Baby Ate My Eightball

January 26th, 2010

02:09 pm - How the heck did you think you could beat them?
I need to get back into posting here more regularly... or you know, at all. I've been thinking about this for a while, but productivity keeps getting in my way - yes, I am actually being productive, or I was, amazing as that seems to admit.

On the other hand, this article just came and knocked me out of that habit:

Because We Always Knew Amoebas Were Smarter than Lots of Men

To recap/summarise: slime moulds are capable of designing efficient public transport systems, as well as (if not better) than most humans. (We should really hand over NYC to them, because much as I love the subway, it's a fucking disaster as far as efficiently getting places goes.)

Alright, carry on with your normal business... and tune in next time, for videos of bats giving blow jobs, knitted brains, or something I make up, which probably can't be nearly as weird as the real things one finds in science.
Current Mood: [mood icon]

mellow

May 15th, 2009

05:21 pm - She said, she said
Do it because you'd like people not to die from horrific neurological diseases and cancers that won't be cured unless scientists can understand the body. Do it because firebombing people's cars and homes and threatening their lives and their families is NOT a legitimate form of protest. Do it because the rats with clipboards are staring at you. Do it for any reason that appeals to you, really..

But I think signing this petition in support of responsible animal research and protecting scientists who carry it out would be a really cool thing to do.

Pro-Test Petition

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Window - BRMC

April 28th, 2009

01:26 pm - Welcome to the Tramazi-Party
For future reference, self: Muscle Relaxants are a weekend treat.

I caught the grand 2009 back plague last week, (just sore muscles, nothing super exciting or even really that bad) and yesterday got to sweet talk the bemused Student Health doctor into giving me something to help with it. He mentioned doziness as a potential side effect... but forgot to tell me that it would make it entirely impossible to get up in the morning without falling asleep every 30 seconds. Today was not an early day in the lab.

On the plus side, the drifty relaxed feeling (the actual sleep last night was awesome, even if Fly Boy tells me I was talking gibberish) makes it impossible to be annoyed, upset or even vaguely worried about this.

Which is a rather nice piece of evidence showing that William James was onto something with his wacky emotional theories (brain reads out the current state of your various body functions, and decides what emotion it's got going on on the basis of those, rather than.. you know, actually thinking about what it should be thinking).

For more on this freaky but super interesting phenomenon, and other related weird things about bodily sensation, check out this thing from the ever-awesome Radiolab (two guys with a bunch of odd sound effects talking about science. Good times). I'll just sit here and feel all floaty...
Current Mood:

high
Current Music: Up In the Sky - Oasis

March 17th, 2009

01:28 pm - Six Months in a Leaky Boat...
Note to self - next time a love of old school museumesque spaces leads you toward choosing a lab to work in, seriously think about reconsidering.

My lab is falling apart! Two floods last week (one the fault of a lab member, one very inexplicable and involving water suddenly starting flowing where no water has flowed for a couple of years), and today, our fridges (admittedly something on the order of 35 years old) stopped working, necessitating a major cleanout of stuff.

We have 30 years of accumulated miscellanities that I can only really describe as 'science stuff'. Most of it of course isn't labelled, or isn't labelled in a way that makes sense to anyone except the original labeller, who generally left the lab at least 5, and possibly 15 years ago. Some of it is actually pretty neat, but most of it is trash or more often, hazardous trash. Generally my boss (who has more than a little of the Hoarder Genes which afflict my mother) is also personally attached to 10 year old brains and larynges, even though even she has no more than a slight idea about what they are.

Today may have been a personal breakthrough for her though, she had us chuck most of the crap from the fridge. So that was nice.

Anyway, none of this is really very interesting, unless you have a deep desire to know something about the day to day running of an established but currently much diminished neuroscience lab. Which maybe you do. It may also help me remember the incident, in case I ever do get around to writing that Devil Fly story... it seems like the kind of thing that could be even crazier than it actually was today.

I think I might have just jinxed myself with that. Now something even stupider will just have to happen.
Current Mood:

indifferent
Current Music: Ballerina - Van Morrison

February 25th, 2009

12:26 pm - Oh, arm and arm we are the harmless sociopaths
Is that not an awesome lyric? Andrew Bird is like my weird and crazy music boyfriend, I think. Or at least he should be. (Of course Alex Turner is still Future Husband, but in the meantime....)

