Filler 49

Oh dear, I seem to be slacking again on the blog front. There are a couple of school-related entries languishing as partial drafts, but I can't say I'm hugely enthusiastic about them; probably neither are you. Otherwise things have been fairly quiet lately.

There's been lots of sunshine, which is always good; I even picked up a bit of colour from time spent out and about this week. Partly because of my aversion to PowerPoint, more just to get out of the dingy seminar room in Wolfson House -- one of the least appealing bits of UCL -- I dragged the MRes Journal Club out into Hyde Park on Wednesday; not exactly kicking and screaming. We sat on the grass in the sun eating strawberries while I described a 1994 paper on eye evolution (writeup to follow -- it's one of those pending posts) with the aid of a small whiteboard and pen, and we discussed its thesis a bit; then threw a couple of frisbees around. That's definitely how science should be done; and education in general, really.

I dawdled home afterwards, only to find email notification of a meeting scheduled for the very time I read it -- eek! Leapt on bike, dashed headlong to college -- luckily, the potential supervisor was running even later than me. Thank goodness for academics, eh? And who knew there was a 10 story building hidden away inside UCL's little chunk of Bloomsbury? You don't really notice it from anywhere nearby, but the offices on that top floor have great views over London.

Anyway, we chatted about structured illumination microscopy and a bit about optical microdialysis, and really this instrumentation lark looks quite promising for a summer research project. On the other hand, so does the astrobiology, which I had a meeting about yesterday. So who knows? If it were only up to me I'd be paralysed by indecision. But I suspect there'll be a good deal more competition for the Star Trek option and things will fall out accordingly. Whichever topic wins, it will doubtless lead to numerous grindingly unreadable posts...

Let's see, what else? In less than two weeks I'm turning 40. I approach this milestone with surprising equanimity -- last year and the year before getting older felt rather doom-laden, this year much less. I guess I must be over the hump of the old mid-life crisis. These days I'm doing stuff I enjoy and generally life is treating me pretty well. In the main, and given an appropriate barrage of disclaimers, exceptions, exemptions, mitigations, denials, repudiative subclauses and other miscellaneous circumlocution, I am at ease.

I'm marginally less at ease about the fact that I'll be spending the week up to and including my birthday in Plymouth -- another wacky part of the CoMPLEX programme, where we go off to visit some marine biologists -- but I'm sure that'll turn out fine as well. We're advised to bring our wellies. Wellies? Do I look like the sort of person who wears wellies? I haven't even owned a pair since I was a child. Guess I'd better go shopping.

On the subject of school trips, I didn't report on Cumberland Lodge, did I? It was a two day pseudo-conference for the CoMPLEX population, congregated in an old royal estate. Students in the later stages presented their work, there were speakers from academia and industry, poster sessions, a debate and -- of course -- a little hoop-jumping exercise for us newbies to introduce ourselves in two minutes or less.

Two minutes is really quite a long time.

I wasn't yet recovered from a really nasty cold, so was a bit prickly and difficult -- well, perhaps that "so" is misplaced, since I'm prickly and difficult anyway -- but I still had a pretty good time. Sunshine and frisbee throwing featured again, which is always a good sign, along with wee hours drunken singing of Elvis songs around the basement pool table, which probably isn't. Never having attended a "proper" scientific conference, I can't say whether this constituted a reasonable simulacrum of the form, but it was in keeping with similar events I've experienced in other fields, so I have to suspect it did. In any case, it was fun.
Posted by matt at May 5, 2007 10:41 PM