Recently I had some business cards with my personal contact information printed up to help me network more effectively and remain in touch with the awesome people involved in science and technology that I've been meeting. As these aren't for work, per se, they have a picture of a Velociraptor skeleton, a quote from Mark Twain ("The more you explain it the more I don't understand it." A good reminder to keep things simple and short, I think), and "Awesome Scientist #17" as my job title, even though it doesn't signify exactly where I work. I'm not sure exactly who the other 16 are. About this time, I realized something: people think I'm smart. This is strange.
I don't know that I'm smart. I don't feel any differently and I cannot imagine being any other way. Frankly, most of the time I feel stupid because there is so much that I do not know and that which I have captured in my mind is so insignificant compared to how much awesome there is to learn. I only know that I am smart by interacting with other people and seeing the reflection thereof. I used to be more reclusive and introverted, counting bacteria by day (doing science) and making music alone at night, but now I have been forcing myself out of that bubble and taking on challenges and actually talking to real people*, doing SCIENCE in the new lab job, and dropping awesomeness and scientific knowledge through the informal molecular biology classes I've been teaching in the Makerspace (Youtube soon). Through all of this, I have come to realize that people actually value my knowledge, experience, perspective, and opinion. I have more opinions than anything else, but it's still a bit strange because I still feel as though I haven't done anything truly awesome that deserves any respect yet.
I probably never will. I realize this, because I know that my ambitions and analytical nature will never let me rest because there will always be more science and/or awesome always going up or something else shiny will captivate my interest. The positive side of this, I think (self-delude?) is that it'll keep me busy, and that's a very good thing as a bored Toaster digs out his backpack of tools and starts taking things apart. The other positive of this is that by taking on more, I hold myself to doing more and am forced to learn how to synthesize all the enzymes to help masticate all that I've bitten off. I used to read scientific papers for fun, but now my boss sends me papers faster than I can read them. I used to make music just for my own enjoyment, but after doing in impromptu live set I have been volunteered to make live music at an art show in 10 days (and all I have prepped are 2 remixes of the Leekspin song). I used to tinker using just my own limited tools and experience, but now that I've helped create a cooperative makerspace I have access to a much wider range of tinkerables and tools (I even coined a new term last week; making a silly, simple mistake now has the swear word: "BLOOTLELOOT!" attached to it after I mistook a diode for a resistor and soldered it to an LED). I used to play with data for weeks just out of curiosity, long after the main aim of the experiment had been answered, just to see what I could draw out of it, but now I have so many data sets to mine that pure play has transmuted into teasing the data for the prettiest results.
These are good changes. It was silly of me to ever think I should first know what I was doing before trying. This is much more informative.
*Not that bloggers aren't real people, but Internet-based communication is easier because it has a backspace key.
04 November, 2009
27 October, 2009
Language Blathering
I posit that language acquisition is driven less by intellectualism than daily utility. A recent post over at Greg Laden's Blog got me to wondering why Anglophones remain so stubbornly monolingual when so much of the world speaks a couple different languages fluently. Upon ponderation, I believe that Anglophones don't learn second or third languages because we don't need to, not really anyway. This isn't to say that this attitude is right, nor that I condone it, but from England on outward to the United States of America to Austrailia, English-speakers have been very successful at ensconcing themselves in geographical isolation, cultural imperialism, and economic massiveness underwritten by strategic military stubbornness. These three conditions having combined to make English the predominant formal language in the world despite its sillinesses.
We dumb Americans don't learn French, Spanish, Hindi, or other non-English languages because we have no daily use for them. We may take a few semesters of a foreign European language in high school, but because we don't have a need to use them, nor a community, space, or occasion to trot them out, we largely forget them. And when we go to other countries we have the privilege borne out of economic massiveness that leads us to expect, and even demand, that our hosts speak our language even as we remain entirely ignorant of theirs.
This isn't necessarily a good thing, but maybe this is why it is the way it is.
For the record, I speak and read German fluently enough to also make out written Dutch and Swedish and can stammer out just enough Spanish to keep myself fed and housed. I intend to learn French if I ever find time because I think it sounds funny, and Mandarin if I can.
We dumb Americans don't learn French, Spanish, Hindi, or other non-English languages because we have no daily use for them. We may take a few semesters of a foreign European language in high school, but because we don't have a need to use them, nor a community, space, or occasion to trot them out, we largely forget them. And when we go to other countries we have the privilege borne out of economic massiveness that leads us to expect, and even demand, that our hosts speak our language even as we remain entirely ignorant of theirs.
This isn't necessarily a good thing, but maybe this is why it is the way it is.
For the record, I speak and read German fluently enough to also make out written Dutch and Swedish and can stammer out just enough Spanish to keep myself fed and housed. I intend to learn French if I ever find time because I think it sounds funny, and Mandarin if I can.
18 October, 2009
Marathon Science
My boss told me that I should factor in that everything will take much longer when I have many samples and that I should plan my time accordingly.
She was very right.
In fact, she was so correct that I wound up pulling 29h in the lab, and 14h the day before, to get Experiment done. There weren't that many samples to begin with, but by the time that I split those samples into cell culture under different conditions and then stained each of those conditions for different sets, I had a couple hundred samples to run on my hands (or, rather, in a tray because I couldn't carry them all at once).
What I found most interesting about this (aside from the Science of it that I can't blog yet), was how all-night science affected me. The entire night was an odd rollercoaster of exuberancy and despondency.
11a - Got to lab, felt guilty about being late but vindicated by 14h there yesterday.
