There is that...

As promised, today is New England Events Day!  Or, for this first one - a chocolate tasting event - perhaps "snobby cities events day" would be more acccurate.  Perhaps this chocolate tasting afternoon more than ever outlined the difference between MIT and Harvard to me.  I suspect that such an event at Harvard would consist of several nattily-attired snobby persons standing around with magnifying glasses, examining the chocolate and making sophisticated small-talk regarding the unique bouquet of aromas resonating from the cocoas.  However, we are at MIT and, as such, rely simply on the evaluating the evidence in front of us, making a hypothesis, and testing it.  We were actually given a booklet describing what the different chocolates were (probably about 100 chocolates in all on display), so I will summarize for you the most important facts I read/observed and the experiments I subsequently undertook:

FACT: Chocolate contains over 600 volatile flavour molecules reminscent of mushrooms, fruit, wine, nuts, flowers and spices
FACT: As fine chocolate melts in your mouth, it actually cools your mouth as fat crystals melt and absorb heat from the body.
FACT: Pure chocolate bars should have a radiant sheen
FACT: Between sampling different chocolates, you should cleanse your palate with sparkling water and/or a neutral food such as crackers
HYPOTHESIS: Who on earth cares, there are several pounds of free chocolate to eat on the table!
EXPERIMENT: Eat copious quantities of chocolate (in a systematic way of course)
RESULTS: Pure cacoa is almost inedible... love the milk chocolates.
CONCLUSIONS: Chocolate is good.

Second interesting activity was a true New England special - candlepinning!  Candlepinning is essentially a cross between ten and five-pin bowling.  The pins are narrow cylinders and are arranged in the same geometry as 10-pin bowling pins... the ball is roughly the same size although a little lighter than a 5-pin bowling ball.  The differences between candlepinning and bowling which I noticed are two-fold (1) it is almost impossible to get a strike - the pins are so narrow, you don't get the same pin-on-pin action when you throw a good one (I only got one strike in 20 frames,
much less than my typical 5-pin performance)  (2) any fallen pins are not cleaned up from the lanes between throws in the same frame.  This leads to some truly fascinating shots such as the one which one of my friends used to defeat me in our first game.  I was up by two points and he was down to his last shot, which ended up being a gutter ball which hit the gutter about 2/3 the way down the lane.  However, one of the fallen candlepins was overhanging the gutter and was contacted by the gutter ball, launching the stray pin up into four of the still-standing pins to vanquish me in a pool of tears (really, it was very emotional for me... I don't like losing) :)  In another frame, he again hit a gutter candlepin, sending it into the adjacent lane and knocking down three pins for the person bowling beside us (who was, of course, thrilled).  Kind of a neat game though.  This is actually just one of many things (most of them less unique than this) which I have been doing to keep myself sane on weekends with a really fantastic group of friends here from my church who, like me, enjoy doing "lame" activities such as board games, classic movie nights, and pastry road trips (some awfully good stuff around here, let me assure you!) - it's been great to have them around!

Tomorrow: The FINAL INSTALLMENT OF MEGA-BLOG... the long-awaited Blogging Truancy Excuse #3 (it's a good one, you'll want to come back for it!)

Red Sox mania is in full swing, and for good reason - a 10.5 game lead on the Yankees in May is definitely cause for celebration.  To give you an idea of how nutty people are for the Red Sox here, MIT runs a discount ticket office for students, employees and even much-maligned affiliates such as myself.  Generally, if you want a ticket to something, you just go to their central desk and pick it up.  For the 1800 Red Sox tickets they had acquired (and, just to be clear, you still have to pay face value for them - this is just for the privilege of paying for them), they had to run an on-line lottery to "prevent incidents" of people in line.  I can see an MIT brawl now... watch the glasses and the pocket protectors fly!  Duck, here comes a calculator!  However, to my enduring bitterness, I lost the lottery while an Israeli post-doc colleague who knows nothing about baseball won... sigh.  However, through the questionably legal pathway of ticket agents, I did acquire reasonably priced tickets to see the Jays game a couple of Mondays back at Fenway, so I guess it turned out OK.  Fantastic game too - the Blue Jays won 7-3 and I was heckled by the standing room only creatures for cheering for the Blue Jays with the insanely creative chant "Go Leafs!" (give that guy a Pulitzer! - of course, I guess he thought the hockey comment would be the ultimate insult to a Canadian).   However, I think the funniest exchange was a text message conversation we were having with my Bible study leader.  After the game, we wrote something to the effect of "And, lo, on the first day, the Blue Jays shall defeateth thy Sox - Fenway 7:3 (with the chapter/verse representing the score) - I thought I was pretty clever.  Then I got his reply... "Evidence for the fall".  Nicely done.

