Life of a Lab Rat

While I was somewhere over Indonesia the long-awaited (well, since last Saturday, anyway) challenge went live:

SciBlog 2008 Challenge: Get a senior scientist blogging

As announced at the London Science Blogging Conference on August 30th
2008, we hereby challenge all scientists to get a senior scientist
blogging. The ultimate aim is to help scientific blogging gain more
momentum and credibility - and also to have some fun. Points will be
awarded for:

• The seniority and reputation of the blogger (both in absolute terms and in comparison to the person who convinced them to blog)

• Their previous lack of experience with blogging and other new-fangled
  online habits

• The quality and quantity of the posts, their relevance to science,
  and any demonstrable positive impact they might have already had

• Other criteria that will no doubt occur to us later
  

Please submit nominations (including self-nominations) by email to 't
dot hannay at nature dot com' by January 5th 2009 using the subject line
'I got a senior scientist to blog'. All formal judging will take place
shortly after this date, but we encourage early nominations so that we
can sign up for the RSS feeds. Please include:

• Your name and affiliation
• The name and affiliation of the blogger
• A link to the blog
• Any interesting anecdotes, or reasons why you think it deserves to win

The winning blog will earn the chance to be included in The Open
Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2008. The blogger and
instigator will also each earn expenses-paid trips to Science Foo Camp
2009, to be held in July or August (exact date still to be confirmed) at
the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.

The decision of the judges (that's us) will be announced in January
2009, will be final, and will probably be somewhat arbitrary.

Good luck!

Peter Murray-Rust
Cameron Neylon
Richard P Grant
Timo Hannay

-------------

Get persuasive, troops.

Well, that was SciBlog '08. A pretty amazing experience actually, and I'll have a full report in due course. In the meantime, here's some aperitifs.

Mike Seyfang took a bootleg recording of my session (OK, I admit it, I just hit 'record' in Garageband and let it run) and turned it into a podcast.

The University of Sydney is pretty progressive it turns out. Ben Goldacre gave props because he'd heard one of the attendees had persuaded his Faculty/Department to contribute towards the airfare from Australia, so I had a moment of fame. In my panel session I pulled up the page at http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/support/ to make the point that Arts & Humanities are over-represented compared with Science at blogs.usyd (and that I don't see A&H people worrying about blogging adversely affecting their career), but it was pretty evident that what impressed people was the University doing this at all.

Alethea, who I met for the first time yesterday, has jotted down some pretty extensive notes (and previous entries, too). We sat and had a lively discussion between us throughout the session on creativity. I won a book in that session but gave it to Henry Gee because it was at his expense (and my suitcase is already too heavy).

You can see a load of people jot down their thoughts as the conference happened at Friendfeed.

More later!

Coming to you live from the Georgian Room at the Royal Institution.

Everyone from Ben Goldacre down to me is here. Yow.

Check Friendfeed for live updates, and in about 4 hours I hope to have a podcast of the final session up on the web somewhere.

Somewhere south of Peterborough, at 140 mph.

Today I'm flying (on the Airbus! Woo hoo!) so that I can attend the SciBlog (which sounds like something from Star Trek to me).

I'm also going to the Open Science workshop on 1st September in Southampton, and will be talking at the MRC-LMB on Friday 29th August.

Edit: I just remembered to say that I'm going to try to update on the fly. Either at Twitter and/or Friendfeed. Possibly, if all else fails, at Facebook (and NN, of course).

Is that the taxi waiting, blowing his horn?

This from Brunhilde:

After 23 years in the prep room, a certain venerable member of staff is pleased to announce that he feels young again since he can still be surprised by the stupidity (is this a fair comment?) of a student.

VMoS (to SS precariously balancing large test-tubes in a small cuvette rack): Careful, that rack is not for test tubes, it's for cuvettes
SS (who can NEVER be wrong): Then why aren't the holes square?
VMoS: Because you can't drill a square hole.
SS: Why not?

