Monday, 13 May 2013
Elders
I spent much of the day interviewing Mature Students. They were none of them older than me, but they were all older than your average school leaver. A third (!) of the people I interviewed today have been made redundant in the last 12 months. This anecdote * 3 doesn't qualify as data, but it does suggest a recent slump in the economy; banks, telecoms and pharma were all letting my people go at the end of 2012. Of course, they're not my people . . . yet. But people who have managed euromillions (as in loadsa money, not the lotto), who have run departments, who have applied themselves to hard work for a decade or two - such folks bring something to the table. They may not be 100% sure that they want a Cert in Pharmacy Tech, but they're certain-sure that they're not going to sit on the couch waiting for dole day. So I look forward to meeting some of them again after the summer.
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Celebrating the Ordinary
On dit que one of the most important lessons to learn before you reach 10 or 11 is to know
that excellence only comes from application. Malcolm Gladwell is famous for codifying the rule that you can only achieve excellence by putting in those 10,000 hours. This sort of ex-cathedra opinionating makes me feel queasy because I have baggage. My poor father was always on and on at me to “concentrate“ but I never could sit down and practice the berluddy piano, never stick at my coin “collection”, never finish reading Pickwick Papers. It was obvious to me, my family and my teachers, that I was not about to achieve excellence. Although I want better for our children, and wonder when they are about to manifest their own version of excellence, I've been careful not to 'help them' crank up application to achieve this.
Two things I have chosen to embrace as an adult have helped me develop me a position on this. And even as I write, I realise that I never really chose the piano, the coins or Dickens as a child: they were sort of surrogates for actually applying myself. About 30 years ago I enrolled in a book-binding course to put some spine into the rough-handled collection of second-hand books I’d picked up at yard-sales during our American years. My teachers, fine craftsmen and enthusiasts, were frequently at me to go beyond the workaday robust library style bindings that I was making week after week. And, to please them, I did create a couple of rather good leather and gold bindings with marbled end-papers. But my real happiness was, over 3 or 4 years of Tuesday evenings, putting a few dozen old books back into a usable state.
I’ve also devoted a lot of time (maybe One,000 hours?) to samba (Weds) and djembe (Tues) drumming. One Wednesday, the biggest of the samba teachers gave us an earful about how beginners must realise that even the best drummers in the group need to achieve their own goals; that tyros shouldn’t pester the “effectives” too much with requests for help when we were all in the process of becoming better Sambistas; that even the best percussionists needed space to apply themselves to achieve excellence. Naaah, I said to myself; I don’t want to become an excellent sambista, I just want to hang out and do a bit of samba.
That was very liberating. And you know, I did get better. My bindings got more symmetrical, my drumming got less ragged without me striving for excellence. It’s okay not to be centre-forward and I like to see my scientific career as having providing the infrastructure to help others make their great leaps forward. As an evolutionary biologist I find that quite comforting. To succeed in life you don't need to be The Best, you just need to be good enough. The accident that Darwin happened to live in an age of galloping capitalism has informed our understanding and especially our metaphors of how the natural world functions. "Nature red in tooth and claw", "the survival of the fittest" rather than the survival of the fitter. But I don't think that success need be defined as being better than your neighbour, just "good enough". I am happy seeing my girls achieve the ordinary. Just by being, they flourish.
I’ve also devoted a lot of time (maybe One,000 hours?) to samba (Weds) and djembe (Tues) drumming. One Wednesday, the biggest of the samba teachers gave us an earful about how beginners must realise that even the best drummers in the group need to achieve their own goals; that tyros shouldn’t pester the “effectives” too much with requests for help when we were all in the process of becoming better Sambistas; that even the best percussionists needed space to apply themselves to achieve excellence. Naaah, I said to myself; I don’t want to become an excellent sambista, I just want to hang out and do a bit of samba.
That was very liberating. And you know, I did get better. My bindings got more symmetrical, my drumming got less ragged without me striving for excellence. It’s okay not to be centre-forward and I like to see my scientific career as having providing the infrastructure to help others make their great leaps forward. As an evolutionary biologist I find that quite comforting. To succeed in life you don't need to be The Best, you just need to be good enough. The accident that Darwin happened to live in an age of galloping capitalism has informed our understanding and especially our metaphors of how the natural world functions. "Nature red in tooth and claw", "the survival of the fittest" rather than the survival of the fitter. But I don't think that success need be defined as being better than your neighbour, just "good enough". I am happy seeing my girls achieve the ordinary. Just by being, they flourish.