Anyway, speaking of boyfriends, the real one found an hilarious website this morning, and now I must pass it on, because it ticks off all those boxes that are the requirements for me to bother to update:
1) Pointless links
2) Pretty pictures
3) Wordy rambling
4) Procrastination potential

Hmmm... if I changed number 3 to 'Prosy pontification', they'd basically all be alliterative. See, to show I'm not totally a geek, I'm not actually going to change that. I'm just going to point it out at length, which come to think of it, probably makes me even more of a geek. Or just a dickhead, anyway. But I can live with that!

But check these pretty pictures/word clouds out!

From Flyboy, words most used in Picture of Dorian Gray

And because I have no interesting writing of my own to try this with, that ethics essay about pigeons I posted here last year:

Try it out yourselves, y'all! Wordle

Katey, you know you always wanted to test how large a part of your language really is 'fuck'...
Current Mood:

busy
Current Music: The Wall - Johnny Cash

February 10th, 2009

06:26 pm - Still the queen of the butterfly collectors
Right, the new year starts in February, right? No?

Oh yeah... January. Well, that was always a stupid month, especially when it spends all its time snowing and being fucking -10 degrees Celsius (yes, I can give that in Fahrenheit, but I'm not going too - if the water is freezing, there should be a bloody negative in front of the number, to express the general level of freakish coldness. It's only sensible).

So, what news do I have? Well, nothing much of note, or at least, none that I'm bothered to put in this journal, which is much better used to occasionally inundate - or at least gently sprinkle - you with silly links. But in honour of the stimulus package coming through and meaning that my lab actually will have money again - our grant finally got the green light it's been waiting for since I started last August! - I think y'all need to see a few cute/silly pictures of frogs.

That's right, frogs. By the time I graduate, you will all LOVE them. Don't worry, that'll be years and years away though...

First off, the cute: Adorable New Frogs on Crack!

Well, not crack. They're just from Colombia... so more likely, it's the awesome coffee that gets them like that. Colombia coffee rocks my pink dinosaur socks (I really have a pair, and yes... they are just as brilliant as they sound).

Secondly, the just plain silly. I have to give the title of the article in the link: Killer Meat-Eating Frogs Terrorise San Francisco

These guys are the ones I work on! Bet you never thought I spent my day with carnivorous killer beasties, did you? Well... I don't - those Californian types are just wimpy weenies, I'm telling you. In any case, I finally have something to thank Fox news for, I guess - they make my beasties sound exciting and dangerous! Even though they lack both teeth and tongues, and to be frank, any sort of useful arms.

Yay, there we go! Tune in next time, for, (if you're really lucky) exciting videos of frog sex!
Current Mood:

chipper
Current Music: Allegro no troppo e molto maestoso - Tchaikovsky

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December 8th, 2008

07:56 pm - Let it never be said that romance is dead.
Usually one update a month, or at least a fortnight is more than enough to satisfy me, but my trusty google mail random news story generator just threw something at me that I can't help but share again today. Admittedly, it can't aspire to the heights of two of my fellow countrymen battling with hedgehogs, but please don't hold that against it!

Click here to read about passion that is 4 Real.

( Cut for spoilers? )

Anyway, in less vicariously and cruelly amusing news, I've been adding to my music collection again - I periodically go through periods of guilt over the discrepancy between my music collection and my CD collection, and took Black Friday shopping deals on Amazon to help rectify the situation. Also, at a concert at the Bowery Ballroom last night (featuring Love Is All, a Swedish group we'd seen before who are the most hilarious fun live, although thus far are failing to translate that into sounding decent on a record) I found a new band to amuse me!

Crystal Stilts, who were opening, holler from Brooklyn (as do all self-respecting Indie-kid bands these days, let's face it) and have managed to hit on a strategy that, when you think about it, is amazing just for the fact that no one else has figure it out in the last twenty years. Said strategy being combining the Smiths and Joy Division (imagine a collaboration between Ian Curtis and Johnny Marr). And I know this description makes me sound like I'm dismissing them - actually, only if you don't know me, probably - but no, they're just derivative and bouncy enough for me!

(Let me know if you're interested, and I shall send some in your direction.)

