Because I know how much you love my screenshots

Do you ever open up new browser tabs to read later?

I do. It's a very bad habit - I sometimes end up with as many as ten blogs and news articles open at once, and it can take me days to get through all of them. It's the internet version of my eyes being bigger than my stomach.

It's also very confusing, as I sometimes forget exactly which articles are currently waiting for me. So I'll be switching from email back into our ethics applications website, and catch sight of something like this:

At first I thought it must be a report of an Arsenal game, but why would I have opened that, unless they'd just played Newcastle, which I knew they hadn't?

Explanation:

Mystery solved!

Well, the browser tab mystery, anyway. Too soon to tell about the origins of life on Earth mystery.

Just... don't.

"BRCA status" is not so long and clunky that you should feel the need to say "BRCA-ness", as in "property X is probably related to the BRCA-ness of the cell line".

If you absolutely must say "BRCA-ness", pronounce it "bracka-ness", not "bee are see eh-ness"

Please.

Ever say never?

Spotted on a whiteboard in a PI's office, written in massive letters (colours as in original):

Book chapters and reviews are for people with no data - NEVER SAY YES

Nuclear fiction

Conversation last night:

Mr E Man: "I was really enjoying that show I was watching before we went out"

Me: "Oh, it was a show? I thought it was a movie"

Mr E Man: "Yeah, it was a movie"

Me: "Oh right, I keep forgetting that you guys [movie industry people] call movies shows. It's very confusing sometimes"

Mr E Man (in his best fake-patronising voice): "Well, you've only known me eight years. Maybe in another decade or so you'll stop being confused"

Me: "Well you must get confused sometimes too! Like, like, when I say genome when I mean exome!"

Mr E Man: "I'm never confused. I always know exactly what you mean"

Me: "What's an exome, then?"

Mr E Man (confidently, without a hint of hesitation): "It's the part of the genome that's outside the nucleus"

Me: "..."

Me: "That was such a great answer that I almost want to tell you it's true"

Confidence, kids! That's the secret to successful bullshitting!

QUIZ: Elementary, my dear readers!

Ooh, this is gonna be a good one!

Remember that this time I've activated comment moderation (for the first time EVAH), and you have 24(ish) hours to submit as many answers as you can before I open up the comments (as soon as I get up tomorrow). Put them all in one comment, or keep coming back and leaving multiple comments - either way is fine!

Once the comments are open, you can keep submitting answers to any outstanding questions on a free-for-all basis. Once all questions are answered OR you've all given up, I'll declare the winner(s)!

Right.

This is another anagram quiz, with a chemical reaction twist. You're given some of the letters from the left hand side of the "equation", but the other letters are from the name of a chemical element. You "react" the letters of that element with the given letters to make a synonym of the clue word (or phrase) on the right hand side of the equation.

For example, for this clue:

Element + given letters = clue word/phrase

_ _ _ _ +          R             = kind of tree

the answer is:

L E A D +       R             = ALDER

You need to provide both the element (e.g. LEAD) and the clue word (e.g. ALDER).

Clear as mud?

Off we go!

1. _ _ _ _ + S P = jail


2. _ _ _ _ + T I E = resident


3. _ _ _ _ _ + C = wild horse


4. _ _ _ _ _ + A L = crunchy cereal


5. _ _ _ _ _ _ + N T = alight


6. _ _ _ _ _ _ + K U = power loss


7. _ _ _ _ _ _ + I S E = submarine spyglass


8. _ _ _ _ _ _ + I L U = stereoscopic


9. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + Y = modesty


10. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + E = augment


11. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + S T = Satan's sulphur


12. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + L O = accident


13. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  + U = kind of dog


14. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + C = history


15. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + N = postulation

Easy peasy lemon squeezy! Have fun!

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).

-------

*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.

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...

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. 

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!

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?

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

*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!

-------------------- 

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.

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!

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.

----------------
*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!

Busy busy busy...

...working on an extremely cool grant, due Wednesday. I want this one to get funded soooo badly - the science is so cool and the potential impact so great. I wish I could blog about it!

Anyway, until I'm free again, here's an interesting link from Genome Biology. As a twist on the annual Beloit College Mindset List¹, the author pondered:

what would the scientific worldview be like for someone, let's say, just starting graduate school today (and therefore about 22 years of age)? Born in 1988, how would their scientific lives differ from the lives of the generations preceding them (including mine, which is the only one I really care about)? It makes for some interesting speculation:

there follows a list of techniques that have always been outdated (or routine) in these students' lifetimes. Some examples:

• In their lifetime, no one has ever pipetted anything by mouth.

