Thanks, Presbyterians!
28 September, 2009
The NY ave Presbyterian church hosted a havurah group for Yom Kippur
services. This amused me all day.
the five-second rule
29 June, 2009
From this NYT blog post
11. Food quickly picked up from the floor is safe to eat. Scientists have put the commonly-cited five-second rule to the test. They found that food that comes into contact with a tile or wood floor does pick up large amounts of bacteria. Food doesn’t pick up many germs when it hits carpet, but it does pick up carpet fuzz.
It cracks me up to read serious debunkings of this “rule.” It’s a JOKE, people! It always has been!
Aww
1 August, 2008
Under the bridge
10 May, 2008
View from my seat
27 April, 2008
Multimedia message
27 April, 2008
Kosher sports hot dog stand@nats stadium
5 April, 2008
Knish!?!
some kind of rubicon
1 April, 2008
A genetic test for the variant I published on last year is now available.
OK so that’s the background, now:
Not sure how I feel about this. Or even what to say. Well, I should get to work anyway. Finding the next gene 
DCist Exposed 2!
23 January, 2008
This photo was chosen for the second annual DCist Exposed photography show, opening March 7!
Thanks DCist!
See you all there!
Sunday miscellaneous
4 November, 2007
– Why does Google still list itself as being beta??
–The sadness of losing DST and having it get dark earlier is mitigated for me by pomegranates. The Trader Joe’s in Chicago had the bad pomegranates while the Whole Paycheck had the best, but in DC up is down and black is white, and so yesterday at TJs I scored two huge, perfect, just-on-the-verge-of-overripeness 16-inch-softball-sized fruits.
I had my first pomegranate as an adult, I’m not sure how I was introduced, but bless you, whoever you were. This meant I was spared in my childhood from wondering how the fuck Penelope could go to Hades and eat only six pomegranate seeds. (I used to read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology a lot.) As friends can verify, once I discovered them I used to inhale them in one sitting. They would even use this for amusement: buy Techne a pomegranate and get contact joy.
These days, on the advice of a Lebanese friend and coworker, I am less gluttonous. She watched me devour one at lunch one day and showed me how good the seeds could be with a little salt, so now I butcher them into a tupperware thingy, salt them just right, spritz maybe a little lemon or lime juice, and eat the seeds with a spoon. This means three fruits can last me a week, instead of three days. Which is cheaper; jeez, I’m not that old and I remember when you could get ‘em for a dollar.
–Amy Winehouse on SNL next week! Have you SEEN the videos of her moving on stage? I have never seen anything so bizarre. Come off the crack honey, we miss you. (MOM: listen to that album before SNL!)
–Today I was reminded yet again of why I hate running in DC. Chicago is blessedly flat, but my neighborhood is on a hill, and all the quiet, smog-free streets run downhill and the busy ones go uphill. Whenever I get a leeeeeeeeetle bit of willpower to run outside, it gets torpedoed by this fact. Today I was extra-dumbass and ran in the spaghetti tangle of streets that is the Adams Mill area, and got stuck at the bottom of a hill just as I was getting tired. (The hill Dr. Birdcage used to live on.) Yes, I could run across the bridge, but I walk that way TWICE A FRICKING DAY, and I am so over it by now. (Hyuk!) I wish I had a good elevation map of my area so I could plan routes.
Where I’ve been, and about James Watson
2 November, 2007
OK, so I missed the first day of NaBloWriMo.
OK, so there ISN’T even a NaBlogWriMo.
I can challenge myself anyway, right?
So, I know you all are wondering…where’ve I been?
At conferences. Five weeks, four conferences, three involving overnight stays, two involving stays of more than one night, and one in the Western time zone. The biggest one was #2. I presented on the first day, in the plenary session after the introductory speaker, who was…Jim Watson. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Fifty years ago he and others divined the structure of DNA in a perfect storm of insight, ambition, office politics, and teamwork. Two weeks ago he ended his career in disgrace…but ENTIRELY PREDICTABLY, in a way that surprised ABSOLUTELY NOBODY WHO’D EVER MET HIM. And I’m gonna tell you why, and give you a front-row seat–literally–on his behavior.
When you are precocious enough to earn your BS at 19 and your Ph.D. at 22, ambitious enough that you decide at age 23 that you will solve the biggest scientific problem of the day, intelligent enough that you DO SO by age 25, and important enough to the field that the insight wins you a piece of a Nobel at age 34…well, this is not a recipe for modesty, and modest he’s never been. He has accomplished a lot with his scientific capital, such as starting the human genome project (until politics forced him out) and leading the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to prominence in the genetics field. But he has also not had to edit himself for nigh on 30 years, and got in the habit of blurting out ideas that…might not have always been appropriate. And as he’s veered into the crochety-old-man-with-cushy-job phase of life, he’s gotten more and more outrageous.
