kaberett | Entries tagged with pretending to be a scientist

I've been picking raspberries for, mmm, a week and a half? two weeks? now, just the first crop from the canes that fruit early, and I'm up to a whisker under 1.25kg in the freezer. Not counting, obviously, all the ones that never made it home.

We typically buy ~800g of frozen raspberries about once every four months.

... if I can make space in the freezer for all of them (plus all the other berries) I think we might... not... end up buying any more raspberries any time soon? (Some of them might end up turned into jam or sorbet, of course, if those end up being more convenient preserving methods.) I'm partly so perplexed by this because I was very disappointed last year by how few I did get, and it's not like the majority of the raspberry thicket is in the fruit cage, even -- I can only assume I was buried in lab work and just... barely making it to the plot at the relevant crucial points.

I'd been vaguely contemplating seriously curtailing said thicket, which I'm now rather more reluctant to do, especially as I discovered a whole new soft fruit lurking in the depths, which I had not expected to happen at this stage in my tenancy. (It's one of the blackberry-raspberry hybrids but I have no idea which; fruits that are long and pointy and will come away from the central wossname pretty cleanly; I can't tell whether they're ripe when they're red or ripe when they're darker; as A put it, "they taste the wrong colour" and it's all very confusing.)

The other thing lurking in the depths is of course more of the feral horseradish, which is a serious problem because to the best of my knowledge I don't even like horseradish. Like, I like Ruby Violet's horseradish ice cream but not enough to make two dozen plants' worth of it when I could make something nicer, and it's not like I eat the other traditional thing that Goes With Horseradish, so, uh, SUGGESTIONS WELCOME I SUPPOSE.

(other major news of the day: turns out I'd made an offering to the gods of embarrassing mistakes with the paper submission, but I've e-mailed in abjectly requesting a correction of the figures and they DID have at least ONE copy of all the relevant figures anyway in addition to the duplication, even if it wasn't in the ideal place. fingers crossed this means that's the only problem with the manuscript, glaring or otherwise.)

that is all.

Thing that is nice: I am mostly, currently, getting to horn practice o'clock after dinner, starting around eight, which is to say, just about as bat o'clock rolls around. I get to sit in the study and make ~~squawking~~ music and watch A Bat happen. It is lovely.

Another thing that is nice: I have spent the afternoon pivoting from "ugh but I don't WANT to read this paper from 1997" (the year I finally learned how to tie a shoelaces, via a lot of concerted effort) to "as a geologist I get to gleefully declare that I am CORRECT about the fundamental nature of the world and it's even ACCURATE (and now I've done that maths I suppose I'd better read the paper)".

I'm still see-sawing wildly between solid trust in my own models and towering impostor syndrome, of course, but it's so satisfying that every time I go "oh heck I didn't consider this constraint--" my beautiful model just. satisfies it. without even needing any massaging. Almost as if I'm right, or something.

Pootling along with Response To Reviewers. I'm quoting them extensively, but I'm still a little facepalm that my document is already up to 2.5k words (plus two figures, plus a table). Plan of attack: make a first pass of changes to the main text per Reviewer 2 tomorrow; tidy up the Response To Reviewers (and maybe tackle Reviewer 3's notes, which are fairly brief) on Friday; circulate to co-authors for comment by the end of the week. Science science science.
Gosh but it's much quieter out. ( CoVID-19 )
Continue enjoying messing about with the horn. My embouchure is much more secure; I'm getting a much better tone out at the top of my range, and to my astonishment actually managed some pretty clean (if not terribly smooth) three-octave slurs this evening. I'm getting about 15 minutes in and finding that I have to start really concentrating on keeping the corners of my mouth appropriately flexed or it all starts going to hell, but definitely something. For today's practice I trialled not letting myself repeat any one legato exercise more than three times (mostly), and it worked well; I'd been allowing myself to get bogged down and frustrated in aiming for Perfect Accuracy, while getting more and more tired and less and less likely to achieve it, resulting in less variety and more disgruntlement. This is an Improvement and I'm going to keep it.
PLANTS. There are so many plants. The cherry blossom on my tree's coming out. I've potted up Several (but not, by any stretch, All) of the tomatoes, and one chilli. I need to take photos for you all.
<3

"Europium" and "empirical".

