I can’t believe the regular season’s almost over! I managed to make it to a game last week, which was awesome, especially because the friend who invited me – an Oilers fan – was convinced the Canucks were going to be crushed. Every time the Canucks scored I leapt to my feet while she stayed in her seat, resulting in some hilarious photo opportunities:

Canucks 2 - 0 Oilers in the 2nd period. My friend is not impressed http://t.co/G9kWnrovV2

April 5, 2013 4:00 am via Photos on iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@enniscath

Cath Ennis

4-0 final. Ha ha. http://t.co/POYMmJJf2Q

April 5, 2013 5:00 am via Camera on iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@enniscath

Cath Ennis

Anyway, on to the pool!

Sugar Scientist edged out ModScientist in Week 10, but lost out to both Mod and Chall last week. Looking at the overall points trend, Mod looks to be pulling away from Sugar Scientist at the top, but there are still a couple of weeks left and anything can happen! As an illustration of this latter phenomenon SBCVandy and Bam294 did really well in Week 10, but I have to say that this is looking like a two-horse race (if that) at this stage.

While I’m under no illusion that the Canucks are going to win the cup this year, I am very much looking forward to some playoff hockey. There will be a playoff pool… stay tuned…

Let’s face it, the tired old standards of education, employment history, and achievements in each role really just aren’t that helpful during the hiring process. Sure, they’re necessary data points, but they’re by no means sufficient. You and your team are going to be spending a LOT of time with your new colleague, and you really want to be sure of making the right decision. I’d therefore like to propose a new section of the standard CV format that would give everyone involved in the hiring process much more useful information on every candidate.

My idea is best illustrated through the use of examples. If I was still in the lab I might include such items as “diligent about re-ordering common reagents and making new batches of common buffer stocks before they run out”, “willing to publicly call out people who don’t do this”, and “good musical taste”, but for an office-based job I would include the following:

• good provider of shared snacks. Repertoire includes both healthy and more indulgent options (e.g. boxes of those teeny tiny oranges, chocolate, wasabi peas, chips. Especially chips. Especially Kettle chips. Especially the honey-Dijon kind. Mmmmmm, chips);
• not at all shy about being the first person to open up snacks left in the shared snack zone by others. Especially if immediate supervisor brought in honey-Dijon Kettle chips again. It’s great that we share an addiction;
• regularly, but not too frequently, emails amusing science, grant writing, and project management-related articles to the entire team (e.g. the clinical trial article Grant kindly brought to my attention last year);
• emails emergency cute animal photos (usually cats, but occasionally orangs) to people who look stressed;
• easy to talk into such things as being the floor’s fire warden;
• completely oblivious to early-stage pregnancies, even when everyone else greets the official announcement with “I knew it!”, therefore extremely unlikely to start rumours on this front;
• keeps desk messy enough to make others look good, but not messy enough to actually cause a health or earthquake hazard.

If asked for my greatest weakness in an interview, I would have to reply that I’m not much of a baker.

What would you put on your CV if you could?

I saw the most amazing TED talk the other day, about Nikola Tesla. Now, we all know that Tesla was a fascinating, awesome dude (especially as played by David Bowie IMHO), but in the case of this video it was the presentation method that blew me away.

I can’t get the video to embed for the life of me, so here’s a link. It’s only 6 minutes long and I promise it’s worth it.

Isn’t that amazing?! I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Being an incurable geek, my first thought was how to use this technology for scientific presentations – imagine being able to flip open a screen the shape of a cell, or a molecule, and run those animations…

I am officially in geek heaven.

I still haven’t quite got back into the regular BRC update habit, but rest assured I have systems in place to make sure I don’t miss any of your awesome comments or posts!

Date listed is the date of archiving, not the date of the comment or post.

Comment(s) of the week:

Apr 14 2013: cromercrox for “I’m sure you can get some funding for your book from that leading oncological magazine, the Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher Daily Mail.”

cromercrox again for “Crox Minor (aged nearly 15) tells me that a good definition of a teenager is someone who hasn’t done their maths homework but would know exactly what to do in the event of a zombie apocalypse.”

chezjake for “I do love the term “tartle” and will try to remember to use it.

Another approach to the problem is one used by my good friend Bill. At any large gathering of folks, he wears a large button that reads “Sorry, I can’t remember your name either.””

and Mike for “Great word – invaluable! But never heard once in my formative years. Srsly, 24 years in Scotchland and I never once heard anyone utter this word. “Common” it ain’t, at least not in the Central belt.

I reckon it’s roots are a polite form of “brain fart” and a really polite form of “Ahm such a fuppin diddy, ah’ve goan an forgot yer name”.”

Post(s) of the Week:

Apr 14 2013: Prof-like Substance for “Undergrad advising: when to hold em and when to fold em” (how much should you push undergrads along their initial path, as opposed to suggesting others to which they might be better suited?)

I know size isn’t everything, but this is still very clever

(pencil for scale)

Bravo, Canadian Cancer Society!

