Seriously...

...I couldn't make this stuff up. Ok, I could, but I'm not.

When I said Boston had a collective IQ of ~75 I thought I was just making shit up.

Turns out no. Yesterday the bomb squad cordoned off a city block to blow up a traffic counter.

As one reddit commentator put it:

drosser 49 points 16 hours ago
I feel a new slogan coming on - "Boston! Because the Big Dig didn't exhaustively prove how fucking stupid we are!"

I want that on a t-shirt. Other great quotes from the reddit and fark comment threads:

david 2 points 3 hours ago
Just brilliant.
For decades, terrorists have known to conceal explosives in familiar objects that don't look out of place. Like parked cars and vans.
Glad to see Boston PD is still ready for an imminent change of tactics.

"Dear Boston,

No one wants to blow you up. You are not a signifigant city to the international community.

Regards,
Everyone

The traffic dept. now owes Boston a million dollars and somebody is going to jail."

"I understand this completely. If I had explosives and could legally blow up shiat all over town, I would.

Hey! That mailbox! It's coming right at us!"

"They are fighting the "traffic counters" there so we don't have to fight them here."

The world is full of people.

I happen to know this for a fact. Let's take a look at a few of them.

Take E.Z. Million. No, that's not a joke, that's his real name. I'm not sure what to make of Elmer Zen Million. His website is awkward, but not totally embarassing (unless you're a Reddit commentator). His politics are kinda comically right-wing, but he doesn't appear to be espousing anything hateful. In general, he just seems like a fiscal conservative who's maybe a little too involved in OU football (and trust me, that is about as common as breathing down here).

Guy's like E.Z. give me a happy feeling. I'm happy because this guy clearly gets it much more than I do: Life is short, at least try to do something. And so here he is, trying. Million is doing the things that every good citizen knows ought to work. He's running for office, he's writing letters, hell, he's even started a website to try to get his message out there.

However, he's clearly out of his element in some of this. A guy like Million can't spend the time or acquire the expertise necessary to win one of the higher political positions. Considering the guy's age and his expertise, his website isn't an embarrassment (certainly better than 95% of what's on MySpace), but even he must realize that it is pretty antiquated.

My point is that the guy is unafraid of failure. EZ might not succeed, but it sure beats sitting around and not trying.

Myself? Oh, I'm mostly afraid. I'm too scared to put my name out there with my beliefs. A lot of times I'm too scared to really act on my beliefs myself. Why do you think this whole blog is written from anonymity? Why do I continue to do science?

I know lots of people who aren't afraid of being associated with their beliefs though. These are people who do things that aren't always 'normal'. Most people tend to view people who do 'weird' things as sorta crazy. E.Z.'s a perfect example of this. Check out the comments by this guy. He seems to be disbelieving that a guy with that name even exists, and that his attempt to actually do something is just comical.

I told some friends of mine about my buddy B. B bought a diesel car and then put in a system so that he could run the thing on veggie oil. There's a lot of risk involved in this kind of decision.
The diesel he bought was pretty old and had a lot of miles, so right off the bat there's a fair number of people who think that must mean it isn't a valuable asset. Then there's the reality of collecting veggie oil from businesses, and storing it and even filtering it. There's also a fairly difficult (to me anyway) process of actually installing the conversion kit.

There are, in summation, a million risky things about this. Many of my friends started in on the typical road of pointing out all the oddness in this kind of endeavor. Not everyone, and not necessarily all being negative either.

But the reality is that people can always come up with good reasons why not to do something. Somethings too risky or too expensive or too time consuming or too smelly or too likely to make the neighbors look at you funny.

It's kinda like getting a dog. Any rational person could look at the situation and realize there's never a good time to get a dog. I mean, dog's are expensive and they're messy and they need constant attention and that's just going to take time away from other things you should be doing.

These facts are always true.

But they are not what should go into decision making.

Sometimes, you just have to realize that what you want is not ridiculous, and that the little obstacles that you have to overcome in order to have the things you want are part of the joy of life.

I think the xkcd webcomic does a great job of making this point. Take a look at some of these comics: here, here, and most vehemently here. The guy who writes xkcd believes that we should let the familiar constrain us, and we shouldn't let the expectations of others constrain us. If we do that we're just going to end up unhappy.

I have another friend M. M builds stuff. He built a overhead rack to hang pots and pans from out of a ladder. He built some endtables out of stone and branches. He built a secret, James-Bond style trapdoor in his basement. The guy is a 2nd year hospital resident and he's built more useful stuff in the past year than I have in my entire life. Considering he works 80-100 hours a week, some people think he's a little weird for spending his 'free time' putting together secret doors in his house.

My friend K, who came down and stayed with us for a couple of days, is also one to just go do it. I have a fantastic picture of her after she jumped in a lake after a fishing trip. Everyone else (including me) was way too cool to do so, but damn it looked like fun.

E.Z. probably isn't going to get elected, but that doesn't change anything. The guy isn't afraid to try, and frankly, I find that kinda inspiring.