EDIT: Flyboy found a review of Crystal Stilts that I feel obliged to include as it a) namechecks obscure 80s bands from my hometown and b) namechecks so many obscure bands that it more than proves its worth as a cred-hungry hipster review designed to make normal people feel uninformed and uncool. Yay, New York!
Current Mood:

bouncy
Current Music: Spiral Transit - Crystal Stilts

09:57 am - A wasted life is bitter spent.
It's been so long since I've lemminged onto a meme, I thought I might try this review of the year for once. Particularly since - as I was surprised to find out when I tried it yesterday - I actually only missed one month out entirely this year! That's pretty good for me. Anyway, my greatest apologies to the month of March. You shall be on my list of New Year's resolutions! Maybe at the expense of July. I've never really been much of a fan of July.

Oh, and please pardon the title of this entry, that looks kinda like it's trying to be intelligent, up there. It's not me, it's Richard Ashcroft - and the song popped into my head as I went to think of lyrics. Dammit.

And thus, here we go:

JANUARY:

Watch me near-mindlessly borrow the habit of titling entries with lyrics, just because I can, and because original thought is overrated. That being the case, this particular line seemed to fit pretty damn well.

( The rest of it. )

I'm sure that was just as exciting for you as it was for me (i.e. not particularly). In fact, having got to work before 10am in the first time in a while (shhh, it's NYC!), I should really go and do some work. I did originally plan to do it as soon as I'd printed a one page document, but am confounded (or abetted?) by our odd lab printer that takes about half an hour to warm up after the weekend. Still waiting on that one...

...alright, I know. I'm going! I like work, really!

...but...
..yup. Going.

..no really...
Right.
Current Mood:

guilty
Current Music: In This Twilight - Nine Inch Nails

December 5th, 2008

11:18 am - They slither while they pass, they slip away
Well.
Last night I was vaguely thinking about a short update to catalogue some of crazy idiocy of my new roommate - not the annoying things, but rather a small part of the very large list of things she apparently just does not know. It's kind of hilarious, actually, although somewhat painful if you're American, I imagine.

But this morning, something bigger turned up, although not nearly as amusing. Flyboy sent me this link half an hour ago, which has an obituary for H. M.. That might not mean anything to you guys, at least excepting Laura, my fellow ex psych student, but still... that's what this is for, right?

( Sciencey... beware )

It's hard to dissociate the science that I've been reading about so long away from the actual feeling breathing human who died.. and I'm not really the best person at doing that anyway, but. By all accounts that I've ever read, he was a nice, funny, pleasant and smart person, which is all the more amazing given the sentence he had to live with (poked by neuroscientists constantly! The horror!). No, I mean... being out of time, out of context, disconnected from all of your experience because it's always new and never continuous sounds just about as horrific as I can imagine. And to end up alone at the end of your life...

...actually, I suppose that we've all got a chance of that one. If your grandparents ever had to go into a retirement home, and you visited them there, you know how isolated most of the people in those places are. But if you were still waking up every morning thinking that you were 21, living with your parents back in your childhood home... I imagine that that probably has to be worse. Being a cheerful, well-mannered, engaging person is all the more amazing then, I reckon.

I feel like it's someone I knew who's gone - not very well at all, but still someone I knew. Sort of like he was one of one of the Professors who taught me about neuroscience - there are certainly a lot of us out here who are glad that he was willing to share his tragedy to help the rest of us understand more.
Current Mood:

thoughtful
Current Music: Nowhere Man - The Beatles

November 13th, 2008

11:36 am - Get your hands off my tail, you'll make it dirty.
Huh... so IJ will let me post today... that's nice, from the point of view of maintaining my current record of nearly three weeks of pretty constant procrastination. (A lot of it has actually been doing assignments on matlab for my computational neuroscience course, but that's so pointless and soul destroying that it might as well have been procrastination anyway).

So, in the news:

In the midst of a global financial crisis, caused in large part by unwise, some might say idiotic, trading on the part of the various financial markets, New Zealanders have decided on mass to elect a former investment banker with no political experience. We're geniuses, yes. But oh well... since the US decided to be sensible (yay!), some lucky sod of a country has to take on the role of global village idiot.

Also, I wasted a lot of time the other day reading up on the All Blacks' current tour of the UK and Ireland, particularly sports journos in Ireland bagging on us because we're so good (can't blame them, the way I go on and on and on about every tiny loss the Aussie cricket team has), before coming to the conclusion that I really need to go home soon. I miss it, despite the idiocy! Only a month till I leave for Christmas, at least... it'll be about time ( a year and a half since i've seen my dad!).

