Perils of procrastination

Well, I must be procrastinating if I'm writing a blog entry at this time of day. Actually, I'm waiting for a DNA gel to run so I have a spare ten minutes, in which I spotted this article on how procrastination can 'ruin your life' .
As a student, both during my undergraduate and my PhD I've felt like I could write a book on procrastination myself, but I've always procrastinated over writing it! So I know the feeling....

One thing though - if you manage to come across the article randomly, then you must be procrastinating. Otherwise you would be too busy to browse the internet. But then, that means the article must have reached its target audience. Mission accomplished.

Better get back to work now!

Store Wars

Much as I disagree with some of the arguments made by organic food advocates I have to say this is a brilliant and very funny advert. Actually, they're right about a lot of the issues with mass production of our 'fresh' produce, but that's not to say organic veg are THE good guys. (And how, may I ask, do you get an INorganic potato?) But that is another discussion altogether.

Welcome to Store Wars!

what physicists do in their spare time

The making of silly videos and bad rap songs (see EpMotion blog entry, 20th June 2008) isn't restricted to life scientists and engineers only. The physicists are in on it too! What better way to explain how a particle accelerator works to lay people than via the medium of Lego?

(Check out the Nature blog- particle physics in Lego and rap, July 29, 2008)

more thoughts on unhappiness

By the way, there are some interesting articles from the Hudson Institute on the treatment of unhappiness and some thoughts on the use of chemical medicines to do so. One article debates the difference between unhappiness and clinical depression.

My own extra thought - contrary to what the words suggest, happiness is not the direct opposite of UNhappiness. You can be not unhappy without actively feeling happy. Or at least, it depends on your definition of 'happy'. (By the by, out of curiosity I googled 'definition of happiness', and a wide range of sites came back. Some are worth browsing through.) You can also not feel either.

To be able to comprehend happiness, you probably have to have endured or observed UNhappiness.

unawareness of unhappiness

Sometimes we can be happy without being aware that we are. But we can also be UNhappy without actual consciousness of the fact. Many of us don't notice when other people are unhappy, or will ourselves to ignore the signs, perhaps for fear that it is a contagious state. In a similar way, sometimes we ignore our own unhappiness in case acknowledgement of the emotion makes it more tangible and somehow more real. Where there is no apparent or only a seemingly trivial reason for unhappiness it seems almost wrong to admit to it, even to ourselves. It is as if we consider the inability to reach happiness to be a failure. So entrained are we to strive for happiness, as if it were a material object that can be bought or caged, rather than an ephermal state to appreciate and treasure.

Unawareness of UNhappiness can be a mixed blessing, as can indeed, unawareness of happiness. Dwelling on unhappy thoughts may lead us very close to overindulgence in self-pity. No-one likes a martyr. But sometimes you can be unhappy without knowing why, and this could be due to something in your lifestyle that doesn't chime quite right. Happy feelings are communicated to our brain via neurotransmitters - unhappiness is thought to be likewise. So it is all chemical? At the very least, an imbalance in our diet, or not enough rest or too little exercise can cause us to feel discontented and on edge. It might be difficult to pinpoint the cause of our unhappiness, but taking stock of how you spend your days, taking more time for yourself and understanding your body better may help.

Too often we rush around and fail to take stock. If we're too busy, we ignore the lack of contentedness, or perhaps, pay a psychiatrist to worry about it for us. We could go over our childhood to death or stuff ourselves with antidepressants, but maybe what is needed is a change of diet or daily regime. Maybe we could learn to trust our instincts more and rely less on other people to work out what we should do?

Sense about Science

As a follow-up to my lament on the mis-presentation of science by the media and misconceptions in the public, someone recently sent me a link to Sense about Science. It's a charitable trust involved in promoting science to the public, with emphasis on good evidence and aiming to help clear up inaccuracies in scientific debate. Do go and have a look!

BK day 2008

This year, BK day was celebrated on the 20th July, a Sunday, in Cambridge with punting on the Cam, braving the hordes of summer students and tourists, much more dangerous than any bear,

before the attempt to get lost.

And what is BK day? For those of you who are confused, it is not an old English festival day, nor is it some arcane Cambridge tradition that we've dredged up from the depths of the UL archives. Nor is it a celebration of the Wimpy burger, Wimpy being the old name for Burger King in this part of the world, back when Snickers was called Marathon.

Three summers ago, before I became the jaded and gloomy PhD student that I am now, I spent two months out in the Siberian taiga collecting data for a biodiversity survey to promote preservation of the taiga before it got chopped up to make paper for my PhD. With me were 6 other students from Cambridge, three wildlife enthusiasts from the UK, and experts and students from Tomsk University in Siberia.