I don’t usually read many non-fiction books, but I happened to read three in a row over the last few months. Funny how that happens…

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The first was Glass Castle: a Memoir, by Jeannette Walls. I actually bought this book by accident; when I spotted it at a fundraising book sale at work I thought “ooh, this is the one that three different commenters recommended on an old book review post!”, but as it turns out I was thinking of Glass Palace by Amitav Gosh (although now that I’ve found that old post, I see that I got two recommendations for Palace and one for Castle after all, the latter from Alyssa). Oh well. I ended up reading the whole book in one sitting, which I haven’t done for years – it’s a very compelling story of a family of children growing up in abject poverty in various parts of the US, with parents who were intermittently infuriatingly wonderful amid a general pattern of alcoholism, mental illness, and neglect that makes you want to scream at them to get help and stop doing that to their kids. The book reminded me a lot of Angela’s Ashes, in that it’s a real page turner but you end up feeling almost guilty about enjoying such a terribly sad story. There are some beautiful moments – you really do see the attraction of the family’s lifestyle in the early days when the kids were young, and the part where the father gave his children the stars for Christmas was genuinely moving – and it’s better written than most of the (admittedly limited number of )memoirs I’ve read before. Definitely recommended.

The next book I read was Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess. This was the first time I’d ever read a book that’s based on a blog, and I somewhat naively assumed that I’d love the book because I love the blog. However, while there are some great parts that had me literally laughing out loud, overall I found that the subject matter and style just didn’t translate very well into the printed form. For instance, sandwiched in between the hysterically funny chapters about the author’s childhood and adolescence with some seriously weird parents and her subsequent wacky escapades with dodgy taxidermy and giant metal chickens, I’d suddenly come across a very serious and upsetting chapter (I initially wrote “post” instead of “chapter” there, which is telling) about her mental illness, or her miscarriage, with such a sudden, jarring change in tone that I found it difficult to keep reading. If I’d read her blog for longer I suppose I might have been better prepared, but having first encountered the blog during the aforementioned giant metal chicken adventure of 2011, I didn’t know that part of her story. This was a very strange reading experience for me; I felt emotionally drained by the end.

The third and final non-fiction book was Tina Fey’s Bossypants. This was my favourite of the three and definitely lived up to the hype I’d been hearing ever since it came out. I loved Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live, but I’ve barely seen any of 30 Rock, although this book made me want to start watching it from the beginning (and also gave me a much greater appreciation of Amy Poehler and Alec Baldwin). The book is absolutely hilarious in places, with some great self-deprecating humour, but also makes some very serious points about feminism and politics (yes, the Sarah Palin impersonation gets a lot of coverage). Highly recommended.

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Amazingly, reading three non-fiction books in a row didn’t suddenly make me a better scientist, so at this point I went back to reading fiction again.

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For starters, I finally got around to reading The Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, and it was worth the wait. I’m a huge Wyndham fan and grew up reading his books, but the subject matter of this one was just too complex and mature for me when I first tried to read it in my early teens. The book’s very much a product of its time, but it contains some fascinating ideas about feminism, science, and the future of humankind – the author definitely redeemed himself for some of the outdated attitudes about women that bothered me when I re-read The Midwich Cuckoos a few years ago.

Next up was Legion by Brandon Sanderson – the very first ebook I bought on my brand shiny new Kobo! I got a 90% off introductory offer for my first purchase, and therefore paid a grand total of 30 cents for this short novel, which was definitely good value for money. It was somewhat cheesy and predictable, but with strong sci-fi concepts and good writing that compensated for its shortcomings. A fun and fast read!

I bought the Kobo right after Christmas during the period when Kindles were unavailable in Canada (I think they’re available again now?). I do like it a lot, but the list of available ebooks is much more limited than the Kindle’s at the moment. I hear they’re working on fixing that though (Dr. Gee of Cromer needs to become part of this noble movement methinks), and at least it’s compatible with the ebooks available for loan through the Vancouver Public Library. A colleague also turned me on to StoryBundle, a site for independent authors that periodically releases a group of ebooks on the same theme (the latest one being women’s fiction). You can choose how much to pay and what the split between the site and the authors should be, and the free software I had to download to transfer everything onto the Kobo was really easy to use. I haven’t read any of the two bundles I’ve bought so far, but I’m sure I will soon. I predict that this little gadget is going to change my reading habits – there’ll be more random buys and fewer “safe bets” by authors I already know, I think.

Although…

…the next book I read (on the Kobo) was the second part of a trilogy I started a few months ago, namely Justin Cronin’s The Twelve (I reviewed part one, The Passage, here). I found this one a wee bit difficult to get into, mostly because it begins with a recap of the first book that’s written a bizarre pseudo-Biblical style that’s completely at odds with the rest of the trilogy so far. I have to admit, I wondered if the success of the first book had gone so completely to Cronin’s head that the whole damn thing would be written like that, but thankfully it reverted to his normal prose style quite quickly. As with the first book, the narrative switches back and forth between the days and months immediately following the initial outbreak and the lives of the survivors a couple of hundred years later, with both old and new characters in both categories. It’s very well done, better paced than the first one, and features some great examples of my favourite aspect of post-apocalyptic fiction, namely the psychology of survival (this time – minor spoiler alert – along the theme of collaboration versus resistance with the enemy). I’m excited to read the final installment of the trilogy, all the more so because (unlike at the end of the first book) it’s not at all obvious how the story is going to develop next.

