How the scientists stole Hallowe'en

Here's some classic X-Files dialogue from an episode called "How the ghosts stole Christmas":

Mulder: [alarmed at a noise] Shhh! What was that?
Scully: [irritably rational] These are tricks that the mind plays. They are ingrained clichés from a thousand different horror films. When we hear a sound, we get a chill, we, we- we see a shadow and we allow ourselves to imagine something that an otherwise rational person would discount out of hand.
[Mulder just continues up the dark staircase. Frustrated, Scully pulls out her flashlight and follows him]
Scully: [continuing to rationalize nervously] The whole, Mulder- the whole idea of a benevolent entity fits perfectly with what I'm saying, that, I mean, that a spirit would materialize or return for no other purpose than to show itself is silly and ridiculous. I mean, what it really shows is how silly and ridiculous we have become in believing such things. I mean that... that we can ignore all natural laws about the corporeal body, that... that we witness these spirits clad in their own, shabby outfits, with the same old haircuts and hairstyles, never aging, never- never in search for more comfortable surroundings... it actually ends up saying more about the living than it does about the dead.
Mulder: [only half-listening] Mmm-huh.
Scully: [clearly rattling on in fear and nervousness] And Mulder, it doesn't take an advanced degree in Psychology to understand the unconscious yearnings that these imaginings satisfy. You know, the... the longing for immortality, the hope that there is something beyond this mortal coil, that we might never be long without our loved-ones... I mean, these are powerful, powerful desires. I mean, they're the very essence of what makes us human... the very essence of Christmas, actually.
[a door nearby suddenly opens on its own with a loud creak]
Mulder: [breathless; whispering] Tell me you're not afraid.
Scully: [breathless also, but stringent] All right, I'm afraid. But it's an irrational fear.

And now, just in time for Hallowe'en, a scientist has proven just how irrational that fear is*...

...or has he?

Well, the explanation satisfies me... partially.

Certain sound frequencies have been shown to induce feelings of "unexplainable dread, chills and depression". And now it's also been shown that these vibrations can be "powerful enough to resonate with the average human eyeball, causing "smeared" vision. This is a phenomenon where the eye vibrates just enough to register something static -- say, the frame of your glasses or a speck of dust -- as large, moving shapes".

After solving the problem of a "haunted" lab by removing a vibrating fan that was emitting such infrasound waves, the researcher in question "went on to test this explanation for ghostly apparitions in the cellar of a nearby "haunted" abbey. According to the locals, as soon as someone would step into the cellar they would freeze up, see strange gray ghosts and have to leave because of nausea. Vic discovered that the shape of the cellar, the hallway leading to it as well as nearby factories all contributed in making the haunted cellar a perfect resonating chamber. The vibrations created were exactly 18.9Hz and were most powerful at the threshold of the cellar, where most people became sick and terrified".

So, an explanation for "haunted" buildings where many people have independently experienced the same feelings of dread and sightings of unexplained entities. Right?

Well, like I said, I'm only partially satisfied. The most interesting and compelling ghost stories I've heard have involved people seeing things much more specific than grey blobs. And this explanation doesn't cover the famous Roman soldier ghosts from my home town of York. As I've said before, my own (extremely dubious) interpretation is that we sometimes see glimpses of things that happened in the same place at a different point in time, due to flaws in the space-time continuum or some such. But that doesn't stop me from getting spooked when someone's telling stories around a campfire...

(And while we're on the subject, the viral video of a "time traveller" using a "cell phone" in a Charlie Chaplin video from 1928 is NOT an example of this phenomenon.  Who the fuck would the person be talking to, and how the hell would they get reception without towers and satellites?! This explanation seems much more likely.

Hilarious comments from my Facebook friends when I posted the "time travel" video:

"We were looking at this last night, and think that the phone call went like this: "I did it! I went from 2002 to 1928! I can prove it - I'm in a Chaplin film *right now* and it's all over YouTube in 2010!"

and 

"1) shes not holding anything in her hand
2) The bloke has far too much time on his hands
3) all of caths points (the same ones I made above)
4) Does nobody think they had mad old women in 1928 who went around muttering to themselves? hell, I look that half the time." 

) 


Anyway, the infrasound explanation of hauntings and ghosts is perfect. It should thoroughly satisfy those who wish to remain sceptical, while leaving enough gaps for those who wish to remain entertainingly spooked at Hallowe'en.

Happy Hallowe'en from Pied Piper and the Disco Bunny! May it be as spooky (or as rational) as you were hoping!

(Better shot of my costume, with rats on my shoulder and hat. I had more running down my leg, too. I also discovered that black cherry vodka mixed with coke tastes like Dr. Pepper. Mmmmmmm).

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*H/T GrrlScientist, who tweeted the link

Context is everything

Gotta love the intersection between science / clinical trial acronyms and automated word choice suggestions:

Yes, lots of people eat rye bread in the former colonies, but that's not quite what I was going for.

In other news, I started quite the debate on Twitter today when I asked whether it should be wildtype, wild-type, or wild type. According to a Nature subeditor who replied, wild type is a noun, wild-type is an adjective, and wildtype can be either.