• Believe it or not, they have never known a world without cDNA microarrays.

Worth reading despite the feelings of advanced age that will inevitably follow. As Beth said on Twitter, "That makes me feel old. In MY day, we had to look at DNA one gene at a time! Uphill both ways in the snow!"

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1. which "provides a look at the cultural background of the students entering college that fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to the Beloit faculty to be aware of dated references. As the website notes, 'it quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation.'"

FEAR ME

FOR I AM ALL-POWERFUL

Until this week, I would have said that my super-powers are limited to the following:

• Locating any spider's web within a 5 metre radius, using only my face
• Locating submerged rocks in the ocean, using only my bare feet
• Turning wine into water

However, over the last few days I have not only caused a peer-reviewed paper to be retracted, but also influenced the outcome of the upcoming US House of Representatives elections.

Inadvertent, but still impressive.

The paper retraction came about as a result of a tweet I posted after spotting something unusual in my journal table of contents RSS feeds:

The tweet inspired Bob O'Hara to write a post about the paper, and the story then got picked up by Tara C. Smith (as a direct result of Bob's post) and PZ Myers (I'm not sure where he first heard about the paper, but he linked to Tara's post).

The editor of the journal left comments on all the posts the next day, saying that the paper was being retracted, and apologising for the mistake! See Bob's comment thread for one example.

Blimey, I wasn't expecting THAT when I rattled off that quick tweet! I almost feel guilty*, except that the paper really was very bizarre and unscientific. I'm all in favour of the occasional silly entry in the peer reviewed literature (e.g. here), but feel that it should be marked as such, or made obvious by the date of publication. April 1st springs to mind... Also, it appears that at least one of the authors had intended the paper as a serious attempt at thought provocation.

I think the comments around the internet about "humourless atheists" are off-base, though - most of the comments I've read are full of humourous piss-taking!

My influence over the US elections came about as a result of this book review. Apparently the author is currently running for office as a US Representative, and someone who lives in that district found my book review when Googling all the candidates. This voter then emailed me yesterday, to thank me - he explained that he has a rule against voting for creationists, and based on my review he's decided not to vote for the book's author!

(For the record, I'm not sure that the author's an out-and-out old-skool religious creationist. From what I've read in the book and then in his comments on my review post, I'd classify him more as a proponent of some weird modified form of intelligent design).

I'm thinking that this might be a good week to buy a lottery ticket.

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*I'd like to direct your attention to this egregious little bit of buck-passing:

TMA: Too Many Acronyms

My Computer files and email inbox are awash, overflowing, drowning in the acronyms used by various funding agencies, academic institutes, media outlets, and assorted other organisations.

I'm sure many of my readers have the same issue. However, my problem is Compounded by working on (mainly) Breast Cancer in British Columbia, Canada - with American, British, and Canadian Collaborators. So the same letters tend to occur over and over:

• A is for Agency, Alberta, Alliance, America, American, or Association
• B is for Breast, British, or Broadcasting
• C is for Canada, Canadian, Cancer, Center, Centre, Centres, Collaborative, Columbia, Consortium,  Corporation, or Council
• F is for Foundation or Fund
• I is for Innovation, Institute, or Institutes
• N is for National or Network
• S is for Science or Society

R is always for research and H is always for Health, for which I suppose I should be grateful.

Put any of these letters together in any Combination, and I probably have a matching folder somewhere.

Let's see, I have folders for the following: AACR, ACRI, BCCA, BCCRC, BCCF, CBC, CBCF, CBCRA, CCSRI, CFI, CIHR, CRUK, GBC, NCE, NCI, NCIC, NIH, NSERC, and OICR.

So today, Checking my Credit Card Balance online, I was Confused to see a payment to an entity Called BCF.

Very Confused.

Was there a new player in town? The British Columbia Foundation? The Breast Cancer Fund? The Broadcasting Centre Foundation? British Central Fund? Boring Christmas Food? Burgeoning Cat Fur? Big Chaotic Frenzy? Bring Cath Fudge?

And why the Bloody Cockeyed Fuck am I giving them money??!!

Until I realised the item was related to our upcoming trip to Vancouver Island.

A trip that necessitates paying a reservation fee to BC Ferries.

