RAHC update

Let’s see how the RAHC is coming along, shall we?


Okay, this is really just an excuse to show off a picture with my new digital camera, a beautiful 4 megapixel number from HP. My parents are upgrading, and while they liked this camera a lot, it didn’t take repeated pictures fast enough for doing the wildlife photography that they enjoy (and are, I might add, extremely good at). You might get a few more pictures in this journal from here on in. This is much better than old pictures of the RAHC I've taken and showed in this journal before (here, e.g. – though the crane adds a certain visual interest that the black tar paper, or whatever it is, doesn’t.)

New paper (again)

The final version of my "loss of giant neurons in scyllarids" paper is up at Arthropod Structure and Development (requires institutional subscription to Science Direct). Yes, I know I was telling everyone about that this was available as a pre-print less than two weeks ago, but this is the final version, with proper citation information and everything.

And it feels good. :)

Not for the faint of heart

CBC Radio Host Peter Gzowski once did a feature on Morningside about the reluctance of people to discuss just how much they made. This reticence seems to continue even when those salaries are in the public domain -- as they are in this university. That's right, you can find out how much everyone makes at my institution -- including me! -- here. I'm not listed by name, but if you know the department and the job level, you can pretty much narrow down what anyone is making to a very small range.

For an assistant professor in biology, it is somewhat depressing reading.

In a fit of masochism, my colleague Mike and I were trolling through the figures, looking for highs and lows, and it doesn't take long to realize that we're in the wrong business. (The wrong business if your main goal is to make money, anyway.) There are assistant professors (my job level) in the College of Business Administration who are making more than many full professors in their own department. Needless to say, they're also making more money than full professors in other colleges (including, needless to say, my own department). That just strikes me as wrong. Why are people in business worth so much more than other faculty? I mean, are they responsible for educating that many more students? Are they creating new knowledge? Are they really in that much demand elsewhere?

More projects completed! Huzzah!

The paperwork has been signed and our Department Chair got copies, so I finally get to welcome Dr. Anita Davelos to our department. Anita was hired in the genetics position we've been advertising for. She'll be bringing some expertise on the genetics of bacteria to the department, although her own research focuses more on ecology than genes.

Just so you can prevent personal embarassment if you should ever happen to meet her, her last name is pronounced with three syllables, not two. It's "Da-vel-los," not "Dave-los."

To paraphrase some classic Uncanny X-Men covers, "Welcome to UTPA, Anita. Hope you survive the experience."

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In other good news, I finally packed up the last manuscripts for "my" special issue of Journal of Comparative Physiology A today. This will be an issue containing papers based on the "Mechanisms of behavioral switching" symposium I organized last year for the Animal Behavior Society meeting. One reason this pleases me is that at the end of the symposium, the participants did a bit of "soul searching" on whether it was worth talking about neural mechanisms at an behavioural meeting, because attendance ran low near the end of the day. If it was kind of a misguided place to hold the symposium (and I'm not convinced it was), having all of the papers together in one place will make bring it to the audience that maybe wouldn't normally attend a meeting like ABS.

But just to give you an idea of scientific efficiency... I had 8 speakers at the original symposium. Two declined to present manuscripts, saying they were too busy to write them. The symposium was August, and the original deadline was January for receiving the manuscripts. I won't mention how many of the six authors made it, but let's say it was nowhere near all of them. Sigh. However, many harrassing emails and extensions have gotten three-quarters of the authors to get their papers in. I'm looking forward to seeing the final thing in print, as always.

It seems like such a cliche, doesn't it? Professors being bright, but disorganized and not really good with deadlines.

Hello Internet, I missed you while you were gone...

Something untoward happened to power somewhere on campus, which left me email-less, web-less, and generally bereft of all manner of the 'Net for most of the day. The shaking of my hands is now slowly starting to subside.

Meanwhile, I managed to get a "letter of intent" for a grant off yesterday. This will be the third for this particular foundation I've submitted. So far, I haven't even been asked to fill in a full application form. Will the third time be the charm? We shall see. Stay tuned.

Bring on the dancing... robots

Science fiction isn't what it used to be, because we live in a science fiction world. It seems like pretty much everything that was once the domain of that genre has either been done, or is being done. Compare the communicators on Star Trek to you average mobile phone; the Trek communicators couldn't even take a picture!

This morning, reading this story in New Scientist reinforced that view. Sons has an experimental robot called QRIO, and is making the rounds, and I must say that those demos are danged impressive. In particular, this movie (you'll probably have to save it to your hard disk; right click your mouse and choose "Save as...") is a sight to behold. Four robots dancing.

Robots, and how humans will relate with them, is one of the classic themes of science fiction. One need only look at this summer's release of I, Robot (based on Isaac Asimov's classic book). The ad campaign for the movie is a very clever imitation of the sort of real ad that Sony might have for its QRIO robot.

Just like cloning mammals arrived sooner than most people expected and left people scrambling for how to deal with the situation, I'm starting to think that we'd better start doing some serious thought about the legal ramifications of robotics.

I hate forms!

Arg. I send in a travel application, requesting a trip to go to Bethesda to attend a short course by Cambridge Electronic Design. I ask for the university to take pay for the travel using funds I was awarded from a Faculty Development grant. I get back... nothing. Is it approved? It is not approved? It's a mystery.

Anyway, without an “okay” to remind me, I forgot to check into the travel arrangements. They are, of course, sitting on the travel officer’s desk, and they’re waiting for me to book flights, etc. Of course, now that it’s closer to travel time, the flights are going to be more expensive... Argh. Argh. Argh. Yes, it’s partly my fault for not checking sooner. But still... why does so much information stall on other people’s desks?!

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Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles!

We have a new ice machine! And it seems to be working!

Of course, getting the ice machine was not without its trials. They were having some issues about putting in filters for the water, so they wanted to order some new filter holders. Turns out that in the time it took to order the machine and get it here, the holders for one of the filters went out of production. Yes, one last absurdity of the slower than slow process it takes to get anything done on this university.

No joke

Today was a good day because:

1. Nobody pulled any significant April Foolery while I was around.
   
2. I managed to do an experiment with a student.
   
3. The temperature has been rather cooler than this time last year. Fingers crossed that it stays that way for as long as possible.
   
4. The preprint of my paper is up, as I mentioned in an earlier post.
   

Announcing a great advance in science!

April Fool's! It's really just my new paper, which, though I'm pleased with it, is a modest advance in science.

If your institution has a subscription to Science Direct, you can now read a preprint of my newest paper on-line, here. Click on "Articles in Press, and you'll see an entry by "Faulkes, Z." I encourage downloading the PDF for purely selfish reasons: on the journal's main page, they keep track of the most downloaded papers for the year. And yes, I'm vain and enough of a shameless self-promotor to want to try to create a "NeuroDojo effect" to push my paper way up there in those ratings!

Ye merry job hunte

Apparently, two of our four positions are about to be filled. The candidates have indicated that they're about to sign on dotted lines, which is refreshing news indeed.

Meanwhile, I'm now in the hardest par of the day: the last three quarters of an hour until my 5:45 p.m. class (groan). It's tough, because I've been here all day, pretty much the last few people hanging around in the department have left (if they didn't leave long ago). You're just left with time to kill, really.

Project: Searchlight

Okay, so our department is trying to fill five tenure-track positions this year, and I'm chair of the Search Committee. We started four of those searches back in fall, where we did reviewed CVs, did phone interviews, on-site interviews, the whole shebang. So far, we've had two of those positions where we extended the job offers and the candidates said "No." So we're not quite back to square one, but in one case, we're almost back to square two. As Marvin the Martian once said, "Back to the old drawing board."

I'm not sure what's going on with the other two positions. I think offers should have been made, but no word on whether anyone has signed on the dotted line yet.

And because our fifth position was created late in the game (in January), we are just in the middle of trying to get applications finished now.

We could be at this all summer.

In press / Sense of triumph

I finally fixed my photo problems for my upcoming paper in Arthropod Structure and Development. So I can now tell you the full citation information for my next research work:

Faulkes, Z. (2004) Loss of escape responses and giant neurons in the tailflipping circuits of slipper lobsters. Arthropod Structure and Development 33(2): 113-123.

The digital object identifier (DOI) is 10.1016/j.asd.2003.12.003. Accept no substitutes!

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I feel a fantastic sense of triumph in identifying my very first word in today's Target puzzle as the often elusive nine-letter word. Sometimes, I rock.

Up there Cazaly

I was never a sports fan until I lived in Melbourne. But enthusiasm really is contagious.