Last time I posted I asked two theoretical questions, whose answers I will now discuss:  (1) I decided that 17 hours round trip driving to attend a fantasy baseball draft in person was, shall we say, unwise (particularly when Skype worked so brilliantly until the final round of the bench draft... I blame the lack of communication capacity for my stinker pick of Pedro Feliz).  However, despite an incredibly slow offensive start (and a still wretched batting average), my team (the MIT Geek Squad... seemed appropriate) is now bobbing between third and fourth place and not completely embarrassing itself.  Assuming a couple of my team members who have decided to forget how to hit (I'm talking to you, Garrett Atkins and Carlos Delgado) rediscover their abilities, I might not break down in sheer sorrow prior to the All-Star break.  On the other hand, if worse comes to worse, I can always just slide over on the ESPN website to play... Fantasy Fishing!  Seriously.  (2) I determined that $150 was a reasonable price for the entire 137 episode collection of Get Smart episodes, only the finest sitcom ever produced.  I have only watched about a dozen episodes so far - it is interesting how many wildly politically incorrect lines are included which would cause the heads of today's censors to simulatanouesly implode, but the comedy is pure gold.  Favourite lines so far: "Max, if it will make it easier for you, I'll take an 8D" and "If I didn't know any better, I'd think that was an electric snake!"  Yes, I realize that out of context these excerpts are completely incomprehensible... but trust me, comedy gold!

Tomorrow: Unique New England Experiences!

OK, time for excuse #2 regarding blogging truancy - taxes! (no, no, this is actually interesting... don't lose me now...
wake up!)  Let me preface this by saying that I am one of those strange people who typically enjoys doing his taxes - I am actually interested in what the government values (i.e. what you get tax credits for doing) and feel a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling doing my part to pay for stuff I like, for example roads, schools, sewers, R&D, and hospitals (you know, all that useless stuff we could easily afford by paying for it ourselves).  However, this year truly sucked all the enthusiasm out of me.  Believe me, the only thing more fun than doing your taxes in one country is doing your taxes in two countries with three different tax codes (yes, the rules for Massachusetts and the United States are ENTIRELY DIFFERENT - not even your calculated net income is the same - woo hoo!)  Turns out that, for tax purposes in 2006, I was a resident of Canada, Ontario, Massachusetts but not the United States... this year I will be a resident of Canada (despite not actually living there a single day), Massachusetts and the United States (not Ontario), while in 2008, I will be a resident of (wait for it) Canada, Ontario, Massachusetts and the United States.  Now, I realize that this means I have developed the extremely impressive ability to live in two places at once (to my Hamilton friends - little did you
know I was still living in your midst, bruhahahaha!), but it does make taxes an absolute nightmare.  Most of this is
actually MIT's fault - in order to reduce the amount of work they needed to do to appoint me (a "foreign scholar"), they
told me to acquire a NAFTA TN work visa instead of a normal J1 work visa, which means that the United States considers me a "resident alien" for tax purposes (I would be a non-resident alien - love that name, makes me want to run out and buy fake antennae or something - if I was on a J1 visa and therefore exempt from all the American tax silliness).  Suffice it to say, if any of you ever do this kind of move, talk to me first and I can give you some pointers on these things!   The best part of it all is that I did not make a single dime of income from a U.S. source (not even bank interest) and yet still have to pay taxes here on my worldwide income because "that's what the Americans decided" (makes sense to me!).  Anyway, it took me forever and required a fascinating 1.5 hour conversation with the IRS (talk about a bunch of fun-lovin' people!) but I think I got it reasonably correct (we will see when the assessments start filing in).  Very valid blogging truancy excuse though, believe you me.

And while we are on the topic of sad things about the United States, here's another - none of my American friends has any clue what a butter tart is... terribly sad, I must import some next chance I get.

Tomorrow: "Baseball and Classic Sitcoms!" (the theme is very clear I think)

Today, I will describe two silly discoveries I have made which, if widely distributed, would effectively ruin my credibility as a research scientist even before I had a chance to build it up.  Fortunately, I suspect nobody is reading this blog anymore, so I can spill it for you.
 
