|
Friday, February 27, 2009 42 Really Is the Answer to Everything Just got back from this. Happy, yet tired. Also managed to get one of the last tickets for the Friday show before it sold out (bwahahaha!). I'll blab more on Saturday. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 12:14 AM : Thursday, February 26, 2009 A Meme Booking Through Thursday: Collectibles * Hardcover? Or paperback? * Illustrations? Or just text? * First editions? Or you don’t care? * Signed by the author? Or not? In general, I do not care about the book format. I'm more of a series completist rather than someone who views books as objects to be possessed. In other words, I'm more interested in the story, not the container it's in. So if I manage to find a copy in a used bookstore and it's not in the greatest condition, I'd still get it--because I want it for the story. On author signings: I've never personally gotten anything signed by a writer. I think it's cool (depending on which author it is), but I'm not sure I could tolerate standing in line and then given a signature like just another consumerist. Book signings are just another promotional tool to get people to buy more books. It's not like most authors really give a damn about their readers. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:23 AM : Wednesday, February 25, 2009 Digital Manipulation I've recently discovered a graphics editor called Inkscape and lately have been fiddling around with it. So far, I've found it fairly easy and intuitive to use--I might even use it to make my poster for this year's ASM general meeting*. Although I do wonder if the apparent ease is really just me being accustomed to how most programs work. Because I definitely recall my first encounter with Photoshop. And it was not a Happy Time. Spending late nights at a computer lab attempting to manipulate yearbook pictures so that all the seniors appeared like streakers** crouching amidst some strategically placed bushes was definitely not high on my list for being artistically creative. *If anyone else is also there, I'll be presenting on Thursday morning. Drop by and say hi. And I'd love to blather to you about my research. Also apologies in advance for those of you who might be expecting something else--I promise it won't have anything to do with naked college students. **They were the ones who asked to be photoshopped. Not me. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:22 AM : Tuesday, February 24, 2009 Convert to the Church of Attenborough Approximately two weeks ago, I mentioned to an undergrad* in casual conversation that I had started watching David Attenborough's 1975 documentary series The Tribal Eye** since I am a total Attenborough fangirl. I half expected to be ignored (fangirls are always ignored) or at least brushed off for having kooky tastes. But this week, the undergrad tells me out of the blue, "I have a mancrush on David Attenborough!!!!!" Without sarcasm. Apparently, he has started working his way through the entire Life series and is totally in love with Attenborough's narration. Some might say that I've created a monster. But I think this is just evidence that my tastes (in documentaries at least) do not completely suck. *No, he was not one of the undergrads who did this. **Which I'm still in the middle of. I might do a write-up once I finish the entire series. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:39 AM : Monday, February 23, 2009 Plate Pouring Should Be An Olympic Sport Urg. I spent most of my weekend making agar plates. Two thousand of them, to be precise*. I could have spent the time being productive on something more interesting (or being completely lazy) if it had not been for some undergrads who had managed to mess up plate pouring earlier in the week**. I guess I'm more annoyed with myself than with them--I'm totally not the type to micromanage, even when perhaps micromanaging is called for. Teaching how to do a protocol is one thing--I demonstrate first with verbal explanations, then I watch once or twice while the student performs the procedure to make sure that they're doing it right. But otherwise, I usually have a kazillion and one other things to do, so I'm absent when people pay insufficient attention to the labels of chemicals*** and when things become fast and sloppy--thus sacrificing quality for quantity (which in the end, more time and materials are required to redo it). A former post-doc had taped a quote on one of the fridges which says something to the effect that if you don't have the time to do it right the first time, you don't have time to do it again. I wish more people would read that and brand it on their foreheads. *And at least two thousand more to go, all before the Big Crazy Experiment planned smack dab in the middle of Spring Break! Cows wait for no one... **For a lot of people, making agar plates is the laboratory equivalent to boiling an egg. How the hell can they mess it up? One might ask. Well, you can mess it up plenty. ***Which judging from some stories I've heard about evacuations of the chemistry building, can be quite dangerous. