Close to two months after moving into my new place I FINALLY have a working internet connection. Now I can once again do things like work, write this blog, and bask in all the time wasting glory the internet has to offer.
In the vain of the latter, here is a fun video that popped up on Digg today. If there’s one thing I love, it’s when science is mixed with drum n bass.
I love uni in the summer. No undergrads, the weather is slightly better (if you live in the UK), no undergrads, there’s more stuff to keep you preoccupied outside the lab, you can drink outside, your adviser may or may not take a holiday (which in turn may or may not be a good thing) and also there are no undergrads. Thus I decided to go with a general summery theme to the July edition of the Carnival of GRADual Progress which I’m very pleased to be hosting this month (cheers to FrogPrincess for unleashing me on all your posts!).
For many a misguided grad student, summer offers a quieter and more relaxed time of year to catch up on those annoying little jobs that have accumulated over the past three years, like writing your dissertation. So I thought I’d have a look around for a bit of advice for all you poor fools. Hayley at Words of Science offers some advice on good words to use in a thesis – particularly useful when Microsoft Office built-in-thesaurus just doesn’t cut the mustard. Combine this with the list of commonly used opening sentences from Lucy at Always Listen to your Pig Puppet and you’ve basically got half your diss written! And because for some reason it is always harder to stay focused on writing during the summer (see cartoon above) Jim gives a handy summary of a useful time tracking app for all you mac users out there (he also managed to find the time to have a baby recently, congrats buddy!).
Then there is the recurring theme ever present in this carnival: woe stories from people who are actually in the midst of writing their dissertations, or thinking about writing, or furiously trying to get enough data so one can start thinking about writing. I like reading these because it’s always nice to know that someone else is suffering along with you. Whether you’re thinking about starting writing like Anastasia, or coming to the sad realisation that working from home is entirely unproductive like PsycGirl, we feel your pain. And it’s this frustration that leads to the perpetual state of existential self-reflection we all live in, about why on earth we even chose grad school at all, as articulated here by FrogPrincess. Though some manage to surpass all this frustration and occupy their summer months when they should be writing by doing other things like getting married. Way to procrastinate ZaPaper!
Of course grad school doesn’t last forever (though it damn well feels like it does!!!), and for a lucky few summer brings about the terrifying thought of graduating and moving into the real world (gasp!). FemaleCSGradStudent shares the rollercoaster ride of emotion that is leaving grad school, while Breena at Who Doesn’t Love Roses? gives us her take on what life is like for the freshly graduated. Once you’ve been out of grad school for a while though, the reality of finding an academic job can hit quite hard, as StyleyGeek found out here.
Others may be spending the summer trying to clock up some teaching experience at summer school. For many, teaching a class can be a tremendous time-sucking bastard of a job, but Joel Corbo, a physics grad student at UC Berkley, explains in an excellent guest post for Cosmic Variance that it is actually key to a well rounded graduate education.
For me, however, working over the summer always involves an unhealthy amount of time spent on mindless web-surfing, facebook stalking and general internet-procrastination. In that spirit, History Enthusiast shares a gem of a music video about being a grad student, while I get my kicks out of watching geeky and lame viral science music videos about pipetting.
There you have it folks. Enjoy what’s left of the summer before all those snot-nosed undergrads move back to campus.
Best. Show. Ever.
Despite the typically bleak, rainy and shite Glasgow weather (and me forgetting my jacket and wearing my converse, pretty much the worst wet-weather shoes ever), this could not have been a better show. It was always going to be awesome, since Radiohead are one of my all time favourite bands and I’ve wanted to see them live since I was about 15, but they totally blew my expectations away.
And the set list was awesome (see below). A fantastic mix that included pretty much everything off In Rainbows (and even one off the second CD) and a bunch of my favourites from OK Computer, Kid A, Bends and Amnesiac. They also managed to get most of In Radinbows out of the way by the end of the set, leaving the steamy heaving crowd to lap up two encores full of classics (including Paranoid Android, Karma Police, 2+2=5 and Idioteque). Although I have to admit it was a little cheezy starting the show with track one off the new album. But that’s just me being a geek.
