Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians! I’m thankful for hockey, hockey pools, and awesome blog buddies, among other things.
Congratulations Thomas Joseph on winning the first week of the pool!
Just remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint…
Who wants to do the update next week? I’ll send you the spreadsheet…
WHEREAS Cath@VWXYNot?, author of an independent weblog at http://vwxynot.blogspot.com (“The Blogger”), has somehow managed to use less 2010 vacation time than she thought, and has more unused days remaining than she is allowed to roll over into 2011; and
WHEREAS The Blogger has only ever had three (3) weekdays off work (not including sick days) that were spent at home, rather than on either domestic or international trips, during her almost nine (9) years of residence in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (“Vancouver”); and
WHEREAS on weekends, the most attractive parts of Vancouver (see Exhibits, attached) are teeming with People Who Do Not Know How To Walk/Jog/Cycle/Rollerblade In Crowds Without Impeding The Progress of Others (“Fuckwits”); and
WHEREAS The Blogger lacks the patience to deal with said Fuckwits in large numbers; and
WHEREAS on weekends, The Blogger therefore tends to avoid visiting the most attractive parts of Vancouver; and
WHEREAS The Blogger has ideas for several interesting writing projects, but can not summon up the requisite mental energy while working full time in a writing-based job, at least not when the weekends are warm and sunny; and
WHEREAS the 2010 Vancouver-Whistler Olympic Winter Games (“The Party Of The Century”) brought the entire Vancouver movie industry to a standstill for three months in the winter and spring of this year (a situation hereby declared “Totally Worth It”); and
WHEREAS The Blogger and her Husband (“Mr E Man”) therefore have no (0) money at this time and can not afford a) to fly anywhere exotic, or b) let Mr E Man take any more time off work this year:
NOW, THEREFORE, it has been agreed that The Blogger shall be released from her place of employment for a period of one (1) week in mid-November 2010, during which time she shall (mostly) stay within the limits of the Vancouver city boundaries (“Staycation”). The activities that shall fall under this Staycation Agreement may include, but not be limited to, the following:
So there.
Right, just this work trip to get through (this post is scheduled to publish while The Blogger is at Vancouver International Airport at Stupid O’Clock (PST) on a Monday morning, looking bleary eyed and attempting to make intelligent conversation with her boss and assorted other colleagues), then six more weeks of grants, manuscripts, progress reports, ethics applications, and (how did you guess?) MTAs and collaborative research agreements, and then The Blogger is FREE! FREE! FREE!
(for a week).
NOW, THEREFORE, YAY!
________________________________
Exhibit A: Stanley Park Seawall. The Blogger has given up all attempts to cycle or rollerblade around this attractive pathway on weekends due to being almost knocked into the water on multiple occasions by Fuckwits stopping dead in front of her for no apparent reason. On one such occasion she was forced to rollerblade rather painfully into a metal fence in order to avoid this fate, and obtained some rather spectacular bruises as a result. The Blogger used to take a detour on her ride home from work to enjoy this route on certain weekday evenings in summer, but since subsequently moving away from her original neighbourhood of Kitsilano this option is no longer practicable. (This Staycation Activity is weather-dependent).
Exhibit B: Granville Island Public Market. Known for its delicious fresh local produce, delicious fresh hot food and beverages, and large roving packs of Fuckwits on weekends.
Exhibit C: Vancouver Art Gallery. The Blogger has never visited for reasons that she can not satisfactorily explain. (She did try during The Party Of The Century, when entry was free, but it was far too busy and full of elite international Fuckwits).
Exhibit D: Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, which again The Blogger has never visited, nor made any attempt to visit, for reasons that remain obscure.
It’s time for another quiz taken from my puzzle of the day desk calendar! I think I’m going to have to buy myself another calendar next year if Santa doesn’t bring me one; it’s provided some really fun blogging experiences. (Either that or I’m going to have to make up my own quizzes, which sounds too much like hard work).
