Happy Solstice II

It’s been six months since my last post. Though in some ways I had tried to make an effort to write more, on a personal level, things have deteriorated rather badly. Though I had received permission to write-up last summer, the months ground on as I sought to bleed the various stones that comprise my thesis. If nothing, I think many folks will acknowledge that grad school can be a frustrating, unfulfilling and thoroughly demoralizing. The effect can be a sort of perpetum mobile of despair and lowered productivity, leading to more despair. The death of one of our beloved cats in late August only aggravated this.

RIP Erbie

Other than a brief dalliance with a couple of SSRIs over the last few months, my only solace of late has been my new interest in freediving. After a renewed and reinvigorated interest in scuba these last few years, the better half and I joined our local freedive club on a whim and have been hooked the last three months. We’ve only done pool training so far but we’ve already seen a two-three fold improvement in our breath holds. We look forward to trying out our skills in open water soon. We’ll be going down south early January to blow off some steam, do some scuba and hopefully some freediving, conditions allowing.

Last, and I have no words for this, the mighty Hitch is dead. His acerbic wit, cutting intellect and eloquence will be missed. He died as he lived, an avowed atheist. I hope I will have the resolve to stare death in the face the way he did – unwavering and defiant.

13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011

So put your antlers on, dance defiantly around the Yule tree and get with the merry-making. Happy Solstice all.

Happy Solstice

Happy Solstice folks. Today we mark the happy happenstance in the northern hemisphere where the Earth's axial tilt in relation to it's orbit provides us the longest daylight period of the year. Hurray for the 23.4 degrees (that's 0.408 radians to you nehds) of tilt from the axis of rotation, and hurray to our tidal pal Luna for keeping our axial tilt, and therefore our seasons, stable!

Sadly I am stuck in doors preparing what I hope to be my final committee report before I defend and put this p!gfμk!ng PhD to bed. By bed I mean 1.83 metres under the earth. Alas I wish I were frolicking with my other verts outside, but lo, 'twas not to be.

So my friends, raise a glass and enjoy it while it lasts because soon we return to the ground from whence we came.

Life is a Terminal Disease.

A First for Canadian Politics

Tonight was a first for Canadian politics. It was the first time that the leftist proletariat party became the Official Opposition. It was also the first time that the Liberal Party of Canada, oldest federal Canadian party, has been staunchly defeated, partly because of a muddy platform and partly because of incompetent leadership by the human incarnation of Count Chocula. On the other side, King Steve, soon to be Emperor Steve, and his rabid band of anti-intellectuals have formed the first authoritarian theocratic majority in Canadian history despite election fraud, document falsification, and being found in contempt of Parliament. For the first time in its history, Canada has elected a Green MP, someone I would have previously endorsed had it not been revealed a few weeks ago that their campaign platform supports complementary and alternative medicine*. The only happy news is that the sovereigntists have got themselves the boot, though perhaps this will set the stage for Duceppe’s role in Provincial Politics.

So our pal Steve managed to split the progressive vote, particularly in Ontario, thereby giving himself a majority. All in all, a good job by Stevie and his hate crew. Their vote suppression tactics of intimidating students, vandalizing property and impersonating opposition campaigns has polarized the votership so much that we find ourselves in the predicament we see toady.

Well played Steve-o.

I bet that when he gets home he’ll give himself a blow job as a reward for his hard work.

*There is no such thing as CAM. Either medicine works or it does not. If it does, then it falls under the category of medicine, if it does not, then it falls under the category of witchcraft.

When a princess kisses a horse does he turn into, uh, wait a minute…

Oh, for the love of Voltron. So when I turn on the idiot box this morning, and flick to good old News World, all I see is bustles and lace for twenty minutes. Really? So I turn to News Net and see the same thing. OK, perhaps American news will satisfy my inner voyeur by giving me one of their famous live car chases. Oh CNN, how you do disappoint, all I see is a gilded carriage.

Why for the love of all things green is this wedding being forced down my throat from every Sky-daddy damned media outlet? Is it not enough that we’re ruled by these inbred entitled imbeciles that I have to watch Duke of Horse-Face suck a “commoner’s” lips off?