Oh, and I’m also just starting to read the original Walking Dead comic books by Robert Kirkman. They’re not available on the Kobo, but I just bought a used first generation iPad from a friend and immediately bought and downloaded the first anthology. I haven’t read a comic book since the Beano when I was a kid, but it’s very well done. I just have to keep reminding myself to spend time looking at the drawings – I’m a very fast reader, and I realised halfway through the first chapter that I was just reading the text and not really taking in the pictures at all. So it’s a good exercise in patience as well as a rip-roaring zombie fest!

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As always, your recommendations are solicited… I’ll even try and buy the book(s) you actually recommend, this time!

There are just two days of regular season hockey left, and you know what that means – PLAYOFF POOL!

If you’re already in this year’s regular season pool, you should have already received an email from the CBC; if not (because you don’t need to have been in the regular season pool to be in the playoff pool!), you can sign up here. Once you’ve made your picks (don’t forget to select one forward, one defenseman, and one goalie as your star players, who earn you extra points, and to complete the tiebreaker questions!), join the group VWXPool – the password is OMGPlayoffs!

Enjoy!

Mr E Man and I got to talking last night about bands and artists we really wish we could have seen in concert. After I started my list with the Beatles, we decided that this could go on all night and therefore limited the game to bands that have existed within our lifetime, and which we could therefore have feasibly seen if we’d had the means and the will to do so.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had the chance to see the vast majority of my favourite bands and artists, but I did come up with a few regrets quite quickly:

My initial list was Nirvana, the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, and Pulp.

I was offered tickets for Pulp once during university, but had already said I’d go out with a peripheral friend for her birthday. The birthday outing was, frankly, boring and I completely lost touch with that person within a few months of graduating, while my friends who went to Pulp still talk about it as one of the best gigs they’ve ever seen, so I think it’s fair to say that I made the wrong choice there. Realistically I was a bit young for the others (my parents wouldn’t even let me see Roxette at around the same time, so I’m sure the Madcester and grunge scenes would have been right out), but I still wish I could have seen them play.

Mr E Man’s initial list was James Brown, Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath, Nirvana, and Jane’s Addiction.

We then met up with a couple of friends, who had their own lists:

JM’s list: Forgotten Rebels, Sinead O’Connor, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Iggy and the Stooges, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Happy Mondays, the Charlatans, and the Clash

JA’s list: Zeppelin, Floyd, Nirvana, the Travelling Wilburys, New Order, and the Grateful Dead

I promptly added the Charlatans, the Clash, the Travelling Wilburys, and New Order to my list; Mr E Man added Iggy and the Stooges, the Clash, and the Travelling Wilburys to his. I made all the guys jealous by saying that I saw Iggy (sans Stooges) at the Glasgow Green music festival once… not in his prime, but it was still a great show!

As you can tell, this kept us occupied for hours! It’s a fun game.

Add your own “bands I really regret not seeing” in the comments, please!

“OK folks, I’ve been DJ Treebeard and it has been my pleasure to man the decks at the 3,457th annual Ent Ball! Time for one last song – everyone on the dance floor, line up, you all know this one!”

(singing)

‘There’s no need to be unhappy,
(dunh dunh dunh dunh dunh),
It’s fun to stay at the’

Bonus photo, for anyone who’s ever wondered what the inside of a hedge looks like:

Part I: British roots / on the fence
Part II: Treehuggers
Part III: STREAKERRRRRR!!!!

I recently helped one of our scientists put together an application for an industry-partnered bioinformatics grant. I understand the company in question to be more or less universally recognised as the leader in its field and therefore the obvious partner for this grant, but because it’s based in the US we had to complete a one-page justification for choosing a non-Canadian partner. After reading the very technical document explaining in great detail why this company is the only one in the world with the right products and expertise for the job, I joked with the scientist who wrote it that we should really just be able to write “you can’t do this stuff on a Blackberry” and be done with it.

In this specific case, the lack of an equivalent Canadian partner isn’t a problem – it won’t make or break this grant’s chances in review. But we’re increasingly running into situations where the lack of Canadian equivalents to American tech companies and their products is hampering our ability to take advantage of all those wonderful cloud computing tools that make research flow so much more smoothly. I’m sure that researchers in other countries with small populations and/or a lack of resources are experiencing the same thing.

The problem is caused by the fact that any data hosted even temporarily on US-based servers are subject to the Patriot Act, meaning that their confidentiality can not be assured. This Act is incompatible with our own privacy laws – Canada in general and British Columbia in particular have very strict regulations on the sharing of personal data – and the BC government agency to which we ultimately report is starting to really crack down on the use of potentially problematic tools. We’ve already been told that we can’t use Doodle Polls to organise meetings without inserting three paragraphs worth of privacy disclaimers into the email linking to the poll, and might soon lose our ability to use this tool at all; we just heard that SurveyMonkey is being banned outright; and Google Drive / DropBox / iCloud / Skype / Google Chat & Hangout / blogs / social media / various webinar and desktop sharing tools will quite possibly be next.

