For some reason I was in a good mood yesterday - perhaps because I haven't tried any experiments this week that might theoretically give me any results, so I haven't had the chance to be disappointed ( Read more... )

It has now been a month since I admitted to myself that continuing to pursue a scientific career would be an effective way to make myself miserable for the rest of my life. The only question now is whether I start the rest of my life now or first spend another three years in purgatory. Perhaps that's a little melodramatic, and in my optimistic ( Read more... )

And now the protein I'm trying to express does something funny to the cells so that I can't even spin them down. All these annoying technical details are really beginning to get to me. It's been two years since the last time an experiment of mine produced some meaningful data, and even then it wasn't very interesting ( Read more... )

After spending the whole day on a competent cell prep, the styrofoam box I carrying them in broke while I was coming down the outside staircase, casting the neat little frozen eppendorfs over a vast area of questionable sterility. Well, I can always do it again...

Anyone care to remind me why I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing this?

In Yunus's article there is a reference to an Oyirat Mongol Lama called "Zayan Ban Di Da". I wish I was called something like that.

I couldn't concentrate on the jinwen 金文 I was trying to read this evening, so I pulled out a CD of Berwald's Symphonie singuliere that I've only listened to once or twice since coming back from Goteborg. This is an amazing piece of music - I'd rank it as high as any other non-Beethoven symphony from the nineteenth century. Why isn't it performed ( Read more... )

Finished translating Yunus' article. Still can't work out what I want to do next - I've started going through the motions in both worlds and feel oddly detached from the whole process. On and off, I've been thinking for years about abandoning science, but still find it hard to believe that I could really choose to do anything else. I've written ( Read more... )

I have asparagus and beans and tomatoes in the fridge at home all ready and eager to be turned into a delicious springtime salad. If they could use the telephone they would call me up at the lab and say, "Where are you? We've been waiting for hours and you still haven't eaten us!" But it will be midnight by the time I get home and I will be too ( Read more... )

Yunus has asked me to translate his article of the above title from Chinese into English, for an as-yet undetermined translation fee to be paid by a research fund belonging to one of the academics in Oriental Studies. The article is based largely on the Tarikh (Annals) written in Arabic by some central asian bloke with an Arabic-sounding name I can ( Read more... )

Off to the Lake District this weekend to be rained on...