12p - Relieved to see that samples had not drowned in melting ice bath overnight, put into refrigerator to finish staining later because Machine was scheduled out into early evening.
1p - Indian food buffet!
2p - Talk to visiting scientist, then journal club.
3p - Journal club.
4p - Realized that I didn't have enough Enzyme, so I went to go get more from our super-convenient on-site Enzyme Store.
5p - Started finishing staining.
8p - Finished finishing staining, Machine time.
10p - Done with Machine for now.
11p - Pulling cell culture.
12p - Plating for staining, blocking, singing deliberately off-key.
1a - Sandwich and caffeine time.
2a - Primary stains, dancing around laboratory to punk music.
3a - Washes. Laboratory is very cold. Sweater not helping. Note that this parallels drop in body temperature that occurs when sleeping. Turn up lab thermostat just a little bit. At least it's warmer in the cell culture room.
4a - Fixation. I could have gone home and slept at this point, but didn't want to have to come back in later. Arikia and I discuss what we carry around in our backpacks/bags, she rightly points out that the contents of mine would have me on a terror watch list in no time flat. I have my laptop, a zombie comic book anthology, lots of heavily annotated biology papers, a screw driver with a full tip set (even hex wrenches!), a digital multimeter, wire strippers, a soldering gun, needle-nose pliers, gloves, fisticuffs, a gigantic rubber band, a set of Exacto knife scalpels, some faded index cards, cufflinks, a bunch of batteries, and Pepto Bismol. I do not know how old that Pepto Bismol is. Might need to add a crowbar.
5a - My pellets have disappeared. I have become paranoid and cynically convinced that all I'm doing is spending lots of time moving small bits of liquid around even though I know from doing this before that fixation can cause a change in their color.
6a - I found enough change in my pockets for a vending machine Snickers bar. It's dawn and I am shivering even with my sweater on.
7a - Still washing and enzyming, other people start to filter back in (this is Saturday now, right?).
8a - More washes and a brief 30min nap on the couch in the departmental library, which is surprisingly comfortable. Glad my phone can be used as an alarm clock, also glad that protocol has 40min incubation periods.
9a - Still can't see any pellets. Morose about prospects for data. Still washing.
10a - Final stain!!! Just one more wash...the sound that the suction makes when washing no longer amuses me...
11a - Machine time! Crap, gotta restart the machine. Fairly certain that I dozed off waiting for the machine to start up all its pumps and stuff, woke back up when I started to fall out of chair.
12p - Staining controls calibrated.
1p - Running samples, strangely extremely alert, become completely attuned to Machine such that I am already fixing a problem before it pops up a problem-prompt.
4p - Finished running samples, Machine no longer talking to me.
4.5p - Promptly miss only bus home for next hour, decide to walk instead.
5p - I am lost. I know by dead reckoning exactly where my apartment is, but there are all these inconvenient streets and houses in the way.
5.5p - Home.
Truth be told, I still didn't go to sleep until 1a. First I ate a lot of food, drank a lot of drink, and played with the new power tool that finally came in the mail even though I didn't have anything on hand that expressly needed it. I need to find space in my backpack to add this tool. And to top it all off, I even had trouble falling asleep.
UPDATE - Dremel is now in my backpack. Also found bag of 15 2" 30-Ohm speakers in there.
She was very right.
In fact, she was so correct that I wound up pulling 29h in the lab, and 14h the day before, to get Experiment done. There weren't that many samples to begin with, but by the time that I split those samples into cell culture under different conditions and then stained each of those conditions for different sets, I had a couple hundred samples to run on my hands (or, rather, in a tray because I couldn't carry them all at once).
What I found most interesting about this (aside from the Science of it that I can't blog yet), was how all-night science affected me. The entire night was an odd rollercoaster of exuberancy and despondency.
11a - Got to lab, felt guilty about being late but vindicated by 14h there yesterday.
12p - Relieved to see that samples had not drowned in melting ice bath overnight, put into refrigerator to finish staining later because Machine was scheduled out into early evening.
1p - Indian food buffet!
2p - Talk to visiting scientist, then journal club.
3p - Journal club.
4p - Realized that I didn't have enough Enzyme, so I went to go get more from our super-convenient on-site Enzyme Store.
5p - Started finishing staining.
8p - Finished finishing staining, Machine time.
10p - Done with Machine for now.
11p - Pulling cell culture.
12p - Plating for staining, blocking, singing deliberately off-key.
1a - Sandwich and caffeine time.
2a - Primary stains, dancing around laboratory to punk music.
3a - Washes. Laboratory is very cold. Sweater not helping. Note that this parallels drop in body temperature that occurs when sleeping. Turn up lab thermostat just a little bit. At least it's warmer in the cell culture room.
4a - Fixation. I could have gone home and slept at this point, but didn't want to have to come back in later. Arikia and I discuss what we carry around in our backpacks/bags, she rightly points out that the contents of mine would have me on a terror watch list in no time flat. I have my laptop, a zombie comic book anthology, lots of heavily annotated biology papers, a screw driver with a full tip set (even hex wrenches!), a digital multimeter, wire strippers, a soldering gun, needle-nose pliers, gloves, fisticuffs, a gigantic rubber band, a set of Exacto knife scalpels, some faded index cards, cufflinks, a bunch of batteries, and Pepto Bismol. I do not know how old that Pepto Bismol is. Might need to add a crowbar.
5a - My pellets have disappeared. I have become paranoid and cynically convinced that all I'm doing is spending lots of time moving small bits of liquid around even though I know from doing this before that fixation can cause a change in their color.