Silver Linings
For about five years just after the turn of the century, I was percussing every Wednesday with a Samba School in Dublin. We drummed. In the marching season, we provided colour and spectacle for parades all around dull rainy Ireland: Ballymena, Clonegal, Drogheda, Dublin, Kilmuckridge, Maynooth, Waterford. We ran workshops for adults and we encouraged excellence in a youth wing whose membership is drawn almost entirely from the flats of Inner City Dublin. Rehearsals were open to all but you could get elected to “membership”, and save a dollar on the weekly sub if you were good enough and attended 4 consecutive rehearsals in any six-week period. You’d get bumped from membership and have to re-apply if you missed 4 consecutive rehearsals without a “sick-note”. Membership was fluid, turn-over high and critical mass sometimes hard to achieve, but the School is still going (without me) now after running for nearly 20 years.
One spring, one of our most effective and experienced drummers, who was also one of our two really effective social facilitators, went abroad for a couple of months. When she returned, she did her 4 consecutive rehearsals and came up for election to membership . . . and she was dumped! damned by a determined group of long-standing members. For whatever reason, they just didn’t like her. It was a heavy, ugly scene at the meeting and, in the aftermath, 4 or 5 more sambistas, including two members of the steering committee and the other effective social facilitator, resigned. As fortune would have it, I was off that night doing science instead of shaking.
Several weeks later, I met Ms Blackball in the street, gave her a big hug and apologised for having failed to be there at the traumatic meeting. She was much more upbeat about the night of the long knives than I was (so resilient and insouciant is yoof) and said that she was quite happy and drumming elsewhere. As we chatted, I realised that, dreadful as the experience had been, it was not without its silver lining.
Without her manifest social and musical skills, the rest of us had had to grow. We could no longer just follow her lead in the riffs, but had to engage more fully with the music, pay better attention, and take responsibility for even less experienced drummers. We also had to contribute more to the social glue of the group. When new faces appeared it was up to me and the others to step up and introduce myself, make small talk and make welcome. Indeed, at the next monthly meeting, we formally introduced a buddy system so that each rehearsal night someone was there, with an “I’m the buddy” badge, who was prepared to do this social facilitation.
What to learn?
1) Nobody is indispensable.
2) It shouldn’t take a pogrom or disaster for people to step up to the plate.
3) Samba, like soccer, is a team sport. It’s not only about, not even mainly about, the centre-forward or the bloke with the biggest drum. Without the likes of me quietly but reliably going shukka suhkka on the chocalho in the background, the guy hefting the Number One Surdo is just a big NOISE.
One spring, one of our most effective and experienced drummers, who was also one of our two really effective social facilitators, went abroad for a couple of months. When she returned, she did her 4 consecutive rehearsals and came up for election to membership . . . and she was dumped! damned by a determined group of long-standing members. For whatever reason, they just didn’t like her. It was a heavy, ugly scene at the meeting and, in the aftermath, 4 or 5 more sambistas, including two members of the steering committee and the other effective social facilitator, resigned. As fortune would have it, I was off that night doing science instead of shaking.
Several weeks later, I met Ms Blackball in the street, gave her a big hug and apologised for having failed to be there at the traumatic meeting. She was much more upbeat about the night of the long knives than I was (so resilient and insouciant is yoof) and said that she was quite happy and drumming elsewhere. As we chatted, I realised that, dreadful as the experience had been, it was not without its silver lining.
Without her manifest social and musical skills, the rest of us had had to grow. We could no longer just follow her lead in the riffs, but had to engage more fully with the music, pay better attention, and take responsibility for even less experienced drummers. We also had to contribute more to the social glue of the group. When new faces appeared it was up to me and the others to step up and introduce myself, make small talk and make welcome. Indeed, at the next monthly meeting, we formally introduced a buddy system so that each rehearsal night someone was there, with an “I’m the buddy” badge, who was prepared to do this social facilitation.
What to learn?
1) Nobody is indispensable.
2) It shouldn’t take a pogrom or disaster for people to step up to the plate.
3) Samba, like soccer, is a team sport. It’s not only about, not even mainly about, the centre-forward or the bloke with the biggest drum. Without the likes of me quietly but reliably going shukka suhkka on the chocalho in the background, the guy hefting the Number One Surdo is just a big NOISE.
Saturday, 11 May 2013
The Madness of the Inclined Plane
Feynman
Richard (Dick to his pals) Feynman has been dead these last 25 years, but would have been turning 95 today had he not been caught in a pincer movement by two species of the dreaded crab in 1988. Since 1982 - the centennial of Charles Darwin's death - I've been celebrating Darwinday at wherever I happen to be working. One 12th Feb I brought pizza to the lab with the cheese cut to shapes representing the Galapagos Islands but the oven smartly reduced this OCD aspiration to the Blobby Archipelago. Eventually the annual party settled down to me buying a few dozen donuts and pushing them at folks over coffee.