THANK YOU GOOGLE SCHOLAR AND YOUR TERRIBLE FUZZY MATCHING.

(I will grant that this is still less annoying than treating adsorption and absorption as synonyms, but that is Not A High Bar.)

I am PICKING UP MY ROCKS from a partner institution tomorrow
these are The Last Rocks Of The PhD
I have 'til end-December to Measure All The Rocks
- ... which is a bit stressful because What If The Very Expensive Vacuum Leak Doesn't Cooperate
- which is something I can't really schedule for, which means I can't make concrete plans for how quickly I'll get through stuff
- not least because I've only got enough beakers for 2x sets of (=20) ready-to-analyse samples
- and while I am only picking up ~26 samples, a bunch of those I will effectively need to analyse twice, for Reasons
- so I can't even go "right let's get all the chemistry done and then blitz the analysis", I gotta actually swap back and forth between them, and if the mass spec isn't behaving then I gotta keep trying mass spec before I can do more chemistry
- which would be less stressful if it hadn't taken me four multi-day sessions to get any data at ALL off the last sample set I was trying to measure
and then once I've done that I have? to finish? writing the PhD?
and I'm "only" going to have five chapters (introduction, three data chapters, conclusion), which I am currently feeling Inadequate about because the thesis I'm reading as background on these rocks has eight (EIGHT!!!) (8!!!!!!) chapters
and by the way I'm having a prolonged mental health crash for indeterminate reasons of therefore uncertain duration AND I'm still sleeping all the time FOR reasons that are still unclear
...
so if I am being Even More Dilatory Than Usual in responses/engagement/etc, it's not that I don't care, it's just that
*waves*
aaaaaaaaah?
oh right and weekend after next I'm going on An Holiday at which I need to be able to give Two Talks and, like, they're SKETCHED and IN MY HEAD but. um. I should probably make slides. and have a slightly clearer idea of what in the hell I want to say.

barrelofrain and I were getting properly into catching up, a family came in and sat down near us. (The King's Cross Ruby Violet has one long table with four chairs each side, plus some bars & bar stools.) One of the parents was talking excitedly about the pear sorbet and I Could Not Help but enthuse about How Good that flavour in specific and particular is.

A little while later, this same parent Explained How Do Science to a very solemn small child, which appeared to be being assumed to be a girl -- something to the tune of Ask Lots Of Questions, and trying things out and seeing what happens, and so on and so forth.

"Sorry for butting in again," I said, "but yes. That is How Science. I am A Scientist and I Approve This Message."

I proceeded to learn that (0) this small child and her sibling had recently Made a Volcano with food dye and vinegar and baking soda; (1) she likes volcanoes but doesn't love them; (2) she is entirely happy saying to strange adults that she doesn't want to share about what she loves; (3) she likes doing experiments; and (4) she's going on an adventure to see the Loch Ness Monster soon. (Probably some other bits, but they escape me.)

I, naturally, explained about (1) The Volcano That Erupts Baking Soda (And Is Why Flamingoes Are Pink), and slightly less comprehensibly that (2) wrapping her water glass in a paper towel would help keep it warm, like how I give my plants a coat over winter so their feet don't get cold.

There was also some back and forth about how I go to big-big-big-BIG-big school, The Biggest School You Can Go To, in response to which I cheerfully explained that it means I don't have to get an actual job.

I spent a lot of time thanking the child's parents for letting me interact and being generally cheerful and good-natured. They spent a lot of time thanking me for Giving Them Facts, and also Being An Example Grown-Up (Girl) for their small child to imprint on, because she is v interested in science and they want to encourage this. (Refreshingly, the wheelchair was not at any point mentioned.)

It was a lovely interaction, even though I am xkcd-crawling-under-my-metaphorical-bed after the fact.

