Wishin' my week away

Make it somehow all seem worthwhile

A few months ago I submitted a manuscript for publication in a scientific journal. For those of you who don't know how the process works, the manuscript gets an initial look to make sure the formatting requirements are met, and that the subject matter is appropriate for the journal. If both those things seem to be okay, then the editors send the manuscript to other researchers who are familiar with the subject for external review. Those reviewers will go through the manuscript, and produce a list of concerns such as problems they see with the analyses, problems they have with the conclusions that are drawn based on the results, etc. The reviewers then send those comments back to the associate editor who is handling the manuscript, along with a recommendation of whether or not they feel the paper should be published in the journal. The associate editor will also read through the manuscript and provide comments, and based on those and the recommendations of the other reviewers will make a recommendation to the journal editor. All of this usually takes a few months.

Last week I received comments for the paper I submitted, and they were all favorable. However, there are some issues that one of the reviewers felt needed to be addressed, so I've been revising the manuscript to deal with those. Some are more time consuming than others, and that's when I begin to wonder why all the comments can't be like some of those from the associate editor:

"Line 35: Please include references that support this statement.
Lines 311, 323: may be extra spaces at the end of sentences.
Line 408: Period at end of sentence is strange - possibly bold or larger font.
Line 415: large-water not large water"

Those are the easy ones to deal with. That said, I'm almost done revising, and the paper will be accepted once I resubmit it to the journal (which will hopefully be in the next couple days) . The only bad part is that it's merely a side project that should've been published years ago.

I've got ten miles to go on a nine mile road

If you tell me that you'll wait for me I'll say I won't be here

I'm leaving for Canada first thing in the morning. I'll be running around British Columbia for the next two weeks. I'm not going to have a computer with me, nor will I be in areas where I expect there to be easy internet access anyway, so obviously I won't be posting during that time. Try not to miss me too much.

I'm going to need you to keep an eye on the internet for me while I'm away. If you can promise to do that, I'll promise to do my best not to get eaten by a bear.

Deal?

Deal!

See you when I get back.

The wanderer, yeah, the wanderer

Ok, seriously, it's a little depressing when you realize that approximately 3 months of your life and $7000 out of your own pocket can be summed up in this much space:

Be Prepared

I received some funding over the past year to help pay for some of my research. The people that gave me the money hold an annual research forum, and require anyone who received money from them to report their data at it in order to be eligible for future funding. I gave my talk today.

I worked on my talk over spring break, and intended to put the finishing touches on it earlier this week so that I would have plenty of time to practice it. That didn't happen. I had other things come up instead, so I found myself working on it last night, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say for each slide. I finished that part, but never gave it a practice run to make sure it all fit within the allotted time (12 minutes).

Needless to say, this morning I was a little nervous about giving a talk I'd never practiced before, but I was in the first session so had run out of time for tinkering anyway. I usually don't take these things too seriously (it's not a real meeting after all), but still prefer to have at least given one practice talk, even if it's only to myself. It helps me to get rid of the feeling of being unprepared.

Then the timekeeper walked in, introduced herself, and asked if anybody had a watch. I felt much better.

Dumb Things I Gotta' Do

My friend has a 'to do' list on a whiteboard at his lab bench. In the beginning of its existence it served a purpose - an actual list of things that needed to be done in the lab. It has now evolved into something with a much better purpose - keep those of us working in the lab entertained. Any time we have a random thought, we write it on the 'to do' list. Here are some of the highlights over the past few months:

• Touch the puppet head
• Dial N for nougat
• Attack the rythm nation
• Exhume the little rascals
• Feed chocolate to the dog
• Become the toast master general
• Stir a witch's brew while doing the running man
• Take time for tea and strumpets
• Lay siege to the kingdom of Monaco
• Double the population of Luxembourg in seven crazy nights
• Grow genetically engineered crunchberries

I wish I could take credit for all of these, but the most random (and hence funniest) ones were thought up by my Polish friend.

Drosophila

One of the problems in my department is that there are a lot of geneticists who can't seem to keep their study organisms under control. You really can't be anywhere in the building and expect it to be Drosophila free. It gets annoying to always have to swat these things away as they're buzzing around your face.