The race stuff he said wasn’t too far out of the ordinary for him–just two things were different. First, it was about race, not about ugly women or fat people or stupid people, as it’s been in the past. Considering genetics’ history with eugenics, this naturally sits more poorly with people than the other viewpoints, which are more easily laughed off. And secondly, he said it to a member of the press on a book tour, not to a room of star-struck scientists whose reaction to him, for decades, has been “*roll eyes* That’s Jim!”
I went to three genetics conferences, which got progressively more general. The first one, featuring my BIG PRESENTATION (a whole other post), was the World Congress on Psychiatric Genetics, in NYC this year–a grand name for a medium-sized meeting of 1000 people. As I said, Watson opened it with a half hour or so of chat. (I was in the front row, hence your front-row view .) Remember, this was PRE-brouhaha, although listen carefully to his media interviews up to that point and you’ll hear previews of what was to come. And indeed, this meeting was a preview. He was talking to, you know, psychiatric geneticists, so his comments focused on that instead of, say, race or attractiveness. What we do is so important, he sez. So many families have pain over this sort of issue. he himself has a schizophrenic son and a friend has a bipolar son who killed himself. Our field is heading in great directions, and being an old man he hopes we can develop, say, tests for psychiatric disorders…in a time-frame he can witness! (audience chuckling.) Such test scould be ever so useful, he goes on. For families, you know, and prenatal diagnosis.
Excueeze me? I baking powder? Prenatal diagnostic testing for MENTAL ILLNESS?
We’re not talking about horridly painful diseases that kill all affected kids before they turn 3 or whatever. We’re not even talking about Down Syndrome or Huntington’s Disease–diseases for which the genetic tests are definitive, but in which people can and do live full lives by almost any standard you apply. We’re talking about illnesses with unknown cause–illnesses where reasonable experts may not even agree on whether a person HAS it or not!
I was livid, as you can probably tell, and for two reasons. First: we have no idea what is going on genetically in these disorders. Take it from me, because I just published a major study in the area and spent 3 weeks absorbing the work others have been doing, and I can tell you for sure that knowing all the genetic everything that we know right now about someone will predict their odds of illness no better than will taking a simple family history. OK, I know that was a confusing sentence, so, an example. We know that if you have an aunt with schizophrenia, your odds of being schizophrenic yourself are one to four times higher than the general population’s odds. The absolutely MOST MOST optimistic spin on the genetics we know right now can’t do better than odds of 2. That means that just by asking for a family history, you can know more than if you do a genetic test. (Yes, some people don’t have anyone in their family with the illnesses…but this is rarer than you might think, especially once you start digging, and hear tell of that weird great-aunt who spent her life in a home or the boisterous cousin with the 5 divorces and so on.)
The second reason is, well…I had been to the Holocaust Museum the week before this conference, and seen this exhibit. (A summary: “The ‘Law for the prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases,’ proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation (‘congenital feeble-mindedness’), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism.”) It was a hell of a juxtaposition.
I felt conflicted after his talk. Sure, we scientists knew to roll their eyes, but the guy had a LOT of credibility among influential people, and there is already pressure in certain privately-funded corners of psychiatry to develop “definitive” psychiatric diagnostic tests. The imprimatur of a guy like him, I imagined, could mean a lot to decisionmakers–it had done a lot for the Human Genome Project, after all. What could I, a lowly postdoc, do? Where did my power lie? Anywhere??
So I was actually pretty glad that Watson dug his own hole. He’s not the first prominent person to shoot himself in the foot like this…the dude IS 80. It’s an unfortunate end to an amazing, and, personally, inspiring career, but I think–I hope–history will be kind.
Next time: How Did Techne’s Talk Go??
(Preview: They laughed, they cried, it was better than Cats)
NaBlogWriMo?
31 October, 2007
NaNoWriMo for blogs…..
*sigh*
29 August, 2007
Life, backyard, Baltimore
17 August, 2007
A fun Flickr meetup last night inspired me to get back on the photo editing horse. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.
Admire my hot boyfriend, please.
damn you, governments
14 August, 2007
They have blocked flickr.
Maybe this is a good thing but C’MON!
“So, what are you doing next?”
14 May, 2007
So: this afternoon, when there was a lull in Science, Dr. Scientist (me) started a post about how crazy is the life of Dr. Scientist…but then Dr. Scientist got too busy to finish it.
