it pours down like rain
more blog entries, put here for safekeeping.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Listserv?
Did we ever come to a decision about our listservs? Are people participating on the Anthro one?
I have been keeping all the mail digests, and all my Drosophila mail digests, just in case. But I have no idea what I should be doing right now with that activity.
CRAP.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 2:04 PM
Monday, October 15, 2007
I have.
1) A glass of wine. A bottomless glass of wine.
2) My presentation from last Friday in Quicktime Video format.
And now it's time for the mainstay of some of my favorite blogs. THE LIVE REVIEW!
00:00:03 - Wow. I can not point a laser pointer. There is no point to using a laser pointer if your hand is shaking so much that it is flying around the slide like a tiny red gnat. BUT! my voice is a lot less nasal than I thought.
00:00:09 - HEY! I'm kind of cute! Sweet....
00:01:46 - Okay so far. My first slide was background, and was pretty good. I'm not saying "umm" as much as I thought I had been. I am looking at the laptop screen too much - which is bad, because I lost a contact right before I gave my presentation. My vision is (-7.00)...I think that translates to 20/1000, roughly.... so in looking at the screen, I have to put my face about 5 inches from it and squint my eyes until they look like hyphens.
oo:o3:26 - I have a very indirect communication style. This is really bad when I'm describing math. It's even worse when I'm describing applications of math. And it's worst of all when I'm describing applications of math on 2 hours of sleep, 6 shots of caffeine, and 1 contact.
00:04:34 - Professors and other males, stop reading. SKIP TO THE NEXT TIMESTAMP NOW. I adjust my BRA!!! Oh my god, do I think people can't see that? We are talking full on grab and go! Dear god. Future presentations, wear sports bra. Done.
00:08:11 - Well... so far...it's not bad at all. I really get cis-regulatory elements. But, there's still 15 minutes to go...
00:09:15 - Oh, I am going downhill at this point. This is where it gets bad, because I didn't spend as much time on these slides when I was making them, so I didn't have as clear enough an idea of what I wanted to say.
00:11:28 - Okay, that wasn't so bad, after all. I inserted a lot of cute applications of my paper in between some of the hard math stuff, so the weaker parts of my presentation are interspersed with strong, fun ones, where it appears like I am actually a human being capable of normal social interaction.
00:15:23 - Still not that bad...hrmm... I do have to bend over and fiddle with the computer a lot to read my Notes. But I also have to bend over to change the slide, and there was no avoiding that. I spend a lot less time bent over than I thought I had - I actually am doing a good job projecting and keeping my body angled toward the class.
00:17:05 - STILL GOOD! I tend to stumble a little bit and get stuck on certain words when I'm trying to express something. I usually don't say "umm" - instead I just say the last word I said again and again. Duplicate-dupli-duplicate genes-genes. But it's not as noticeable as I thought. It's pretty clear I should have practiced a little more, you can definitely tell that I'm adlibbing the whole thing. But still, not that bad. I still can't point a laser pointer, though.
00:18:46 - Ah, this is the worst part. I didn't understand how the graph showed the principle in the paper. I understood the graph, I understood the principle, but I had no idea why the authors used the graph to illustrate the principle. I had hoped I would divine it by the time I did my presentation.
00:21:00 - Okay, I'm through that part. I kind of skipped over how the graph illustrated the principle, and skipped straight to the principle, complete with an analogy and an "asshead" joke.
00:22:42 - Oh, that was way too short. It actually wasn't bad at all! Dude! I rock! But I need to make longer presentations. And my closing with Antennapedia was so good! Whoa! I'm so happy. ....and tipsy.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 9:23 PM
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
slouching towards couch potatoness
Fall break needs to arrive ASAP. I have a midterm in my physics class the day after tomorrow, which I seem to have no motivation to study for. I'm trying to calculate the minimal effort I can put into my academic life without causing serious disruption to my potential future. If I knew for sure that I wanted to go to UO instead of Harvard, I might have a little more wiggle room in terms of how much I want to study for my exams. :)
My advice to first-year students --> do not at any point take a serious full-time job during your college career. Not even during the summer (yeah, I know you don't have a choice). And definitely don't do it in a semester off. It requires a certain mindset and momentum to deal with being a student, and once you taste the sweet sweet satisfaction of the 40-hour work week and the carefree evenings and weekends, you will NEVER go back.
Ahh screw it - I'm just going to think about this week in terms of time rather than in the amount of effort it will take to get through it. Maybe I will work on thesis instead of studying. My favorite form of procrastination is to work on low-priority responsibilities that are satisfying.... like keeping up my blog. :(
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 6:40 PM
Friday, October 19, 2007
He-ey. Ye-ah.
I have to say, I really like keeping my blog. I hope I don't come off too whiny or too stick-up-my-ass. I really like having a digital receptable for my anxiety - but maybe I should do that somewhere private. Like in the shower.
That said, fall break is HERE! My fall break officially commenced 6 hours ago, and I have celebrated by drinking a cup of gas station coffee, checking my favorite webcomics, reading three chapters of the AWESOME book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (by Steven Johnson), and marveling that my favorite illegal video-sharing site appears to have vanished from the web. Oh TV-links, I hardly knew you!!!
The creature that was living in my walls two weeks ago is back again. I'd hoped it was dead. :( The good news, it sings during the daytime now. Bad for trying to get things done in my room, but at least I can still get some sleep. I don't know what it is - its noise is an octave or two higher than a cricket, as consistent as a spruce beetle, and LOUDER THAN DEATH METAL.
Seriously. I'm not sensitive to noise, I swear. When I was a raver, I'd fall asleep against the speakers - the thumping of the bass puts you to sleep like a baby in the backseat of a moving car.
When the creature first started singing a few weeks ago at 2 in the morning, my neighbor pounded on my wall. I have no clue what she thinks I was doing.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 8:53 PM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
JK Rowling has stated that she always pictured Dumbledore as gay. That woman rocks. This makes the whole Grindelwald storyline so much more tragic. I wish that had been more apparent in the subtext - it would have made the Grindelwald portion of Deathly Hallows much less "came-out-of-nowhere" for me.