We use these tools all the time – to schedule and conduct meetings with internal staff and external collaborators, to share data with collaborators, to collaboratively write grants and papers with people from all over the world. Sure, we managed before these tools existed, but when all the other investigators involved in a massive global genomics consortium can use the cloud and we’re the only ones not able to participate, it’s going to be a problem.

We’ve been trying to find Canadian equivalents of everything listed above, but so far all we’ve come up with is FluidSurveys - a replacement for SurveyMonkey, one of the least-used tools on the list. A good start, but not good enough! If I had the technical ability I’d be working on creating some alternative tools myself, but since I don’t, I’m putting this post out there with the hope that readers will either be able to point me to some options we haven’t found yet, and / or that someone who knows what they’re doing will use it as inspiration. Who knows, maybe the big US tech companies will even read it and decide to create some country-specific servers to allow the rest of us to join in the American cloud dream… that would be a silver lining indeed!

It was my Dad’s birthday a couple of weeks ago, and after some thought and some time on the Amazon website I decided to buy him the History of the World in 100 Objects book; I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the radio series (via podcast, which I listen to while looking at a photo of the object in question on the website) and knew my Dad would like it too. And I was right – the book was so very much his cup of tea that my sister had already given it to him for Christmas.

Oh, and his other two birthday presents – from my Mum and my sister – were identical to each other.

This happens quite a lot in my family: my Mum and my sister have given me the same book, a year or so apart; and one Christmas my parents bought each other the same book, which caused a lot of amusement when they unwrapped their gifts simultaneously. I’ve always taken this phenomenon to mean that we just know each other very well and have similar tastes, but lately I’ve been wondering if it doesn’t signify a general lack of creativity in the gift ideas department.

Finding creative and thoughtful presents for people I’ve known for multiple birthdays and Christmases is almost as difficult as coming up with good topics for posts after six years of blogging. Strangely enough, though, I’ve started having the same problem with people I haven’t known for very long at all – possibly because even if I haven’t given that particular person a book or some nice earrings or concert tickets or a spa gift certificate before, I’ve given so many books and nice pairs of earrings and concert tickets and spa gift certificates to other people over the years that it just feels like it’s been done and I’m being boring.

(Kids are the exception. Buying for kids is always AWESOME. I may or may not have once bought one of our nephews a marble run game just because I wanted to play with it. And a suspicious amount of very cool Lego has been purchased over the last few years. Don’t judge me!)

As a recipient, though, I really don’t mind getting the same kinds of gift every year – I’m thrilled to receive as many books, pairs of socks, fancy soaps, earrings, gift certificates, and fancy food items as people want to give me. Especially books – I’d rather have the occasional duplication than have no-one ever buy me books again. I’d prefer it if my Mum would stop buying me clothes, but that’s not going to happen and it’s no great hardship to have a few items set aside for “Sunday Skyping only”.

So, while I’ll continue to try and think of new, exciting, and creative ideas (suggestions in the comments, please!), I guess I’ll also try to feel better about the times when inspiration doesn’t strike… like with my Dad’s replacement gift: A History of the World in Twelve Maps. (Oooooh, I’m so very original). I’ll feel especially good about these times if the non-creative ideas come with one-click buying and free shipping!

About ten years ago, a Dutch friend told me one of the most epic “lost in translation” stories I’ve ever heard. I re-told the story many times over the next couple of years, but hadn’t thought about it for a long time… until last week, when I suddenly found myself telling it twice in five days, both times in the context of a conversation started by someone else. Funny how that happens. Anyway, I realised that I’ve never shared the story on my blog, so here goes!

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The story took place in my Dutch friend’s second year in Canada, when she and a Canadian colleague were invited to a mutual friend’s wedding. This was the first Canadian wedding my Dutch friend (let’s call her D) had attended, so she wasn’t sure of the dress code – specifically, whether she should wear pantyhose. Naturally, she asked her Canadian colleague (let’s call her C) for advice… although, unfortunately, her translation of pantyhose was not ideal.

This is the conversation that was relayed to me by D who, by the way, speaks almost perfect English, usually rather loudly…

Before the wedding, in the workplace:

D: “I’m going shopping this weekend to buy a dress for the wedding. I was wondering, is it usually expected that women should wear panties at Canadian weddings?”

C: “WHAT?! Um, yes, definitely!”

D: “Really? Even in the summer?!”

C: “YES. EVEN IN THE SUMMER.”

D: “I’m surprised, because the West coast is usually so laid back! But OK”

A few weeks later, at the wedding:

D: “Hey, C! You told me everybody would be wearing panties, but you’re not wearing any!”

C: “I most certainly am!”

