Ants & the academic dream
When I was an undergraduate, I found that university really wasn't living up to my expectations of stimulating, interesting people and ideas.
But today, I was totally living the academic dream.
We had a visit from a leading expert on ant behaviour. This wasn't about computer ant algorithms; she studies real live ants. We started off the day with her talk on the Turtle Ants she's been studying in Mexico, a talk filled with pictures of ants and paths and grad students on ladders pointing at the trees. A talk filled with speculation about behaviour and patterns and analogies to search in computer networks and bifurcation of biological trees. Over the course of the day, the group talked ants, bees, simulations on the computer and using robots, immunology, flu and t-cells in the lung, patterns and theories. It was the kind of conjunction of ideas from multiple disciplines where things were just clicking and questions and potential experiments started getting debated.
Biochemistry from my scientist parents, ecology and field work from Macoun Club, immunology from the above plus my own master's research, algorithms from math and CS... I was pretty proud of myself for knowing the jargon pretty much across the board and being able to keep up. I love that I'm with a group where seemingly disjoint backgrounds are consistently recognized as a huge advantage, and my own particular background fits right in.
I learned a bunch about ants and flu today. My notebook is filled with doodles of ants and cells doing stuff. Apparently turtle ants, since they have paths in the trees, sometimes get the paths broken when the wind blows, and the ants just back up and wait for the wind to blow the branches back so they can keep going. I learned that swine flu's replication rates in cells are a hundred times higher than avian flu (and ~20 times more than regular flu) but avian flu does other things to suppress immune response. I learned some about how T-cells get into the lungs and find infection despite the fact that they don't seem to move fast enough to explain how well we handle infection. And I got to watch people putting ideas together in ways that might result in using experiments in ants to try to explain things that would be much harder to test in the lungs, and so many ideas that probably just couldn't happen anywhere else.
So if you've been wondering why the heck I moved here despite the many downsides about the US/desert/altitude/regional poverty/city, etc.... this is why: Cutting edge research at the conjunction of biology, computing, and maybe a few fields besides. Even if I decide to do something else once my contract is played out, this has already been amazingly worthwhile, and with my own project starting to take shape, I'm pretty sure it's just going to get better!
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But today, I was totally living the academic dream.
We had a visit from a leading expert on ant behaviour. This wasn't about computer ant algorithms; she studies real live ants. We started off the day with her talk on the Turtle Ants she's been studying in Mexico, a talk filled with pictures of ants and paths and grad students on ladders pointing at the trees. A talk filled with speculation about behaviour and patterns and analogies to search in computer networks and bifurcation of biological trees. Over the course of the day, the group talked ants, bees, simulations on the computer and using robots, immunology, flu and t-cells in the lung, patterns and theories. It was the kind of conjunction of ideas from multiple disciplines where things were just clicking and questions and potential experiments started getting debated.
Biochemistry from my scientist parents, ecology and field work from Macoun Club, immunology from the above plus my own master's research, algorithms from math and CS... I was pretty proud of myself for knowing the jargon pretty much across the board and being able to keep up. I love that I'm with a group where seemingly disjoint backgrounds are consistently recognized as a huge advantage, and my own particular background fits right in.
I learned a bunch about ants and flu today. My notebook is filled with doodles of ants and cells doing stuff. Apparently turtle ants, since they have paths in the trees, sometimes get the paths broken when the wind blows, and the ants just back up and wait for the wind to blow the branches back so they can keep going. I learned that swine flu's replication rates in cells are a hundred times higher than avian flu (and ~20 times more than regular flu) but avian flu does other things to suppress immune response. I learned some about how T-cells get into the lungs and find infection despite the fact that they don't seem to move fast enough to explain how well we handle infection. And I got to watch people putting ideas together in ways that might result in using experiments in ants to try to explain things that would be much harder to test in the lungs, and so many ideas that probably just couldn't happen anywhere else.
So if you've been wondering why the heck I moved here despite the many downsides about the US/desert/altitude/regional poverty/city, etc.... this is why: Cutting edge research at the conjunction of biology, computing, and maybe a few fields besides. Even if I decide to do something else once my contract is played out, this has already been amazingly worthwhile, and with my own project starting to take shape, I'm pretty sure it's just going to get better!