Laugh? Until we stopped. And then we started again.

This evening I went along to a presentation about iTunes U. I was accompanied by a couple of the more, eh, radical members of the department and we had a good laugh, not to mention free alcohol, rather un-filling canapés and a discussion on why wild pig was on the menu for a certain vegetarian but calamari isn't.

But, besides your correspondent managing to score a rather splendid freebie, the highlight of the evening was a certain member of the department proclaiming in a loud voice,

The number of people doing anything in science (at USyd) is very limited.

Laugh? I had to help myself to more cauliflower soup.

There's more lovely photos and some fascinating early microscope history over at BibliOdyssey. I learned, for example, that Giovanni Faber is credited with inventing the term 'microscope'.

... because waiting around for over an hour in the middle of the day just to lodge a visa application is what busy professionals do best.

And the banks close at 4, so I have to leave early to collect currency for my upcoming trip.

There's a real opportunity here for time-shifted service industries.

To celebrate the Olympic Games, DKSH is offering great deals on their range of Laboratory equipment.

Cool. I wonder what Olympic-themed freebies they're giving away?

Be quick as the first 50 orders will be eligible for either a EuroLine 6 Cup Coffee Maker s/steel or a Zwilling J.A. Henckels 7 piece Knife Block Set.

Ah. So that'll be the coffee-drinking and synchronized knife-throwing events? I think maybe DKSH have missed the point maybe as much as China and the IOC have.

I can clone! Yay!

After a couple of intensely annoying days in the lab, in which I've had to clean unnameable gunk from two centrifuges, as well as gibber in Cthulhuian fear at certain stupidity (which is like certain death but much, much worse), I've come to the conclusion that the problem, the real problem these days, is that laboratory neophytes are not scared enough.

Back in the day, I was left in no doubt as to what might happen if I screwed up in the lab. In today's whale-hugging politically-correct and peace-loving brown rice world, such attitudes are unheard of, and the laboratory, actually, seems rather anaemic. New students are told — sorry, they're not, they're shared with — how to use interface with a piece of equipment, and how sad and disappointed everyone will be if they do something wrong sub-optimal.

I think that it's much more effective to say,

"Do this wrong and you will die"

with a side-order of,

"and if, by some miracle you survive, I myself will hunt you to the ends of the earth."

Sounds harsh, but by gum you learn how to balance a centrifuge, and just how much it is worth your while to clean up your own mess and use the booking sheets because the lab tech is really really scary. And everybody's happy, or at least considerate to everyone else, which amounts to the same thing.

Those stains on my labcoat? They're actually blood — and it's not mine.

This one is for Jenny.

Bench-top autoclave (successor to this one), clearly reading 121°C, so clearly very hot and full of steam. Muppet standing by it, frobbing the safety valve to release pressure so he can get his stuff out.

Gibber

I went down to Stores just now. On the way back I was accosted by Brunhilde, who asked if she could borrow my muscles to open a particularly recalcitrant liquid nitrogen tap. Having obliged, I trotted back up stairs via the pigeon holes and Beta Gal's office, to bump into Brunhilde with her dewar of very cold stuff.

"That did it!" she said, "Ask a pig-hunter!" I came into my office, feeling all butch and manly, to read an email that began

Dear Colleagues

The Sydney University Network for Women, Research Peer Mentoring Group
and the Equity and Diversity Unit, University of Technology, Sydney take
great pleasure in inviting you to the inaugural Joint Women's Research
Network event.

Oh, OK, I thought, I must write about all that at some point, and saw that the email closed with the line (emphasis mine),

We encourage you to attend and meet other women researchers, and we look forward to welcoming you to the event.

Ha ha, I thought, what muppets they are writing that to the entire Cage mailing list.

Then I checked the To: field.

female-staff@usyd.edu.au

Now while I scored 50% on this little test, and I may be in touch with my feminine side (or be an incurable romantic, whatever), this is a bit much. So here's a picture of me to help me feel better. Grr.