So many thoughts...

Reasons (true and false) that I haven't posted since Thursday:

1. I've run out of interesting things to say (False!)
2. Nothing much has been happening (False!)
3. The station was attacked by terrorists and I had to fight them off using nothing more than a Poison CD and a broken laptop (True...er...False!)
4. I got really really drunk on cheap beer, 70 degree weather and sunshine on Thursday (True!)
5. I spent all day Friday doing stuff (Kinda True!)

So what's been happening. Let's make another list!

1. My wife visited the doctor. She's pregnant. I know. I'm as shocked as anyone!

2. I'm learning how much I hate racists!

3. The TV show: Ok, let me give you a brief transcript of what I said...

"I work on gabbaba adaga agaha abifdai dDag DAPHNIA and how they inteatcate awiaath afdfda abjath GOLDEN ALGAE ana ana ana FISH."

So if you know me, you should be embarrassed. I did not do well. I'd like to think I could do the kind of thing that Steve Irwin did, but I'd need a lot of retakes.

A lot of retakes.

4. New experiments!! Finally!! I've been waiting for my daphnia to start kicking up the reproduction for a while now and they've finally responded.

5. We sold our house!! We managed to lose a ton of money doing it, but the house is totally sold. We celebrated by going out to eat four/five times this week and then I bought an exercise bike. My history with exercise bikes is not really pretty (I tend to ride them into the dust), but I spent a bit more on this one, so hopefully it will last longer than 6 months. My plan is to ride it while I play video games, which means it will get a lot of use.

6. I haven't figured out what to write here.

7. Check out this enormous sinkhole that opened up in a Guatemalan city. If you had shown me that picture and said "Is this real?" I would have laughed at you. I'm amazed this can even happen. Seriously, what in the hell are you supposed to do when this happens? Considering there appears to be a river of sewage running underneath there, I'm pretty sure you're not going to be able to just fill it in with dirt (I'm not even sure you could find enough dirt!!). I'm pretty sure that if this had happened in New York the entire U.S. would be paralyzed with fear and Congress would authorize the use of military force to "prevent future sinkholes."
If this sinkhole opened up in Boston nobody would notice for three weeks and then the bomb squad would be called out. Then they'd arrest the employees at the sewage treatment plant for "misplacement of sewage."
Seriously. I really don't like Boston anymore.

8. Becoming the GOP Presidential candidate requires jumping through a certain number of hoops. For example, you have to hate homosexuals, atheists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, Washington insiders, liberals, black people, Asians, Indians (dots), Native Americans, poor people, hippies, everyone who was big in the 60s, war protestors, tofu, vegetarians, taxes, Muslims, Hispanics, single moms, people who have 'funny names, anyone on welfare, drug addicts (except for Rush Limbaugh), movie stars, movie producers, Hollywood, 'big government', rappers, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. Whew! That's a list.
One of those hoops is making fun of people with disabilities. For example, George W. Bush famously laughed about a death row inmate who was mentally handicapped on T.V. Now emerges a clip of Rudy Guiliani making fun of a person with Parkinson's disease. Oh man, he is so going to be our next president!

9. I play way too much Age of Mythology.

10. Here's the weird thing about living in southern oklahoma. The restaurant's are terrible. We've actually gone to Pizza Hut. Multiple times. And loved it. We went to a Dairy Queen tonight and I almost cried. Why?
People are so friendly. I mean, you forget about how crappy the food is when the waitresses or people behind the counter are just so nice. And we don't even know these people yet! I love it down here.
And on Thursday it was 70 degrees and slightly breezy, so everyone just ended up sitting around a picnic table from 4 - 7 that night drinking and eating homemade salsa and chutney and talking shit until the sun went down. I love it down here!

11. The wind. There are probably only two places in the world where you can feel truly insignificant. The ocean and the prairie. Today you could walk outside, look into the wind, and know that you didn't matter at all. The wind was pushing lengthwise along the lake and the waves were enormous. I'm not sure I've been in a boat on freshwater that could stay afloat on the lake as it was today. We saw a tree that had cracked in half because the top blew off. Apparently somewhere to the west of us they've had dry weather, because for about 4 hours we got so much dust that you couldn't see 200 feet in front of you. Dust bowl part deux.
You can't help but feel alive when there's that much energy in the air. I love it down here!

12. Oklahoma City is pretty cool.

Baby Update!

My wife made her scheduled appointment with the baby-delivering doctor (technical term). There can now be no doubt as to the reality that a child prodigy will be entering the world in the late-August, early-September time-table. The little guy/girl was, in the words of the doc: "Really squirmy." That's not really a problem now, I think the little guy/girl is the size of a peanut, but that's going to suck if he keeps it up once he gets a little bigger. I think we're going to have to cut back on sugar and caffeine in our diet.

Oh, and the first question I asked my wife: Just one heartbeat, right? The answer is yes, and it is a strong one.