6a - I found enough change in my pockets for a vending machine Snickers bar. It's dawn and I am shivering even with my sweater on.
7a - Still washing and enzyming, other people start to filter back in (this is Saturday now, right?).
8a - More washes and a brief 30min nap on the couch in the departmental library, which is surprisingly comfortable. Glad my phone can be used as an alarm clock, also glad that protocol has 40min incubation periods.
9a - Still can't see any pellets. Morose about prospects for data. Still washing.
10a - Final stain!!! Just one more wash...the sound that the suction makes when washing no longer amuses me...
11a - Machine time! Crap, gotta restart the machine. Fairly certain that I dozed off waiting for the machine to start up all its pumps and stuff, woke back up when I started to fall out of chair.
12p - Staining controls calibrated.
1p - Running samples, strangely extremely alert, become completely attuned to Machine such that I am already fixing a problem before it pops up a problem-prompt.
4p - Finished running samples, Machine no longer talking to me.
4.5p - Promptly miss only bus home for next hour, decide to walk instead.
5p - I am lost. I know by dead reckoning exactly where my apartment is, but there are all these inconvenient streets and houses in the way.
5.5p - Home.
Truth be told, I still didn't go to sleep until 1a. First I ate a lot of food, drank a lot of drink, and played with the new power tool that finally came in the mail even though I didn't have anything on hand that expressly needed it. I need to find space in my backpack to add this tool. And to top it all off, I even had trouble falling asleep.
UPDATE - Dremel is now in my backpack. Also found bag of 15 2" 30-Ohm speakers in there.
26 September, 2009
7 Kinds of Awesome Busy
I have been 7 different kinds of awesome busy lately, although at the moment exhaustion is chipping away at the thick layer of exuberance I've been smearing across my forehead lately. Please do not expect this post to be in chronological order.
Last Tuesday the flow cytometer I needed to get data was broken. So instead I went to Chicago and Milwaukee and drove back in the same night for the Two Hands Project. I also went to Boston for a week at the beginning of the month with absolutely no hotel reservations, just friends of my brotherfriend to stay with. There I met Prime*, who is awesome in 17-8,597 different ways and I'm 97% certain that I'm in love with her now and I can't help it and don't care except that there's a rather inconveniently large physical space between us (1Mm, too big for catapults!). We're trying to figure out how to fold the space between us into technical nothingness, so if you live between Michigan and Boston please be aware that there may soon be a sudden extreme change in the topography of your region. I'm sorry, Cleveland, but Prime sends me cookies and cookies > Cleveland, although it should be noted that I can be bribed with plane tickets now.
I did many other things in Boston, some of them rather unbloggable** now that I know my boss reads this site, but they include surviving biking through downtown Boston traffic with several kgs of computing and goggles and letting complete strangers surprise-dye my hair however they wanted to. They're not strangers anymore and my hair was a very lovely bright pink for about a week when it faded to a strawberry blonde. However, the purple sides did not fade nearly so quickly and now, even after buzzing away the unruly mop that needed trimming anyway, I have a subtle bright yellow blotch on one side of my head.
Regarding blog-reading bosses, I changed laboratories shortly before going to Boston and am quite pleased with the change. In Immunolab, I read papers to actually apply them to the science I'm doing and planning instead of just reading because I'm bored, and doing so matters(!) and this is also awesome even though it has also resulted in a drastic cut in how many PLoS Computational Biology articles I have time to read. I expect to find an equilibrium again sometime as I climb the learning curve.
But as for equilibria, that's been thrown even further off balance by trying to organize a local hackerspace. And that brings me back to the Two Hands Project, but only in a moment. A hackerspace is a place where creative awesome people can come to build their ideas, talk technical shop, imagine, invent, innovate, destroy and re-create whatever they want to. It's essentially a community in a common shared working space with shared tools and parts, and maybe even eventually club-like membership to buy those parts, that fosters creative productivity by pitting like-minded people of completely different backgrounds into their own creative passions. These emerging spaces have the potential to remodel the entire American economy by shifting innovation from closed-source company driven patents to fast and flexible open-source crowdsourced invention. So far we have computer programmers, musicians, roboticists, artists, biotechnologists, cooks, textilers, and other crazily awesome people coming to meetings and generating large numbers of incredible project ideas. However, forming this group involves a lot of email management, community outreach, calender planning, part sourcing, charter writing, agenda creating, etc etc etc and I for that I am grateful that I can rely on most of my friendfamily, who're also all embroiled in this.
And yes, I have a friendfamily that has coalesced. Sister Doom, Brother Discord, Brother Deliverance, and myself, Brother Destruction. These are people whom I can completely count upon to have my back, whom I can trust and who know that they can depend upon me as needed. Sometimes I want to kick Brother Discord in the face, but that's probably because he's also my roommate. Sister Doom and I drove to Chicago and back last Friday to pick up a stranded Brother Deliverance.
But The Two Hands Project is also awesome. As I understand it, Brother Deliverance first came up with the project when he found out that JetBlue was offering a $600 ticket that lets you fly as much as you want from September 8th to October 8th. So he put out a call for donations at http://www.twohandsproject.com and raised enough money for a ticket and people donated equipment, and 2 have even joined him on his bad dash from coast to coast. It was with him and his crew that I (politely and enthusiastically) stormed Pumping Station One in Chicago, went on to interview James Carlson (director of Bucketworks in Milwaukee), and then drove from Milwaukee back to Ann Arbor so I could be back in lab by 10am. Because Brother Deliverance et al are too busy recording footage, flying, and meeting awesome people across the country to keep up the blog at Two Hands Project, they've enlisted me to do it for them remotely. I posted the first semi-polished video from San Francisco's Noisebridge and The Internet Archive*** today here and will be posting a string of profiles of hackers/makers soon.
