Oh, XKCD...

...how brilliant you are:

You cannot stop this.

You can only hope to contain it.


Yeah, baby!! While I am terribly disappointed that the Vikings lost this week (in true Brett Favre fashion) and that Green Bay won, I will accept this victory on behalf of my picks.

One of my favorite maps

I grew up in one of the dark blue "pop" counties, and now I live in one of the dark yellow "soda" counties. So where are you from?

Similarly of interest is the Harvard Linguistics Survey, which generates a myriad of maps to questions like "What do you call the activity of driving around in circles in a car?" I will note that my answer, and obviously the only right answer, falls outside the 80.7% majority. I don't know what the rest of you are talking about.

Week 12 NFL wrapup

A week for high scores in pick'em! There was a tie at the top between Candid Engineer and Chall, and the tiebreaker gods have found favor in the Engineers. Congrats, CE! Proudly display the trophy:



BTW, the tiebreaker rules are listed on the main page of the pool - here is the link. This narrows the gap on my season lead (92 overall points) to a measly three points - three! There's a big cluster on the leaderboard, starting with the Doritos Dream Team in second at 89, followed by Nat at 88, the Tight Ends at 87 and Chall at 86.

What fortune!

DrDGT & I are having a fantastic Thanksgiving vacation. We have not traveled to the hinterlands of this country to visit family, which makes it infinitely more relaxing than whatever unpleasant amount of time we'd be spending at the airport.

Tonight, we ordered Chinese take-out for dinner, which came with a giant bag of fortune cookies. DrDGT's fortune was something lame about not speaking ill of people. When I saw my fortune, I said "SQUEEEE!!" All right, perhaps not, but I think it may have been more like "Holy SHIT." Why? Well...

Figure 1: Yeah, I told you so.

Baby got back

One of the grand traditions in all the labs I've been in is the Going-Away Party. This festive event takes place (generally) on the final Friday that the departing lab member is in lab, and (generally) involves dinner at a place within walking distance of lab, where someone will order a far more expensive entree than anyone else but yet think splitting the check evenly is the best plan. The evening wraps up with a group activity - perhaps bowling? perhaps pool? but certainly somewhere with a bar - wherein many people drink many drinks, and something embarrassing happens that remains in lab lore forever.

Last night, that contribution to lab lore came from me.

A postdoc was leaving DrDGT's lab for a faculty position, and the formula I outlined above was filled by sushi and karaoke. At dinner, there was much discussion about whether or not their PI would make an appearance at dinner. Odds were placed at ~ 3:1 against, as he had hemmed and hawed about other things he needed to do, and gave various vague excuses but promised that "he'd try" to make it. (Pssshht. I've made that excuse before. I know what it means.) An hour later, we were waiting in the lobby of the karaoke place (not a bar, but a seedy variety with "private rooms" where you sing with just your friends) and wondering what the odds were that the PI would make an appearance at karaoke. Then we all laughed, because we knew it wasn't going to happen.

So, we start into karaoke. A few ABBA classics, Don't Stop Believin', some Jack Daniels snuck in under a coat, a lovely rendition of New York, New York, and then... and then someone handed me the microphone, and Baby Got Back came up on screen.



People, let me confess something to you: I love this song. I know all the words to this song. I sing this song whenever I have a chance. I jumped into that mother with a vengeance, and the assembled audience went nuts. It was awesome. I was having a great time. Everyone was having a great time.

And then...

[sigh]

And then, people, what happened was that DrDGT's very senior, very tenured, very conservative PI steps into our room, his lovely wife gingerly trailing behind, while I'm enthusiastically belting out "I want 'em real thick and juicy/So find that juicy double/Mix-a-Lot's in trouble/Beggin' for a piece of that bubble".

So what's a girl to do? Keep on singing, naturally - I finished that song to riotous applause, hysterical laughter and knowing winks from the party, plus thin-lipped smiles and polite clapping from the PI & MrsPI. Awesome. At least it wasn't my PI, I suppose.

And how was your Friday?

Thirty

It was my birthday this weekend, and I'm now thirty years old. So who am I, at thirty? Well:

1. I've been a technician for ~ 8 years, across three labs, in academia and industry.
   
2. I've been with DrDGT for 13 years, across three states, from high school through postdoc.
3. I have a bachelor's degree and despite being fascinated by and passionate about science, have no real intention to ever get a PhD and run my own research group.

Is this who I planned on being when I was little? I can't say it was - in fact, my career aspiration when I was small was to train killer whales at Sea World - but I do like where it's brought me.