Loopholes

I'm still too embroiled in deadline stresses to come up with anything original myself, so here are some little tricks and loopholes devised by two of my more ingenious friends. Use at your own peril, especially the first one...

• The first friend used to work in retail sales, and had a fairly standard complaint for someone in that industry, namely having to deal with eejits on a regular basis. He invented a trick that I've occasionally thought of applying to certain colleagues, but I've never quite managed to summon up the courage. 
  
  If an especially obnoxious customer was giving my friend an especially hard time, he'd say "my manager lets me tell one customer per month to fuck off. But I'm not going to waste that on you".
  
  If anyone complained, he could legitimately say that in fact he very specifically did NOT tell that customer to fuck off.
  
  This person no longer works in retail sales, and is much happier as a result.
  
  
• The second friend comes from a very religious Irish Catholic family, but never voluntarily goes to mass or confession. However, these are not optional activities on her trips back to Ireland to visit her folks. On the first trip home after leaving the country, she told the priest in the confession box at the local church the truth - i.e. that it had been 11 months since her last confession. She got a very stern lecture and a whole heap of penances (she retains enough of her family's beliefs that not doing the penances given to her by her priest would be unthinkable; she had to do them all, to the letter).
  
  On her second visit home, she told the priest that it had been two weeks since her last confession.
  
  And then she listed her sins as "lying".
  
  A half-hearted slap on the wrist and she was out of there with a fraction of the penances of the first time.

Genius!

(Hi Mermaid! I told you I could get a blog post out of the first anecdote on this list!)

Derailed

My biweekly, half-hour progress update meetings have been running for about a year now, and are proving their usefulness yet again as I work towards Friday's progress report deadline.The cast is never the same for two performances in a row; some people attend every time, others show their face every six months, and the rest of the team fill the entire spectrum in between. This has allowed me to notice a couple of correlations:

Yeah. Short, snappy updates do not mix well with the professorial tendency to focus on the ins and outs of one sub-sub-project for an hour at a time... 

Don't get me wrong, the focusing is extremely useful - especially for the person running the actual experiments, but also for me, as evidenced by the reams of notes I take in these sessions. I just need to be more assertive about asking people to take their detailed discussions off-line! 

Either that or bring glazed doughnuts to counter the various pairs of glazed eyes around the table...

Quiz format changes - another reader poll!

I've looked through the remaining pages of my now-famous desk calendar, and there is one more sciency quiz left!

In the quizzes I've done so far, I've kept the comments completely open but asked that people submit only one answer per commenter per hour. There's always lots of very entertaining banter and trash-talk when we do it that way, BUT:

1) someone always fails to read the rules and posts multiple answers in one comment;
2) people in other time zones always moan at me that all the answers were gone by the time they got there.


So, for the remaining quiz (and any others that I may come across or invent myself in the future), I'll leave it up to my readers to decide on the format. I see two basic alternatives to the status quo:

a) increasing the shut-out time, or
b) switching on comment moderation for that post only, letting people answer as many questions as they can while the comments are hidden, and approving all comments after a 24 hour period so everyone can see all the answers at once.

The drawback to the former approach is that quizzes could drag on for days...

The drawback to the latter approach is that we'll lose the real-time trash talk and banter...

but I'll let you guys decide if it's worth it.

The results of the following poll will be binding, unless someone suggests another alternative in the comments that I think is better than all the listed options, at which point I will shout "screw democracy!" and use that format. You have one week to submit your answer, and will not be allowed to moan once the decision is made :) 

What format should we use for all future quizzes?

Blades of glory (with reader poll!)

I went ice skating on Saturday! With people I barely know, for added adventurousness!

Well, it was more of a shuffle than a skate, but not bad, considering I've only skated three times before:

• The first time was at primary school, when a company came in one weekend and laid down big slabs of weird Teflon-type stuff that fitted together like a jigsaw, and that you could skate on. Kinda. It was a huuuuge deal - I remember everyone talking about it for weeks before it happened, and having to sign up for a specific time and skate size well in advance. I also remember being part of a pack of kids careening around the tiny school gym, barely in control (none of us wearing gloves or helmets, of course) having a whale of a time during our half-hour slot.
• The second time was when I was about 14 and we went on an uncharacteristically awesome school trip to the Doncaster Dome, over an hour away (our closest ice rink). We spent the morning in the wave pool and on the water slides, and the afternoon skating around the dual level rink: around the top part, down the slope, around the bottom part, and up the other slope, a set-up my new Canadian friends described as "crazy" when I told them about it. I had to stop early because a smaller kid cut me off just as I was coming off the downwards slope and, not wanting to hit her but not knowing how to stop, I grabbed hold of the side with one hand to stop myself, swung around in an arc, and slammed right into the hoardings, knees first. Someone else (not from my school) fell over and had her hand run over by a skate - I didn't see it, but some of the kids from my school did, and they told us all about it. No-one was wearing gloves or a helmet, of course. 
• The third time was on New Years Eve a couple of years ago, when we were staying with Mr E Man's sister and her family up near Kamloops, BC. Someone had created a community rink by flooding the tennis courts using a hose pipe, so after dinner we borrowed skates and hockey sticks from a neighbour and went and shot pucks at the only kid in the village who had a full set of goalie gear. I was using hockey skates, rather than the figure skating kind I'd used before, which were also a size too small; add in the choppy ice and the fact that there was nothing to hold onto other than my brother-in-law, and I took the skates off and was running around playing hockey in my hiking boots within ten minutes (yes, the ice was choppy and rough enough that you could run around in hiking boots while pleasantly drunk and not fall over. Much). I wore gloves that time (it was soooooo cold), but no helmet, of course - just a toque.

