Life of a Lab Rat

Made some changes on the right-hand nav bar (guess who discovered that the templates on this system are editable?)

Hit 'refresh' if you're still getting the old version, and feel free to let me know if it works for you, or not.

BK

Right. I'm off to a Gordon Conference.

I might write a few things while I'm away, depending on (a) if anything funny happens and (b) if I have time/energy. If not, see you in about 10 days.

BK xx

For reasons that may or may not be important, memorable, or even strictly adhered to, I'm going to try to divide the types of posts that I write here and at the other place (my anonymity was always pretty precarious, yeah?).

Here I'll concentrate more on the doing of the science, funny things that happen on the way to the forum and basically 'outreach' — talking to you folks who do other things than tinker with the very fabric of the created order for a living.

Dear Black Knight

I'm writing to invite you to Science Blogging 2008, to be held at the
Royal Institution, London on 30 August 2008. The conference, organised
by Nature Publishing Group, will unite over 100 of the world's top
scientific bloggers to discuss common issues.

As one of the most popular bloggers on Nature Network, and a prominent
blogger at the University of Sydney, your participation at the
conference would be greatly valued.
...

Full details of the conference, such as they are at the moment, can be
found on Nature Network.

I look forward to your reply and, hopefully, welcoming you to London in
late August.

It ties in rather nicely with my father's birthday back in the UK, so all I need to do is raise some cash for a ticket. Anyone feeling generous?

One lab's very like another/ When your head's down over your data, brother

Gosh. Cobwebs.

This weblog is primarily about life as a scientist, and not very much about the science itself (except if I think it might be useful or interesting). For the last couple of weeks I have been getting seriously to grips with an incomplete microarray data set, to see if it can inform some paper revisions.

And the thing, the crucial thing about analysing data, is that you don't much get to interact with outher people. So that whole 'life as a scientist' thing? It's not really been happening. Well, it has, obviously, but not in a way that's immediately bloggable (and you've all had enough of Perl code, yes?).

Which might explain, but doesn't excuse the relative silence here. Sorry chaps.

Tomorrow I will emerge blinking into the light and prep some RNA, thaw some cells, set up an RT-PCR and start a Western. Then it'll be back into the Pit with me to co-write a book chapter. But I shall be on the prowl for japes and jollities — so look out.

As someone else once said, better than I could: "I'll be back".

In one of the waking moments between my microarray nightmares I saw that Alethea had taken one of these silly personality tests. Rather than get up and go and remind myself what the sky looks like I succumbed to temptation.

Guess what?

ABOUT TIGGER: Tigger is the newest addition to the Hundred Acre Wood, and he lives with Kanga and Roo, because Roo's strengthening medicine turned out to be the thing that Tiggers like best. Tigger is bouncy and confident -some of his friends think he is a little TOO bouncy and confident, but attempts to unbounce him tend to be fruitless.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are a positive and confident person. You feel capable of dealing with anything and everything, and funnily enough, you usually ARE. You don't worry about much, and you love to go out and find new adventures.

Your friends and family might sometimes be a little exasperated by your boundless enthusiasm. You don't like to admit your mistakes, and when you find yourself in over you head, you tend to bluff your way out of things. You would be surprised, however, at how happy the people around you would be if you would actually admit to a mistake. It would make you seem more human, somehow.

Thanks everyone, especially Nurse Donovan for the PyMOL file . . .

Weblog admin question for all y'all.

I have reason to believe that some people are having difficulty commenting here.
If you are, please drop a line to blackasknight 'at' gmail.com, so that I can try and sort it out.

thanks. . .

BK

I did not write about this earlier, and I should have. How remiss of me.

Anyway, the 'Best Science Writing on Blogs 2007' is now available, here, and your humble chronicler, once famously described as the Herodotus of the scientific age, is in it.

I'm back. And normal service, or what passes for it around here, will be resumed when we've done all the post-holiday fritzing.
xxx

Well colour me pink and call me a Barbie. One of my posts from last year has been selected to appear in the second science weblogging anthology Open Laboratory 2007.

Which is, apparently, going to be a real book (2006's was print on demand), available from bookstores and Amazon and stuff. Despite my new-found notoriety, I'll not be able to make the conference because I have a prior engagement with a bottle of vodka and a fishing rod.

Thank you to my proposer (you know who you are) and a fantastic 2008 to everyone.

About, oh two days and six hours ago, I got the guys at Uni IT to sort out my 'Captcha' thing for the comments.

You can tell, can't you?

As Dr Chou and myself walked to Redfern last night we mused about how lucky we were to work with some very smart people; people who (within a rather narrow community, admittedly) are world-famous.

And then this morning I looked at the front page of Nature.com, and read a name that I know is familiar to at least some readers of the Rat. Maybe not fame, but a little notoriety at least:

Oh, the main picture there; I don't think we're related but she may have tried to chat me up at a party once.

Whee. I checked Technorati this evening, as you do (seeing as the bastard spammers have destroyed the usefulness of trackbacks), and discovered that yesterday's post was spreading ripples in the blogospheric pond. It came first to the attention of Peter Murray-Rust, who has a thing (a good thing! — I hasten to add) about open access and open science in general, and thence to the open science community itself, in the shape of Cameron Neylon.

Funnily enough, Neil Saunders then picked it up from the OpenWetWare people, and I do some digging and find that not only did Neil do a DPhil but that he is now in Bostjan Kobe's lab. Bostjan is a long-time collaborator of my previous boss and from meeting him at Lorne he seems to have quite forgiven me for not going to work for him when I had the chance (or forgotten about it).