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 6:35 AM : Sunday, February 22, 2009 Linky Dink The Sleeping Bear. (via Bifurcated Rivets) It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase sleeping with the Color in Nature: Seahorse. Ooo, wacky colored ones. WebUrbanist has a bunch of funky things. I especially like the posts on abandonments, like a recent one on windmills. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 8:44 AM : Saturday, February 21, 2009 Droppin' Like Flies I don't particularly think of people who go into science as being squeamish. Just go to a couple of seminars given by researchers working on infectious disease. There's almost always a bit of unholy glee when certain clinical pictures come up. On Friday morning, a research associate and I were training some students on a protocol for processing bovine blood samples. Non-trivial amounts of blood were involved (and it is a non-trivial exercise getting the blood from an animal that could mow you down in a heartbeat--if it was smart enough), but I didn't think too much about it because, really, it's just tubes of red stuff. But before we could even get to step two, three-fourths of the students staggered out of the lab on the verge of fainting (the remaining student was too hyped up on coffee to notice anything). You'd think that they had stumbled onto the movie set of some splatterpunk gorefest rather than some fairly routine laboratory procedure. I dislike looking at gross stuff as much as the next person, but this, I'm not quite understanding. It's easy to depersonalize (or in this case, debovinize*) because the blood isn't gushing out of some living thing--it's in a tube. Or maybe this is just me--I can think of it in the abstract and treat it as nothing special in the large scheme of things--just another component in the big picture experiment. Other people, it's more like: Arg! Blood! Cue smelling salts. *If this isn't already a word yet, I call dibs! [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 9:45 AM : Friday, February 20, 2009 From Yesterday Booking Through Thursday: Storage. How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on? I would like to organize my books by author, but at the moment, the order of all my books are a mess. Non-fiction is mixed in with the fiction. The only sort of order they might be in--and my memory is a little foggy on this--is the order in which I obtained the books. I have also been trying to keep all my unread books in the same location so I could have a reading list, in all its cluttery 3D glory. Last night, when I was eating dinner, I heard my neighbor upstairs start up the vacuum cleaner. This wasn't particularly unusual until the whir of the vacuum was interrupted with a rrrrack-ck-ck-ck-ck-rrrrack-ck-ck-ck-ck as if a disgruntled housewife had taken a chainsaw to the kitchen floor. What the heck? I also attended a seminar yesterday. It was supposed to be part of a series put out by my department. But I knew I had dropped into Never Never Land when the seminar speaker said early in her talk, "As you all know from plant physiology courses you've taken...." What?! I managed to hide my expression of intense bewilderment in the guise of frowning while taking copious notes--no need to alert the nice plant professor seated nearby that I had the urge to run flailing and screaming from the room rather than hear about phloems and xylems. Well, let's just say I found it all as enlightening as being lectured on the amino acid synthesis pathways. And as a microbiologist, maybe I'm rather biased, but I was utterly disappointed that while nitrogen fixation was a major topic, there was no mention (not even a hint!) of the bacteria involved. Is it a bad thing to say that there are some areas of science that I don't find especially scintillating? Must I be enthusiastic all the time? There's a reason why I study one thing and not something else. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:14 AM : Thursday, February 19, 2009 Lovecraft on Happy Pills Sometimes I wonder if my tastes are too mainstream, that if something finally has come to my attention and I find that I like it, it's probably jumped the shark. Well, there's nothing wrong with liking mainstream stuff although if you just look around online, it seems as if a lot of things are described, at best, as pedestrian. But then when you mention this stuff to people in Real Life, they don't have any idea what you're talking about. Example: steampunk. This aesthetic movement was written up in mainstream media like the New York Times not too long ago, but when I mention this to people--it's all new to them. Lovecraft is another of those things which people in Real Life don't have any clue about. "Come on, you must have at least heard about Cthulhu!" Blank stares. This makes me feel too geeky to be interacting with normal people, yet not geeky enough for the hardcore crowd. It sucks to be in the middle--a dilettante, a dabbler. No respect as an