Paper: currently at the point where every time I think I can write a sentence, I end up disappearing into the rabbit-hole of double-checking references and re-wrangling data for an hour or two. This is A Good Thing, in that it means that I've got to grips with the job in question sufficient to see the small manageable chunks, rather than burying my head in the sand about it. Of course I've just run into a bit of a dead end, at least until I can get my supervisors' input (probably in the new Gregorian year), but happily there are many other paths for me to branch off down.

Relatedly: PhD2048 is dangerous. I'd successfully avoided all previous iterations of the game, which unfortunately meant I wasn't innoculated when this nonsense started doing the rounds.

Foot: bruise came up briefly! Swelling was temporarily visible! Now at the point where I can walk on it around the house a little provided I'm careful and don't push it beyond, ooh, the bedroom-bathroom-kitchen-sofa route before I have a rest. In turn this means I'm wearing the boot a little less (it has so much velcro), which means I'm crossing my legs by default, which means I'm putting weight through my foot awkwardly, which... means I'm wearing the boot more again! But so it goes.

Thyroid: I'm feeling hypothyroid-ish worse again but my numbers are now pushing toward hyperthyroid! Still no autoimmune markers (and all my vitamins et cet are fine), not clear to me that the GP is actually aware that you plausibly want to end up "hyperthyroid" by-the-numbers when treating hypothyroidism, but regardless I'm intending to go back in the new year and ask for (i) free T3 levels as well as free T4 and TSH, (ii) trying adding in straight-up T3 in case there's a conversion problem ongoing, and (iii) a referral to an endocrinologist because I'm really bored of this.

Books: I kinda sorta ended up, on Wednesday, going into Foyles and then Fopp with awesome ex-housemate-C, who was briefly around; in consequence I acquired a present for Adam, an unambiguously-for-grown-ups book by Shaun Tan (I slipped and fell, it was by the checkouts, I flipped through briefly and saw the giant snails and succumbed), some Actual Pink Floyd Of My Very Own (for the listening to on our backs in the dark at 1am, sorry neighbours), and another couple of Carrie Fisher's memoirs (they were two for a fiver, It Had To Be Done). And, er, then going into Waterstones unsupervised, where books were Buy One Get One Half Price, which meant that I acquired a copy of Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race (having had the library ebook automagically evaporate from my device when I was 2/3rds through, due to disorganisation) and Mortal Engines (because I loved the film and wanted to know more about some of the worldbuilding and characterisation that were sketched for the cinema but were clearly explored in a great deal more detail in the source text).

"Confidence interval": it me.

[Metadata; transcript not available. The comic is a grid of graphs, titled "Curve-fitting methods and the messages they send". Each graph shows the same data, with a different curve. The subgraph entitled "Confidence interval" is captioned "Listen, science is hard but I'm a serious person doing my best."]

1. Yedi Kocalı Hürmüz at the Arcola several weeks ago now, performed by the in-house Turkish-language company (Arcola Ala-Turka), with my friend D. A little rough around the edges (e.g. the surtitles frequently just sort of... didn't) but the energy & the audience engagement were fantastic, particularly in the segments that were just sort of... mini interconnected folk gigs? Lots and lots of clapping (and singing) along. I was very entertained -- there was comedy "whack people over the head with an inflatable stick and over-the-top sound effect" that worked really well -- and I even understood the occasional word and sentence fragment, go me.

2. Baby's first paper has been formally accepted. It is going into various preprint archives as we speak; I will link once it's actually usefully available. (Did I mention how good it is that I fixed the graphics driver issue with my desktop such that it's actually usable? It is SO GOOD.)

3. Off to Cornwall on Thursday, for approximately a fortnight, for the hundredth-birthday-that-isn't, coming back for the middle weekend because Reasons. I am looking forward to it. I will be bringing wild garlic back to plant out. Cornwall in early May is, in my unquestionably objective opinion, the best place in the entire world.