DISCOVERY #1: IF YOU GIVE SOMETHING UNPLEASANT A FUN NAME, IT AUTOMATICALLY BECOMES FUN - I have been doing a lot of biocompatibility experiments recently which essentially involve growing some cells in plastic wells, adding a material I have made, and then waiting four days and checking what percentage of the cells survived the presence of the material.  It's essentially a very crude way to filter out the really tragic materials before actually injecting or implanting the material into an animal.  These experiments are real ordeals - they each take several days since you have to count and plate out the cells, feed the cells (they are hungry little guys), sterilize the materials (typically 20-30 different materials per experiment), load them into syringes for injection, apply the materials (about a five hour process over which you have to remain sterile the whole time), and then assay for how happy the cells are after a pre-determined time period (a four-step, timed process which requires you to donate a full day of your life to science).  So, the bottom line is that this is a tedious and very work-intensive process which is not normally something you would look forward to.  In response, I decided that if I gave the experiment a fun name, I would be happier about doing it (half jokingly believing this at first).  I settled on "Cellapaloozah", which not only rolls nicely off the tongue but also evokes memories of a fun party atmosphere which requires narcotics to truly enjoy.  However, both myself, my undergrad slaves, and my other lab co-workers genuinely did enjoy the experiment much more by joking about it all day (somebody else's undergrad slave actually asked if she, too, could take part in Cellapaloozah seeing as how fun it was).  I have since kicked the fun up another notch with the sequels (note the Roman numerals, gives the whole thing some extra gravitas I think), "Cellapaloozah II: The Return of the Fibroblast" and "Cellapaloozah III: The Bupivacaine Boogie", which premiered just this Thursday (PS 1 - early box office returns suggest that Cellapaloozah III is a hit so far; PS 2 - if you understand either of the subtitles, you are just as much of a geek as me) :)  Try it, it's fun!

DISCOVERY #2: CELLS NEED SOME LOVING TOO - We were having trouble growing fibroblasts, cells found in connective tissues which are normally child's play to culture.  We changed the media, cleaned the incubator, bought fresh cells... and still had no luck whatsoever.  So, out of actual scientific ideas, we repeated the experiment and wrote "good luck little guys" on their growing flask.  Guess what - they grew!  We decided to experiment a bit by switching to happy faces instead - life was still good!  Scientifically, we then shook it up and experimented whether button or point noses were better - either way, the cells were happy campers.  For two weeks, any cells we cultured with a happy face on their flask grew while cells without happy faces died... it was absolutely creepy, and to this day we have never figured out what was going on.  So, the bottom line: just like people, cells need a little encouragement from time to time :)  

Tomorrow: "Blogging Truancy Excuse #2!"

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.

Just got back from a Super Bowl party (part of my immersion into American culture), and, in celebration of seeing all the big Super Bowl ads in their entirety for the first time without having to endure 2.3 million Global promos for My Name is Earl or something, thought I'd share with you this video combining the two passions of Super Bowl weekend - commercialism and having way too much time on one's hands.  Also, it involves chemistry, which makes me particularly excited about it.  I will be back (hopefully later in the week) with something more substantial, but in the meantime, enjoy:

 

Also check out the other videos if you are so inclined - the dominos experiment is also pretty impressive.

Apparently, 7 million Americans (roughly 5% of the country's workforce) will call in "sick" tomorrow with "Super Bowl Fever"... tempting to continue the immersion project, but alas, my mice are calling...

So, seeing as I apparently received zero page hits the last three days thanks to the ever-popular blog.com view counter, perhaps it is time to post an update (if only to validate that I indeed do still have friends :).  As opposed to the typical scenario, when I do not post because I am lazy, I haven't posted for a while because I feel I have nothing terribly exciting to share.  The "routine" of Boston life has really set in this month, which is not a complaint at all (indeed, I quite like the routine) but has limited the potential for exciting news.  But, here it goes anyway:

- Probably the most exciting thing that happened was that I was responsible for giving the lab seminar last week.  Typically in academia, lab seminars are cosy little gatherings of 10 people or so; however, in our lab-on-steriods, they are fully catered extravaganzas in a lecture hall with a crowd of 70-80 people, including my "official" boss, who will probably win a Nobel Prize in the next 5-10 years (he's won every precursor prize to the big one).  Since I have arrived at MIT, I have talked to this "official" boss for a sum total of approximately 3 minutes - 1 minute complimenting his four-storey beachhouse in Cape Cod, 1 minute about the weather, and 1 minute over approximately six sightings exchanging pleasantries in the hallway or in the bathroom (sidenote: don't you hate meeting people whom you know in some sort of supervisor-employee relationship in public bathrooms?  It is just a weird vibe for some reason).  So, it was kind of nice to force him to listen to me talk for 50 minutes for a change.  However, "listen" may be a strong word - I think I had his full attention for around 2-3 minutes, with the rest of the time being devoted to Blackberrying (sidenote 2: perhaps the most socially destructive device ever designed by mankind) and getting up and down from the Mexican buffet table to fill and empty his plate.  Although that sounds quite unimpressive in terms of my allure as a seminar speaker, 2-3 minutes is approximately 1-2 minutes more than he typically listens to seminars, so I was pretty happy with that.   The better news is that I got a ton of questions and interest after the seminar and I think I earned some more respect in the lab.  The grad students in particular are fairly snobbish about universities (i.e. if you didn't come from an Ivy League school or some place like Johns Hopkins, they assume you are an inferior intellect), so it was good to inject some McMaster propaganda into the mix.  The other fun thing about the seminar was that the seminar organizer is also a Canadian (and a very proud Canadian at that).  As a result, the promotion e-mail he circulated regarding my seminar included the phrase "although I would much rather listen to a talk about the impact of recent NHL rule changes and the importance of maple syrup on national security, the actual topic of the talk will be...."  So, not being one to let a perfectly good Canadian propaganda setup pass me by, I opined at the outset of my seminar that I felt the new NHL 4-on-4 overtime rules had added some much-needed pace and excitement to the extra frame and shared that my uncles actually make maple syrup in the sugar bush around our house every year and have yet to be convicted of a crime, so it seems to work just as well as anything (sidenote 3: I only barely managed to avoid mentioning the Iraq war and how it could have been prevented by maple syrup - still a little bit of a touchy topic around the U.S. of A. :)   I also enjoyed that the guy responsible for ordering food intentionally ordered Mexican because, seeing as we had a Canadian seminar speaker at an American school, Mexican food was required to fulfil NAFTA requirements.