If I hadn't failed my physics "O" level I might instead have been making a reg'lar knees-up on the 11th of May because Feynman was made of the same stuff as heroes are. There were very few places where he wasn't the smartest man in the room and we should be in awe of this intellectual prowess. I wrote in March about his intuitive feeling for numbers and how this helped hone his crap-detector.
But he brought a number of other talents to a level far above the mean. He was a natural percussionist who was co-opted into an authentic Samba School in Rio and played with them during Carnaval. He modestly maintained that they liked his style because he played with a 'foreign accent' that was as attractive to them as for us hearing a French girl speak English. Quite independently of my admiration for Feynman, I spent about 5 years of my life playing chocalho and repinique very badly with a samba school in Dublin, so my respect for his skill is informed by knowing how hard it can be to do it at all, let alone well.
He learned to speak Portuguese fluently enough to be able to give lectures on particle physics to Brazilian university students in that language. He started learning the language when he was a young faculty member and took advantage of his institution's evening extension programme. All set to enroll in Conversational Spanish (always useful in the US where it's the second language), he signed up for Portuguese instead when he saw two pretty girls going into the room next door. Quite independently of Feynman, and indeed years before I discovered Samba, I also spent several years struggling with Portuguese which I first took up in preparation for a field-trip to the Cape Verde islands a generation ago. I loved it, and was eventually able to read a newspaper and write a few simple grammatically correct sentences but I was as far from being able to lecture in the language as I am from being able to play a concert flute.
He had an artistic eye and was accomplished with charcoal or a pencil and a large sheet of paper or with a biro and the back of an envelope. Coherent with the anecdote about evening classes above, he was particularly drawn to drawing women clothed and especially unclothed. I suppose that my XX readers will find this a bit seepy but suggest that the directness and openness of his love of women and of the female form has some redeeming qualities. It is no coincidence that one of his great contributions to the understanding of physics was his Feynman Diagrams which represented the dynamics of particle physics as cartoons. Oh and while we're on his physics I should mention that he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. I can't even reliably spell that, let alone explain it.
Ever since it was published in 1985, I've been buying (especially when I find a stack remaindered for less than half the list price) multiple copies of Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman - adventures of a curious character and giving them away to anyone whom I thought might benefit. It's sort of autobiography, sort of ghost-written or taken-under-dictation by a sambista friend of his called Ralph Leighton. Most people think it and he is brilliant but a substantial minority find endless anecdotes of Feynman's multiple talents intensely irritating. So I'll recommend more whole-heartedly Genius - the life and science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick which is more balanced, less adulatory and which you can buy now 2nd hand on Amazon for $0.01. Don't read? Then another aspect of his interesting life is covered in the filum Infinity with Matthew Broderick as Feynman and Patricia Arquette as Arline his tragically dying first wife: it's available for €3 on play.com.
If I hadn't failed my physics "O" level I might instead have been making a reg'lar knees-up on the 11th of May because Feynman was made of the same stuff as heroes are. There were very few places where he wasn't the smartest man in the room and we should be in awe of this intellectual prowess. I wrote in March about his intuitive feeling for numbers and how this helped hone his crap-detector.
But he brought a number of other talents to a level far above the mean. He was a natural percussionist who was co-opted into an authentic Samba School in Rio and played with them during Carnaval. He modestly maintained that they liked his style because he played with a 'foreign accent' that was as attractive to them as for us hearing a French girl speak English. Quite independently of my admiration for Feynman, I spent about 5 years of my life playing chocalho and repinique very badly with a samba school in Dublin, so my respect for his skill is informed by knowing how hard it can be to do it at all, let alone well.
He learned to speak Portuguese fluently enough to be able to give lectures on particle physics to Brazilian university students in that language. He started learning the language when he was a young faculty member and took advantage of his institution's evening extension programme. All set to enroll in Conversational Spanish (always useful in the US where it's the second language), he signed up for Portuguese instead when he saw two pretty girls going into the room next door. Quite independently of Feynman, and indeed years before I discovered Samba, I also spent several years struggling with Portuguese which I first took up in preparation for a field-trip to the Cape Verde islands a generation ago. I loved it, and was eventually able to read a newspaper and write a few simple grammatically correct sentences but I was as far from being able to lecture in the language as I am from being able to play a concert flute.