I recounted this history to the people at Friday night's party who were proposing the outing, and they reassured me that none of them had skated for years. I found out the next day that for two of them this statement came with the caveats "not since high school, when I played lots of hockey", and "not on ice, although I'm a roller derby referee so I'm on roller skates all the time" (I've roller skated maybe twice as an adult), but it was really fun to do something so different, and everyone was very nice and encouraging! I wore my ski gloves and bike helmet this time, and spent the first circuit hanging onto the wall all the way around, before getting gradually more confident; by the end of our 40 minutes (a steal at $9 including skate rentals), I could make it almost all the way along one long edge of the arena without grabbing hold or falling over. I was still very wobbly and attracted various scornful / pitying looks from the hordes of small children flying backwards around the arena doing leaps and twirls, and my feet and ankles were in agony, but it was a blast!

We went out for beer and snacks afterwards and as we were sharing some poutine, someone said "well, you're properly Canadian now". However, I'm not sure that this was actually the most Canadian thing I've ever done - there are other candidates.

So here's a poll:

What's the most Canadian thing Cath has ever done?

Anyway, three cheers for trying new things and making new friends!

Meep Meep!

I've discovered another reason to keep cycling on rainy days:

That's the second one this month! The first was a scruffy little fella who suddenly appeared from a patch of mist in the cemetery when I was out for a run; he looked terrified, and ran away immediately. Today's sighting was a magnificent specimen: fully grown, with a gorgeous coat and big bushy tail, a brave and handsome boy who stood and watched me for a while before deciding I wasn't a threat and getting on with his day.

I used to see foxes almost every week on my bike commute in Glasgow - usually in the woods, but sometimes in the vet school campus where I worked - and it always made my day. Coyotes still seem terribly exotic to me, and the sightings are rarer, so that thrill goes double.

I wasn't scared at all - hey, if he'd started chasing me he'd no doubt have slammed into a cliff or fallen into a canyon within a few seconds* - but it was a great reminder of why the cats need to stay inside at night!

ETA: right on cue, the BBC have an article today on the role of cemeteries in preserving urban biodiversity!

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*hi, Facebook and Twitter friends! Yes, I recycle my jokes for the good of the environment.

RBO Cycling

• I've commuted by bicycle almost every day since I started my PhD in 1998. That's a lot of kilometres, a lot of near accidents, a lot of hills, and a LOT of rain (we're talking Glasgow and Vancouver here, two cities notorious for their wet weather). And yes, I've always ridden year-round, rain or shine, although I do take the bus on icy or snowy days. Really, if you have the right gear and your journey takes less than half an hour or so, how wet are you gonna get?! Plus it's still cheaper, faster, cleaner, and more fun to ride in the rain than to take a steamed-up bus full of wet people. With a hot shower available at both ends of the trip, the worst thing about wet weather riding is the ickiness of putting still-damp leggings and shoes back on at the end of the day before the ride home, but that's just a fleeting sensation. I've done this for so long now that it's part of my identity, and if I'm 100% honest I do feel a certain sense of superiority over fair-weather cyclists, enabled by friends and colleagues who say things like "you rode today?! Wow, you're so dedicated! I'd never ride in weather like this!"
  
  This autumn, though, feels different. I sense a growing reluctance to ride in the rain, characterised by a bad case of the DON'T WANNA!s when I look out of the window on wet mornings. I blame the Vancouver-Seattle ride I did in June: I got thoroughly drenched on one of my long training rides, damp on a couple of others, and soaked to the skin to the point of what a nurse colleague tells me was almost certainly early-stage hypothermia on the ride itself*.
  
  Now, if you'd asked me back in hot and sunny August what effect those experiences might have on my commuting habits in the future, I'd probably have said "none" - surely after all that misery, I'd power through my wet 20 minute commutes thinking "this is NOTHING!", right?
  
  Wrong.
  
  I think that second day of the ride just plain ol' exceeded my tolerance limits for rain for the year, if not longer. Rainy rides now just take me back to the misery of that second day, when the rain and the hills just. Would. Not. Stop., and I got so cold I started making near-fatal bad decisions. I just DON'T WANNA! any more.
  