In the New York news:

This morning we captured and disposed of our very first NYC house mouse! (I swear they're a different breed of smart little buggers). When I say we, I mean myself and cool American roommate, who lived in Kyrgzstan for two years with mice in her bed and doesn't start screaming at the thought of them. The other two roommates.. well, you can imagine, I think. "We need to do something! This means we're dirty! We have to kill it!" ...wander back into her room without taking any action (including doing her dishes that have been sitting on the oven, where the mouse was getting in, for two days) then coming out and screaming again because she imagined it was in her bed.

Anyway... sensible roommate found some awesome humane traps that are like little boxes on seesaws that close as the mouse goes to get food at the end of the box, which have the great advantage of actually working. (I have no issue with spring traps, because to be honest, the quickest least painful death you can give a mouse is to break its neck, but I've never heard of one actually working in this city. They can lick the food off the plate without ever setting them off, the damn smart wee bastards. And glue traps are horrible and inhumane). Amazingly enough, this morning one was closed and full of mouse, and we set off down the road to release it into Riverside Park among the bushes. Bye bye, Lucie! (He was so tiny and scrawny, it was sad...)

Yes, I named my pest mouse. This shouldn't surprise anyone after the cognitive mice. I even name the mathematical models of neurons I make for computational class, which is arguably even more insane, so... yes.

So off goes our furry bescraggled little companion. I give him maybe a day before he's eaten by a red-tailed hawk, a rat, or maybe even a squirrel (you never know in New York), but who knows? Maybe if he's brave, he'll make it into the basement of one of the fancy buildings down by 115th and freak out some other excitable girls!

If you ever have a mouse in your house, please remember:
1) Don't shriek, panic, or otherwise freak out - odds are, all you saw was the mouse running away from you anyway. He's gone, he's more scared than you are, and SCREAMING DOES NOT SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM. Sit down and think about it for a second and let your roommates ear drums not die while they think about what to do.
2) Bait any trap you use with peanut butter. Seriously, there is nothing they like better, except maybe froot loops mixed with peanut butter. But don't expect any trap you set to work, because house mice are pretty amazing with what they can do. Try the little box humane ones, they seem to work best.
3) Be prepared to take the trap out... whether it's killed the mouse or especially if it's a humane one, you then have to DEAL WITH IT. Mice can't live for more than about 12 hours without water, or about 24-48 without food, so if you have an issue with killing them (instead of leaving them for the hawks), you'll have to check the trap very regularly and go and release the little guys. Don't use glue traps. Technically you can release the mouse, but would you like to be stuck in glue for hours panicking and dehydrating? It's just not nice.
4) Especially if you live in New York, get used to the idea of mice, especially in the fall when it gets cold. Odds are you'll have one at one point or many. If you don't like the thought of that, move.

Alright, that feels better off my chest! I seriously doubt anyone here needs this advice, but it will stop me bitching out the two more... excitable... roommates, so that's probably a good thing. And don't forget about the peanut butter!
Current Mood:

accomplished
Current Music: Lies - The Black Keys

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November 4th, 2008

11:10 am - Every member of Parliament trips on glue
Happy Election Day, everyone!!

I am weirdly massively excited today, I have to say. It feels a little bit like Christmas Day, with all the anticipation and festive holiday cheer. (I live in Harlem... so yeah. Actually, the whole of Manhattan, the whole of the city is excited. But it's particularly obvious up here). It's either that or the fact that I left my apartment at 8am to go vote with Flyboy - or at least to watch him vote, because I wanted to see the crazy punchy machines - and there was no one really around on the streets at that point, kind of like Christmas morning. I don't really get to see that very often, as I tend to be a lazy shit.

Anyway, it's pretty damn exciting. It'll be pretty fucking soul-destroying tomorrow morning if the election doesn't go the way that fivethirtyeight.com has been assuring me it will for the last month, but here's fingers crossed!

While I'm thinking about it, let me offer my condolences up into the ether for Obama, as his grandmother passed away last night, and he wasn't able to be with her. That's fucking hard, even when you're prepared for it to happen, and it's worse when you're thousands of miles away.

Onto happier things.... I VOTED this morning, people!

No, not in your election - the stupid constitution doesn't let me have a say in this country that I'm stuck in for at least the next four years. As my (English) post-doc in my last lab pointed out last week, what happened to "No Taxation Without Representation", Americans? Huh?