- I have also just hired two MIT undergrads (one materials engineering freshman and one biology junior) to be my slaves, er, I mean "academic collaborators" (must be more careful with this whole terminology thing).  I interviewed 7 people for two positions and learned four interesting things in the process: (1) MIT undergrads have the most ridiculous resumes I have ever seen - not only are they top of their class in high school but they were also swim team captain, chess club captain, yearbook editor, student council president, and moonlighted as district school superintendant  (2) about half of my interviewees had a total absence of social skills to accompany these resumes  (3) I eventually found out that I didn't care a whit about their answers to my questions but learned a lot from their questions about my ramblings - definitely a useful interviewing technique for the future when I actually have to pay the people I choose  (4) I got the feeling that most of the people I interviewed didn't really know why they were there - that is, they didn't seem to be particularly passionate about not only the research but also their entire courses of study, more or less going through the motions of padding resumes.  I think I picked out two pretty good ones from the unch (I am really excited about my freshman hire actually - very impressive interview) but it was a much more difficult process than I was anticipating.  I will be spending most of my next two weeks training my recruits (also known as "ensuring that they don't break things or at least avoid breaking things to a non-fixable level") and, after that, hopefully they will ease some of my workload.  I now have seven projects I am working on, which means since I started working in the lab in late August, I am picking up an average of 1.4 projects per month.  I'm no business analyst, but I am guessing that is an unsustainable pace (otherwise, by the time my post-doc is done, I will personally be involved in every biomaterials project now underway on the planet).  The good part about it is that it is hard for me to get too bored because there are always hundreds of different things to do, so I can't complain in the least.

- After my informal rabbit wrestling match pre-Christmas, I got to do my formal "rabbit handling training" to extend my animal portfolio from its firm rodent base (even though it must be said that rabbits are technically not rodents, which surprised me for some reason).  As you might expect, rabbits are a little more interesting to handle than rats or mice and are actually very poorly designed animals - you can apparently break a rabbit's spine very easily by picking it up by the scruff of the neck (the proper way to lift a rabbit) but failing to support its disproporationately heavy rear end.  The things you never thought you would know....  However, I was at least happy that we don't work with these rabbits - one kick from those guys and it may be emergency room for you :)

- I've also had a chance to do a bunch of little fun things.  I was at a New England Patriots playoff party last Sunday when they played the Colts for a trip to the Super Bowl.  Two observations: (1) it is very weird for me to attend or watch a sporting event where everybody there except me was very passionate about the outcome.  I typically have some emotional connection to the result of the game I'm watching (i.e. either a Toronto team is involved and/or one of my fantasy baseball pitchers is starting).  However, although I do legitimately like the Patriots, I also like Peyton Manning and the Colts, so I got more of a chance to be an "interested observer" instead of rabid fan (or as "rabid" as I get anyway)  (2) if you ever need to get popular fast, buy a digital projector.  Everybody loves them, nobody (except me I guess) has one - it's the magic of "big screen, big sound".  I ask you: how else would you have crammed 16 people into my tiny apartment in Hamilton for, of all things, a Canadian election party?????  (sidenote: visuals of Peter Mansbridge on a big screen lay waste to the claim that "bigger is always better").  Unfortunately, the Patriots lost in a very exciting game, so the Super Bowl next week won't be nearly as fun to watch as it would have been otherwise.  I also went to a free Boston Symphony Orchestra string quartet concert today (very nice) and caught the Raptors game when they were in town at the strangely named TD Banknorth Garden (yep, that is TD as in Toronto Dominion... you can't really ever leave home I guess).  I think I was one of approximately 3 Raptors fans in the entire arena, but they won and I was not pummeled by psychotic Celtics fans, so things worked out quite nicely there.