Melbourne is arguably the most sport-mad city on the face of the planet. Put two teams in uniforms, and people will show up for it. And Australia rules football is the Melbourne game. I caught the bug while I was there, and now footy (as it is otherwise known) is the one sport I actively follow. I decided to become a Melbourne Demons supporter, because I thought of myself as living in Melbourne rather than one of the many suburbs with their own team. (Fitzroy, where I was living, had merged with Brisbane some years before I lived there). Now, I may be the only person in the lower Rio Grande Valley to watch the footy games shown on Fox Sportsworld. Even though they show the games almost a week after the fact, not live. Even then, I probably still don't qualify as a real footy fan, since I only watch the weekly hour-long highlight show.

I bring this up because this is a much anticipated weekend in Melbourne: the start of the new home and away season. This article examines how footy takes over the minds of people for half the year. I note with a sense of relief that a neurobiologist is one of them.

For my part? "Go the Dees!"

A day in miniature

Here was my Monday: Get up. Teach. Teach. Break. Meeting. Meeting. Meeting. Teach. Go home. Excercise. Bed.

That was the week that was

A very odd week, by all accounts. And since I'm doing the accounting, I get to declare that it was odd.

It was a week where I either got quite a lot done or very little. I'm still not sure. Every time I turned around, it seemed as though some thing or other would leap into my field of view and demand attention.

The best example was on Wednesday, when I got an "urgent" email to revise some figures for a paper I have coming out in Arthropod Structure and Development. Someone at the publisher's emailed me, saying that two of my figures weren't reproducing properly, and that they needed new, revised copies right away if this article was to go into the next issue of the journal, which is scheduled to "go to bed" next week. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon making the changes, and emailed them back. I promptly got an auto-response email saying, "I'm away from my desk, and will be until next week." I love the irony of someone declaring this to be urgent but not being there to deal with it. In fairness, though, someone else at the publisher did check the email and let me know they'd got one of the figures.

I was also a bit nonplussed that after a week's break, I didn't see any of my Honors students until Thursday. And there's one I still haven't seen since the break. Note to myself: light fire under butts of students.

In my capacity as Search Committee chair, we've also started the process of looking for a fifth position. Which means more folders to make, more forms to mail, more phone interviews, more travel arrangements, and so on. Assuming we get any applicants, of course.

And because I don't have enough to do, I'm working with a group on campus that is trying to put together a so-called RIMI grant (short for "Research Infrastructure at Minority Institutions"). I'm going to try to write up a request for a confocal microscope, a very useful (but still very expensive) piece of kit for a biologist to have.

And yesterday was day five away from the office this year. I went and tried to find some new clothes. I got to feel guilty about being away from the office and feel guilty about spending money all at the same time. It was really awful. I had the worst feeling that something bad was going to happen because I was away from the office. Okay, not "Universe about to collapse" bad, but maybe "small section of university turned into piles of rubble" kind of bad. (Yes, my sense of self-importance is that over-inflated.)

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Let me take the opportunity to welcome Christopher Eccleston to the role of Doctor Who. To the best of my knowledge, I've never seen anything he’s done, which is great. It’ll be wonderful to experience the role afresh, with no per-conceived notions as to how someone’s going to play it.

Good luck, mate. You'll need it.

"You get what you pay for" and "That aching feeling in my bones"

Last weekend, I went out of town for two days after I'd bought some crayfish from a local grocery store. I only paid $4 for the lot, so I thought this was a bargain. Turned out of the 30 I bought, one lived until today. So, by mid-week, I ordered some more crayfish from a biological supplier. Ordered about 24, and only 1 died. But this time, I spent over $70 dollars.

The sad thing is that on a "cost per crayfish basis...", only a couple more from the grocery store would have had to live for it to be more economical to buy them there than from the biological supplier.

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Meanwhile, by yesterday afternoon, I was wondering why my legs felt stiff. Didn't stop me from going excercising last night. But when I crawled into bed, I thought, "I recognize this feeling. I'm getting sick, aren't I?" Ack! And I was on the money -- I feel fairly woozy, and am alternating between slightly hot and chilly. It's a pity, as I was thinking of going out tonight, but I don't think that's going to happen. I'm just hoping I've recovered before my 7:45 am class in two days time.

Breaks

You go away for a couple of days, and what happens? 28 crayfish die in their tanks, raising a substantial stink. Buying from the local grocery store was a mistake I shall not make again. I'll buy from scientific suppliers instead. Unfortunately, our secretary's out until tomorrow, so I won't be able to order until then.
Nevertheless, it was very nice to up the days away from my office to three for the year. I went off to Austin and got in touch with my inner geek and played L5R at a tournament there on Saturday. Fared very poorly (ranked 55 out of 71!), but it was a good break even so.

Now that I'm back in the office, I'm working on a short introductory article for the special issue of Journal of Comparative Physiology A I'm working on. Also have many things to be done relating to the Search Committee. Still, the lack of classes has given me enough flexibility in my time that I was able to finish calculating and filing income taxes yesterday, go to the optometrist today and get new contacts and the first new glasses I've had in at least 8 years.

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This news piece is the sort of thing that you expect to see in a comedy routine...

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A few days ago, I mentioned Bernard Pivot's questionnaire with regards to my least favourite word. Here, as I suggested I might do, are the rest.

1. What is your favorite word? Facetious.
   
2. What is your least favorite word? Incentivizing. Thank you, Belinda Stronach for introducing such an unnecessary and unneeded awful word!
   
3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Seeing other people turned on. Seeing other people excited about what they do brings out more energy and excitement from me. (I think this question, and the next, are about the toughest questions in the set.)
   
4. What turns you off? Boredom. It's easy to be disinterested in anything, and people do it all the time, because "the world bores you when you're cool."
   
5. What is your favorite curse word? Bollocks!
   
6. What sound or noise do you love? The sound of ice cubes cracking when you drop them into a freshly made tumbler of iced tea.
   
7. What sound or noise do you hate? Ringing mobile phones when I'm giving a lecture.
   
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Science, to some extent, gives you a chance to do many professions at once. I would probably be a non-fiction writer, or be involved in publishing. But of course, being a scientist means that's one of the things I do anyway, so I'm not sure if that's a legitimate answer.
   
9. What profession would you not like to do? Police officer. We had a lot of RCMP officers as family friends when I was younger, and while I have great admiration for what they do, I don't envy them the job.
   
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? "I never knew that [insert famous discovery by ZF here]..."
    

Wet Mars

One of the big news stories this week is the announcement (long suspected) that there was once free-flowing water on Mars. Of course, coupled to that announcement is the inevitable speculation that Mars could have once held life as we know it. I wrote the following bit in 1996, when the announcement of possible Martian bacteria had just been released. It was published in The UFO Invasion (Prometheus Press). My chapter, "Is intelligence inevitable?", concerned whether, once you had life, evolution would push invariably organisms to become ever more complex and eventually yield smart beings (aliens, in other words).

"There is a more depressing side to the announcement of possible past Martian life, however. Mars may be an entire biosphere that has gone extinct. We find living organisms living and often thriving in our planet's most hostile locations, so terrestrial life appears marvelously tenacious and resiliant. There is no evidence of life on Mars now, suggesting that if life originated on the red plant, it never managed to get a toehold: No macroscopic organisms, no increasing complexity, no smart Martians carved out by the forces of natural selection."

Replace "life" in the first sentence with "water," and it still sums up my attitude. It's also one of my favourite passages from anything I've written to date.

Crabs rule!

An army of monster crabs is on the march, crushing everything in their path.

I'm serious.

You can read the whole story here. Click here to appreciate just how big these are. (Of course, that silly Neil Gaiman would go and spot it first...)

Crabs rule.

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Meanwhile, things are starting to calm down after the madness that was February. After the last search was over, I topped off the month with a mad karaoke binge on the weekend. (Can one song be counted as a binge when you've never done it before?) But no matter, the recommendation memos are getting written. We still have to see who ends up here, since there's negotiation that could fail, people could accept other job offers, and so on.

Samba science scores second

Click here for a story of how Brazilian dancers merged art and science.

The candidates have left the building...

Job candidate #8 got sent off without incident this afternoon. Huzzah! I'd like to think the end is nigh, but I know there's still work to be done. Recommendations to write, paperwork to gather -- and the part that is no fun -- writing four emails telling people that they they were not the selected candidate.

Rather tired most of today. I woke up at 5 a.m. couldn't get back to sleep, so was sitting in my office around 6:20 a.m., working on the morning's lecture. I came home a little early this afternoon and promptly fell asleep for an hour or so.

Seven gone, one on campus...

I took job candidate #7 (of eight) for position #3 (of four) to the Harlingen Airport yesterday. No major problems with this interview -- hurray! Our eight (I hesitate to say "last") job candidate arrived on time and safely yesterday, so things are looking good for a smooth interview today.

