Post-meeting dinner with visiting Todai researcher and incidentally major wine amateur: any day, really…
Life of a Research Student
Minutes from the first meeting of the organisational committee for the Joint Bioinformatics Center’s Grad Student Presentation Day:
P-san: Ok, now that we have set the presentation schedule for the day, we need to name the session chairs. And a time-keeper for each session.
Dave: That’s easy: there are three sessions, there’s three of us… We each chair one session.
K-san: Actually… The goal is to avoid doing it ourself. Chairing sessions is a real pain in the ass.
Dave: Good point.
K-san: There are three participating labs. For time-keepers, we’ll just pick the kōhai in each of the three labs…
P-san: nods in assentiment
Dave: Great idea. Stupid kōhais, gotta be good for something.
K-san: For session chair, we’ll just ask one senior member from each lab to volunteer.
P-san, Dave: Sounds good…
Dave: Wait a minute… There is only one research student in my lab: me!
K-san: Oh… that’s right.
Dave: …
K-san: …
Dave: Chotto FML.
Glamour
God how I would have loved to seat the design meeting for this one:
“- For our sign, we need something refined something that spells GLAMOUR…”
“- how about the silhouette of a woman sitting on her ass, spread-eagled, showing her crotch?”
“- Brilliant! That’s exactly what I meant!”
Hey, let’s mock objectivism for a bit…
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
No particular reason, just felt in a Rand-bashing mood tonight.
Kamogawa at Dusk
Near demachi yanagi
Tonight near Sanjo Bridge
… There is a young guy applying strokes to an oil painting while frenetically dancing to tribal trance music…
Japanese Train Schedules
Japan: the country where trains being one minute late on the usual schedule warrants posting advance notices all over the station…
North by Innuendos
Cary Grant: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eva Marie Saint: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Cary Grant: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eva Marie Saint: Then again, she might not.
North by Northwest
Cautionary Tale
It’s 4:30pm on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am sitting at my balcony in my underwear, sipping on a gin & tonic, putting together some very repetitive music on my laptop while waiting for the lab’s computers to spit out some results.
I am also holding a high-pressure water gun, carefully aimed at the neighbourhood pigeons, patiently waiting for them to get within range.
What?
Oh, me too: I used to have a real job, wearing ties and fine Italian suits every day, working some place where people would say things like “synergy”, “milestone” and “ballpark estimate”, while planning the next meeting on their Palm Pilot… You bet I did.
But you go ahead: judge me.
Facebook and Me
Facebook had three things going for it, a couple years back, around the time I finally caved in and signed up:
1) A fairly decent interface. A newsfeed that was actually designed to intelligently filter stuff of interest to you while hiding the the rest automagically (instead of requiring you to constantly click through endless moronic application notifications, courtesy of your bored-friends-at-work).
2) Everybody was/is on Facebook. Even those kids you used to share your milk with, back in first grade… Facebook is the ultimate “where are they now” tool… If somebody born within your lifetime is not on Facebook, chances are they are either dead or building pipe bombs in a secluded cabin somewhere deep into the woods. All you need is a full name and/or school attendance year.
3) Advanced privacy features meant that people used their real names (a necessity to make point #2 worth anything), while allegedly keeping private stuff away from your boss/exes/crazy Google stalkers etc.
Here we are now, a couple years later and point #1 has died a long and painful death at the hands of a dozen asinine “interface redesigns” plagiarising any other Web 2.0 service with an ounce of popularity, all the while bringing server cost down (yes: turned out, all those great intelligent filtering tools were so intelligent they did not scale at all… oops).
Point #2 is more valid than ever: it is only a matter of time before even dead people have their Facebook page (never mind: they already do). But let’s be honest: once you’ve looked up all your friends from kindergarten and realised you did not share much beside reminisced fondness for crayon drawing and shared hatred of afternoon nap time, once you’ve made sure the asshole bully from Junior High is now assistant manager at Taco Bell and once you’ve found out that secret High School crush Susie now has three kids, two dogs and a suburban house, and is (according to her status) feeling bloated after that huge KFC meal they just all had at the mall… Once you have satisfied that bit of morbid curiosity about every single living soul you have ever interacted with during your life… You just want to go back to hanging out with people you actually chose to be friends with, preferably at an age where your common interests involved more than making watercolour handprints and trying not to pee your pants in public.