There're some sweet experiments coming up that I am very excited about, and I just realized that I forgot the slip of paper that has the part name of the low-voltage audio amplifier I wanted to buy from RadioShack tomorrow on my desk in the lab.
I'm not quite sure what to do with Atomic Pudding. On the one hand, I could just use it like I've used this venue and let my awesome shine through, but on the other hand I liked what I was doing with open-access research and interviews, but it was just getting absolute crap page views and as such I'm not sure I was doing very well with it. Thoughts?
I also went out to visit i3 Detroit recently (Wednesday night, I think?) and had mjaddra before that (I think?) after a local maker/hackerspace meeting that Brother Deliverance recorded for the Two Hands Project (I had a lapel-mic, but was probably still unintelligible) and invited them to the free Drupal Web Development class that our as-yet-unnamed space**** is holding this coming Wednesday. And somewhere in here I know I made some really awesome live music with a fellow maker/hacker at a meeting sometime that may have been last night but I can't be certain. Wasn't I in Boston last night?
*Whose intellectual and physical hotness are mutually inclusive and inseparable properties! In testiment to her awesomeness, note that she was the first person to ever convince me of the functional utility of buying clothes that don't need to be modded to fit and has even inspired me to replace the whiskey in my burritos-cookies-and-whiskey diet with vegetables!
**Get your mind out of the gutter!
***Technically not a maker/hackerspace.
****We're working on it!
P.S. - I don't recommend prying all the keys up off your keyboard and rearranging them from QWERTY to DVORAK before you know DVORAK very well. Makes passwords very difficult.
Last Tuesday the flow cytometer I needed to get data was broken. So instead I went to Chicago and Milwaukee and drove back in the same night for the Two Hands Project. I also went to Boston for a week at the beginning of the month with absolutely no hotel reservations, just friends of my brotherfriend to stay with. There I met Prime*, who is awesome in 17-8,597 different ways and I'm 97% certain that I'm in love with her now and I can't help it and don't care except that there's a rather inconveniently large physical space between us (1Mm, too big for catapults!). We're trying to figure out how to fold the space between us into technical nothingness, so if you live between Michigan and Boston please be aware that there may soon be a sudden extreme change in the topography of your region. I'm sorry, Cleveland, but Prime sends me cookies and cookies > Cleveland, although it should be noted that I can be bribed with plane tickets now.
I did many other things in Boston, some of them rather unbloggable** now that I know my boss reads this site, but they include surviving biking through downtown Boston traffic with several kgs of computing and goggles and letting complete strangers surprise-dye my hair however they wanted to. They're not strangers anymore and my hair was a very lovely bright pink for about a week when it faded to a strawberry blonde. However, the purple sides did not fade nearly so quickly and now, even after buzzing away the unruly mop that needed trimming anyway, I have a subtle bright yellow blotch on one side of my head.
Regarding blog-reading bosses, I changed laboratories shortly before going to Boston and am quite pleased with the change. In Immunolab, I read papers to actually apply them to the science I'm doing and planning instead of just reading because I'm bored, and doing so matters(!) and this is also awesome even though it has also resulted in a drastic cut in how many PLoS Computational Biology articles I have time to read. I expect to find an equilibrium again sometime as I climb the learning curve.
But as for equilibria, that's been thrown even further off balance by trying to organize a local hackerspace. And that brings me back to the Two Hands Project, but only in a moment. A hackerspace is a place where creative awesome people can come to build their ideas, talk technical shop, imagine, invent, innovate, destroy and re-create whatever they want to. It's essentially a community in a common shared working space with shared tools and parts, and maybe even eventually club-like membership to buy those parts, that fosters creative productivity by pitting like-minded people of completely different backgrounds into their own creative passions. These emerging spaces have the potential to remodel the entire American economy by shifting innovation from closed-source company driven patents to fast and flexible open-source crowdsourced invention. So far we have computer programmers, musicians, roboticists, artists, biotechnologists, cooks, textilers, and other crazily awesome people coming to meetings and generating large numbers of incredible project ideas. However, forming this group involves a lot of email management, community outreach, calender planning, part sourcing, charter writing, agenda creating, etc etc etc and I for that I am grateful that I can rely on most of my friendfamily, who're also all embroiled in this.
And yes, I have a friendfamily that has coalesced. Sister Doom, Brother Discord, Brother Deliverance, and myself, Brother Destruction. These are people whom I can completely count upon to have my back, whom I can trust and who know that they can depend upon me as needed. Sometimes I want to kick Brother Discord in the face, but that's probably because he's also my roommate. Sister Doom and I drove to Chicago and back last Friday to pick up a stranded Brother Deliverance.
But The Two Hands Project is also awesome. As I understand it, Brother Deliverance first came up with the project when he found out that JetBlue was offering a $600 ticket that lets you fly as much as you want from September 8th to October 8th. So he put out a call for donations at http://www.twohandsproject.com and raised enough money for a ticket and people donated equipment, and 2 have even joined him on his bad dash from coast to coast. It was with him and his crew that I (politely and enthusiastically) stormed Pumping Station One in Chicago, went on to interview James Carlson (director of Bucketworks in Milwaukee), and then drove from Milwaukee back to Ann Arbor so I could be back in lab by 10am. Because Brother Deliverance et al are too busy recording footage, flying, and meeting awesome people across the country to keep up the blog at Two Hands Project, they've enlisted me to do it for them remotely. I posted the first semi-polished video from San Francisco's Noisebridge and The Internet Archive*** today here and will be posting a string of profiles of hackers/makers soon.