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Some weeks back, a friend advised me to look up at the night sky. Earlier this week, I finally did get a glimpse of a beautiful night sky. There was a crescent moon, and Venus was just a few degrees to the right of the moon, glowing brightly. It was just dark enough that no other stars were visible. Marvelous...

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Most thought provoking comment this week (so far), from ABC Radio's show The Buzz: "I maintain that mobile phones are really the learning tools of the future, that we are going to see pretty much all learning take place around the world through this communication device because teaching and learning is basically a communication process."

This was part of a fascinating interview about how younger people ("digital natives") have dramatically different ways of doing things than older ("digital immigrants"). You can read the transcript here or go to the main page to listen in Real Audio.

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I found a new reason to go back to Canada today: Belinda Stronach. I'd like to go back to Canada to vote against her. I couldn't support anyone who uses the word "incentivizing," which she did repeatedly on CBC Radio's show The Current this morning. I think that just displaced "prioritizing" as my answer to "What is your least favourite word?' question on Bernard Pivot's questionnaire. (Maybe later, I'll post my answers to the other nine questions.)

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Oh yeah, I had a birthday this week. Not enough people brought cake. Rather anticlimactic day, in fact.

Six down....

...Two to go. Our latest faculty candidate was apparently loaded onto a plane this morning without incident. We are now 75% done our on-site interview schedule! That's six accident free interviews -- a fact of which I am inordinately proud.

The other two major things I did today was to run a short faculty meeting related to faculty searches, and attend a meeting on research at UTPA. The research meeting was surprisingly... promising. It's not exactly been a secret that we have had problems with research here. The infamous ice machine saga has been one that I documented at some length in this journal. So a few of the biologists, myself included, showed up loaded for bear. We were vocal.

One of the people in the meeting, though, was a gentleman who is responsible for implementing a new computer system that is pretty much going to run UTPA. And although it took him way too long to get to the point, ultimately he got around to saying that pretty much every procedure in the entire university is being torn apart and reworked from the ground up. No more physically carrying paper around from building to building for signatures; we'll be able to send this requests through electronically and and track where requests and orders are. If something is sitting in someone's office for a week, we'll know -- sort of like tracking a package when FedEx ships it. Should be brilliant if it works as advertised.

Not only that, but I found 55 cents in the return slot of one of the Bio department vending machines! Woo-hoo! (Probably happier about that than I should be, but things like that have always made me smile.)

Other things that make me smile? Ice cream. The sound an ice cube makes when you put it into ice tea on a really hot day and it cracks. Godzilla toys. (I got this one Mechagodzilla figure on a bottle cap recently that I love. It's molded in translucent plastic that looks black, but if you hold a light behind it, is more a smoky grey. It looks sooOOOOooo cool. The picture doesn't do it justice. I was having a major geek out about pulling this out of the box because it’s one of those “can’t see what you get until you buy it” toys.)

Lest anyone think this was a good day, though, let me balance that out. I've spent most of the week mad, and yet again, anger bit back. I was reaching around a cabinet to pick up something, with a little more force than strictly necessary, and caught one of my rings on the bottom of a cabinet drawer. Ouch! My poor students got a very loud Irish curse. I am cultivating what is sure to be a lovely bruise on my ring finger. Less drastic than when I messed up my back the last time I got mad, though.

But I think I gave a pair of great lectures today. I seem to lecture really well when I’m angry.

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People unclear on the concept: “You remember that? How do you remember that? Do you study?” (heard in hallway outside teaching lab).

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More lines I'd like to use in a movie: “I’d rather French kiss a moose.”

Games scientist play

The techno-savvy among you may have heard of "Googlewhacking": trying to find a query on the massively popular search engine Google that produces exactly one webpage. (I actually produced a Googlewhack a couple of days back -- but, to my chagrin, can't remember what the search was.) Now, biologists have their own version: Pub-Med whacking. Pub-Med is a huge biomedical database much used by folks in my field.

Clearly, "whacking" is due for a new entry in the OED. (Incidentally, their "Word of the day" feature is free, and fun for those who love words. My favourite new word that I learned: "stour," meaning conflict or uproar.)

Lines I’d like to use in a movie

Occasionally I find myself wishing I wrote fiction. I think of good lines, and wish I had a great movie scene to put them in. Today’s line I wish I could put in a movie is:

“Don’t thank me. The knives in the back are thanks enough.” (Variation: “The knives in the back are their own reward.”)

Money

Hey, did I mention that I got a memo yesterday informing me that I'd been given some money to attend a short course on electronic equipment in Bethesda, Maryland in April? About $1,200 in fact. That, plus finishing the proofreading on my latest manuscript, were about the only two bright spots in an otherwise (|>@& day. I'm pretty good at getting small internal grants. I wonder why I keep bombing on the external ones?

Five down, plus mountains and molehills

Our fifth (of eight) job candidate finished her interview today, and was dispatched to the airport without incident. Which is good, because I really didn’t want to have another incident.

Turns out that today’s candidate was having difficulty walking due to a knee injury. I didn’t know this until she arrived on Sunday. On Monday, we try to make some arrangements to book one of the University’s golf carts that they have for visitors. I call the Dean’s office, and the secretary contacts Visitor Services, who says that we have a cart reserved and that there’s no special authorization needed to drive it. I get there this morning, and I get told that you do need to be authorized to drive the cart.

Fine. There's a student who can drive the cart, so I ask for her to be our driver for the morning.

The person in charge also informs me that she wasn’t there yesterday (good for her, having a workday away from campus; my total remains at one for this year), and admonishes me for not calling in advance. (Somehow, our phone calls from yesterday didn’t count because she wasn’t there, I guess. Not that we could have phone earlier, since we weren’t informed of the need earlier.)

Fine.

Get the cart, take it over to the Science building, and the candidate is already in her first meeting. We leave instructions for the staff that the driver will come back to pick up our candidate and take her across campus for her next meeting with one of our Associate Vice Presidents in our administration building. After some time, I get word that the candidate is still in that office, and that she needs transport back to our building. I phone Visitor Services phone number as listed in the directory, and it doesn’t work. I phone back to the administrative office asking them to phone, because I can’t reach the number. After a few delays, our candidate is back in the building.

Just before the seminar, I am informed by the Chair of our Department that the Ass. VP our candidate met with was mad that we didn't make arrangements to have her picked up, and emailed the Dean about it, and was asking that I apologize to our job candidate.

Fine.

I can deal with people complaints about me made by people without any knowledge of facts or circumstances. I apologize to our candidate after her seminar. She had thought little of it. I write an apology and send a bunch of copies to the Chair, Dean, and Ass. VP.

I did manage to finish proofreading my latest article today. I am so pleased to see my words professionally typeset and soon to be in a journal again. I answer a few more emails and make a few lecture and note revisions, and do a few more search committee things.

“Work harder!”

So far today I have given two lectures on cellular respiration; walked over copies of job candidates' CVs to administration; arranged a golf cart for our job candidate who has a bum knee; wrote a draft course outline for a new class I want to teach (titled "Sex") while the curriculum committee was meeting (not an optimal strategy, but this is the price you pay for trying to relax on Valentine's Day weekend); searched for and revising a proposal for a "Neurobiology methods" course I want to create (again, while the curriculum committee was meeting); packed up and mailed two manuscripts to the Journal of Comparative Physiology A from contributers to my ABS symposium; issued ultimatums to authors who missed the deadline for their Journal of Comparative Physiology A symposium manuscripts (few things cheer me up like writing an ultimatum); talked to one of my Honors students about his research project; did a first proofreading of my most recent manuscript in press (yay!); set up a quiz for a student who couldn't take it when he was supposed to; and am just about to meet with our job candidate, then go to a social mixer for her; collect ballots for the department's choice of job candidate for two positions; and teach another lecture tonight.

I think brushing teeth and eating lunch were in there somewhere, too. Maybe even applying deordorant. I'm not sure.

Valentine's Day

There's nothing wrong with being Hindu, but today, I'm glad I am not one: "Hindu nationalists who claim they are fighting against Western cultural influence have threatened to shave young lovers' heads and beat them if they exchange Valentine's Day cards and gifts." (My emphasis. Spotted in The Age. Also worth reading down the page for the story of the quarter million dollar speeding ticket in Finland. Go socialist democracy!)

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Meanwhile, I spent part of the day at uni preparing for the arrival of job candidate #5 tomorrow and trying an experiment (unsuccessful; I think the tissue was too far gone).

Halfway done

Job interview #4 of 8 is now completed. Two weeks down, two to go.

Correlation does not imply causation (but...)