He had an artistic eye and was accomplished with charcoal or a pencil and a large sheet of paper or with a biro and the back of an envelope. Coherent with the anecdote about evening classes above, he was particularly drawn to drawing women clothed and especially unclothed. I suppose that my XX readers will find this a bit seepy but suggest that the directness and openness of his love of women and of the female form has some redeeming qualities. It is no coincidence that one of his great contributions to the understanding of physics was his Feynman Diagrams which represented the dynamics of particle physics as cartoons. Oh and while we're on his physics I should mention that he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. I can't even reliably spell that, let alone explain it.
Ever since it was published in 1985, I've been buying (especially when I find a stack remaindered for less than half the list price) multiple copies of Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman - adventures of a curious character and giving them away to anyone whom I thought might benefit. It's sort of autobiography, sort of ghost-written or taken-under-dictation by a sambista friend of his called Ralph Leighton. Most people think it and he is brilliant but a substantial minority find endless anecdotes of Feynman's multiple talents intensely irritating. So I'll recommend more whole-heartedly Genius - the life and science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick which is more balanced, less adulatory and which you can buy now 2nd hand on Amazon for $0.01. Don't read? Then another aspect of his interesting life is covered in the filum Infinity with Matthew Broderick as Feynman and Patricia Arquette as Arline his tragically dying first wife: it's available for €3 on play.com.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Today - The Smoke
Today, Ascension Day, is an Holy Day of Obligation. Bizarrely, for a deeply multicultural place, The Institute declared it a holiday and closed for business. At school in the 1960s, at the very centre of the Anglican communion, we also used to have holiday on Ascension Day. But apart from the son of a Jewish shop-keeper from Dagenham and a diplomat's son from Sierra Leone, the school was 100% protestants, so there was an excuse to celebrate one of the key events in the Christian year. Ascension Day marks the return of the resurrected (that's Easter - 40 days ago) Lord to heaven and is not to be confused with The Assumption which is when his mother Mary left our plane for a higher one (that's 15th August for you unbelievers).
ANNyway, my old Boss in Dublin sent me an e-mail suggesting that "there's no better way to spend a HDoO than in an extended lab meeting" . . . and it was so. I caught the early bus up and spend the whole morning and much of the afternoon talking science with once-and-future colleagues. Eeee, it were great. Lots of catch up for me as I tried to recall what I was working on last year. Lots of new faces who turned out to be interesting and engaged. Some of the old guard still still there so I didn't feel totally adrift.
The turn-over among young scientists can be disorientating. When we worked out in StVs Hospital 10 and more years ago, one of my tasks was to run the weekly Journal Club: I assembled a mailing list of eligible presenters, decided on a batting order (cricket metaphors are okay if you've been educated at the very hub of the CoE) and sent out timely reminders. I did that for a couple of years and then someone else took over and then they left so I took up the task again and dug out my previous list to edit. Of the 59 people on the original list there were only 8 left after 3 years elapsed time. You don't notice the drip drip turn-over as post-grads write up and move on; technicians fall pregnant and don't come back after maternity leave; people emigrate to Australia. But if you have a written record of the changes it's like giving a patronising €2 to a child of 10 and next seeing them as they tower above you at 15.
Today we had a rolling succession of productive meetings. One of the tasks that my HoD at The Institute is attempting to frighten me with for next academic year is the care and education of six (6!) final year undergraduate project students - 3 x 10 weeks before Xmas and 3 x 10 weeks afterwards. So I need to source some data for these lads and lasses to analyse and Schmallenberg and H7N9 flu virus are looking like strong possibilities for two projects. Four to go!
ANNyway, my old Boss in Dublin sent me an e-mail suggesting that "there's no better way to spend a HDoO than in an extended lab meeting" . . . and it was so. I caught the early bus up and spend the whole morning and much of the afternoon talking science with once-and-future colleagues. Eeee, it were great. Lots of catch up for me as I tried to recall what I was working on last year. Lots of new faces who turned out to be interesting and engaged. Some of the old guard still still there so I didn't feel totally adrift.
The turn-over among young scientists can be disorientating. When we worked out in StVs Hospital 10 and more years ago, one of my tasks was to run the weekly Journal Club: I assembled a mailing list of eligible presenters, decided on a batting order (cricket metaphors are okay if you've been educated at the very hub of the CoE) and sent out timely reminders. I did that for a couple of years and then someone else took over and then they left so I took up the task again and dug out my previous list to edit. Of the 59 people on the original list there were only 8 left after 3 years elapsed time. You don't notice the drip drip turn-over as post-grads write up and move on; technicians fall pregnant and don't come back after maternity leave; people emigrate to Australia. But if you have a written record of the changes it's like giving a patronising €2 to a child of 10 and next seeing them as they tower above you at 15.
