Veniality

The weather has been astonishingly nice these last few days, taunting us with the possibility of summer. A fraud, probably, but too nice a one to dismiss out of hand. Only weekdays so far, as much vicious in their loveliness as giving succour -- let's see this kind of shininess on the weekend, then perhaps we'll talk -- but even so, it would be churlish to complain.

Yesterday I presented at the UCL/NIMR student seminar day, which was fun, even despite the fundamental dreariness of the medics and developmental biologists who made up a significant fraction of the delegates. The ability of these people to reduce fascinating questions to sheer soporific tedium is remarkable -- if only there were some socially valuable function to which their talent could be put, beyond boring the fuck out of innocent PhD students. My talk went okay, though it would be better if I had any bloody results at all, of any kind, on which to report. Next year, perhaps.

Tiddly pom.

And this was just one of the week's obligations. Another (this morning) was to present something to our notionally-fortnightly-but-in-practice-rather-randomly-scheduled lab meeting. I chose to discuss Shin et al's 2008 paper, Dendritic glutamate release produces autocrine activation of mGluR1 in cerebellar Purkinje cells, a slightly underachieving electrophys/pharmacology outing on self-stimulation in a certain type of central neuron. A tricky subject about which, alas, I know far too little, especially given how closely related it is to what my PhD is notionally investigating. But I guess the meeting went okay despite that.

After assorted other scholastica not worth reporting, I met up with the world-famous visiting blogger formerly known as Sin and we sat and drank fine wine from cadged Costa plastic cups in the balmy Soho Square evening; as can be clearly not observed here:

It was very nice indeed, and if I can escape from the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs in sufficient time tomorrow perhaps we may reprise the occasion. Otherwise, roll on next time...
Posted by matt at May 8, 2008 11:34 PM