Hockey Pool!

Back for the 2010-2011 season by popular demand*!

The pool works in the same way as last year's: you pick two centres, four wingers, three defensemen and one goalie from the lists on the website. (The lists highlight injured and suspended players to help you avoid players who aren't playing that week!) Each player on the list has a value of 1 - 10 based on past and predicted performance. The challenge is to put together a team that will score the most fantasy points while not exceeding the value "cap" of 50. You get one point for every goal and assist scored by your forwards and defensemen, one point for every win by your goalie, and two points for a shut-out by your goalie.

You can change your picks every week if you want, or keep the same team if you can't be bothered or if you miss the pick submission deadline for that week (unless they change the point values assigned to the players based on mid-season performance and you end up over the cap - you have to re-pick if that happens).

Sign up here, enter your picks, and then please email me at vwxynot [at] gmail [dot] com to get the name and password of the group I've set up. All regular readers, commenters and lurkers alike, are very welcome to play, but I would like to make sure that I know who everyone is and no random people sneak in!

The first pick deadline is Thursday October 7th

The prize is a $20 Amazon gift certificate! (more if any other players want to chip in!)

I originally hesitated about running a pool this year, as the weekly update posts became a bit of a chore last time. But ScientistMother has kindly offered to share the load! Yay, ScientistMother! You rock! So we'll each do one update every four weeks, alternating so the updates come every two weeks. If we're going to have weekly updates, like last time, we'll need two or more other people to take part on a rotating basis... hint hint...

YAY, HOCKEY!

*ScientistMother and Chall. They're popular around here!

Podcath Part II

It's been about 18 months since I made my first forays into the world of podcasts, and I am officially hooked! Thanks to some excellent suggestions in the comments of my last podcast post, some recommendations from my hilarious new sister-in-law, and some finds I've made on my own, I have more podcasts than I have time to listen to, and I love it! I listen to music podcasts all day at work, and spoken word while I'm getting ready in the morning, stretching, exercising (it happens occasionally), cooking, cleaning, and when I'm on the bus or SkyTrain.

There have been a couple of times recently when a friend (most recently Alyssa) has asked for new music recommendations, and I've referred them to podcasts rather than bands. This is how I find most of my new music now - if I like something I hear on a podcast, I write it down (sometimes rather cryptically) and look it up on iTunes later. (Given that I listen to a lot of unsigned band podcasts the songs I like aren't always available in the store, but I'll try again every few months). So I thought I'd list my favourite podcasts here for easy reference! I'm still listening to all the podcasts I mentioned last time, but for this post I'll focus on the new stuff.

I'm too lazy to find all the links, but I'm sure my readers are perfectly capable of looking things up in iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts from!

My favourite podcast in each category is in blue.

Music - single song podcasts

• Current Song of the Day - Minnesota Public Radio
• Indiefeed - I subscribe to the Alternative/Modern Rock, Blues, Dance, Electronica, Hip Hop and Indie Pop channels. I <3 Indiefeed!
• KEXP Song of the Day
• NPR: Second Stage
• Triple J (recommended by Professor in Training and Mermaid)

Music - multisong podcasts

• Bands Under the Radar - excellent tunes, but the length (~2 hours) can sometimes be a bit much.
• CBC Radio 3 - an online-only radio station that plays exclusively Canadian music, all genres, live and studio recorded. I subscribe to the combined feed to get all their podcasts. There's so much more to Canadian music than Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Nickelback and Justin Bieber! 
• Coverville - a new find. The shows alternate between sets of covers of / by a specific artist, and "who did it better?" episodes featuring two or three versions of the same song by different artists, with an online poll so you can vote for your favourite.
• Mad Decent Worldwide Radio - more uptempo and clubby than anything else I listen to. Good for a late afternoon energy boost.
• NPR: Live Concerts - great if you like the band they're featuring, but some of the longer live shows can be a drag if you're not into the band; I end up skipping about a third of them. They also have a habit of not updating for ages and then dumping eight 90 minute shows into the feed at once, which causes problems for those of us with limited space on our 8GB iPhones!
• The Sound Culture - again more clubby than the others, but less so than Mad Decent. I really like this one.
• Triple J: New Unearthed Music - unsigned Aussie bands. (Recommended by Professor in Training and Mermaid)

Music - Blues
At one point I downloaded the entire back catalogue of the Indiefeed Blues podcast, and listened to ten tracks a day for a couple of weeks. I quickly realised that blues is the perfect music to work to; I don't know why, but something just gels. True aficionados will be horrified by this, but the specific band or song don't seem to matter - the whole genre works for me!