What's up
- Took an impromptu trip to the Bay Area this weekend. Bit expensive since we decided to do this on Tuesday, but otherwise quite feasible, which is good to know for future trips! Mostly hung out with the new parents and thus got to meet the new babies, which was fun.
- My first visitor to Albuquerque has scheduled her flight. Which means I now have a time limit on unpacking and prepping the house! To be fair, it's perfectly feasible for visitors to show up anytime now (the spare bedroom has bed, lamp, sheets, etc. and I'm using it as a quiet place to chill or have a nap where John won't disturb me) but I'm hoping this will provide the push to make the place nicer.
- I hated moving, but at least I culled my stuff before I did. Not only does it suck to have finally gotten the unpacking under control only to wind up with another household worth of crap in the house, but there's a lot of "why the hell did you bring all these useless old computer books, and why did you unpack them onto my one remaining bookshelf?" -- John is taking it in good humour; I want to burn all the things. Have not thrown him and his junk out of the house yet, shockingly! But he may be buying a shed to temporarily manage our stuff problem. Not kidding.
- I'm still settling back into a new routine with two of us in the house instead of just me. I like having milk mysteriously appear in the fridge!
- Work is still settling in. I am irked by the fact that I miss paperwork deadlines because I don't know about them until after they've passed, but I think I'll be able to predict some of them for next time, so I have hope I'll be able to be responsible and not on academic-time always! I've got a project on the go and will be giving a prelim talk on the subject on Thursday. I'm debating if I can find some clever way to do an off-the-wall presentation here, just for variety, but think this will be more of a led discussion.
- After much fuss, I have most of a dev environment set up again for Mailman hacking on my laptop. Looks like I probably can't justify Pycon, but am still hoping I can make the sprints. (Work may have a visitor then, though, which would mean I'm stuck here.) Either way, have a bunch of summer of code stuff that I really want to have integrated. Maybe this weekend I will actually sit down and do that. I have been a very absent dev for the past few years due to thesis, and I'm a little nervous about getting back to it, but there's lots I want to do!
- Also, I have started keeping a list of all my "I should really do this..." projects, which I find strangely motivating because so many of them seem within my grasp. I'm trying not to over-extend myself, but little personal private ideas don't feel like they're in the way. It's more like now, when I'm bored, I know I can grab something off the list.
- I totally managed a step class at altitude before I left for California for the weekend. But I also managed to make myself very sore between that and playing too many kinect games the night before. Am slightly afraid for my next class (weds unless I wimp out), but at least this time I wasn't gone long enough to lose my entire altitude adaptation. I have to say, it's a neat and unexpected perk that the university provides me with a free fitness class pass! If it turns out step doesn't work for me, i can switch to a variety of other classes, but I figured step was the most familiar class for me to start at: I know how my body should react to doing step at sea level, which gives me a handy baseline.
- That said... I managed to get a migraine for the first time since, uh, I had a root canal done many years ago which apparently fixed the freaked-out nerve. This was the day *of* said fitness class, so trigger could have been over-exertion, dehydration, altitude, or possibly plain old lack of sleep. Hopefully this will not be a thing in the future, but as far as migraines go it was kinda fun: I still have prescription drugs left over from before the migraines were cured, so it didn't hurt, and I got some seriously fascinating aura stuff happening with half of my vision flashing white shiny-ness. It made the trip to home depot especially trippy.
- I bought some "water crystal gel balls" that are absurdly fascinating given that they look like tiny plastic ball-bearings and then swell up to be marble-sized bouncy gels. Soon, I'll have some bamboo stuck in them and will have continued on my plan to green up the house (currently only at 3 plants, but I'll have a jungle yet!)
- I also bought a little nail buffer/shiner thing, which is just a bunch of different very fine grades grit used to make nails shiny without polish. This is much more fun than it has any right to be, but it encourages me to keep my nails longer than usual, which feels odd because I tend to use the tips of my fingers and thus I'm knocking them on stuff a lot. Strangely, this reminds me that I need to get back to practicing clarinet so that I'm in shape to join one of the local concert bands.
- As you can tell, I'm not actually that good at anti-materialism despite my constant complaints about the amount of stuff around here. le sigh.