expert and no excuse as an ignorant. It's with this viewpoint that I watched the first three episodes in the anime series xxxHolic: Kei. I really liked the first series of xxxHolic--deliciously creepy and silly self-contained episodes about addictions, obsessions, compulsions, and their consequences all illustrated in a twiggy, serpentine style. This is all as a casual viewer. I'm sure that stuff was lost in the translation, references to other anime flew over my head, explanations in the manga ignored, and cultural subtleties were as transparent as mud. Despite my obtuseness, I do realize that none of this stands completely alone. While Kei may very well be enjoyed by itself, I think the viewer would better appreciate it with the first series already under his belt. In the three episode arc ("Spiderweb", "Left Eye", "Half"), two of the main characters get caught up in the consequences of grudges and a Hammurabi-esque notion of justice. But is it really about the ones bearing grudges who have a worse view of things than the ones who did the damage, or something else entirely? The theme that really intrigued me was that of sacrifice. What does it mean for the person who sacrifices? More importantly, what does it mean for the person who is sacrificed for? Although it might seem noble at first glance, will a sacrifice in the long run be worthless? Overall, I thought this was a really good start to the second series. It was more character oriented rather than horror--I can only compare my reaction after watching the episodes to when I finish reading "The Gift of the Magi", bittersweet but fitting. That said, I'm still mulling over the bizarro Alice in Wonderland sequence. I could ascribe meaning to it. Or should I brush it off as just another silly interlude? [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:22 AM : Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Mine's Eclectic Well, I finally got around to updating my blogroll (not to be confused with the bookroll, which will be updated as soon as I finish a book). It more accurately reflects my online reading habits--but other than my own edification and cross-linkage, what purpose does it serve anyway? I'm more likely to pay attention to a blog's commenters. Sometimes I look at other people's blogrolls, but they're pretty much impossible to interpret. Does the blogger actually read these blogs or are they just there for reciprocal linking? I'm reminded of the recommendation systems at book sites where you find a book and some algorithm comes up with a bunch of other "similar" books that you might also like. It would be awesome if the blogroll also contained sites that the reader might find worthwhile to read. But so far, I've found this to be hit-or-miss. Occasionally, I find interesting blogs this way. And other times, I reach a site that I can't click away fast enough. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:22 AM : Tuesday, February 17, 2009 Old People Appropriate Social Networking, News At Eleven Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies. (via Fimoculous) I'm not on any social networking sites and I do not consider myself cool. Or hot for that matter. I'm a distinct shade of temperaturelessness. At any rate, I'm very easy to find by Google. If you're trying to reach me--yet you cannot bother to find my e-mail address by one single Google search--let me save you the trouble by saying that I'm not worth finding anyway. I can see the appeal of something like Twitter. It's just like blogging except with limited characters. One of the reasons I'm not doing that is due to time. I don't have time to twiddle on the keys, spouting out inanities whenever it strikes me (not that I already do it here, albeit on a more occasional scale). The main purpose of a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace is to connect with people--which has nothing to do with why I'm clogging up the interwebs with my blather. I write because I want to write. I will continue to write even if I had no audience. Connecting with other people or other people connecting to me just happens to be an interesting side effect, definitely not something I actively strive for. Besides, I don't see the point in me signing up for this kind of thing. As I've mentioned above, Google is already a pretty good tool in tracking me down. I can sort of see someone who has no other internet presence using Facebook, but it kind of seems too much if an individual has a Facebook on top of a website, a blog, and any number of other online doohickeys. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:59 AM : Monday, February 16, 2009 But Isn't That Overkill? On my way home from lab, I counted at least five police cruisers within one block. Maybe I've just discovered the ultimate in speed traps. The road is part of a short cut to the south side of town for anyone wanting to avoid the traffic lights. And people are heading back into town from a three-day weekend. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 4:21 PM : Saturday, February 14, 2009 Random Robot Linkage Pretty Robots. They would be so cool if they were flying wind-up toys. Recycled Robots (via Drawn!) Hm, old and unused lab equipment could make some interesting fodder for an art project... [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 9:26 AM : Friday, February 13, 2009 Let's Pretend It's Yesterday Booking Through Thursday: Authors Talking. Do you read any author’s blogs? If so, are you looking for information on their next project? On the author personally? Something else? I read authors' blogs sporadically--mostly to find out about their latest work. Sometimes I'm interested in what they have to say about the writing process or other kinds of issues related to publishing. Sometimes it's other issues in general. I gloss over personal posts, though. I'm not interested in what they had for breakfast, what their kids did over the weekend, or how they felt when the bagger at the local grocery looked at them strangely. One thing I wished authors' blogs talked more about is books they've read that didn't work for them. Books that have failed expectations. Boring books. Books that they hate with a passion. I'm really curious as to what they feel would be a failure of craft. Yes, I know this might result in catfights and boycotts by rabid fans and, well, making enemies of other authors isn't exactly something to aspire to. I'm not thinking about bashing--more like critical analysis. But I doubt most authors have any inclination to do this since some people might view this as shooting their own reputation in the head. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 5:41 AM : Thursday, February 12, 2009 This Year It's "Catching-Up-On-Sleep" Day The Tide of Pink and Flowery. I mentally groan whenever someone asks the question, "What do women want?" It's like asking, "What's the weather like?" with no point of reference. It could be sunny, raining, or as unbearable as a Plutonian winter. As to what I want--well, no one gives a damn anyway. And I couldn't care less. I like the attitude of expecting the worst and being pleasantly surprised if anything goes the other direction. I suppose there's a lot to rant about V-Day: how it's too commercialized, how it sets up unrealistic expectations and makes single people feel bad, how it engenders the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses attitude (my bouquet is bigger than yours!), how the whole thing is as ridiculous as a kid getting his sweetheart a teddy bear big enough to hold a dead body in, blah blah blah. But frankly, I'm too uninterested to rehash all this stuff. When resentful people start raving about Valentine's (i.e. whining about their lack of love life), my eyes glaze over. Sometimes I tell depressed singles, "Hey, I'm single, too!", just to let them know that they aren't abnormal in their lifestyle, that they're not the single outcast freak in the sea of coupledom. But these depressed singles look at me as if I've lost my marbles. Anyone who knows me understands that my personality is such that I have a tendency--even a preference--to go off and do my own thing. Yet most just don't comprehend why. Then again, I don't understand why some people are bitterly unhappy if they aren't attached to someone. For instance, I had to listen to another grad student in lab complain all of last semester that she didn't have a boyfriend. This was both uncomfortable and weird. It was like being forced to watch a televangelist when all you really wanted to do was to chill out with a James Bond marathon. A lot of people would be happier if they viewed this hoopla with amused apathy. It's like Lent for non-Catholics. Smile and nod your head whenever you come across a fanatical participant. The rest of the time, treat the day like any other. Besides, why worry about that when today is Darwin Day! (Thanks, Google, for reminding me with your funky logos.) I think I'll celebrate by making some "primordial" soup for dinner. I've got some chicken stock handy... [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 8:03 AM : Wednesday, February 11, 2009 Not Much Into Junk The Trough of No Value (via Boing Boing) explores "the time in an object's life-cycle between when it's valuable because it's new, and when it's valuable because it's old and collectible -- the long period in between when it's worthless." And I'm thinking, Antiques Roadshow. I'm not sure it's even worth it to keep around anything which has no utility except for its monetary value. If you're not going to sell it, it's not going to make your life appreciably better. Objects, for me, generally come in two classes: useful and useless. These days*, I've internalized a minimalist and utilitarian aesthetic in my daily life which includes not buying anything which I consider useless. I'm not much of a hoarder--excessive clutter drives me nuts. And if I needed to move tomorrow, well, that would be one less thing to worry about. True, I sometimes do accumulate piles of stuff, but this stuff is 100% books. I don't have knick-knacks or posters adorning walls. No random shiny things reside in my living space to give it a homey atmosphere**. Of course, I'll make an exception if the object in question happens to be a lava lamp. *I used to collect things when I was younger, but I currently have no plans for augmenting those collections. **I've moved around too much in my life to call any particular place "home". My current residence? Also transient. It seems a little presumptuous to call a place home (or even decorate it as such) if I'm not planning on staying there permanently. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:31 AM : Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Brie Lobotomized Last weekend, I discovered spreadable brie at the local supermarket. I really like brie. And if it's spreadable, that only means I could put it on anything I wanted. Easily win-win, I thought. I was wrong. I expected Igor Stravinsky and ended up with John Denver. What freakin' gives? The resulting cheese product is spreadable all right, but it's quite bland and tasteless. It's the kind of thing that would be perfect for a football party held in a McMansion populated by aspirants who want all the frou-frou trappings of yuppie beatniks except without all the existential angst. I'm no foodie, but I'm beginning to appreciate that the rind of good brie is the part that gives the cheese individuality. Without it, there's no tang, no coy sharpness, no wit. The spreadable brie had no rind, thus no character. It's not even a cheese anymore, let alone brie. So grocery clerks, take note: spreadable brie should be shelved with the processed guacamole and year-old salsa. Definitely not any place close to the dairy section. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:44 AM : Monday, February 09, 2009 Mumbling into the Chalkboard The Lecture System in Teaching Science is an essay pointing out the uselessness of lectures and the advantages for learning in discussion. Discussion works out fairly well in graduate level courses, but I have mixed feelings about the undergraduate courses. I don't think abolishing all lectures would be the answer--I learn in part by taking notes. Especially in chalkboard/whiteboard lectures, there's something about the process of hearing, seeing, translating the material in my mind, and then writing it which helps lodge the information into my head. I can tell you, though, what sort of lectures I despise--the PowerPoint lecture. PowerPoint works okay for a seminar where the speaker's aim is to give the high points and the take home message. But a lecture where every slide is going to count in the final exam? No. Not even if the slides are copied for all the students. PowerPoint condones laziness on all sides: the professor drops a bunch of figures onto the slide with a click of a mouse and babbles the info he already knows without much forethought about how the audience is going to absorb the information; the students treat the slides as an extension of their textbook (which 90% of them won't read anyway) and don't bother to take notes because, look!, the prof isn't writing anything down himself. I coped with such lectures by semi-transcribing the speech. I didn't even bother looking at the pictures since I already knew I could scrounge out a copy somewhere. The idea that a student reads material before class and then participates in a discussion to actually learn has merit. But I really don't think this would work on huge groups as mentioned in the essay. Ten students, max. Because if most students are like me, only the loud mouths, know-it-alls, and teacher's pets will be doing any discussing. Discussion is virtually impossible in settings where there are too many people to fit around a table. Instead, it's more like a two- or three-way ping-pong match with lots of observers. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:56 AM : Sunday, February 08, 2009 Heavenly Silver When it comes to driving, I consider myself the practical sort. I go from point A to point B without much mind about all that stuff in between. It's not that I zone out while I'm driving--of course I pay attention to the traffic--but I don't contemplate much on the scenery. It's like reading a book. Once you're reading, how much attention is really paid to the typeface, the paper quality, the formatting of the text? Not much--unless it causes considerable eyestrain. But sometimes the scenery is beautiful for its own sake. The example that immediately comes to mind is the Lewiston grade on Highway 95, heading south. You're winding down among the steep landforms and if you keep your foot off the gas pedal (which you should), you'd feel like you're flying into a tiny, hidden valley. Going up the grade is another matter. Most of the time, you're just concentrating on keeping a constant speed as your vehicle climbs. And you're also keeping half an eye on the extreme traffic--either you're a semi going 20 mph or a smaller four-wheeler flying out of there like a bat out of hell. But earlier today, in the late afternoon, the scenery really startled me. So much so that I fancied that I had briefly driven through an alternate dimension. I was at a point in the grade where the mountains jutted out like fingers. And these fingers were a frame for a teal sky and a frighteningly large moon with the texture of a gray horse's hide. It was as outrageous as a 60s sci-fi set. The landscape in words might sound like a mundane one. But for some reason, that moment in time, nature on the other side of the windshield struck me as weird and awesome. Or maybe I've spent too much time in lab and too little time looking up at the sky. At least I didn't mistake the moon as a UFO. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 9:52 PM : Saturday, February 07, 2009 Cilantro Therapy Sometimes, like today, I wish I was a bit more vocal about things which really annoy me. Take, for instance, the post office. What the heck is up with only handling certain things from Monday to Friday? Why can't you also do it on Saturday when you're also open? I'm one of those people who feels guilty when I'm not in lab during the "usual hours". (I also feel guilty when I'm not in lab during the unusual hours, but for obvious reasons, a little less so.) I don't want to have my work disrupted because of some bureaucratic thing--although I know some people who'd use this excuse to take off the entire day. Thus when I reserve Saturday to get real life stuff done and find myself thwarted, I'm more irate than pissed. I've heard that some people do retail therapy when they're upset. Spending money and buying things doesn't make me particularly happy (especially when you consider the bills), so I'm leaning toward stress-free culinary havoc. Cilantro, meet knife. Mmmm. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 1:44 PM : Tuesday, February 03, 2009 A Brief Thought If there are fans of an author, they praise the author and say, "I'll read anything by them, even if it's a grocery list!" Yet, when the author tries something different, the fans get angry because the new work is not like the old work. Damn, grocery lists are unmarketable. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 8:24 AM : Links in Brief The "I Can Read Movies" Series. Oh man, these are awesome. I really like the Highlander one. Superuseless Superpowers. How about a photographic memory that only lasts for a minute? Remember this? I overheard a student ask another who was present at the incident what exactly happened and she replied, "I thought it was funny!" I don't know--if someone took enough offense that some sort of public apology was required, then it must not be very funny after all. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 7:47 AM : Monday, February 02, 2009 Lunch Time Paranoia I don't often go to the Commons to get lunch, but I was there this afternoon, eating a taco salad and surfing on the internet. I think I was either reading Metafilter or looking at LOLcats when I heard someone nearby say loudly, "There's a PhD grad student with a laptop here and she's surfing on the internet." Surreptitiously, I looked around, but saw no one recognizable. I was sitting up against a corner so I knew no one had snuck up behind me or to my left. Were my ears deceiving me or was there someone out there I don't know who recognized me? And why the accusatory tone about surfing? I was on my lunch break, for goodness sake. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 5:36 PM : Sunday, February 01, 2009 Why Must Other People Apologize? I just checked my e-mail and there's a notice from the university president about bad behavior at a recent basketball game. Apparently, some fans made derogatory remarks about the opposing team, specifically one player. I don't follow sports, so I have absolutely no idea about the particulars, but what struck me was that it was the university president who made the apology to the other university president. I find this resolution of events to be unfair, unjust, and unsatisfying. Sure, the university president represents the whole of the university community and when something goes wrong--even if the wrong is perpetrated by someone else--he takes the blame. I can sort of understand this reasoning if, say, the university president spearheaded some initiative that ended up failing miserably. But some other individuals? No--the individuals who made the derogatory remarks should be the ones disciplined and made to apologize to the player. If the university president is doing all the groveling instead, the individuals who actually did the wrong wouldn't feel that they have any deterrent from behaving badly again. Aside: There are the practical matters to consider, of course. It's quite possible that among all the shouting in the heat of the game, no one except those who said the derogatory remarks knew who said what. Or that if people do know, they are quite reluctant to name names. After all, whistle blowers get unjustly stigmatized even though they are doing the ethically correct thing. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 10:43 PM : |