- Interesting, totally random, and probably useless to you fact: if I was a Japanese citizen living in Sweden, I could purchase Canadian mutual funds; however, if I am a Canadian citizen living on a temporary visa in the United States, I cannot do so.  Why?  Nobody seems to know, except that "those are the rules" (I love it when people tell me that :) 

Although it's been said many times many ways - Merry Christmas!  I am headed back to Haliburton via Kingston tomorrow afternoon (with a pit stop in Syracuse) and will be heading back to Hamilton on January 2, at least staying until early afternoon on the 3rd, possibly until the morning of the 4th.  So, if you'll be around during those times, drop me a comment or an e-mail and hopefully we can get together (I might not get back to you until the new year though, no internet access at home).  

Hope you take some time to reflect on the reason for season amidst all the busyness of Christmas.  

PS - Jason tagged me, so in the spirit of the season, here it goes - add your thoughts to any/all of these categories in the comments:

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Hot chocolate hands down - tell me, who initially sat down and postulated "you know, drinking a liquified egg would just be great!"

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? Santa just leaves them under the tree (probably just a coping mechanism - could you imagine the labeling system required to pull his job off otherwise?)

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Coloured - variety is the spice of life.

4. Do you hang mistletoe? Negative.

5. When do you put your decorations up? Last week of November/first week of December - not before!  They stay up until just after the New Year

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?  Got to be the turkey stuffing... my mom makes excellent stuffing.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child  Probably receiving my first Majo kit, which was a city-assembly toy which kind of became popular in the early-mid '80s and then just disappeared.  It was all set up when I walked into the living room (I think my dad had stayed up for a couple of hours putting it together) and it was pretty great.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? Honestly, I have no idea... seemed to happen pretty organically as I recall... apparently I wasn't too traumatized by it (I tend to be an outcome-driven person, so if the presents still arrived, I was fine with it).

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? No way.  Good things come to those who wait.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?  Lights first, then garland, then balls, then ornaments - we get one per year, a tradition started by my grandmother and now carried on by my parents (it is all documented when each ornament arrived).

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? Depends on whether or not I have to shovel my parents' roof off.... last year, three feet of snow plus inch-thick ice layer = five hours of good fun.  On the bright side, when I was done, you could just walk up the snow pile on to the roof at one place (ladders?  Who needs 'em?)

12. Can you ice skate? I can skate really well (one year of figure skating training!); stopping on the other hand... well...

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? As a kid, my own Ernie doll - I was a big Ernie fan (of Bert and Ernie fame).  More recently, the 3100+ piece New York City 3D puzzle... four days of glorious fun.

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you? The real reason for the season for one; also, considering I have been a moderately nomadic student/hired slave for the past nine and half years, getting to go home is great.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? Hmm, tough call... a tight race between mincemeat tarts and sugar-jam cookies (they are rot-your-teeth-out-of-your-skull good)

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Putting together Lego originally and now a puzzle on Christmas Day afternoon - every year as long as I can remember.

17. What tops your tree? A star

18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving? Honestly, I am more excited about people opening my gifts to them (particularly if I thought of something cool for them) than opening my own gifts.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song? What Child is This? (although I also love "Sleigh Ride" on the more frivolous side of things - most fun song to play ever.

1) Our building at MIT is currently under construction (at least parts of it - our floor is largely unaffected but the floors above and below ours are being completely gutted to rebuild new labs).  As with any construction project, there is of course some periodic noise, but (outside of one hour about a month ago) the noise level is hardly that troublesome, certainly not enough to really change your plans on what you were doing.  Actually, the normal noise from the lab ventilation systems is probably as loud or louder than the construction noise.  However, my supervisor complained and demanded MIT do something to compensate us for our (lack of) troubles.

Quiz time: MIT's response to this demand was:
(a) reschedule construction to occur only during off-hours (although, to be fair, our lab's "off-hours" would be hard to define)
(b) move people who are particularly bothered by the noise to temporary office/lab space
(c) express regret, but plead helplessness about the situation
(d) purchase the ~90+ research and office staff on the floor their own iPod nanos together with top-of-the-line ultimate noise-suppressing earphones (estimated retail value $130 + $120 = $250), to be returned after the construction is over.

If you picked (c), you are a realist.  If you picked (a), you a creative insomniac.  If you picked (b), you are sane.  If you picked (d), you are right.  So, as of today, I am now the proud temporary possessor of a 2GB iPod nano to help me survive the "intolerable noise" I have noticed for one hour over the last three months.  MIT's motto: "no problem is to big that it can't be solved by spending thousands of unnecessary dollars buying overpriced and underutilized electronic equipment".  I have never shaken my head so often and so long since my last conversation with James :)  However, at least my lab mates found the response to be as truly ridiculous as did I (although, like I, they were in no position to look a gift horse in the mouth).  Here's what I want to know: who will want my used headphones when I have to return these gifts after they have spent 11 months stuck in my ear?  Truly odd.