  I'm going to try to push through this. I don't want to be a fair-weather cyclist, I don't want to take steamed-up buses full of wet (and germy) people, and more importantly I feel the need to get out there and make all the naysayers realise that yes, there IS a point to building new cycling infrastructure in a rainy city, because people WILL use it year-round (a major point of contention in Vancouver right now as our awesome mayor and council commit to building more and more separated bike lanes downtown and elsewhere).
  
  I'll let you know how it goes...

(don't worry, the remaining bullets are much shorter)

• As a caveat to the above: I no longer ride on (most) Fridays. I started this habit during my training, as I did two long rides most weekends, and Friday seemed like a good choice of rest day. But I quickly realised that there are other benefits, such as not having to choose between the "leave bike at work and then not have it over the weekend" and the "ride bike to pub/friend's house and then either ride home after drinking or leave it at friend's house" options when a friend texts at 3pm on a Friday to suggest a spontaneous get-together.

• When I first learned to ride a bike, I started on a two-wheeler with removable stabilisers (training wheels, if you're from North America). So did all the other kids in my town. But all the kids I see around here who are just learning to cycle have two-wheelers, no stabilisers, and no pedals - they push themselves along with their feet. I guess that sometime in the last 30 years or so, someone decided that it's better for kids to learn balance first, rather than mastering pedalling/steering first, as I did. It makes sense, actually, and I wonder how many bruises and scraped knees I might have been spared if I'd learned this way!

• Once the local kids graduate to pedalling normal bikes, many of them start to accompany their parents on rides on the city's designated bike routes (side streets with some traffic-calming measures in place, but which are unfortunately still very popular with drivers because you get favourable stop signs, plus lights to cross all the major cross-streets). This is great - with the right parents! Some let their kid(s) ride behind them or on their left, where they're prone to wander all over the road or make sudden changes in speed and/or direction, which is very dangerous when faster riders and cars are trying to pass. And of course you can't say anything to these parents without getting yelled at (I've tried).
  
  So it was such a joy to see two counter-examples in the last couple of weeks. In the first case, a father was riding behind his son, keeping up a constant commentary along the lines of "go wide! That driver's stopped in front of a parking space, so she might start backing up and swinging out!", "I don't think that driver's seen us, so let's slow right down even though he has a stop sign and we don't", "wave and nod to say thank you!", "remember to keep in a straight line", "look behind you if you want to slow down", etc. It was awesome, and I told him so ("great job on the training!") as I passed. The other case, on a different route and a different day, involved a mother riding behind her daughter, giving similar advice and reminding her to always try and figure out where other road users want to go and what they might do next.
  
  Awesome job, guys! I salute you, and I wish there were more out there like you!

• That is all. Sorry this got so long. Bullets FAIL.

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*apparently my self-treatment prescription of hot-tub, beer, and spicy Thai food was "kinda dumb", but hey, what doesn't kill ya makes ya stronger, right? :)

Days of hours of minutes

A blog buddy (who may or may not wish to identify themselves in the comments) posted a wee ditty on their Facebook page recently that rang very true indeed:

just received something from a fellow sufferer that will only be funny to Secretaries (with a capital 'S'):

"And so while the great ones depart to their dinner,
The Secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner.
Racking his brain to record and report,
What he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought."

The post made me literally laugh out loud. I'm responsible for taking minutes at several recurring meetings - it only takes one instance of "it was decided that the prospect of cruel would be better than the reflex perspective analysis*" to see why someone with a scientific background is needed for this task - and part of the reason for my relative bloggy silence recently is that I was down in San Diego last week at a research collaboration progress meeting, typing away so fast that I'm surprised my laptop keyboard is still intact and functional.

The meetings themselves are hard work, both physically and mentally. I type and type and type almost non-stop for hours on end, battling through the hand, wrist and shoulder pains (laptop keyboards are not designed for such marathon sessions) as I try to capture every single little thing that's said, struggling with the balance between brevity and speed versus future intelligibility. Unlike the other attendees I can't zone out or divert my attention to another task even for a couple of minutes, a lesson I learned the hard way after embarrassingly failing to capture an important action item at one of my first meetings with these collaborators, while I was checking my (work!) email. I even have to keep typing during the coffee and lunch breaks, as people come up to me asking for additions to be made to the minutes following one-on-one conversations they just had with another attendee while getting their coffee.

The most stressful part comes at the end of each day, though, when I'm asked for a list of all the action items generated. This request took me completely by surprise the first time, but luckily I'd decided that it might be useful to have the action items highlighted in red text. Even now though it can be an embarrassing process that can make me look really stupid as I scroll through pages and pages of text** trying to read out the action items in a coherent manner. I'm not sure everyone realises that there's just not enough time in the heat of the moment to type in more than "ACTION: [PI] will get back to [collaborator] with answers to the above questions". This item might refer to a full page of discussion about how to proceed with a project, but makes no sense when read out in a list, separated from its original context.

I also colour code (in blue) any amusing little conversations or observations that pop up that can't go into the actual formal minutes, but that might make good blog fodder. The bloggable LOLs from this meeting include an amusing conversation:

My boss: "Who did this scoring and analysis? This project needs to be led by a human pathologist".

