By the numbers

• Actual temperature: 101 degrees F
• Humidity: 80%
• Heat Index: 40 degrees too high
• Thermostat set at: 78 degrees F
• Actual temperature in house: 82 degrees F at 10am
• Temperature in attic: ~79 degrees at 10am
• Number of holes discovered in AC ducts in attic: ~34
• Water pressure in the AA household: -2psi (yes, that's a negative value)
• Hours estimated until water pressure is restored: 4-6 (which translates to >8)
• Hours since anyone's last shower: >24
• Persons staying in AA household during the day: 4 (DangerDog, Thing1&2, Mom)
  
• Minutes spent bitching about heat and lack of H2O before leaving house today: 43
  
• Miles to work: 2.5
• Time to work: 12 minutes by bike, 30 minutes by foot
• Amount of H2O required to rehydrate upon arriving at work: >1L for consumption and ~4 gallons for shower
  

Terrific/Terrifying

I have a post-doc interview!

Yipppeeeeee!

*gulp*

Non-linear regression

Here's the problem with having several distinct but related manuscripts on the go at once - when writing the discussion for one manuscript you keep thinking about how it relates to the cool findings of the second manuscript and suddenly your discussion takes a hard left and ends up in the second manuscript's jurisdiction.

Le sigh.

Oh well, cut, copy, paste into discussion of second manuscript. Continue train of thought. Realize several paragraphs later that you have now tied this discussion into the cool new findings of the first manuscript. Which would be fine if anyone else were aware of those cool new findings. But they're not. Because you haven't published the first manuscript yet. Why not? Because you're still writing it.

Damnit! These things need to be published back to back in the same freaking journal so I can cross reference them myself.

?????

How did Fred Thompson's PAC get ahold of my email address?

Do they think that I am at all likely to give them money?

Why? How could they arrive at such an erroneous conclusion?

And why doesn't the "unsubscribe from this mailing" button work?

AA's true identity revealed!!

In case any of you were wondering what the name was about:

Get Your Cyborg Name

An Open Letter

Dear Natural Selection,

I am writing to personally thank you for a development in human anatomy that I am particularly grateful for today: the nasal septum. When did you come up with this little bit of cartilaginous genius? Was it a just a hop, skip, and a leap once you'd settled on bilateral symmetry? Well, I suppose it must seem kind of like old hat to you so many eons later, but I just wanted to let you know that I still appreciate it.

Of course, I could do without the bugs that are holding their own bacterial Glastonbury Festival in my sinuses. They are partying at all hours and making quite a mess. Could you kindly direct me to whomever invented "glamping"? Because I've got some other words for that fellow. These bacteria are getting faaaaaaarrrrrr too comfortable in there.

But at least I can breathe out of one of my nostrils. It was a really good idea for us to have two of them. Thanks for that.

Hugs,
AA

Milking It

It appears that the graduate school from which I am hopefully soon to be leaving has increased the "graduation fee" to $200 for the upcoming year.

WTF!?!?!?!?

You mean I have to PAY you assclowns to get out of here!?!? WHAT!?!? It wasn't enough that you screwed me over on benefits, skimmed off illegitimate taxes for four years that you swear I'll get back (I'll believe it when I cash this mysterious check you keep alluding to), and generally underpaid the annual cost of living then renigged on our stipend increase "because of the economy" this year...after all that, I have to pay YOU to finally throw off the yoke!?!? All the students who have come before me have done the same??? How did I not know about this before?

The increase in the fee takes effect in the upcoming academic year, so if I want to knock $50 off of that slap in the face I need to defend by August. I wish, but it ain't happenin' folks. And what's with all this "increase is due to the ever rising cost of the graduation process (ceremony, regalia, diploma, yadda, yadda yadda...)"? What if I don't go? Can I not go? Can you not charge me for the one-day rental of a $200 folding chair, which my ass will not be occupying at the most boringest event of the century?

If I do go, does this mean that you're paying for my robe with velvet sleeves? And I'll get to keep it? Because that's the only motivation for me to attend the bleeding ceremony. I want a fucking Harry Potter robe, but I can't afford to fork over several hundred bucks for it - somehow I kind of doubt that you're putting my $200 (not optional) fee towards buying me a sweet robe. I kind of think you're going to tell me to pay for that myself. If that's the case then spare me the "rising cost of regalia" bullshit.

No, seriously, who goes to the ceremony? We all move on to our post-docs at random post-defense times of the year and most don't come back to march around to "Pomp and Circumstance". We did that for our high school graduations. Some of us did for college too. At this point, most of us are over-educated and over the fucking parade of people in stupid-looking hats as well. (You can keep the stupid-looking hats. But I do want the robes. Even if I never wear them in public again, I will prance around my house post-shower with nothing underneath on a weekly basis. Shut up. I'll have earned the right to be eccentric just like the rest of the Ph.D.'s in the world.)

