The conference is over so at last I have some time --it was so much hard work-- to give my testimony of how hard it was. Being a scientist, you know. Going to conferences in exotic locations (like Bariloche, Argentina). My friend Ben can tell you how hard it was, seeing me drag myself to the dark conference room, like a cockroach scuttling underneath a rock, while he went off into the sunlit, radiant natural beauty of the surrounding lakeside forests. (what a bastard, no pity)
So, here is a snapshot of my so-called hard life (TM Ben 2010), specifically the view we had from where we poor traumatized scientists took our coffee breaks. Not too shabby, I suppose.
Or administrative assistants, or whatever you want to call them.
The good news is, I haven't really composed an ode, so I won't be inflicting any bad poetry on the world (today).
But really, they do make the world go round. In fact, they rule it. They have the power to make your life much easier in the face of admistrative formality -- or to make it absolute hell.
I've just had a brief and incredibly productive telephone conversation with a secretary at the FNRS (the people who pay me my fellowship salary out of the Belgian taxpayer's pocket) and I have to say, while email exchanges with the FNRS are often fraught with frustrations and delays, on the phone they're absolutely stellar.
In short, I'm all set (administratively speaking at least) for my Great Austral Trip starting tomorrow. About which more details will be posted as the situation develops. As they say in the catastrophe-reporting media.
I'm back in Boston after a week of lab retreat in Maine. I have ten days to revised my analysis program, complete the genome analyses I've been working on, compile the data and put together my presentation for the IPBC conference in Argentina.
Y'all got the chance to marvel at my home-workspace last week; now you can wince at the sight of my cramped little desk in the lab, make a quick mental comparison, and understand at last why I prefer to work from home as much as I can (if not just for the Couch of Napping Doom). And this is not as bad as it used to be, since I only recently took it upon myself to triple my PC-desktop real estate by getting an add-on widescreen monitor (for cheap on geeks.com) to connect to my trusty ThinkPad (yes, in the Mac-PC wars, I swing both ways).
This, incidentally, is how it looks when I'm working overnight on a manuscript (and running long electrophoresis gels in parallel). Usually there's not quite so much angrily scribbled-on paper hanging all over the place. The rest of the mess, of course, is part of the normal ecology of the desk.
Meh. I was going to post happy stuff -- a funny story about my impromptu field trip to Minneapolis, a picture of my uber-kitsch miniature christmas tree, maybe even Gus' latest adventures (since I know that's all you folks really want to hear about) -- but then I got handed a sheet of paper.
That sheet of paper was a printout of a poster presenting data that prove an idea I've been pursuing on and off for about a year now. A very good idea -- as these other people have just demonstrated.
The cosmic irony is that they came up with the idea after hearing my current boss present some previous work... Just like me. But they worked faster, were more focused, and beat me to the punch.
*sigh* It's not the end of the world since it was only a side project for me, and I do get the intellectual satisfaction of having my idea validated without having to do all the wet work... but it's a disappointment nonetheless.
So, sorry, no happy stuff just now. I'm off to watch some delightfully silly anime (fancy name for Japanese cartoons) to cheer myself up... Yami ni hitotoki nomarete mo yagate mizukara hikari dasu!
A few loose words about my experience of Maine Event, our annual week-long lab retreat at Harvard's Howell House in Kittery Point, ME.
Pictured here is the introductory "slide" for my session (note the high-tech multimedia presentation equipment), which I intended to preface with a brief historical note on the geopolitical origins of Belgium starting with the Romans and the well-known (in Belgium) Julius Cesar quote "Of all the peoples of Gaul, the Belgians are the bravest" (I'm afraid that when living abroad, I tend to get annoyingly nationalistic... but my colleagues don't complain as long as I keep a steady supply of beer and chocolate available).
This was to be my supporting figure, an astoundingly accurate map of the Old World drawn entirely in freehand with some cartographic assistance from the iPhone Google Maps application during lunch break (toot my own horn, moi? never, mon capitaine!).
As it happened, the map and its facetious labeling inspired our Great Leader, El Jefe, into a somewhat rambling but thoroughly enjoyable historico-philosophical commentary (see annotations in red) on Descartes and the roots of European Enlightenment.
Then we got into some hardcore discussions of genome sequencing, quorum sensing, bacterial conjugation and the ecology of small molecule production by Bacillus cereus, and that allowed me to refine my work plan for the coming year.
That's part of what Maine Event is like -- but it's also something completely different for someone else. And don't get me started on the food, drinks and oh yeah, the crazy games of after-dinner charades (official lab clue for "famous person": point at El Jefe). In all cases, it's intense, it's exhausting, it's immensely rewarding.
And this year we even got to learn a cool new dance move: the mating parade of the blue-footed booby. No kidding, send the boss to Galapagos and back he comes with tales of boobies, how serious is that ;-)
Or should I say Follie! Follie! Delirio vano รจ questo!?
This news just in: my big genome sequencing project has been given the green light by the people in charge of the purse strings. Taxpayers of America, know this: your money will be well spent (for once).
Now for the hard/scary part: actually doing what I said I could do. *gloups*
I don't see it, myself, but there seems to be a consensus out there...
The first time my thesis supervisor told me that I argued like a Jesuit, I really didn't know how to take it, and I must have looked vaguely offended because he rushed to explain that he meant it in a nice way. Since then, various other people have made similar comments over the years,and just this morning, a collaborator writes me in an email: "Thanks for your comments, a very jesuit-like approach of the problem."
Oh my, I've got so many posts drafted that just need some teeny bit of editing to be done... and on really exciting stuff, I mean, there's whale-watching, bad travel, dinosaurs and of course, back by popular demand, the return of the Almighty Gus!
But something trumps all of that. Something I need to get done before I can think of polishing off those posts.
Tomorrow morning (Aug. 31st) at 8:50 AM (someone up there hates me), mountain time (GMT+7) I'm giving a talk at this year's most important meeting in my field of study. I've been working on streamlining my presentation for a week, cutting it down from the original 40 minute version to the allowed 15 minutes + 5 for questions (argh, the pain, the pain!) and rehearsing out loud to tease out the more difficult tongue-twisting bits.
Could I be more ready? Yes I could. Am I ready enough? I bloody well hope so.
Whatever happens, tomorrow evening I will be drinking margaritas at the hotel bar with some fun people.
And then I will finish those blog posts I've been promising you. Such are my priorities in life :-)
This is a table that records my performance in peer-reviewing duties for my favorite scientific journal. Check it out: 3 out of 3 submitted BEFORE the due date. Now that's public service.
Below the fold is a brief recap (brief? I think my irony meter just exploded) of how the process works, if you're not familiar with the process of peer-review.
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