Still to early to get an idea of the sex. I'll have to keep using the slash pronouns for now.

UPDATE:
A pic from the sono! Somebody who presumably knows something about babies said that this is a picture of our child.
As far as I can tell that is just two little blobs, still kinda exciting.Oh, and that date at the bottom is the new 'due date' projection. Please let our child be born in August!

The TV show

Well, I haven't really mentioned this to too many people, but today a TV crew is coming down to document my research. The research funding is organized by the state of OK, and so is the TV program.

This isn't really all that nerve-wracking, as my part in this production is probably going to be very minimal. However, I'm a little nervous about what I'm going to have to say.

Basically, I have spoken to the producer for 5 minutes. 4 minutes of that 'conversation' was the prof I'm working with talking, and the rest was me asking questions. Useful.

Anyway, I'm off to get things set up for this little show and tell.

Editing

I don’t know why everyone thinks scientific manuscripts need to all have the same ‘boring’ style. I mean, would it kill anyone to write papers that could potentially capture the interest of an audience beyond the limited circle of experts to which these papers are always addressed. Seriously...I’m totally sick that 90% of science papers sound ‘forced’ and the good ones sound aloof. Probably 1 out of ever 100 papers I read is ‘exciting’. What’s wrong with putting that voice in there?

And yes, if anyone’s read my papers you know that my papers sound aloof at best, and forced more often. This isn’t my fault. This is because everyone who edits my papers tells me things like “This sounds strange” or “Yuck!” or “Make more clear”. As far as I can tell these comments translate to: Write it like everybody else would.

Ok, sometimes it’s because I just suck, but let’s not ignore the point.

Every time I see someone write the phrase ‘make more clear’ I can’t help dying a little on the inside. Do people even know what the word ‘clear’ means? You can’t make something more clear, you can only make it clear!! And these are the people who think I’m not being clear.

And yes, a journal editor just told me her suggestion “Makes this more clear.” Even Microsoft word knows that’s just wrong.

And don’t get me started on the way people use the word ‘disconnect.’

So the world thing...

...isn't entirely bad. If I look to my right, I can see one of the most beautiful sunsets in modern history. Or at least in my recent history. The temperature is 73 degrees, the sky is clear, and a breeze is wafting through my apartment. That breeze carries the smell of fresh-made croûtons, a bison roast, and a loaf of homemade bread.

All together, pretty nice.

On the downside, Dustin's baby is suffering from a horrible addiction. I suggest you all take a read here, and try to make sure nothing like this ever happens to one of your loved ones.

In other news:

- Amazing list of articles from the internet that I'd recommend:
This one answers the question "If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?" But what this article really addresses is the mythical 5th taste: umami. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I heartily recommend you take a read. Just incredibly interesting.
This is just funny. The title was "What would you think of a professor who returned your test like this?".
This is a fascinating bit of internet lore that I might have already mentioned. Does anyone realize it is still September of 1993?

- My NBA All-Star weekend thoughts:
Dwight Howard = Robbed
Jason Kapono = Boring
The Rookie-Soph game = Uh...I forgot
The All-Star Game = Uh. The Taco Bell I had on my drive home during the game was pretty good.
The NBA in general = Does LeBron James have a personality? Has anyone confirmed this? If we're going to have to get through the next 5 years with D-Wade's "Quiet Mike" routine, we're going to need a little more than just Agent Zero.
Amare Stoudamire vs. Dwight Howard = Why don't more people talk about this? These two guys were virtually clones until Amare hurt his knee. Throw in Yao and we've got a Hakeem, David Robinson, Shaq kinda thing going (maybe Bynum can play Ewing?). That's pretty cool.

- Brownies from scratch. Mmm...

- Is anyone else sick of hearing about Britney Spears? I mean, great, she's got no hair...or dignity...or common sense...or moral compass...and I'm starting to think she's from Boston. Is there something like news here?

There are going to be days like this I suppose.

There are two truths in the world: 1) everyone wants to be happy and 2) everyone sees themselves as pretty amazing.

Oddly enough, this inevitably leads to religious wars, racism, bigotry, class warfare, poverty, and every kind of despicable behavior known to man.

Why? Because we aren’t actually as amazing as we think ourselves to be. Everyone believes, deep down, that he/she is a special person. This isn’t strictly true. Each of us is special, but we are special to those who know and appreciate us, not the greater population of mankind. Further, we all have different expectations for happiness. One person seeks money, another to go fishing, another to change the world, another to travel. When we are unable to achieve these goals, or when these goals are difficult to attain, we begin to perceive the world is against us. That someone or something is trying to prevent us from achieving the happiness that our special status deserves.

And so humans suffer from a kind of mass hysteria. Numerous political and social movements have used the perception that other people are to blame for your problems as a way of rallying broad support. This battlecry unites the strategies of George W. Bush, McCarthy, and Adolf Hitler.

It is the terrorists, the Chinese, the immigrants, the Communists, the Jews, the blacks, the Arabs. These are the source of your problems. Elect me and I will eliminate your problems by somehow eliminating these other people.

