Not quite geeky enough. For once.

My basic stumbling block in grad school can be summed up as: I am too geeky and yet not geeky enough at the same time. My field is a bit of a merger between one hard-but-not-that-hard science and one quite technical field. I originally came from the less-technical side, where I felt a bit too analytical and out of place; now I am definitely having to pick up some arcane things on my own, and I feel like a bobblehead doll in a convention of Serious Math People.

If I could just learn to leave well enough alone, it would be okay. I could probably get on with life by continuing to do things in some patched-together good-enough kind of way, but then I get these whiffs of possibility. So, instead of running all of my simulations for my dissertation on my laptop or commandeering machines in our student computer lab, I spend two days trying to set up my computer and change all my code so I can use the department's Unix server instead. Or, when I need to put together a CV, I can't just do it in Microsoft Word and not worry if it looks a little strange. No, I have to spend a day searching for a LaTeX style file that does CVs and should theoretically make things easier. Only, all the examples I can find reference makefiles and Cygwin and putting files in search paths that as far as I know, lead to the witch's house in the forest where Hansel and Gretel ended up. I would say it's all Greek to me, but frankly, Greek is easier.

Do I ever learn and let go of the dream? No. But now I do have a pretty CV in LaTeX, which took multiple days to put together, and if you'd like the template, I'll give it to you. No translations required.

I have nothing to say and I am saying it. And that is poetry.

Julie has a sweet post up about her son's recent language explosion. (No, no one was hurt. Just some bruised dipthongs.) Before becoming a parent, I remember learning about theories of language acquisition in college, but I didn't really get the magic of it all. (Look, the value of a liberal arts education! A science geek learns about language! Now, of course, all I remember is "Chomsky." No, not his theories, just his name.)

Man, am I glad they don't charge by the parenthesis here at Blogger.

Anyway, soon after having WonderGirl, I became fairly obsessed with the idea of her picking up language. It seemed beyond possible that she would find a way to organize and interpret the random sounds we made for her and figure out which were meaningful in a directive sort of way, and which were meaningful in a Mommy-used-too-much-tequila-in-the-margaritas-again sort of way. She was a bit late with first words; this was partly because I think we refused to believe she was using words unless they were exceptionally clear and partly to teach me a lesson. When she did start talking, though, it was amazing. One of my professors described the process of a child learning to talk as: "One day, your kid says, 'Gah," and the next day he says, 'Dad, I was thinking just now about dinosaurs...'" and that is almost exactly how it happened with WonderGirl. I'm still not sure how she managed it, and her vocabulary and syntax still suprise me.

(Side note: We have assiduously avoided baby talk with WonderGirl, both the adding of "-ie" to the end of all nouns and the gratuitous doubling of words, as in "wipe-wipe" or "Boutros Boutros." She still calls dogs "doggies" and we don't worry about things like that, but I do tend to encourage her not to similarly modify every word. Yesterday, she made a comment about her "poopy" to me, at which point I reflexively said, "Not 'poopy,' WonderGirl, 'poop.'" I have officially lost all perspective.)

Rocco is getting to the Age of Words now also, and he seems to be moving a bit faster than WonderGirl did, which is good, because he still does that weird scoot thing instead of crawling, and he needs something to keep the other infants from making fun of him at daycare. He definitely says, "Ma mamamamamamama," to mean me. Or food. Or water. Or daylight. This week he started with, "Uh oh" although we're not quite sure where that came from. We never make mistakes or drop things, hence no "Uh oh"s in the QoD house.

This morning, I nursed Rocco in bed while DT dozed a bit more. After he was done eating, he rolled over to see DT, which is his usual drill - he blinks his enormous eyes and grins, trusting that we'll forget he was just screaming bloody murder in his crib, then dives at DT. Today, before commencing the ritual, he looked at DT and said, "Dada." Swoon.

Hard to comprehend

I have been somewhat obsessively watching the internet for news about the trains bombed in India this morning. I'm having two main reactions:

1. I am incredibly grateful that my dad, who was traveling in India, returned last week. He wasn't in Mumbai, but still, I am beyond happy to know that he is safe and sound in a very boring town in New York. My family tends toward the worrying end of the spectrum, and it was already hard for me to act happy and supportive when he told me he was going to India. I knew I would be uncomfortable the whole time because my God, what if??? So now, I know that my dad is okay, but there are plenty of children in India right now who do not know that about their dads. Which leads to my second reaction...
2. I'm disturbed at how relatively unemotional I feel reading the articles. It is almost impossible for me to understand what happened, or really feel the panic that affected families must be feeling now. Intellectually, we're all on this planet together and I do believe that we are all connected. Truthfully, though, while I am horrified and saddened by the attacks, but I know that I would feel more strongly if they happened closer to home. I wish that wasn't true.

I blame the metric system

As I may have mentioned previously, I share an office with seven other students. I shouldn't complain, because sharing an office implies that we have office space, which is not true for all PhD students in my school. Although many students in my department work from home, most of my work is done in the office, since the kids' daycare is just a couple of blocks away. All of my books, my notes, my articles, my old inspiring fortune cookie fortunes (cookie fortunes? just fortunes?) are in my office space. Working elsewhere is very difficult from a practical point of view.