Before anyone asks, it was very hot. +30 degrees Celsius, and it was a cooler summer than usual. We were wrapped up to reduce the amount of blood loss to the hordes of mosquitos and midges, making it even hotter.

We wanted to collect data mainly from old, relatively untouched, stands of trees, and set off each day from camp on foot to find such stands. Kevin, one of the wildlife enthusiasts, told us that he had passed an old stand of conifer forest and drew us a map, directing us to turn off from a village close by and past certain 'landmarks'. Unfortunately, what we hadn't realised was that the 'streams' marked on the map were actually ephemeral features, only there previously due to a thunderstorm a few days previously. As it had been sunny for three days, there was no sign that they ever existed. We were also told to look for 'trees with blue tape'. They were EVERYWHERE! It turned out that the blue tape was used by taiga rangers to mark out territories, and was not, as we had naively assumed, put up especially by Kevin to act as a marker for us. The other landmarks were equally elusive or misleading.

In the end, we spent a very hot three hours looking for the stand, and after giving it up as a bad job, several unfulfilling hours working in stands that were substandard (for our purposes) as it was too late to trek to a different part of the forest. The day only got worse. We decided to have another quick search for the old stand on our way back to camp as we passed through the village. After 40 minutes of more walking we retreated hastily as we found ourselves on the trail of a mother and baby bear who had left VERY fresh tracks on the ground. This was an encounter we would rather not make. Then, due to tiredness and shaken nerves, someone had an accident with a camping knife. By this point we were thoroughly fed up, sunbeaten from tramping along unshaded tracks for several hours, and very shaken by our proximity to animals whose paw prints were many times the size of our hands.

So that is how 'Bloody Kevin day' (or BK day for short) came into being. Each year in late July we try and meet up somewhere and, using a map drawn by our esteemed student leader with directions such as 'get the first bus at the first bus stop where people are waiting' and 'carry on walking until you reach a postbox', we try to get ourselves lost. And thus the spirit of BK day lives on.


This year was in Cambridge, which was fun. But in terms of following our map we didn't do too well. It was a bit hard to get lost and go randomly when we knew exactly where we were. Hannah, as usual, still managed to lose us before she even got to the meeting point, and so we had yet another BK day without her. Maybe next year.

Press perspective

A couple of months ago, there was a seminar I wanted to attend on the responsibility that scientists have to represent their science correctly to the public. Unfortunately I had another course I had to attend at the same time, and wasn't able to go.

A large proportion of the scientific research in the biological and biomedical sciences in the UK is funded by public money. Therefore it's natural that the public should be made aware of what their money is being used for. In recent years there has been an increasing amount of debate over whether research is being made transparent enough to the public, and increased pressure to make scientists more accountable for the way they use their funding money and when presenting the results that they find. Fair enough up to a point.

But why is there not more pressure on the press to stop them from wilfully misrepresenting the science? If scientists misled people in the same way about their work they would be heavily penalised by their peers and by the press themselves. But journalists are 'allowed' to write scaremongering stories with very little responsibility for any consequences. You might argue that it's up to the scientists to respond to such stories and educate the public, but once an idea has been planted in people's minds, it takes much much more to persuade them that it is incorrect. Journalists are also prone to paraphrasing and are capable of twisting quotes and scientific 'facts' to fit their whims. 'Chlorine in tap water doubles chances of having deformed children' sounds so much better than 'Study carried out in Taiwan suggests a tentative correlation between chlorine in treated water supplies and defects in newly born babies, but doesn't take into account other socio-economic factors in the areas sampled' (story from June 2008)

Dramatic headlines always sell more papers, and people carry on buying more newspapers to keep up with any updates. If the newspaper later has to qualify the original statement, the damage is still done, and the seeds of worry and doubt have been sown. They flourish so much better than the seeds of confidence and common sense. Sometimes though, these stories can have worrying longer-term effects. Stories on what are 'cancer-causing' and 'cancer-defying' agents are a case in point. Up to a few years, vitamin C was THE wonder vitamin, it helped cure colds, eczema, headaches, cancer, etc etc. You could never have too much of it, so people took tablets with far higher amounts of vitamin C than their bodies could ever absorb. Then, it transpired there was a link between overly high levels of vitamin C in the diet and development of cancer. Cue panic.

The best diet is a well-balanced diet. All the press about 'wonder vitamins' only serves to put lots of money into companies that cash into the demand for extract of ginkgo, extract of aloe vera. Not to say that these don't have health benefits - but they won't help if you take them after smoking half a pack of cigarettes and neglect having any fresh veg in your diet.