I've come to a part in Emergence that talks about why the Internet in its present form will not give rise to emergent intelligence/global structure. The problem is there is no feedback mechanism in the Internet - ant colonies and neurons give rise to emergent structure because individual members affect and are affected by each other. But on the Internet - sure, pages can link to each other. But they can't perceive that linking and make changes based on it.
One exception is Google - it's capacity for pseudo-emergent intelligence is what makes it so useful. Google returns the best links by remembering what link most people choose to visit for a given search term - it's like having everyone vote, and then putting the links into a hierarchy based on the poll results. THEN it also assigns extra power to the most successful link - if Amazon is a site frequently visited via Google, then the links that appear on Amazon's website will move up in the hierarchy themselves.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:51 PM
Monday, October 22, 2007
NOT AGAIN
It's weird. Tonight should feel like a Saturday night to me. Instead, all I can think about is that the reading for this class has to be done by tomorrow night so I can post my discussion... damn! That said, the reading about gender is pretty cool.
I spent my whole break in the lab. I can't believe that happened. All day, every day. HOW???? WHY??? The worst part is, aside from my genetics, I made no progress. In one of my experiments, I found that a different protocol gives me slightly better results, but I still see variable results in my control. This is not good. Then I tried to set up a different experiment, and it looks like the reagents I have to work with are no good. GAH!!! SUCK IT, RESEARCH!
I wish I got more e-mail. I could solve this problem by making more firends.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 10:12 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
GOGOL BORDELLO!!!!!
AHHH people are selling tickets for the Gogol Bordello concert on craigslist for base price!!! I could go to the show! I have to go!!!
THOSE STUPIDS SCALPERS I WANT TO KILL EVERY POSTER SELLING 6-8 TICKETS. I was so sad when the concert sold out over a month in advance.
But! I will persevere! I will take the train in, I will take the bus home, I will take the subway to meet the seller to pick up the tickets. I have to see this show. I went to a Gogol Bordello show once when I was a sophomore, and I have never been happier in my life. I crowdsurfed twice, I got smacked upside the head by Eugene Hutz's microphone, and I supported Eugene Hutz on a bass drum while he screamed in my face and dripped sweat on me. IT. WAS. AWESOME.
I also fell in love with the most talented violinist and accordion players in the world. In alphabetical order by instrument.
Seriously people - if you don't know them, YouTube yourselves some Gogol Bordello ASAP. They are unbelievable. Oh, but skip "Start Wearing Purple" - I don't know why that song was their big hit, it does not represent nearly enough of what they do best. Look for "I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again" or "Sally." Or Mishto. Or something off the new album.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:19 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
okay, so maybe I post when I don't have anything to say....
I've realized that I really like stabilization - I don't like wandering around the world, and I don't like having temporary homes and staying in suitcases. It really irritates me that I can't sew up my shirts whenever I want to.... or that I don't own a spoon. I'm really looking forward to the day when my life is stable enough that I can own a cat. CAT.
Here are some secrets about me - I don't like Radiohead. I liked Creep, and Karma Police a little bit, and apparently these are the singles people associate with Radiohead going too commercial. I like Idiotheque, but I have to be in the mood.
Secret the 2nd - I also will usually switch the song when Public Enemy comes on. I love their lyrics, and I love how Chuck D talks in interviews...but I don't like the music that much. It's sad, because I REALLY want to like them. Then again, if I were alive in 1990, I would probably desperately latch onto every track on "Fear of a Black Planet" - I get the feeling that the early 90's were a musical dead zone. The bright shining artistic lights of Metallica and Nirvana. And what else? Amy Grant and Ace of Base, that's what else. PLLLLBBTT.
I don't know, I was living in Big Lake back then and we didn't really have much in the way of radio. Or TV. We had a big mudhole in the backyard that my brother and I would play "Rivers" in. On the weekends we would explore the abandoned trailers and claim treasure from their burnt out cabinets. Maybe that's why I have so much trouble respecting property boundaries nowadays.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:07 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Radio Lab
OK, I hate that I talk about science so much because I sound like a caricature of myself. I can't help it! I FRIGGIN LOVE SCIENCE.
Back to Earth.... has anyone here ever listened to Radio Lab? It's a program put out by NPR, through the WNYC station. And it's sooooo good. I wish they released them more often - but the production values are extremely high, so I suppose it's a tradeoff. I guess I'm stuck to 6 episodes a year. :(
Basically, they pick a really fascinating topic - Memory... Morality.... Musical Language.... Perception of Self.... and then they do a really cool show that digs very deep into it. They talk to scientists from all over, visit their labs, talk about their research, but discuss it all in a very down-to-earth context, that's really exciting and very interesting. And they get seriously legitimate people on their program - Oliver Sacks is a frequent guest, for example.
The memory show is one I especially liked - a perfect balance of "OMG THAT'S SO COOL" and tragedy. The first part was super cool - they talked about memory studies in rats, and how memories were programmed and could be selectively erased.
And the last part was just very sad - it was about a man who has terrible short-term memory loss. He remembers everything about his life up until he started suffering this memory loss, but up until that it's like time has not passed. Even though he's had the disease for a long time, he still calls his wife several times a day, saying he just woke up and he doesn't know where he is, and he hasn't seen her and needs to see her - even though she was there a few minutes prior. I'll admit that it had me bawling... a welcome reminder that I am capable of empathy.
Please allow me to spread the amazingness that is Radio Lab. The memory episode is in Season 3, if you want to check it out.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
I was always frustrated in a lot of my Scripps classes - there were several questions that would come up in discussion, and I would want to approach them from a biological view.... and that would completely halt discussion. Once, after I spoke, I had a teacher say "Well, that's a science-based viewpoint....let's get back to the discussion...."