On top of them just being annoying, there is a risk to the science that I do. I work with DNA sequences, and you always have to be careful in order to avoid contamination of samples. I know it will upset me to no end if I end up getting a population of fish that is more closely related to fruit flies than to my other populations.

I can't help but wonder what the response would be if it were my fish that were flopping all over the halls, and slapping people in the face with their tails while they're trying to work. I'm pretty sure people wouldn't stand for that. I don't understand why they stand for the flies.

Random Thoughts

My department has a seminar series where every Friday a person from another university or research institution comes in and presents their research. We have a small department with very wide research interests so sometimes the seminars are interesting to me and sometimes (ok, most of the time) they aren't.

Last week we had a microbiologist come in to talk about bacteria that live in hot springs. This is not a topic that interests me, so I had to come up with some of my own little things to keep myself entertained. At least then it would look like I was paying attention. Here are a few of those thoughts:

• What temperature would the water in hot springs actually have to be in order for my skin to peel off if I were to jump in?
• I need to come up with a research project that allows me to travel to remote forests and such, passing through places like Arches, Yellowstone and Yosemite on the way (oh wait, I already do).
• Carbon Cycling - can they ride tandem bikes? is there a yellow jersey involved?
• Do Correolus forces affect the direction in which the ends of one's mustache curls? If so, would one end curl up and the other down if one were to stand straddling the equator?

I am a sexy man

A few months ago I was working alone in the lab one afternoon when there was a knock on the door. I answered it, and standing there was the chair of my department along with three other people that I didn't recognize. He introduced them to me as people from the public relations department here on campus, and told me that they were going around trying to get pictures of people in our department doing research. I was actually getting ready to leave the lab at that point, but I had to wait another five minutes or so for some stuff to cool enough to place into the cooler. Since I was the only one working in the lab at that point, I couldn't really pawn them off on someone else (plus it looks bad if your department chair asks you for a favor and you flat out say no) so I decided that I would oblige them in their quest. They asked me what I was working on right then, and if they could take pictures of me doing that. I told them I was waiting for a gel to cool and that was about it, so they asked me if I could fake something while they took a picture. I thought that would be a waste of time to just act like I was working, so I looked around to see if there was anything I could do rather quickly. That would allow them to get their pictures, yet also allow me to leave the lab shortly thereafter (I didn't want to try starting a DNA extraction or something that would take another hour or so). After glancing around, I saw a jar of fish on my lab bench that still needed to be assigned museum numbers. There were only 10 fish in the jar, so I knew that I could tag them in a matter of minutes, get something accomplished that actually needed to be done (rather than faking work), and they would get their picture.

Little did I know how much time and effort goes into a photo shoot. Even an impromptu one such as this ended up taking more than a half hour. First of all, there was the matter of setting up some kind of lighting. Then we had to rearrange a bunch of things in the lab so that they could get their pictures from the proper angles. It was about all I could do not to just crack up at how ridiculous the whole situation was. I felt like some kind of model. I would grab a fish to tag, and the photographer would call out things such as:

"Oh, hold that fish right there. Perfect."

"Drop that fish and pick it up again, except this time tilt your head a bit more to the left."

"Ok, now do that again, except this time try not to smile. We want you to look serious."

On and on it went. I swear they took about 50 pictures of me, then wrote down my name, the fact that I was a Ph D student, and a few other things about me. They told me that they might be including these pictures in a university publication at some point, but if they did they would come get me to sign a form giving them permission to do so. I never did hear back (or sign a form) but the picture above came out in the latest issue of the University's magazine. Now I'm a star.

A few weeks after the 'photo shoot' a friend of mine printed up my star chart. She knows a guy who is supposed to be really good at interpreting these things, and a group of us were going to meet with him and have him interpret ours. If you don't know, a star chart is supposed to tell you stuff about yourself based on the positions of heavenly bodies at the exact time of your birth (for the record, I don't believe in astrology, but it is kind of fun to read horoscopes and stuff like that). My star chart includes about two pages worth of things about me, my favorite of which is "you protray an earthy, physical sexiness that others find quite seductive."

These two lines of evidence may not be enough to prove that I am a sexy man (surely having your photo published in a magazine is a sign of sexiness), but the evidence is mounting.