No comment needed, but I will anyhow

During my blog-hiatus, I attended a conference. Now, my scientific turf is male-tilted, and this conference was, if anything, even more male-tilted, but whatever. That's just your garden-variety daily crap to live with.

HOWEVER, I was nonetheless (naively?) surprised to see the following announcement posted in giant letters on the blackboard in the conference room:

Soccer- Team World vs Team Europe
Wednesday 2pm (Friendly) Girls and senior citizens welcome
Thursday 2pm (Intense)

For fuck's sake, people. For fuck's sake.

Down time

I'm on a couple weeks' vacation. Blogging will be highly sporadic, especially as I am making the acquaintance of my new niece.

Story hour

When I was a lab technician for a couple of years post-college, I spend my weekends volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. (I had oodles of free time then, with a 9-5 and no spouse. What happened? Oh, right.)

Anyhow, I enjoyed swinging a hammer, learning about house construction, and getting to know the other volunteers. After I'd been volunteering for a year, the founder of Habitat, Millard Fuller, came to town for some speechifying, and the local chapter head asked me to give one of the short intro speeches to his talk.

I was terrified. As you may have noticed, I am very anxious about public speaking, even of this 2-3 minute stint in front of a ~150 person group. However, I am also too proud to let fear stop me from getting up there. The big question was, what to talk about?

I had started to craft a rather generic, "Seeing smiles of happiness from new homeowners blah blah blah" speech when my mother called. I told her about this short speech I had to give, and how I was nervous, and she said something both wise and obvious (the way mothers do): "Tell a story. Everyone likes hearing stories."

Now, my mother is a librarian, for pete's sake (as well as an astute observer of human foibles), so this was not a quantum jump on her part. But it really helped me figure out what to talk about. I scrapped the pablum and instead spoke about my first day volunteering and being scared to walk on the "roof," which at that point consisted only of trusses. And the audience, to my total shock, liked it, laughed in the right places, and applauded.

Then Millard Fuller got up, found me in the audience, and said in a wonderful admiring Southern drawl, "Jekyll--you're something else." He then proceeded to give a really good speech whose contents I have forgotten, although I'm sure he told stories.

Complete side tangent:
Later, as I walked Millard to his car, he put his arm around my waist. I was a little surprised when his hand slipped to a location that I might have called grab-ass had he been a boy my own age, but I chalked it up to old men being careless, or forgetting where young ladies' waists ended, or something like that. A year or two later, this story helped me realize that old men do not, in fact, forget where young ladies' waists end.

Back to the point:
It's old news in science that our papers and talks succeed the most when we tell a story. Sometimes it's showmanship, in the best sense of the word--framing the work in logical, climactic fashion rather than in a chronological, meandering mess. Other times it's really about finding the common threads to a story to weave a larger scientific implication out of some disparate bits of data.

I was thinking about all this as I prepare a short conference speech to give to, oh, ~150 people. I'm nervous, of course, but I'm focusing on the story, on capturing my audience with my supercool data held together in clean narrative arc.

Thanks, Mom. And thanks readers for your suggestions about allaying fear by focusing on the data rather than on myself.

After all, I have a whole blog to focus on myself.

And on the age-old paradox that even a guy who dedicates his life to helping those the poor might nonetheless be prone to some grab-ass.

Imagining images

In honor of Iran's Exxxtra FREE Missile!!111!!!1! and discussions over at DrugMonkey's about prettifying your data, I send you all to photoshopdisasters if you haven't been there before. (Variably NSFW, some of the funniest are soft-core porn with misplaced shadows etc.)

And, like, remember not to do the scientific equivalent (cut-and-pasted Western blot bands?) with your own data.

Trends in Book Reading (TiBR)

Looking over a bookshelf in our lab yesterday, I came to a realization: I don't read very many scientific books.

I dip into an occasional college/grad-level textbook if I have a two-minute question. But I don't read the books authored by senior scientists on (as drdrA says) "Poogly-plugs," although there are certainly a host of good ones. I'm worried about shelf life (literally!) of the science therein. Is it really better to read a book than to read five or six reviews in Trends or Current Opinion or whatever? By the time a book has been edited and published and distributed and purchased and read, isn't it scientific light-years out of date?

At the same time, I wonder if I'm missing something. If people are taking the time to synthesize the past, present, and future of their lifelong field into a (dense) volume, shouldn't I take a few days and read it, if I have more than a passing interest in the topic?

Also, these books are too heavy to take along on plane flights, so I can't bring them on vacation and ignore them the way I do with papers.

It's hard to carve out time to make a book a priority. But maybe I should?

Why do we say "Pee-yew"?

Last night, a skunk burrowed past some chickenwire to get into the crawl space underneath the place we are renting (or so we hypothesize). First there was a musky waft from the kitchen, the sort of nose-wrinkling but not unpleasant odor you associate with highways at night.

It was soon followed by a truly lip-curling stench unlike any I have known before. Dr Hyde and I variously identified it as rotting onions, burning plastic, and smoldering insulation before our landlord dropped by and assured us that this was Skunk.

We spent the evening turning on fans, opening doors, etc, and we slept in the guestroom, which was fortunately less pungent than our own bedroom. We don't know if the skunk(s???) is still in the crawl space, or for that matter what will happen if our semi-outdoors cat should encounter him.

