Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The margins of scientific understanding

Apparently I'm feeling bloggier now.

It is not a good sign when you write "aaarrgghh" in the margins of a paper you're trying to understand. I never knew that my lack of training in pathology nomenclature would become such a major problem.

Yes, there's another grant deadline approaching. How could you tell?

More blogginess at my other blog - a human genetics story with a local flavour (not the ubiquitous smoked salmon), and a Python reference.

Geez I need to cut down on caffeine.

Edited to add: shortly after posting the above, I was chatting to my boss at my desk and he picked up the scribbled-on paper and started to browse through it. Worried about the aaarrgghh! note, I preemptively said I was having trouble with the nomenclature, and apparently it's not just me, the whole field is hopelessly confused and needs to be standardised. So now I don't feel so dumb.

2 comments:

  1. I do the same thing re. margins; glad I'm not the only one.

    I long for the days when I could take my stack of papers to the library or a cafe and read in silence, with a nice cup of coffee, or (better yet) both. Now I'm chained to my desk and all that is GOOGLE in order to translate (what feels like) half of the papers that I read!

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  2. And then you get stuck in a loop of Googling, finding an interesting page that's not all that related to what you were looking for, clicking on an interesting link...

    If that starts happening too much, I end up keeping a paper list of things to Google and doing them all at once. It definitely helps my productivity.

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