I am pretty staunchly anti-monarchist as it is, but between this, and the prorogation fiasco that Earl Steve of Harperland pulled off, my vasculature boils with the blood of a free republic.

Bring in proportional representation. Bring in an elected senate. Bring in separation of church and state. Bring in the separation of legislative and executive branches of government and bring in an elected head of state. Off with their heads. It’s time for a new republic, the Republic of Canada.

Some thoughts about Christmas

Ahh, Christmas, the commercialized commemoration of the birthday of a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who may or may not have existed, about whom writings may or may not have been forged and whose divinity is questionable. A Jewish apocalyptic prophet (of whom there were many in the first century CE) who unwittingly spawned a new religion apart from and distinct from Judaism – a case of theological misunderstanding. This was a man who was simultaneously immortal, mortal, eternal, corporeal, ethereal and also his own father. In modern times we celebrate the birth of this god-man by fueling the greed of our offspring by telling them an omniscient elf (dragged across the sky by cosmic ungulates no less) will visit them on Christmas Eve and shower them with gifts for good behaviour or otherwise punish them with coal for their misdeeds¹.

Ahh Christmas, a time carefully chosen by the early church to coincide with and hijack pagan solstice holidays once celebrated all over Europe and Asia Minor. A holiday to celebrate the end of the darkness was usurped by a holiday to worship one head of a tritheistic spiritual hydra.

Ahh Christmas, for me a time of forced family gatherings and contrived ceremony and tradition where we are all obliged to mutter the ritual incantations and pray to the almighty anthropomorphic creator for a good year ahead - a time when I keep any and all utterances to myself and attempt to remain calm as parents lie to their children about the wrathful elf who will magically descend chimneys across the globe risking self-immolation to bring them crappy Chinese-made toys.

Ahh Christmas, a time when the culmination of the holiday begins with the celebration of the cutting of the genitals of the divine man-god on the holy day known as The Feast of The Circumcision², or more commonly, New Years Day.

I guess the world really does rotate around the end of a divine prick.






1. In some European traditions father Christmas descends on the houses of naughty children and beats them with sticks. Santa terrified me as a kid – more so than god.

2. The feast day is still celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Catholic traditions.

Good luck Friend

And so it came to pass, on the morning of equinox, autumn, 2009, we set forth on a journey that would enrich America and impoverish Canada. On that morning, a son of Canada, a mad biologist - a doctor of evolutionary biology, would descend to the unwashed southern masses to spread the gospel of Carlo:

Observe, hypothesize, test, repeat.

Having defended his PhD he looked south, to the National Institutes of Health, to complete his training.

Carlo is one of the few persons who lives and breathes science. For him it’s not just an occupation or an esoteric philosophy, but a way of life that can be applied to history, language, art and even Guitar Hero. During his time completing his PhD, Carlo and I became friends. Despite being a few years his senior and having worked in science longer than he, his ambition, maturity and singular focus on science often impressed and occasionally intimidated me. Indeed, his attitude impressed and perhaps intimidated some faculty. During his four years at Mac he published three (soon to be four) papers as primary author and several others as a second or internal author – more than some professors during that same period. During that time, Carlo taught himself programming, statistics, and became intimately acquainted with the minutiae of evolutionary theory. While most of us would be at the local bar on Friday pounding back car-bombs, Carlo would be deciphering the inscrutably obtuse PAML documentation just to get a jump on the week.

That said, Carlo always made time to help out and to have some fun. In the time I knew him he put in six to seven days a week at the lab, read a new book every fortnight and still managed to get in several dozen hours of video games in per week. Once in a while he even accompanied me to a metal show or out for an evening of drunken silliness.

***

Setting out on the nine hour drive, we were both apprehensive, Carlo because of the bright sparkling adventure ahead of him, and I because of my fear of being rogered rectally by bellicose border guards. Thankfully, the latter never happened. After the move, we drank bourbon and sipped potato vodka. We reminisced about the past and mused about the future. We listened to Behemoth and Between The Buried and Me and The Locust. The next day we returned the truck and I left for home. On my nine hour journey home (two stop-overs and lots of waiting) I grew a bit melancholy. One rarely meets someone like Carlo. I will miss our discussions. In a span of five minutes, our conversations could go from differential sexual selection pressure, to hyperdrive motivators, to the benefits of using the line-gun against necromorphs, to the disappearance of megafauna in Australia, to the creative use of dissonance by Psyopus.

