…and counting.
How cool is DHTML and Javascript? Ok maybe not that cool. Anyway, not long to go now. That’s a bad thing. Still have most of the introduction to write, a bit of methods, all the results and all the discussion. Stuffed? You bet.
Sitting on my backside all day trying to read reviews and papers to get an idea of what I’m meant to be writing in my introduction/literature review for the thesis.
One book open to my left about imaging intercellular transport, flicking to and from the references to track down a few cited papers in conjunction with Firefox and databases and the library website. A review in front of me, with other references being chased up on a completely different topic. Another book to my right with yet another topic and more references to look up. Find a reference, give it a quick skim, and find a few more references to look up from that paper.
For each 1 paper I read, I find another 10 to read. It’s fun chasing all these papers but if you never get to the end of the chase, the reading gets a bit tough. Very tough.
Snowballing comes to mind.
Why do they call it science a collaborative exercise if all people ever publish is successes? Very rarely in the literature do you find articles on artefacts or, *gasp*, failures. Unless of course you study the artefact/failure to bits and then maybe some obscure journal somewhere may publish it.
Even many of the successes that get published probably have some degree of artefactuality in them anyway. The big names can publish without much fear of reprisal because they’re so revered in the field. So many people worship these researchers and go with the flow that the O’ revered ones can probably get away with saying ludicrous things like plants actually dance around at night when no-one is watching.
I think general scientific collaboration would be greatly improved if people talked about failures. Since 90% of molecular biology experiments are failures, there will be plenty to publish. This way, not only can honours students actually publish stuff, but scientists can learn from others’ mistakes so that the same bleeding mistake doesn’t have to be repeated in hundreds of labs across the world, wasting everyone’s time and money.
I say set up the Journal of Failures and Artefacts (abbreviated to J. F. Art. for obvious toilet humour reasons) and let the papers roll in. Let’s learn from the mistakes of others - who knows, perhaps we’d have a cure for cancer and AIDS already if people actually published failures.
Was making a mini-seminar Powerpoint on my whole honours project, and what did that annoying paperclip say to me? The gall of Microsoft…
Thanks for rubbing it in.
In the interest of wasting time while writing up my thesis… here are some more Flash games I like.
Unreal Flash - yes, it’s like UT but Flash and 2D. Fun but sometimes laggy.
Chaos Faction - like Super Smash Bros on Nintendo consoles, too bad it’s only single player vs CPU.
Champion Archer - shoot arrows at stick figures.
Weapon Fire - not as corny as it sounds; a side-scrolling shooting game.
Territory War - turn based side-scrolling combat game.
Flash Craft - tower defence based loosely on Warcraft 3.
Clash n Slash - arcade game where you shoot alien spaceships. Yes, fun!
Thing Thing 3 - fast-paced side-scrolling shooter. Also check out 1 and 2, they were easier to beat.
I’m currently taking pictures on the confocal laser scanning microscope in the lab. Going to go shoot some DNA and gold into leek soon. Using the computer that’s hooked up to the microscope to control my laptop via VNC. Using the laptop then to control my mobile via infrared. Why don’t I just have my mobile next to me in the lab? Good point. But that would mean I couldn’t blog about all this remote control business.
Meanwhile the 180FM leaders are having dinner at Pent Thai in Epping, and I’m stuck at uni doing experiments. Argh!
Well, that’s not entirely scientifically correct, but doesn’t this look cool? We literally shoot DNA encoding green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish into leek which then forces them to make the protein, causing their cells to glow green. In nerd talk this is known as biolistic microprojectile delivery of a plant expression vector causing transient heterologous expression. And who said science isn’t cool?
Actually I said that today, but honours is my excuse.
That’s a bad thing, when it concerns honours and the time I have left to do experiments. A handful of other honours students were in as well, no doubt feeling the crunch. Argh!!!
In on Saturday again to finish off some stuff. At least I got to take a few pretty pictures of plant cells. See how uniform they are, fitting together so neatly. How well they were designed. That’s a microscopic view of leek by the way, one of the leaves, stained red with a fluorescent dye.
Ah, wonderful smelly leek. How hard they are to study. Healthy leek is hard to come by in winter, but we need healthy, alive leek so that they will do the things with DNA we want them to. But supermarkets can store leek that have been pulled out of the ground in their storerooms for ages in winter without them going off, so it’s hard to find a good leek.
But the more healthy the leek, the harder it is to do another part of the experiment, even though the first part requires healthy leek. Also, younger leek are better because there’s more of a chance of seeing what we want to see, but specimen preparation is easier on older leek because the epidermis is hardier.
Hmm. Well, going into uni soon to keep playing with leek. It’s what my supervisor calls the ‘rescue plan’ - it’s gotten to that desperate stage in honours where we’re just clutching at straws, trying to think of anything to do to rescue the thesis from the depths of failure.
And the leek’s not helping.
Gave up on cloning last week, since I apparently suck at it and nothing ever works for me. Spent 4 months trying to clone 3 things, only got 1, and that was using a sneaky method.
Cell biology is more my thing I think. Plus it gives you pretty results, if things work. Might be meaningless, but pretty. Microscopy is interesting but tedious (and time consuming), but at least you get to see something as opposed to cloning where you add clear solutions into other clear solutions and a few weeks later you get some DNA sequencing information back and it’s contamination.
So anyway, here’s a pretty picture I took today. I can’t explain what it is - if I did I’d have to kill you.