There're some sweet experiments coming up that I am very excited about, and I just realized that I forgot the slip of paper that has the part name of the low-voltage audio amplifier I wanted to buy from RadioShack tomorrow on my desk in the lab.
I'm not quite sure what to do with Atomic Pudding. On the one hand, I could just use it like I've used this venue and let my awesome shine through, but on the other hand I liked what I was doing with open-access research and interviews, but it was just getting absolute crap page views and as such I'm not sure I was doing very well with it. Thoughts?
I also went out to visit i3 Detroit recently (Wednesday night, I think?) and had mjaddra before that (I think?) after a local maker/hackerspace meeting that Brother Deliverance recorded for the Two Hands Project (I had a lapel-mic, but was probably still unintelligible) and invited them to the free Drupal Web Development class that our as-yet-unnamed space**** is holding this coming Wednesday. And somewhere in here I know I made some really awesome live music with a fellow maker/hacker at a meeting sometime that may have been last night but I can't be certain. Wasn't I in Boston last night?
*Whose intellectual and physical hotness are mutually inclusive and inseparable properties! In testiment to her awesomeness, note that she was the first person to ever convince me of the functional utility of buying clothes that don't need to be modded to fit and has even inspired me to replace the whiskey in my burritos-cookies-and-whiskey diet with vegetables!
**Get your mind out of the gutter!
***Technically not a maker/hackerspace.
****We're working on it!
P.S. - I don't recommend prying all the keys up off your keyboard and rearranging them from QWERTY to DVORAK before you know DVORAK very well. Makes passwords very difficult.
09 September, 2009
E-mail Quandary
I find myself facing a bit of a quandary.
I need to send out emails to professors at places I would like to attend graduate school, but I am not sure how to write these emails. I want to write:
When I know that it wouldn't do to do so. I know that perhaps 3 professors might appreciate getting such an email, but in the vast majority of cases I am aware that to do this would be folly and most likely leave an irreparably bad impression. So I'm left with:
And this just seems so damn contrived and passionless that I don't know what to really do with it. It's so boring and flat and it communicates none of the enthusiasm or intelligence I may be able to bring to bear on their research focus. But it's what's right, kinda. If I try to inject personality by dressing up words just a little, I'm liable to come across as a sophist jackass or, as is more likely in my case, as a crazy person not to be trusted with pencils.
So this is my quandary, and I don't really see any good ways around it. How do I balance my enthusiasm with the need for propriety/formality? Suggestions!?
I need to send out emails to professors at places I would like to attend graduate school, but I am not sure how to write these emails. I want to write:
HEY DR. DOOD!
ZOMGFLUFFLES UR RESEARCH IS, LIKE, SO HAWT!!!!11!1! U R TEH AWESOMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) HAZ U ROOMZ IN UR LAB FOR ME!?
SQUEE!,
TOASTER
When I know that it wouldn't do to do so. I know that perhaps 3 professors might appreciate getting such an email, but in the vast majority of cases I am aware that to do this would be folly and most likely leave an irreparably bad impression. So I'm left with:
[Banal Salutations],
[Bland Statement 1] [Who I Am] [Something Vaguely Intelligent] [I Read Your Paper, By Which I Really Mean I Read the Abstract] [Bland Statement 2] [Something Trying To Be Intelligent] [Bland Statement 3] [Might There Be Room In Your Lab For Me?]
[Respect]
[Word.]
And this just seems so damn contrived and passionless that I don't know what to really do with it. It's so boring and flat and it communicates none of the enthusiasm or intelligence I may be able to bring to bear on their research focus. But it's what's right, kinda. If I try to inject personality by dressing up words just a little, I'm liable to come across as a sophist jackass or, as is more likely in my case, as a crazy person not to be trusted with pencils.
So this is my quandary, and I don't really see any good ways around it. How do I balance my enthusiasm with the need for propriety/formality? Suggestions!?
25 August, 2009
Tactile Ostrich
If we have Wiimotes that make little blurtles and blops when you past them over an icon or button or pick up a sword within a game, making it feel more as if you're actually touching those items and increasing engagement with the medium, then why do we not also have computer mice that do the same for icons and links?
Someone fix that, please.
Someone fix that, please.
22 August, 2009
Dear Reader
Dear Readers,
You may have noticed I'm not as engaged as I used to be, that I'm not hanging out on your blogs like I used to, or updating nearly as much. Yes, I have been busy, true, I have not had much time, and yes, also correct that my Internet access has been spotty at best lately. However, none of those are the reason for my scant attention. Dear reader, let me blunt: there's another blog in my life.
It's not you, dear reader, it's me. I've changed. My ambitions have grown larger in proportion with my happiness, and through some persistence I have procured a spot for myself over at True/Slant called Atomic Pudding. Over there I'm going to be writing about science and health and kicking ass, and due to the time it is requiring out of the increasingly rare free time I do have this blog, our special place, has fallen to inattention.
Also, dear reader, I've not been entirely forthcoming with you. I've told you that my name is Toaster Sunshine. My real name can be found here. I am not posting it here because I do not want it to show up in search engine results.
I intend to keep posting here, but my posts will be less frequent, and at least until I get regular Internet back in my life I will not be so active as before on your blogs. In the meantime, however, my good Brother Discord has sworn upon his first child's foreskin that he shall help with the posting here.
