Sydney Uni public toilets

As a card-carrying male, I am able only to comment on male toilets. My nominations are:

Worst: Chemistry building, outside the lecture theatre on the lower ground floor. Rumour has it that the smell of the toilet once drove an insane person sane.
Honourable mention: Fisher, and any other toilet that has been besquirted by so many, many asses (or arses, if you prefer) for so long, so regularly.

Best: {Like with travel books, the mere mention of a good place can change it, for the worse probably. Still, the truth must be told, and I assume few will read this} Old Teachers Building, ground floor. Big, rarely used, well lit, a real pleasure to … ahem…, or just pass the time.

Killing Time

The End Of Time by Julian Barbour
Published by Phoenix

“Time does not exist.” Try telling that to anybody with a deadline. Yet this is precisely the message of physicist Julian Barbour in his new book, The End of Time. Barbour, who supported his research by translating Russian scientific journals on the side, believes that time is an emergent property - like the colour violet or the temperature of a bowl of pea soup. This is a shocking thesis, yet in a straw poll conducted by the author, twice as many of his colleagues (physicists mind you, not translators) believed that time should not appear in the foundations of any theory of the world as those who thought it should. According to Barbour, there are only instants, snapshots, configurations - and a great deal of them at that. We occupy one of these ‘time capsules’ and infer the past from it.

Barbour takes up the onerous task of convincing the lay reader of time’s passing (it is almost impossible to avoid puns with this topic) with the gravity and finesse befitting such a grand topic. He sets the scene using Turner’s Snow Storm, which depicts the force and fury of a boat caught in a storm. Motion can indeed be created out of a static, timeless picture. We then fall into triangle land, Platonia and a rich discussion of the ideas underpinning his theory, including relativity and quantum theory. I grappled with some of the mathematical and physical concepts, such as the foggy notion of ‘quantum mist’, yet in asking the reader to make the effort Barbour ensures the trip is a more satisfying one. A more philosophical epilogue, ‘Life Without Time’, and extensive notes demonstrate the author has thought about much more than the physics of time. Although at times dense, this is a fascinating introduction to a timeless world.

How to destroy a soul

Take a job that drains you.
Spend as much time as possible with said job.
(Working on drains is ok)

Live for the future.

Get sucked into the meaningless pursuit of beauty.

Not realise the universe is a wundaful place. Not wonder about it.

Avoid eye contact with stars. Avoid uninterrupted vistas.

Stay indoors. Sit down. Look ahead. Don’t move.

Follow big software company’s advice on how to write.

Ignore the truth.

Live the life unquestioned.

Take things too seriously.

Forget you’re an animal with animal needs. (But Ren! I have needs!)

Consume more than is necessary.

Block ears to music. (No comment passed on soul-destroying music)

Not see the humour in statements like “if you read this you are an idiot”.

Destroyed souls may be repaired by applying salve.

Them's the breaks

I broke a stick. It cost $200,000. It’s pretty funny when you think about it. Looking back now, it’s fair to say that breaking that stick was the bravest, and yet most craven thing I’ve ever been accused of doing. Bernie said I did it. All I did was beef bibimbab. That stick was sharp at both ends, if you know what I mean. It was also sharp all along its shaft.

Wisdom? Humour? Cynicism? Whatever it be, I like it

Quoted in this article

Carlos Romulo, former president of the UN General Assembly: "If there is a problem between a weak nation and another weak nation and the UN takes action, the problem disappears. If there is a problem between a strong nation and a weak nation and the UN takes action, the weak nation disappears. If there is a problem between a strong nation and a strong nation and the UN takes action, the UN disappears."

Mouse Primary Cortical Neurons

These are costained for total cellular actin (red) and neuronal microtubules (green). The actin stain helps me estimate the area of growth cones and the microtubule stain helps me identify neurons. These neurons are ~30 microns in size.

My Mind Was Seeded

The other day i found myself inwardly hearing (but also a little singing i suppose (not at the same time, mind you)) "the Mississippi Delta is shining like a national guitar" and "as if I never noticed the way she brushed her hair and farted". I was enjoying Paul Simon's (with the help of Africa's musical heritage) warm, fluid and bouncy tune and I wondered how it came to sparkle through my synapses. It didn't take me long to realise.

I suppose the most common mode of musical infection is aural. You hear a snippet on the radio or while you're on hold to some godforsaken customer information line and later in the hour, you find yourself humming it. Involuntarily, too. But reading it can be just as effective. Upon very little reflection, I think cw's transmission was more effective because it alluded not to a song title, which one encounters relatively often, but to an emotive line in the song. Titles are often (but not always) texts within the song, but they are more readily hermetically sealed off as separate categories, independent on the actual sound of the song. Other lines within a song depend on the surrounding words and music and invoke them strongly. "National guitar" triggered the whole musical roundabout in my head, plunging me immediately into its lyrical waters and away I sped, naked on the back of a dolphin towards Graceland.

