Democracy in the UK

Me: “So what are you going to do today?”

Dad: “Stay here and watch the election coverage on the internet”

Yup, it’s election time in the UK!

I’m not voting, because I don’t think it’s fair for people to influence the results if they don’t have to live with the consequences1. For the record, if I had decided to vote, I would have picked the Liberal Democrats – their coalition with Labour did some good things in the Scottish parliament, and I think that would be my favoured outcome for this election. Although if there’s a hung parliament and Labour end up in third place, as is being predicted, a Lib Dem – Conservative coalition might better reflect the way the country voted and therefore be a fairer outcome, if a less natural relationship.

Speaking of which, the chance that the Lib Dems might manage to push through some kind of electoral reform is one of my reasons for hoping they form part of the next government. The current first-past-the-post system is blatantly unfair; the Lib Dems in the UK (and the NDP in Canada) get far fewer seats than they should, given the share of the popular vote they attract. Given that the UK and Canadian systems are essentially identical, my wish is the same for both systems: a mixed constituency MP / proportional representation system like the Scottish one. In Scotland, everyone gets two votes – the first for a candidate in your constituency, and the second for a political party. A certain percentage of seats in the house are given to the candidates who win in each constituency with the first vote, and the rest are divided up among the parties according to what percentage of the second vote they won. This system let me vote for Donald Dewar, the Labour candidate in my constituency, who was a bloody good bloke and also guaranteed to win regardless of how I voted, but also for the Lib Dems, who, as I mentioned, used their PR share of the seats to form a governing coalition with Labour and get some of their pet issues (abolition of university tuition fees, universal free care for the elderly) into the books.

Anyway, I seem to have got sidetracked from the original purpose of this post, which was to lament that I miss the British election fever. It’s just not the same in Canada; people don’t talk about politics as much, and we’re missing a certain British sense of silliness and fun. Every Brit I know in real life and on the internet is positively obsessed with this election, and I’ve had a fantastic time reading their posts, debating with them,and listening to the hilarious Vote Now Show podcasts from the BBC2. The last Canadian election campaign was deathly dull in comparison. My friends did talk about it, but not with the passion and obsession that you see in the UK. I think we actually discussed the US election more than the Canadian one. There were no election night parties with drinking games (featuring red, blue, and yellow drinks, obviously) based on the number of seats each party wins, and no-one stayed up all night to watch the results come in like everyone I know always does in the UK.

Part of the reason is that I’m in the West of Canada, where we’re under-represented in parliament and where people are still voting when the results in the East are already known. Yeah, there’s a complete ban on reporting those results until the Western polls close, but it doesn’t exactly help to ease the existing sense that our voices don’t matter and that people in other provinces have already chosen the government before we’ve even voted. I’ve watched election night CBC news shows where the outcome was announced within ten minutes of our polls closing, before a single BC vote had even been counted.

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From Wikipedia:
 
Electoral Quotient (Average population per MP):

Prince Edward Island: 33,824
Saskatchewan: 69,924
New Brunswick: 72,950
Newfoundland and Labrador: 73,276
Manitoba: 79,970
Nova Scotia: 82,546
Quebec: 96,500
Alberta: 106,243
Ontario: 107,642

British Columbia: 108,548

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Combining this situation with a first-past-the-post system is a recipe for voter disengagement and dangerously low turnouts, especially in the West3. We should have a mixed constituency MP / proportional representation system. You know, like the Scottish one (see how I managed to link what I originally planned to write about back into what I waffled on about at the beginning? Blogging WIN!)

Can any of my Canadian readers from over-represented and/or Eastern time zone provinces please let me know if there’s any more election fever there than there is in BC? I might have to come for a visit during the next election campaign…

Anyway, if you’re in the UK, enjoy all the swingometer action tonight! Have some red, blue, and/or yellow drinks for me.

And, if you haven’t voted yet, GET OUT AND VOTE! You have a right that’s been given to only a tiny minority of the people who have ever lived, and which is still denied to far too many: please don’t take it for granted.

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1) Although I might vote next time just to make sure that I keep my rights in case I want to use them in the future – see Tideliar’s recent post about trying to register as an overseas voter. I’d probably vote for the Green party though, or someone else who hasn’t got a chance of winning.


2) I taught my parents how to play these podcasts from iTunes before I left this morning. They’re both feeling homesick today. 

3) Oh well, at least we’ve got the oil sands Rocky Mountains and all the best ski resorts.

Posted in Canada, current affairs, family, politics, rants, UK | 9 Comments

Wren and Stumped-y

Damnit, Microsoft!

Why?

Just… why?

I mistype “were” all the freaking time. 