Hilarious collaborator: "Well, he's definitely human..."

a promise to myself:

"I hereby swear to never, ever, use 'homozygose' as a verb" (my boss had just done this, in the context of trying to engineer a cell line homozygous for a gene mutation that we only ever see as a heterozygote in a certain tumour type).

and an observation from me about another lazy bit of technical jargon that, like "poor prognostic marker", doesn't stand up to grammatical scrutiny. This time the example was "spontaneous mouse models", which caused me to have to suppress a snigger as I imagined a bunch of white mice suddenly popping into existence in a lab. Sure, "mouse model of spontaneous tumour development" is more of a mouthful, but at least it's accurate.


Unlike the person in the verse , I do at least get to go to dinner - an excellent Mexican restaurant this last time. Mmmmm, guacomole. A few of us also enjoyed some excellent local beer on a beachfront patio on the second day, as the meeting finished a couple of hours early and we couldn't change our flights home. The chances of me growing thinner and thinner on one of these trips are, well, slim.

The effort continues when I get back to the office and have to prepare formal, neat versions of the notes for circulation to all internal and external collaborators and their bosses. I have to re-order the original minutes to capture follow-up comments and action items that someone suddenly thought of in the middle of a presentation about another project, to make the information flow more logically within and between sections, and to remove some of the more random dead-end tangents completely. I also have to clarify or remove any items that really don't make any sense (I'm usually too busy typing for any critical analysis of what I'm writing), and add some context into all the action items.

I also have to fix all the typos and auto-corrects, turning all the "serious ovation cancers" back into "serous ovarian cancers" and such, and adding all the optional little luxuries that I don't have time for during the actual meetings - luxuries such as full words, sentences, paragraphs, and grammar. You know, the minor details. Once that's done I can format the document, try to proofread it, realise I'm heartily sick of the damn thing and only be able  to bring myself to skim it superficially, send it out, and then spot an embarrassing surviving typo as I go to close the document.


Oh well, at least I remembered to take out my observation about mice spontaneously popping into existence.

An action item about the cakes to be served at the next meeting did make it through, but that was deliberate.

Nope, definitely not gonna get any thinner playing this game.


------------
*Seen in minutes from a meeting that took place before my time, when the admin assistants were responsible for all minutes, including those of very technical meetings. Sentence should read "it was decided that prospective accrual would be better than retrospective analysis". I  think.

**At the actual 1.5 day meeting I typed a total of 30 pages of notes, which translated to 31 pages of nicely formatted formal minutes with each major item starting on a new page. 

Hockey Pool, Week 1

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians! I'm thankful for hockey, hockey pools, and awesome blog buddies, among other things.

Congratulations Thomas Joseph on winning the first week of the pool!

Just remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint...

Who wants to do the update next week? I'll send you the spreadsheet...

Staycation Proclamation!

WHEREAS Cath@VWXYNot?, author of an independent weblog at http://vwxynot.blogspot.com ("The Blogger"), has somehow managed to use less 2010 vacation time than she thought, and has more unused days remaining than she is allowed to roll over into 2011; and

WHEREAS The Blogger has only ever had three (3) weekdays off work (not including sick days) that were spent at home, rather than on either domestic or international trips, during her almost nine (9) years of residence in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada ("Vancouver"); and

WHEREAS on weekends, the most attractive parts of Vancouver (see Exhibits, attached) are teeming with People Who Do Not Know How To Walk/Jog/Cycle/Rollerblade In Crowds Without Impeding The Progress of Others ("Fuckwits"); and

WHEREAS The Blogger lacks the patience to deal with said Fuckwits in large numbers; and

WHEREAS on weekends, The Blogger therefore tends to avoid visiting the most attractive parts of Vancouver; and

WHEREAS The Blogger has ideas for several interesting writing projects, but can not summon up the requisite mental energy while working full time in a writing-based job, at least not when the weekends are warm and sunny; and

WHEREAS the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic Winter Games ("The Party Of The Century") brought the entire Vancouver movie industry to a standstill for three months in the winter and spring of this year (a situation hereby declared "Totally Worth It"); and

WHEREAS The Blogger and her Husband ("Mr E Man") therefore have no (0) money at this time and can not afford a) to fly anywhere exotic, or b) let Mr E Man take any more time off work this year:

NOW, THEREFORE, it has been agreed that The Blogger shall be released from her place of employment for a period of one (1) week in mid-November 2010, during which time she shall (mostly) stay within the limits of the Vancouver city boundaries ("Staycation"). The activities that shall fall under this Staycation Agreement may include, but not be limited to, the following:

• Visiting the Vancouver attractions listed in the attached Exhibits while they are (relatively) free of Fuckwits; 
• Hanging out in coffee bars in the most fun parts of town (which may include, but not be limited to, Kitsilano, Main Street, Commercial Drive, and Granville Island) with a MacBook and an Americano, pretending to be A Writer;
• Catching up on sleep;
• Cooking some delicious dinners;
• Getting to be the one still sitting on the sofa looking cozy with a cup of tea, a fleece blanky, and a kitty cat or two when Mr E Man has to go out into the dark and the rain to go to work (the converse of the situation during The Party Of The Century, and also last week, this week, and possibly for the next two or three weeks while Mr E Man is Between Movies);
• Spending time with friends and/or sisters-in-law who do not work standard weekday 9am - 5pm (PST) hours, possibly including a visit to a spa for a massage, to be followed by a cocktail hour. Or two.