Yep…I have been meaning to post about my big paper which came out last week, which is the thing I have been working on, but couldn’t talk about in detail, for the last 18ish months. It was a big secret, see, because we were trying to be the first group to publish on the topic (which, you’ll recall, is the genetics of bipolar disorder). Well, IT WORKED, y’all! Yay! All that work! Not for nothing!
We have surprised everyone. In fact, we have it from the head of NIMH (who’d be Boss’ Boss’ Boss’ Boss) that an even bigger bigwig (let’s call him BaB, for “Bigwig Among Bigwigs”) called him after reading the paper, saying “Why didn’t I hear about this?!” Heh.
This would be a day or two after I ran into BaB (at a graduate student poster session, of all things; I was there as a judge). Now his friendliness is legendary and I am not one to be intimidated by bigwigness, so I walked up, introduced myself and gave him the elevator pitch about the paper. A few hours later he called my boss and arranged permission to mention our paper in a Congressional subcommittee hearing on Monday. (Lest you think this was ALL because of me, BaB already had the paper, but his staff said he was not going to have a chance to look at it in time for the hearing. But probably when a young enthusiastic postdoc waylays you at a poster session and tells you she found a result for a psychiatric disorder that’s more significant than any that’s yet been published, it pushes the paper a bit more to the front of your mind.)
This whole bleeding-edge thing is new to me. Heck, in grad school I never even imagined I’d be doing science at the cutting edge of ANYTHING. I thought I had gotten used to it while writing the paper and nervously trying to figure out if we’d been scooped yet, but that was only the beginning. We had a little celebratory party last Wednesday, ~24 hours after the paper came out. You know how it is, “Yay us, our hard work paid off, let’s have some sandwiches.” And even there, EVEN AT THAT PARTY, sandwiches in hand, someone — who meant well, surely — asks me, “So Techne! What’s next??”
(Actually I was eating a brownie. Oh the weight I’ve gained in the last few months of sitting in front of the computer.)
More tales to come: tales of bigwigs and the science rat race, from the life of Dr Scientist. Just as soon as she gets a fucking minute to breathe.
From: Dan
Subject: Hey it’s Dan
My first serious boyfriend was named Dan. We haven’t spoken in years, not for any fighty reason, just how things go. Hmm say I. Wonder what the story is?
The gmail blurb: “Thought you should know of a new music site I stumbled across.”
Oh well.
Maybe I should email Dan.
Psychophobia
20 April, 2007
Friend hymes of blog Charlottesville Prejudice Watch is an advocate for the rights of those with psychiatric disabilities, and works to oppose forced treatments. She has a nice rant up about the VT shootings and how ridiculous some of the proposals for preventing such events in the future have been. An excerpt (emphasis mine):
…They also claim that changing the standard for commitment in this state would somehow have prevented this tragedy when no one even tried to have this guy committed since 2005. If he had been committed to an inpatient unit in 2005, he would have been out at least a year ago…
It is as if people with psychiatric illness are not people nor fellow citizens to these folks, let alone most likely members of their family… It is also as if psychiatry had superior[ity] to other medical specialties scientific methods of determining who is ill, what their illness is and what if any risk they might pose to themselves or others. That is a myth. A dangerous myth to people who daily die from the side effects of psychiatric drugs or from being restrained in state hospitals…
Even more amazing is folks denial that they could ever themselves be the subject of a psychiatric intervention…Are we so complacent about our liberties and the good intentions of our federal government these days that we want to trust them with more opportunities to lock up inconvenient or troublesome citizens?
I’ve been trying to keep in mind, as I hear people scramble around for someone to blame this tragedy on, that it’s merely human nature and this response will subside. After all, nobody REALLY thinks there is a way to reliably predict who is going to commit a violent act, and that administrators and authorities in Blacksburg were negligent in doing so…do they?
What do you think, readers?
give humans a break
17 April, 2007
I of course agree with this sentiment about the recent events in Virginia. (If you are too lazy to click on the link, the sentiment is: this is nothing compared to what’s happening in Iraq.) On the other hand, I think it is a bit harsh to judge the coverage in this way. Virginia is closer then Iraq. Americans are more likely to know the dead people there than those in Iraq. Is this a sin? Humans were ever so. We pioritize what and how we care about things based on their proximity to us and our interests.
(Ioz has more understanding of human nature than most bloggers, so I don’t mean to pick on him, his was just the first expression of the idea that I saw.)