The building my department is located in has three floors. Chemistry occupies the top floor, and Biology takes the bottom two. My colleague, Scott Gunn, recently moved his office space from the second floor to the first. On his way out today, he commented, "It's a ghost town down on the first floor after 2 pm." Not like that on the second floor; people are hanging around considerably later. Intrigued by this, I felt compelled to point out an interesting correlation between activity levels and the faculty occupying those spaces.

Number of teure-track faculty on second floor: five.

Number of tenure-track faculty on first floor: zero.

Make of that what you will.

Three down...

Apparently our latest job candidate was delivered to the airport on time. That's three through the interviewing pipeline with no broken bones, lacerations, or contusions. Only five more on-site interviews to go...

Advice

One of my colleagues, upon learning how much is going on around me, advised, "Go out, look up at the night sky, and try to remember the awe and wonder of it all." I thought that was good advice, so I tried that last night.

It was cloudy.

"You have got to be kidding me..."

"...another candidate didn't come in on the plane last night?" No joke. I come in, expecting our thrid job candidate to be at uni, and instead open an email from his SO saying that his flight out of his city of origin was delayed and he was stuck in Dallas last night. He's scheduled to arrive at 11:58 am. This is rather inconvenient, since he was slated to give his job seminar two minutes later. I somehow doubt that we could get him from the airport to the UTPA Science building in two minutes.

To paraphrase Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge, we are improvising, adapting, and (hopefully) will overcome. Rescheduled the seminar (though I worry about how many faculty will be there). Will see what we can do about everything else.

With two out of three candidates arriving late, I am seriously not liking these odds for dealing with the remaining five job interviews. I don't really want to have to go through this grief two or three more times this month.

;;;;;

Additional: It's now 2:15 pm. We had rescheduled the candidate's seminar for 2:30 pm. There has been no sign of him on campus, nor word from the faculty member who was supposed to pick him up from the airport. If he doesn't make it here PDQ, I don't know what we'll do. Probably have to invite him back for another visit, I reckon.

I should be freaking out, but that would take energy, and I already used up that before lunch.

;;;;;

Even more additional: To my great relief, our candidate actually showed up in time for his seminar. Whew! The poor guy, though, got about the shortest on-site interview ever. I think both he and we will be hoping that there aren't bad impressions resulting from short interview, which were nobody's fault.

Another day, another dollar... ^*

Here I am. In my office. Again. Working on lectures. Devising questions. Writing harassing emails. Checking animals.

Earlier today, I found an old poster I made at the start of my grad school days at UVic. It proclaims:

SCIENCE

knows no bedtime!

The text is printed against a window looking onto a nighttime moon, surrounded by icons of clocks with digits spinning off the face, file cabinets, computers, and the like. The image looks a little clunky, which is not surprising considering that I made it on a Radio Shack Color Computer and a graphic package called CoCoMax 2, and a dot-matrix printer. (I compare it to what I work on now and laugh at people who say there's no such thing as progress.)

Finding that poster seems oddly appropriate, as I was earlier tallying the number of days I haven't been on campus this year. It didn't take me long: one. That was the first Saturday after the New Year. I wasn't on campus Christmas, or the first Saturday after Christmas... I can't quite remember the last day I wasn't here before the Christmas break. Note to all grad students out there: the grass ain't much greener after the degree and the job offer, sleep wise.

I think I'm going to keep a running total of that "off-campus days" number. Out of sheer masochism. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my work, but splud! My advice to follow and future Assistant Professors: the most important word you can learn to say -- with absolute and utmost conviction -- is "No." Add curses and/or threats if necessary.

* A saying that sometimes feels dangerously close to financial reality.

Better

Spent a good chunk of the day doing some nerve recording and even running a pilot experiment with my Honors' student, Gloria. This was a good thing. My three other Honors' students (Anna, Nisha, and Marco) are chugging along on their projects nicely; Gloria's had to go onto the back burner for a while, and then it turned out what I originally envisioned was technically more challenging than expected.

Two down, six to go

Received confirmation that we got our second job candidate of our eight back home safely. We're 25% done, and still injury free!

Ghosts

Lord Morpheus has a long memory.


Last night, after the fairly difficult day of dealing with a late candidate (among other things), I woke up at 3 in the morning, driven awake by dreams. Not nightmares. Not exactly.

I am not, by nature, a nostalgic person. Nor do I normally remember my dreams. But my mind dragged out some old memories from my head. Memories that are tied into some very intense but not-very-pleasant emotions. And my mind decided to put those memories into my dreams. And I wake up in the middle of the night with that sort of sick tension that feels like someone has reached into your ribcage and squeezed. That tension followed me around a lot today, haunting me. I had a long drive to and from South Padre Island to pick up some animals for research, which has the unfortunate side effect of giving you too much time to ruminate.

Why is this in my research journal? I'm not sure. I can try to justify it as a proof that yes, I have an emotional life and not just the rational one that dominates my day-to-day job. Maybe it's an attempt to appease the Dream King? (Though he is subtle, and I know not what pleases him.) Or maybe to exorcise the ghosts?

With so many things going on in my life, one thing I often desire is something that no person can give: a good night's sleep.

Strays

Okay, I am now officially freaking out.

Got a phone call last night around midnight from Mike, the Search Committee member who was supposed to pick up our latest visiting candidate. Plan was late. Candidate's not on the plane.

Check email this morning. Candidate misconnected due to bad weather. Phone call this morning: airport shuttle is running late. Get another phone call: plane running late. Now 15 minutes before seminar begins...

.... Oh, could it be? Sounds like the candidate is actually on campus now!

More reasons for a crummy month

The sand crabs I collected last week all died. That was my own wretched fault, however. One died, and I didn't clean it out in time, and once one starts to decay, it starts a rather unpleasant chain reaction. I'll just have to go back to the beach sometime soon.

On the plus side, we've just about finished interviewing our first (of eight!) job candidates without mortally wounding him. I cannot speak to any psychological trauma at this time, however. (That, I say, that’s a joke there son!) Our second candidate arrives later today. And this keeps up for three more weeks.

How crummy is this month shaping up to be?

Pretty crummy.

I came in yesterday, but didn't manage to get much done. This morning, I forgot my lecture notes at home by forgetting to pocket my memory key. The computer crashed twice in the middle of my first lecture this morning. The university won't pay for anyone to take our job candidates to lunch or dinner. And I managed to send off one of my colleagues to pick up our first job candidate about an hour before he was scheduled to arrive. Still not sure how that happened. I'll be pleased if we're able to get the job candidates through here without mortally wounding any of them.

On the plus side, my nice computer was fixed -- after two months of messing around and waiting. This, of course, meant the day was basically shot reinstalling software. Which meant I was not very productive.

I so want this month to be over.

;;;;;

Edit (9:39 pm): And the aikido class at my gym got cancelled. Not just for tonight, but very probably for good. And the reasons why it was cancelled do not bode well for the gym in general, which looks suspiciously like a money grab.

It bites. I'd only been there for a couple of months, but I was enjoying it and going regularly. Now, if I want to continue training in aikido, I'll have to make a much longer drive.

Bugger, blast and damn.

Quick trips

It says something when the most relaxing part of your day is hopping in a car and making a 90 minute round trip on a busy highway. That was yesterday, when I zipped out to collect some animals from the Coastal Studies Lab. I fetched a lobster I'd ordered earlier for one of my students, and mucked around in the sand pulling out some pearly sand crabs, including the biggest individual of the genus (Lepidopa) that I had ever seen. I'll have to take a picture of this critter, it's huge compared to its relatives!

Also speaking of trips, our first job candidate -- of eight -- arrives in two days. There are two job interviews a week, every week, for February. Still, as Search Committee Chair, I'm pretty proud that we're movng these candidates through at such a good clip. Even if I do fall down from nervous exhaustion sometime in the month.

Although I must confess, I've been experiencing weird combinations of nervousness and boredom lately. I sort of feel like a truck stuck in the mud: expending a lot of energy, but not necessarily managing to move in the direction I want. My plans to put in a grant application to the US Department of Agriculture got bogged down -- I just won't have the time to finish it. I haven't had a chance to work on a manuscript in a while. I keep having to remind myself that I accomplished something this month: first action potentials recorded, new ISN website, apparently a successful faculty development grant, and maybe a few other things.

Not for the weak of stomach

I couldn't help myself when I saw this news story. I just had to click the link to "Whale explodes in Taiwanese city." I mean, you've got to be curious, haven't you?

;;;;;

One of the wonderful things about being in a university are all the meetings. We had a departmental faculty meeting Tuesday, and today we're having a college faculty meeting. One of the things I'm actually looking forward to hearing is that the Coastal Studies Lab is actually starting to get attention from administration, which will only be good for me.