4. Frantically getting lab work finished up for pre-interruption-of-studies before that, so far as possible. Cocked up yesterday in a way that adds an extra week in lab (boo) but it was one I would otherwise have been anxious about not doing (yay), so that's worked out fairly well.

5. British strawberries, reduced in the supermarket. Yes. Good.

6. Started thyroxine (low-ish dose) on Friday last (the 20th). So far no conclusive changes, but excitingly the water is muddied by the part where I finished the most recent course of iron supplementation right before I started the thyroxine.

7. Have had first salad-and-cheese-and-bread dinner of the year on the PATIO. We have a PATIO. It has been WARM. I am very excited by this, and also by linens.

8. I have participated in A Bunch of research recently -- autism + the social model of disability in higher ed, intersection of trans status + disability, Being A Grumpy Tran At Market Researchers for fun and profit (and actually they were really great and give me hope), miscellaneous cognitive function for the long-term psychiatric study I'm participating in (£15 in vouchers, whoo).

9. Voucher has thus far been used on a bamboo travel mug, with a succulent pattern and duck-egg-blue silicone bits. (

staranise, I keep restraining the urge to put together the succulent-themed care package you did not ask for and probably don't want because it would be silly to do the Shipping To Canada thing if you don't, but if you'd like preposterous succulent-themed tat let me know and It Will Happen.)

10. I spent a lot of the weekend making friends (at A's step-relative's Significant Birthday Thing) with both nibling S (who has, correctly, decided I am interested in them, and now greets me with enthusiasm) and -- which is what I was going to go with when I started this point -- a ridiculous ornamental cherry, which had the big-blousy-white blossoms as most of its canopy... and one branch, comprising about a third, that had been grafted on from a dark-purple-leaves and bright-pink-flowers tree. It was Good. I went and patted it on the graft and told it it was good, and made A admire it.

(The mint I rescued from the supermarket has established itself sufficiently aggressively that I'm starting to worry for the parsley it shares a tub with. I shall clearly just have to consume more of it.)

1. On Sunday, A & I went to The Postal Museum, including a ride on the Mail Rail. It was great. It was a SMALL TRAIN that went through POST TUNNELS and I was very excited and flappy. Be warned that it's quite cramped; I sat and watched one of the videos and it included a lot of elderly engineers ergo there followed a nontrivial quantity of inexplicable-to-onlookers weeping; I learned things about how the Royal Mail started out (genuinely just for royalty), the origins of the post horn (I knew perfectly well what it was for on Alpine post buses but hadn't put together how it started), the existence of both air mail pillar boxes and pillar boxes with integrated stamp dispensers (which were really very short lived because they fundamentally didn't work very well), and about Travelling Post Offices a preserved iteration of which we're now planning to make a visit to. I also fell down the rabbit-hole of trying to look up procedural differences in how first- and second-class post are handled; A found me a not-as-informative-as-I'd-hoped Freedom of Information request, and I found a video with obnoxious ableism/ageism and backing music but some interesting if irrelevant stuff (phosphorus detectors!). A+ nerding all round, would visit again.

2. A & I have got started on Leverage courtesy of a loan of the box sets from

sebastienne and

shortcipher.

3. Early this evening I submitted my first first-author paper. It took me four hours to get from "okay, I'm ready to submit" to actually hitting the submit button on the website. Good grief but the interface is terrible. I am feeling pretty good about this, and especially good that the latest night I've had working on it was Monday, when I was poking at it til shortly before midnight and then went to bed and... my supervisor made functionally 0 corrections to the bit I put together (from scratch) in that session.

4. New horn case is excellent, is indeed encouraging me to practice more, and I am very rapidly observing the benefits... just in time for Saturday's concert, or not, as the case may be. But: hopefully will manage to keep up the momentum.

5. I don't think I mentioned here that I finished the Duolingo Turkish tree last week, but I did and for all there are huge chunks that I am Really Not Very Good At Yet I am fundamentally pretty proud of myself for that one, too.