So there.

Right, just this work trip to get through (this post is scheduled to publish while The Blogger is at Vancouver International Airport at Stupid O'Clock (PST) on a Monday morning, looking bleary eyed and attempting to make intelligent conversation with her boss and assorted other colleagues), then six more weeks of grants, manuscripts, progress reports, ethics applications, and (how did you guess?) MTAs and collaborative research agreements, and then The Blogger is FREE! FREE! FREE!

(for a week).

NOW, THEREFORE, YAY!

________________________________
Exhibit A: Stanley Park Seawall. The Blogger has given up all attempts to cycle or rollerblade around this attractive pathway on weekends due to being almost knocked into the water on multiple occasions by Fuckwits stopping dead in front of her for no apparent reason. On one such occasion she was forced to rollerblade rather painfully into a metal fence in order to avoid this fate, and obtained some rather spectacular bruises as a result. The Blogger used to take a detour on her ride home from work to enjoy this route on certain weekday evenings in summer, but since subsequently moving away from her original neighbourhood of Kitsilano this option is no longer practicable. (This Staycation Activity is weather-dependent).

Exhibit B: Granville Island Public Market. Known for its delicious fresh local produce, delicious fresh hot food and beverages, and large roving packs of Fuckwits on weekends.

Exhibit C: Vancouver Art Gallery. The Blogger has never visited for reasons that she can not satisfactorily explain. (She did try during The Party Of The Century, when entry was free, but it was far too busy and full of elite international Fuckwits).

Exhibit D: Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, which again The Blogger has never visited, nor made any attempt to visit, for reasons that remain obscure.

Bragging Rights Central V

New archive post!

Remember that there's an annual vote and prize for the best comment of the year - coming in mid-December to a very silly blog near you!

Dates represent date of archiving - it's just easier that way.

VWXYNot? Comment(s) of the week: 
 
Oct 1 2010: Ricardipus for "What I like best about the pelicans I've seen (Brown Pelicans, in Florida) is how they wheel and glide overhead, obviously delighting in the wind, and then

WHUMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! they fold their wings and absolutely PLUMMET into the ocean after a fish.

Graceful aerobats and psychotic daredevil bombardiers all at once. Love 'em."

Nina for "google translator solely exists for the purpose of a good laugh every now and then. A friend of mine translated a persian abstract into french, but since no one spoke enough french to see hilarious mistakes, it was a wasted effort. So he put the translation into his thesis."

and Microbiologist XX for "For a second I thought maybe you found this guys Dungeons and Dragons CV."

Oct 8 2010: sooo many this week! It's the hockey pool trash talk that does it.

Thomas Joseph for "my agency recognizes papers by letting you keep your job!"

Professor in Training for "How does my dept recognize my achievements? They don't. Most of my colleagues avoid me because the more I do, the worse they look."

Pika for "we have a "mandatory"* departamental social event about once a month - just for fun. [...]

*Mandatory, according to my boss: "fun is not optional""

Bob for "And of course the imaginary answers are

1: martini,
2: University (it's in Oz)
3: computer (the computer fish is a more evolved electric eel)
4: IO (yes, that moon does have life on it)
5: DOD,
6: Stupidity (political science),
7: trousers,
8: money (as in "a fuel and his money are easily divided"),
9: jazz,
10 is rover"

Alyssa for "Damn - I was kind of hoping you'd forget about the NHL pool this year so I wouldn't feel obligated to kick ass again ;)

Seriously though, I'll have to think about it because of the whole baby-coming-in-November-thing, but will let you know!"

then ScientistMother for "Alyssa - what can't watch hockey AND give birth, talk about lack of multitasking :))) "

then Chall for "if Alyssa can be more "like all the rest of us" we'll have a chance this year (slaughter might be too big a word for what happened last year - or not ;) ) "

Oct 15 2010: soooo many good ones again! You guys are outdoing yourselves lately!

Cromercrox for "I have a theory about fuckwits, though. I don't think they are as stupid as they seem. It's all a front. I think they are all members of a secret worldwide conspiracy called S. T. O. P., the Society for Tiresome and Obstructive Pedestrians, whose members might include (but are not limited to)

1. Little old ladies who, while they seem small, walk in such a way as to monopolize the whole sidewalk;

2. Italian teenagers who are ostensibly in UK studying in English, who hang around in shop doorways;

3. Ladies with prams who suddenly stop and gossip with each other.

And so on and so forth in like fashion. I hypothesize that S. T. O. P. is obscurely allied with S. C. U. M., the Society for Curmudgeonly and Uncooperative Motorists, whose members include men driving white vans, people towing caravans, boy racers and so on."