The title of this blog post is the first time I’ve deliberately typed “wren” in… years? decades? ever?

So why is it the first option on the suggestions list?! It’s the least common (and alphabetically the last) word on there!

Booooooooo

/grumpy & crampy & keen to get outta here

Posted in English language, rants, technology | 7 Comments

Just desserts

One of my molecular pathologist colleagues just came up with a beautiful little phrase that has made me re-think my prior criticism of his field’s terminology.
“We’ve got some soufflé data”, he said. “It looks incredibly promising if you peek through the oven door, but it could collapse at any minute.”
I hope the dinner guests on the other end of the phone don’t end up disappointed.

Posted in fun with language, science, silliness | 6 Comments

Farewell, giant marshmallow

Before:

During:
(photo by me)

After:
(photo by me)

The Vancouver skyline will never be the same again. But at least we won’t have to queue for up to an hour to get out of the stadium at the end of an event any more… air-supported roof = only a few revolving doors (with airlocks) can be used.

Posted in current affairs, photos, Vancouver | 4 Comments

Scottish tree hybridisers

My parents are here!

They arrived on Saturday, on the same flight as my boss’s inlaws1 and the woman who Gordon Brown called a bigot2. And now I have five weeks of chatting to my Dad about football  before work! Oh, and endless comments of the “do you always have that kind of thing for breakfast?” variety. At least my Mum has finally given up trying to stop me (and my sister, when they visit her) from leaving the house with wet hair.

Yesterday morning was spent in the VanDusen Botanical Garden, which is in full and splendid bloom at the moment.

A non-blooming part of the garden. Oops!

My Dad’s sense of humour has been documented here previously, but one thing I didn’t mention was that every trip has to have a theme. He’ll find something that amuses him, then create a whole set of jokes, stories, and banter around it. For example, after meeting someone on his flight once who had an annoying voice and rather unusual opinions on several issues, everything that happened on that trip had to be commented on and re-told as if by that person. It’s always very funny for the first week, less so the second, and gets gradually more annoying through constant repetition. By the end of five weeks we’ll be begging him to stop, but my poor Mum will have to live with it for at least another month after they get home.

Mr E Man’s Scottish heritage is a recurring theme of my Dad’s banter, and he happened to be wearing his Scotland rugby shirt yesterday. So when my Dad spotted a mention of a “famous Scottish tree hybridiser” on one of the Garden’s plaques, it quickly became apparent that the theme for this trip was set.

“You Scotsmen will shag anything!” was the opening salvo. (Mr E Man did point out that this is not a very nice thing to say to the man who married your daughter).

There was much more banter along these lines as we made our way around the garden, and the puns and jokes continued over lunch. I know I shouldn’t encourage my Dad in his efforts, but “Robert the Spruce” popped into my head and was too good not to share. My Dad then inquired whether Mr E Man’s ancestors came from the Outer or Inner Hybridise3, and it’s all been downhill since then.

Sigh.

Ah well, it’s lovely to see them, and we have lots planned for the next few weeks. Luckily, both my parents seem happy to watch lots of hockey (Go Canucks Go! WOOOOOOO!). We’re also taking them to see Delhi 2 Dublin (we’ve told my Dad that the venue will be serving curried Guiness), and to visit Mr E Man’s mum and then one of his sisters. Oh, and we’re going to Whistler so the boys can play golf and the girls can go to the spa. So if you don’t see me round the blogosphere as much as usual, this is why… so much to do! Although we will have a temporary return to normality next week when my parents leave for their week-long Alaskan cruise, and they might also go down to Seattle for a couple of days at some point.

Oh, and the cats are being excellent ambassadors for their species; if this continues, my Mum should be able to persuade my Dad to get another cat (the last one died seven years ago), if/when she decides that she would like one. She’s always been a pet person, but my Dad most definitely isn’t, and he agreed to get the last cat only after much begging and crying by my sister and me. The cat turned out to be a vicious little bugger who’d rather scratch you than snuggle with you; Google and Saba are the opposite, and have already slept on his lap several times. Nice work, kitties!

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1) I ran into him and his family in the arrivals area. We had a long wait as there was a problem with the baggage carousel; my parents got one suitcase immediately, but had to wait an hour before the second one showed up.