• BluzNdaBlood
• Friday Night Blues - a bit more high energy than the others.
• Murphy's Saloon - the host sounds grumpy is a prince among men, the soul of patience, and tells a bad joke on each episode, but and the music's great :) <-- see comments :)
• Nothing but the Blues - the only UK-based blues podcast on my list, although the tracks are international, and the only one that plays some old (sometimes really, really old) recordings mixed in with the more modern stuff.
• Texas Blues Cafe

Moving on to spoken word...


Canadiana

• The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos (video) - George (aka Canada's Boyfriend) is a Canadian institution, but you don't have to be Canadian to appreciate the sheer awesomeness of his guests. Current episodes on my phone include Slash, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, and (d'oh!) Nickelback. The interviews are always interesting!
• Today in Canadian History - daily short (~8 minute) snippets about recent and (relatively) ancient history - everything from Captain Vancouver's voyages up the west coast to sport to politics to space exploration. The shows feature interviews with some very interesting people (an astronaut today!) including academics, politicians, and lots of others.
• Vinyl Cafe Stories - OMG I LOVE this show! The host, Stuart McLean, has a true gift as a story teller and as someone who can find extraordinary pleasure in the most ordinary things. He once spent ten minutes praising mandarin oranges and it was fantastic. It took me a little while to get into the stories he tells of a fictitious family - you have to get to know the characters - but it's been totally worth it. Sometimes very, very funny, sometimes very, very sad, but you always get a lovely warm-and-fuzzy feeling. The live shows also feature music and readers' own stories. My all-time favourite podcast. (Recommended by Alyssa and Wayfarer Scientista. Thank you!)

Comedy

• The Moth - live recordings of people standing up and telling a true story from their life, without notes. Not all of the stories are funny, but almost all of them are interesting and well worth listening to. 
• NPR: Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - comedy news quiz. Great stuff, especially once you get to know the panellists! (Recommended by EcoGeoFemme)
• Zeitgeist (video) - short snippets of silly news stories presented by a host with a really dry sense of humour.

News/current events/other

• The bike podcast - from the Guardian. UK-oriented, but great listening for all the cyclists (recreational, race, and/or commuter) out there.
• From Our Own Correspondent - from the BBC. Each episode features several short reports on current events (or just cultural observations) from foreign correspondents based all over the world, mostly serious but with one more light-hearted story at the end. Extremely high quality journalism.
• Savage Love - I LOVE Dan Savage, having been introduced to his weekly column (syndicated in our awesome free weekly  indie paper, the Georgia Straight) by a labmate during my first month in Vancouver. This show is not for the squeamish as some of the sexual problems people call in with are rather weird and wonderful, but his advice is (usually) great and I think he's really doing some important work on this podcast and in his column. Check out his "it gets better" video campaign, which aims to bring hope to gay teens being bullied at school by describing to them the life as happy, well adjusted gay adults that they can't imagine having for themselves while stuck in small-town high school life.
• This American Life - two or three stories on a given theme per episode. Again, the quality of the journalism is great and they find some amazing stories. Sometimes funny, mostly serious. (Recommended by Wayfarer Scientista and EcoGeoFemme)
• WNYC's Radiolab - similar to This American Life, but with scientific themes. The shows are really well done and appeal strongly to me (a scientist) and Mr E Man (not a scientist, but interested in Stuff In General). THIS is how you bring science to the public!

Great, now the next time anyone asks for new music recommendations, I can just give them a link! And if anyone has any new suggestions, bring it on! Maybe I can do a Part III in another 18 months.