Set list: (courtesy of Ateaseweb)
01 15 Step
02 Airbag
03 There There
04 All I Need
05 Nude
06 Arpeggi/Weird Fishes
07 The Gloaming
08 The National Anthem with Hunting Bears outro
09 Faust Arp
10 No Surprises (Thom: “There was a guy showing me his nipples in that one”)
11 Jigsaw Falling Into Place
12 Reckoner
13 Just
14 Bangers and Mash
15 Everything In Its Right Place
16 Fake Plastic Trees
17 Bodysnatchers
Encore 1
18 Videotape
19 Paranoid Android
20 Myxomatosis
21 Optimistic
22 Karma Police
Encore 2
23 Like Spinning Plates
24 2 + 2 = 5
25 Idioteque
And the stage was very…well…Radiohead. Instead of the band being lost in a big empty black square, they had a huge 3D matrix of dangly light things which were extremely trippy but way cool. It wasn’t so over the top that it distracted attention from the band, and lighting design complemented each song beautifully.
Great gig.
Have been house-bound for the past few days trying to finish my last masters project report, so obviously I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube. Here’s a vid that’s a particular fav of mine at the moment. It’s the music video for You! Me! Dancing! by Cardiff indie-pop band Los Campesinos. Beautiful piece of really fun futuristic-yet-retro animation.
The dangers of genetic manipulation have never seemed so real to me.
(www.xkcd.com)
After several years of sitting on a dusty miniDV tape, I finally got round to uploading this short film made for the Mothra Student Film Festival at my old uni back in 2004. I made a bunch of short films for this festival, but this is definitely my favourite. Based on an idea spawned one drunken night many years ago, it was written by myself and a couple of good friends, and filmed around the uni campus over the space of about a day.
Inspired by the live thesis efforts of Attila at Pimm which I have been following recently, I’ve decided to go ahead and post an online version of my own MSc thesis on the identification of stem-like cells in the thymus of mice lacking tumour supressor gene p53.
One of my very first posts was about putting a thesis together into a single PDF file, so hopefully this provides a physical illustration of the end result.
As an aside, chances are a thesis PDF is going to be friggin massive (mine was >300Mb), so I thought I would briefly mention a further nifty programme for PDF editing on a mac that converted my mofo of a thesis into a more manageable size for distribution.
PDF Compress is a simple, fast and easy to use programme that converts big bulky PDFs into much smaller files, without excessive loss of resolution, in one easy step. My original 300Mb thesis PDF was downsized into a much sleeker 1.3 Mb PDF that is easily sendable or uploadable.
While the programme is only a trial version, you can cheekily request further trial licenses when the original one runs out. Although if you’ll be using it regularly I’d suggest buying the license (around US$35).
Kapai.
Have had some quality family time in recent weeks, with Mum and Dad having flown over from NZ for a visit. Needless to say, I was completely spoiled: presents from home (mostly Marmite), lots of eating out, and 4 nights up in the highlands courtesy of Dad’s credit card.
Was also quite fun showing them around Edinburgh and taking them on a tour around campus. A particular highlight (for me…at least) was showing them my lab and our fancy new SOLEXA DNA sequencing machine. Although trying to explain how it works and why it is so awesome over dinner that night was a bit more challenging.
So in between dragging them around all the tourist sites in Edinburgh and showing Dad the finer points of british ales I have had little time to read anything going on in the world of science and thus have had a brief hiatus from blogging. But now I’m back, in all my intermittent and semi-regular blogtastic glory.
Although fortunately a friend from back home sent me the latest album from one of my favourite NZ bands, the Phoenix Foundation, entitled Happy Ending, which has helped keep me from jumping out the lab window.
I’m drawing to the close of my research project for the semester so am obviously spending this week doing all the experiments I should have been doing for the past two months in a mad attempt to get enough data to write a coherent report about. Have spent 12 hours or so every day this week doing nothing but HPLC to measure the effects of up or down regulation of a particular serotonin receptor (5HT2CR…if you’re asking) in a couple of lines of transgenic mice we have in the lab. While interesting in theory, the actual lab work involved in preparing and running each sample is very mundane, thus this album was a welcome addition to the lab-work playlist on my iPod.
And since these experiments have cut the umbilical cord I share with my laptop on most days, this post is all I have had time to come up with all week (which is a token effort, at best). Anyways, here’s the retro-tastic beast of a video clip for the first single off said album, Bright Grey.