(very meta, this one) Ricardipus for "I believe I deserve a special award for Most Reasonable Usage of the Term "WHUMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" in a Blog Comment About Seabirds During September of 2010.

Also, that comment was possibly the most useful thing I wrote all month."

following on from last week's hockey pool-related trash talk between Alyssa, ScientistMother, Chall and me, here's what happened when Alyssa and Pika won the quiz last week:

ScientistMother for "No fair, some of us actually have to do IMPORTANT things like drive to work, dress, drink coffee, oh and feed small child before we can get onto our blogs. Those damn EST folks have a head start."

then Alyssa for "Tsk, tsk, tsk - so many excuses. It's all about priorities, people! I mean, how is research, feeding your kid, or sleeping more important than THIS? I figure either shit or get off the pot!"

then Chall for "Alyssa> that goes for the hockey too, right? "feeding your kid" vs hockey picks. That's a clear priority ;)

(sorry, couldn't resist.)"

then ScientistMother for "Ayssa - Chall beat me to this. But note, I had to drive, drink coffee AND feed the small child. You were complaining about just giving birth and a hockey pool. C'mon now, how hard is giving birth anyway?"

and finally Alyssa for "Oh, crap, I didn't realize you had to do all those things! My most sincere apologies. Giving birth and then learning to take care of a newborn obviously does not compare to that!"


Oct 22 2010: Chall for "Sounds like a fun thing to do, keeping the notes I mean. You do know it's the power.... to write what you want them to have decided ;)"

and Mermaid for "Maybe the solution is having one really horrible bus commuting experience to switch you back to the joys of cycling. Perhaps sitting beside someone with personal space and body odour issues....along with a cold, sneezing fits and a lack of tissue?

That would make your bike seem like a luxury!"

Oct 29 2010: Mel for "i voted for hockey shootout/curling... drunk new years hockey only lost because you admitted already that you took your skates off (very UNcanadian) and also you did not say that it was below -20 degrees (which is critical to the Canadianness)!!!"

Mermaid for "Oh, there was curling, but we never really paid attention. As kids, it was far too tame and the good looking boys played hockey :)"

Professor in Training for "I only recently saw a picture of poutine - it looks like it could very well be my favourite food of all time as it contains all of my favourite ingredients that aren't Doritos."

and Bob O'H for "I like the status quo - I hoover up the easy answers, then retire to bed and leave the hard ones for you people in the Colonies."

Nov 5 2010: Microbiologist XX for "We have a weekly group meeting that four PIs attend. Sometimes I get the feeling that if one person weren't standing in front with a laser pointer, that we would never get the hell out of there."

and Bob O'H for "I liked Clippy. Primarily because I could swear at him.
"It looks like you're writing a letter."
"No, fuck off and tell me the full reference for [redacted] et al. 1967, wanker"
"I don't understand what you're asking"
"Of course not. You're a useless tosser who should go back to Seattle with all the other idiots who live there"
etc etc"


Nov 12 2010: Hermitage for "I'm such a wimp, I got the spooks just from reading about a frequency that resonates my eyeballs. Aiiiiii, abomination! Not of the lord! Squee, squee."

Ricardipus for "You know, I think I will go through the whole pool without changing any picks at all. Think of it as a negative control."

Chall for "of course, we all know the saying - up like a sun, down as a pancake - right?!"

and Antipodean for "Ooooh. I'm as excited as a kitten in it's very own paper bag..."

Nov 26 2010:  Massimo for "I think it's true, you may be becoming more and more Canadian every day but... you're still a Brit at taste buds :-)"

and Massimo again for "I think they are looking for a high-level administrator at my institution... I am sure they can make him a competitive offer. We only want the best, when it comes to bs."

Dec 3 2010: Bumper two week edition!

EcoGeoFemme for "My friend's husband went along with her to a meeting once. He went to the poster session and pretended he was an ecologist. I guess he had picked up enough from my friend that he was pretty convincing, even though he said he was in a somewhat different subfield from her. For some reason, this irritated me more than it made me laugh."

Hermitage for "You love melancholy air? You are SUCH a Brit!" (hey, a little melancholy now and then is good for the soul!)

Nina for "I am delighted to see grey misty gloomy November weather in other places when I can finally go to work on flipflops and colleagues throw spontaneous wine tastings around afternoon teatime."

Bob O'Hara for "I think that's Chinese for "flower horribly infested with smut"."




Post(s) of the Week:
 
Oct 1 2010: CromerCrox for "Ancestral furniture" (in CC's family, "when the elder male of the clan reaches his mid-forties, he is seized by an implacable urge to make pine dressers". There are some impressive furniture making genes in this family!)

and Scicurious for "The lab your lab could BE LIKE!" and "The Old Spice lab: Does YOUR lab smell like an Old Spice lab?" (fantasizing about Isaiah Mustafa turning reagents into data. I’m on a stool. HYAH!)

