Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit

If a famous novelist visited your lab, would you remember it?

Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest novel The Marriage Plot features a bipolar yeast geneticist. While writing the book, Eugenides, who lives down the road from several world-famous yeast genetics labs at Princeton, decided to do a little research. He visited David Botstein, one of the elder eminences of yeast genetics, got a tour of the lab, and nobody there seems to remember the visit. From the New York Times: Continue reading “Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit”

Tell me why I’m doing this again?

They don’t tell you this in Bio 101:

Ars Technica, The Tenure Track Not Taken:

Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work. That may get you an assistant professorship where, at a state university, the starting salary is in the $60k-70k range.

(The only other career path I have seen that has similarly low pay for exorbitant requirements is becoming a chef. In both cases, you only do them because you simply love doing them.)

Continue reading “Tell me why I’m doing this again?”

They call me, “Mr. Panther”

On our way to visit family in Central Illinois, we used to always pass a sign for Jim Edgar Panther Creek – State Fish & Wildlife Area. Personally, I’m glad my name isn’t “Jim Edgar Panther”. How could you ever live up to such name?

Sunday Poem

Phosphor Reading By His Own Light

It is difficult to read. The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.

The page is blank or a frame without a glass
Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

The greenness of night lies on the page and goes
Down deeply in the empty glass…

Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.
The green falls on you as you look,

Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech.
And you think that that is what you expect,

That elemental parent, the green night,
Teaching a fusky alphabet.

– Wallace Stevens

Stevens is not easy, but he repays the effort with his remarkable word choice and fierce cognitive engagement. Of particular interest to the scientifically inclined, his poems are often about the intersection between our minds and reality – clearly a theme in this poem. (Maybe this poem is also about you, trying to read this poem.) As he once wrote, “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.”

Avoiding the same old song: Spider Baby Jesus

It’s short and sweet with simple lyrics and a straight forward structure. Like all the best punk, though, Duffy and the Doubters’ Spider Baby Jesus is great not because it’s catchy but because there’s something true about it. It’s the kind of song that works because it leaves you knowing that something, anything, somehow makes more sense than it did before. This time around, Vancouver music mainstay Duffy Driediger reminds us of the pitfalls of relying on the same tired narratives. When we tell the same stories, the ending is always the same. There’s always a boring subject and there’s always someone else to blame. It may be inescapable. It’s always the same old song.

Continue reading “Avoiding the same old song: Spider Baby Jesus”