All New Episode!
So, after a thrilling ~60 hour week in the lab and slogging through about a foot of slush to get home on Wednesday night and a skating rink to get home Thurs-Fri night, I am positively bursting with blogging energy! My apologies if this entry is more dim-witted and/or ridden with spelling mistakes and/or less entertaining than usual (although periodically I become hilarious when comatose, so hopefully that will happen here):
(WARNING TO CANADIAN READERS: I was lambasted earlier this week when I sent out an e-mail to an American friend spelling the word "honour" properly (i.e. with the "ou" instead of the "o"). I replied saying "yeah, what would the English who, you know, invented the language, know about proper spelling of English words???? Clearly I was mistaken!". However, I caught myself deleting the "u" a couple of times in writing the post, so please forgive me if you see an obvious error.)
- This was one of those weeks where I was very effective at solving other people's problems but not so effective at solving my own - of the four projects I was actively working on, only one and a half of them was really working (although the failures in all but one case were "useful failures" in that we did at least learn something from them). I really can't complain though - that is pretty much par for the course for research and I have been pretty lucky since I've started here. My first paper from MIT is now finished, which is exciting (I am sure my "supervisor" will be thrilled with his 920th some paper... yawn) and I have data for another two papers, so three papers in six months is hardly a bad start.
- Safety training is an annual requirement at MIT (and at most places) which is always, naturally, an eagerly anticipated event by all involved (you mean, we shouldn't use our mouths to pipet toxic liquids??? Whoa, thanks for that useful tidbit of information!) Because our lab is so massive, the health and safety people organized a special "refresher" seminar just for us, which entailed packing nearly 100 people into a seminar room built for 60 (I was standing the whole time... if there's one thing that makes a two hour safety seminar even more exciting, trust me, it's not having a seat...) Instead of doing a standard lecture, however, the health and safety wizards decided to have us "refresh" by playing "Safety Jeopardy". First, they had us rank whether we were a "safety general", "safety major", "safety lieutenant", or "safety private", based on (as far as I could tell), how often we had worked with dangerous materials and/or how often we had set something on fire in the past (I've done it once, so I made rank of "major"). Then, they had us move around the room to form teams - in a 60-person maximum capacity room with 100 people, this took 10 minutes or so (keep in mind, roughly half the people in the room had a Ph.D. and herding Ph.D.s is the academic equivalent to trying to train 20 cats to knit a quilt). We were then subjected to 20 pun-laden questions which I think only served to make me groan in pain and/or encouraged me to be more careless in the lab at every opportunity. At least there was pizza.
- Interesting MIT fact: "The Tech", the weekly newspaper of MIT news, publishes on average about 3 pages of "news" every week. To accomplish this crushingly difficult feat, the newspaper employs seven "news editors", which (in the most recent issue) worked out to exactly 1.4 editors per news story actually published. And, the best part of all: there was still a grammar error. This, friends, is resume padding at its finest... being an "editor" looks a lot better on the old resume than "staff reporter". While I have learned many things already doing my post-doc, taking a highly skeptical approach to the "credentials" of students from prestigious institutions is certainly very high on my list. However, the undergrads I hired to work with me have been on the job for two weeks and so far I am very positively impressed, so the news is not all bad on that front.
- Another interesting "real-life" lesson: we just submitted a patent application on one of my projects (good news either way!) So, why is this a "real-life" lesson? Well, the "proof of principle" data in the application took me approximately three days to collect and doesn't even prove that our idea actually works. Furthermore, I was told that the average patent is examined for a grand total of... 30 minutes, primarily by non-experts in the fields of the patent. This is obvious based on one patent which may cause us problems in going forward with our technology (assuming we get data which actually is proof-of-principle). A company just outside Boston filed a 1995 patent in which they did exactly one experiment - put a magnetic needle inside a common gel, hit it with magnetic radiation, and measured how much water was expelled from the gel when the gel collapsed as the temperature inside the gel was increased by the rotation of the magnetic needle in the oscillating magnetic field. From this one, very very lame experiment (totally useless for any kind of practical application and very much with precedent in the scientific literature, so it wasn't even a new idea), they claimed patent protection over all types of devices of delivering all types of molecules using any type of electromagnetic radiation (from radio frequencies to microwaves to UV) -- and their claims were approved! So, it seems as if patents are less about how good an idea you have or how cleverly you can convert a concept it into a useful product and more about how good a lawyer you hire. I think we have a pretty good idea, but it will be depressing if we run into the iceberg of this patent.