My Core 2 class was called "Death" - and in several of the discussions, we would be discussing what it means to be alive, what it means to be dead, and what consciousness is. But biology was completely excluded from the discussions. One time, we were talking about consciousness, and I had no idea what was going on in the discussion - I couldn't follow people's arguments at all. Then I realized that the existence of a soul was being taken as a given in the class. I broached the idea that thoughts are chemical responses to stimuli, backing it up with the fact that a thought is going through your brain entire seconds before your consciousness becomes aware of the thought. Needless to say, I put a lot of people on the defensive, and I was dismissed pretty quickly.
I hope I don't come off as a playing this character, of science-nerd, acting as an authority of some sort. I have a tendency to hold on really tightly to that identity when I feel like I'm in an environment where that is a small fraction of the population... even in the science department, you'll find few people who are really excited about science... there are a hell of a lot of pre-meds in there. I don't talk about science with anyone but Dr. Armstrong. I probably spend more time with Dr. Armstrong than most of my friends at Scripps... hell, we go on road trips!
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:41 PM
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
You read it. You know you did.
I loved the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, but I was a little bit disturbed by some of the magical ones. Like there were the two little girls whose voices disappeared because they whispered too much.... or the children who pretended to mishear their parents, and as punishment they were given overly sensitive hearing that made them wince when mosquitos screamed. Those were seriously disturbing - apt punishments, maybe, but bordering on child cruelty.
Much more tolerable were the down-to-earth, non-magical punishments. Like the tiny set of dishes for the daughter that was a "Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker." Or the mom that planted radishes on her daughter that wouldn't bathe. NOW THAT is parenting!
I didn't go to the Gogol Bordello concert, because I am a Lamey McLamerson who is totally broke and still has to drum up money for grad school application fees. Sad. I should post to this blog less. I'm doing it at least 5 times a week even without participating in the experiment, just because it's more enticing than doing my homework. Creative procrastination, my friend calls it....I'm doing it because I want to, not because you tell me to! (bonus points if you get the reference and can name the disease!)
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:18 PM
Sunday, October 28, 2007
My fiancee, Janet Vice...I mean, Weiss.
So, tonight was the Ted Leo and the Pharmacists concert. I managed to throw together a costume at the last minute - I was a Magic 8-Ball, with an 8 on my back and blue triangles on my front that I could swap out. My friend and I got there after the opening band started. I must admit, this power trio wasn't quite our thing - I didn't like the singers voice or the way he played the guitar or the songs he wrote, and it kind of seemed like he and the bassist were phoning it in.
The drumming was another story, however. The drummer was making my night. It was this awesome woman, and her hair flew around and she was just wild and the drums were making crazy sounds. Finally, the singer stopped playing guitar and got on keyboard, which he was actually sort of good at playing. They did a jazzy song that was good enough to actually give dancing a go....which is when I got close enough to the stage to actually SEE the band...
The drummer was JANET WEISS!
Okay, maybe you guys aren't into Sleater-Kinney, but they were dynamos and I was quite disappointed when they broke up two years ago. Janet Weiss was my idol, the reason I started learning drums - I had pictures of her up on my wall. I'd heard that she'd started a new band with her husband or boyfriend or whatever, but I hadn't known what it was called.
Needless to say, I was quite embarassed that minutes prior I had been quietly mocking the band with my friend in the back, like those two old men in the balcony on The Muppet Show.
When they were done, I danced around on my toes nervously for a minute, and then got up the courage to go up to her and ask her to sign my costume. I AM NEVER THROWING AWAY THAT 8.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 12:50 AM
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Not-So-Fly Girl
DAMN DAMN DAMN.
My research is not going so well.
I tried to make create flies that were expressing a certain protein, that glows green when I shine fluorescent light on it. I succeeded, and then I started doing the crosses I needed to do to make stocks of these flies.
I just checked my stocks, and two of them have larvae that aren't fluorescing! Meaning they are not expressing the protein! One of them has mostly larvae which are fluorescing, and I picked those out to create a substock. The other one only has 1/5 larvae fluorescing, which is a terrifyingly low percentage. What's worse is, they have thrown off the larval marker that tells me whether they are homozygous or heterozygous - I cannot see their genotype until they are adults. This means that even if I pick the 1/5 that are fluorescing and start a substock, I will have no way of knowing whether the stock will be maintained, or if I have introduced a new chromosome into the gene pool.
The reason this is so terrible is that I need these stocks so that I can put them with a mutant. Which takes about two crosses (4-6 weeks of work). I have to do that before I can even start the experiments I need to do. And if I have to remake these stocks, then I am in a mess of trouble.
Fortunately, the stocks that did work are my experiments - the ones that didn't work are my controls. I can spend the rest of the semester doing the experiments and remaking my control stocks, and then do the controls next semester. But this is extremely frustrating.... it should have gone well, I did everything right and I spent a lot of time on it and it still didn't work.
And this why science makes me cry 95% of the time.... but I still live for that 5% where things are working and I actually get data.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 2:32 PM
Monday, October 29, 2007
Songs with your name...
Do you guys know songs with your name in them? Do you like them? Alternate spellings or masculine spellings totally count - they sound the same when sung!
I love the Mamas and the Papas, and one of their best songs is "For the Love of Ivy".... but I get really self-conscious when I'm singing about how it takes up all of my time to fall in love with Ivy. And there's a part at the end where they just sing "Ivy" over and over again, but with BEAUTIFUL HARMONY I LOVE MAMA CASS'S VOICE.
Usually when I want to sing the song in the lab I'll close the door so no one will hear and think that my ego is so massive that is pulls nearby objects into orbit.
I know there's a Lyle Lovett song called "Sonya", or maybe "Sonja."
There's also a fairly awesome Tenacious D song for Leigh. Here are the lyrics:
Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee,
Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee,
We're talkin' fuckin' Lee.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 9:09 PM
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Blogger < Livejournal?