2) Actual radio ad today in Boston (and said in a total tone of seriousness, it must be noted): "WBOS invites you to join us to experience the long-awaited return of Richard Simmons, live in Boston!"

My immediate response:  the "long-awaited" return of Richard Simmons?  Long-awaited by whom exactly????

Yes, I am catching up on the whole blogging thing again... it's kind of like when you tape (or PVR or TiVo depending on your level of technological advancement) a TV show and then don't have time to watch it for, oh, say, two weeks or so.  Anyway, all that pent-up blogging is about to be released, buckle up:

1) Thanksgiving only comes twice a year - OK, I promised the Thanksgiving story, teased you even, and then.. silence.  So, here it goes.  Brett, Courtney, Ashley and I decided to make an American Thanksgiving dinner (seemed like the appropriate thing to do... when in Rome and all) and, as the household with the dishwasher and the kitchen which can comfortably fit more than one person, I volunteered my place as the preparation venue.  First the good news (1) I won (with Courtney) in Trivial Pursuit, although it was perilously close (it took us TEN (yes, that's one-zero) attempts to get our arts and entertainment pie... very sad... all I can do in that category is just wait patiently for the inevitable CBC question) (2) The meal was great - I did a roasting chicken and dressing, which I must (as an unbiased observer) say was juicily scrumptious (I rock on poultry - and after dissecting rats, the whole neck removal/cleaning process seemed WAY less gross than previously), with the rest taken care of by the Wilson/van Veller clan.  Here is a picture of the teamwork you want to see happening on such an event - Brett and I lifting the bird out of the roasting pan prior to my slice and dice job. 

And now, the bad news.  I have a garbage disposal (or, as it is known to select persons among us, a "garberator") in my kitchen sink (not the bad news in and of itself, but stay with me here).  Having never had access to one of these contraptions before, I am extremely tentative in using it (almost scared in fact) and have thus restricted my use of the garberator to disposing of rice I've soaked off the bottom of my rice cooker pan.  Brett and Courtney, on the other hand, grew up with a garberator and thus have no fear in dumping vegetable peels, meal scraps, small appliances, etc. down the chute and letting the grinding begin.  However, here's a helpful note to those of you who have garberators at home: never drop a whole uncooked sweet potato down the chute.  Why you ask?  Well, your sink backs up and, when your dishwasher empties out, you end up having to apply teamwork of a very different kind:

We managed to keep the kitchen from flooding (by about one inch or so in water height... phew) and the apartment fix-it man took care of it the next day, so all is well that ends well I suppose (more pics here, more for the benefit of the Wilsons whom I am told are avid blog readers).
 
2) I am Premium... for one afternoon - The other nice thing about American Thanksgiving is that virtually everybody goes somewhere else for the weekend... so, if you are sticking around the city, you get your own version of "Thanksgiving leftovers".  I lucked into some very nice leftovers this year when the drummer on our worship team was heading home to Texas for the holiday and just happened to have four Premium Club Boston Bruins tickets to spare.  Here is, as he told me later, his thought process for offering the tickets to me: 1) Todd is Canadian  2) Therefore, he must like hockey.  Stereotypical?  Yes.  But correct.  The seats were amazing - right behind the local cable channel's intermission studio (the side of my head was on TV - I can't tell you how difficult it was to shop the next week with hundreds of people stopping me to say "hey, you're the guy whose side of head was on TV!") behind the Boston goal with tall, padded seats and a bench top table in front of us to support our free (!) food and beverages.  Although I realize that it is bad form to comment negatively on free things, I have to give at least a small critique on the very strange mix of free food provided at the Garden - nachos with cheese, waffles, brownies, and - wait for it - fried cream cheese.  Yes, that was not a typo - fried cream cheese.  Unfortunately, the subsequent required emergency coronary bypass surgery was not provided free to Premium Club members.  The game was a bit of a stinker (5-2 Boston loss to Carolina) but you can't quibble with free.  I actually ended up spending the rest of the afternoon touring Boston with the lab tech I work with at MIT who came to the game with me - it was kind of neat to get to know somebody you work with in a very different environment.  We ended up catching the lighting of the Macy's Christmas tree, which was a bit of a bust really (it really can't hold a candle to New York's tree lighting event) but still a legitimate "Boston experience".