I might review my favourite iPhone apps (mostly games) next, if anyone's interested!

Steamjunk

"What's wrong with your whiteboard?", asked a colleague this morning.

I didn't know anything was wrong with my whiteboard, which I use to keep track of grant deadlines, grants and manuscripts currently under review, and PI travel dates. But sure enough, on closer inspection it became clear that while the bottom left corner is flush to the wall, as it should be,

straight flush

the bottom right corner is, well, not.

no force or movement of the whiteboard was involved in the taking of this photo... the corner of the board is a good 5cm or so off the wall

The culprit?

Oops.

I guess regular steam baths and tea breaks aren't as good for whiteboards as they are for the people who write on them.

Public recognition

My former student was on TV yesterday!

Well, not the real TV. Just the fancy flat screen monitor mounted high on a wall by the elevators in my building. The TV appeared a few months ago and originally featured reminders of upcoming talks, bake sales and other fundraisers, and the occasional social event. However, The Powers That Be recently decided to add announcements of published papers and grant awards to the programme listings: just top tier journals and grants over a million dollars to start with, but they've now expanded the initiative to include all papers (including my postdoc lab's new review paper) and multi-year grants.

I think this is a great idea, especially in a large multi-department building where it's impossible to know everyone. My awesome, friendly, super-social postdoc department already did (and I think still does) something similar: when your paper got published, or your abstract was accepted for an oral presentation at a conference, you printed a copy out (abstracts on colour-coded paper according to the date of the presentation) and gave it to one of the secretaries, who would ceremoniously staple it to the Wall of Honour. It could then be appreciated in all its glory by your respectfully jealous* colleagues, and by bored visitors waiting for someone to find the PI they'd come to see.

Other departments in our building seem to have similar Walls of Honour in place. However, my current department (not known for being particularly social) doesn't do anything other than get its papers onto the new screen downstairs. Some of the PIs I work with provide champagne and nibbles to everyone involved when a paper gets into a top tier journal, and occasionally when they get a big grant, but those occasions are rare and there's no formal recognition of smaller achievements. I'd be tempted to try and correlate lab sociability with public recognition of success, but the institute where I did my PhD was even more awesome, friendly, and social than my postdoc department, and they didn't do anything special either.

Although, thinking back, maybe that was because we all knew each other so well that we always knew when someone's paper had come out because they'd buy the first round on Friday night...

How does your lab / department / institute recognise milestones such as papers, presentations, grants and fellowships? Do you think there's any association with how social your department is?

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*depending on the journal / conference

Hankie enlightenment

I found an absolute gem in my automated search results this morning: a bio of a man I know fairly well, having worked for two of the organisations named in the piece. However, it turns out that I didn't know him anywhere near as well as I thought I did. I never knew, for example, that this man "as good as graduated with a BSc in Biology"¹, or that he has an "MSc in dungeon physiology"². And apparently "during his healing precision he was severely shabby"³.

I had no idea.

Judging by the torturous grammar and hilarious word choices, the bio seems to have been dragged through several iterations of Google Translate (or possibly just translated by my cat Google, which is an equally good explanation).

Google had a tough day on Sunday

I'm guessing that someone with less than stellar English then replaced every second or third word using a random selection from a thesaurus.

Now, we all know that science and spell checkers don't mix, but apparently scientific language forms an even more disastrous partnership with automated translation tools and/or careless thesaurus use. From disaster, however, springs hilarity: the cell/dungeon confusion was funny enough, but my absolute favourite part was the translation of "tissue culture" as "hankie enlightenment".

Genius.

As soon as I could stop laughing, I sent the link to several friends who also know the distiguished dungeon physiologist in question. One of them pointed out that the torturous translation process was no doubt intended to disguise the text's origin as a plagiarised Wikipedia entry.

Compare and contrast.

It truly is a privilege to see such outstanding scholarship in action!

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1) the many instances of "as good as" seem to be replacements for "as well as", "and", & "also"
2) "dungeon" = "cell"
3) apparently, "severely shabby" = "greatly influenced", as in by a particular mentor. I had to check this one against the original text.