6. I have been spending more social time with people over the last few weeks than I had prior to that and it's been really good. Thank you, all. <3

I am in bed in new house. Boxes have been moved such that there are clear paths through everything. Most of the furniture is in the right place, and even my optimistic plan for how to arrange it worked. Our landlord has, so far, been startlingly lovely.

My contact details post has been updated with the new address.

And my supervisor's feedback on the latest version of the paper draft was actually positive, and... yes. Yes. Hello. <3

( Read more... )

( food )
( Also food. )
( Still food! )
I am still chewing over last week's Elementary, and redemption arcs and chosen family and boundaries and necessities and narrative imperative in tension with multiple kinds of emotional satisfaction, and the things I find myself wanting -- superficially -- from the story, given points-of-view, and the odd and bittersweet relief at instead getting what I need. The murder plots make no sense, but then they mostly didn't ever; I am still very much here for the characters.
My new CEA card arrived in the post yesterday, which means I will stop feeling faintly guilty about "wasting money" every time I go to the cinema. This is a Good Thing, given how much I'm looking forward to Hidden Figures.
I'm having a really tough time writing an abstract this week, for a variety of reasons, but in the face of that I got a draft in more than 18 hours before the deadline that I was actually reasonably happy with, via the iterative-improvement approach to writing. It needs substantially rewriting, but I've demonstrated that my techniques work, and I've got reasonable confidence that the substatial rewriting wasn't in fact me wildly misinterpreting what was going on.
I said no to someone, and it was fine. (And indeed several other someones, which was less fine but which left me feeling better than I would've if I'd stayed silent.) I told someone I'd screwed something up, face-to-face and more-or-less straight away rather than stewing for six hours over sending an e-mail, and it was fine. Both were really difficult, and I did them.
I appear, via UCH, to have found a sustainable set of strength-building exercises to do that are resulting in measurable improvements. I'm dealing with a lot of complicated Feelings about this pretty well.
Some stripy tulips were much reduced in the supermarket last week; they've been sat in a glass jar on the dining table slowly drying out and turning interesting shapes ever since, and they make me feel soothed and safe and at home.
I am forever gently amused by the thing where, when A is around, we sleep under a single lightweight duvet and are frequently too warm. When he's away, I end up nesting in a pile of that duvet, my three-season much-larger covered-in-dinosaurs duvet, a weighted blanket, and a big soft non-allergenic stripy blue blanket -- and I end up comfortably warm, and with a lot of weight on me, and it's very nice to have occasionally.

Thing that are not terrible and also do not begin with P:

1. My baby brother phoned me this evening to vent about SPSS and request tech support as an excuse for catching up with me and it was lovely.

2. I heard someone asking a member of cleaning staff how to get to Leicester Square. There was perplexity and some problem with accents. I provided assistance in the form of detailed instructions, then checked the Earl's Court Thought for the Day on my way out, and it was about unexpected kindness, and I briefly felt less like shit.

3. I'm really enjoying seeing all the Canadians I know on tumblr being dazed and tentatively hopeful about politics. There are multiple aboriginal/Native ministers. The cabinet is 50% women, because it's 2015. The Minister for Science is a scientist who's served on the IPCC. 50% female cabinet appointments lead to 5000% increase in guys who suddenly care about merit in cabinet.

4. My local bike shop has got in a replacement pump head and a new set of tyres for me, and I have in all the necessary parts to peer suspiciously over

me_and's shoulder while he applies a theoretically-straightforward fix to my power brick, whereupon taken altogether my big chair will work properly again and it will be a great relief.

5. Hot chocolate. Utterly ridiculous hot chocolate with mixed spice and condensed milk and plum brandy.

6. After having an enormous grump late last week and early this about my literature review (and massive thanks to each & every one of you who provided pep talks) I'm now feeling rather more confident about my framing and approach and am kind of enjoying working on it? Obvious sources of stress are obvious, but. Enjoying working on it. That's definitely a thing.

7. your blue-eyed boys. my e-reader.