Brisbane, bleh.

So, anyway, it turns out that I had previously made contact with OpenWetWare, and talked about them over a year ago. Which just goes to show that (a) it's a small world and (b) incest is more fun than you'd think.

I have an apology to make. I have offended someone through this medium, quite unfairly as it turns out and I am sorry for it. Perhaps the worst of it is that I accused the subject of my ire of doing exactly the thing that he seeks to prevent.

Up until this morning I was having a pretty crap week.

But just after midnight an email arrived in my inbox, and sat there until I was able to peer at, bleary-eyed, before breakfast. And it said,

As you may have noticed, Nature Network also features blogs by scientists. We have read your blog "Life of a Lab Rat" with interest and would really like to have you blogging on Nature Network. Your writings are really enjoyable to read and would resonate quite strongly with Nature Network users, a lot of whom are (mad) research scientists like yourself.

I know, I really haven't been keeping this place ticking over recently. It stems from the depression that's been bugging me since I got pneumonia last year (Hmm. I still haven't written about my time in hospital. Must do that).

So I need to get on top of that, and do some writing. This weblog, my personal one, and maybe, finally, do something about those half-arsed chapters I've got sitting on my Palm.

Um, OK.

Which reminds me; I need to pontificate publicly on the principles, pros and pitfalls of particular protocols, with respect to my very young apprentice.

I came here to write something about teaching, hiding from my student and maybe being careful not to identify people in this weblog, and got distracted.

I appear to have achieved some sort of recognition. "Good Coverage of General Postdoc Issues Award", for the post "Just another whinging postdoc".

Go me?

Bit of a furore.

Unfortunately it's not in real life, but in the so-called 'blogosphere'. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that while I am not opposed to neologisms in general, the class of them that starts with 'blog-' is monstrously barbarous and should be avoided whenever possible. Sometimes, sickeningly, this is not possible. I apologize to my more discerning readers, both of you.

I have been wondering, myself, about the purpose of this weblog and sciencey weblogs in general. I am not totally sure on why I wanted to do this, except that 'it seemed a good idea at the time'. I know I had some noble notion that I could attempt to make science and the scientific way of thinking accessible to Bruce and Sheila Public, and some completely selfish motives that were to do with channelling my creative instincts. But I never thought that it was just about me, by me and for me — an exercise in self-gratification.

One good thing about coming back to Australia, at least this time, is that once again bananas are nearly as affordable as they are in New Zealand.

What with Christmas, annual leave and the whole pneumonia/pleurisy thing (about which I will write some more this week) it has been six weeks since I did any productive work in the lab. I did set foot in there a month ago, and showed the boss one of my x-rays, but then I went round to the Royal Prince Albert and next thing I knew I was flat on my back with a whizzy thing whizzing around me, some bugger sticking a tube in my chest and on enough antibiotics to sterilize the whole damn' hospital. If only it was that quick, actually — again, more on that later.

So tomorrow, it's back to work. And I have to remember what the hell it was I was doing all that time ago, and decide whether I should go to Lorne this year as planned or spend the extra week working. I certainly won't have time to do the experiments that were to form the basis of my poster.

There's been some good reasonable suggestions about the name of Ratty, up there.

Yersinia was favourite for a couple of minutes, before I wondered if there were suitable Norwegian names (Rattus norvegicus). I briefly considered Sprague or Dawley, or even SPF, but then I heard on good authority (hello, Wodger) that s/he is is a desert rat. So I toyed with the idea of Ararat, or Shimon, before almost settling on Dot, short for Herodotus.

But late last night it struck me.

Ladles and gentlespoons, I present Monty.

For those of you using RSS aggregators to read this (hello Jonathan) there is a new header graphic. And a NameThatRat competition.

That is all.

The thing that makes a weblogger's cockles warm is feedback. We might know that people are reading us — I can look at the webserver stats and see all those lovely unique hits, you might bump into me on the stairs and say something nice — but what really gets the pulse going is comments. That someone has taken the time to prestidigitate the keycaps and share their ineffable thoughts on my humble weblog . . . it's better than drugs.

Trackbacks are good, but I'm not going to be greedy.

But throwing it open to all comers can cause problems. And, in theory at least, this particular weblog is under the auspices of the University of Sydney, which might inhibit some of you. And you have no idea what I think about comments or how I might decide what is suitable, because I haven't told you yet.

So, having read Georg's little spiel this evening I'm going to iterate my comments policy in the hope that maybe more people will feel able to natter away, and maybe we can get some good dialogue going.

Most of what follows is shamelessly nicked from the templatedata, and is aimed at protecting me as well as your rights to free speech (do we have such a thing in Australia? Or am I being seditious again?).

The University has a revamped website. And there's quite the discussion going on about it over at Georg's place (oh, and Andrew lives there too but he's keeping quiet. Sensible man).

It's bright, it's in yer face, and there's lots of content available directly from the front page. Let's be honest here, the idea of a University website is not primarily to make people go 'Oooh, shiny! Look at the pretties!'; people are visiting because they want information. The quality of the research and teaching is not linked to the whizziness of the web site (and if you are so simple-minded as to believe it is, we don't want you here). I have seen too many corporate websites where there's a Flash landing screen and it's almost impossible to find the farking information I went there for.

Thought I'd better include a glossary.

Please email or leave a comment if you want to see anything here.