Small pleasures

Any day you can shake a vending machine to squeeze out two creme-filled chocolate cupcakes on some other sucker’s quarter... is a good day.

Today was a good day.

Money talks

Hey, I got a raise this month! I’m not sure how I managed it, or what formula they used to calculate it, but I managed to get a merit increase based on last year’s work. The down side is that I think raises are normally given in September, but nobody got a raise then due to budget cutbacks. Ah well, as the song says, “It’s all part of the game.’

What you want is not what you've got
You can work 'til dawn but when will it stop?
You can take time off but never get caught
It's all part of the game

"Money Talks," Saga

I can't talk, but I'm going to Washington anyway!

The bad news is that what started out as a cold on Saturday has morphed into what may be the worst case of laryngitis I've ever had. An ambitious group of viruses or bacteria seem to have taken up a happy residence in my vocal cords. when I talk, it sounds like somebody's run my voicebax through a cheese grater. I can barely talk. I am so glad I don't have a class to teach today. Yesterday, I had three, and I think it pushed the situation from bad to worse. Tomorrow's lectures could be... interesting. But the show, as they say, must go on.

The good news is that my department chair just let me know that my recent faculty development grant application is being recommended for approval. If all goes well, I'll be attending a short course on the Spike 2 software I use in April, right before the Experimental Biology meeting.

Culmination

A lot of hard work is starting to make its presence known on the internet, as the various routers update the ISN link to its new domain. It was quite a thrill to be able to type in "neuroethology.org" and finally see the redesigned website load. I'm real pleased with how it's come out, though there's still a lot more to do. Hop over there; it's pretty cool. Oooh, and if you reload the page, you'll get a different picture...

“You can be replaced!” Part 2

Last week, I made note of the “robot scientist.” Here’s another news story about it. I feel this one is noteworthy for exposing some of the attitudes some researchers have in this quote:

“We’ve had robot scientists for a long time now,” jokes Chrisley. “But in the past we’ve always called them grad students.”

Replace “robot scientists” with something like “robot janitors” and “grad students” with any ethnic group (Hispanics, say) and see if you think that’s funny. Long hours, no fringe benefits, little job stability; yeah, that’s hysterical. Work conditions for junior researchers are such that more than one writer has compared some senior scientists to plantation owners – business thrives thrives only because of a cheap, voluminous workforce that doesn't get too uppity. Sadly, I’ve heard that senior scientists do have that attitude. I’ve been fortunate not to have any in my career, probably because I’m in one of the scientific backwaters where things are a little less competitive and not as fast-paced.

;;;;;

I’m felling better now, if you’re curious, though still not back to normal. Still have a sore throat and cough.

Bleck.

My body's punishing me for something. Whether it's that I was hanging around people smoking cigars last night, or that I missed excercise, or that I spent to long at Tico's (local resto) way longer than I should with a bigger meal than I expected, or that I'm working too hard (ha!), I don't know. But I did not sleep well last night, have a sore throat and generally feel a little woozy. The Halls Icy Blue lozenges didn't help at all, but the Cool Berry Fruit Breezers seem to have done the trick.

I'm not going to stay at uni very long today. But I am spending a little time on my way back from Wal-Mart (where I picked up the aforementioned helpful Fruit Breezer lozenges) to set up some classroom technology stuff. I'm doing a pilot project using something called CPS, which should be cool. It's a wireless polling system that lets you survey people on the spot – anonymously, which is important in these big classes, so people don't feel like their being singled out. Anyway, I cam in to install some software and such, then realized that a good chunk of what I wanted is on my desk at home. I'll have to do it tomorrow or Monday. I have to come in for a meeting with one of my Honours students Monday (*) anyway, as much as I would love to stay home and watch the Godzilla movie stompathon on the SciFi Channel.

Also, the new International Society for Neuroethology website should be going live Tuesday. I'm really happy with how it's coming out. It's a major improvement over the previous site.

* Note to those outside the United States: this Monday is a federal holiday.

Time waster of the moment

I really wanted one of these badly as a kid one Christmas.

"You can be replaced, gel jockey!"

First automobile contruction, now... research? This news story describes an automated scientist that designed experiments to test hypotheses. And it did the job better than graduate students.

I'm not sure if I'm lucky or unlucky that I work an area that can't be so easily automated as molecular biology.

Scientists walkout?

Labour action in science is pretty rare, making this story of French researchers threatening to quit quite notable.

Two days in and it's a mess already

The new semester isn't even 48 hours old.

I'm overbooked on classes. I missed a class yesterday that I wasn't aware I was still slated to teach -- because I'm down for one more class than usual. Now the question is, which class will I drop to get back down to the right number? If I try to teach an extra class this semester, I will perish before my next birthday next month.

Went to hand in an internal funding form (Faculty development) and had the fun of trying to find out where the thing was supposed to go. "It says on the form to submit it to Dr. Gary Mounce, Library 1120." "He has no office here." Joy. Turned out that it was supposed to go to someone else in that room, but her name was definitely not Gary. Messed over by wrong instructions.

Just asking for it

I wonder how long it'll be before cartoonist Iliad gets into hot water for this cartoon.

How does that make you feel?

Or, “What are web journals for if not for embarrassing personal revelations?”

So I was perusing the Guardian's science website for news, and happened across an online empathy quiz. It’s being run as part of a feature on Simon Baron-Cohen’s book The Essential Difference. It’s a self-test of how well you relate to others, your ability to “put yourself in their shoes,” etc. I take the quiz, and at the end, it says that women usually score 47 and men score 42. A score of 0-32 was the “lower than average” category, and it notes that high functioning autistics and people with Asperger's Syndrome score about 20.

Which is what I scored. 20. Eeep.

About the only thing I take comfort in is having heard a story on the Science Show that suggested that this sort of thing seems rather common in scientists. Ah yes, here’s the quote I remember:

[Simon Baron-Cohen] looked at a thousand students from Cambridge and assessed them on what he called ‘the autistic spectrum’.

Now these were normal, functioning intelligent people that had tried to decide whether they had particular autistic traits or not. And he found that the scientists, as opposed to the arts and humanists, came significantly higher on this autistic spectrum, they had more autistic traits.

The article goes on from there, and has a great deal of interesting things to say. Given that one of my interests is in public outreach (an avowed reason for this journal!), I can’t help but wonder if one of the reasons that scientists are so seldom able to convey what it is that they do and why is because we scientists, as a group, suck at empathy. We can’t understand or predict why people should respond to particular findings or statements.

I hope it’s not too late to set a New Year’s resolution to walk more miles in others’ moccasins, so to speak.

---

In other news, let's see how the RAHC construction is progressing...

Another shrewd Faulkes scheme bites the dust

The confocal grant proposal I wanted to do is in a coma. Not dead, but it won't be doing much until next year. It turns out that my collague had the same idea of putting in the grant to the National Science Foundation. But it turns out that each university is limited in how many proposals they can submit (two). The Dean decides which one goes forward, and two other groups were in the queue ahead of us.

Drat. Another opportunity to prove my tenure-worthy quality vanishes like so much smoke. Drat drat drat.

Another proposal

I'm still waiting for my colleague to get back to talk about a confocal. So, in the meantime, I'm pulling together a short "Faculty development" proposal. This is a small amount of money (no more than $2,000) available from within the University to better your teaching and research. I'm asking for some cash to attend a short course on the use of the technical software I use in the lab, called Spike2. The short course is two days long, and is being held in Washington, DC. Having been able to visit the city a couple of times when the Society for Neuroscience meetings were there, I wouldn't mind at all going back. It has many lovely and interesting features, if you can overlook the poverty, violence, and the U.S. government.

But I digress.

These training days would be held just around the time of the Experimental Biology meeting, which I've never been to. Unfortunately, I doubt I would have the time or money to be able to attend the meeting. I could submit a late paper, but those are going to be shown as posters late in the meeting. I'd have to find about, oh, $1000 for the hotel and food to keep me there on the days between the end of the short course and when the poster session would run. And I doubt that'll happen.

Otherwise, how are things? I'm still nervous about teaching next week, for two reasons. First, I have a 7:45 am class (ugh). Second, I have a graduate class that has all of three students enrolled. That's not enough for the class to go forward, so some more students better crawl out of the woodwork pretty dang soon. Otherwise, I'll have to teach an evening class. And I don't want to be on campus until 7 or 8 and night and have to be here at 7 the next morning. That would just be icky.

Classes? No, not yet!

I spent part of yesterday in the lab working on the recordings that I had made to learn how the software works. This was actually quite difficult, because the temperature control is whacked out. It's about 13-15 degrees Celsius in there! (Note to Americans: about 20 degrees Celsius is generally considered "comfortable room temperature").

