drawing clothing lately but the nuances of what is tacky and what is fashionable appears to be, still, beyond me.

Lawn darts and baking soda

Confession: sometimes what motivates me to write a post is the title I can use for it.

Especially when the title is a result of my brain when I tell it to summarize the 24 hour highlights in ten words or less.

You sir! Yes, you!

There's unobservant and there's failing to notice three girls in bright yellow flailing at you from a grand distance of 15 feet away.

Why is it so hard to explain stairs to people? Why?

So I've been told that the Comic-Con tickets are already sold out.

The tickets just went on sale for registered members only this morning.

It wasn't this crazy the first year I went. If this trend keeps up soon we'll have to register for it a year or even two years ahead of the time, and it will be as bad as the university-run daycare. (Yeah they don't really have good infrastructure for career professionals who are also mothers. At least not until you've made it to the income bracket where you can afford to hire nannies five days a week.)

Unrelated: I have stubble burn on my arm. It is obviously a better alternative than getting clobbered in the face but a) light-haired people's facial hair, until they grow a beard or something, isn't obvious, so this is ...sneaky ninja stubble b) ow and c) and I thought that sprained toes were hilarious.

I didn't know necks could do that....

The man seated in front of me on the bus reeked of alcohol and was distressingly floppy. Based on what I recall from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he only needs a packet of peanuts to be ready for hyperspace jump. (Though he is a couple towels short of being an actual space-time hitchhiker. Shame, that.)

Tired now. Sleeeeeeeeeeeep.

Right.

So when a scientist is essentially told that she is too idealistic to survive in the academia, what is she not too idealistic for?

Loosely translated message from mother:

"So about the garden: We bought a bunch of bulbs and buried them. They grew. The stump from the dead lavender is still there. Should we save it for you or can we dig it up?"

Oh mom.

She's caught on to the whole interest in botany and all, but her updates regarding the tiny garden in the back is always a cross of lol'ing and face-palm moments. (Like most things with my parents, it is touching when it isn't frustrating.)

Information learned from emails & colleagues: most biotech companies require 5 years of either company or post-doc experience, because not all newly minted PhDs are equal and some of them has never had an independent project before.

My thoughts:
1) What's the point of grad school if you don't even get to have your own project??

2) Five years?

Bleh.

Two things:

1) I have a new contestant for the competition of the "Most Boring Dream, Ever". Last night I had a (short, thankfully) dream where I was at the store buying bread. Oh brain.

2) Have been introduced to GoodReads by someone on Facebook and am attempting to import my spreadsheet over to it. (It's got nicer graphics, for one thing.) As I'm going over books I have read and ones that I meant to read and ones I despised I can't help but think that so many problems with people in the world could be solved if only you're allowed to prescribe them books. Not even the self-help books, but genuine works of literature. I mean issues of efficacy and side-effects and incompatibility can't be worse than some of the medicine that's currently in the market.
...like a book-psychologist. I'd want to be one except I'd have to talk to people.

I returned from this morning's classes happy with endorphins, only to realize that somehow the list of chores I have to do this weekend had multiplied drastically.

...how did this even happen.

Dear Life,
I would like a nice break about now. A few hours with some nice music with nothing to do but to think happy fluffy hoppy thoughts. The music is optional.
Thank you kindly,
Me

Oh God it's time to deal with taxes and their associated paperwork and whyyyyyyyyyyyy.

(For those unfamiliar with my situation: the school sends me forms indicating the amount that I paid for tuition. I did not actually pay for those tuition, my program / professor did. The school also sends me a W2 of the amount the professor pays for my wage. This accounts for less than 40% of my income. The bulk of it comes from my training grant which is awarded to the school, which I don't get paperwork for. In other words: I have no paperwork for reality and must correct the paperwork manually for it.)

Love letters to science

Today only, from LooksLikeScience:

The thing that really makes the pursuit worthwhile is that there’s a truly visceral joy, a sense of excitement and wonderment and pure relief when the data lines up and you realize you’re seeing something that nobody else has ever seen. You think then that maybe, just maybe, science loves you back. That moment is one that hangs suspended, like that brief moment after the first kiss with that one you’ve been chasing for so long, tugging at heart strings and letting you know that it’s all been worth it.