2) Apparently she was very embarrassed to be recognised! I wonder if it was a pre-planned trip or if she suddenly felt the need to flee the country…


3) Link for those of you not au fait with Scottish geography

Posted in current affairs, family, furry friends, music, photos, politics, silliness, travel, Vancouver | 10 Comments

Poor choice of words

I’ve been working with molecular pathologists for more than two years now, and one piece of their terminology still throws me every time I hear it.
When told that a protein has been found to be a “poor prognostic marker”, my first reaction is always to be disappointed that we couldn’t find more compelling evidence of a correlation.
But when I say “marker of poor prognosis”, people look at me funny.
At least I’ve got prognostic and predictive markers straight (I think). I was lucky enough to attend a multi-disciplinary workshop during my first couple of months in this job, and one of the clinical presenters hastily chalked a couple of graphs onto the blackboard in order to make sure that everyone was following him. I immediately copied his scribbles into my notebook, and I’ve kept the copy to hand ever since. This seemed like as good a reason as any to create a PowerPoint version.
(The different colours represent marker status – positive or negative. Which colour is which depends on whether you’re looking at a poor unfavourable or a good favourable marker).
markers
A picture is worth a thousand words… this visual explanation has stuck in my memory much, much better than any verbal description ever could.
Of course, you can also get prognostic predictive markers, like the estrogen receptor in breast cancer. But that’s far too confusing for a Friday, so here’s a Star Trek / Monty Python mash-up instead.

Posted in cancer research, science, things I'm not really qualified to write about | 5 Comments

"Is this normal?"

Have you ever had a conversation that began with the above words, progressed to a friend bending their elbow the wrong way or turning their nostril inside out, and ended with everyone else saying “NO! That’s not normal, you freak!”?

No?

That’s not normal?

Anyway…

Is this normal?

Every time I get a paper cut, nick, scrape, or other kind of boo-boo on one of my hands, it seems to multiply over the next few days, leaving me with teeny tiny cuts and scabs all over both hands. In the latest example, I sliced open the iPhone touchscreen / laptop trackpad-using part of my right index finger early last week, and looking at my hands now, I have a total of six independently-acquired boo-boos on my right hand and two on my left, all in various stages of healing. Most of them are right on a knuckle, too, for added ouchies. I can understand an accumulation of cuts on the same hand as the original injury – it hurt like a bastard and probably made me clumsier and more prone to other injuries than normal – but I have no idea why I always end up with a cluster on the other hand too.

Ah well, at least I’m no longer in the lab. Profusion of cuts + latex gloves = grossness. (This is how I first observed the phenomenon, by the way. Latex gloves are a great way to identify microscopic cuts you didn’t even know you had).

Posted in freakishness, personal, silliness | 6 Comments

"Doctor Doctor! I need glasses!"

“You certainly do. This is a fish and chip shop.”

BOOM BOOM!

You know what’s even funnier than really cheesy old jokes?

This:

Posted in silliness | 3 Comments

Science Idol

The BBC’s “Science and Environment” RSS feed included a real gem today: news of a competition in which members of the public were asked to submit ideas for research projects. The four winners will be mentored by experts in their chosen field as they design and conduct the appropriate experiments, and then (hopefully) write them up for publication.
This is an absolutely brilliant idea, and I hope the BBC will continue to support (and report on) this initiative.
The article also reminded me of recurring conversations I’ve had with various scientist friends about our own fantasy research projects. The ones we would undertake if we had the time, resources, and specialist knowledge. The first is (more or less) within my field of expertise, the other is way, way outside it, but here goes – please feel free to submit reviewers’ comments on each proposal!
Project I: a comparison of human and equine malignant melanomas.
My flatmate and all-round best friend during my PhD days was a physiologist who specialized in equine gastrology. She’s been around horses her whole life, in roles from stable girl to veterinary assistant to physiologist to punter at the races, and loves to talk about her work whenever possible.
She mentioned just in passing one day that she’d just assisted at the necropsy of a white horse, and said “much less melanoma than usual”.
“Um, what?”, asked the person who worked at the cancer research centre just up the road from the vet school.
It turns out that a majority of white horses have extensive metastatic melanoma throughout their entire body, a condition that may be genetically related to their pigmentation.
My friend described the art of necropsy of white horses as “pulling out big black nodules like bunches of grapes to try and get to the organs to find the cause of death”.
“The melanoma’s not the cause of death?”
“No! They can live like that for years!”
Apparently this is something that every vet just knows. Y’know, like every cancer researcher just knows that malignant melanoma in humans is an extremely aggressive disease that’s often fatal in just a few months.
But apparently, vets don’t often talk to cancer researchers. Unless a university graduate student office happens to assign one person of each type to a shared university flat in their first year, and they end up becoming lifelong friends who enjoy talking about science in pubs.
There are a few clinical reports of “pigmented epithelioid melanocytoma”, aka “equine” or “animal-type” melanoma, in humans. But not one basic cancer researcher I’ve ever talked to had heard of this phenomenon before I mentioned it.
As soon as I heard about melanoma in white horses, I wanted to perform a genetic comparison to human melanomas to try and uncover the reason for the differences in pathology. This was in the late nineties / early noughties, so I was thinking in terms of microarray studies and comparative hybridizations, but none of those approaches were really suitable. Of course now that we have next current generation sequencing technology, the problem is eminently soluble. “All” you need is the human and horse genome sequences (a high-quality draft of the latter is now available), and then normal DNA plus tumour DNA and RNA from each of:
a malignant melanoma from a white horse;
a pigmented epithelioid melanocytoma from a human;
a regular human melanoma;
and Robert’s your father’s brother.
I would love to see this study done, and sincerely hope that someone decides to tackle it in the next few years.
Project II: a comparison of visual response and decision making processes in (ice) hockey goalies and mere mortals.
Have you ever watched a game of (ice) hockey? It’s fast. Scary fast. So fast that it took me months to learn how to follow the puck properly (it’s all about inferring its position, speed and direction from the players’ body language as well as from the brief glimpses of speeding frozen black rubber that you occasionally manage to catch). And the goalies are simply amazing. Here’s a particularly impressive example of the art of the glove save, from the Vancouver Canucks’ Roberto Luongo in last night’s playoff game that eliminated the LA Kings from Stanley Cup contention. Man, I loves me some regicide.