It's interesting - I actually prefer Livejournal to Blogger, even though Blogger has a much classier layout. My problem is that Blogger lacks the community structure of Livejournal - I haven't updated my LJ in months, but I still visit it every day to check my friends page. Maybe I haven't discovered it yet, but Blogger doesn't seem to have a "friends" page like LJ does. I suppose they expect everyone uses RSS feeds now, but meh.
I also really enjoyed the option of displaying to you guys what books I'm reading and what music I'm listening to. If I write a particularly heinous/embarassing blog, I still had the option of salvaging some cool-points if you could see that I was listening to Sigur Ros.
But I'm not listening to Sigur Ros. I'm listening to ABBA. Maybe having the music option off is for the best.
My grad school list is complete! I asked my recommenders to write me letters yesterday, so there is no changing my list now. I ended up applying to all the schools on my list, even the ones I'm on the fence about. I checked out Yale and NYU's faculty again, and I realized that I actually would really really love to go to those schools. I just doubt I would be able to keep a cat in Manhattan (funny how that keeps cropping up as my main priority).
Indiana is a really good program for me too - however, over half of the grad students are international students, and most of them are from the same country. I'm discouraged by this - but not because I am xenophobic (i hope!). I have a hard enough time making friends as it is, but I bet if I went to Indiana, all the people from the same country would rather hang out with each other than hang out with me. I was working at UC-Santa Cruz for a little while this summer, and one thing I noticed was the grad students and post-docs seemed to eat lunch by country. The French people ate together and spoke French, the Italians ate together and spoke Italian, and the Chinese people ate together and spoke Chinese. I usually read a book.
I can picture myself becoming one of those creepy cat-ladies. And the truly terrifying thing is that thought doesn't bother me.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 8:05 PM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Some Scientists Are Douchebags.
If they can say douchebag on TV, I can say it in my blog. By the way, did you know they can say douche and douchebag on TV now???? I've heard it on so many shows! But you still can't say ass-hole. You can say ass. But asshole still gets bleeped on Conan. Crazy.
Did anyone see the Colbert Report the other night? Stephen interviewed Craig Venter, and asked him if he found a gene for narcissism when he decoded his own genome.
Craig Venter definitely has a reputation for being a show-off and an egotistical person who cares more about sexy science than careful science. He sequenced his own genome, for sure, but when he sequenced the first published dog genome - it was his own poodle. Plus he deliberately challenged the Human Genome Project to a race, and made the whole thing into a big public vs. private, potentially embarassing mess (though that was fortunately sorted out through the miracle of compromise).
James Watson is also a great big jerk. Fortunately, he has gotten some comeuppance recently. But here are some other gems from him...
On Rosalind Franklin, the woman whose X-Ray crystallography revealed the double helix of DNA: Though her (Rosalind Franklin) features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents."
He also comments that she was "willfully unsexy" and "needed to be put in her place." This was after his editors made him change the book to be less harsh on the late Ms. Franklin.
I saw him on Charlie Rose once, and he was talking about how "Irish DNA" could lead one to be a better poet than "Eskimo DNA" could. Which is gross even if you ignore the strange use of the term Eskimo. He's also suggested using genetic engineering so "all girls would be pretty."
This, along with a certain professor at JSD who I think I can guess the identity of, tend to give scientists a bad name. Yeah, there's a hell of a lot of bias out there, but when you look at the actual data - ie, genome sequencing showing the genetic variance from individuals of different "races" is no greater than the genetic variance of individuals of the same race - the truth usually comes out, and hopefully these ancient ideas will die out with the dinosaurs.
Sorry, again friends, I'm on a kick because I just submitted my first grad school app. UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, WHAT?!!
Plus I got a result today in lab that was totally sexy.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:40 PM
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Genetics is a buttmunch journal.
ETA: Allow me to preface this with an apology. I am sorry, class, for being so bitchy. I think this blog makes me seem like a very unpleasant person. My rationalization is that for most people, a blog is an emotional dumping ground. And I am hella frustrated right now. HELL...A.
Genetics wants me to add additional revisions to my paper. The main problem is the reviewers misunderstood the conclusions of the paper, which is difficult to get around because there are serious word limitations on the paper. I don't know how they expect me to keep adding all these experiments they want without going past the length limit... I guess they want me to prove the world and then make it into a supplementary figure (not available in print).
This is really frustrating.
I just wrote this gigantic entry about everything that is frustrating me in the lab right now... but then I realized how terribly boring and incomprehensible it would be. So I deleted it.
I'm just very tired, and angry. None of the reagents and stocks I'm working with are working right, and the guy who would know why not is very helpful and easily contactable by e-mail....but one of our collaborators has forbade us from talking to him, because he is a "competitor." Despite the fact that this "competitor" GAVE US the stocks we're using, and taught us how to build our own GFP microscope, and is being really generous to undergraduate researchers despite being a top dog at Harvard.
I'm so pissed off that we could just e-mail this guy and ask for help, and instead I'm being asked to do TEN 6-hour experiments that require an additional FOUR HOURS OF STRAIGHT MICROSCOPY, to sort it out myself. All of these experiments are wasting my time, and they are getting in the way of me collecting actual data. Every time I do an experiment on the microscope, my eyes get worse. I did a genetic screen last year, and my eyes went from -5.5 to -7.0, because I was spending several hours a day on the microscope for 3 months straight.
By the end of the year, I couldn't see/recognize faces over 15 feet away. I had a lot of people unjustly believe that I was not returning their "hello smiles," or looking away and ignoring them after seeing them.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 6:07 PM
Saturday, November 3, 2007
An Equation
Awesome Reggae Festival + Cranky and Tired Ivy = Better perspective.
ETA: DOOOD! I am done with 6 out of 9 applications to graduate school! I'm going to power through one more tonight, and finish up my Yale application. Then I'm leaving Berkeley and Harvard for later - those are my two super-duper schools, and I want to approach them with caution.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:59 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Listserv?