Today in America I see this. A perception by the middle class that their problems are caused by other people, by black people, by Mexican people, and by people who don’t share the same viewpoint as middle America.

This is, in a larger sense, the most ridiculous notion in the history of civilization. Middle-class America today exists because previous generations killed all the Native Americans, used slaves to build the early economy, instigated wars with neighboring states, forced their way into markets that had no interest in their services, and invented the most appalling ways of killing people known to man. And yet still the most powerful force ever in the history of the earth finds itself constantly afraid of wasting money on welfare or subsidizing research.

I see this perception that America is under constant cultural assault by other people all the time. For example, the Fox News Channel has made careers for guys like Bill O’Reilly because of paranoid non-threats such as the War on Christmas. 80% of Americans refer to themselves as Christian. Does this seem like a country in which a ‘War on Christmas’ should be taken seriously? Our entire economy gears itself around the holiday, every charity, every church, every academic activity takes Christmas as its fundamental dividing point. Yet some people seem to feel that using “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” signals some kind of immoral assault on the very basis of Christianity. This perception can only be considered irrational. Yet it persists.

Some groups might be forgiven if this blaming other people for their own problems seems rational (even thought it might not be): African Americans have been the subject of intense, state sponsored racism in this country as recently as 35 years ago, and an entire social movement has emerged advocating a return to values as they were when African Americans were enslaved. Understanding why blacks might think they are being persecuted isn’t hard: There is a lot of evidence that it is still occurring and there are a lot of people alive today who grew up in a culture where racial hatred was an institutionalized reality.

I don’t really recommend you spend much time thinking about this. There isn’t much anyone can do to prevent people from being ignorantly afraid. You can’t explain to someone that their pitifully narrow viewpoint is just that, when they don’t want to believe anything else. You can’t even explain that happiness isn’t the same for everyone.

I just spent all weekend and today thinking about this. I’m depressed, exhausted and increasingly angry. I don’t want my child coming into the world as it is. This is a world filled with hatred, racism and ignorance, and too many people are doing their best to keep it that way.

Some days I just don’t want to make the world a better place. Some days, the world doesn’t deserve it.

The Bio

Some interesting facts about my life you might not be aware of:

I was born in the Summer of 1978 to loving parents in Kansas. At the tender age of 2 I was abducted by international diamond smugglers who believed a strange birthmark signaled me as “The One” and who believed me to be filled with a ‘divine destiny.’ After 18 harrowing days for my parents, the smugglers returned me unharmed and surrendered themselves to the authorities. According to official documents, the smugglers had apparently believed my childhood babblings were the word of god and had spent most of the 18 days looking for crackers.

At age 8 I taught myself Latin.

In the Spring of 1988 I surprised my parents by cooking the family four course meals once a week for over 3 months. This ended when I realized mid-way through the construction of a pumpkin cheesecake that we had run out of nutmeg. I did not cook again for years.

During my freshman year of high school I volunteered to help out at the local food bank. After three weeks of moving boxes and stacking cans I invented a robot that would do all the work in 1/10^th the time, thus freeing up the busy staff to address other difficult issues. As my final donation to the food bank when I left town after my senior year I gave them the patent and all future proceeds from the design. To date this has netted over $150 million.

As a freshman at a small liberal arts college I discovered alcohol, new music, theater, and number theory. This combination of activities prompted me to write a newspaper column entitled “Number Creative” that was syndicated in over 200 newspapers and spawned a bestselling book.

During a summer break I once worked at a BBQ restaurant where I still hold the records for most tips in one night ($387.23), despite it being a Tuesday. On another occasion, in a competition between waiters that got out of hand, we collectively made more in tips than the restaurant made in sales.

My entry into graduate school is well-documented. Less well documented is that I once attended the London International School of Performing Arts and excelled for three months before realizing that I had been mistaken for another accepted student. Embarrassed, I have since turned down all opportunities to appear in Broadway productions.

Pretty standard stuff I guess.

Wheel of food.

Ok, so this is kinda funny. We've been trying to find good restaurants down here since we've moved. We were accustomed to eating out and having great food we didn't make on a regular basis. So far this search has not be particularly successful.

Enter, the Wheel of Food.

I think to myself: maybe this will show us some interesting places to try.

Check out what I got (you'll have to click on it to read it):



That's right "Skip lunch." Welcome to Texoma, where the restaurant options are so great you might as well skip lunch.

Oh man.

Reality check here

I can't stand seeing that 'response to a response' post on the top of the list anymore. I keep re-reading it and thinking to myself:

"The idiot who wrote this acts like he knows something."

That's simply not true, because I know the idiot who wrote that (me) and he doesn't know shit.

Dustin is, I'm perfectly willing to admit, way more experienced than I am when it comes to graduate school. He's interviewed at more, attended more, and has had more success.

I don't know why I keep acting like I know something.