Cath has misheard that the bird is the word

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His mouth can hold more than his belly can,
He can hold in his beak,
Enough food for a week.
I'm damned if I know how the hell he can!

(by Dixon Lanier Merritt, apparently. Not Ogden Nash. You learn something new every day!)

And I'm damned if I know how the hell I can have made the same ridiculous mistake twice.

It's all because of my habit of paying only partial attention to the TV. I'm usually doing something else at the same time - eating, talking, playing a game on my phone, reading a book, surfing the web, playing with a cat or two, that kind of thing. So some time last year, while I was "watching" the local news, I was startled to hear the anchor say that there'd been a pelican attack in one of Vancouver's eastern suburbs! By the time I'd looked up at the screen he'd moved on to another story, leaving me completely baffled and with some very odd mental images running through my brain.

Fortunately, the CBC website was running the same story - about a pellet gun attack.

Which made more sense.

Fast forward to last night, when Mr E Man and I were watching Survivor. I loooove Survivor (it's an extremely guilty pleasure), so I was actually watching it properly. However, during the commercial breaks I was paying attention to Saba, who was sprawled all over me and purring contentedly as I rubbed her belly. I was vaguely aware that there was some kind of cosmetics advert on the screen, but was suddenly snapped into full alertness by a rather bizarre slogan I'd just heard.

"The colour of pelicans???!!!", I blurted out before I could stop myself.

Mr E Man eventually managed to gasp out the word "elegance" in between fits of laughter.

Oops.

In my defense, it's still a ridiculous slogan. And later on in the show they actually showed some pelicans flying past the beach, which set us off laughing again. I suspect they'd already shown a similar shot before the commercial, which helped to trigger the confusion. Either that or I have a very bizarre subconscious.

Ooh! That just reminded me of something. Hang on a minute, Googling:

Ah, yes, I was right! 

To (mis)quote Douglas Adams in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul:

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.

She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins pelicans, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins pelicans.

So there you go. It's not my fault, it's just the way the human brain evolved.

Weirdly, like this post just did.

A tale of two sisters

My sister is one of my favourite people in the whole world. She's the person I miss the most from the UK, and although I love my three Canadian sisters-in-law dearly*, it's just not quite the same.

There was only ever going to be one answer to the "so who's gonna be your bridesmaid?!" question

Sis is two years younger than me, and always managed to be better than me at everything. I got excellent grades, but she always went just a little bit further, taking more subjects and managing to avoid the B I got in GCSE music. I sucked at sports, but she was in the school and county and/or city netball, field hockey, and cross country running teams. I got my Grade 6 music exam (classical guitar); she got her Grade 7 (clarinet). Thank the flying spaghetti monster that I'm the older one and didn't have to follow her and meet the expectations she set!

Fortunately for me, we chose different subjects in high school. There was lots of overlap in the GCSEs (the exams we took at the age of 16) we got, since certain core subjects are compulsory. However, when it came to our A level courses, we diverged significantly. At the time, students had to choose three (or occasionally four) subjects to study for the final two (optional) years of high school. I chose biology, chemistry and maths; sis chose history, French, and English language.

The interesting thing - and a sign of what was to come - is that when sis was making her choices, my Dad asked what we each would have chosen if we could have taken five subjects. I would have added French and history to my choices, and she would have added biology and maths to hers. So from no overlap at all in our three actual choices, with five we would have 80% of our subjects in common.

As it was though, we each followed our own paths. You know mine: undergrad degree in genetics, PhD in molecular cell biology, postdoc in molecular biology and genome evolution, marketing in the biotech industry, cancer research grant wrangler. My sister followed in the footsteps of both our parents, plus an auntie and a cousin, and did her degree in modern languages - French and Italian, to be precise**. Her department wanted her to stay and do a PhD, but she decided that this time she wouldn't try to outdo me, and went off to do an internship in the publishing industry in London (hence continuing her trend of moving ever further south, while I kept moving north and/or west).