Thank you for your understanding,
Toaster
You may have noticed I'm not as engaged as I used to be, that I'm not hanging out on your blogs like I used to, or updating nearly as much. Yes, I have been busy, true, I have not had much time, and yes, also correct that my Internet access has been spotty at best lately. However, none of those are the reason for my scant attention. Dear reader, let me blunt: there's another blog in my life.
It's not you, dear reader, it's me. I've changed. My ambitions have grown larger in proportion with my happiness, and through some persistence I have procured a spot for myself over at True/Slant called Atomic Pudding. Over there I'm going to be writing about science and health and kicking ass, and due to the time it is requiring out of the increasingly rare free time I do have this blog, our special place, has fallen to inattention.
Also, dear reader, I've not been entirely forthcoming with you. I've told you that my name is Toaster Sunshine. My real name can be found here. I am not posting it here because I do not want it to show up in search engine results.
I intend to keep posting here, but my posts will be less frequent, and at least until I get regular Internet back in my life I will not be so active as before on your blogs. In the meantime, however, my good Brother Discord has sworn upon his first child's foreskin that he shall help with the posting here.
Thank you for your understanding,
Toaster
18 August, 2009
Blathering on Hunger
As I was fumbling contacts into bleary eyes this morning, my stomach untied itself from the knot I had been unaware of and startled me with the ferociousness of its growl. I was hungry. I am often hungry as I tend to skip meals to do more interesting things and frequently go 12 or more hours without any food*. This is a long-tailed habit rooted back 8 years, and it is not likely to change. I don't mind being hungry. I relish it, because it reminds me of the sheer vitality of the human body, its metabolic resilience, and it makes my next meal taste that much sweeter. I sincerely believe that food would not be nearly so appealing if I didn't occasionally let myself get so hungry that the reptilian brain underneath my consciousness begins to wonder how squirrels taste. That being said, this morning's hunger was somehow different. Normally hunger pangs are diffuse, a distant inconvenience upon the sphere of my awareness, but this was sharp and intense and immediate like a rattlesnake uncoiling.
And my hunger made me feel guilty.
I had oatmeal in the pantry and a stove to cook it on. This is a privilege, and it is one that I do not take lightly or for granted. So many people in the world are hungry, even in the West, and we simply don't see them. Sure, we admonish children to finish their peas because a kid in Poor Country X doesn't even have peas, but this nicety conceals an ugly truth: that the kid in Poor Country X really exists, and actually is hungry.
Wrapped up within this is the disgust that the phrase "I'm starving!" evokes from me. It is a terrible hyperbole, and I find it cruel and inappropriate to use when you merely want lunch while someone else in the world may not have lunch, or have had breakfast, dinner, or lunch the day before. Americans claim to be starving at the slightest hint of hunger, but maybe that is just the uniquely privileged perspective that we as a nation have, when we live in a country that has so much food that many are obese even on top of all the food we simply throw out. I suspect that the majority of the people who use this phrase so callously have never really been hungry and I wonder what they would do in a hard situation. So much of our Western society is carried upon the backs of titans treading on toothpick bridges, tenuous and fragile. Entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, yet still incredibly wasteful. The food we, as a country, throw away before even opening the package could probably feed a great many people. Yet somehow, just as the hyperbole of "I'm starving!" or the "Eat your peas because a child in Poor Country X doesn't have them" is part of our culture, food waste is also deeply ingrained upon our national consciousness.
I'm debating whether or not I am too proud to reclaim some of the unspoilt food that gets thrown away. On the one hand, it is there, free to take and perfectly edible, but on the other hand I feel that it is somewhat gross to eat dumpster chicken (if found still cold in an unopened package). I am fairly certain that many of those who are relatively well-fed yet claim to be starving would find it disgusting, but what are your thoughts?
*It should probably be noted that when I do eat, I try to eat 1Mcal+ at a time.
And my hunger made me feel guilty.
I had oatmeal in the pantry and a stove to cook it on. This is a privilege, and it is one that I do not take lightly or for granted. So many people in the world are hungry, even in the West, and we simply don't see them. Sure, we admonish children to finish their peas because a kid in Poor Country X doesn't even have peas, but this nicety conceals an ugly truth: that the kid in Poor Country X really exists, and actually is hungry.
Wrapped up within this is the disgust that the phrase "I'm starving!" evokes from me. It is a terrible hyperbole, and I find it cruel and inappropriate to use when you merely want lunch while someone else in the world may not have lunch, or have had breakfast, dinner, or lunch the day before. Americans claim to be starving at the slightest hint of hunger, but maybe that is just the uniquely privileged perspective that we as a nation have, when we live in a country that has so much food that many are obese even on top of all the food we simply throw out. I suspect that the majority of the people who use this phrase so callously have never really been hungry and I wonder what they would do in a hard situation. So much of our Western society is carried upon the backs of titans treading on toothpick bridges, tenuous and fragile. Entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, yet still incredibly wasteful. The food we, as a country, throw away before even opening the package could probably feed a great many people. Yet somehow, just as the hyperbole of "I'm starving!" or the "Eat your peas because a child in Poor Country X doesn't have them" is part of our culture, food waste is also deeply ingrained upon our national consciousness.
I'm debating whether or not I am too proud to reclaim some of the unspoilt food that gets thrown away. On the one hand, it is there, free to take and perfectly edible, but on the other hand I feel that it is somewhat gross to eat dumpster chicken (if found still cold in an unopened package). I am fairly certain that many of those who are relatively well-fed yet claim to be starving would find it disgusting, but what are your thoughts?