Seriously, I don't know any Ph.D. students who go to the bloody ceremony. The defense is it folks. Send the diploma in the mail. Hell, you can email it to me and I will print it out at home to save the expense of the super-duper expensive paper that is apparently a part of the scam. That'll save you at least $0.42 postage.

The lab will buy me a cake and maybe some drinks after my defense (which will in no way coincide with an arbitrary date for this over-priced hoedown next June) and it will not come to $200. The only people who go to the friggin' ceremony are med students, and I don't see why $200 (which amounts to 12.5% of my monthly income I should point out - churches don't even tithe that much) of my barely-squeaking-by living expenses should subsidize their party. Especially since I apparently don't get any choice in the matter whether I attend the ceremony or not, or whether I show up in the Harry Potter robes or in the nude.

Bloodsucking leeches!

Cause and Effect

I have had it up to here with other people's bad attitudes. I am your colleague, not your subordinate. I am intelligent, not an idiot. I treat you with respect rather than derision. Why? Because 1) you're human, 2) you do an important job that makes mine easier, and I appreciate it, and 3) because I'm a professional and that's what professionals do. You are also a professional, so afford me the same fucking courtesy.

There is really no excuse for treating your colleagues as if they are half-wits. Unless it is because you have been on the receiving end of that shit for the last two weeks. Yep, I just snapped at one of my labmates (who had nothing to do with the other shining example of humanity who's been patronizing my ass), for no good reason. I feel bad about it. It's not a good excuse. I'm going to go apologize to my poor bewildered labmate and then go eat some chocolate. Then maybe I'll go to the gym and take out my aggression on the pool instead of on my coworkers.

Things Fall Apart

It's been an eventful morning. I was waiting for the wash to finish so I could chuck it in the drier before I left for the lab (nobody likes to come home to a load of wet and stinking clothes), when DangerDog came in from the other room acting really funny and agitated. You know, like when Lassie comes dashing back to the farm and starts spinning in circles and barking until someone goes, "What's that girl? Timmy's fallen into the well!?!?"? Yeah, like that. So I get up to see what's the matter and find that there is a medium-sized stream running through the back of the house. The washing machine is leaking ridiculous amounts of water all over the damn place. It has flooded the kitchen and is now pouring onto the hardwood floor in the dining room.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Many towels and curses later I had it all mopped up. Waited for our most excellent handyman to arrive, take it apart, decide there's nothing wrong with it and restart it again. No issues. Huh. Oh well. I just hope the load of now very wet towels I left running while I dashed into work doesn't have the same problem. Fingers crossed.

Iz In Yer Labratree, Krankin Out Sum Paperz

After much mulling yesterday, I've decided to take a crack at the short communication option for my cool new little finding. Since I'm still waiting for the critters to repeat the experiment, I spent the last couple of hours writing up a rough a draft of the manuscript, as a sort of thought experiment to see how it might turn out. Will I have enough to be convincing? Can this finding stand on its own two feet?

Hellz yeah! I love these 3000-words-or-less "papers"!

I still need to add figure legends, and the results section will obviously need to be modified as the follow-up experiments are finished (which can only give a binary answer so the discussion is easy to write in the meantime), but either way the conclusions are going to be interesting. Obviously, there's still some work to be done, but I just wrote the paper in half a day.

I am a science machine.

Am I putting the cart before the horse by getting the bones of this thing on paper before I have all the results? No. I think not. The results are what they are, I just need replicates and two short follow-ups which can be performed on the same samples that comprise my replicate set. Four figure limit!! This is the perfect format for this finding.

Now if only the ManuBeast could borrow some momentum....

Mine! (AA needs a nap)

I am burned out. It's only Monday. I have a ton of things going on and moving forward and the data are looking pretty darn good. But dang. I'm tired!

I took Sunday off completely. First day of not coming in to the lab AT ALL in a very long time. It felt really good. Got my head back in a good space, planted some corn and sunflowers in the garden, took the dog out for a bike ride, spent some quality time hanging out with BH, and really truly relaxed. It was awesome.

It really did my brain some good. So much so that I came in today totally energized to bust out some hot data and also had some time to think through a couple of potential papers that I might be able to get out be the end of the summer. I feel like I've been so busy getting stuff done that I haven't really had time to think for a while. The beast of a manuscript is so close to finished that I can almost taste it. I need one more rep to get it all in order (assuming that rep actually works - trust my luck to have a reagent go bad now). Fuck, this thing has taken FOR.EV.ER. to finish. I feel like once that one's done I'll have knocked down a wall or something and the next ones will roll out a little more smoothly. I feel like they already are. It took years to get the data for the ManuBeast, and months to work out an outline and get the fucking ducks (ducking fucks?) in line. While I'm trying to get that one wrapped up in a nice little bow, I've got visions for two more, and the experimental design is working itself out in my sleep. Geez, why couldn't I have had this kind of mojo with the first one? I am a science machine.