Did we ever come to a decision about our listservs? Are people participating on the Anthro one?
I have been keeping all the mail digests, and all my Drosophila mail digests, just in case. But I have no idea what I should be doing right now with that activity.
CRAP.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 2:04 PM
Monday, October 15, 2007
I have.
1) A glass of wine. A bottomless glass of wine.
2) My presentation from last Friday in Quicktime Video format.
And now it's time for the mainstay of some of my favorite blogs. THE LIVE REVIEW!
00:00:03 - Wow. I can not point a laser pointer. There is no point to using a laser pointer if your hand is shaking so much that it is flying around the slide like a tiny red gnat. BUT! my voice is a lot less nasal than I thought.
00:00:09 - HEY! I'm kind of cute! Sweet....
00:01:46 - Okay so far. My first slide was background, and was pretty good. I'm not saying "umm" as much as I thought I had been. I am looking at the laptop screen too much - which is bad, because I lost a contact right before I gave my presentation. My vision is (-7.00)...I think that translates to 20/1000, roughly.... so in looking at the screen, I have to put my face about 5 inches from it and squint my eyes until they look like hyphens.
oo:o3:26 - I have a very indirect communication style. This is really bad when I'm describing math. It's even worse when I'm describing applications of math. And it's worst of all when I'm describing applications of math on 2 hours of sleep, 6 shots of caffeine, and 1 contact.
00:04:34 - Professors and other males, stop reading. SKIP TO THE NEXT TIMESTAMP NOW. I adjust my BRA!!! Oh my god, do I think people can't see that? We are talking full on grab and go! Dear god. Future presentations, wear sports bra. Done.
00:08:11 - Well... so far...it's not bad at all. I really get cis-regulatory elements. But, there's still 15 minutes to go...
00:09:15 - Oh, I am going downhill at this point. This is where it gets bad, because I didn't spend as much time on these slides when I was making them, so I didn't have as clear enough an idea of what I wanted to say.
00:11:28 - Okay, that wasn't so bad, after all. I inserted a lot of cute applications of my paper in between some of the hard math stuff, so the weaker parts of my presentation are interspersed with strong, fun ones, where it appears like I am actually a human being capable of normal social interaction.
00:15:23 - Still not that bad...hrmm... I do have to bend over and fiddle with the computer a lot to read my Notes. But I also have to bend over to change the slide, and there was no avoiding that. I spend a lot less time bent over than I thought I had - I actually am doing a good job projecting and keeping my body angled toward the class.
00:17:05 - STILL GOOD! I tend to stumble a little bit and get stuck on certain words when I'm trying to express something. I usually don't say "umm" - instead I just say the last word I said again and again. Duplicate-dupli-duplicate genes-genes. But it's not as noticeable as I thought. It's pretty clear I should have practiced a little more, you can definitely tell that I'm adlibbing the whole thing. But still, not that bad. I still can't point a laser pointer, though.
00:18:46 - Ah, this is the worst part. I didn't understand how the graph showed the principle in the paper. I understood the graph, I understood the principle, but I had no idea why the authors used the graph to illustrate the principle. I had hoped I would divine it by the time I did my presentation.
00:21:00 - Okay, I'm through that part. I kind of skipped over how the graph illustrated the principle, and skipped straight to the principle, complete with an analogy and an "asshead" joke.
00:22:42 - Oh, that was way too short. It actually wasn't bad at all! Dude! I rock! But I need to make longer presentations. And my closing with Antennapedia was so good! Whoa! I'm so happy. ....and tipsy.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 9:23 PM
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
slouching towards couch potatoness
Fall break needs to arrive ASAP. I have a midterm in my physics class the day after tomorrow, which I seem to have no motivation to study for. I'm trying to calculate the minimal effort I can put into my academic life without causing serious disruption to my potential future. If I knew for sure that I wanted to go to UO instead of Harvard, I might have a little more wiggle room in terms of how much I want to study for my exams. :)
My advice to first-year students --> do not at any point take a serious full-time job during your college career. Not even during the summer (yeah, I know you don't have a choice). And definitely don't do it in a semester off. It requires a certain mindset and momentum to deal with being a student, and once you taste the sweet sweet satisfaction of the 40-hour work week and the carefree evenings and weekends, you will NEVER go back.
Ahh screw it - I'm just going to think about this week in terms of time rather than in the amount of effort it will take to get through it. Maybe I will work on thesis instead of studying. My favorite form of procrastination is to work on low-priority responsibilities that are satisfying.... like keeping up my blog. :(
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 6:40 PM
Friday, October 19, 2007
He-ey. Ye-ah.
I have to say, I really like keeping my blog. I hope I don't come off too whiny or too stick-up-my-ass. I really like having a digital receptable for my anxiety - but maybe I should do that somewhere private. Like in the shower.
That said, fall break is HERE! My fall break officially commenced 6 hours ago, and I have celebrated by drinking a cup of gas station coffee, checking my favorite webcomics, reading three chapters of the AWESOME book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (by Steven Johnson), and marveling that my favorite illegal video-sharing site appears to have vanished from the web. Oh TV-links, I hardly knew you!!!
The creature that was living in my walls two weeks ago is back again. I'd hoped it was dead. :( The good news, it sings during the daytime now. Bad for trying to get things done in my room, but at least I can still get some sleep. I don't know what it is - its noise is an octave or two higher than a cricket, as consistent as a spruce beetle, and LOUDER THAN DEATH METAL.
Seriously. I'm not sensitive to noise, I swear. When I was a raver, I'd fall asleep against the speakers - the thumping of the bass puts you to sleep like a baby in the backseat of a moving car.
When the creature first started singing a few weeks ago at 2 in the morning, my neighbor pounded on my wall. I have no clue what she thinks I was doing.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 8:53 PM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
JK Rowling has stated that she always pictured Dumbledore as gay. That woman rocks. This makes the whole Grindelwald storyline so much more tragic. I wish that had been more apparent in the subtext - it would have made the Grindelwald portion of Deathly Hallows much less "came-out-of-nowhere" for me.