Something worth reading

Give peace a chance, eh?

I Fell Down But They Laughed

Why does this sentence not ring true? After all, people laugh all the time. People fall down quite often too. It's the 'but' that's out of place. It really should be 'and'.

Why is this reaction so common? It seems to be a core part of our being, which probably evolved three million years ago when we were roaming the savannahs of Africa, looking for Marbig expanding folders. It's a gut feeling, an instinctive response. It's funny to see others lose their dignity. That's a shame, but we might as well make the most of it and "drink to good times".

You've Now Heard of a Western Blot

Biologists are interested in proteins, because they do so much. In fact, if there's anything to be done on a molecular level, it's mostly proteins that do it. To most people, protein is something you get in meat; something athletes are interested in; the basis of some diets. It's clearly a category of things, but they are all roughly equivalent. In biology, this couldn't be further from the truth. There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of different proteins, depending on your definition. People dedicate their whole lives to studying a single protein. Genes are much more famous though. They are passed from one generation to the next and everyone knows about the double helix. Genes are the grist to evolution's mill.

Well, a protein is to a gene as a running program is to the program's code. Most analogies fall down somewhere, and this one falls down all over the place. The point is that a protein is directly reliant on a gene for its existence, but once its out there, it can do all sorts of wonderful things. For every gene there is a protein, and often more than one. Genes tend to sit in cellular nuclei, while their protein minions do their bidding all over the place. Genes are largely stable, while proteins come in and out of existence all the time, depending on the needs of a cell.

Western Blotting is a really common technique in biology. The aim is to find out whether certain proteins are expressed and to what degree, and also whether certain treatments change their expression. For such a central component of a life scientist's toolkit, the visual results are abjectly boring. They are ubiquitous though, and if you pick up a journal article from a science journal (which is extremely unlikely for the average person) you may encounter one. The input to a Western Blot is any kind of biological sample containing protein, and the output is these bands. A Southern Blot detects DNA, and was named after Mr Southern (true story). The theme was extended with Northern Blots (RNA), Western Blots and the very rare Eastern blot, which i'm told detects lipids. These substances account for the contents of every single organism, save for precious carbohydrates and other organic compounds like cholesterol, and minerals.

I could write for a long time about Western Blotting, but that would be bad. The main thing you need to know is that the dark bands represent proteins, and these dark bands can be there, or not be there, they can be thick or thin, high or low. All these things tell you about the nature of your protein sample. To the trained eye, much information can be gleaned from a blot. As with all techniques in science, interpretation is everything, and there are many assumptions and variables involved.

Forwardly flippant

Can you smell my whole... life?

you've got to hand it to ween for coming up with some super bizarre lyrics.
tastes good on the bun
sail brown bay to chocolate town

one style i like is a lyric that sounds like one thing, but is actually something else
eg "jets flew in formation", but i normally hear as "gets you information"
eg "i called upon a force of space and time" sounds a lot like "i called your mom, a force of space and time"
beck also does that. i once had the thought about mutations that there are several lines that are repeated, but with slight variations (mutations!) in different songs
eg the wild lives are so mild

When the chips are down, eat them

Why has poker taken the world by storm? Humanity's predilection for gambling is not new. In fact it was Alexander the Great who coined the term "to coin a term". He had been having difficulty getting some of his elephants to navigate some treacherous mountain passes, and deciding to make things interesting, bet his second in command, Barry, that he could make the elephants move faster without touching them. Barry naturally scoffed and suggested that the winner of the wager would receive free tuition for their eldest child for three months, or one term. Alexander proceeded to release a mouse under the feet of an elephant, at which point it trumpeted, picked up speed and trampled two dozen of his finest men. Barry accepted defeat with good grace, and handed Alexander a special bronze coin, noting "My liege, your term with this coin." Alexander was suddenly struck by a severe anal discharge and proceeded to empty his bowels all over the coin, which he had dropped a moment earlier, owing to the fact that he had perpetually sweaty palms.

Have You Ever Been Paralysed By Indecision?

There are stages.

Stage 1: awareness of option.
Everyone has options of some kind or another. In my case, it's the end of my Honours year, signifying my entry into the world of academia, industry or neither. Will I stay in this specific area? This field? Will I research? Will I talk/write/administer science? Or will science see the back of me?

Stage 2: research of alternatives.
Before I had broadband, I really felt the lack. Now that I have it, I'm not sure it's made things any better. There are times I feel I am closing in on a decision. I have it within my grasp. All of a sudden, it rears up on me, whinnies and bolts away, often kicking me in the head in the process. Then there are the times I feel no closer to a decision than ever. It's times like these I can be paralysed by indecision.

