Can you cross out "Sarah" and say "Bristol"? UPDATED, AGAIN! I LOSE!

Final update: The campaign has released the news that Bristol is pregnant now, she's marrying the father, respect their privacy blah blah blah. Fine. Wuz WRONG. Will return to attacking Palin on the issues. But make no mistake, liberal pals--Palin will be adored by a large mass of dittohead conservatives who wouldn't have gotten out to vote for a McCain-Romney ticket. We need to bring the fight.

Ok, this is a total smear job, but I. Don't. Care. You smear Kerry as a cowardly trash-talker, you smear Obama as Muslim, you smear Edwards as a pretty boy? (Ok maybe that last one was true.)

Then fine, if that's where we are with political discourse.


There's a scurrilous rumor going around, but I'm going to promote it on the oh please chance it's true and will ruin the lives of some decent people: Sarah Palin's newest "son" is actually her daughter Bristol's.

Discuss.

And for some context, a photo of Palin pregnant with some earlier child doomed to end up with a sled-dog name.


UPDATE: The nice folks over at the Kos are going ape over how mean and trashy and intrusive it is to write smear stories like this. But their admins haven't put the squash down on the writer of Part 1. Behold, Part 2. As one perceptive commenter put it, "She don't pregnant."

And my own feeling: Palin has a paper-thin resume but the fundies love her for her family values. So if they're going to vote for her on the basis of family values, and she's going to shove down our throat that she was Saint Sarah for bringing to term a Down's syndrome baby....hells yeah, I want this public. Sorry, Bristol, you're probably a really nice girl and you shouldn't have to get put through this. You might want to tell your mom that. Right after she drops out of the VP race for "family" reasons.

Playing calm

Some of you may remember I had the golden opportunity to give a short talk at a conference recently, and that said golden opportunity scared the bejeezus out of me.

Happily, I got bucketsful of good advice from my labmates, my GradAdvisor, and from you-all. So, although my tummy was clenched in sheer terror from the second I woke up to the end of my talk, I did what I needed to: I spoke slowly, and pitched my voice low. Ignore. Panicky. Terror.

Afterwards, I was showered with compliments, many of which (especially from grad students and postdocs) included a line like, "And you were so calm!"

You can fool all of the people some of the time....

I think I made a couple of mistakes, though. The first was that I was so damn relieved when the talk was over that my brain totally switched off....right about as I got the first question, which was on an aspect of my work that is outside my turf. I gabbled senselessly for a while. Ugh.

The other is that when people later told me how calm I seemed, I promptly informed them that in fact I had been shaky with fear, but covered it really well. Although this probably won me some points with people who were impressed I could fake it, in retrospect I should know better than to play the whole "deflect compliments" game. Shoulda just smiled and said, "Thank you!"

Overall, though, it was a terrific experience and I think I will be much more relaxed in the future when I give talks--having plunged in at the deep end I'm less afraid of the sharks (mixed metaphor?) I got plenty of feedback on experiments, good questions, and even the occasional discussion about collaboration out of it. Huzzah.

But I was totally nervous.

Call me an emotional hydrant

Srsly, I have never spent so much time sniffling and blowing gobs of snot into Kleenex dabbing my eyes daintily over, for chrissakes, NY Times speech transcripts as this week.

Good on you, Democratics.

Oh, and the arithmetical conversion of McCain's 90% voting-with-Bush record to a "10% chance for change"?

I melts like the glaciers, but with more muffled cheering noises.

_________


Jekyll: "You know this means we have to send him more money."
Hyde: "You're kidding, right?"
Jekyll: "Here, let me read you the part about the gay and lesbian people in the hospital again."
Hyde: "Oh, okay already."

Why I blog....

GradAdvisor once asked me what I thought could be done about the attrition rate in our grad program--people who don't graduate, or who graduate but leave research science because it made them utterly miserable (as opposed to those who leave because there are other jobs they want....)

I said that I thought for a lot of people, whether or not they stick around will depend on how much they enjoy their graduate experience; further, that it was my observation that people who went to parties generally enjoyed their graduate experience, and people who didn't, didn't.