Now that I think about it, my relationship with science is very much like a crush. Complete with more teenage pining that I'd ever done as a teenager. (Oh dear God.)

Speaking of which, I think the LooksLikeScience site is a pretty cool profiling of all the types of people who ends up in the scientists. I mean yes there're the dorky bespectacled types, but there are also plant biologists with blue hair and material chemists dressed as bees.

This is me, being a girl (sort of)

If I were to ever wear nail polish on my hands, I'd want to try something like this which, yes, is hugely time consuming but it looks awesome. 

...however I can't really stand nail polish on my fingers (it just feels weird). I can tolerate it on my feet but then I've stopped that as well what with the martial arts thing, because when the polish starts to get chipped (which happens early because I'm the sort to go barefoot as soon as it's warm enough) people in class start thinking "blood" because the current two "colors" I tolerate is dark red and pearlescent (nevermind pearlescence isn't even a color).

Also, nail polish is kinda flammable. And time consuming. So my options are either to wait until I go into a career that is less 7-days-a-week kind of insane and involves fewer bunsen burners, or do this on a friend's nails.

Conclusion: I need a friend who lives locally who wears nail polish who will allow me to experiment on them.

...darn it.

Right, so about Kindle...

Reviews for this week:

What is this madness

Ever tried to run an experiment that has the incubation time of 5 minutes, 5 minutes, 10, 1, 1, 1 at the same time as another experiment that goes 15 minutes, 15, 15, for two hours? Guaranteed to drive you mad. Occasionally my labmates and I fantasize about having less stressful jobs. Sadly the fantasy usually doesn't last long, since someone would always point out, after a few minutes, that any of the other jobs we could come up with just seems...well...boring in comparison to what we could currently do. This inevitably leads to my conclusion that all scientist are all terrible addicts at heart, with compulsive tendencies. We're addicted to stress. And then I go and put the song "Stress" on because that's how life goes these days.

This conclusion about stress addiction got an interesting note added to it yesterday when The Adviser said something along the lines of "like how the marines knows to put together and take apart their guns you guys show know how to do that to your pipetman."

So...scientific research == going to war...?

Please be not linear

1) I've managed to get the Adviser to TYPE LIKE THIS TO ME in an email. I feel like this should be considered some kind of achievement. (Though mostly it's just a consequence of the fact that, despite of the amount of time I spent in his presence, there will be times when one or both of our translators break and understanding each other is harder than interpreting the lyrics of a pop star trying to be significantly thematic / artistic.)

2) At some point last night I realized that grad school in fact defies most common sense. At dark 'o clock, I found this immensely amusing, because my experience is pointing toward a trend that increase in length of time in grad school correlates to decrease in amount of common sense. I can only hope that it's a half-life / exponential sort of decay and not linear, so that the amount of common sense I possess will never actually hit zero. (If it ever does I will respectfully ask for a mercy killing. Please.)

Face-palm moment

I've never been asked by someone whether or not I speak Chinese after I'd had three conversations with him in Chinese before. It was a novel experience. Not to mention he was a scientists from a neighboring lab and I tend to expect scientifically trained people to be ...well...more observant.

Hypotheses:

1) People really are that unobservant
2) People's power of observation are not uniform across the board
3) I am really that forgettable.

2) seems the most likely, though I'd actually prefer 3)....

Things they don't warn you about wet lab: the boxes storing your samples will get moldy, and at some point in time, you, and you alone, will have to deal with moldy cardboard boxes holding your hundreds of samples at four degree Celsius.

Some kind of philosophy on life

Wendy was describing to me a kind of soda that has a unique bottle where you open it by pushing a glass ball (which then gets trapped in the bottle) in. Apparently one of her friend collects the bottles (or used to, before she graduated and moved away), another one of her friend breaks the bottle and collects the balls (I have no idea why, but I've met him and he is certainly...quirky), and you can buy the soda from 99 Ranch.