Oct 8 2010: KJHaxton for "Lady Lab Coat Ga Ga" (the frustration of trying to find a practical lab coat for a woman that doesn't leave you looking like "a rectangular polycotton yeti")

Masks of Eris for "The teaching-assistantial mind at work" (messing with students' minds through the medium of URLs)

and Eva Amsen for "No-one cares about your blog (part 2)" (a very funny tale of a t-shirt, and an excellent reminder to those of us prone to MEta-blogging that really, no-one cares). 

Oct 15 2010: travel and reading hilarious comments cut into my blog-reading time this week!

Prof-like Substance for "Job vacancy: journal club killa" (there's one in every department!)

and Alyssa for Misery wars (Four kinds of oneupmanship. Can you think of any more?) 

Oct 22 2010: Thomas Joseph for "#UnK3rn3d: Life Outside the Lab?" (excellent rebuttal to Scott Kern)
Anthony Fejes for "Science blogs and Caveat Emptor. A comment on an Analytical Chemistry editorial" (excellent rebuttal to Royce Murray)

Eva Amsen for "Technical paper: home-made mocha optimization" (Abstract: "I made instant mocha at work and am now writing a silly blog post about it.")

Kimli for "False advertising" (Kimli's experience with the iPhone Facetime video calling feature does not quite match the one promised in those commercials)

and Alyssa for "My eyes! My eyes!" (I don't have a formal award for "most hideous furniture of the week", but maybe I should start one?) 

Oct 29 2010: Jenny Rohn for "In which I defend a bit of honest ignorance" (does it matter that most people don't understand technical scientific terms?)

Chall for "...not in Kansas any more..." (an encounter in the "wrong" neighbourhood opens up a new career option that could be so, so right...)

and Information is Beautiful for "The true size of Africa" (some stunning maps that put country & continent sizes into perspective) 

Nov 5 2010: Nina for "In the fume hood" (Nina continues to crack me up, this time with an explanation for why she got to experience a large aftershock from inside the hood)

and The Digital Cuttlefish for "My place in the dance of the universe" (I have to admit that I've been neglecting ol' Cuttle lately, but this post made me realise what an eejit I'd been not to keep up with his blog) 

Nov 12 2010: It's all Hermitage all the time! Check out this awesome series on "How Gaming Makes me a Better Graduate Student": Glossary, Intro, PvE vs PvP, and Gear (with more to come next week, I think). I know next to nothing about gaming, and thought the whole series was fantastic!

Oh, and Beth gets a shout-out too, for the awesome Vegetarian Lady Gaga costume she wore to my Hallowe'en party last week. 

Nov 26 2010: Bob O'Hara for "Why Libel Needs to be Reformed" (funny post (hee hee! Just noticed the URL as I added the link) about a serious subject. Please sign the petition, wherever you may live, because English libel law affects YOU).

and StyleyGeek for "Remind me why we are using a wiki again?" (almost too familiar to be funny. Almost). 

Dec 3 2010: Bumper two week edition!

The Bean-Mom for "What's important" (very sad but beautifully written tale of loss)

Prof-like Substance for "But those grant reviews are unreasonable!" (how even ridiculous reviews can improve your proposal)

Chall for "Tale of two languages" (fantastic post and comments thread about living, working, thinking, and dreaming in more than one language)

Jennifer Rohn for "In which I correspond" (the story behind getting permission to use the poetry quoted in her new book. Canadian authors FTW!)

Cromercrox for "Guinea pigs for a guinea pig?" (the story behind the next global publishing phenomenon: Defiant the guineapig: Firefighter!)

Richard P. Grant for "Onlooker" (geeky googly goodness)

and Ugliest Tattoos for "Tomorrow, on Springer" (excellent visual pun) 

Friday Quiz: Missing Links

It's time for another quiz taken from my puzzle of the day desk calendar! I think I'm going to have to buy myself another calendar next year if Santa doesn't bring me one; it's provided some really fun blogging experiences. (Either that or I'm going to have  to make up my own quizzes, which sounds too much like hard work).

This time the aim is to fill in the missing middle word on each line, so that the first two words AND the last two words of each set form a scientific(ish) term. As a non-sciency example, fill in the gap below

GREEN ________ BAG

with the word TEA, to form the terms GREEN TEA and TEA BAG.

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!  

1. DRY __ICE__ AGE (Lisbeth)
2. STROBE _LIGHT_ WAVE (Pika)
3. BINARY __STAR__ FISH (Alyssa)
4. FOOD _CHAIN_ REACTION (Bob)
5. HEAVY _WATER_ TABLE (Anonymous)
6. PERPETUAL _MOTION_ SICKNESS (Mermaid)
7. CLEAN __ROOM__ TEMPERATURE (Chall)
8. FUEL __CELL__ DIVISION (Schlupp)
9. COMMON __COLD__ FUSION (Pika)
10. LAND __MASS__ SPECTROMETER (Alyssa)

I got all but one of the answers. Let's just say that I came up with some fairly ridiculous guesses (binary cat? Code fish?) out of desperation, and felt rather silly when I saw the answer!

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.

Have fun!