On a lighter note, here is an image sent my way from Reaganite.
yet one more mistake Bud Selig made
2 April, 2007
I’m loving the day’s news of how Bush was, uh, Way Too Busy to throw out the first pitch of the season at RFK this afternoon. In case you’ve forgotten, baseball is Bush’s favorite sport, to put it mildly:
Bush wanted the [commissioner of] baseball job so badly that he stalled for a full year, as frustrated as a bride at the altar waiting for the groom to show up. When he called Vincent the next fall, he was still not entirely resigned to losing out. “Selig still says he wants me to be commissioner, but nothing’s happening,” Bush reported. “I told them I have to decide in a couple of weeks.” He made one last glum call to Vincent: “You were right, nothing happened. I’m going to run for governor.” And then, in November 1993, he announced he was challenging Ann Richards.
Read the article if you haven’t, it’s fascinating. I’ve had outrage or outrage fatigue about him and what he’s doing to this country for so long, that I got mad at him the other day for something or other, and it felt like nostalgia.
March Madness, scientist style
13 March, 2007
DCist Exposed and new website
8 March, 2007
If you read DCist or are in my group of flickr contacts, I’m sure you’re sick and tired of hearing about the show by now. Give us a break, for most of us it’s our first show ever AND it counts as winning a competition. So we are excited!
The Washingtonian write-up even gives me a shout-out. Thanks to i495blues for the heads-up on that and also on helping me design my new website.
SXSW and our snowstorm
7 March, 2007
New data means more URGENT!!1! work on paper, but to hold you/me over…
E. Blair has listened to 48 hours of music so you don’t have to. I DL’d the entire 2006 SXSW mp3 list and never got even close to through it, so my hat is off to him. On first listen-through I rarely note particular songs, but “Burning Man” did catch my ear.
It’s not even worth getting into how depressing it is that DC calls 2 cm of snow a “storm”. Although it is coming down a teensy bit heavier now…which makes me want to go outside and play. I even brought my camera today. Sad clown. Stuck inside, updating data tables.
Moses
5 March, 2007
stop the presses
23 February, 2007
Last night I saw a young black man hail a cab.
Now, there were Circumstances. It was at the northbound corner of CT and Q, where the 42 bus stop is. He was light-skinned, wearing very expensive shoes and was otherwise extremely well-dressed, and was in the 25-35 age range. He was bald-shaven and had glasses, and although they were plastic and not wire-rimmed, they sent the same message*. And there were a string of cabs stopped at the light, and he was impossible to ignore; that is, the cabs were trapped, and couldn’t speed by all “oh I didn’t see him.”
I was sensitized to this fact of life early on, when a (white) friend gave me a mix tape with the Lenny Kravitz song “Mr. Cabdriver,” and growing up in a major city with lots of cabs and black men I got to witness it firsthand. DC is not too different, and I see it closest-up when hitting the town with i495blues, who, having grown up in the non-cab-oriented Orlando, was more new to the behavior. We developed a nice little joke about “letting the white girl hail the cab.” Ho ho ho! Ain’t racism hilarious?
Actually, this joke got me in trouble recently. Last Friday night I stood on the corner of 18th and Columbia at 7:30 PM and COULD NOT GET A CAB. None were stopping for me. 18th and Columbia! Friday night! Cab after cab, not all full either, passed me. I could sympathize before with black men’s frustration, but now I was empathizing. Finally one stopped, and I got in. “Library of Congress” I said, for this was where I wished to go. “I’m not going over there,” said the cabbie. Uuuuuh. ?!! Got out of the cab. Two guys on the corner who’d witnessed the scene and I laughed about it. Finally another stopped for me, an older black man. I established that he would travel to the LOC, and, still in surprise, shared my story of the recalcitrant cabbie with him. He seemed to be listening — when I take a cab as a single woman, cabbies ALWAYS start conversations with me, so I was expecting the same here. Continuing about the earlier part of my efforts, in an un-thought out attempt to convey the sentiment “now I know what black men mean when they say it feels like you are invisible,” I put my foot in my mouth and mumbled through it, “Couldn’t get a cab! And I’m a white girl!”
You may laugh at me now. **
I felt bad about it the whole trip, imagining the many ways I could be misunderstood through this one comment, but he was very nice to me at the end, charging me only two zones when he coulda worked me on three, and after I paid I clearly didn’t know where I was going and he pointed me the right way.
There’s a post in here about if/how to talk about race across the boundaries. IME, it’s not possible unless there is a level of social trust, beyond mere acquaintance. Maybe that’s just true for me, though. And I don’t have the post in me today, because 1) I should be working and 2) I’m totally expecting to get flamed for something or other here, and want a read of my audience before I say any more.