Okay, so the State Department is paying for me to be here, but whatever. The Founding Fathers would still have been disgusted, I'm sure. :D

Anyway, I voted in New Zealand's election, (big day, the 8th, but I wanted to pretend I was enfranchised over here) which will affect the country over the next three years while I'm not living there. A little bass-ackwards, but hey, ours is more exciting anyway! No, not more important for the future of anything, but our elections tend to be full of way cooler stuff. Some examples:
1) Transexual ex-prostitute MPs
2) Atheists in government! (Oh my! They don't even have to pretend to believe...)
3) Politicians whose major campaign promise is to run down the main street of the city naked if they lose (he did... and he did)
4) Leaders debates where people shout at each other and accuse the other of having tantrums on prime time TV
5) MPs whose entire faces are covered in tattoos
6) Non-voting Christian fundamentalist groups trying to buy the election
...okay, so the US kind of has 6) - but can you can compete with any of the others? I think not! Although on the other hand, Palin is ridiculous enough to balance out at least four of them, so maybe I won't crow just yet.

It might take over a month to find out the results of the NZ election, given that overseas voting has a large impact for us (we don't just throw out absentee ballots unless we decide we really need them) and the multi-party system where no one has a clear majority means it can (and this time probably will) take weeks to figure out a coalition deal to put one group or other in power, but my part is over!

Here's hoping tonight's will be clear before midnight!!!
Current Music: Talk Show Host - Radiohead

October 8th, 2008

01:26 pm - I've seen the light, and it's green and glowy...
I've just come back from a champagne lunch in my current department toasting the newest Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry (he's a prof in the department, we're not just random science fanboys and girls, I promise.. although that would also have been fun)!

It is really not every day that you get to do that. Even here. And it makes me squee! Yay, biology!

Here is the press release, on the high probability that you won't have been woken up this morning by your boss e-mailing you to celebrate, like I was.

Basically, these three guys between them managed to go from the fact that some crazy species of jellyfish glow green to finding the protein that glows and engineering it so that it (and relatives that are yellow or red or blue or orange) can be put into any cell or tissue of any species that you want. We have some frogs that glow green downstairs, actually.

This is one of the most important scientific discoveries that has happened in the last twenty years, actually. I'm not even kidding - glow-in-the-dark cells have almost unlimited uses for biological science and beyond. Already they're critical for bunches of drug and disease research, and the age is just starting.

Which brings me to the point that Chalfie (our Prize winner of the day at Columbia) and everyone else has been making an effort to point out today:

Basic Science - stuff you do because you're interested in figuring out how things work, not with any applied or therapeutic goal in mind - is fucking important, and needs to be supported. People mucking round with fluorescent jellyfish because they think it's sort of cool can provide the most important tools to get the results that everyone wants (curing diseases, for example) - often far more significant results for progress than someone who sets out to 'cure cancer' or similar.

That's obviously not always true, but this sort of thing does happen surprisingly often - basic science gives us the tools and the insights that we need to do applied science. Unfortunately, the funding situation in just about every country in the world doesn't recognise that at the moment. If you can't link your research to this disease or that... you may as well close down your lab immediately. You won't get funded.

Follow the glowy green fluorescent road to a more scientifically interesting (and productive) future!
Current Music: Scarlet Ribbon - Roisin Murphy

September 13th, 2008

04:45 pm - But no one's in your head, cause you're too smart to remember
Random pet hate of mine, apropos of nothing much today, although I was really reminded of it a week or so ago:

Using 'my' in group conversation when you really ought to be using 'our'.

For example, and probably why I'm still particularly sensitive to it, my sister used to have a really annoying habit, when the two of us were talking to someone else, of referring to things like 'my cousin, blah blah'. Dude! I'm here too, and yes, they are also my cousins! Would it kill you to notice other people in your conversation and adjust your context accordingly?

It also turns up a lot in Jane Austen novels (e.g. Lizzie and Jane talking, and Lizzie abruptly says something about 'I must go see my mother.'). That makes me wonder if it wasn't once upon a time the appropriate grammatical construction or something, but I still don't care. Recognise the shared relationship, people - it doesn't take that much effort, and it makes you look so much less self-centered!

I would try to link this into some bigger picture - perhaps of fundamental respect for others, or something - but really it just annoys me for no rational reason. Like a picture that's hung crookedly, which no matter what people might mutter about OCD, is insanely annoying and requires fixing.