By "parties" I mean just about any social or quasi-social get-together in which grad students hung out, gabbed about their labs, whined about their problems, and drank some beer.

I think these events are hugely beneficial for students, because of the chance to hear others' experiences and get help on your lab problems (intellectual, technical, and otherwise). Good parties often foster good mentorship ("Oh, if you're at the writing stage then I can send you a copy of my thesis for formatting help, and also you'll want to know this about dealing with the paperwork...."). Also there is beer.

What is my point here? I was thinking about why I blog, and read other folks' blogs, and the answer is simple--it feels like a sprawling, continuous scientists' party.

To elaborate:
Everyone shows up to this party. There are the neat mentor-types whose brains you can pick; you gossip about politics; share grumbles; talk lots of shop; and of course, meet up with your drinking buddies.

But it's better than a real party, because people whose lives are usually constrained by offspring or similar can still attend, as can anyone whose time zone doesn't match up with yours.

Also, IRL you usually party with people in your immediate social circle, but this blogfest includes folks who have taken alternative career paths, so you can learn about different directions and gain some new perspectives rather than living in your (grad/postdoc/PI) bubble.

There are of course cool-kid cliques at this party, as at every other wine-and-cheese you've ever attended. But it turns out some of the cool kids are willing to give you loads of useful career advice, so it's ok.

And of course, there's an obnoxious loudmouth who appears to have taken some illegal substances before arriving. (Kidding! Kidding!)

Finally, though the alcohol is awol, people's inhibitions about interaction have been loosened by pseudonymity, or by the Intern-net, to much the same purpose as a tequila. We say stuff we might not otherwise--and that's kinda awesome.

Thanks for partying with me.

Have to admit

Hillary Clinton's speech made me cry. Pundits are reading all kind of things into it like leaving the door open for a 2012 run, but you know what? That wasn't the key message. She laid it out brilliantly: Were you in it for me, or for all the downtrodden invisible people in this country?

I voted for Obama, largely on the strength of the Iraq vote, and I was happy to see him win. But it was poignant and a tiny bit wrenching to see Hillary (finally!) suck that up, throw her weight behind him, and rally the faithful. I thought she did a great job.

Also, the bit about how her mother was born when women couldn't vote, but Hillary's daughter got to vote for her mother for president? Waterworks, totes, and I'm not even PMSing.

How d' you like them mangoes?

It was cool that Abel Pharmboy live-blogged his own vasectomy.

But blogging your abortion? That takes serious balls. As it were. This girl rocks.

h/t, Jezebel.

Hypotheses, questions, and induction

I never got into philosophy. People arguing about the reality of chairs in the neighboring room and such. I don't have that much imagination.

But today Advisor handed me a commentary in last week's Cell regarding the philosophy of science. The authors (David Glass and Ned Hall) discuss the history of the hypothesis, by which they mean the history of how scientists have approached their work. Do you set an a priori hypothesis, which you then try to falsify with experiments? Or do you use your current knowledge about the world to create a model of how things work, and then do an experiment to test your model?

The first version is called hypothesis testing, and the second is known as induction. At least, I think that's what they said. Every time I hear the word "induction" I think of stovetops, so I may not be a reliable guide here.

The authors discuss the known problems with both approaches, and with these classifications generally (e.g., how do you come up with a hypothesis to falsify if not by the process of forming a model and inducing/inducting/cooking with magnets! from there?)

They conclude by saying that a simpler idea might be to assume that everyone is working within some degree of model framework, and that experiments are best described not as hypothesis falsification or model testing, but as questions about that model.

At least, I think that's what they said. Seriously, I just want an induction stovetop.

Or, as Advisor pointed out, no less an authority than Richard Feynman said, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

ps) Biden? Huh. I think he'd be good in office at helping O navigate Senate politics, but selecting him may make it harder to get into office to find out.

Updates, memes, awards: a post about me, for a change

Thanks for all your good wishes following my THNGVB day. The gargantuan karma bank deposit did indeed pay interest on Monday, with at least one piece of good data and another possible one, depending on how analysis goes. Huzzah!