Here's how I got into graduate school: I took the GRE, a school waived the application fee, and I got accepted into an environmental engineering program. I only applied to two other schools, and I didn't get invited into a lab in one of those. The other school I was accepted in decided to pull a punk-ass "commit now or we won't even consider you" move, and so I really had no other options. 3 months into the environmental engineering program I realized that the professor I had starting working with was: A) pushing me into geochemistry and B) batshit crazy. My options at that point were to try to get into a fantastic masters program where another friend of mine was at, or transfer to the biology department the same institution I was at. I transferred.

This was, I'm convinced, the only way I would have been let into the biology program I attended. Every year at grad recruitment weekend I would see the impressive credentials of the incoming graduate students and feel overwhelmingly embarrassed. I didn't stack up next to any of them in any way. Many of them already had masters degrees, or had worked as lab techs in impressive labs, or had spent multiple summers conducting research. I can still remember one of my advisors telling me I had an impressive resume when I talked to him about transferring. I can't believe he was so kind! Some of those former recruits who's credentials I'm referring to are no doubt reading this right now (K, J, A, D, S, B, JR, to name a few off the top of my head), and at one point I was told that I was now supposed to be an example for those same recruits. Ha! I just feel lucky those guys/gals think enough of me to collaborate on fantastic research.

So I'm hardly qualified to offer any legitimate opinion on how to get into graduate school. I came in the back door, didn't understand how the whole thing worked for my first year and a half, and had to ask the most embarrassing questions about almost everything (even the week of my defense).

I need to quit offering my thoughts on stuff and keep this blog to stuff that's entertaining.

Like making fun of Boston.

Stupid Boston.

Response to a Response

So Dustin thinks I’m a bitter and jaded in my representation of graduate school recruitment. That’s interesting, since I don’t think of myself as bitter and jaded. Am I? In 3 words: No, I’m realistic.

I’m not going to disagree with Dustin’s major points: A) grad school is a job and B) life isn’t perfect. I will add though, that graduates students are at sort of a weird interface between employment and education. A lot of the real research that gets done in science is done by graduate students. So they clearly have a lot of responsibility and high expectations are placed on them as a result. The job is research.

At the same time, most of society treats them like students. Graduate schools themselves play a little game of back and forth with this: Grad students are staff when convenient (they represent the college as staff by teaching classes) but they are students when convenient as well (most grad students don’t get the benefits staff do). There are usually minor or non-existent annual raises (sucks), but there are also very few codified vacation restrictions (awesome). A lot of people see graduate students as they do college students.

The people who put the most at risk by attending graduate school are the students themselves. Essentially these students are agreeing to do high-quality research and teach classes in exchange for receiving an academic degree and job training. The pay is extremely low (well below minimum wage at most institutions), the expectations are very high, and a student’s eventual success depends entirely upon how they are perceived by their advisor. Failure to succeed in graduate school is almost always seen as a result of some flaw in the graduate student, not in the advisor. A tenured professor with lots of previous success is essentially immune from criticism about how he/she treats graduate students, while graduate students are exceedingly vulnerable to a professor’s negative comments about them.

I think maybe the point I was trying to make is that graduate recruitment weekends are much better for profs and the school than they are for the recruits. Any grad student recruit would be infinitely better served by meeting with a lab or professor outside of recruitment weekend. I’m certainly not suggesting a better alternative would be to go off of what’s on paper without meeting a person.

Many of Dustin's criticisms are related to the 1st point I made regarding the honesty of professors.

“not all professors lie, just a small proportion,”

Lying is such a strong word, which is why I didn’t use it in my previous post. I said almost nothing they tell you is true, but I’m not connoting that they are intentionally being deceptive. At the start of a project (often when grad students are brought in) nobody knows how everything’s going to work out. I was told I wouldn’t have to teach classes for my first three years, I would be focused almost entirely on toxicity research, and that my advisor would be available for communication on a regular basis. I’m not suggesting these were lies, they weren’t. I honestly believe that’s how the advisor who talked to me at the time felt things would go. But it turned out that the toxicity wasn’t going to take off as quickly as I thought, the funding situation changed a little so that I had to teach, and my advisor had a different idea of what ‘regular’ communication meant. The professors during grad recruitment weekend prefer to tell you good and optimistic things about your potential role and deemphasize the negatives. That isn’t really the whole truth.

Let’s put it another way: If a professor tells you that he feels this project could generate big-time publications in journals on the Nature to Science level, you need to take that with a health dose of skepticism. After all, the research hasn’t been done and the one who will do the actual experiments (you potentially) isn’t even a part of the lab yet.

“If you go into an interview with a potential advisor assuming everything is a lie, that set's a precedence for the rest of your career with him/her.”

I would agree with this entirely. I would also add that it would be equally foolish to go into an interview with a potential advisor under the assumption that this person has your best interests at heart. That probably isn’t the case, especially at institutions with extremely competitive and ambitious professors. Dustin goes on to point this out in his next sentence:

“My advice is to go in positive, but beware of the rare selfish advisors and avoid them like the plague ( I too have past experience with a selfish/overbearing advisor, but clearly I have also had incredible advisors that haven't skewed my perception quite as bad).”