This time the aim is to fill in the missing middle word on each line, so that the first two words AND the last two words of each set form a scientific(ish) term. As a non-sciency example, fill in the gap below
GREEN ________ BAG
with the word TEA, to form the terms GREEN TEA and TEA BAG.
As before, answer in the comments in any order you like – but please submit only one answer per person per hour, to give as many people as possible a chance to play!
I got all but one of the answers. Let’s just say that I came up with some fairly ridiculous guesses (binary cat? Code fish?) out of desperation, and felt rather silly when I saw the answer!
I’ll update the post with the answers and bragging rights as and when I get time, and I’ll add clues if there are any unanswered questions after a day or two.
Have fun!
Back for the 2010-2011 season by popular demand*!
The pool works in the same way as last year’s: you pick two centres, four wingers, three defensemen and one goalie from the lists on the website. (The lists highlight injured and suspended players to help you avoid players who aren’t playing that week!) Each player on the list has a value of 1 – 10 based on past and predicted performance. The challenge is to put together a team that will score the most fantasy points while not exceeding the value “cap” of 50. You get one point for every goal and assist scored by your forwards and defensemen, one point for every win by your goalie, and two points for a shut-out by your goalie.
You can change your picks every week if you want, or keep the same team if you can’t be bothered or if you miss the pick submission deadline for that week (unless they change the point values assigned to the players based on mid-season performance and you end up over the cap – you have to re-pick if that happens).
Sign up here, enter your picks, and then please email me at vwxynot [at] gmail [dot] com to get the name and password of the group I’ve set up. All regular readers, commenters and lurkers alike, are very welcome to play, but I would like to make sure that I know who everyone is and no random people sneak in!
The first pick deadline is Thursday October 7th
The prize is a $20 Amazon gift certificate! (more if any other players want to chip in!)
I originally hesitated about running a pool this year, as the weekly update posts became a bit of a chore last time. But ScientistMother has kindly offered to share the load! Yay, ScientistMother! You rock! So we’ll each do one update every four weeks, alternating so the updates come every two weeks. If we’re going to have weekly updates, like last time, we’ll need two or more other people to take part on a rotating basis… hint hint…
YAY, HOCKEY!
*ScientistMother and Chall. They’re popular around here!
“What’s wrong with your whiteboard?”, asked a colleague this morning.
I didn’t know anything was wrong with my whiteboard, which I use to keep track of grant deadlines, grants and manuscripts currently under review, and PI travel dates. But sure enough, on closer inspection it became clear that while the bottom left corner is flush to the wall, as it should be,
the bottom right corner is, well, not.
The culprit?
Oops.
I guess regular steam baths and tea breaks aren’t as good for whiteboards as they are for the people who write on them.
My former student was on TV yesterday!
Well, not the real TV. Just the fancy flat screen monitor mounted high on a wall by the elevators in my building. The TV appeared a few months ago and originally featured reminders of upcoming talks, bake sales and other fundraisers, and the occasional social event. However, The Powers That Be recently decided to add announcements of published papers and grant awards to the programme listings: just top tier journals and grants over a million dollars to start with, but they’ve now expanded the initiative to include all papers (including my postdoc lab’s new review paper) and multi-year grants.
I think this is a great idea, especially in a large multi-department building where it’s impossible to know everyone. My awesome, friendly, super-social postdoc department already did (and I think still does) something similar: when your paper got published, or your abstract was accepted for an oral presentation at a conference, you printed a copy out (abstracts on colour-coded paper according to the date of the presentation) and gave it to one of the secretaries, who would ceremoniously staple it to the Wall of Honour. It could then be appreciated in all its glory by your respectfully jealous* colleagues, and by bored visitors waiting for someone to find the PI they’d come to see.
Other departments in our building seem to have similar Walls of Honour in place. However, my current department (not known for being particularly social) doesn’t do anything other than get its papers onto the new screen downstairs. Some of the PIs I work with provide champagne and nibbles to everyone involved when a paper gets into a top tier journal, and occasionally when they get a big grant, but those occasions are rare and there’s no formal recognition of smaller achievements. I’d be tempted to try and correlate lab sociability with public recognition of success, but the institute where I did my PhD was even more awesome, friendly, and social than my postdoc department, and they didn’t do anything special either.