Thus I have nothing to complain about and will turn to the memes, because I think what this blog has been missing is more about me... Anyhow as we all know these are somewhat boring to read except for the annotations, so I will be annotating heavily! Hold on to your seats.

First up the food meme, which I don't think I've been tagged for but man is it entertaining. Bold means I et it, italics means it hit my gullet and did a reverso, strikethrough means I'd rather go on Fear Factor and get covered in tarantulas.

1. Venison - Oh, Canada! We honeymooned and feasted there.
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding - British culture is full of deadpan humor, as is their food.
7. Cheese fondue - Most recently, also in Canada!
8. Carp - On summer vacations we fed ducks and watched the carp circle beneath. The mother ducks were terrified and kept trying to herd their oblivious charges away.
9. Borscht - Gotta love the CSA veggies. Lord do we eat beets.
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart - Is it better or worse that this was in NYC?
16. Epoisses - Winston Churchill on France: "How can you govern a country with 300 cheeses?" De Gaulle: "There are at least 350."
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns - Dr Hyde is Asian....
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes - the ones from our garden this year tasted like wine....oh so good.
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras - I'm against animal cruelty, until it tastes like this.
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche - And the Haagen-Dazs version, which is just too sweet.
28. Oysters - I'm missing N'Awlins right about now.
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda - No, but having googled it ("Hot bath? Huh?") just now, I sure want to try.
31. Wasabi peas - Can we just stipulate that nothing sold at Trader Joe's should count as exotic enough for this list?
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea - When I was about 10, and I still remember the eclairs.
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O - Also that nothing you drank in college should make this list? Unless you went to college in Macau or something?
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal There's a limit to my spicy intake and this is it.
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala - booooorrrrrrrrriiiiinnnnnnnnggg
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut - Only 0.5/sitting though or my head explodes.
50. Sea urchin - Presumably they mean the roe.
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal - Some things are just wrong.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin - This appears to be a type of rock. Can someone enlighten me?
64. Currywurst
65. Durian - My eyes were watering it tasted so vile. Had to go brush my teeth immediately. I've read all the articles on how it smells bad and tastes good. FAIL!
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake- the whole reason for SfN annual meeting in NO is the beignets, srsly.--BikeMonkey speaks the truth.
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong - Dr Hyde calls it barbeque tea, but I love it.
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky - Someone brought it into lab one day.
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers - Show me the person who has not nibbled a dandelion.
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab - The best part of jury duty in New York is that it's in Chinatown. WIN!
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox - The best part of New York is that it's in New York. Bagel lox win!
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

So I've eaten 66 of these....D minus!

Next up, the book meme, as seen at AcmeGirl's!

Bold is I've read it, italics is started but unfinished.....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - And the BBC adaptation, overandoverandover.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Reads like science fiction, and I hate science fiction.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - can quote passages at length.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - I went to Episcopalian school for 12 years. 'Nuf said?
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Think I read this too early since the lesson I took from it was that women are crazy and Dickens was boring.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - For school. And disliked it all the way through.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - Warning: completely weird addition to pseudo-intellectual list!
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Read it for school, got A's on all my essays, never really got it. Prob time for a reread.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Maybe someday when I'm old or dead.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - And the rest of the "trilogy."
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Dr Hyde loves the Russians but they mostly leave me cold.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Go ahead, ask me to recite the Jabberwocky. No, really, go ahead. I'm fun at parties.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - And "Lazy Sunday" too.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Er, duh, this is one of the Chronicles of Narnia. Who's in charge of this list? Moron.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Actually started reading it to Dr Hyde in absence of us having a child for me to take it out on.
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - And I'll never get those 2 hrs back, either.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Anne bugged me. Everyone always ended up loving her. Emily of New Moon was a much more interesting heroine.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - Ok but does not belong on this list, that's for sure. I think men just rated it highly because the guy has sex twice in 24 hrs.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - I'm loving the Austen boost to my list here.
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Again, really does not deserve to be on this list. Also? The people who couldn't figure out the "mystery" are morons.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - I read it before it came out in the US and pissed off my college suitemates by laughing out loud so frequently.
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Acmegirl, you will have to share more about the dance piece. I sure hope you weren't the whale.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - I lived in England for a year, an experience which made this book unfailingly hysterical.
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - Quite recently, liked it but didn't love it.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - It was good, but everything else of Ishiguro's I've read has been junk.
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - I nominate this book to be the first one removed from this list by appalled meme-doers.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Kinda stretching to make 100 here, aren't we?
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - It was like a French collection of Hallmark cards. Quelle horreur! But Saint-Exupery's autobiography was good.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - At summer camp, ostentatiously. Wonder why nobody liked me?