I think I need to get out more.

Friday Quiz: Scrambled Geometry

My sister-in-law got me a "puzzle of the day" desk calendar for Christmas. She apologised profusely for not getting me anything "better" (by which she meant "more expensive"), but honestly it's one of the best presents I got! Some of the puzzles are dumb, but lots of them are really fun, and just occasionally there's a science or maths themed entry that provides me with excellent blog fodder.

This one's a set of geometry-related anagrams, perfect for a Friday quiz for my readers!

1. ALARM GALLOPER is PARALLELOGRAM (PIKA)
2. BARLEY HOP is HYPERBOLA (BOB)
3. EARTH RODENT is TETRAHEDRON (BOB)
4. GREY TIN MOTOR is TRIGONOMETRY (ARINK)
5. HOP DEARLY is POLYHEDRA (SILVER FOX)
6. NUCLEAR DIPPER is PERPENDICULAR (PIKA)
7. PRIME TREE is PERIMETER (PIKA)
8. READ TIME is DIAMETER (ARINK)
9. RELATE QUAIL is EQUILATERAL (ARINK)
10. SEES COILS is ISOSCELES (BOB)
11. TO SCRIBE is BISECTOR (PIKA)
12. UPSET HONEY is HYPOTENUSE (BOB)

Answer in the comments - but please submit only one answer per person per hour, to give as many people as possible a chance to play before Bob attempts to sweep the board like he did last time. Oh, and there's no need to answer in the right order - choose any anagram you like!

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!

Next-generation paranoia

I'm back from my trip with more photos than I can reasonably fit into a blog post, so please bear with me while I attempt to cull the collection! Until then, it's enough to say that it was an amazing experience that proved once again that there is simply nowhere else I'd rather be than the BC coast in summer.

Luckily, I have plenty of post ideas that don't require any agonising decisions over which photos to ditch. Here's one about a dream I had the night before we launched.

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In my dream, I was on one of my twice-annual trips to San Diego to meet with collaborators. As always, I was part of a group from my institute that consisted of four or five PIs plus me, and after an interesting first day of meetings, our wonderful hosts had taken us out for a wine-soaked dinner on a sunny patio. One of the senior hosts had brought a friend, but forgot to introduce him to the group. The friend told a distinctly unfunny joke... and then got in my face angrily demanding to know why I hadn't laughed. When I replied that I was sorry but I just didn't think the joke was all that funny, he yelled "WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA???!!!", tipped my chair backwards, threw a bag over my head, and man-handled me into a vehicle. I could hear everyone at our table loudly protesting and saying they were going to call the cops, and my assailant shouting "I'm the head of the fucking CIA! Call the fucking cops, they won't do nothing!!!!"

I was taken to a tiny, dark cell filled with people, had the bag roughly pulled off my head, and was told that I would rot in jail. I had all my belongings taken from me* and was not allowed to call my husband, my boss, or the Canadian (or British) embassy.

My cellmates asked what had happened, and when I told them they said "DUDE!!! You always laugh at the head of the CIA's jokes!"

After a long and scary night, and then many hours of waiting the following day, I was finally summoned from the cell and told I was free to go. The desk staff were clearly embarrassed, and one female officer apologised for her boss's drunken temper tantrum as she handed me back my belongings. "He's just an ass", she explained helpfully, and called me a cab.

I asked the cab driver to take me to our collaborators' facility, where I found the second day of meetings in full flow, with one of our PIs in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation and people excitedly asking lots of questions. Everyone looked round as I entered, and someone said "oh good, they let you go then?"

"Why the fuck didn't you come and get me??!!" I demanded, not unreasonably given the circumstances.

"Sorry Cath", said one of our PIs. "We were going to, but the conversation about our latest next-gen sequencing results just got soooo interesting! Look at this slide, this is a totally novel finding!"

Cue me waking up, equal parts disturbed and amused.

The moral of this story?

It's wonderful to have colleagues who are passionate about their work. Really, it is - it's one of the main perks of my job.

However, if you're so completely dedicated to your research that you make your colleagues have paranoid dreams about you letting them rot in a jail cell rather than disrupt your conversation about your latest results, maybe it's time to ease up a little, eh?**

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*the list under "contents of purse" included "iPhone". Under "contents of iPhone", I wrote "life". This dream was clearly trying to tell me many, many different things.

**none of my colleagues would ever actually do this for real. I don't think. I guess it depends on which project they're discussing.