8. I have acquired all the necessary ingredients for planned baking (bar buttermilk, which I am happy to work my way around not having). Ergo tomorrow all I have to do is Cook All The Things. (Planned: macaroni cheese, Apfelstrudel, two varieties of apple cake, as much stewed apple as I have jars for, a vat of chickpea thing, a vat of chilli, and the start of lemon meringue pie.) (Prep done tonight: loaf of bread started; fennel and garlic laid out for roasting.)

9. I picked up another bag of apples from my parents' this afternoon, and additionally liberated a jar of quince jelly made by my mother's own fair hand, an avocado, and the aforementioned fennel.

10. I'm not enjoying the shit my brain is throwing at me but I am at least recognising it as distortions, and employing coping mechanisms around it.

( tada )

( Read more... )

Gave presentation to supervisor (which, because I am an incompetent, was in fact my first run-through verbally as opposed to just sitting and staring at it). She liked it and thinks I am going to be fine. I get on Really Well with people whose attitude to praise is that a dismissive "you'll be fine" means "I am impressed and pleased", heh. I'm bang on the permitted time, and I was talking a little fast but we've rejigged flow so that I'll need to repeat myself less, and aaaaaaaaaaahhh she liked it. She thinks it flows! She thinks I am clear and talk at my audience sufficiently! She has suggested a joke I can tell! (It is a relevant joke.)

(what I am actually doing in person is going "ssssssss" very quietly; it is a small victory hiss)

(Internalised ableism, capitalism, etc.)

( Read more... )

( Some good things. )

1. So I was saying that I hoped my supervisor was suitably pleased with my pile of data from this run? SHE WAS. She was, by her standards, extremely effusive; I am basking gently in the glow of having been told that I made the right judgement calls about the slightly difficult mass spec session, that I got a significant amount of good data, that the reproducibility of results was great, that I've done really well with my standard deviations given how low the concentrations I'm working with are. She was just really really nice about my dataset just being... really good work. Basking.

2. I crashed out at 9pm and woke up spontaneously at 6; I had a nice relaxed morning pottering about (packing bag for tonight, eating breakfast, making hot chocolate), got into work at 8am, had my supervisor tease me gently about it (she normally gets in around 7 but today I beat her...), faffed with some more data (including fixing the problem in my 'orrible plotting script that I identified last night after I'd put computers away to sLEEP), tidied my desk, replied to some e-mails, ... yeah, pretty pleased with myself. And I slept super well, so.

3. Help help I am seriously considering setting up a side-tumblr called "kaberants" for the sake of engaging with irritatingly wrong text posts without having them clutter up my set of nice pretty pictures??? (Today's discovery-via-tumblr of the morning: Emily Blincoe's photography.)

4. It is a source of great pleasure to me that it's now light at 7am; soon I will start getting the District line into work again (because it runs aboveground for most of the trip, whereas the Piccadilly is underground for this section). Also, I tamed my hair.

5. Indelicates gig tonight! And I have reason to believe they'll be playing lots of stuff from the upcoming album, which appears to be about SPACE SCIENCE and SPACE ROBOTS and CHOICES and consequently I cry everywhere at it every time :D :D :D :D

(and 6: facesfriend points out to me that if I think he is being ludicrously indulgent of me because he adjusts the toaster to provide me with toast slightly burnter than he prefers it, this is possibly an indication that my perception of myself as Really Difficult To Deal With and Always Making People Go Out Of Their Way is skewed.)

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2	3	4	5	6	7	8
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16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

[growth] adventures in the undergrowth

paper: resubmitted

diarish

diarish

today in Words That Are Not The Same

[psa] aaaaaaaaaaaah

oh that was another thing that happened at the ice cream parlour yesterday

a gentle murbling

... oh no xkcd

PS longer letter later

Some things make a post

quick check-in

[food] In which I am avoiding drafting an abstract

the best people I know are looking out for me <3 // ten good things

things that are terrible that begin with P: progesterone, politics, PIP.

executive dysfunction, you know the drill

[brain log]

\o/

{though there are days that I don't think of you they rarely outnumber those I do}

:-)

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