He and I have both had bad experiences with pretty selfish advisors.

“So, as intense and sometimes unfair as recruiting weekend is, I think it really simulates a real world environment and job interview.”

This doesn’t seem to be the case to me. I have never had an interview that consisted of being herded through from person to person being constantly evaluated. I’m not saying that might not be the way some interviews take place, but I’ve never had one. That certainly isn’t how interviews seem to go after graduate school. The interviews I’ve participated in were me competing anonymously, primarily on paper, and always in isolation from other candidates. The grad recruitment weekend phenomenon is much more like how students are recruited as undergraduates than it is any ‘real’ job interview I’ve ever had.

The key point I’d like to emphasize, is that recruitment weekends are not designed with the best interests of the recruits in mind. This seems a little obvious (they aren’t the ones doing the planning after all), but it is something to remember. The whole process always made me feel disgusting as a participant and an observer. As a recruit, you have additional options. Considering the magnitude of the decision, those are options you should definitely exploit.

As a final point to you, dear readers, I'd like to state that I am never going to suffer the 'forgetfulness' that I see from so many PhD's. What am I talking about? I'm talking about how so many grad students complain bitterly about the problems of the recruiting process and graduate school for years, then as they approach the end and receive their PhD all those issues suddenly become less important. Why does that happen? I guess it happens because those people don't have to face those issues anymore. Those issues are still important.

I can't believe how quickly some people forget what it is like to be a early-career, graduate student.

Just a quick thought here...

Ok, so this is pretty hilarious. Watch this nutjob, Christian zealot try to explain how the banana was 'intelligently' designed by god:



What's really hilarious about this is he's right about one thing: Banana's that we eat are a product of intelligent design. OURS!! Over the past several thousand years humans have been continuously propagating banana's that are A) have no seeds, B) taste good (higher sugar content), and C) have are bigger and easier to transport. The reason a banana is such a good food for humans is because we've genetically engineered it to be so (through selective breeding). In fact, the bananas we actually eat have so little genetic variation that in all likelihood they won't exist in 10-20 years due to diseases. What this idiot in the video won't tell you is that evolution is killing the banana. Because we humans engineered bananas to not reproduce sexually, the plant is stuck evolutionarily, and diseases aren't (globalization and the transport of disease doesn't help).

I'm imploring you, if you ever see this guy in person, punch him in the mouth. He's clearly from Boston.

In other news: Hurray! Idiocy is back out of the standards in Kansas. That's 3 times now that Kansas has brought decent evolutionary education back into the standards. Let's hope that it finally sticks.

Grad student recruiting

Well, apparently it is that time of year again. The magical winter ritual known as “graduate student recruiting.”

I’m remembering this not because I’m actually participating in any grad student recruiting right now, but because my buddy Dustin just did. The point of his ‘rant’ is that prospective students often seem bored or indifferent to the recruiting process.

I can’t disagree.

However, this is a perfect opportunity for me to rant a bit on the recruiting process. I have been ‘recruited’ by 3 colleges and sat in on 4 different Grad Recruitment Weekends at my esteemed graduate institution. I’ll also add that since I was a member of two labs, I got to see 2 fairly different perspectives about the process.

In no particular order, stuff that bugs me about grad recruiting:

1. You can’t believe anything a professor tells you during recruitment weekend.

This might be a bit harsh. In my experience, most full-time professors can tell you to write a paper about X and then two days later ask you why you didn’t write a paper about Y. Why? These professors will tell you it is because they work so many hours, on so many projects, and therefore lose track of things. However, the net effect is that almost nothing that I heard from professors when I was being recruited to graduate school was true. This mostly includes stuff like: the amount of technician support, the monetary support, teaching obligations, research obligations, the availability of your advisor, the kind of research you’ll be expected to do, and how quickly you need to make a decision. I don’t want to name any names here, but there are at least 3 people who I will never forgive for having lied to me during the grad recruitment process. In some cases this is just a matter of being disorganized, in other cases it was definitely intentional. And yes, I did transfer out of the first graduate program I was conned into attending, why do you ask?

2. There are a lot of good recruits.

Newton or Einstein?

Probably 95% of the recruits I saw every year at recruitment weekend are more than capable of getting their Ph.D. Getting a Ph.D. requires A) a lot of hard work, B) a lot of writing, and C) 1 good, unique idea (if you have 2, save one for the postdoc). This means the reality is that a professor is going to be kicking to the curb several candidates who are really good, but just might not make the best impression over a 1-day interview process. And yes, this happened to me at a grad school, and I’m bitter.

3. The whole process is designed for the school’s benefit.

Competition anyone?