Stage 3: decision.
This needn't be a lifelong commitment, although a PhD does entail at least 3 years of research. The comforting thing is that time has an inexorable way of passing. Thus, despite my current ignorama and ignominy, in but a few months the decision will have been made. I find stress about exams can sometimes be eluded in a similar fashion.

Stage 4: awareness of option.
About three months after the decision has been made, new options arise. The cycle resumes, with hilarious consequences.

The Ineffable Anxiety of Planning Experiments

Next week I begin a large series of experiments, on which my Honours thesis hinges, swaying gently in the breeze. If I'm not careful, i'll cut myself on the screen door like Cletus.

There are essentially three steps:
1) grow some neurons
2) take some of them and
a) visualise the location of several different proteins using fluorescent antibodies
b) examine their morphology using other fluorescent antibodies
3) take the rest and meaure the amount of certain proteins

If I could perform these steps sequentially I'd be living the life of Riley. Nary a worry in the world, but so slow that my scientific competitors would rise above me. So I must do 2 and 3 at the same time, and therein lies my fear. Still, that's what molecular biology is made of. Is it any wonder women do well here, with their notorious ability to multitask, while men flounder and bream? This is just a stereotype to make me feel better, but I'm sticking with it 'til the sun don't shine for three months.

Red Computer Bucket

Arthur a grammar. What is a question.
How'm I s'posed to get outta here, somehow?
I am king of plasma.
That's the only thing i want so much.
Kim's got her watermelon gun.
You sold me fifty dollars.
A tear drops my eye.

Nonsense or fact? You be the judge.

World's Oldest Bat Discovered Underneath Fat Man

The oldest bat in the world was discovered on a couch previously occupied by a morbidly obese man. The bloodsuckler was a Townsend's Big Eared bat (Corynorhinus townsendii) and biological testing confirmed its age as 37, beating by seven the previous record held by a little brown bat.

The man involved was identified as Barry Templeton, a 62 year old man from a village near Bristol, England. Templeton, who weighs 132 kg, explained that he would not have noticed a thing, but his dog, Marmaduchess alerted him to the unlikely visitor's presence after he had gotten up to answer the door. Templeton took the bat to his local vet, who pronounced the bat dead on arrival. Templeton said he had "no idea" how the bat got there.

Although a battery of tests were used to establish the deceased bat's age, the clincher was DNA testing of blood which had dried around its lips. This was amazingly traced back to a male pig-tailed monkey (Macaca nemestrina) known as Bonnie, who died of heart failure whilst in orbit around the earth aboard the NASA spacecraft, Biosatellite III. The monkey passed away 9 days after being launched in June, 1969.

Templeton, an amateur astronomer, casually mentioned the story to a friend working at NASA, who recounted the tale of Bonnie. NASA regularly takes blood samples of humans and animals it sends into space for identification purposes. Although it usually keeps these records confidential, NASA had no problem releasing the data to the Bristol veterinarian.

A NASA official was unable to confirm whether Bonnie had been bitten by a bat, but suggested that a trip to the zoo a few days before launch by members of the Biosatellite III team, including Bonnie, would have been the only time the monkey would have been exposed to bats.

Alright, I'll write something about science

After claiming to be a scientist (at least in training), it is probably time that I offered something of a scientific bent. I may still manage to fit sport in somewhere.

The world media was aflutter with reports of a paralysed man who controlled a cursor and a robotic hand using his brain, but not his muscles. Y'see, he had a sensor in his brain which sent signals to a processor, which decoded them and moved said cursor/robotic hand.

What to make of all this? First of all, it's worth checking out the article itself:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7099/pdf/nature04970.pdf

It's nice that Nature has made this freely available, as like most scientific journals they have a way of keeping things to themselves and their subscribers. When faced with a journal's website telling me i'm not allowed to view an article, I go here: http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/ejournals/
and access is usually forthcoming.

Nature Publishing Group is also one of the most respected/highest impact/popular series of journals in scientific publishing. If you're a scientist with a paper that you think is white hot, you might try sending it to Nature.

Returning to our cybernetic tetraplegic, MN - for some reason, subjects are always referred to by their intials. Does it really protect their privacy when there's pictures of them in the article? And how hard can it be to find a tetraplegic with those initials? They also mention that his injury was from a knife wound that transected the spinal cord between cervicl vertebrae C3-C4. C'mon, you can't give those details but not explain any more!

One of my first thoughts was: how the heck do they transduce his brain signals? To me, it all came down to the signal processor. Measuring neuronal activity is not such a big deal, but converting that into movement of a cursor seemed to me more complicated. This probably reflects my background in neuroscience and I would like to now call upon anyone with an engineering background (you know who you are) to fill in the other details.