- You may have remembered that a few posts ago I was bubbling over with excitement over a consulting gig which was going to pay me real money for doing fake work. Well, easy come, easy go. The company terminated their research contract with our lab without notice by sending a letter to the research contracts office and freezing the accounts - nobody from the company contacted me or, even more appallingly, my supervisor explaining why the funds were withdrawn. Our lab is probably going to sue the company for breach of contract (and quite rightly so - how can you actually plan staffing levels and equipment purchases if things just get pulled without warning?), and one of the post-docs in our lab has had her project terminated (six months of work down the drain), so I am hardly among the most inconvenienced. Yet another "real-life" lesson I guess!
- I enjoy lists of "new words" that people have come up with. The annual "Word of the Year" awarded by Merriam-Webster is always entertaining ("truthiness" is such a perfect word for how politics work now), as is this classic list which, although it apparently has nothing to do with either the Mensa society or the Washington Post, is still entertaining. In that spirit, I would like to add an additional term based on my experience here at MIT: "ideabarfer" (n): a person who, without being asked, insists on "advising" you by spewing every possible idea that anybody knowledgeable in a field would naturally suggest and then, after you choose a particular path and troubleshoot all the problems to execute it, demands credit for his/her brilliance". The beauty of this term is that it works on multiple levels because after this process is complete, you yourself feel like barfing. I now avoid talking to one person in the lab entirely to avoid being "ideabarfed" (the verb form of the term). Tell your friends - maybe it'll catch on!
- Sad news right here. What will I do now when, regardless whether I am writing a paper, small group leader's notes, a grocery list, or my extensive collection of baseball draft notes (beware Pandas!) Clippy will no longer pop up and tell me "it looks like you are writing a letter. Can I help?" I would really love to know what Word document could be designed which doesn't look like a letter to our pal Clippy. New or non Word users, sorry for this unrelated rant.
- Quick poll: (a) how much would you pay for a complete, five-season DVD set of your favourite sitcom of all-time? (b) how far would you drive to attend a fantasty baseball draft? I already am quite confident I know the answer to both of these questions, and that the answers will not speak highly of my sanity, but humour me.
- Continuing on the baseball theme, I just purchased my MLBTV subscription for the 2007 season - $89 for every baseball game played this season on web streaming (awesome deal!) I have a great system rigged up here where I can run the games off my computer and then pipe them into my TV, so it's just like watching them on cable (albeit slightly fuzzier). Baseball fever has already gripped New England (indeed, it had as soon as the Patriots lost in the NFL conference final), particularly with the arrival of their new Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka to the Red Sox spring training complex. I guess when somebody pays $51 million for the privelege of talking to you, you should expect some major press... however, this was beyond anything I had ever seen. The local channel did a breathless, minute-by-minute review of "Dice-K"'s arrival day, from the SUV he brought to the complex (it was black, he was driving, with a single passenger) to his fashion choices (black t-shirt with chopped-off sleeves and khaki shorts with sandals - very casual but "ready for business") to his first throwing session (he was throwing roughly as hard as I would throw warming up for softball), complete with mechanics analysis on the telestrator. I love baseball, but people here really need to take a chill pill.
- Finally, I was at a somewhat cool event last night - a choreographed laser show set to the music of U2 at the planetarium here in Boston. I love U2 in general and the laser work was really quite excellent, although it did kind of make you a bit disoriented when you went to stand up after the show. I went with a friend from Queens, NY who told me she was surprised I suggested going to such a show based on her experience in New York City at a similar show, where apparently roughly half the crowd was intoxicated in some form (and, although I have never have nor ever will ingest any narcotic in my life, I can see how all the waving colours of the laser would make for a pretty wild time in that state). However, the Boston crowd was amongst the most sedate and normal crowds I have ever seen at any event. It reminded me of the contrast with subway schedules between the two cities- New York's subway runs all night, Boston's shuts down at 12:30PM. New York is "The City that Never Sleeps"; Boston is "The City That Goes To Bed Early So It Can Get Up Early To Go To Work". Yet another reason I like living here.