Even if the lab were above teeth-chattering range, I'm not sure how many chances I'd have to work in there this week. Class starts next week, and I can feel all the weight starting to fall back down on my shoulders again. Lots of emails coming in, lots of phone calls. I just know that it's non-stop until the start of May.

Breakthrough!

Texas, we have liftoff!

After some more fiddling around, the smaller spikes have died down and aren't so prominent, so I'm getting a much clearer signal. I'm convinced I've got real biological activity.

This is the same type of recording as the last journal entry. This time, the main spikes you see I can attribute to one cell: the tonic stretch receptor of the muscle receptor organ (MRO). It's a little sensory organ that fires when the tail is bent. This picture shows the response to my bending the tail, twice, with the second time being a little harder. At this scale, all the individual spikes sort of blur into one big chunk when the stretch receptor fires really fast, so you see a wide fuzzy stripe instead of individual action potentials. You can see a few single potentials trailing off at the end of the recording, before the tail completely relaxes.

It only took, what, a year and a half to get to this point?

Well, I don't care. This is definitely a great start to the New Year. And boy, did I ever need it! It's a small landmark for me and my research: my first recording from a neuron in my own lab with my own equipment. Or maybe thst should be a "benchmark," since lab work is sometimes called bench work.

Breakthrough?

I think I’ve managed something I should have done some time ago. I think I’ve finally managed to record some action potentials....


This is an extracellular recording of sensory neurons in nerve 2 of an abdominal ganglion of a crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) tail. At one point in this recording, the tail flexed spontaneously, so about one third of the way in from the left, you see a substantial increase in the number of spikes (neural activity). It’s a recording of many neurons at once, so you see lots of spikes with different sizes and shapes and such.

Turns out that the major problem was that I’d wired some cables together wrong. Stupid DIN plugs. Fortunately, my crack about British engineers didn't stop me from getting good help from the hardware support people and Cambridge Electronics Devices, who made my amplifier and analogue/digital board. And it was good to know that my grief over soldering plugs and cables together yesterday actually paid off.

The next step – well, it’s not so much a step as a marathon. I’m going to have a ton of refinements to do to make sure that I'm getting good recordings. I have to make a bucket more cables and connectors and wires. And I really have to convince myself that this isn’t all some weird recording artefact that has nothing to do with the crayfish. Heaven knows I’ve been fooled before, but let’s not talk about that.

Oh, and here’s something to make the British engineers feel batter: another old joke. “In heaven, the police are British, the food is French, and the engineering is German. In hell, the police are German, the food is British, and the engineering are French.”

In the “Nobody ever tells me anything” department...

Okay. That’d be one graduate degree, two postdocs, and two years on the job that I’ve been working with electronics. And today I discover I've been doing soldering all wrong all this time. D’oh! Three supervisors, and none ever gave me a hint about the subtleties of joining two wires together. Yeah, the stuff I did before worked somehow, but I did it the wrong way. I learned today (through the wonders of a Google search with the keywords, “how to solder”) that you’re never supposed to pick up a bit of solder on the tip and “paint” the wires, which is something I'd done many times...

C'est la guerre.

And to make matters even more annoying, I’m trying to solder wires into a 6-pin mini DIN plug, which is extremely annoying, because you can barely get that soldering iron in around the wire cups. One of the more irritating connections known to man. Must be a British engineer involved in their creation somewhere.

(Old joke: “Why was there never a mass-market British computer? Because they couldn’t figure out how to make it leak oil.” Current and former MG owners like myself find that joke hysterical.)

Blessing or curse?

So after having spent several days working on a grant proposal for a confocal microscope, I get confirmation that another faculty member was doing the same thing. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, it theoretically means less work for me. On the other, I know from experience that it can be difficult to integrate text from two authors, especially when it wasn't originally planned to work together.

New Year's Day

Can't do much at work today, since there's almost nobody else around - nobody to answer some of the questions I need answering, in any case. So I finished reading a book I've been working through on and off throughout the intersemester gap, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (sometimes referred to simply as "GEB").

The book is about a lot of things, but I think it's mostly about artifical intelligence. I had to admit, I was disappointed. I've run across references to this book constantly, almost invariably hearing it held up with high praise. But I didn't find it engaging. Perhaps I was too lazy to put the effort into really appreciating it, because there are fairly lengthy sections of simple computer code used to demonstrate various points, and I just wasn't interested enough to work through them in detail.

I did find several points of note, though. One of the funniest to me was,,, well earlier in this journal I've occasionally referred to Zen's Law of Time: "Everything takes longer than you expect." Now, I must bow to my elders, since page 152 of GEB contains Hofstatder's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstatder's Law."

Contrary to proverb, I think there is something new under the sun, but my law of time wasn't it. Dang.

2003: So long, baby!

The major task I've spending the last few days working with people on the revisions to the new redesigned website for the International Society for Neuroethology. If you click on the link and see a page with a red band down the left, that's the old site; the new site should be up later today or tomorrow.

You can't help but to be reflective on the last day of the year. As much for my own mental health as anything, here's a recap of some of the things I did this year besides goofing off.

Teaching: I taught my new class, Neurobiology (BIOL3310) the first time in the spring, and again in fall. Also had my first independent study students and Honours students. Got one small grant for a teaching technology pilot project.

Research: Wrote three external grant applications: two were rejected and one had the program killed before I could submit the letter. Got one small grants from within UTPA. Got one of my manuscripts from my post-doc in Australia accepted and in the pipeline for publication next year.

Service: Organized a symposium for the annual Animal Behavior Society meeting. Took over as chair of the Search Committee, and managed to attract somewhat more and better applicants than we had in previous years. And, as noted above, oversaw the redesign of neuroethology.org.

And is that enough? No! In 2004, I am really going to have to pick up the pace for getting grants and getting publications if I want to keep this job. Which I do. Most of the time.

Article progress

I received some paperwork from the publisher in the U.K. for my most recent article today. Of course, the term "paperwork" is almost archaic now, since it arrived as a set of PDF files. But I did still have to use paper, as they required a signature. I had to print the files, sign them, then fax them back to the publisher.

This is the first paper that I've been completely responsible for getting it through. For my previous papers, I was working with a co-author, my supervisor for the work. It'll be interesting to see the process more close at hand. It'll also be the first paper I've published in a while (ugh -- not good), and I'm curious to see how email and the web are used in the publishing process.

Happy holidays

No research today or work or trips to uni today. For the first time in a long while.

Merry Christmas.

Tomorrow, I'm back to writing my next NSF grant.

Shot down again

My last grant proposal from the National Science Foundation was rejected tonight. Wheeeee.

Even when it's cool, it's hot...

One of the things I dislike about my job is that it is located in a place that feels hot almost all the time. And now, close to Christmas, where the temperature outside is actually rather pleasant, the building I'm working in is really unpleasantly warm. The air conditioning is off. I even wonder if the heat is actually on?

Anyway, I spent much of the day dealing with committee business. On the one Search hand, I'm gearing up to bring in eight job candidates for campus visits in February. That's two per week, every week, for a month. On the Web hand, I'm working closely with a web design firm to develop a new look for the website for the International Society for Neuroethology, which should be up in the new year.

Still have lab equipment that I need to get running. Still have manuscripts to prepare. Still have grants to write. Unfortunately, a lot of those tasks kind of rely on other people being available to do their work, and at this time of year, that seems to be a tall order.

I wonder if people who know the physical act of juggling are any better than regular folks at juggling jobs?

Coming up for air

Where have I been, might you ask? Nowhere special -- just very busy. Several things have happened on the research front since we last chatted.

First, the good news. I've got another paper from my work in Australia accepted and on its way into print. This one should see the light of day in Arthropod Structure & Development next year.

Then, the bad news. My second attempt to be allowed to write a proposal for the Whitehall Foundation was rejected.

Map of the cyber-world

Among subjects that challenge the imagination for how to display it graphically, the Internet would certainly be a top contender for one of the most difficult.

I was intrigued by this story in New Scientist about a project to map the Internet. You can see a recent map here (a perfectly 700 x 700 pixel graphic). A much larger (as in, don't you even think of clicking without a very fast connection) map is here (this is a 4096 x 4096 pixel image). The homepage for this project is http://www.opte.org.

I'm not sure quite yet of how this adds to my knowledge of the Internet. It does change my view of the Internet, however, by making it beautiful visually, not just conceptually.

I do look forward to the project developing the ability to pinpoint your own website, so I can say, "Hey! I can see my webpage from here!"

Where’d it go?!

So here it is, a day with very little teaching, one phone interview (done), so I went into my lab and started to set up to do an experiment. I went down the hall to get some ice...

And the flipping ice machine is gone! Blast it! Apparently, it was taken away this time because it was leaking.