And that makes an even 50/100. Fail!

If anyone wants to consider themselves tagged, you go right ahead.




Finally, I've been simul-tagged for an award by Scientist Mother and the duo at RESEARCHERS and, late-breaking news, DrdrA! Honored!


I'm going to take this triple-tag as a sign that this one has propagated pretty thoroughly through my little community. But if you haven't been nominated yet, Anonymoustache and DamnGoodTech, this is your time!

CRISPy charms

At a recent conference, I had a chance to see some fun stuff that NIH is planning (I know, how often do you get to say that?)

CRISP is going to add in a new visualization format: grants are organized based on their abstracts, and then displayed in a webby network, with each grant as a point, and lines connecting them together. The distance between grant-points reflects the verbal similarity of their abstracts.

It was total fucking nerd joy. You could search it as you would normally search CRISP, and then see which grants "resembled" your target result. Or you could just zoom in on one major topic area, and then browse around to see what was in the mainstream (abstract-wise, at least) and what was out on a limb.

It was as though you had a bird's-eye view of all American biomedical science. And it was clickable.

There was even a color scheme associated with it, which if I recall rightly corresponded to the different granting institutes (although, as one colleague suggested, it'd be sweet if instead it reflected the grant amount...).

I'm not sure when they'll release this version publicly, but I'm calling it right now: the amount of biomedical science done in America will plummet for 1-2 weeks while everybody plays with the new toy. Er, way to go, NIH!

Dr Jekyll and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (more apologies, to Judith Viorst)

I went to bed without flossing and when I woke up my mouth tasted like something had died in it and also the cat clawed me awake, again, and I had gas and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

At breakfast I found out that there was a hold placed on our credit card because of suspicious activity: an in-flight movie and last night's dinner at a restaurant we have eaten at before. I wasted ten minutes explaining this to CitiFolks.

I think I'll move to an HHMI lab.

At work a paper just came out in C/N/S that, although it doesn't exactly scoop the manuscript I just submitted to One-Tier-Down, still kinda takes the flash out of our findings. Who cares about C/N/S, anyhow?

Advisor seems more interested in Other Postdoc's data than in mine.

Someone left a bunch of stinky mouse cages out and the smell made me gag. I hope you clean up those mouse cages, I said. I hope the next time you do an experiment, it goes horribly wrong and cancels out all the good data you got already, and you can never join an HHMI lab.

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

That's what it was, because we had to do a data blitz with neighboring labs this afternoon so I spent all morning making three stupid PowerPoint slides. I hate making PowerPoint slides.

Since experiments have been bad lately and because my experiment time was constricted by data blitz, I decided to do a "fun" alternative experiment. I couldn't get that to work, either.

In the afternoon, Advisor asked me if I was washing my tissue with PBS before storing it long-term. No, I said. Nobody told me to do that or gave me a protocol. Well then your data will be screwed up, he said. Next week do it differently.

Next week, I said, I will be in an HHMI lab. But nobody even answered.

After crying in the bathroom, I decided to calm down by making myself a mug of hot tea, and I was careful as could be, but somehow still upended the liquid all over my skirt.

After experiments we had the data blitz and my imaging movies, which were kinda super-important, wouldn't play. They can make me present a data blitz, but they can't make me like it.

Before I left work I got an email from a collaborator who said all the data I collected last Saturday was useless.