Anyhow, the point of this post is that my jeans, which had been hanging in the bathroom to dry after laundering, have taken on the Eau de LePew. I spent today in lab, emanating odor. While this was distressing to me and, one may presume, to my colleagues, I must say that things could be worse.

Reasons to be Glad I Have a Lab Job When I Reek
a list I never thought I'd make

** Labs are well ventilated, with something like 8 full air changes per day. Thus my wafting skunkness is not encouraged to linger.

** While the lab has an open floor plan, we're not sharing office cubicles. The nearest person sits about 12 feet from me and is often not at his desk. So I have some space to fumigate.

** There are many smells in lab that compete with, if not dominate, my own. Mouse cages, bacterial growths, chemicals--heck, even Advisor's dog, in a show of solidarity, peed on a desk today. Malodorousness loves company!

If you're wondering, Dr Hyde gave me a useful idea that markedly improved my experimental setup, and that's why I am so cheerful in the face of our odoriferous misfortune.

Decisions, decisions

So I'm putting together a talk for Big Conference, and I am in rigid paralysis.

It's not the choice of this graph vs that, or which data to keep, or how much intro I need.

It's the elephant in the room: What color should the slide background be?

I'm almost paralyzed typing this.

White: standard (for everyone who blanches at the once-default powerpoint royal blue plate special); bright and contrast-y; but glaring, often too contrast-y, and a disaster if you have any dark immunofluorescence images or similar--the white background blinds your viewers before their eyes can adapt to darker hues. I don't actually have any of those images, but still--the whole Very Bright Screen in Kinda Dim Room thing bugs me.

(I write as I type on my laptop in the dusk.)

Dark: dramatic, but then you're faced with the question of whether to make all your graphs with white axes etc, or to put white boxes on the dark background and plop your graphs on there, which doesn't seriously annoy me but has a certain ad hoc quality to it.

JrProf, I expect you to take some time off your high-minded projects to address this quasi-sartorial dilemma.

Happy Congressional Recess!

A happy Fourth of July to you all. And a happy Independence Day to my fellow USA inmates.

Did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two founders who kinda hated each other for a while, both died on July 4th 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? (Actually independence was declared on July 2 and the D of I signed in August, but let's not get all nitpicky here.) And both died thinking the other still lived, it being back before the days of Twitter.

David McCullough's John Adams, in which I learned this tidbit, was a bit of a hagiography but terrific reading nonetheless.

Enjoy the day. We, naturellement, are celebrating with Korean barbecue.

Picture this

Making figures of your research can be gratifying in the "Gee, when you put it all together like that it's kinda impressive!" sort of way. It can also be tedious in the "Criminy this is tedious" sort of way.

What aspect of figure-making would I term the tediousest, if I were inspired to abuse my mother-tongue? The candidates:

* Gathering together all the data that despite your best organizational efforts is scattered across three binders, two lab notebooks, and seven computers, one of which has a dead hard drive and another of which you've forgotten your special login/password combo for.

* Finding figure-quality examples. You know the data add up.....so how come no individual example is ever "representative"? A mystery for the ages.

* Scale bars. Even when you have the Photoshop file with pictures of your calibration slide, there is always some sort of problem: you've changed the resolution of your picture, you've montaged several pictures together and they're no longer the same pixelage, your old camera died and the new one takes slightly different photos and no one has updated the Photoshop calibration file....

* Realizing that you analyzed your older data differently from your newer data and you have to go back to re-analyze months of work. Yum.

* Trying to make 5 equal-sized graphs fit into a multi-panel figure. "Hmm, 2x2 +1? Or, um, 3x2 - 1? Fuck it, I'm creating an unnecessary graph just to make it all fit right."

Of these many options, I surely loathe scale bars the most. Because even when you've gotten it all finished, you print out the graph triumphantly and then think...."That's odd, there's no way in nature that that object could be that size. Ohhell."

30 published papers can't be wrong!

Recently I happened to see a reviewer's comments on a manuscript submitted to a good journal (not my manuscript, and I didn't help review it either). The review, heavily paraphrased, went something like this:

"The authors show evidence in favor of a strange result.

"The evidence per se isn't bad; however, many respected labs do the same type of technique as these authors, and the respected labs don't see these results.

"Ergo, Strange Result is likely the result of inexperience or idiocy on the authors' part.

"Vote to reject."

I am of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is the sort of dismissive attitude that makes it difficult for revolutionary research to get published in good journals. It contributes to the do-safe-research-with-expected-results mindset: if your research turns up something too novel, you can't even publish it!

On the other, I think the reviewer might be right.

Hot pockets of research

In the last couple of years, my subfield of bio has seen the arrival of a new generation of tools for studying stuff. These CoolTools have been developed by a few different labs and address a major lacuna in currently available techniques.

Because the CoolTools are revolutionary, every job talk in my field now ends with these future plans:
--I will continue the stuff I published on during my postdoc.
--And I'll use CoolTools too!

I'm not mocking the job candidates. If I were on the market, I'd sure be talking about CoolTools as well.

I just sort of miss the days when the "future plans" section of a job talk actually stood a chance of surprising me, rather than being about the Cool Bandwagon. Once upon a time, when a job candidate came to speak, what distinguished the Really Exciting from the others is that the future plans portion of the talk would set out the start of a research program that no one else was doing: a new niche, a new approach.

But now everyone's got a new approach--it's CoolTools! End of talk! And I think it's gotten more difficult to evaluate the candidate's creativity and originality as a result.

That said, CoolTools are really physioproffing cool.