I've come to a part in Emergence that talks about why the Internet in its present form will not give rise to emergent intelligence/global structure. The problem is there is no feedback mechanism in the Internet - ant colonies and neurons give rise to emergent structure because individual members affect and are affected by each other. But on the Internet - sure, pages can link to each other. But they can't perceive that linking and make changes based on it.
One exception is Google - it's capacity for pseudo-emergent intelligence is what makes it so useful. Google returns the best links by remembering what link most people choose to visit for a given search term - it's like having everyone vote, and then putting the links into a hierarchy based on the poll results. THEN it also assigns extra power to the most successful link - if Amazon is a site frequently visited via Google, then the links that appear on Amazon's website will move up in the hierarchy themselves.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:51 PM
Monday, October 22, 2007
NOT AGAIN
It's weird. Tonight should feel like a Saturday night to me. Instead, all I can think about is that the reading for this class has to be done by tomorrow night so I can post my discussion... damn! That said, the reading about gender is pretty cool.
I spent my whole break in the lab. I can't believe that happened. All day, every day. HOW???? WHY??? The worst part is, aside from my genetics, I made no progress. In one of my experiments, I found that a different protocol gives me slightly better results, but I still see variable results in my control. This is not good. Then I tried to set up a different experiment, and it looks like the reagents I have to work with are no good. GAH!!! SUCK IT, RESEARCH!
I wish I got more e-mail. I could solve this problem by making more firends.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 10:12 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
GOGOL BORDELLO!!!!!
AHHH people are selling tickets for the Gogol Bordello concert on craigslist for base price!!! I could go to the show! I have to go!!!
THOSE STUPIDS SCALPERS I WANT TO KILL EVERY POSTER SELLING 6-8 TICKETS. I was so sad when the concert sold out over a month in advance.
But! I will persevere! I will take the train in, I will take the bus home, I will take the subway to meet the seller to pick up the tickets. I have to see this show. I went to a Gogol Bordello show once when I was a sophomore, and I have never been happier in my life. I crowdsurfed twice, I got smacked upside the head by Eugene Hutz's microphone, and I supported Eugene Hutz on a bass drum while he screamed in my face and dripped sweat on me. IT. WAS. AWESOME.
I also fell in love with the most talented violinist and accordion players in the world. In alphabetical order by instrument.
Seriously people - if you don't know them, YouTube yourselves some Gogol Bordello ASAP. They are unbelievable. Oh, but skip "Start Wearing Purple" - I don't know why that song was their big hit, it does not represent nearly enough of what they do best. Look for "I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again" or "Sally." Or Mishto. Or something off the new album.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:19 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
okay, so maybe I post when I don't have anything to say....
I've realized that I really like stabilization - I don't like wandering around the world, and I don't like having temporary homes and staying in suitcases. It really irritates me that I can't sew up my shirts whenever I want to.... or that I don't own a spoon. I'm really looking forward to the day when my life is stable enough that I can own a cat. CAT.
Here are some secrets about me - I don't like Radiohead. I liked Creep, and Karma Police a little bit, and apparently these are the singles people associate with Radiohead going too commercial. I like Idiotheque, but I have to be in the mood.
Secret the 2nd - I also will usually switch the song when Public Enemy comes on. I love their lyrics, and I love how Chuck D talks in interviews...but I don't like the music that much. It's sad, because I REALLY want to like them. Then again, if I were alive in 1990, I would probably desperately latch onto every track on "Fear of a Black Planet" - I get the feeling that the early 90's were a musical dead zone. The bright shining artistic lights of Metallica and Nirvana. And what else? Amy Grant and Ace of Base, that's what else. PLLLLBBTT.
I don't know, I was living in Big Lake back then and we didn't really have much in the way of radio. Or TV. We had a big mudhole in the backyard that my brother and I would play "Rivers" in. On the weekends we would explore the abandoned trailers and claim treasure from their burnt out cabinets. Maybe that's why I have so much trouble respecting property boundaries nowadays.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:07 PM
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Radio Lab
OK, I hate that I talk about science so much because I sound like a caricature of myself. I can't help it! I FRIGGIN LOVE SCIENCE.
Back to Earth.... has anyone here ever listened to Radio Lab? It's a program put out by NPR, through the WNYC station. And it's sooooo good. I wish they released them more often - but the production values are extremely high, so I suppose it's a tradeoff. I guess I'm stuck to 6 episodes a year. :(
Basically, they pick a really fascinating topic - Memory... Morality.... Musical Language.... Perception of Self.... and then they do a really cool show that digs very deep into it. They talk to scientists from all over, visit their labs, talk about their research, but discuss it all in a very down-to-earth context, that's really exciting and very interesting. And they get seriously legitimate people on their program - Oliver Sacks is a frequent guest, for example.
The memory show is one I especially liked - a perfect balance of "OMG THAT'S SO COOL" and tragedy. The first part was super cool - they talked about memory studies in rats, and how memories were programmed and could be selectively erased.
And the last part was just very sad - it was about a man who has terrible short-term memory loss. He remembers everything about his life up until he started suffering this memory loss, but up until that it's like time has not passed. Even though he's had the disease for a long time, he still calls his wife several times a day, saying he just woke up and he doesn't know where he is, and he hasn't seen her and needs to see her - even though she was there a few minutes prior. I'll admit that it had me bawling... a welcome reminder that I am capable of empathy.
Please allow me to spread the amazingness that is Radio Lab. The memory episode is in Season 3, if you want to check it out.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
I was always frustrated in a lot of my Scripps classes - there were several questions that would come up in discussion, and I would want to approach them from a biological view.... and that would completely halt discussion. Once, after I spoke, I had a teacher say "Well, that's a science-based viewpoint....let's get back to the discussion...."