So... overall, things are settling again. I'm happy to give myself a little longer of settling given that house stuff is still taking up a lot of my weekend time, but I'm hoping that I'll move past settling and into doing new stuff soon!
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- My first visitor to Albuquerque has scheduled her flight. Which means I now have a time limit on unpacking and prepping the house! To be fair, it's perfectly feasible for visitors to show up anytime now (the spare bedroom has bed, lamp, sheets, etc. and I'm using it as a quiet place to chill or have a nap where John won't disturb me) but I'm hoping this will provide the push to make the place nicer.
- I hated moving, but at least I culled my stuff before I did. Not only does it suck to have finally gotten the unpacking under control only to wind up with another household worth of crap in the house, but there's a lot of "why the hell did you bring all these useless old computer books, and why did you unpack them onto my one remaining bookshelf?" -- John is taking it in good humour; I want to burn all the things. Have not thrown him and his junk out of the house yet, shockingly! But he may be buying a shed to temporarily manage our stuff problem. Not kidding.
- I'm still settling back into a new routine with two of us in the house instead of just me. I like having milk mysteriously appear in the fridge!
- Work is still settling in. I am irked by the fact that I miss paperwork deadlines because I don't know about them until after they've passed, but I think I'll be able to predict some of them for next time, so I have hope I'll be able to be responsible and not on academic-time always! I've got a project on the go and will be giving a prelim talk on the subject on Thursday. I'm debating if I can find some clever way to do an off-the-wall presentation here, just for variety, but think this will be more of a led discussion.
- After much fuss, I have most of a dev environment set up again for Mailman hacking on my laptop. Looks like I probably can't justify Pycon, but am still hoping I can make the sprints. (Work may have a visitor then, though, which would mean I'm stuck here.) Either way, have a bunch of summer of code stuff that I really want to have integrated. Maybe this weekend I will actually sit down and do that. I have been a very absent dev for the past few years due to thesis, and I'm a little nervous about getting back to it, but there's lots I want to do!
- Also, I have started keeping a list of all my "I should really do this..." projects, which I find strangely motivating because so many of them seem within my grasp. I'm trying not to over-extend myself, but little personal private ideas don't feel like they're in the way. It's more like now, when I'm bored, I know I can grab something off the list.
- I totally managed a step class at altitude before I left for California for the weekend. But I also managed to make myself very sore between that and playing too many kinect games the night before. Am slightly afraid for my next class (weds unless I wimp out), but at least this time I wasn't gone long enough to lose my entire altitude adaptation. I have to say, it's a neat and unexpected perk that the university provides me with a free fitness class pass! If it turns out step doesn't work for me, i can switch to a variety of other classes, but I figured step was the most familiar class for me to start at: I know how my body should react to doing step at sea level, which gives me a handy baseline.
- That said... I managed to get a migraine for the first time since, uh, I had a root canal done many years ago which apparently fixed the freaked-out nerve. This was the day *of* said fitness class, so trigger could have been over-exertion, dehydration, altitude, or possibly plain old lack of sleep. Hopefully this will not be a thing in the future, but as far as migraines go it was kinda fun: I still have prescription drugs left over from before the migraines were cured, so it didn't hurt, and I got some seriously fascinating aura stuff happening with half of my vision flashing white shiny-ness. It made the trip to home depot especially trippy.
- I bought some "water crystal gel balls" that are absurdly fascinating given that they look like tiny plastic ball-bearings and then swell up to be marble-sized bouncy gels. Soon, I'll have some bamboo stuck in them and will have continued on my plan to green up the house (currently only at 3 plants, but I'll have a jungle yet!)
- I also bought a little nail buffer/shiner thing, which is just a bunch of different very fine grades grit used to make nails shiny without polish. This is much more fun than it has any right to be, but it encourages me to keep my nails longer than usual, which feels odd because I tend to use the tips of my fingers and thus I'm knocking them on stuff a lot. Strangely, this reminds me that I need to get back to practicing clarinet so that I'm in shape to join one of the local concert bands.
- As you can tell, I'm not actually that good at anti-materialism despite my constant complaints about the amount of stuff around here. le sigh.
So... overall, things are settling again. I'm happy to give myself a little longer of settling given that house stuff is still taking up a lot of my weekend time, but I'm hoping that I'll move past settling and into doing new stuff soon!