Oh yeah, because SFN's annual meeting is coming up, and I have no time these days. What with the trying to get all the work that I should've been doing this summer done. I did write a semi-longish post about a week ago, but I think it's been relegated to the drafts folder for some time, and I can't remember what it was about.
Tonight I made cookies for the first time in a long time. There is another meeting of the Neuroanatomy Club that I started last year, and no-one volunteered to do food, so I had to go to the grocery store, then the beer store, then to the lab to put everything away & start the chilling process, then home to make dinner & start baking the cookies. It's a new recipe from the New Fannie Farmer (or updated or something), and I think it turned out pretty good. More like brownies than cookies really, although I actually thought the amount of flour had to be a misprint! Only 1/4 cup?!? I followed it anyway, and they are very chewy, as promised. OOOHHH, I just remembered the molasses cookies recipe that I got from Drew's grandmother. I have to make those soon.
I ran another Western blot this week, on transfected cos7 cells (transfected with the choline transporter gene, so they'll make choline transporter). So I ran the gel on both tranfected and untransfected cells, and both of my antibodies labeled exactly the same on both lanes. Urrgh. I hate science sometimes. I'll have to pull that Piled Higher & Deeper (Ph.D.) comic strip that talks about how as a child, you think science is awesome because it figures out how things work, and there are objective truths. And then you get to the doing it part, and you realize how hit-or-miss it really is, and how much you have to qualify everything you say/conclude. And how many completely unfounded assumptions go behind what you're doing. But, as I've said before to some of my colleagues, if you spend all of your time trying to prove all those assumptions before you do your experiment, then you'll never actually do it; sometimes you just have to jump in and do it to see what's going on. Then again, I end up with a lot of data that you can't tell what it means.
This weekend I'll be working, but next weekend there is a pumpkin carving party at my friend (and fellow grad student) Mala's house. I may not go to pick pumpkins (just buy one locally), but I think I want to carve one up with people.
Hope you all are doing well, what are your plans for Halloween/Samhain/harvest celebrations?
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1 comment:
Sweetheart,
I don't know anything about the work that you do but you must know how much I admire you for doing it. From your post, it seems like there is a problem with assumptions and finding ways to prove them. I think that a number of researchers have fallen by the wayside by finding ways to manipulate data to prove their assumptions. "Danger Ericka Robinson, Danger, Danger!". The data is the data and the problem is to explain and anticipate it, not to manipulate it. Let Holmes be your guide. Holmes often said " When you can't determine what is, eliminate all that can't be, and what is left has to be.".
I envy your being able to try to solve mysteries for a career. Every job becomes tedious over time but there are moments of personal exultation when you realize that you are the better at a certain thing that you do than anyone else is. This however can lead to the Peter Principle.
Think of Einstein and his quest to find one common force. Look at what he found along the way. Watch the data as it accumulates, none of it is trivial, and try to find what is, not what people want it to be. There is joy in being what you are, not what people want you to be,
all of my love and respect,
daddy
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