It's important that we keep up-to-date, and to be aware of any research on risks to our health. But our information should come with an awareness of perspective, and what it means in terms of how we live our everyday lives.

One of my friends pointed out that the science editors for magazines and newspapers are mostly only trained in one discipline and one area of that discipline at that. Although they may be trained as an ecologist or zoologist, they commission and edit articles on physics, genetics, nutritition, the lot. This may be a partial reason (or excuse) for some of the rubbish that newspapers churn out but it needs to be remedied. The press have a lot of power, but with little of the sense of responsibility that should go with it.

Hurdle. Jump. Hurdle. Jump. Splat.

Let me see.
Experiments. PhD third year presentation. Grow up plants for more experiments. Keep virus stocks going. Form for fourth year plan comes in. Strike one.
Kill off plants from the last experiment. Dissertation plan form comes in. Strike two.
Data compilation. Find out you just killed off plants before collection of all the desired data. Groan. Strike three.
Crash, bang, wallop.

I thought I'd finally sorted out all the paperwork and jumped all the hurdles that the Graduate Studies Board wanted from me before the last BIG hurdles of thesis and viva. Finally I can concentrate on actual experimental work. As usual, wishful thinking. Only a few weeks after I gave my third year presentation, I've now got a form entitled 'Graduate Student Fourth Year Plan', with all the questions we don't want to be asked.

1. Have you finished your data collection? (I wish)
2. If not, when will you have finished collecting data? (sometime this decade I hope)
3. Please provide a list of abbreviated chapter headings for chapters already completed and the date when these were handed to your Supervisor. (BLANK)
4. Please give an estimate of when you will give a complete draft to your supervisor. (more blanks)

signed (by Student)
signed (by Supervisor) (indicating that they think this is realistic) (sigh)

I spend more time than I can afford over these things. And guilt over the number of trees that have died unnecessarily so that I can do this PhD and the blasted paperwork that goes with it. Plus it distracts me from my work.
All this paperwork to make sure that we are on track to finish our PhDs. But I need to do the experimental work to have something to put in my thesis!!

In theory, I know it's meant to be 'helpful' and not a bad idea really. In reality, a reply consisting of running jumps, River Cam and AARGH comes to mind.

Come, let us kiss and part

Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.

- Michael Drayton

the biofuel debate

A report accessing the effect of current biofuel production on world food shortages has just been leaked from the World Bank. It estimates that biofuels have contributed to the increase in global food prices by up to 75 %.

This is a pivotal point in the future of biofuel policy. It's evident that we need to find alternative energy sources to fossil fuels, but the current policies for biofuel production are not substainable. It's all very well encouraging and even legislating the inclusion of biofuels as an energy source, but this shouldn't come at the cost of reducing world food supplies, which are already insufficient for those in developing countries.

So what is wrong with encouraging biofuel production as it stands? Where should I start?

Instead of using good quality crops for food, we are burning them for fuel. And these crops are frequently grown in countries that have intense poverty and food shortages already, whilst their governments pocket the money they get. The rainforests in Brazil have been cut back again and again to use the fertile land for soy production - the most idiotic thing being that although the land is fertile and would be very good for many food crops, it doesn't support soybean. So they have to pump fertilisers and chemicals into the soil, affecting the ecosystem, whilst the local farmers who would have kept livestock and crops on the fringes of the forest lose their livelihood. Of course, this problem goes much further back than the current debate over biofuels, but it can only get worse if we insist on using soy for energy.

The idea of using biofuels as a more environmentally and substainable energy source is completely contradicted by the current methods of production. The Kenyan government has recently approved a biofuel project that would involve using a large chunk of the Tana river delta as a sugar cane plantation. This is in a continent where drought and shortage of fertile land is a problem - can you imagine the impact of damaging the river delta ecosystem, both on the people who rely on the delta for food and livelihood, and on the many species of birds and animals that live there?

Nor is Kenya the only African country that has joined in, without properly considering the long-term problems. The Guardian report on the sugar cane plantation project also says this:

The merits of growing biofuels are the source of increasingly acrimonious debate in east Africa, where vast tracts of open land in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Tanzania are attracting the attention of local and international agriculture firms hoping to cash in on the demand from the US and the European Union for clean energy sources such as ethanol.

So the local governments want the money, as do the agricultural firms. But what happens to the people and ecosystems that are already there?

If the policy-makers don't stand back now and take a good look at what is really happening, then although biofuels were originally supposed to be a relatively eco-friendly solution to our fuel problems, in the long run we are just escalating the problem of world poverty, food shortage and climate change. Biofuels are currently produced for the profit of private companies. Perhaps we need international organisations like the World Bank to become more involved and keep an eye on the long-term effects of these biofuel projects.