*It should probably be noted that when I do eat, I try to eat 1Mcal+ at a time.
12 August, 2009
MAGIC!!!
The 4 GREATEST words in human language are, undoubtably and irrefutably:
So much of our daily tedious lives are consumed so much by the "what", the where we're going and what we've gotten done and what we've yet to do in any given day. We rush and we careen through each day, blindly numb to the absolute wonder that simply being alive allows us to experience! So many of us fumble through every day, finding nothing but monotony when all around us there are secret lives of insects and rodents playing out tragedies that the Greeks couldn't've even begun to fathom. Each day the grass bending under the weight of a squirrel and ruffling in the new nuances of a fresh breeze is different!
And all so many of us do is go home to bask in the banal glow of the television, consuming aspartame shovelware with no analysis or reflection thereof. To me, this is a catastrophe! Sure, we've dissociated ourselves from the intricate and minute rhythms of nature and congregated in cities, but that nature still flourishes underfoot whether we want it to or not. The stubborn tufts of grass clawing out of the asphalt, the clever raccoons who persist amid our concrete monuments to our own aggrandized sense of self-worth*. Nonetheless, there is wonder bursting all around us, and all we have to do is notice it!
Too often, we're too breathless, too tired, too distracted, to find the simple awe that is captured in every bubble that the dish soap sprouts. And at the same time, we're not asking why, we're not wondering if, we're not trying to figure out how, and we're not imagining. If we let ourselves fall into this shallow pattern, then we fail the full realization of our evolutionary endowment and I wonder if we can truly say we have lived and not just merely existed.
This is all born out of the manic and inescapable conviction that if I could just crack open my mind and let you see inside, let you peer into the window of my imagination, you might understand, you might realize just how absolutely wonderful the feeling of midnight rain and the lovely contrast to a warm pillow at night is, how exquisite the sharp pang of a bit of hunger and how it sweetens one's meal may be, and just how much MAGIC exists in the world. As if I could shake you laughing like Jello until your spine was marshmallow and your mind was flooded with the brilliance of what the world is and how it came to be and how it works and what it might be someday if suchandsuch does thisorthat.
This is also wrapped up in my frustration with the limitations of language itself. I could shout "IMAGINE IT!" at you until my vocal cords tried to strangle me in protest and it would do nothing to help you realize the pure depth of the inner vision I am trying to communicate to you. There exists SO MUCH potential in the world, so much burgeoning awe that it stings to know that so many people prefer to wrap themselves up in soporific entertainment, hate, or blind ignorance.
I know that there's no such thing as ooga-booga-hocus-pocus magic, but I remain convinced that the world is thoroughly magical. All we need to do is see it.
So, tomorrow, go outside, or stay inside, or fall asleep with a tea cup over your eyes, and look in the corners of the world and of your mind. Instead of waiting to see a Wunderkammer, find your own instantly and for free. Seek out the dust bunny that reminds you of your Aunt Matry, find the chord that rings back the sweetest memory to roar back through your senses clearer than the moments it happened. Notice the glinting halo of light around the glimmering rain as it splatters across the pavement in aggregated fluid dynamics (that you're observing almost in REAL TIME!) and sing a song that only you know but will not remember in 5 minutes! Ask WHY, let yourself IMAGINE, question HOW, and wonder IF!!! And, most of all, teach it to others and spread this joy of wonder!
*That isn't a condemnation of the human ego. We have, collectively, wrought great, terrible, and beautiful things upon the face of the Earth. The decaying industrial rust towers of Detroit are exquisite in their intricacy! The rudely squatting chemical factories of Saint Louis are brilliant works of art in the loaming glint of the fading sun piercing through foggy humid air! The oil refineries of Toldeo and Maumee bellow upon the horizons, belching red underglow into Cheerio snowstorms (I once lived in Toledo across US-23 from a cereal factory), give the entire short little city a Monet-like quality! The sheer patched-togetherness of Gary, Indiana is an awe-inspiring exercise in ret-conning! And all of this has been wrought by human hands and human minds, to bend the Earth itself to our will! How is that not marvelous?
WHY
IF
HOW
IMAGINE
IF
HOW
IMAGINE
So much of our daily tedious lives are consumed so much by the "what", the where we're going and what we've gotten done and what we've yet to do in any given day. We rush and we careen through each day, blindly numb to the absolute wonder that simply being alive allows us to experience! So many of us fumble through every day, finding nothing but monotony when all around us there are secret lives of insects and rodents playing out tragedies that the Greeks couldn't've even begun to fathom. Each day the grass bending under the weight of a squirrel and ruffling in the new nuances of a fresh breeze is different!
And all so many of us do is go home to bask in the banal glow of the television, consuming aspartame shovelware with no analysis or reflection thereof. To me, this is a catastrophe! Sure, we've dissociated ourselves from the intricate and minute rhythms of nature and congregated in cities, but that nature still flourishes underfoot whether we want it to or not. The stubborn tufts of grass clawing out of the asphalt, the clever raccoons who persist amid our concrete monuments to our own aggrandized sense of self-worth*. Nonetheless, there is wonder bursting all around us, and all we have to do is notice it!
Too often, we're too breathless, too tired, too distracted, to find the simple awe that is captured in every bubble that the dish soap sprouts. And at the same time, we're not asking why, we're not wondering if, we're not trying to figure out how, and we're not imagining. If we let ourselves fall into this shallow pattern, then we fail the full realization of our evolutionary endowment and I wonder if we can truly say we have lived and not just merely existed.