On my bike ride home, an SUV cut me off by turning right just in front of me, and I had to slam on my brakes and skid and even so nearly hit him. I tried to follow him to find where he lives and kill him, but he got too far ahead of me.

This week's New Yorker still has not arrived.

Dr Hyde came home and hugged me and kissed me and said some days are like this.

Even in HHMI labs.

Fantasy Futures

The other day, experiments were not working for me. Same reagents and setup as on Monday, when I got lovely data without hardly trying--no clue what went wrong.

Simultaneously, Other New Postdoc (an outstanding experimentalist), was having a bad day trying to install a camera frame grabber in his computer. After a lot of frustration, he hollered, "I quit!"

In another corner of lab, GradStudent was supposed to be working on his first paper. He instead was helping ONP with the camera issues, and he said, "Man, I hate working on this paper. I want to quit and just become a technician who troubleshoots things like this camera problem."

So here is the idea I proposed to them:
"We are going to run a lab together. GradStudent, you will be the technician, computer guy, and chief troubleshooter. ONP, you will do all the experiments. And I will write the grants and papers."

Everyone was happy with this utopian future.

Later in the day, I ran into another grad student who was unhappy with his day too: "Today I found that the code I'd worked on for the last week was buggy and in any case not as good as equivalent code another guy wrote," he mourned. I told him about the Lab Collective Plan, and he said, "Oh, man, can I join? I'll be the conference schmoozer and seminar presenter--that's the one thing I'm good at."

At home, Dr Hyde also expressed interest in joining the Collective. "What is your unique skill?" I asked him. He thought for a while, and then said, "Dogwalker."

Anyhow, the point of this is that as scientists, we must wear many hats. Hardly anyone is good at all the jobs required--we all have predilections for one or another part of the Scientist Skillset. I think this is one reason we frequently feel so stupid.

If you were going to form a Lab Collective, which job would you want? Writer? Experimentalist? Technical support? Teacher? Schmoozer? Other?

13 4 Ways of Looking at a Bad Deal (with many apologies to Wallace Stevens)

The gossip
A recently graduated friend had lined up his postdoc with Dr BigShot. After he had signed a year-long lease in BigShot's location, BigShot told him that actually the lab was too full and there was no space for him after all.

The reactions
Graduate student: "Wow, that's really scary. I feel bad for him."

Post-doc [Dr Hyde]: "Jeez, that's terrible. Of course, he should really have gotten the offer in writing, but maybe that felt too awkward to ask for."

Unhappy, disenchanted postdoc: "This is totally proof that the system is broken, because famous PIs can screw over people with no repercussions whatsoever."

A PI: "I don't believe the rumor. I know Dr BigShot quite well and this would never happen."


I do not know which to believe,
The story by the recent grad student,
Or the PI who vouches for Dr BigShot,
The young and naive,
Or the cynicism that comes after.

What does it mean to do science?

Following up a discussion at Dr. Free-Ride's on the question of what makes science--is it peer review bestowing an "accurate" stamp, or just an attitude?

I'll place my marker on the bingo square marked Attitude.

Sure, your own investigation of why your vacuum has ceased function is not publication-worthy; you might not even be right when you conclude it's motor burn-out, nor when you hypothesize that said motor burn-out (if true) was probably due to an excess of cat hair build-up.

But it's the fact that you took the vacuum to pieces, identified the components from common sense and the internet, tested each component to the best of your abilities, and located a plausible source of the issue that makes you a scientist.

(Bonus science points awarded if you took the step of removing the matted cat fur, replacing the motor, and testing your hypothesis; but since motors are ridiculously expensive compared to new vacuums, we did not push that far.)

One of my good friends is a terrific scientist, always alive with inquiry. We once went to an organ concert, with the organ on stage in full view. I gazed with happy mystification at the stops and pedals. My friend said, "Man, it just makes you want to go down and push everything to figure out what does what, huh?"

For that remark alone, she deserves the title of scientist.

Peer-review and concerns about replicability? That's nice and all, but that's for Cutting-edge Important Stuff. Science in your daily life is an attitude, an approach, a mind-set.

In total agreement with Chad Orzel on this.