My Core 2 class was called "Death" - and in several of the discussions, we would be discussing what it means to be alive, what it means to be dead, and what consciousness is. But biology was completely excluded from the discussions. One time, we were talking about consciousness, and I had no idea what was going on in the discussion - I couldn't follow people's arguments at all. Then I realized that the existence of a soul was being taken as a given in the class. I broached the idea that thoughts are chemical responses to stimuli, backing it up with the fact that a thought is going through your brain entire seconds before your consciousness becomes aware of the thought. Needless to say, I put a lot of people on the defensive, and I was dismissed pretty quickly.
I hope I don't come off as a playing this character, of science-nerd, acting as an authority of some sort. I have a tendency to hold on really tightly to that identity when I feel like I'm in an environment where that is a small fraction of the population... even in the science department, you'll find few people who are really excited about science... there are a hell of a lot of pre-meds in there. I don't talk about science with anyone but Dr. Armstrong. I probably spend more time with Dr. Armstrong than most of my friends at Scripps... hell, we go on road trips!
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:41 PM
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic
You read it. You know you did.
I loved the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, but I was a little bit disturbed by some of the magical ones. Like there were the two little girls whose voices disappeared because they whispered too much.... or the children who pretended to mishear their parents, and as punishment they were given overly sensitive hearing that made them wince when mosquitos screamed. Those were seriously disturbing - apt punishments, maybe, but bordering on child cruelty.
Much more tolerable were the down-to-earth, non-magical punishments. Like the tiny set of dishes for the daughter that was a "Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker." Or the mom that planted radishes on her daughter that wouldn't bathe. NOW THAT is parenting!
I didn't go to the Gogol Bordello concert, because I am a Lamey McLamerson who is totally broke and still has to drum up money for grad school application fees. Sad. I should post to this blog less. I'm doing it at least 5 times a week even without participating in the experiment, just because it's more enticing than doing my homework. Creative procrastination, my friend calls it....I'm doing it because I want to, not because you tell me to! (bonus points if you get the reference and can name the disease!)
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:18 PM
Sunday, October 28, 2007
My fiancee, Janet Vice...I mean, Weiss.
So, tonight was the Ted Leo and the Pharmacists concert. I managed to throw together a costume at the last minute - I was a Magic 8-Ball, with an 8 on my back and blue triangles on my front that I could swap out. My friend and I got there after the opening band started. I must admit, this power trio wasn't quite our thing - I didn't like the singers voice or the way he played the guitar or the songs he wrote, and it kind of seemed like he and the bassist were phoning it in.
The drumming was another story, however. The drummer was making my night. It was this awesome woman, and her hair flew around and she was just wild and the drums were making crazy sounds. Finally, the singer stopped playing guitar and got on keyboard, which he was actually sort of good at playing. They did a jazzy song that was good enough to actually give dancing a go....which is when I got close enough to the stage to actually SEE the band...
The drummer was JANET WEISS!
Okay, maybe you guys aren't into Sleater-Kinney, but they were dynamos and I was quite disappointed when they broke up two years ago. Janet Weiss was my idol, the reason I started learning drums - I had pictures of her up on my wall. I'd heard that she'd started a new band with her husband or boyfriend or whatever, but I hadn't known what it was called.
Needless to say, I was quite embarassed that minutes prior I had been quietly mocking the band with my friend in the back, like those two old men in the balcony on The Muppet Show.
When they were done, I danced around on my toes nervously for a minute, and then got up the courage to go up to her and ask her to sign my costume. I AM NEVER THROWING AWAY THAT 8.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 12:50 AM
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Not-So-Fly Girl
DAMN DAMN DAMN.
My research is not going so well.
I tried to make create flies that were expressing a certain protein, that glows green when I shine fluorescent light on it. I succeeded, and then I started doing the crosses I needed to do to make stocks of these flies.
I just checked my stocks, and two of them have larvae that aren't fluorescing! Meaning they are not expressing the protein! One of them has mostly larvae which are fluorescing, and I picked those out to create a substock. The other one only has 1/5 larvae fluorescing, which is a terrifyingly low percentage. What's worse is, they have thrown off the larval marker that tells me whether they are homozygous or heterozygous - I cannot see their genotype until they are adults. This means that even if I pick the 1/5 that are fluorescing and start a substock, I will have no way of knowing whether the stock will be maintained, or if I have introduced a new chromosome into the gene pool.
The reason this is so terrible is that I need these stocks so that I can put them with a mutant. Which takes about two crosses (4-6 weeks of work). I have to do that before I can even start the experiments I need to do. And if I have to remake these stocks, then I am in a mess of trouble.
Fortunately, the stocks that did work are my experiments - the ones that didn't work are my controls. I can spend the rest of the semester doing the experiments and remaking my control stocks, and then do the controls next semester. But this is extremely frustrating.... it should have gone well, I did everything right and I spent a lot of time on it and it still didn't work.
And this why science makes me cry 95% of the time.... but I still live for that 5% where things are working and I actually get data.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 2:32 PM
Monday, October 29, 2007
Songs with your name...
Do you guys know songs with your name in them? Do you like them? Alternate spellings or masculine spellings totally count - they sound the same when sung!
I love the Mamas and the Papas, and one of their best songs is "For the Love of Ivy".... but I get really self-conscious when I'm singing about how it takes up all of my time to fall in love with Ivy. And there's a part at the end where they just sing "Ivy" over and over again, but with BEAUTIFUL HARMONY I LOVE MAMA CASS'S VOICE.
Usually when I want to sing the song in the lab I'll close the door so no one will hear and think that my ego is so massive that is pulls nearby objects into orbit.
I know there's a Lyle Lovett song called "Sonya", or maybe "Sonja."
There's also a fairly awesome Tenacious D song for Leigh. Here are the lyrics:
Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee,
Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee,
We're talkin' fuckin' Lee.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 9:09 PM
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Blogger < Livejournal?