Although, thinking back, maybe that was because we all knew each other so well that we always knew when someone’s paper had come out because they’d buy the first round on Friday night…
How does your lab / department / institute recognise milestones such as papers, presentations, grants and fellowships? Do you think there’s any association with how social your department is?
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*depending on the journal / conference
I found an absolute gem in my automated search results this morning: a bio of a man I know fairly well, having worked for two of the organisations named in the piece. However, it turns out that I didn’t know him anywhere near as well as I thought I did. I never knew, for example, that this man “as good as graduated with a BSc in Biology”1, or that he has an “MSc in dungeon physiology”2. And apparently “during his healing precision he was severely shabby”3.
I had no idea.
Judging by the torturous grammar and hilarious word choices, the bio seems to have been dragged through several iterations of Google Translate (or possibly just translated by my cat Google, which is an equally good explanation).
I’m guessing that someone with less than stellar English then replaced every second or third word using a random selection from a thesaurus.
Now, we all know that science and spell checkers don’t mix, but apparently scientific language forms an even more disastrous partnership with automated translation tools and/or careless thesaurus use. From disaster, however, springs hilarity: the cell/dungeon confusion was funny enough, but my absolute favourite part was the translation of “tissue culture” as “hankie enlightenment”.
Genius.
As soon as I could stop laughing, I sent the link to several friends who also know the distiguished dungeon physiologist in question. One of them pointed out that the torturous translation process was no doubt intended to disguise the text’s origin as a plagiarised Wikipedia entry.
It truly is a privilege to see such outstanding scholarship in action!
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1) the many instances of “as good as” seem to be replacements for “as well as”, “and”, & “also”
2) “dungeon” = “cell”
3) apparently, “severely shabby” = “greatly influenced”, as in by a particular mentor. I had to check this one against the original text.
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His mouth can hold more than his belly can,
He can hold in his beak,
Enough food for a week.
I’m damned if I know how the hell he can!(by Dixon Lanier Merritt, apparently. Not Ogden Nash. You learn something new every day!)
And I’m damned if I know how the hell I can have made the same ridiculous mistake twice.
It’s all because of my habit of paying only partial attention to the TV. I’m usually doing something else at the same time – eating, talking, playing a game on my phone, reading a book, surfing the web, playing with a cat or two, that kind of thing. So some time last year, while I was “watching” the local news, I was startled to hear the anchor say that there’d been a pelican attack in one of Vancouver’s eastern suburbs! By the time I’d looked up at the screen he’d moved on to another story, leaving me completely baffled and with some very odd mental images running through my brain.
Fortunately, the CBC website was running the same story – about a pellet gun attack.
Which made more sense.
Fast forward to last night, when Mr E Man and I were watching Survivor. I loooove Survivor (it’s an extremely guilty pleasure), so I was actually watching it properly. However, during the commercial breaks I was paying attention to Saba, who was sprawled all over me and purring contentedly as I rubbed her belly. I was vaguely aware that there was some kind of cosmetics advert on the screen, but was suddenly snapped into full alertness by a rather bizarre slogan I’d just heard.
“The colour of pelicans???!!!”, I blurted out before I could stop myself.
Mr E Man eventually managed to gasp out the word “elegance” in between fits of laughter.
Oops.
In my defense, it’s still a ridiculous slogan. And later on in the show they actually showed some pelicans flying past the beach, which set us off laughing again. I suspect they’d already shown a similar shot before the commercial, which helped to trigger the confusion. Either that or I have a very bizarre subconscious.
Ooh! That just reminded me of something. Hang on a minute, Googling:
Ah, yes, I was right!
To (mis)quote Douglas Adams in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul:
It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of
penguinspelicans, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storingpenguinspelicans.
So there you go. It’s not my fault, it’s just the way the human brain evolved.
Weirdly, like this post just did.