I am persevering and trying to continue with the experiment.

Approaching 40...

Not me... Well, me too, I suppose, but this entry’s title is in reference one of my favourite shows. Doctor Who debuted 23 November 1963. Doctor Who's 40^th anniversary story is, perhaps appropriately, only on the internet. It’s called “Scream of the Shalka,” and you can watch it here. They’ve done animated stories on the ‘Net before for Doctor Who, but they’ve picked up the animation quality for this one. This time, the mouths actually move! And characters blink! Definitely worth a look.

;;;;;

Was planning on spending today in the lab trying to get equipment running, but the number I did on my lower back means that I’m largely reduced to sitting in one place quietly. Not conducive to lab work, which requires movement.

Hopping mad

Still mad. You know how when you get really angry, you get a little more energetic than you should, because you really want to punch something but can’t? Well, yesterday, I was starting a lecture, and jumped down the stairs – and landed bad. I messed up my back, which is still sore and spasming a little today.

And the moral of the story is: Don’t get mad. (Unfortunately, I can’t get even, as I'm mad about something that’s happening to colleagues, rather than me.)

Despite that, I think I gave kick-butt lectures that morning. I was pretty energetic despite the bad back. I think the bad back was about the only thing keeping me from going ballistic yesterday.

Very bad day

Bad day here. Very angry about something being done to a colleague. Ready to pick up chair and fling it at university administrators. Seriously considering looking for new gig.

And had a zit on my lip.

Good night, Dr. Griffin, where ever you are...

One of researcher I never had a chance to meet, but wish I had, died Friday: Don Griffin. His primary claim to fame was that he discovered how bats are able to navigate in the dark: namely, through echolocation. Prior to that, I’ve heard that people seriously suggested that bats were clairvoyant, because they couldn't figure out how they did this.

Now, let me play James Burke and show the connections between that discovery and my own career. Don Griffin, working with Robert Galambos, discovers bat echolocation. Following this discovery, Ken Roeder observed that moths behaved differently when echolocating bats were around. Later, one of his students, one Dorothy Paul, published two papers in Journal of Insect Physiology on the nervous system of noctuid moths. Dorothy Paul was my supervisor for my doctoral work.

But there's a second connection. Having found that moths were specifically listening for echolocating bats, other insects were found to be able to hear those ultrasonic cries. Crickets were one of those species, and a large part of my first post-doctoral position (with Gerald Pollack) was researching some of the auditory interneurons in crickets that respond to bat-like ultrasound.

So, the late Don Griffin is sort of an intellectual great-grandfather.

Another reason Griffin was someone I wanted to meet was that he was a thoughtful writer. In the last couple of decades, he wrote many articles and books on the prospect that we could scientifically study the minds of other species. He was one of the founders of the field now called “cognitive ethology.” And I should note that he was doing this at a time when many scientists have retired.

If an afterlife existed, I would hope that Dr. Griffin would finally have a chance to enjoy retirement.

The new catalogue in the post

My parents used to make a living selling as a distributor for Eaton’s, a Canadian retailer famous for their catalogues. The Christmas catalogue was particular fun to look forward to, as a kid, because there were all the cool toys. What was a little different from how many catalogues are done now is that you took a form to a local distributor who placed the order, which was then shipped back to the distributor. Very personal sort of interaction. Eaton’s had stores in big cities, but even in the big cities, people knew about Eaton’s catalogue.

Eaton’s had been in business for decades, and it was a real shock when they closed up shop. This precipitated one of many career changes for my parents, who were pioneers in life-long learning. Let me tell you, the idea of “you’ll have several careers in your lifetime” isn’t a new idea in my household.

Now, of course, the Internet has filled the niche that catalogues used to. But in case you needed living proof of just how far removed mailouts are from human involvement, read this short article here.

Work in progress

Snapped this quick picture as I was walking into work the other morning of the big, big crane being used to build together the Regional Academic Health Center.

T’will be a lovely building. The question remains, though, as to who will work in it.

Publishing

There's a nice article here about the process of publishing scientific articles. (Those with Real Player can listen to the original radio piece by clicking here.)

It's a topic that I've talked about from time to time in this journal. I've definitely had some of the experiences that this person is talking about. And I particularly liked the poem near the end, which made me laugh out loud.


Actually, I should be talking about it more, because I should be submitting more journal articles.

Can't talk now!

Busy writing lecture that needs finishing before tomorrow's class.

Have also been having fun dealing with application for the four jobs that are open in our Department. Review begins next week, so a lot of stuff is coming in.

This sucks.

My new computer, which I thought was going to solve problems, has turned into a problem creator in a very emphatic manner. Why else does one blog at 1:17 a.m. on a Friday night / Saturday morning?

First, the hard drive was completely [rude word deleted] and needed to be replaced. Tonight, something has gone wonky with the video card (I think). It's definitely not right, whatever it is. Back to tech support...

Fast times at SPI

South Padre Island, that is. Spent most of the day out there collecting animals, after I failed to gather any when I was out there for the weekend enjoying Sandcastle Days.

Meanwhile, the ice machine is back! Repaired in a record 8 days! I wonder who got leaned on, and how hard, to make a repair that fast this time. Of course, there's still the niggling question of how long it'll keep ticking. It's like some weird game of nerves -- man versus ice machine.

May we recommend...

Here's an article that merits a trip to the library.

The pioneering team of Gert Holstege, Janniko R. Georgiadis, Anne M. J. Paans, Linda C. Meiners, Ferdinand H. C. E. van der Graaf, and A. A. T. Simone Reinders have just published their research findings, "Brain Activation during Human Male Ejaculation" in the most recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience (Volume 23, pages 9185-9193).

Their summary reads in part, "Brain mechanisms that control human sexual behavior in general, and ejaculation in particular, are poorly understood." (Ain't that the truth.)

I see great opportunities here to do a follow-up study on females.

Finagle's Law

I am not the first to note that life is unfair.

I worked at home yesterday, because I was expecting a new computer to arrive at home. My S.O. was out that day, so she wasn't around the apartment to make sure it was delivered, so I stayed home. I waited and watched... but nothing came until 6:42 pm. So I had stayed away from work all day for nothing, really. While the day wasn't completely a waste, it wasn't the most productive day I'd ever had.

Anyway, the computer finally arrives. Boo-yah! I'm psyched. I take my 4.5 year old laptop off the desk and plug the new machine in, turn it on... and am treated with the most gawdawful sound I have ever heard a computer make. (And I've owned many computers.) Two long whines, followed by a "put your teeth on edge" screech. A message comes up saying, "Hard drive not found." Bad sign.

I phoned technical service. After several back-and-forth diagnostic tests, the fellow I'm dealing with comes to the conclusion, "I think your hard drive's broken." Not exactly surprising news there. I'm now waiting arrival of a shipment of a new hard drive from the computer company.

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Five days without ice. Round 2. The ice machine has been taken away for repair again.

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Oh, the meaning of this entry's title? Click here.

Normalcy reasserts itself

The ice machine lasted nine days.

Maybe eight.

It was working Friday afternoon. It was busted this Monday morning.

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This is HESTEC week here at UTPA. All the classes in the science building were cancelled, so I spent the morning in a symposium. The first, on mathematics, was quite good, describing a system for choosing start lanes in BMX racing. The problem was that in BMX racing, some lanes are better than others, and the old system allowed a contestant a chance of getting the worst lane repeatedly, pretty much killing your chance of winning.

Second talk was on nanotechnology and how organic chemistry might be used to make very, very small computer chips...

The third talk was the worst of the lot. It described remote sensing, primarily satellite imaging. It was a bad talk because there were no actual ideas. It was more a grocery list of satellites that provide remote data. And the slides had way, way too much text on them.

The final talk really picked up, though. This was from Jeffrey Glassberg, who is one of the creators of DNA fingerprinting and the current President (founder, too, I think) of the North American Butterfly Association. Lots of great pictures. He made the very interesting point that in places like the lower Rio Grande Valley, which is something like 90% Hispanic, the local membership in wildlife organizations, like the butterfly organization, or birding organizations, is almost the opposite of the local demographics! About 90% of local members are not Hispanic. Why that should be so is an interesting and difficult question. Is it just that the tradition of natural history is really one that was strong in England, but less so in Spain, and has really carried through Anglo-Saxon culture?

Life in the graveyard

Maybe I'm just a zombie.

Had my attention drawn to a couple of interesting articles (here and here) on the (short) life of "blogs" like this one. Interestingly, most are not like this one, because the majority never get a second entry! I feel somewhat proud in having kept this journal more or less up to date for almost a year and a half now. I've probably hit the survey's criteria for "abandonment" once or twice, though.