D: “I can clearly see that you are not wearing panties! In fact, I think I’m the only woman here who is!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ten years on, and this still makes me laugh…

My second-best “lost in translation” story involved a very fun, vivacious and attractive Swedish friend, who was a good skier but decided to keep me company on the bunny hill when I just learning. Rather than be frustrated and bored on skis while all our other friends were off at the top of the mountain, blasting down the black diamonds, she decided to try snowboarding for the first time instead. She took some advice from a mutual friend who was a good boarder and took herself off to the rental shop while I was having my ski lesson. She met up with me later, already better at boarding than I was at skiing, and told me how confused she was by her experience at the rental place:

“[good boarder friend] told me to get a strap-on board rather than a step-on, so I went into the shop and I asked this really cute Aussie guy for a strap-on, and he just laughed and laughed and laughed at me! The next guy did the same! It was so weird! They only had step-ons in the end anyway!”

After I stopped laughing, I was able to enlighten her…

Oh, the joys of working with colleagues from all over the world!

I hope all my Canadian readers are having an awesome long weekend! (And that everyone else had an awesome normal weekend!) Ours has involved spending time with various friends on patios, roller coasters, log flumes, beaches, ocean swims, picnics in the park, a BBQ later today and – of course – over beer.

Speaking of which, I like this commercial, even though I’m not that fond of Molson (it’s not the worst beer of its type, but unfortunately its type is “strictly for those who think “cold” is a flavour”):

The ad reminds me somehow of the second time I took Mr E Man to London. On our first visit, my sister had located a Canadian pub for us (the Maple Leaf in Covent Garden) so we could watch the Calgary Flames in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. We had a blast – even my sister, who isn’t into sport in general and who was having a hard time following her first ever hockey game – and met lots of lovely Canadians, including someone who lived two blocks away from me in Vancouver. So when we found ourselves back in London a couple of years later during the World Juniors tournament, we decided to go back.

The problem was, my sister was at work that day and we didn’t really know where we were going (this was before we had smartphones). We took the tube to Covent Garden and asked a couple of random people if they knew where the Canadian pub was, with no luck, and were close to giving up and just going to a normal pub instead.

But then! Someone walked past us wearing a Canucks jersey!

We looked at each other and, without speaking, turned around and followed him.

He walked right up to the door of the Maple Leaf pub… and kept going. Apparently that wasn’t his destination, but he somehow managed to lead us there anyway. Which just goes to show that if you’re looking for a sports bar, anywhere in the world, just follow the first Canadian you find and they’ll take you right to it.

They weren’t playing the Juniors game, but we had a good time anyway.

Those of you who’ve read some of my recent posts, or who follow me on Twitter, might have noticed that many of the photos I post are now circular.

No-one? Really?

Anyway… this is because for the last few months I’ve been taking most of my photos through an iPhone app called Rando, which – like many of my other major time-sucks – I found out about via my official app consultant Kimli.

What makes Rando different from all the other photo apps out there is that it’s an anonymous photo exchange service. What this means is that through the miracle of the internet, any photo you take and approve through the app will be sent out anonymously and at rando(m) to another user, and you’ll soon receive an anonymous photo back from another Rando-er (not the same person who received yours – there’s some kind of central pool of photos to be sent to the next person who contributes their own).

Most of the photos I get are admittedly rather dull (as Kimli has also noted on her Rando Tumblr – this link is SFW, but some other entries on that page are definitely NSFW!) – someone’s feet, a wall, a blurry pet of some kind, a backpack on someone’s floor – presumably because bored people will take photos of just about anything and send it out so they can get something more interesting back. This is frustrating, because I try to Give Good Rando by only sending interesting shots. I like sending photos of any art work I come across and, especially, the local scenery – like this shot taken of the Bowen Island ferry from the Sunshine Coast ferry,

or this lovely sunset taken near my house last Wednesday.

But occasionally I do receive something interesting enough to keep, like this sunset from just East of Aukland,

this misty lake on the Italian-Swiss border,

or this inviting path through the woods whose location will have to remain a mystery, because whoever sent it wouldn’t let Rando access their phone’s location services.

This kind of paranoia secrecy is rather annoying, because seeing where the photo’s from is the best part! I’ve received photos from all over the world (and, thanks to a recent update that lets you see where your own photos ended up, I know that I’ve sent mine all over the world too) – mostly South Korea for some reason, but all over Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, China, Russia, Netherlands, UK, India, and other countries too. And it’s not as if the location information you send out is high-resolution – the map you get shows the sender’s location at the city level, and you can’t zoom in or out at all. Check out this example I received over the Easter long weekend:

Photo:

Associated location information:

All the photos you take through Rando automatically end up in the same location on your phone as all your other photos, and you can download any received Rando to the same place, although this isn’t automatic. While Rando does take a little while to boot up and get ready to take a photo, meaning that it introduces a longer-than-usual gap between spotting something interesting and being able to take a photo of it, it’s definitely worth it if you’re capturing a static target. Hours of fun, and the rudest image I’ve received so far was a blurry shot of some Russian dude’s bum crack, so relatively clean fun at that!

Enjoy!

The increasing frequency with which I hear scientists misuse the word “agnostic” is starting to annoy me. It’s usually used to mean “I don’t have a strong preference”: for example, “I’m agnostic as to protocol – I could go either way if someone else has a strong opinion” when discussing how to conduct an experiment.