3) Sister in the house - Ainsley came down to visit for six days, which was a lot of fun.  I think we did a fairly successful job of seeing the entire city of Boston over the one weekend I had off (although she discovered Newbury Street, the fancy shopping district, by herself, which is actually good given that one of my "rules to live by" is "never go shoe shopping with a girl, in particularly Ainsley").  In two days, we managed to visit (1) The Museum of Science (including the BodyWorlds exhibit which was at the Ontario Science Centre last year - real bodies which have been "plastinated" and posed, showing the actual muscles, nerves, and bone structures as they would be oriented while doing specific activities - really interesting, although I got a bit obsessed with finding the sciatic nerve we use to do nerve block experiments on our rats in each specimen)  (2) The New England Aquarium (very fun - particularly the Deep Ocean Tank, which featured sharks, three very cute turtles, and (my personal favourite) three yellow-and white speckled fish who just did laps in a group for the entire five hours we were at the aquarium... we dubbed them "the boys" and checked in every so often to make sure they were still going at it... the jellyfish were also pretty amazing)  (3) a classical music concert featuring one of my friends from church who is a professional cellist (really good actually)  (4) dinner at Ye Olde Oyster House, America's oldest continually operating restaurant and frequent haunt of J.F.K. (amazingly good)  (5) desserts at the famous Mike's Pastry Shop in the North End (also amazingly good)  (6) a walking tour of downtown Boston and Cambridge (always fantastic, although we didn't make it to my favourite spot, Beacon Hill... next time).  I very much enjoy being a tour guide, so it was a lot of fun.  We also caught the Bruins game during the week, which (ironically enough given my Premium Club access the previous week) we watched sitting in the VERY LAST ROW of the TD Banknorth Garden (and I mean last - the back of our seats was the concrete wall of the arena).  My, my, how the mighty can fall so quickly... but the game was WAY better, decided in a shootout and ending in a Boston victory despite Ainsley's cheering for Tampa Bay "because they were cuter". 

4) Animal Wrasslin' - My lab work is still moving along nicely - I am now completely done experiments for my first paper from my post-doc, which I think will be reasonably good (we have a nice story and, even better, understand why things worked as they did).  My materials were, last week, used in a rabbit experiment to try to prevent adhesions between the peritoneal wall and the intestines following bowel surgery and was found to be amazingly (and surprisingly) bioadhesive, which is very interesting and potentially very useful (although the actual peritoneal adhesion prevention result was, although hardly disasterous, not a home run).  We have also finally figured out how to miniaturize our drug delivery membranes so we can test them in our oscillating magnet, which is very exciting (we already know they work if you heat them up in a water bath instead of using a magnet).  If that works, we will implant our device in a rat and see if we can numb and, uh, "un-numb" the leg of a rat by applying an oscillating magnetic field on the rat's leg.  I am getting kind of excited about this project as I see it come together - this has a huge potential to make a big difference to people with chronic joint pain, potentially allowing them to trigger the release of anaesthetic locally by just holding a magnet to their joint for a short period of time (great, that is, as long as you aren't wearing a pacemaker).  I think there is definitely potential for patents/very good papers for me out of this too, which would be a nice side-benefit.  I am getting deeper and deeper into the lab though... I am now working on six projects (yee!), am co-writing two grant applications for February (one as kind of the primary scientific guy), and am about to recruit my first full-time undergraduate slave, er I mean, "research assistant", so things are definitely picking up.  On the other hand, doing animal research definitely keeps you humble... over the last week and a half alone, I got in a wrestling match with a 10-pound New Zealand white rabbit while we were trying to fix his bandages (I won, although the decision was closer than you might have expected) and (in our last nerve block experiment) handled three rats which, on average, generated 3-4 poops per test cycle (which takes about three minutes and is repeated 7-8 times over the course of a full experiment).  As a chemical engineer, I am seriously tempted to try to work out the mass balance on these rats to figure out how that prodigious waste production is even possible, but the proof is in the pudding (pun not intended) I suppose.  I am a little relieved actually that all my animal work is done for the time being (i.e. tested and dissected) and, as of Wednesday (knock on wood), all my cell work should be temporarily finished, which means I can head home for Christmas without having to worry about any babysitting duties.  Actually, I think that working with animals is very good preparation for real parenting... feeding, constant attention, and cleaning up the toxic waste (we will certainly leave the dissection part out of the metaphor though).

5) Geek Alert I: A couple weeks ago, I got sucked into purchasing a "lifetime subscription" to live streaming internet satellite television, which advertised access to several Canadian TV stations.  Although somewhat skeptical given that the provider would not let me know which 3000 channels you supposedly get access to until you actually sign up, I was sufficiently interested in attempting to get access to Raptors games without paying NBAtv's $179 annual fee (I like the Raptors a lot, but not that much) that I bit.  Turns out that among the roughly 20 Canadian channels included in the package, the only one I had even HEARD of before was CPAC, the Canadian Parliamentary Access Channel.  Now, normal people would be fairly upset at life at this point... I, on the other hand, was actually kind of pumped that I would get to watch the Liberal leadership convention a couple of weekends ago.  I can actually remember watching the convention where Jean Chretien beat Paul Martin for Liberal leader back in 1991, at which point I was (doing the math)... well, 13, and I have been a bit of a convention junkie ever since.  Actually, when you subtract the 90% of the time where people are standing around and/or waving banners and chanting for no apparent reason, political conventions are some of the best pure theatre you can get on TV, and this one was also pretty sweet.  I am actually pleasantly surprised by the choice of Stephane Dion, who has always struck me as an intelligent and (for a Liberal anyway :) very principled person who is willing to do something risky if he thinks it is right (see: Clarity Act).  The next election is shaping up as pretty interesting, with two (and potentially three, if one includes the somewhat intriguing Green Party) relatively decent party choices led by actually intelligent people - a rare confluence of events indeed.  This is in sharp contrast to my opinion of the result had Bob Rae won (considering the first time around was such a rousing success, who wouldn't want an encore, only on a larger scale???)