* From a debate about some famous racism studies on Malcom Gladwell’s blog a few months ago, I found this, which is such a great observation I reprint it here:
I think it would be good for society if whites become more aware of black social class markers. Something that drives black anger is when a young black man with a college degree is crossing the street and he hears from inside all the cars at the stoplight the “ka-chunk” of white motorists locking their doors to keep him from carjacking them.
For about a decade, I’ve assumed that a younger black man wearing those small, typically round wire-rimmed glasses is making a statement about his social class and aspirations, indicating something like “I’m no nerd, but I have definitely been to college. I’m hip-hop, but I’m not ghet-to. I’m cool, but I’m a thinker.”
The first celebrity I can remember with this look was John Singleton, director of “Boyz ‘n the Hood,” back about 1992. Laurence Fishburne’s guru Morpheus in “The Matrix” (above) is another example. (The head doesn’t have to be shaved and the lenses don’t have to be tinted, but that doesn’t hurt the image). You often hear a particular accent from wire-rimmed glasses wearing black guys, too: it sounds both black and educated, but rugged, not prissy.
In the past, the educated black man would adopt a white accent and white visual styles. But, the more recent generations of college-educated black men don’t want to do that. They want to assert their blackness. On the other hand, they also want to assert their social class. So, they’ve adopted some subtle clues that other blacks can easily pick up on. Unfortunately, the little glasses and this new accent are too subtle for many whites to notice.
**Flame me about how racist I am, though, and I will delete your post.*** Unless you can prove to me that you are not living in a glass house. If you want to have a civilized discussion, we can do that.
***Actually, since it was i495blues who was all “[laugh at me a long time] You have to blog that!”, I’ll just forward all flames his way.
****What is up with me and the footnotes? I started doing it when I was writing my paper, to be cute, but now it seems to have stuck. It works well for how I think, though. At my thesis defense I was told, re my writing, “More Hemingway. Less Faulkner.”
we now return me to normal life
15 February, 2007
THE PAPER IS IN!
Free advice: Never ever use Word’s “track changes” feature. In fact, if you can avoid Word altogether, that’d be best.
I may get LASIK. I had an appointment this morning. It turns out I gots me some thick corneas and some good insurance, both of which make me an excellent candidate. And they have an 18-month interest-free payment plan. Which is sweet.
Had a lot of fun joshing with the technician who kept shining lights and dripping drops into my eyes. (Apparently I am a blinky person, but I control it well.) He reminded me of an interesting thing about myopia: EVERYONE thinks theirs is the absolute worst. I knew this because once while offhandedly referring to mine as the absolute worst, my eye doc got a funny look on his face and flipped down some fuzzifying lenses that make it far far worse and said “Everyone thinks that, but they’re wrong. Look, this is my wife’s prescription.” It was -16/-20, mine are -3/-5. So at one point when discussing my candidacy the tech is all “and your eyes aren’t that bad” and I sort of hmm’d agreement, and he was really relieved. “Some people get SO UPSET when I tell them that! ‘Yes they are! *strangle*!’ “
We also discussed the Valium I’d be taking if I go under the, er, laser. Never taken Valium. “DON’T drive home, get a friend” he said. I noncommittally “mmm”. He looks at me. “No Metro either! You got that resourceful look in your eye, I know those eyes by now. You’ll be all on there so relaxed, who knows what’ll happen. Gt someone to take you home.” “The right person,” I say. “Exactly!”
This particular office/surgeon did Tiger Wood’s eyes. Just ask ‘em. They’ll tell you ALL ABOUT IT. (His eyes were around -10). I mean, that’s great, that’s some expensive eyes, and God knows if I get it there I’ll be sure to tell everyone that alla time also, but sheesh.
Inspired by birdcage, I took some quizzes…
You’re Catch-22!
by Joseph Heller
Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you
see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense
of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an
ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You
could coin a phrase that replaces the word “paradox” for millions of
people.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Well, it’s not THAT bad. But I like the idea of making an impact on the English language.
You’re the United Nations!
Most people think you’re ineffective, but you are trying to
completely save the world from itself, so there’s always going to be a long
way to go. You’re always the one trying to get friends to talk to each
other, enemies to talk to each other, anyone who can to just talk instead of
beating each other about the head and torso. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and you get very schizophrenic as a result. But your heart is in the right place, and sometimes also in New York.
Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid
er, ok.
BTW, if you’re not reading birdcage’s blog, you should. Vox agrees with her, there is some fine dc blogging going on over there. Her bus posts alone have me in stitches. And Dr. B, you should get on dcblogs.com’s live feed already. You need an audience!