When schools have ‘grad recruitment weekends’ they are trying to save money and time. However, this is a terrible thing for recruits. Instead of getting a chance to interact with the profs and grad students and postdocs in a ‘realistic’ setting, they are forced to follow a schedule of events that gives them 1 or 2 chances to speak with a professor who’s just gotten done speaking with someone else. Those chances to talk are often limited to half an hour or even 15 minutes. There isn’t much time for looking about the campus, there’s usually zero time to look about the town, and a student must be ‘on’ all the time.

4. Current grad students are weird.

Isn't this a group you'd like to join?

Grad students already present in a program seem to have a weird assortment of attitudes towards prospective students. These usually fall into three categories: 1) demanding, 2) personality seekers, and 3) indifferent. “Demanding” means that the grad student is expecting a lot out of prospectives. This isn’t irrational, as grad students collaborate a lot. However, sometimes it gets taken a little bit far. For instance, expecting recruits to be aware of the kind of research that’s gone on in the lab is ok, expecting them to have read most of the lab’s recent pubs is a bit excessive (unless maybe the prospective has a MS in the same field). And yes, I’ve seen that. “Personality seekers” recognize point #2 above, and try to decide how well a student would fit into the lab’s social dynamics. While a pragmatic and ultimately useful approach, this is tough during such a short window of opportunity. If alcohol is involved, it can be a lot easier to figure this out. “Indifferent” grad students are probably indifferent because they are burned out. These are the people who are annoyed that they have to spend a whole Saturday entertaining prospective grad students. They are taking advantage of the free food and drink. In a sense, you could say that these people recognize point #2 as well. In my humble opinion, these are the only people from which recruits can get useful information. (Why yes, I was indifferent, why do you ask?)

In conclusion: Grad student recruitment sucks. The recruits feel like shit because they have to impress everybody and act smart for 2 straight days. The current grad students feel like shit because they are often (but not always) asked to pass judgment on people who they’ve just met. I really have no idea how the profs feel.

I do think that this initial process contributes to professors feeling like graduate students are sub-people; I mean, how seriously can you take someone who was practically killing themselves to get into the lab? This puts the whole colleague-in-training scenario on a bad footing to start. However, that’s another issue.

Pictures

So, tonight I tried to take some pictures of stuff. I don't really know why, except that I'm kinda bored. Here's some pics of our crayfish: Steve "Dusty" Irwin:


"Hi, I'm Steve Irwin. Everybody calls me Dusty. I'm a girl, so the name is a bit weird.
I hate the world, and my place in it. I have a new tank that is 5 times bigger than the old one. I don't like it. This is my mountain. I used to like it, but now I really don't."


"Look at my massive claw. I made him take a picture of my claw close up. I can't believe he couldn't get the damned camera in focus. Why does he suck so much?"


"This is me angry. If I could make noises, I'd make some kind of RAR sound right now. But I can't. So I won't."

The crayfish has spent the 4 days since I put him in his new cage just walking around, trying to flip himself out of the water, and generally letting us know that he hates us tremendously.

I also tried to get creative and take a picture of the growler I got from the Bricktown Brewery in Oklahoma City. Turns out it was really hard to get the effect I was going for (white lettering on a black background. This is the closest I could get to a nice picture.



Ok, well, picture fun-time is over.

Ouch...

Those of you who have had the pleasure of playing basketball against me know two things: The pain of absolute defeat (ha!) and that I roll my ankle approximately once ever 4-5 games played. In fact, I can remember going to hoop it up the day before my Ph.D. defense and thinking to myself:

I haven’t rolled my ankle playing basketball in over 2 months. I shouldn’t even be out here right now.

Turns out I didn’t roll my ankle. If I remember correctly, I even finished my graduate school basketball career with a game-winning 3-pointer (which is worth 2 the way we play). Those of you who were there will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going to stick with that story anyway. Call it magical realism. Yes, me making a 3-pointer is magical!

Where was I going with this? Am I just going to spend some time reminiscing about 3-on-3 basketball? Pointing out that I can’t rebound, dribble, or shoot a basketball? Adding that I’m really not that good at defense either just seems like a pointless waste of everyone’s time.

Oh wait. Apparently Talocrura (God of Ankles) decided he wasn’t going to wait for me to get back on a basketball court (it has been months), and smote me as I walked in to work this afternoon. He cleverly invoked the god of rain and medium-sized rocks, who conspired to place a .75 by 1.25 in rock in a precarious location just where I typically step off a curb.

See. Magical realism.

Now my ankle hurts.

And you, fearless reader, are now stuck with 260 words in your brain that really don’t have anything resembling a point. Don’t you love this blog?

Things I learned today:

Modern paperclips are made of metal, however, the original paperclips were made out of string bean stems carefully crafted during the growing phase and then clipped en masse. These original paperclips were known to have been produced by ancient Egyptian societies to ‘mark’ locations in rolled papyrus scrolls.

Contrary to popular belief, modern ink pens do not use squid ink. Instead, modern ink pens use cricket blood as a more environmentally friendly alternative. Currently cricket production is a fairly lucrative business owing to the great popularity of ink pens, the frequent use of crickets as pet food, and the relative ease with which these animals can be raised.