Sis chose non-fiction, rather than fiction publishing, because editors get to have more input into the final product than in the fiction industry; they can suggest additions to the content, for example. To be honest I've lost track of her exact series of jobs because she moved around a lot in the first few years, but I know that she started off in the mind/body/spirit field (everything from astrology to fitness to psychology) before moving into a more medical/scientific space; her last job was at a journal publishing company that specialises in annual compilations of scientific review articles.

She just started a new job though, one she's very excited about. Like me when I moved into my current job, she's absolutely delighted to find herself in the non-profit sector, where the pay may be lower but people are (generally) nicer and everything's not just about the money. She's now helping to manage the publishing arm of one of the British medical professional societies, or Royal Colleges. Their output includes a journal, textbooks, electronic learning resources, special reports, clinical guidelines, and information for the public.

So, although we took very different paths through high school, university, and the early years of our respective careers, my sister and I now both have jobs where a large part of our role is to write and edit text about the same kind of cancer.

I say "it must be genetic", she says "Mamma Mia!", but we both think it's hilarious and awesome.

Well, something's definitely genetic.

------------------
*I decided at the weekend, at the wedding of Mr E Man's brother to my newest sister-in-law, that if men get to "brothers from another mother", we get to be "sisters from distant misters"

Me and my lovely three sisters-in-law sisters-from-distant-misters on Saturday

**Mum: Spanish and French; Dad: French and German; Auntie: Spanish and Italian; Cousin: French and psychology. Plus one of my uncles has a degree in English, and another cousin who didn't go to university is fluent in German. I'm considered a freak in my family, although both of my male cousins are in technical fields, so I'm not completely alone.

Making a difference

Hey, remember my colleague* who did the fundraising bike ride to Seattle with me and was the star of my video?

(Here's the video again)



Well, he's all over the news this week thanks to his two very, very interesting new papers on ovarian cancer!

The first identifies Arid1a as a novel tumour suppressor gene that's mutated in clear cell and endometrioid cancers of the ovary, and the second recommends the removal of the fallopian tubes during hysterectomy and tubal ligation in order to reduce the risk of developing ovarian cancer. (Neither paper is on PubMed yet, so the links go to news articles instead). I've heard this PI talk about both subjects for a couple of years now, and it's so exciting to see the research maturing and progressing!

Once again, THANK YOU to all my lovely readers who donated to the ride this year!


------------------------------

*one of my jobs is to try and bump our departmental website up the Google rankings for each PI's name - this is why I won't be naming names on my blog!

Environmentalist loonies

I recently came across an environmental campaign that is so unique, so creative, and so effective, that it blew me away.

This is a Canadian one dollar coin, aka loonie*, featuring an image of a common loon, and also Gavia immer on the other side (sorry, Your Majesty! Couldn't resist that one).

(image source)

This is the loonie I got in my change last week:

(it's a sticker, in case that's not obvious from the photo!)

WOW. Seriously nice work - what a striking, unambiguous combination of image and URL.

Of course I went straight to their website, where I signed the petition - Enbridge Inc wants to bring the first ever crude oil supertankers to Canada's Pacific north coast, and this group is asking Parliament to legislate a permanent ban on oil tankers in these waters.

I also found a solution to my dilemma. See, I love my modified loonie so much that I want to keep it, but I also understand that the whole point is to keep it circulating so others can see it and be inspired to sign the petition. So I've donated $10 in exchange for 42 decals that I can attach to other loonies and send out into the wild.


Seriously, the people behind this campaign are geniuses.

-------------

*two dollar coins are, of course, called toonies. When Mad Hatter visited last year she needed change for a $10 bill for her bus fare, and the waitress she asked replied "sure, are loonies and toonies OK?" Mad Hatter turned to me with a look of sheer uncomprehending panic that was absolutely hilarious!

Tuesday Pet Peeve: Careless North Americans

A certain phrase has been on my mental pet peeves list for a while. Every time I hear someone say it, it jars - it's not one of those UK*/North America differences where both ways are equally valid and I just have to get used to it, because the North American version is clearly just plain WRONG!