This is not what agnostic means! What it does mean is “I don’t believe it’s possible to know the right answer”. So when you say you’re agnostic as to protocol, it means you don’t think it’s possible to know how to choose the right experimental method. (This may actually be true in some cases, but I doubt it’s what most speakers mean).

A plague of protocol fundamentalism upon people who misuse the word agnostic!

(I don’t mind the South Park episode about militant agnostics, though. That was pretty damn funny).

It was her toenails I noticed first, as I bent over to push my bag under my chair in a restaurant a few days ago; they were painted the same colour as mine, a funky metallic turquoise.

“Ooh, nice sandals”, was my next thought – a similar colour to my own beloved Keens (but more stylish), they looked super comfortable, and I wondered where she’d got them because I’d already decided I’d like a pair.

Straightening up and turning to face my friend, I stole a sideways glance at the owner of the the sandals, at the next table over. Her hair was curly and styled just like mine – but fully grey, instead of mostly brown with grey streaks that can apparently pass for deliberate blonde highlights in certain lighting conditions.

Her skin and eyes were also the same colour as mine, and she wore clothes – beige capris and a pale green top – that looked like they could have come straight from my own wardrobe.

Like Beth and her shadow, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at her. It was an older version of me!

I’d never experienced anything quite like this before. I look quite a bit like my Mum facially speaking, especially if you compare photos of the two of us taken at the same age, but my Mum’s worn her hair very short since before I was born, and my colouring is definitely my Dad’s. Plus my clothing choices blend in much better in Vancouver (the jeans, Keens, fleece, and hiking shoes side of the equation, rather than the yoga pants, massive sunglasses, and dog-in-a-handbag side) than anywhere in my native land. So as alike as my Mum and I are, my resemblance to this complete stranger seemed somehow much more striking.

The older version of me was with a man, seemingly on an early (but not first) date. She laughed a lot during the hour we were in the same room.

This makes me happy.

It’s a well-known fact that watching certain films and TV shows with a scientist is no fun at all – in fact, it’s almost as bad as trying to watch ER with three medical student flatmates, as I did every week from 1995-1998. Rather than trying to competitively guess each diagnosis (and argue about it loudly enough to drown out the dialogue), however, the scientist’s problem is usually a lack of ability to prioritize narrative flow and dramatic tension over scientific accuracy, and to switch off other scientific thought processes.

CBC’s Dragons’ Den, in which entrepreneurs pitch ideas to potential investors, is usually (but not always) a life-sciences free, and therefore a safe, option. However, an old episode I watched for the first time on Wednesday proved to be an exception to the rule, and made me put on my “and another thing!” ranty-pants for at least 15 minutes. Poor Mr E Man…

The pitch in question is 7:33 long and can be found here (there’s no embed code, unfortunately). The company making the pitch extracts and stores DNA from humans and pets, either as a future medical and ancestry testing resource or to be embedded into jewellery or other mementos.

Moving in order of increasing seriousness of the problem, rather than chronologically, my first issue with the pitch is that, I’m sorry, storing DNA in a tube is NOT proprietary. (See section of video from 4:40 – 5:12). The design of a tube can obviously be proprietary, but I just can’t see any possible way in which storing DNA in said tube can be patented. The building I work in contains dozens of fridges and freezers, all crammed to the gills with thousands of tubes of DNA – big tubes, little tubes, colourless tubes, blue tubes, pink tubes, you name it. The same is true for every single lab I’ve ever set foot in. I extracted DNA and put it in a tube for storage during an undergraduate lab class. Hell, the elementary school students who come in every so often to tour our lab, learn about genomics, and extract DNA from kiwi fruit put that DNA in tubes, too. Sheesh!

So far, so ridiculous. However, the part that really made me mad is described from 2:38 –  3:50. This part of the business involves getting funeral home staff to swab cheek cells from every deceased person they prepare for cremation, and offer DNA extraction, storage, and/or insertion into jewellery to the bereaved – for a fee, of course. The fact that cremation destroys the genetic history and medical information [emphasis added] stored in the body’s DNA is apparently used as a persuasion tool when trying to make these sales.

This latter point raises a huge red flag for me – and not just because of the thought of bereaved people being marketed to in this way*. My job has recently involved a lot of reading and synthesis of the latest research and guidelines relating to the ethics of genome sequencing, and this part of the pitch set my “YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DO THIS WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE DECEASED” warning lights ablaze. Who knows what the dead person’s opinions on this matter were?! You can’t just go taking their DNA and testing it for medically relevant information that could affect the entire family! Hell, I’m a geneticist by training who’s spent the last six years in the genomics field, and I’m still highly conflicted about direct-to-consumer genetic testing myself! GAAAAAH!

I’ve talked about this clip with several colleagues over the last few days, one of whom is a real expert in the ethics and consent aspect of genome sequencing, and they all agree with me, so this is not just my opinion.

The scientists did not get their deal, although largely because the company is too young and doesn’t have enough cash flow yet – the ethical aspect wasn’t mentioned at all. In fact, they were invited to come back in a year to pitch again when the company has matured a little. I’ll be watching, with my ranty-pants on standby – stay tuned!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*although I do understand that this happens a lot, with everything from the funeral home to the coffin or urn to the headstone to the flowers etc etc etc. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though.