As soon as I started to get into hockey, I wanted to know how these guys get so good. How on earth do they manage to see the puck in time to stop it? (And why don’t they run away gibbering and crying like normal people instead of trying to make the save?) Again, this discussion came up on a regular basis while watching games in the pub with my geeky friends. Are the parts of the brain that process visual information and turn it into quick decisions simply more developed in these players? If so, is this something that develops over time as they train, or is it innate?
There’s only one even slightly relevant paper in the literature, a 1979 study titled Visual cues in ice hockey goaltending (no-one should be surprised that it was published in the Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Science). The study assessed the visual cues that young goalies can pick up from an attacker’s approach on goal, but there was no control group and no real insight into my specific question.
As stated earlier, this study would be far outside my area of expertise. I know that some people find fMRI results, ahem, fishy, but maybe there’s some kind of brain scan that could be done on junior and elite hockey goalies, compared to hockey players who specialise in other positions, elite players of other sports, and average Joes, to see if there are any structural or functional differences there.
Anyway, those are my picks. Does anyone else have a fantasy research project they’d like to see done?

Posted in cancer research, genomics, science, Things I read on the BBC website, things I'm not really qualified to write about | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Defeating perfect enemies

Here is the single most useful piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard, and I apologise for not thinking of posting it sooner. It came from my PhD supervisor, lo these many years ago, and it really helped me to get started in earnest on writing my thesis.

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If you’re procrastinating, blocked, or otherwise having serious difficulties starting a piece of writing, it may well be because you’re a perfectionist.  You’re possibly unsure of what exactly is required of the piece – the scope, the tone, the structure, the length – and your perfectionist little brain won’t let you start working on something that it knows won’t meet your high standards.

If this happens to you: just start writing. Dive straight into that first draft. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfect is the enemy of the good*, but it doesn’t even have to be good. Not at this stage, anyway.

The trick is to make your perfectionism work for you, rather than against you, by shifting it to a different stage of the writing process. Trust yourself: trust that if you put your perfectionist tendencies aside during the drafting process, they’ll still be there later, waiting for you, and will kick in during the editing phase. You will, inevitably, re-read your dodgy imperfect first draft, recognize the flaws, and start to restructure, reword, fill in gaps, cut unnecessary sections, lather, rinse, repeat. C’mon – you’re a perfectionist! You just know you won’t put up with an imperfect draft for long! You’ll whip it’s arse into shape in no time!

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Of course, you then have to turn your perfectionism back off again after a final thorough editing and proofreading, because otherwise you’ll never submit the damn thing.

Blog posts are excellent training in this regard. I’ll publish a blog post at a waaaaay earlier stage than when sending a document to my boss or another colleague. I might notice the occasional typo or clumsy wording, and go back and tweak once it’s posted… but then again, I might get lucky and have comments to respond to instead. Which is much more fun, obviously.

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*supplementary advice: as I learned just last year, during a writing course I took at work, procrastinating until just before a deadline is another way to defeat this enemy. If you wait long enough, the deadline will become so urgent that you’ll accept that the piece doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be on time (and good enough), and you’ll be able to start writing. Some people will never be able to eliminate this deadline crutch, but the main thread of the advice above may help you to take the first wobbly unaided steps.
Posted in career, communication, meta | 14 Comments