However, for some reason I've never felt quite strongly enough about this issue to blog about it (not on a Tuesday, anyway).

Last week, though, I was catching up on some (very) old podcasts and found that John Cleese has already said everything I wanted to say on the matter, much more eloquently than I ever could:



(ETA: Eva pointed out that David Mitchell has had a very similar rant on this subject



Love it!)

HA!

Now I have something to which I can refer people who challenge and/or mock me for saying "I couldn't care less". I will continue to say it this way because a) I'm still British, damnit and b) it's correct, whereas the North American way really doesn't make any sense (sorry).

A plague of dead parrots on people who carelessly say "I could care less" when they don't care at all!

---------------

*I say UK just because I'm not 100% sure which version is used in Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland, although I suspect they all say "I couldn't care less". 

Budget oasis

Biology is messy; grant applications even more so.

There are so many intangibles: is the scope too big, too small, or just the right mix of feasible and ambitious? How's the balance between hot topic sexy science and safe reliable techniques? Have we adequately addressed the specific aims of this RFA? How much preliminary data do we need? Should we include two fall-back alternatives to the shiny new technique we're planning to use, or will one be enough? Should Dr. X be a co-applicant, or just a collaborator? Who's on which review panels this year? Is the wording of the hypothesis the very best it could possibly be?

It goes on and on, and you can never really be sure you've got it right; there's always more second-guessing and tweaking that can be done. And of course it's not just a matter of learning "the rules" of a single agency, like the NIH or NSF: the Canadian research funding ecosystem teems with an incredible biodiversity, a tangled bank of government, charity, and private funding sources, with even the federal health research dollars being split between multiple funding agencies.

During my first few rounds of grant wrangling, I found budget development to be the most confusing part of my new job (I even wrote a limerick about it!) However, I've since come to view budget wrangling very differently, and in fact it's now my favourite part of the whole process.

A couple of years worth of experience and the resulting increase in confidence are a large part of the reason. I've worked on so many grants by now that if a PI wants to do some next-gen sequencing or build a tissue microarray or whatever, I can usually find an older grant that used the same methods and use its budget as the starting point for the new one. I've also learned who to go to for help with statements of work & service quotes, salary grades & benefits rates, and equipment quotes.

However, I've also learned that the true joy of budget development lies in its focus on those lovely tangible, quantitative things:

numbers.

Thank the flying spaghetti monster for numbers! They can only ever add up one way, and there's always a definite right answer. The maximum amounts you can request for salaries, trainee stipends and equipmentare listed in the competition guidelines, and the grand total is always either over or under the stated limit. No quibbling, no second-guessing: if it's wrong, you fix it, and if it's right, you move on with a great sense of satisfaction.

I remember feeling the same way about maths lessons in high school; they were an oasis of certainty and logic amidst the hustle and bustle and messiness of history, English literature, music, French, and yes, biology*. None of this "which of these conflicting sources is the most reliable?", "what analogies does this poem draw on?", "how did this composer use changes in instrumentation to evoke different feelings in the second movement of this symphony?", "j'ai mangé but je suis allé", or "how might an increase in the numbers of a given species affect the population dynamics of its prey and its predators over time?". No, in maths lessons 2+2 was always 4, and when you'd solved an equation you got to write "QED" next to the obviously correct answer and feel extremely pleased with yourself.

Of course, grant budgets aren't quite this simple; there are always some messy intangibles involved. This agency has never once awarded a PI more in a given year than 85% of the stated maximim annual limit; that agency doesn't like chunky budgets, so be sure to spread your most expensive activities over the whole term of the project to make it look more even; the other agency always trims the budget by 8-10%, so put some cannon fodder in there**.

But overall, sitting down with a cup of tea to play with numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, rather than with pages and pages of messy words, still gives me the same joy as a high school maths lesson. Just as I did way back then, I do enjoy the messiness, too, but it's nice to have a break from time to time.

To use a different part of my brain.

To get a right-or-wrong answer.

Writing "QED"? Well, that's up to the PIs... but I'll be happy to write the progress report and edit the papers!