Lately my days seem drab and uninteresting. Even though I know that we will still stay in touch, things seem a little more grey than usual. Being around Carlo, one always learned something new. Perhaps that’s what I'll miss most.

Good luck Carlo. You will be missed. Thanks for being a friend.

Carlo and I rockin’ out at our pal Ba’al-Zebub’s place on one of our numerous ‘Redshirt Phrydays’

Banff impressions– days one and two

I have now officially been at the conference for the third day. Although Sunday had the keynote address and opening remarks, I judge it to be the wind up to the conference proper, i.e. the grueling ~14 hour day schedule I alluded to in the previous post. I jus recently got back from the last talk (incidentally by the person who had scooped me last spring) at 10:40pm. Indeed I am feeling craptacular because for whatever reason I had decided to stay at the bar until 2pm – after my three beers and three martinis. Since breakfast is served between 7am and 8:30am, I didn’t get much sleep. Indeed the plan was generally ill conceived given that I had my poster presentation today, compounded by the fact that my actual poster was hastily (and perhaps also ill) conceived. Rather than give a play by play, I’ll try to give some general impressions and anecdotes from the last two days.

The place

This is my fourth time in Banff – both the park and the city. I still marvel at the sights whenever I leave my room or head out to the talks or to meals. It’s hard to believe that anyone could take this for granted. Generally, the Rockies are magnificent and the town is quaint but somewhat overbearing in its quaint touristy pretentiousness. On Sunday night I had sought out some action in the two local bars where I’m staying and finding no one (unusual for this type of conference) I decided to head out to buy a disposable camera since I had forgot my digital at home. Earlier on Sunday I nearly walked into a deer (I wasn’t watching where I was going) quietly grazing the shrubbery outside my temporary residence. I decided I needed some apparatus to capture these things for posterity. Later that night after finding the bars deserted I headed to town to acquire my camera.

After some searching I found the SafeWay, bought my camera and headed to the liquor store to score some cheap non-monopoly sold booze.

No such luck. As free-market economics would have it, given that Banff has a captive market and that it is a tourist destination, booze was very expensive. The cheapest 26er of uncle bobs bathtub distilled gin was ~$28, approximately $5 more expensive than in Onterrible. Premium brands such as Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray went for over a $10 mark-up. After leaving in disgust I headed back to the conference centre via a convoluted and more scenic route. Having not seen Banff at night (other than being really smashed the last time I was at a conference here), I was taken aback by the shear number of Euro and Aussie trash collapsing intoxicated on the streets. Although I suspect there is a building code requiring all commercial architecture in Banff to adhere to strict esthetic rules, this does not preclude every establishment from displaying flashing neon signs advertising bars, Xtereme sports gear or tattoo and piercing shops. Given the relative sleepiness of the town during daylight hours, the drunk 20-somethings and Nevada style signage was a little surprising. But the town is home to 8000 residents and sees 4 million tourists per annum. What can one expect?

As an aside, today I saw a doe and fawn right outside the conference building, not 5m away from me. Naturally I forgot to bring my disposable camera with me.

The meeting

In my previous post I had alluded to how my presence at this meeting, a meeting on cell signalling, is a bit strange since I no longer do research in cell signalling. Since the resumption of my PhD, I have been working on gene expression. Nevertheless, the talks have by and large been rather good and this year sport a significant foreign component, hosting speakers from UCSF, Oregon, Oslo, Heidelberg and places besides. The problem though is that many felt redundant and none so far have been relevant to what my research interests. As an aside, most of these talks were put on by PIs sporting 30 man operations and budgets (and associated technology) large enough to pay for the Iraq war for a week. Some of the crazy things that I have seen in relation to real time imaging, confocal microscopy, single molecule detection, etc. has been discouraging, given that my lab, nor even my department or perhaps university has the resources to perform studies of this calibre. Moreover, it saddens me that McMaster, once a powerhouse in signalling and basic cancer research, has suffered such a blow in expertise and esteem in the last five years with its successive emigrations of expertise and grants. This year there were three representatives from Mac, including me. There was a larger contingent from Kuopio Finland. Moreover, there was also a second contingent from Turku Finland…

And Heidelberg Germany...