Science Book meme

I enjoy reading the book memes (and will get around to the tag soon, AcmeGirl!) but they don't bear much relation to our lives. As a solution [pun!], Junction Potential has a great thread going about what works belong on a science book meme. Go suggest your own favorite classic science writing! We too can change the Interntez!

Right back atcha

I totally get the rants from many of you professor-ish types about god-awful manuscript drafts from your trainees. I've looked back at my own cringe-worthy efforts, and I've blanched at equally bad writing from others.

But you're not off the hook either, you know. Based on my own experiences and what I hear from friends, here's my

List of Ridiculous Things Professors Do with Manuscripts.

1) Tell your trainee, "Well, I don't really think you have enough for a paper, but you can go ahead and write it up and we'll see."
WTF?? If you've somehow forgotten, it actually takes a lot of time to write up a manuscript. Even if the product is shoddy. The prospect of writing one only to have it treated as too pathetic to even consider revising? Nuh-uh.

2) Leave them on your desk for months on end.
I get it, I get it, you're so flabbergasted by the sheer stupidity of the manuscript that you ignore it rather than do anything about it. But see the complaint with #1 above. If you truly hate the ms., sit down with the student and explain why. Is it organized well but the writing's horrific? Is it illogical and incomprehensible to boot? Fine, but your sitting on it like it's a world-class egg is not going to help anybody. Also, on Dr Hyde's behalf: Totally uncool to sit on a draft you say is all but finished for Literally Four Months Despite Nudging.

3) Make illegible comments.
Sometimes I don't incorporate a comment from GradAdvisor into a draft, not because I disagree with it, but because I can't READ it. If your handwriting is illegible, and you know who you are, use the freakin' Word editor or whatever. Your chickenscratch makes me think you don't care about the paper enough to even form letters decently. Thanks.

4) Make inscrutable comments.
Gotta love it when you just circle a paragraph and write "?" You think my facts are wrong? You think this paragraph belongs elsewhere? You don't see the point in including this paragraph? Who knows? Next time I'm going to return the draft to you with your "?" circled in red and another "?" next to it.

5) "Fix" the manuscript back to the way I had it before.
I hear you, JP et al. Apparently this is just a habit you acquire when you become a professor, like tweed or Birkenstocks. But it is unbearably frustrating from the trainee's POV. What message are you sending? "Hmm, I read Draft 2 while (talking on the phone to my mother/changing my timing belt/playing Wii) and this sentence seemed out of place, but now when I read your correction in Draft 3, I realize it was ok after all." If you have to do this, for chrissakes explain why you're doing it. Explain why you changed it in the first place, and why you're changing it back now. Again, from the trainee's perspective it's as though you didn't care enough to think it through on the first read.

6) Promise you'll give it back to me with comments this week, and then don't.
We all have commitments. We're all overworked. If you pull this crap, and I know many of you do, have the basic decency to explain what's going on to your student and give a new date you can stick to. You hate it when trainees string you along like this; don't do it right back to them.

There's probably more I'm not thinking of right now. But here's the key thing:

Don't EVER forget that you hold total power over paper production, and we hold almost none. You get to decide what data goes in, what stays out; who's first author, who's stuck in acknowledgments; when to return drafts to us; when the paper is ready to get sent out; which journal it's going to; whether or not it ever sees the light of day. We can do lots of little things to nudge, but ultimately you're holding onto 1-5 years of our toil in that paper. That disparity between our raw need and your utter control makes us a wee bit nervous. Have a little compassion.

Reviewing reviewers

Earlier this week, GradAdvisor and I sent a manuscript off to a FairlyGlamorousMag.

Of the many byzantine components to actually submitting a paper, suggesting candidate reviewers has to be the weirdest. You know that the editors will probably select one of your suggestions, plus one (or two) people you didn't suggest. You obviously want the ms. to go to scientists who are going to be judicious, fair, and--let's be honest--favorable.

It's sort of like ordering off a Chinese Menu A and Menu B, except that you can only define the options on Menu A, not pick an item off it; and you can't define Menu B at all--you can only try to guess which dishes are likely to be on it, and strategize accordingly with your suggestions for Menu A.