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*with the exception of genetics; I think there's a reason why the logic of Mendelian inheritance, with its nice neat phenotype ratios, appealed to me so much when my biology teacher first introduced it to us!

**as with the other grant wrangling Dark Arts, none of this stuff is ever written down - you have to learn it by asking experienced PIs, especially those who've served on review committees, and from your own experiences (I re-read old grant reviews before each new round of applications to the same agency).

Friday Wednesday Quiz-ology

Yes folks, it's time for another fun quiz from my puzzle-a-day desk calendar!
 
I was going to save this for Friday, but I just submitted a grant after much stress and panic and lost sleep,* so I could do with a little light relief, even as I get stuck in to the next big project.

This time the actual puzzle on the calendar was to match the -ology to the subject under study. I got all 21 right (using a process of elimination in a few cases), so the quiz is clearly too easy in this original form. Because all my readers are also highly intelligent people (with excellent taste), I'm therefore going to just ask you to define every -ology, without giving you the matching list of subjects to choose from. (It should still be easy, as some of my readers ARE some of these kinds of -ologist).

As before, answer in the comments in any order you like - but please submit only one answer per person per hour, to give as many people as possible a chance to play!  

(AND NO GOOGLING!)

I'll update the post with the answers and bragging rights as and when I get time, and I'll add clues if there are any unanswered questions after a day or two.

1. Agrology- Soil, as it relates to the growing of crops (Chall) - partial credit for Thomas Joseph, Antipodean, & Nat Blair
2. Campanology - Bells (Stephen Curry)
3. Cetology - Whales (Nat Blair)
4. Cytology - Cells (ScientistMother)
5. Dactylology - Sign language (Pika) - partial credit for Nico, Antipodean,
6. Dendrology - Trees (Chall)
7. Etiology - Causes / origins (Biochem Belle)
8. Geomorphology - Tectonics / landforms (Scott) - partial credit (kinda) for Ruchi
9. Lithology - Rocks / stones (Nat Blair)
10. Meteorology - Weather (Biochem Belle)
11. Metrology - Measurement (Schlupp)
12. Mycology - Fungi (Ricardipus)
13. Myology - Muscles (Nico (first to answer correctly) and Thomas Joseph (second, presumably independently!))
14. Oology - Eggs (Nat Blair)
15. Pomology - Fruit (Chall) - partial credit for Knutty Knitter
16. Rhinology - Noses (Nat Blair)
17. Selenology - Moon (Alyssa)
18. Semiology - Signs (Lisbeth (first to answer correctly) and Pika (second, presumably independently!))
19. Speleology - Caves (Chall) - partial credit for Ruchi
20. Vexillology
21. Vulcanology - Volcanoes (Erika Cule)

The person with the most correct answers at the end of the quiz will be declared Ologyologist in Chief.

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*the Adobe Acrobat issues I blogged about in my last post turned out to be the least of my problems yesterday. The networked drive, which the IT guys tell every new hire to save all their files to because it gets backed up every hour and has all kinds of redundancies built in and has never, ever, failed even once in the 6.5 (non-contiguous) years I've worked here, went down with all the grant files on it at about 3pm yesterday. Oh, and the head of IT is on vacation. It came back up at 5:30, and I only lost about 25 minutes worth of edits made since the last back-up, but there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Oh, and the actual proposal had to be pasted into a text box on the online submission form, FFS, and wouldn't recognise the line breaks from the Word document until I double spaced them all and then deleted the extra spaces. I worked 12 hour days on Monday and Tuesday, and had to come in super early today to walk the Dean through the sign-off and submission procedure. But it is DONE!

After my experiences in my last job, though, I have to say that I much prefer to get stressed about things I actually care about, rather than product inserts and email campaigns. This is some seriously cool stuff, both scientifically and because it has the potential to significantly increase the speed and efficiency of the cancer drug development process. If I had to choose just one of the grants we've submitted this year to get funded I'd pick this one for sure, even though some of the other pending grants are for much more money. (Just don't tell the department's accountant I said that!)

Oh and yes, I do intend to drink some beers at Mr E Man's birthday dinner tonight!