Sleep is for chelonians

Xtreme TeamBuilding: the Academic Brainstorm Edition.

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 ;-)

Libiamo, ne' lieti calici

Or should I say Follie! Follie! Delirio vano è 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*

In the public opinion

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."

Actually, I still don't know how to take it.

Big breath before the jump

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 :-)

Do I get a gold star?

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.

I'm going to use that

Read on the Female Science Professor blog, in a list of academic complaints available as Facebook "gifts".

"Faculty Parking Lot Closed for Home Game (this used to be an issue at one university but I would tell the parking attendant that my lab was going to blow up and kill lots of people if I didn't get to it really really soon and they always let me in free)"

Now, to find a creative way to adapt that to lunch queues...

Bad travel (no biscuit)

I'm usually a very cheerful traveler, but on this latest trip events conspired against my natural bonhomie to make the whole experience lousy and needlessly tiring. Nothing like the frank, unmitigated "disaster" of missing the night's last flight out of China last year, but the kind of seemingly endless string of annoyance and frustrations that makes molehills seem like mountains.

I originally planned to rant and rave about how awful it was, but it's been over a week now, I've had my therapy (oh blonde bubbly goodness, I salute you) and I can now write this up without going into fits of screaming all-caps. A skill that TV host Glenn Beck has yet to master, ESPECIALLY IN HIS NEW BOOK -- stay tuned for a review of his mangling of the message of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense".

More good news

Yay for Facebook! I haven't yet received the official letter, but a friend today sent me a message on Facebook congratulating me for my FNRS fellowship. A quick investigation confirmed that the 2009 June decisions have been posted on the FNRS website, and yup, I'm in. Or, on.

As in, I'm on the gravy train for another 3 (+1 optional pending renewal) years.

Weehee. No worrying about funding for awhile. Free to think science, do science, breathe science.

Starting with hydroponic tomatoes (long story).

I can talk! I can talk!

Title inspired by The Simpsons' version of Planet Of The Apes: The Musical.

Heehee... oh never mind that then.

My point: on Friday I received an email confirming that my request to give a talk at a Big Upcoming Conference has been accepted. I get 15 minutes + 5 (for questions) to talk about my favorite subject to a captive (all but bound and gagged) audience.

This is Great News that make me Very Happy.

Evolution comes to Idaho

Last year I spent a very enjoyable month at the University of Idaho (in little Moscow, ID) doing some freelance work, helping out on a plasmid sequencing project, that resulted in a publication. Now I'm flying back there for some follow-up work with my collaborators at the Top lab and to attend Evolution 2009, a big meeting on, you guessed it, evolution. It's going to be fun! Eugenie Scott will be giving the first ever Stephen J. Gould Award lecture!

Heh. Looking at the program just now I realized I've never been at a large meeting with concurrent sessions, and I'd better work out a schedule of what talks I want to see beforehand. There's just so much to choose from, this is going to be great for my evolutionary biology culture. I'm expecting a lot of the hardcore computational stuff to fly well over my head, and of course the topics are hugely biased towards eukaryotes (so-called superior lifeforms; snobs, more like), but that's okay, I'm open-minded enough. Some of my best friends have nuclei, you know.

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Addendum: one announced talk has a title that opens with "The small Tree of Life"... In Pythonesque spirit, I propose that the authors change it to "The Shrubbery of Life". Bonus points for using a herring as a prop during the talk.