I ended up listing four suggested reviewers, two of whom are likely to be favorable but would not have necessarily sprung to the editor's mind; two of whom are likely to be a bit harsher, but are more obvious based on research similarity. I deliberately left OFF the list two people who I think would be favorable, but who will hopefully occur to the editor on his own.

I don't even know if this was the right way to go about it, but GradAdvisor was on vacation so I just plunged ahead. 24 hours later I was already second-guessing myself and agonizing that I should have done it differently. How, I'm not sure.

If people ran restaurants like this, they would go out of business. I'm going gray here.

Hey, only 4-6 more weeks to wait!

Reflecting on reflections (so we get a real image?)

I am shameless about reading over other people's shoulders, particularly on public transit.

I take a bus to work, and as with most buses it contains a cast of regulars and assorted cameos. One of the regulars on this bus is a math professor, which I know because (a) she grades papers that I nosily read over her shoulder, and (b) she has a math symbol tattooed on her foot.

The papers that she grades are not usually math papers, per se. Instead, they are "Reflections" from the members of her class about their experience in the last week's lessons. Such as:

"I really enjoyed this week hearing about the Fibonacci series. For a long time I didn't understand how it related to what we were doing in class, but then Maria explained it and all of a sudden it clicked into place for me. It was really neat. Although I didn't participate in class much this week because of some other problems in my life right now, I still felt as though I learned a lot."

This sort of thing continues for a page, usually a page with wide margins and 11-pt Courier. The professor then writes something at the bottom, such as, "Sorry to hear about your life problems but I'm glad the math made sense to you! Checkmark" and moves onto the next Reflection.

I hardly need to say that this is a rather different type of math homework than any I ever had.

The calc geek inside me says, "This is the problem with education in America today. We're too wrapped up in how the student is reacting to the classroom rather than in whether or not they've learned the damn concepts."

The inner bleeding heart says, "This is clearly a math class for students who don't have a good background in math [a lot of the Reflections have mentioned learning about simple probability, like drawing a red card, or an ace, from a deck], and these students have maybe always been afraid of math because of their weakness in it. This provides an opportunity for the prof to find out what works and what doesn't in her teaching style, as well as to find out which students need more help."

Calc geek: "But wouldn't both the student and prof time spent on these Reflections be better spent, I don't know, doing math problems? Reinforcing concepts?"

Bleeding heart: "It doesn't do students any good to reinforce concepts if they're all at sea anyhow. This is where the professor gets to find out whether her teaching is getting through."

CG: "You know, this is what I really hate about you. All nicey nicey, no results."

BH: "I'm sympathetic to your feelings. Should we talk more about this?"

Ok, ok. Point being: I can see reasons to do this sort of thing, but really--wouldn't it be better to make the homework Math rather than Mathy Feelings?

Then again, I've never done any teaching, so maybe this is the new way to run lessons and I'm just ignorant.

Though not about the probability of drawing a red ace (1/26).

Returned!

Dr Hyde and I are back from our long vaycay. It wasn't all fun and games--one week was spent at a conference, and since the other two weeks were spent (a) helping my brother+wife care for my 3-month old niece, (b) helping my parents, and (c) going to my grandfather's funeral, it was actually a rather busy and stressful time.

However, although we weren't sunning ourselves in the Mediterannean, I still feel refreshed. Three weeks away from the bench is a plenty long time, long enough that I now regard my experiments with a sort of hazy happy indifference. Much improved from prior to this trip, when I regarded them with fear and resentment. ("What, like it would have killed you to give me some publishable data?")

In fact, it is possible that my busy vacation actually helped me with re-entry. After last year's trip (which involved lots of sunning selves in the Med), I was almost too blissed out to return to the bench. After this trip, I'm just plain grateful to be doing benchwork rather than changing a diaper, coaxing a reluctant infant to sleep, or commiserating with my grieving family.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a few lines on this I always liked:

Get leave to work--
In this world 'tis the best you get at all;
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.

She didn't say "Flying Spaghetti Monster" but I'm totally sure that's what she meant.