6) Geek Alert II: Saw this on a shirt at MIT - if you can figure out what it means, you really belong down here.  Feel free to share your guesses (and rationale for the guesses) in the comments - I won't explain it unless somebody at least tries :)

 

7) Church Stuff - I am definitely feeling more at home in my church here.  I led my first small group this past week (it was like old home week after doing the Philpott group for 2 1/2 years) and have been to a Christmas party and a games night over the past two weekends, both of which were quite fun.  It's not quite the level of connectedness I had at Philpott just yet, but I definitely feel like I am "in the loop" now, which is definitely a nice feeling.  They are now trying to recruit me to lead a small group in the winter, which I am not sure I have time to actually pull off in addition to my other MIT and church commitments with worship team etc., but I have definitely noticed a pattern in that jumping into doing things really has a huge payoff in more ways than one, so we'll see what happens. 

8) A Cultural Experience - Periodically, I miss the last bus out of MIT back to my place and end up walking home through Cambridge's Central Square, which has been termed by one of my co-workers as "slightly scuzzy".  This is, of course, "scuzzy" only by Cambridge standards, which is really not that scuzzy at all (car break and enters are considered "major crime" here).  As a result, I am totally comfortable walking through at virtually any hour of the day.  However, this past week, I had an interesting encounter which backed up the "slightly scuzzy" label.  I was stopped by a black man trying to collect money for a "racism prevention" centre in the Downtown Crossing area of Boston to "fight" the philosophies of Louis Farrakhan, a Malcolm X contemporary who (according to the guy trying to convince me to donate) "pledged to destroy the white race in a pool of blood" (a quote which I cannot find any credible evidence for, although Farrakhan is on record as stating "white people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet" and "murder and lying comes easy for white people").  He handed me a well-worn laminated photocopied sheet "describing" the organization and claimed this was "the last night" for such donations to be received.  Now I would not give any money on the street to any organization I had never heard of, let alone the $50 he was trolling for to an organization whose goals I was sensing as somewhat questionable, so I tried to extract myself from the conversation by playing my "starving student" card (mostly true) despite sympathizing with his stated goal to "end racism".  As a walked away, the guy heckled me and told me to enjoy the bloodbath to come in which I would presumably be dismembered by the Farrakhan nation along with all the other white people in America.  I think I would ultimately view the experience as equal parts scary and oddly amusing, but it does point to something I have most certainly noticed since arriving even in this supposedly "enlightened" corner of the United States: racial tensions are very, very real (even here in Boston, the cradle of the anti-slavery movement) to an extent I have never even begun to experience in Canada.  Two examples (1) after approximately 30 trips to the local Shaw's grocery store (roughly equivalent to Loblaw's/Fortino's), I have NEVER been served by a non-black or Hispanic worker (to put that into perspective, Boston is demographically a more predominantly white city than Toronto or even Hamilton); (2) in our lab of 70 people total, we have 7 Canadians as well as Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Israeli, and (insert country here); however we have ZERO black or Hispanic scientists.  There is a real economic divide and, particularly with the black population, what seems to be a very deep-seeded, historical bitterness which provides a very different vibe from the Canadian experience.  I think this is one instance where, even given our obvious historical advantages in terms of slavery, Canada has clearly done a more proficient job at erasing many of the boundaries between the races, particularly among the younger generation.   

9) Rant:  At the risk of repeating myself, I was out Christmas shopping north of Boston last weekend and am more convinced than ever that Bostonians are the worst drivers on the face of the planet.  During the thirty minute drive (covering an uninspiring total distance of approximately... three miles), I was nearly in ~18 accidents, none of which were remotely my fault.  Based on this experience, I now present a (not) actual transcript from a typical driving examination in Boston:

EXAMINER: "OK, let's get started.  Turn on the car"
EXAMINEE: "OK dude" <examinee proceeds to try to insert the blunt end of their house key into the cigarette lighter>
EXAMINER: "Congratulations, here's your license.  Drive safe!"

Never again will I complain about Toronto drivers... until, of course, I do, but at least then I will appreciate their relative average sanity.

OK, here's my new year's resolution: same volume of blogging, better distribution of blogging.  If you survived up to here, congratulations, you have way too much time on your hands :)