It's interesting - I actually prefer Livejournal to Blogger, even though Blogger has a much classier layout. My problem is that Blogger lacks the community structure of Livejournal - I haven't updated my LJ in months, but I still visit it every day to check my friends page. Maybe I haven't discovered it yet, but Blogger doesn't seem to have a "friends" page like LJ does. I suppose they expect everyone uses RSS feeds now, but meh.
I also really enjoyed the option of displaying to you guys what books I'm reading and what music I'm listening to. If I write a particularly heinous/embarassing blog, I still had the option of salvaging some cool-points if you could see that I was listening to Sigur Ros.
But I'm not listening to Sigur Ros. I'm listening to ABBA. Maybe having the music option off is for the best.
My grad school list is complete! I asked my recommenders to write me letters yesterday, so there is no changing my list now. I ended up applying to all the schools on my list, even the ones I'm on the fence about. I checked out Yale and NYU's faculty again, and I realized that I actually would really really love to go to those schools. I just doubt I would be able to keep a cat in Manhattan (funny how that keeps cropping up as my main priority).
Indiana is a really good program for me too - however, over half of the grad students are international students, and most of them are from the same country. I'm discouraged by this - but not because I am xenophobic (i hope!). I have a hard enough time making friends as it is, but I bet if I went to Indiana, all the people from the same country would rather hang out with each other than hang out with me. I was working at UC-Santa Cruz for a little while this summer, and one thing I noticed was the grad students and post-docs seemed to eat lunch by country. The French people ate together and spoke French, the Italians ate together and spoke Italian, and the Chinese people ate together and spoke Chinese. I usually read a book.
I can picture myself becoming one of those creepy cat-ladies. And the truly terrifying thing is that thought doesn't bother me.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 8:05 PM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Some Scientists Are Douchebags.
If they can say douchebag on TV, I can say it in my blog. By the way, did you know they can say douche and douchebag on TV now???? I've heard it on so many shows! But you still can't say ass-hole. You can say ass. But asshole still gets bleeped on Conan. Crazy.
Did anyone see the Colbert Report the other night? Stephen interviewed Craig Venter, and asked him if he found a gene for narcissism when he decoded his own genome.
Craig Venter definitely has a reputation for being a show-off and an egotistical person who cares more about sexy science than careful science. He sequenced his own genome, for sure, but when he sequenced the first published dog genome - it was his own poodle. Plus he deliberately challenged the Human Genome Project to a race, and made the whole thing into a big public vs. private, potentially embarassing mess (though that was fortunately sorted out through the miracle of compromise).
James Watson is also a great big jerk. Fortunately, he has gotten some comeuppance recently. But here are some other gems from him...
On Rosalind Franklin, the woman whose X-Ray crystallography revealed the double helix of DNA: Though her (Rosalind Franklin) features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents."
He also comments that she was "willfully unsexy" and "needed to be put in her place." This was after his editors made him change the book to be less harsh on the late Ms. Franklin.
I saw him on Charlie Rose once, and he was talking about how "Irish DNA" could lead one to be a better poet than "Eskimo DNA" could. Which is gross even if you ignore the strange use of the term Eskimo. He's also suggested using genetic engineering so "all girls would be pretty."
This, along with a certain professor at JSD who I think I can guess the identity of, tend to give scientists a bad name. Yeah, there's a hell of a lot of bias out there, but when you look at the actual data - ie, genome sequencing showing the genetic variance from individuals of different "races" is no greater than the genetic variance of individuals of the same race - the truth usually comes out, and hopefully these ancient ideas will die out with the dinosaurs.
Sorry, again friends, I'm on a kick because I just submitted my first grad school app. UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, WHAT?!!
Plus I got a result today in lab that was totally sexy.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:40 PM
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Genetics is a buttmunch journal.
ETA: Allow me to preface this with an apology. I am sorry, class, for being so bitchy. I think this blog makes me seem like a very unpleasant person. My rationalization is that for most people, a blog is an emotional dumping ground. And I am hella frustrated right now. HELL...A.
Genetics wants me to add additional revisions to my paper. The main problem is the reviewers misunderstood the conclusions of the paper, which is difficult to get around because there are serious word limitations on the paper. I don't know how they expect me to keep adding all these experiments they want without going past the length limit... I guess they want me to prove the world and then make it into a supplementary figure (not available in print).
This is really frustrating.
I just wrote this gigantic entry about everything that is frustrating me in the lab right now... but then I realized how terribly boring and incomprehensible it would be. So I deleted it.
I'm just very tired, and angry. None of the reagents and stocks I'm working with are working right, and the guy who would know why not is very helpful and easily contactable by e-mail....but one of our collaborators has forbade us from talking to him, because he is a "competitor." Despite the fact that this "competitor" GAVE US the stocks we're using, and taught us how to build our own GFP microscope, and is being really generous to undergraduate researchers despite being a top dog at Harvard.
I'm so pissed off that we could just e-mail this guy and ask for help, and instead I'm being asked to do TEN 6-hour experiments that require an additional FOUR HOURS OF STRAIGHT MICROSCOPY, to sort it out myself. All of these experiments are wasting my time, and they are getting in the way of me collecting actual data. Every time I do an experiment on the microscope, my eyes get worse. I did a genetic screen last year, and my eyes went from -5.5 to -7.0, because I was spending several hours a day on the microscope for 3 months straight.
By the end of the year, I couldn't see/recognize faces over 15 feet away. I had a lot of people unjustly believe that I was not returning their "hello smiles," or looking away and ignoring them after seeing them.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 6:07 PM
Saturday, November 3, 2007
An Equation
Awesome Reggae Festival + Cranky and Tired Ivy = Better perspective.
ETA: DOOOD! I am done with 6 out of 9 applications to graduate school! I'm going to power through one more tonight, and finish up my Yale application. Then I'm leaving Berkeley and Harvard for later - those are my two super-duper schools, and I want to approach them with caution.
Posted by thelastpolarbear at 11:59 PM