And Utrecht Netherlands…

And Oslo Norway…

Taken from Gold et. al, 2007 ¹.

Nevertheless, as meetings go, this one is pretty good, though a bit inbred over the years with heavy representation from Toronto and Montreal. For the first time since teacher’s college I decided to put on the charisma (what little I have) and try to mingle. Generally things have gone OK, though I have been trapped in a few awkward situations with overzealous grad students. Despite my best efforts however, mingling has been tough to do since one only has the opportunity during meals or after the talks are over - meaning after 11pm.

The other stuff

There were going to be a number of unpleasant things with which I knew I would have to deal at this meeting. One was the said business of my former supervisor who failed to include me as an author on a paper that arose as a result of my MSc work. I decided to confront my former boss (non-aggressively) over lunch on Monday and the conversation went something like this:

Necator: Ex-boss, for the sake of my mental well-being, why was I excluded from the X paper?

Ex-boss: None of your work appeared in the paper.

Necator: I cloned a partial X cDNA from RT-PCR DNA, did the phage screens to pull out the full-length clone and created a number of the constructs that were used in the paper.

Ex-boss: Oh, yeah but they had to be rederived.

Necator: Why?

Ex-boss: We lost them.

Necator:???

How convenient. Never mind that I have the constructs in my freezer at home, nor that I provided detailed sequences for the oligos and said constructs, nor the fact that they had the oligos to begin with, nor the fact that were at least one -20C and -80C stock – but I digress.

Today I had to present my shoddily assembled poster. With a raging headache (for which I’m solely responsible) I had to put on a stiff upper lip and give’er. To my surprise I discovered that there was a poster in my numbered slot on the presentation board. Incredulous at the utter moron who was numerically challenged, I barely stopped myself from tearing down his/her poster and pooing on it right there in the poster room in front of onlookers. It’s a good thing I didn’t. Upon inspection of the program my poster was listed under two different numbers in two different sections – as was that of two other students. Therefore there were two slots and three posters. With little time, I grabbed a few push pins and stuck my poster on the drywall directly opposite my numbered slot(s) and hoped people wouldn’t think I was a complete simpleton.

So there I was, standing like the village idiot by the wall, not the poster board, with the numbers 57/58 by my poster, presenting a poster that had nothing to do with signalling. I had initially hoped I would be sandwiched beside some really hot sh!t poster so that I could merge inconspicuously into the background. But now people were clammering over each other to take a gander at the buffoon who decided to stick his poster to the wall. As though this wasn’t bad enough, the PI who had scooped my work last spring showed up to interrogate me. The situation was unexpected to say the least. Given that this is a predominantly a Canadian conference on SIGNALLING and he is an American not working on signalling, his presence was more than unusual. It’s as though the fates not only choose to kick me in the balls when it’s convenient but they also actively seek me out. Again to compound the insult, it turns out that he’s also performing the same experiments that we decided to include after the scoop, meaning he’s out to scoop me again. Only difference is that he has three post-docs and an army of grad students to make things go. My boss only has me.

Well, so it goes. 2008 is looking utterly awesome. After being scooped three times, it looks like the fourth time I have been politely informed that I’m going to be scooped. I may be starting to believe in a deity, and he seems like that genocidal misogynistic, misanthropic Old-Testament prick after all. Now all I need is the BH to turn into a pillar of salt. Knowing my luck I'd have neither Tequila nor lime.

__________________________

1. If one stares at this stereoscopic protein model properly, in the fashion of the magic eye pictures, one can see the image in 3D. It’s a trick I picked up while in a crystallography lab. This structure was not presented at the meeting. However, the PI for the said work is here presenting other data. I needed something sciency looking but I’m tired and got tired of looking.