This is all born out of the manic and inescapable conviction that if I could just crack open my mind and let you see inside, let you peer into the window of my imagination, you might understand, you might realize just how absolutely wonderful the feeling of midnight rain and the lovely contrast to a warm pillow at night is, how exquisite the sharp pang of a bit of hunger and how it sweetens one's meal may be, and just how much MAGIC exists in the world. As if I could shake you laughing like Jello until your spine was marshmallow and your mind was flooded with the brilliance of what the world is and how it came to be and how it works and what it might be someday if suchandsuch does thisorthat.
This is also wrapped up in my frustration with the limitations of language itself. I could shout "IMAGINE IT!" at you until my vocal cords tried to strangle me in protest and it would do nothing to help you realize the pure depth of the inner vision I am trying to communicate to you. There exists SO MUCH potential in the world, so much burgeoning awe that it stings to know that so many people prefer to wrap themselves up in soporific entertainment, hate, or blind ignorance.
I know that there's no such thing as ooga-booga-hocus-pocus magic, but I remain convinced that the world is thoroughly magical. All we need to do is see it.
So, tomorrow, go outside, or stay inside, or fall asleep with a tea cup over your eyes, and look in the corners of the world and of your mind. Instead of waiting to see a Wunderkammer, find your own instantly and for free. Seek out the dust bunny that reminds you of your Aunt Matry, find the chord that rings back the sweetest memory to roar back through your senses clearer than the moments it happened. Notice the glinting halo of light around the glimmering rain as it splatters across the pavement in aggregated fluid dynamics (that you're observing almost in REAL TIME!) and sing a song that only you know but will not remember in 5 minutes! Ask WHY, let yourself IMAGINE, question HOW, and wonder IF!!! And, most of all, teach it to others and spread this joy of wonder!
*That isn't a condemnation of the human ego. We have, collectively, wrought great, terrible, and beautiful things upon the face of the Earth. The decaying industrial rust towers of Detroit are exquisite in their intricacy! The rudely squatting chemical factories of Saint Louis are brilliant works of art in the loaming glint of the fading sun piercing through foggy humid air! The oil refineries of Toldeo and Maumee bellow upon the horizons, belching red underglow into Cheerio snowstorms (I once lived in Toledo across US-23 from a cereal factory), give the entire short little city a Monet-like quality! The sheer patched-togetherness of Gary, Indiana is an awe-inspiring exercise in ret-conning! And all of this has been wrought by human hands and human minds, to bend the Earth itself to our will! How is that not marvelous?
10 August, 2009
How to Explain the Senses?
Crowdsourcing: to open up the development process of any given project to the public in a meaningful way that allows the public to impact the course of that project's development.Ann Arbor, Michigan is about to have a mini-Makers' Faire (as opposed to a Gigantic Makers' Faire). This entails a large gathering of creative people showing off the products of their creativity and ingenuity in a public forum. Typically there are demonstrations, learning, and sharing as most everything is open access. Basically, it is a gathering of nerds who like to make stuff teaching other nerds of similar aptitude, and the curious public, about the stuff they made. The purpose is to share, awe, inspire, educate, elucidate, demonstrate, and possibly also confuse.
I've gotten in on this, and a project is rapidly coalescing. In the Sensory Augmentation Devices booth, we're trying to demonstrate the electrical properties of nerves. However, to do this live and in real time, we must also tread carefully to avoid disgusting the public. Listed below are the ideas so far, and they are open to your comments and criticism.
1) Brain-ablated Xenopus (frog*) with thoracic cavity open connected to electrical leads at each limb in a physiological solution of potassium chloride. Each electrical lead will be run by a robotic sensor glove such that movement of the glove will induce neuromuscular contraction in the frog limbs. In effect, this is a frog puppet. We hope that the physiological potassion chloride solution will allow passive diffusion of ions back into nerve cells and allow for repeated contractions.
2) Similarly, brain-ablated Xenopus with thoracic cavity open and heart connected to an LED through a tranformer. The blinking LED will demonstrate to observers that the heart does indeed contract due to pulsed electrical impulses.
3) Petri dishes of rat or mouse neurons with silica implants connected to a computerized output to show random electrical activity of cultured neurons. We have a source of cultured neurons, but we still need a way to get a signal amplified out of them.
4) Brain model, either preserved real or plastic so that we can get the neuroscientists among us to explain the structural functionality of the brain and how it relates to neonatal development in humans, as well as anatomical siting of neural pathologies.
5) Setting up some of the basic sensory tricks, such as the Wet Illusion. In the Wet Illusion you place 2 cold metal bars against someone's bare skin with a warm bar sandwiched between them. Although all bars are quite dry, the brain registers the unusual temperature gradient as wetness. If you have other sensory tricks to use, let us know.
6) Electrode-based EEG interfaces hooked up to a sound synthesizer to allow the audience to "hear" the wearer's "thoughts". Getting the EEG output to interface with the sound synthesizer is the easy part, but getting a hold of the EEG/electrodes will be difficult.
7) 8-bit imager, where the audience may flip any of 64 switches to light up one of 64 LEDs in a board to explain how rhodopsin in the eye's cone cells converts light (the audience's hand) into an electical signal (the LED) by way of altering its molecular conformation (the state of the switch).
Any and all of this is completely open for your comment, criticism, and input. In fact, all 3 of those things are explicitly welcome! New demos may also be suggested, but the general theme of this is simply that we show how nerves and sense work.
*We figured that frogs are uncharismatic enough that no one, save the hard-core animal rights' activists, will have a major problem with using them for education purposes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