Just in case you were still retaining delusions of my basic rationality, I also can't handle listening to crystal, glass, or really anything else for that matter, ring, by the way. That's acquired family superstition (it drowns sailors), but really, I've been drilled so much about it that it makes me seriously uncomfortable if it happens, especially if it doesn't stop quickly. People who play music on half-filled wine glasses need to be dragged out and shot.
Current Mood:

aggravated
Current Music: There There - Radiohead

August 19th, 2008

11:24 am - I'm in ur mind, reading ur thoughtz.
Gleeeeeee! Olympics glee!

Nick Willis just won the bronze medal in the men's 1500m! That goes along with a bronze last night in the men's triathlon too, for Bevan Docherty, but that doesn't fill me with as much glee (although still quite a lot). We're good at Triathlon, and we know it (gold and silver in Atlanta), we have a team in there in the race to help him out.

1500m, on the other hand... we have this amazing history in middle-distance running, but we haven't made a final in 20 years, and a medal in like 30. I think everyone would have been pretty amazed if Willis had come in 5th or so, given the way that other countries dominate the sport now. But no! Bronze! Glee! (Skinny white men can still win medals at running! It's amazing!)

Too bad about the fucked up way that NBC delays every fucking thing till primetime the next day, I won't be able to see it - but hopefully there'll be a video up somewhere after tonight.

Anyway, no one reading this but me should really care about that, but never mind. It makes me happy. And something else that has made me happy this morning, as I avoid going to be my new lab for the second day in a row (I keep falling dead asleep at 9.30am, after getting up normally), was reading some articles about oxytocin and social recognition in humans - this is the stuff I'm soon going to be studying in mice - and finding this:

It should be noted that the RMET tests a specific facet of mind-reading, that is, inference of the internal state from subtle affective facial expressions rather than mind-reading in general.

Riiiigggghtt.... glad we sorted that out. The greater mysteries of telepathy remain unstudied.... they're just waiting for us!

(No wonder the majority of neuroscientists don't take these results seriously.)
Current Mood:

happy

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August 16th, 2008

10:15 am - Good on ya, mate.
Update: at last, my bitching wins something!! NZ is actually being cool about what we managed last night!

So the medal tally went from 0-0-0 when I went to sleep to 1-1-2 now (gold and two bronzes in the rowing, silver in the men's track cycling), which is honestly pretty fucking awesome. Our rowing twins defended their title from Athens, and our world champion single sculler, who's been puking his guts out all week and had to be carried from the medical tent to receive his medal managed to pull out a bronze, which in a lot of ways is the most amazing achievement of all.

But the best part is: NZ has actually realised it, for once!!!!

Check out this: NZ actually being positive about sport!

Of course, the article still starts off bitching about the All Blacks. Baby steps, kiwis, baby steps.

Also: How bloody amazing was the mens 100m Butterfly? We ended up not going out last night because we had to watch it, and then watch it again, and then cheer like crazy. Phelps is the Freaking Man. Or Manfish!

Edit: Ooohohoooooooh! We just won the women's shot put too! More golden girls! Man, I thought that was a silver for sure, but... yay Valerie Vili!
Current Mood:

bouncy

August 15th, 2008

10:14 am - Oh say does that star-spangled banner still wave?
Some random Olympics thoughts:

* For some reason, while (Indoor) Volleyball has been one of my favourite sports to watch at the games (incidentally, I'm kinda in love with Kim Glass from America. She looks like Storm with dark hair), Beach Volleyball is insanely boring. Try as I might, I just can't really get excited by it. All the stuff that makes volleyball exciting, like the quick rallies, the strategic hits, the massive jumps just isn't really there. Meh, beach volleyball.

* I'm finding it really easy to support the American team, weirdly enough. Reasons i'm considering for this: Every gold they win in the pool means one that Australia doesn't; Phelps is a Fish. A Fish of Awesome; watching the US basketball teams reminds me of watching the All Blacks - they have the same level of physical and athletic dominance and just sheer presence on the court (let's hope they don't make like the ABs at the world cup); Nastia Lukin makes me happy. Usually while gymnastics is amazing, they make me wince every time they try to 'dance', because it's so mechanical and awful. She actually looks elegant and aesthetically pleasing when performing. It's nice.

