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

a sunset

pubs (not that kind)

A couple people over the past few weeks said they might like to look at some of my papers -- you can take a gander at this page if you're interested. Link is also up on the sidebar.

conned

it is of course at the very moment that i decide to start reading daredevil, a title the brother assured me had no crossovers or company-wide shenanigans, that marvel comes up with this shadowland nonsense that spans 5 months and crosses over into about 80 bazillion other titles. thanks a lot, dude. next time DC does a company-wide event i'm going to mailbomb you with .cbrs of every last issue, which knowing DC will probably come to 2.5 terabytes.

some things never change

Singapore, A Biography, p141-142:

In addition, as Singapore grew in size after 1870, it began to offer its European arrivals a considerably improved social life. Even by the 1860s, John Cameron, editor of the Straits Times, had written of a colonial lifestyle that 'may be set down as luxurious, and this to a degree that could not well be indulged at home on similar means'. The problem with this lifestyle, as Cameron went on to observe, was that it so completely lacked variety. European life in Singapore revolved around an eternal consumption of food and drink: dawn coffee and biscuits; the nine o'clock breakfast of curry and rice; tiffin-time around midday and the first glass of beer or claret; then finally more curry, wine or beer, throughout the dinner hour from six o'clock. On the completion of their working day, many younger members of the European community did 'resort to the fives-court or the cricket ground on the esplanade', while on Tuesday and Friday nights the whole community turned out for Esplanade band nights. Nonetheless, in the 1860s Cameron still yearned for a more sophisticated social intercourse as was 'usual at home, and in most other parts of the world'. It was a source of some regret to him 'that the people of Singapore so determinedly set their faces against every sort of entertainment which does not include a dinner'.

a stupid thought while passing burger king

have you ever pondered over how much of the world's supply of ketchup actually gets eaten? i mean, everyone takes more ketchup than they need for fries, and it gets left behind on fast food trays or on the bottom of those silly plastic cups they sometimes give you. or there are the last bits that you can't squeeze out of the little ketchup packets unless you're one of those compulsive people who squeezes from the bottom and rolls them up as you go, and even then. and that's if you even get round to opening the little packet in the first place -- think of the number of them that just get tossed. then there's ketchup left at the bottom and sides of the bottles in diners and people's homes, and ketchup that just molders away in pantries for decades because they couldn't resist buying 120 bottles at costco at one go. you know, i wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a 1:1 ratio of wasted ketchup to ketchup that actually makes it into a stomach. a tragic waste indeed.

even though my blog has a current readership of, like, two (2), i'd like to go ahead and put a plug out there for comics world singapore, which is not only wonderful but now also the only show in town for "western" comics since comics mart shut down. of course, my standard have been lowered a fair bit by living near probably the only comic book store in the world to not actually sell any comics at all.

Peter Brooks, Professor at Yale, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative:

Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually unlimited monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.

NUS is like one of those escher-esque impossible staircases where no matter which way you turn you're headed uphill. also: terribly large. also: not for people with no sense of direction.

following the wisdom of those who have gone before me, i'm going to refrain from making any comments on the new workplace other than the completely neutral, lest i be discovered by online googlestalkers and taken for either being disloyal or sycophantic. suffice it to say that [                                                   ] and that, compared to the ex- and ex-ex-lab, this one is rather
[                                                                                                                                                    ]

i hate to this say this, but it's really quiet and lonely at home. i used to be so good with solitude.

***

got lost today trying to look for maxwell market. my own stupid fault really -- it's not that anything has changed all that much around there, but i tried to be clever and cut through side streets, and ended up in a hopeless muddle. i suspect that parts of my hippocampus just died or exploded over the past few years, or got annexed to learn useless stuff about neuroanatomy.

***

am reading singapore: a biography, which is good except that i could only find a hardcover edition that weighs down my bag like gangbusters.