...so when I went to do my grocery shopping this morning, I got myself a bottle of Ramune soda (lychee flavor), which does indeed operate by trapping a glass ball inside a bottle. Suddenly the reason for collecting the bottle became clear. No doubt this fell in the same line of thought as the thing going around on facebook the other week with the sausage bits with noodles stuck through them -- namely, it seems like the thing to do to "mess with the kids". (I'm deriving an immense amount of pleasure these days from messing with people. It's indecent. It's also really fun.) The soda tasted, as far as I can tell, about average, but the bottle with something trapped in it endlessly fascinating in a juvenile way that reminds me of my fascination with mud and insects between the ages of 4 to 6 (you can imagine mother's reactions) -- it's interesting in an uncomplicated, inexplicable way. So I may keep buying the soda not so much for the taste but for the bottle which, when I thought about it, is an very effective marketing strategy.

It, of all things, reminded me of something that Gaiman once wrote about style in writing. Basically it boils down to: the key to success is delivering what you, and only you, can deliver. This appears to apply to both shapes of soda bottles as well as story telling.

Darn it, I accidentally closed the bottle again with the glass ball. Good thing I kept the plastic thing on the lid so I can open it again.

This is probably some sort of statement on life as well, but I'll leave it to someone else to interpret.

1) I find that my book-hording tendencies expands very readily to include digital books, and that I have already amassed enough to use up half of the memory space on my Kindle, and therefore Kindle will have to be a device and not The Library. Alas.

2) Aside from that and one issue with connecting Calibre with Kindle on Linux (no issues at all with Windows Systems), Kindle = magical fairy dust. (Note: Magical unicorn fairy dust is still reserved for my tablet.)

3) I was listening and wondering at what the song "Dark Blue" was about, and then I looked up the lyrics and thought "Oh hey that makes sense... ...no. No it doesn't. What?" What on earth is the guy singing about? Is the tsunami a metaphor for love? Despair? Both? I'm guessing unrequited affections (mostly because this seems to cover 50% of pop music one way or another)? This is really bothering me.

Polling all my friends between the ages of 20-30: if you had the option of knowing, within the next year, with about 95% certainty, whether or not you will get a certain rare neurodegenerative disease (age of onset 50-65), which occurs sporadically and for no known medical reason and for which there is no cure...

...would you want to know?

Anonymous replies allowed. "I don't know" will be counted as "no".

Bus ride home experienced unexpected delay in what I shall hence forth remember as The Incident With the Drunken Man. Alcohol poisoning is an ugly, ugly thing. And the poor bus driver is new on the job too.

Wednesdays. What is it about them?

[edit 17:23]
Huh. Unexpected: vivarium staff gave me a donut.

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!

"Maybe it only hunts things with osteoporosis."

Have just dropped by library and consequently started reading McKinley's Dragonhaven on the way home. The story is in first person and the protagonist reminds me unerringly of Mike, had he been raised on a reserve with dragons (of all things) and had to deal with nature reserve / research institute funding shenanigans. It's like if Mike were in Albert's job, from the "Alby and the Manticore" short story by Moonsheen. (You can read it for free online here and it's awesome. I highly recommend it.) It is, frankly, really weird. And I'm not even five chapters in and I'm already worried that someone will get set on fire by accident.

The Thesis Advisor has a dog that weights as much as me and has intense separation anxiety. What.

DNAja vu??

What the....

Is it bad taste to re-use gift bags? Would you care if I re-used gift bags? What are people supposed to do with used gift bags?

Advantages of shopping online: you get boxes. And if you save and swap the boxes there will be ones that are just right for the odd-shaped things you're trying to wrap. Driving up next weekend. Which means all the stuff better arrive in time for me while my wrapping paper and I are at the same location asdfasdf where is that package??

Remind me never to buy cards with glitter again. They get EVERYWHERE. I think I may have accidentally ingested some.

Have been catapulted to the middle of the holiday season induced insanity. Should be planning out next week's menu for grocery shopping but exhausted brain cannot come up with anything besides cookies and soup.

This week:

I have discovered that the county databases for the jury system are separate, since that my parents, in bay area, have received a jury summons for me...while I have been receiving jury summons addressed to my San Diego address.

Well that explains it

Science jargons: the reason why the longer I stay in academia, the worse I get at non-scientific communication of any kind. (Scroll down for the chart. Really, all you need to see is the chart to get the basic idea.)