* Also on reasons, Olympics are painful times to be a kiwi (and I'm really glad I'm out of the country). Not because we don't have any medals yet, because that's really not surprising, and in any case all our best chances are yet to come (Super Saturday, tomorrow), but because we take it all so seriously, not to mention pessimistically. Every other fucking news story you'll see is 'kiwi [insert sport here] disappointing'. Moss Burmester became our best swimmer in 12 years, making 4th, and the headline? 'Burmester fades to fourth'. Fuck you, NZ.

My own favourite, rowing, is coming up for finals tomorrow, and is definitely our best chance. Sadly, of our five world champ/favourite crews, only three have made it through to finals, and none were looking convincing in the semis. Hopefully they can still pull something out, because they're absolutely capable of winning, and I like to think they deserve it, but the crashes in the semis were sad. Some guys I knew from high school missed out in the four because although they had the 5th fastest time, they were 4th in their semi. That sucked.

Anyway, we also have some good chances tomorrow in cycling, discus, maybe even 800m (although that last one isn't too likely). It could either be Super Saturday, or, as the kiwi journos have taken to calling it 'sinister saturday'. Yeah, we're really witty.

So it's not really whether we win or not that bothers me, it's just the whole general attitude that NZ brings to everything. Yeah, it's cool when we punch above our weight on the world stage, and we generally do, to some extent. But that doesn't mean it's the end of the world if we don't live up to our expectations (except in rugby, where they're actually fairly justified). And we're so pessimistic about it all - for the hell of it this morning, I did a quiz on the kiwi news website: how many golds do you think NZ will get tomorrow? Options: 0-5. I picked two, as a middle of the road estimate, to see what the results were...

...and far and away the majority of kiwis are saying: 0. So positive, we are.

Anyway, I'll wrap up bitching about NZ's habit of bitching about everything (it's the official way to be meta-patriotic in Kiwiland). Go Team USA!
Current Mood:

aggravated
Current Music: Women's Volleyball - USA/ChinaS

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August 4th, 2008

11:07 am - You've made my shitlist.
Two posts in two days? What the hell is going on here, huh?

Well, yesterday I tried to keep from ranting too hard about stupid people. I did, really. And then today, what do we find in the NY Times headlines, but this.

In case you can't see get to the link for whatever reason, and so I can let loose some capslock rage, some FUCKING ARSEHOLES firebombed the homes of two scientists at UC Santa Cruz. Tried to murder them and their families because they do animal research.

Obviously this shit is evil and terrorist, so I don't even feel the need to rant about it. It does make me a little nervous, of course - we actually had a bunch of people passing out Save the Chimps fliers in my building as I was coming into work today, and we've had some incidents of crazies wandering around asking for my boss and muttering about animal torture, but at least no one's been violent. It's scary though.

What I will say, as relates to the fucking arseholes that think it's okay to bomb family homes and try to kill children because they claim it will save animals, relates to where they get their funding. A lot of organisations like PETA claim that they have nothing to do with the extremists, and yet that is in fact where the money and information (for example, scientists' home addresses) the terrorists use is coming from. So I would say that even if you don't agree with me about the need for animal research, please don't give support to groups that fund and defend people who think that attempted murder is an acceptable way to air their ethical views.

And while I'm on the subject of PETA and their hypocrisy, check this site out. Yes, I'm a horrible person and deserve to die because I sacrifice some lab animals, but you guys? Yeah, you're clearly trying to help all those fluffy darling creatures.
Current Mood:

irritated

August 3rd, 2008

06:25 pm - These are the days of miracle and wonder
You ever catch yourself wondering about what one might (in potentially biased, and certainly inflamatory fashion) call Wilfully Stupid People? Not just your everyday dumb moment people, because let's face it, we all have our moments of that, or even people who have those moments with rather more frequency than average, but the sort of people that can and do go on really believing something in the face of all evidence, sometimes even at the same time as apparently accepting pieces of said evidence in the course of their day to day life?

I'm thinking mostly of crazies (yes, it's my blog, and I'm not going to be tactful about other people's opinions) like Flat Earthers, Creationists, and just to give the fundamentalist Christians a break... umm... oh yeah, people who think vaccines cause autism. You fucks. I want to stab you most of all, for all sorts of reasons. But that's not quite the point I'm going for here, so I'll try not to diverge into rants about my own opinions and how they are backed up by the awesome wonderfulness that is Science. In fact, my point today is just about completely the opposite.