Otherwise how are things? I'm spending a lot of time trying to order stuff for my Honours students.

Got a letter of intent in to the Whitehall Foundation in on time, and received a confirmation from them.

The applications for the many jobs our department is hiring for are starting to trickle in. Hopefully, the trickle will turn to a river after our ad comes out in Science magazine this Friday (fingers crossed).

Also spent part of the morning trying to set up what classes I would teach next semester, finally confirming that I would be able to "reactivate" an old graduate class that hasn't been taught in some time.

It's five ice machine breakdown-free days so far, and counting. When we hit a month of continuous service, I'll be very happy.

South Texas freezes over!

Incredibly, our ice machine is back and working!

It took 40 days to get it repaired, which is probably a record for repair in the last year. Of course, it's still about four times longer than it ought to be.

I will be taking down my "When will the ice machine be fixed?" count-up calendars, and replacing them with something more akin to the calendars they have in factories. You know, that say "23 accident free days." This one will say something like, "23 breakdown free days."

How bad can it get?

Bad. Warning: this article on the worst jobs in science is not for those who has, as they might have said in Victorian England, "delicate sensibilities."

Tomorrow's Friday! Already?!?

Where has this week gone?

I swear I'm not a stress junkie, but I always have problems reorienting myself when big projects come to a close, and I have to start new projects. Work sort of eased up on me like that last weekend; I was even able to clean out a lot of stuff in my office for the first time... well, since I got there two years ago. Literally! I threw out stuff that had been sitting in a pile for two years.

But it's been a weird week; I just haven't managed to make headway on anything for me. Today, for instance, I spent almost the entire day in meeting, after meeting, after meeting. The first meeting was the most fun, in a way. The University of Texas system has a consulting group (the "WAG" -- the "Washington Advisory Group") going around to 8 of the universities getting input on how to strengthen research.

Yes, I ranted about how we can't get an ice machine fixed. Oh, I think we're up to day 39 with no ice!

After that came a curriculum committee meeting, where I tried to pitch a new lab-based neurobiology class.

Finally, a meeting with several people in computer science who are looking for computational problems to apply their expertise to. Not sure I was able to give them anything they can sink their teeth into yet.

Hope to get refocused on my research projects over the weekend so I can crack in on them Monday.

A role model returns

One of the reasons I wanted to be a scientist was because of fictional characters rather than real people. Mr. Spock, science officer? Cool. Buckaroo Banzai? I decided that I wanted to be him. Renaissance man, who was both brain surgeon and lead singer of a rock and roll band. Living life to the max, going in 20 directions and once, doing many things and excelling at all. That was my goal. To some degree, I’d like to think I succeeded. My career in science has taken me around the world, and I've got a chance to use lots of different skills. Still working on the rock and roll band, though.

One of my favourite science role models is making a return. Finally. Doctor Who is coming back to telly! (Okay, I never really say “telly,” but I'm going for that British feel, since Doctor Who is a British show.)

Dr. Who, for those who don't know, is the world's longest running science fiction show. This year is the 40^th anniversary. I was introduced to the character in Starlog magazine around 1978. I saw my first episodes – The Seeds of Doom, parts 3 and 4 (yes, I am a such a geek) – on a family vacation in Texas (of all places) after a long night in... Houston? – where we'd spent rather more time than we expected trying to find a hotel. And I was lucky enough that one of the local PBS stations that broadcast into southern Alberta took up the cause to show the series routinely. I made lots of friends though watching Dr. Who, and wrote a feature article for The Meliorist when the show hit its silver 25^th anniversary.

The Doctor represented so much of what I thought a scientist should be. Adept in solving problems of all sorts, whether it be preventing a Dalek invasion or a patching a piece of broken equipment. That “Renaissance man” aspect in particular is one I love (see comments about Buckaroo Banzai, above). Not taking the word of authority (scene from The Five Doctors: Soldier: “Sir, you’re not allowed in there.” Doctor: “Me? Not allowed? I'm allowed everywhere!”). Travelling the universe. Good companions. (And, incidentally, it is total coincidence that one of the longest running Dr. Who companions and my SO are both named Sarah. Though I do have a lot of fun when I get to say, “I'm the doctor, and this is my companion Sarah.”) And it's one reason why I sometimes suggest people call me “Doctor Zen” – it has the sort of same slightly cool ring as “Doctor Who.” At least it does to my vain ears.

I’m happy.

Oh yeah, I also got the revised version of a manuscript off in the post today. That also makes me happy (I’ve been working on getting this thing in print for two years and counting), but I’m holding off on any major celebrations until I get the thing accepted.

Big crusty

This news makes my crustacean-loving flesh tingle. Note, though, that what are typically called "crayfish" in Australia and New Zealand are known as "spiny lobsters" here. Although there are some Murray River freshwater crayfish that get pretty big, this beast would be a saltwater animal.

Why was I...?

...standing in Staples, spending money out of my own pocket to photocopy the latest version of a manuscript I've been trying to get published for, oh, two years now?

Our department decided to get a new photocopier. The old one had served well, but apparently had reached the end of its usefulness. The photcopier came, and worked well... until the ink ran out.

The shelves next to the photcopier are filled to the proverbial brim with toner cartridges -- for the old machine. Apparently, nobody thought to order new toner cartridges at the same time they ordered the new photocopier.

Yet another case of a piece of equipment that we kind of need to do research -- but it's not working. Between this, the ice machine, trying to order anything in a timely fashion, I'm reminded of the old observation that even a lion can be eaten by ants.

Take this job...

One of my current tasks is running this year’s Search Committee. We have four shiny new positions here in UTPA Biology (see here for more details). It’s a challenge, but so far, I’d have to give ourselves a pat on the back, because I think we came up with a better job ad than this one.

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Hey, I'm on the "Professors who blog" list! Actually, I think I asked to be put on that list back when the Chronicle of Higher Education article ran. Shameless self-promotion. It's the only way to go.

Back from the brink

The topic of endangered animals is important and interesting to me, so I was heartened to read this article about a small mammal that's been rediscovered.

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One month ice free! Whoo-hoo! What a milestone! Or it would be if we hadn't gone through this several times before...

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Spent yesterday working mostly on search committee and other committee things. Have to get back to writing my own science. Off to do that now, with a letter of intent for the Whitehall Foundation.

Movement on the ice front!

Hey, they've actually done something about the ice machine...

At this point, a copper pipe sticking out of the wall is a sign of progress. It only took us twenty-six days to get this far...

I freely admit this my obsession with this piece of equipment is a sad, sad commentary on me. But everyone needs a hobby.

What would they do if it snowed?

They're closing the university today due to weather. Hurricane? No. Tornado? No. Tropical storm? No. Thunder and lightning? No.

It, uh, rained.

It's not even raining right now.

I did my first two classes, and they announced just as I was finishing my second class, that the university was cancelling classes for the rest of the day. Yeah, it is a little soggy outside, but there's no wind to speak of, and I found the outside air temperature to be quite pleasant. It's so nice not to have sweat forming when you walk outside! My students were still giving me a hard time for wearing shorts, though.

Sheesh. I though this was science, not a baseball game.

The other side

Hey, my new computer wasn't stolen last night! Hoody hoo!

I was paranoid enough, though, that I took several steps to avoid getting it stolen. I didn’t just leave the boxes in the hall. I personally carried the boxes out away to the dumpster, so that there wouldn't be any hint that a new computer was in this office. Another advantage of this new computer is that it looks like just a flat screen monitor. All the computer “stuff” are located behind the screen. They’ve basically taken a laptop design, and stood it on end. I’m hoping that by leaving the old computer “box” and keyboard where it is for a while, a thief might just think, “Oh, he’s just got a new monitor.”

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Day 22 with no ice. So, so hot...

The other side

Hey, my computer wasn't stolen last night! Hoody hoo!

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Over 3 weeks with no ice.

See you on the other side

This will be the last post journal entry made on my hand-me-down Pentium 2, 4 gig hard drive computer that I inherited from Dr. Ortega (who'd been the last to retire before I joined here). My new computer has finally arrived. And that's definitely been the best thing to happen in a day that has otherwise been riding on the edge of crisis from the word "go."

After I got out of my two early morning classes, I got back paperwork concerning the searches for new faculty positions. We were approved to search for four new faculty; paperwork came back listing only three. Bad. Apparently, some of the paperwork got "lost" between the Dean's office and the Provost's office.

Then, the editor for one of my manuscripts emailed me asking when I would have the revisions done. Ugh. I've got to do that pronto, or the whole process starts from scratch.

On the plus side, that revision will be much faster once I set up my shiny new computer.

Hm. On second thought, I should add one qualifier to my first paragraph. This will be the last journal entry on my old computer. I hope.