That many species of birds consume small stones to mechanically aid in the digestion of food is a well-known truism. Less well known is that these ‘gizzard stones’ are eventually coated with a layer of organic material. Due to the unusual chemical conditions in the gizzard, this layer of organic material is almost always 70-80% sugar, making it a tasty find for certain predators.

Modern outdoor sporting arenas typically hold between 50 and 100 thousand fans. However, an ancient Incan arena recently uncovered in Peru probably held several million attendees, although it is unknown what sport was played there. Further complicating the mystery is the fact that population estimates for the entire Incan society suggests only several hundred thousand citizens at any one time, and even the entire population of the South American continent would likely not fill such a stadium.

The fastest growing tree in the world is the black locust. This tree will reach a height of 15 feet just 2 years after germination, and is named for the hordes of locusts that use it as a daytime refuge (turning it black in color). If oak or maple grew as fast as the black locust, then no industrial process could have caused the deforestation of the Eastern U.S.

The city of Boston has, on average, the lowest intelligence of any major U.S. cities. With an average IQ of just 75, the city’s inhabitants are on the border of severe mental handicaps. Unsurprisingly, this has lead to a city government comprised almost entirely of mentally handicapped individuals, who believe building roads underground is a good idea and who comically overreact to bright lights. The next most unintelligent U.S. city is Detroit, who’s 95 average I.Q. is a full 20 points higher than Boston’s (and is much closer to the worldwide average of 100).

The current source of my unbridled irritation...

...is Pimephales promelas. That’s right, the fathead minnow.

These disgusting little bastards are absolutely necessary for my research, yet I don’t even study them. Why are they necessary?

The toxin I’m studying is impossible (at this time) to measure, therefore we’re left with kinda-measures. We can calculate the toxicity to a fish, and use that as our standard unit of measurement. So we need to have lots of fathead minnow babies around at all times so that we can continuously measure the level of toxin.

If this doesn’t seem to make any sense...well just trust me, it does. I just can’t think straight today (or yesterday).

The point is that our fathead minnow cultures are going through a period of strict abstinence, during which all my carefully planned research is essentially useless.

Groan...I might have to come up with an entirely new project to work on in the meantime.
I’m tired.

Other stuff:

- NBA Fantasy basketball: So, I completely forgot about this stuff from Dec 25-Jan 20-ish, and yet I was still in 1st and 2nd place in 2 of the 4 leagues I play. For the last couple of weeks I've been paying more attention, and now I'm in 4th place or worse in all 4 leagues. Correlation or causation? You decide.

- I like to use this platform to clear up my opinions on various topics, like politics, science, religion, race, Boston.
In that vein: Dry skin- I'm against it.

- Ahhh...parody religions. Good read.

- Note the subtle change in the "PC guy's" tone in this new Mac commercial. The reality: Mac's still suck. I hate to be the one to break it to you. If you want to be able to do anything: Use Windows. If you want to be free from viruses etc: Use Linux. Those are your choices.

Ok, I'm going back to work.

Strange exhaustion...

...and depression is sweeping over me. I read the news. I’m not going to link to the particular stories that depressed me, because I don’t want to spread the infection. Suffice to say: this is why I quit watching Law and Order SVU.

I’m trying to let the sun soak back into my soul after reading the news. I’m getting there.

We had a fantastically good time this weekend in Oklahoma City with friends M and K. We got to meet, again, another couple they know, and we spent probably 36 hours talking about babies. And, holy shit, I am totally unprepared. I was also reassured by one phrase used by an army guy to describe the first several months of living with a colicy baby:

“I’d rather serve another stint in Iraq.”

This guy was hilarious in a lot of ways, but he did tell a terrifying story about being a sniper. I won’t go into the details here, but he was a participant in an action that got him sent to the pysch ward of the Army for a month-long ‘evaulation.’ The thing is: He’s not a jackass, at least, not from what I can tell. I think this merely makes me realize that going over-seas to kill people entails a lot of disassociation from what you’re doing.

Not that I needed the reminder, but war is hellish.

However, the Geneva conventions have some apparently bull-shit clauses. There are some rules about ‘excessive force’. For example: You can’t throw a grenade at an individual assailant. Seriously! If some guy is shooting at you, you’re supposed to not throw a grenade at him unless he’s in a group of other guys shooting at you.

I agree with and understand having rules for the treatment of prisoners and civilian non-combatants, but rules on man-to-man combat? This seems a bit excessive. Maybe I don’t know how powerful these grenades are.

At any rate, it was an entertaining and enlightening weekend (we were forced to see a baby’s diaper changed...AAHHHHHHHHHH!!!). I don’t have any idea how the human race had managed to survive this long

No seriously...

...holy freacking shit. Did somebody really do this?

Be sure and check back tomorrow, when I post pictures of me getting drunk to celebrate the success of someone 918 miles away who isn't involved in any professional sports teams.