learned last friday that genetic alleles can now be tested for about the price of a plate of fried rice. well, expensive fried rice, but not the really expensive kind with lobster and XO sauce and each rice grain individually coated with egg. this was a rather pleasant surprise, except that i now get to go bananas with what i get to assay and run into all sorts of lovely multiple comparisons problems and spend sleepless nights inventing post-hoc rationalizations to justify my criminal behavior.

i will say (again) that worrying about budgets is something i'd really rather leave to other people. money in research is such an ugly thing: oil and water. i maintain that we need to bring back real patrons, the kind with endlessly deep pockets and a real eye for ability, and throw budgets out of the window. then -- real honesty, none of this hedging ones bets and praying to random deities for data to reach significance. no scrambling desperately for alternate explanations and splitting datasets into a billion infinitesimal pieces in an attempt to publish them all. look at me: 30 years old, and still an idealist. maybe one day soon i'll leave never never land.

DIY Negroni at The Tippling Club: from left to right, gin with lollipop, vermouth, campari, soda water

it amazes me that certain scientists here who shall remain unnamed fail to grasp the idea that experiments need control groups. i remember when this notion first truly dawned on me. it was in sec 3, when von and the crew and i were in boarding school, and we had to design an experiment, and i hit upon the cockamamie idea of playing different genres of music to bean plants to see whether it affected their rate of growth*. i know, genius right?. anyway, i was nearly at the end of the thing when i realized that i hadn't kept a no-music pot, which, on top of the facts that a) i had no idea how to do a one-way anova, and b) plants don't actually have ears, would most certainly have caused the experiment to be filed under 'u' for useless.

so, yes, we were all young once, and in a pre-post intervention design, it's a bit more complication. but seriously? an experiment without controls?

* i only admit this in public because i already have my diploma, which arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. can't take that away from me!

have been eating quite a bit of korean food since i got back thanks to minz. i admit that i used to have a very low opinion of it in the past due to a) its seeming homogeneity and b) witnessing multiple people get food poisoning from seoul garden*, but my last few excursions have generally been pretty good. i've learned though, that i'm hopeless at remembering names of dishes...i swear the korean language has like 2 vowels and 6 consonants or something because all their words seem to run together in my mind. or, i'm just dumb (very likely).

also, if anyone wants to get a peanut-butter milkshake with me at some point, i'm (seriously) in the market.

* i know, fake korean. also: we were probably young and thought that eating half-cooked meat was manly or something.

LAT 08/13

Difficulty: *** (out of 5)




i think I came up with this theme while i was high or something, but it turned out well enough. Some notes:
* 32-Across is the first overt hint i've put in a published puzzle that I'm an academic (who else would clue it that way?).
* 43-Down was originally clued [Surfer's souvenir], but I guess that was too tricky.
* 48-Down was inspired by the housemate, who made us haupia once and enlightened me on what it was (su-lin: all is now clear; i was serious about having referenced event though).
* 51-Down was [Pattern for Poe, periodically], which I still like better :)

they've been fixing up the shielded room that we're eventually going to use for fNIR testing, which has made the whole (very poorly ventilated) office smell of epoxy or whatever stuff it is they're using to fasten the panels to the walls. in the morning this is just mildly annoying, but by mid-afternoon it feels like one has spent most of the day snorting a line of bad coke very, very slowly. there has to be some WSHA regulation against this; i really should, in fact, march myself down to the MRI scanner and investigate for neuronal cell death. who feels like a court case?

a sad state of affairs

it's 8:30 p.m. on *that day*, and i'm remarkably sober.

the puzzle java applets have been fixed, thanks to my one engineering/CS friend in the world. i can only hope the lawyers come through for me similarly when the authorities try and cart me off to jail :) applets are on the days the puzzles were originally released; links are on the puzzles page

molecular genetics

i've gone ahead and proposed to the boss that we should do this molecular genetics work i want to do, and he seems generally supportive, so hold on to your hats folks, some real actual biological work may be on the horizon. this is the psychologist's equivalent of becoming a Real Scientist, so let's hope it works out, and that i can still remember from college days how to tell a 3' from a 5'UTR.

why is it that whenever i till people that i live at home (with my mom) the automatic response is: oh, at least you don't have to do your own laundry? maybe this is just another example of me being in cultural outer space, but...aren't adults generally supposed to do their own laundry? and even if not, why is that the stereotypical advantage? i mean, just to name a few other things, there's

a) at least you can share the cost of the electric/water/phone/tv bill
b) at least you have company for dinner at night
c) at least you don't have to put up with crappy roommates

etc.

first day

so it genuinely seems that my instructions in this job are to take a bunch of money and turn it into data/papers, with 0 supervision in between. this is either thrilling or alarming, depending on how much caffeine in me at any particular time. otherwise, everything else just feels a lot like being a grad student again, except that now i have more drawers.

If you'd like to check out my published crossword puzzles, mosey along here