(Title translation provided by Google Translate, so please don’t moan at me! It’s not my fault I didn’t have a Classical education ;-p)

I heard a nice little riddle while catching up on NPR’s Sunday Puzzle podcast this morning, and thought I’d share. I’ll moderate all comments until Saturday morning Vancouver time to make sure early correct answers don’t spoil the fun for everyone else – although I might let other spoiler-free comments through.

“What’s special about the Roman numeral for 38?”

Have fun!

I just sent out a Rando that may be of interest to some of you:

Yup, it’s that time of year again, and Twitter is abuzz with talk of a new #VWXPool!

We’re using the same pool as last time, on the CBC website. The group name is “Puck Science”, and the password is “VWXYNot?” – all regular readers are very welcome to join! No knowledge of hockey is required, as I think we’ve proven every year since we started.

The deadline for pick submission is Tuesday October 1st at 4pm Pacific time – my apologies for the later notice than usual (and thanks to Lavaland for nudging me on Twitter!). I’m back on the grant application train again, so it’s my busiest time of year at work, combined with an unusually active social life over the last couple of weeks.

A note about updates: during the last two seasons, hosting and coordinating other hosts for the weekly update posts started to feel a bit like a chore, which made it less fun than usual. So, this year, I am decreeing that I will do updates whenever I damn well feel like it, which I think will be much better (for me, anyway, and it’s my pool, so there). There’ll definitely be an end-of-season update, and probably one at the all-star break, but other than that I’m not promising anything! We can always trash-talk on Twitter instead – and if any participants have blogs and would like to post updates more often than I’m managing, you are very welcome to do so, whenever you damn well feel like it!

While helping Mr E Man book the final leg of our upcoming vacation yesterday, I realised that it’s been almost a whole year since we went to Puerto Rico and I still haven’t blogged about it. BAD blogger!

We flew to San Juan via Toronto, just a couple of days before the airport closed for Hurricane Sandy. We weren’t at all sure that our connecting flight would be going ahead, as our flight path would skirt the eastern-most edge of the hurricane’s predicted path, but we took off on time and were told by the pilot that we were in for a smooth ride.

This was a lie.

We bounced our way south for the final hour and a half, and could see the huge masses of cloud off to our right. But, after a very steep descent right over the old city and a bit of a hard landing, we were on the ground, sleep deprived after our red-eye flight but otherwise fine.

We spent the first two nights in San Juan, at a hotel called El Convento which, as the name suggests, used to be a convent. It’s a gorgeous building right in the centre of the old town, with old hardwood fittings and an inner courtyard – and all the Sandy-related cancellations meant that we got a free upgrade to a suite!

The old part of the city is very compact, very charming, and feels very safe (there’s one part the guidebook warned us away from, which a bartender we talked to thought was hilarious – he took a photo of the warning text and put it on Facebook. However, he then came back to our table (with some free beers) to say that he got several comments in the first few minutes telling him that yes, it is indeed very dangerous for tourists to go to that part of town). We walked all over – we explored both of the old forts (ducking into the sentry post towers to avoid some brief, but very fierce, tropical showers), and experienced both the worst (everything battered and fried) and the best (ceviche and other seafood) of the local cuisine.

(One of the definite benefits of Puerto Rico over Cuba is that all the food and drinking water are regulated to US federal standards, so you can eat anything that looks good without worrying about it. In contrast, I spent a few days in Cuba feeling pretty rough, probably from ice cubes made of unpurified water).

After our second night, we picked up our rental car from the airport and headed west, to Rincon. (The roads are well maintained all over the island, but the drivers are a bit… adventurous). Our accommodation in this surf town was the Tres Sirenas guesthouse, right on the beach, where we quickly made friends (and had a few drinks with) the owners and some of the other guests. The water was too rough for swimming during our first couple of days there, but we enjoyed the delicious pool-side breakfasts, the sunsets, the nearby beachside bar, and driving through the hills then trekking through the jungle to a nearby waterfall running over a rock face that looked like a giant head.

After watching some of the local kids jump off the rock, Mr E Man decided to follow them up the rocks at the side, then stood on the tiny, sloping, slippery ledge with water rushing over his feet before launching himself off into space.

I stayed at the bottom so I could take a photo. You’re welcome.

We left the pool when we started to hear thunder, and ran back up the hill through the jungle in the pelting rain, reaching the car just before the lightning started. We actually earned our beer that day!

On our final full day in Rincon, we were finally able to swim in the ocean. It was pretty rough surf still, but lots of fun, and I only face-planted in the sand once.

Back into the car again, and on to the Villa Sevilla guesthouse, in the foothills of El Yunque rain forest. This was our longest drive of the trip, especially as we took a detour to follow a Twitter friend’s suggestion to visit Caba Rojo, on the very southwestern tip of the island. It was just as gorgeous as promised – I just wish we’d been able to spend longer there, because the beach looked absolutely amazing!

