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.