So.... when wondering about these people, perhaps especially Flat Earthers, who pretty much need to hold two contradicting belief systems in their head, you sometimes start to wonder how you can believe two things at once. After all, we're rational, right? We know that there's no possible way that horoscopes work - that the position of the stars when you're born affects your future and your personality? The logical conclusion is that people born in the same month are much more likely to have similar personalities than people born in, say, March and September, and I think most people can agree that that's a) untrue and b) blatantly ridiculous. And yet, on the other hand, we all (even me, sometimes!) check out what the horoscopes say about us, and like to say things like 'yeah, I do this or that because I'm such a Virgo/Pisces/Scorpio/credulous fuckwit'. Oh yes, we are very rational. Orwell was onto something with doublethink, except that you really don't need a totalitarian freaky government to get people to do it.

Of course, who in this post-modern life actually believes in human rationality? I haven't for a long long time (of course, being raised by a clinical psychologist kind of helps with busting that myth, pretty quickly), and I'm really very fond of irrationality, as far as it goes. For the most part, anyway (people who think that vaccines are going to damage them still need to get the diseases they would have protected themselves against), especially when it doesn't do any harm, like probably the majority of everyday human irrationality. No one's going to be worse off if I decide to keep making lists because of my awesome Virgoness, after all. But it is a strange thing, this innate human ability for doublethink.

Upon which we get to the original point of this post, which is where I relate a short story from yesterday about how weird and silly my brain can be. Kind of a waste of all this ranting, but never mind.

So I'm currently running 20 mice through a radial arm maze test, where once a day, every day for ten days, every mouse gets to run through a maze with eight arms until it has found and eaten four little pieces of fruit loop. They suck at this, incidentally... but as of today (day 6), I'm starting to have hopes that they're improving, even my dear little Matt Murdock, the Mouse With Obscene Amounts of Fear. I do name my test subjects, yes. It... um... helps to remember them and tell them apart? (It actually does, but as we know, that would be too rational, and so isn't really why I do it). It's a fun way, generally, to spend a day in a dark room (we test them under red light, so they're awake) cleaning up mouse shit.

Science is glamorous, I know.

Anyway,the point is that yesterday, I spent about six hours testing my mice, and writing down the date for each mouse I tested on its little scorecard. 2 AUG 08, approximately 14 times before 4pm. And yet, AT THE SAME TIME, up until a rather confused series of phone messages with Hot Turkish Classmate (not to be confused with Hot Turkish Roommate, although it is difficult, as all turkish girls seem to be freaking gorgeous), I fully believe that it was the 4th of August. I was going to a concert, and then my friend from NZ was arriving late that night. Somewhere along the line about a month ago, I'd decided that the 4th was a Saturday, and thus this first Saturday in August had to be the 4th.

Not that it's weird to get dates mixed up, or anything. I do it all the time - but generally not when I'm writing the correct date down over and over again about once every twenty minutes. Apparently I'd set up one stream of thought for processing all that stuff about what I was going to be doing and where I needed to be after work, and a completely separate one for mindlessly working through lab stuff. Never the twain shall meet...

...alright, so it's not quite insisting that dinosaurs are just god's way of tricking scientists into disbelieving the true faith, or anything. But it really is mental, and, I like to think (in good ol' reductionist scientific mode), an interesting simplified model system version of doublethink, occurring right in my very own brain. And now I want to figure out a way of studying it.
Current Mood:

confused
Current Music: Blue Monday - New Order

July 4th, 2008

11:33 am - She pledges her allegiance to the United States of Me...
Huh... so funnily enough, I don't actually have an American icon with which to celebrate Independence day (except for the one about the cat and the President, which I think I might just spare for the moment). New York will have to do! Clearly the only worthwhile part of America, or so the Professors up at the medical centre tell me.

Insert recap of interview with Columbia Professor, back in February 07:

Me: [Jet-lagged and somewhat out of it, trying to make conversation after being grilled about how my marks were too good to believer, therefore my University must suck] That's a really nice view over the river that you have in your office...
Professor: [Insert decent Noo Yawk Joo accent, for full effect] The view? Nah, that's Jersey. Only bad thing about living in Manhattan? You have to look at Jersey. Only good thing about living in Jersey? You get to look at Manhattan.

( Take me off to the ballgame... )

Yup... I feel pretty faux-patriotic after that, I really do.

Yay, America!