While I do have an alarming number of officemates for a small space, they are all quite nice. They are also all international students. Most are Chinese, so our office is filled with conversation that is unintelligble to me. (As an aside, DT, who is American-born Chinese, says that Chinese is meant to be shouted across a restaurant. I now believe it is also meant to be shouted across grad student offices.) A typical eavesdropping endeavor for me produces gems such as: "(something something something) regression (something something) left-censoring (something something) bossy MDs don't know what a p-value is." (Not an exact quote.)

Besides being quite nice and quite loud, though, one of my officemates is also possessed of absolutely no body fat, and I have a hypothesis that this leads to temperature regulation issues. She won't say anything out loud about it, but whenever she's alone in the office, the thermostat magically goes up to 95 degrees. (I'm assuming that Farhenheit degrees are so unfamiliar that she just pushes the thermostat all the way and figures no matter how high it gets, it still won't meet whatever Celsius temperature she'd choose.)

We live in a very warm place, and still, the heater has been on in the office nearly all summer. Every morning when I come in, the office is 86 degrees, because the heater just can't get it any hotter than that. All of my other officemates are too nice to say anything or change the thermostat, although they look relieved and agree readily when I propose turning it down to an icy 80 degrees. I feel like the ugly American for not being able just to let her keep the office hot, since everyone else is dealing with it somehow, but I get so hot that I truly can't work. I have struggled to find a solution (turning the thermostat down a degree at a time to try to find a happy medium, subtly leaving a polar bear costume on her chair, stripping naked to work) but no dice.

Yesterday, I made a decision. I'm cutting and running. One of my friends just defended her dissertation, and I've requested a move to her office space. It's smaller, but with fewer people, and I'm hoping there's leftover good mojo since my friend was able to finish her degree while working there.

Most importantly, there's no thermostat.

Potential activities for Rocco's 1st birthday party, suggested by WonderGirl, rejected by Ruth, to date:

1. Making fairy wands
2. Tongue painting (analogous to finger painting, not face painting)
   

A moral victory

For fear of jinxing myself, I haven't been updating here with my academic progress. But oh!, there is (some) progress. Ever since I wrote about my lack of motivation, I have been - how do I say it? - motivated. Very strange, but very welcome.

Of course, working will lead to nothing but problems in the long run, and those surfaced recently.

In the course of doing some work in response to the reviews of my paper, I sent what should have been an innocuous email to Dr. Nice and Dr. Brilliant. I wrote that, when one of the assumptions we make was relaxed a bit, our results still held up very well, except in situation X. I continued on to say (my mistake! my mistake!) that this was very similar to the original results from situation X which we described in the paper.

This unleashed a flurry of communications, not all of which I was privy to, I'm sure, about how to present the results from situation X. Our results were neither surprising, nor terrible. When certain conditions are changed a bit, the results turn quite promising. However, situation X is a bitch, and there are few methods in our field which deal with situation X well. Suggestions were made about how to mitigate the less-promising results. These suggestions included re-running all of the work in the paper, using more favorable conditions. This prompted suggestions from me, which included everyone reading the entire freaking paper before we send it out next time, then signing in blood that no one would be allowed to suggest changes that the reviewers didn't even ask for. Oops, no, that's what I wanted to suggest.

Instead, I had a lovely conversation with Dr. Nice, during which I presented my view that we really shouldn't change the conditions, because that seemed of dubious ethical merit (for various reasons). I avoided using the word "ethics" but he got my point. I suggested finding some way to present the situation X results so that they wouldn't be mistaken for more general results. He suggested that Dr. Brilliant felt quite strongly about not presenting the results as they were currently shown. I suggested, jokingly, that next time I would perhaps not write so many updates to everyone, since had I not written the email, we wouldn't be having this conversation. He only laughed a bit. I left, thinking three things: I was glad that Dr. Nice would be talking to Dr. Brilliant instead of me, I wasn't sure what I would do if pushed to change the work, and finally, perhaps this was the encounter that we all needed for someone, anyone!, to realize that having three advisors for one student is simply not all it's cracked up to be.

Last night, I got an email from Dr. Nice. He had convinced Dr. Brilliant to go along with presenting the current results, but we would move the situation X results to a separate table. I get to keep my probably overly rigorous ethics intact, I don't have to redo lots of work and I am reassured that both Dr. Nice and Dr. Brilliant will do the right thing.

It's a good day.

Axiomatic principles I have discovered:

1. An email from an advisor which says, "Call me when you get this," is never a good thing. Something which is too confusing to explain in email will serve only to complicate your life.
   
2. Fireworks cause rain.
   

The learned senator from Alaska

I love me some Sen. Ted Stevens. You might think he's a blowhard idiot who likes nothing more than the sound of his own voice, and you'd be correct. However, ever since I saw Jon Stewart's hilarious juxtaposition of Stevens' eruptions about the negative publicity over his bridge with Robert Byrd inexplicably saying "War" and shaking his finger, well, I'll just say that I look forward to hearing more from Stevens. I'm rarely against a good laugh.

So I was happy this morning to check out Begging to Differ and see that Greg had a post up about Stevens. Turns out he has one of those internets that Bush likes to talk about... read about it, get scared, and make sure to check out the forensic analysis link at the end.

Ah, that's the way to start a Monday morning when everyone else is on vacation.