I've been turning over some thoughts on a neat little result that I got a couple days ago. I think it could really change the thinking in my sub-sub-field if my hypothesis pans out. I haven't told GrAdvisor about it yet because the data looked pretty shitty thanks to some equipment failure. But I know what I saw, and it won't be hard to repeat. No sense mentioning it to him until I can back it up with some evidence. So I'm waiting for some more critters and then I'll have at it again. In the meantime, I'm trying to decide whether to roll it into my current ManuBeast, which will no doubt increase the impact of that story, but will delay submission. If this thing sits on my hard-drive for much longer I will self-destruct. It needs to go, and I don't want to wait for another piece of data that will require a refocusing of the Beast.

The second option is to write it up as a stand-alone paper. It's certainly significant enough, and though it's related to the ManuBeast, I'm not sure it belongs in the same story. Also, the finding is important and (I think) somewhat paradigm-shifting in our little corner of science, but I don't know that there's much that I want to/have time to say about it other than "hey look guys, we were wrong about this one thing all along...and now we can start thinking about all those other things differently". I am hesitant to get too excited about this because what the hell do I know, but if I'm right I really think that this could take the blinders off of how we think about this whole system and lead to some cool new stuff.

However, I don't have the time here to see all that through. I gotta graduate. I'd really kind of like to throw this out as a short communication in a fairly visible journal and just get on with things. Someone else can then pick it up and run with it and cite the hell out of it.

There is maybe a third option. I'm considering an in-lab collaboration. Potential In-Lab Collaborator (PILC) has some nice data on other stuff in the same system, and I think that our results complement each other nicely and support an interesting paradigm-shifting hypothesis. We've kind of talked around the relationship between our findings and I'm thinking about maybe rolling them into a co-authored paper. Maybe still just a communication, maybe something a little more substantial.

Not sure though. My hesitations are thus:

• PILC has nice data, but doesn't really know what to make of them. So I'm not sure how cool this paper really would be. Then again, I'm not much better off with my own data at the moment so who knows.
• PILC has insinuated that "maybe you want to keep yours for a first authorship"...I do want a first authorship out of this it's true, but I was envisioning an "equally contributing" first authorship if we roll these into one paper, and I think PILC is trying to tell me that PILC wants sole first author if we collaborate.
• PILC feels the need to get this paper out quickly, even into a mid-tier journal since someone else has the same reagents in hand and is likely observing the same phenomena. (But PILC won't be ready to submit for several weeks, so I've got time to get some good-looking data that could be combined with PILC's.)
• PILC is very opinionated, but lacking a foundation in our sub-field. Sometimes PILC embarrasses PILC's self by throwing out hare-brained hypotheses and conclusions, just because PILC has not taken the time to educate PILC's self in the fundamentals of our field. If we were to co-author a paper together, I can keep it to a minimum in this manuscript...but do I really want to hitch my star to someone else's name that might gain a reputation for crazy? Or worse, sloppy? On the other hand, PILC is moving on soon and won't be sticking around this little corner of science, so do I really need to worry about PILC's reputation down the line? I think probably not.

I'm leaning toward broaching the collaboration thing again once I've got some more data in hand. Perhaps PILC has not considered the equally contributing authorship yet, but I'm not handing over the golden egg for a second author position. I need that first authorship. PILC doesn't. PILC wasn't planning on writing this up at all. PILC has more data in hand currently, but it's all from the same experiment -I don't think that more raw information necessarily means greater contribution if it all ends up in a single figure. Especially not if I'm the one doing all the intellectual heavy lifting.

I really hate all the possessive territorial bullshit that I'm feeling over this right now. It makes me feel greedy and mean and bitchy and cranky. I know I have to play the game. I don't have to like it though. This is probably why I feel so tired.

I did it! {UPDATED}

Post-doc applications have just left the relative safety of my hard-drive and made their way out into the ether. It is both a relief and an utter terror to have them out there.

I am imaging them as little fledgling carrier pigeons sent out into a storm. I am nervous for them. I hope they find their targets, deliver their message, and work their magic.

Please join me in wishing them luck because I am as superstitious as the next scientist. I really hope at least one comes back with good news.

{UPDATE}: Have an informal meeting scheduled for next month - w00t!

Better Late Than Never

I've been neglecting the blogosphere for the last few days. You probably know all about this by now, but on the very slim chance that you don't read any other blogs on my blogroll, I'll tell you about it anyway.

During my absence a couple of very visible bloggers have initiated a campaign against sexual violence, particularly in Liberia. A bunch more very visible bloggers have jumped on the wagon, and are donating this month's proceeds from their blogs to Doctors Without Borders. It's a worthy cause. I don't make any money off of this blog, so I encourage you to click over to those other sites I've linked to and read all about it there. Every click means $$ for supporting victims of sexual violence.

I understand that if you normally access posts from those bloggers via Google Reader/RSS feed, that doesn't count as a click and it doesn't generate any revenue to be passed on to DWB. So please access those blogs via your web browser, or via links provided here/elsewhere. Those count.

What else can you do? Write to your reps and/or the UN. Both Isis and Sheril have the links for finding the relevant people, so click through to theirs to find them and generate a little donation in so doing. Thanks.