Luckily, after surviving a near-zero visibility downpour in the mountains and then the outskirts of San Juan during rush hour, Villa Sevilla turned out to be stunning. The owners took us on a tour of the garden and invited us to help ourselves to the passion fruit, Jamaican cherries (which taste like candy floss / cotton candy), and the best avocados I’ve ever eaten.

On our first morning there, we followed the owners’ directions to a swimming hole in the nearby river, where we swam, hung out, and enjoyed the view of the hills. A couple of hours later, it was time to drive back to San Juan to pick up my sister, who was flying in from London to join us for the second week of our trip. We had to drive past the airport to get to the terminal entrance, and were speeding down the road right next to the runway just as the BA jet we could see coming towards us touched down next to us – pretty cool, especially when we confirmed that it was indeed the plane my sister was on!

Now, when my sister and I were growing up, West Side Story was one of the first videos we ever owned, and we watched it over and over again. So when we first started planning our trip over Skype and Mr E Man first suggested Puerto Rico as our destination, my sister and I immediately launched into a spirited rendition of America (which begins with the words from this post’s title). So, after greeting my sister, picking up her luggage, and piling into the car, we had the song cued up and ready to go on the stereo – and blasted it at full volume as we headed back to the chalet.

Much rum was drunk that night.

Over the coming days we explored the local beaches, and went on a couple of very hot and sweaty hikes in El Yunque rainforest national park.

Luckily, the views over the jungle and beyond to the coast were stunning (although the various swimming pools were very crowded), and there was a German beerhaus at the foot of the hill for reasons no-one could satisfactorily explain, complete with bratwurst, oom-pa-pa music, and Puerto Rican waitresses dressed in dirndls.

We also ate lots more delicious pork and seafood, and I coined what is probably my best-ever pun: while trying conch ceviche, Mr E Man asked if I was enjoying it, and I said “not really. I don’t like the texture. I guess I’m a conch-ientious objector”.

After a few days, we moved on to our final destination, Vieques – a small island off the east coast of the main island. (The ferry took about an hour and a half, and cost $2 each. You can’t even get a terrible cup of tea for that price on BC Ferries). This was, hands-down, everyone’s favourite part of the trip. Vieques used to be used as target practice by the US Navy, so it’s only very recently started to be developed (and you do NOT stray off the path – the navy are still clearing up after themselves).

We stayed at Casa La Lanchita, near the ferry terminal on the north side of the island, and rented one of their beaten-up old jeeps – a must, as the roads out to the beaches aren’t paved and are pretty rough in places. The beaches are some of the best I’ve ever seen – clean white sand, clear blue water, and hardly any people. We swam, snorkeled, and generally relaxed. We even went to the beach in the rain (Mr E Man thought the sight of my sister and me spending 10 minutes covering ourselves in factor 30 before snorkelling in the rain was hilarious, for some reason), which was actually very cool indeed.

Vieques inspired my second-best pun of the trip: “I got 99 problems, but a beach ain’t one”.

In the evenings, there was yet more delicious food, and some more spectacular sunsets. We spent one evening watching the results of the US election coming in, which was quite exciting, especially because Puerto Ricans were also voting on the future of their relationship with the US (they voted to apply for statehood).

Our final night was the true highlight of the trip. There are some mangrove-fringed bays on the south coast of Vieques that have some of the highest concentrations of bioluminescent organisms in the world, and we experienced them on a moonlit kayak tour. (You used to be able to swim there, but a) sun screen and bug spray kill the organisms, and b) someone got bitten by a shark last year).

It. was. STUNNING.

Every paddle stroke became a fireworks display. You could scoop up some water, hold it in your hands, and actually see the individual points of light swimming around. You could see fish and manta rays moving under the surface. My only complaint was that the tour was only about an hour long – I could have stayed all night.

It was only with great regret that we packed up the next morning and headed back to the ferry terminal. As our ferry approached, I managed to lighten the mood by turning to my sister and singing “I think I go back to San Juan”; I was so proud when she immediately sang back “I know a boat you can get on”.

We dropped my sister off at the airport for her evening flight, then spent our last night in Puerto Rico in a generic business hotel near the airport. As we flew home the next morning, I couldn’t help but compare our trip to our 2009 vacation in Cuba. As I said, it was great to be able to eat and drink anything without worrying about food poisoning, and it was certainly much, much easier to get around than it was in Cuba; the food was also (in general) much better. The accommodation and the beaches were definitely much better in PR, but on the latter point at least I don’t think we saw the best of what Cuba has to offer. However, Puerto Rico did feel less exotic, less culturally different than Cuba (we did some of our food shopping for Villa Sevilla at the local Wallmart), and I missed the ubiquitous music that characterised our time in Cuba. I would definitely go back to both places, but for different types of vacation – Cuba for a more difficult but more culturally rewarding trip, and Puerto Rico for relaxation, food, and if travelling with anyone with kids. We’re working on making the latter happen… stay tuned! EMERGENCY EDIT – I meant that we are working on persuading some friends of ours who have kids to go back to Puerto Rico with us, NOT that we are working on having kids of our own to take with us to PR, or anywhere else. Thank you though to the reader who messaged me privately with a very nice message of congratulations!