Today we had a rolling succession of productive meetings. One of the tasks that my HoD at The Institute is attempting to frighten me with for next academic year is the care and education of six (6!) final year undergraduate project students - 3 x 10 weeks before Xmas and 3 x 10 weeks afterwards. So I need to source some data for these lads and lasses to analyse and Schmallenberg and H7N9 flu virus are looking like strong possibilities for two projects. Four to go!
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Pilcrow beats mouse
Introducing ¶ the pilcrow or, less elegantly, the paragraph mark. I wrote earlier about keyboard shortcuts and how they can change your life: "...mouse-work requires a lot of static muscle
activity from wrist to shoulder, which leads to lactic acid build up (it's hard
for this by-product of activity to flush out if the muscles aren't pulsed),
which increases fatigue, muscle mass, deep-vein thrombosis and death...". Now that the teaching year has finished I can expand a little in this arena. A table of the life-enhancing mousifuge shortcuts that I use every day:
Edit 27/05/2013: Want a € sign? <ctrl>+<alt>+4 or <ctrl>+<alt>+e both work or (ευχαριστίες (tnx) Chris Ergatides) <AltGr>+4.
<ctrl>+h find & replace is normally used to replace all instances of psuedogene with pseudogene, but, with the handy <ctrl>+a to highlight the whole document, you can better control document format. In the <ctrl>+h world ^t is a tab, ^l is new line, ^p is a paragraph. Most people create white-space between paragraphs by hitting the <return> key twice. With <ctrl>+h you can [replace all] the, lazy, ugly, uncontrolled rtn+rtn paragraphs with a single rtn:
Find what : ^p^p
Replace with: ^p
WTF who cares?? You will care if you have to cram your florid prose into a specified number of pages - say for a form, a 2 page CV or a grant-application, or to get the page-count down to a multiple of four that you can print as a booklet. You can then specify/reduce the space between paragraphs, so that there is white space enough - 6pt, say, rather than the default 12pt - but not so much as to require another page in your document.
And finally <alt>+o,t will take you to the tab menu. From there you can control your tabs and make your documents neater and more readable and not prone to schlub into a mess if you increase the font-size or change it from Times New Roman to Calibri. Here's a more comprehensive list of of shortcuts; thanks bernd and amp. TMFS? Sure!
<ctrl>+b:
bold
|
<ctrl>+u:
underline
|
<ctrl>+i:
italics
|
<ctrl>+c:
copy
|
<ctrl>+x:
cut
|
<ctrl>+v:
paste
|
<ctrl>+z:
undo last cmd
|
<ctrl>+s:
save
|
<ctrl>+p:
print
|
<ctrl>+l:
left para
|
<ctrl>+e:
centre para
|
<ctrl>+r:
right para
|
<ctrl>+
]: increase font
|
<ctrl>+<shift>+=: superscript
|
<ctrl>+j:
justify para
|
<ctrl>+
[: decrease font
|
<ctrl>+
=: subscript
|
<ctrl>+g:
goto [page]
|
<ctrl>+
h: find&replace
|
<ctrl>+
k: make hypertext
|
<ctrl>+<shift>+*: pilcrow
|
Edit 27/05/2013: Want a € sign? <ctrl>+<alt>+4 or <ctrl>+<alt>+e both work or (ευχαριστίες (tnx) Chris Ergatides) <AltGr>+4.
<ctrl>+h find & replace is normally used to replace all instances of psuedogene with pseudogene, but, with the handy <ctrl>+a to highlight the whole document, you can better control document format. In the <ctrl>+h world ^t is a tab, ^l is new line, ^p is a paragraph. Most people create white-space between paragraphs by hitting the <return> key twice. With <ctrl>+h you can [replace all] the, lazy, ugly, uncontrolled rtn+rtn paragraphs with a single rtn:
Find what : ^p^p
Replace with: ^p
WTF who cares?? You will care if you have to cram your florid prose into a specified number of pages - say for a form, a 2 page CV or a grant-application, or to get the page-count down to a multiple of four that you can print as a booklet. You can then specify/reduce the space between paragraphs, so that there is white space enough - 6pt, say, rather than the default 12pt - but not so much as to require another page in your document.
And finally <alt>+o,t will take you to the tab menu. From there you can control your tabs and make your documents neater and more readable and not prone to schlub into a mess if you increase the font-size or change it from Times New Roman to Calibri. Here's a more comprehensive list of of shortcuts; thanks bernd and amp. TMFS? Sure!
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