Without knowing anything, the following sketch may not be too far from the truth. The sensor uses its 100 electrodes to detect the activity of neurons - sometimes single ones, other times groups. This activity is measured in microvolts. What they then do is build up a database of firing patterns associated with certain movements. Imagine putting your hands together then apart, get pattern X. Open and close your hands, get pattern Y. Imagine manually tracking a technician-operated (in Australia we call them research assistants) cursor, get pattern Z.

This pattern was converted via a filter function into a two dimensional output signal - the neural cursor. This makes sense for imagining moving a cursor, but I'm not sure what a 2D output would mean for opening your hands or shrugging your shoulders. I still have no idea how the filter function works, but it seems to do the trick.

They then compared MN's neural cursor with the techinician's actual cursor. Over 6 sessions the correlation between the neural cursor and the technician's was 0.56 +/- 0.18 on the x axis and 0.45 +/- .15 on the y axis. It would be weird if there were a difference between x and y axes. This didn't seem to me to be a particuarly impressive correlation, but the results were 'similar or better than those seen in intact monkeys'. Unsurprisingly it turns out that they've done this in monkeys before. 'Preclinical animal studies' are a common story in neuroscience research.

It turns out the robotic control was also by using his cursor skills. Later on they got him to open some simulated email. Why was it simulated? I have no idea.They also got him to adjust the volume, channel and power to his television. Now that's research you can take to the bank! They also made movies of MN playing Neural Pong and Neural "HeMan" game. I'd love to watch these but damn MediaPlayer can't play the mov file.

Am I alone in finding many scientific papers hard to get through? This one had a lot of techniques I was unfamiliar with but still, it'd be nice if they converted it to a laywoman's version. Most newspaper reports just don't even try.

It seems like they had a few technical difficulties with the sensors, one of which required 'clinical protocol change', which meant cutting MN open and fiddling with the device. In a second subject (no initials for him) a technical issue caused an abrupt signal loss at most electrodes, the reason for which is being evaluated. I suppose this would be like getting disconnected at a critical time. Impressive research, though more reporting of difficulties and problems would better serve the public.

I can't think of a good way to sum up this paper, so I'll end with Go the Doggies!

Zizou Butt Theories

There's too many comical items in this to single out any.

http://foxsports.news.com.au/story/0,8659,19752159-5004540,00.html

Oh, alright. My favourites are Thierry Henry's comment, SOS Racism quoting "very well informed" sources, The Times' lip reader's analysis, and Materazzi's command of whichever language it was he was speaking.

Hamish’s Portfolio Theory of Sport Following

This is quite a simple idea, but can be very effective.

One of the great things about sport is you are admitted into a world of vicarious highs and lows. This leeching of the emotional experiences of elite athletes is enhanced if you follow the athlete/team, and moreso if for a long time. In the World Cup, because the athletes are so good, and the fans so involved, it’s the ultimate sporting spectacle. But if your country happens to qualify, you top up your enjoyment account manifold. If you have followed your country’s vain attempts to qualify or progress for three decades, the ante is upped again. And the World Cup is special because your emotions (limited as they are to the sporting spectrum, but valid nonetheless) are shared by many of your countrywomen and men.

The problem with sport is the lows can be a bit a of a bummer. First of all, it can be genuinely heartbreaking seeing some losses. This is one of the easiest, sure-fire way to get one of those ‘replay the scene in your head’moments, or more likely continuing episodes. If it was a bad loss, you may temporarily forget failure and imagine what would have happened if they hadn’t lost after all. You may even map out future opponents and results of these games, if only... Interestingly, such counterfactuals are largely involuntary, and can indeed be hard to suppress. Second of all, bad moods can follow losses, which disrupt your interactions with loved ones and colleagues, and may impair your productivity, thus draining the economy of the wealth it so richly deserves. Lastly, it is frankly downright embarassing to admit a sporting team’s influence on your person. After all, are we sports nuts any better than those pond scum who indulge in gossip magazines? P’raps. I know there are many things I’d feel in my soul of souls more pleased doing - playing guitar, singing, listening to Mars Volta, playing Druglord, cooking for my wife - the list goes on. But back to sporting failure, and how to hide it under your bushel.

This is where the portfolio comes in. Having a sports portfolio - a range of teams or individuals to follow - means somewhere, sometime there is always someone winning. You black out the failures and take the winners on board. My portfolio has consisted over the years of (in rough order of frequency of support and importance) the Bulldogs in the NRL, the Socceroos, the Golden State Warriors (NBA), the Sydney Kings (NBL), and then a range of lower tier ones: Sydney Swans (AFL), River Plate and pretty much any team from Sydney, NSW, or Australia. This takes in tennis players (although for Lleyton Hewitt I’m willing to make an exception), golfers (especially Appleby, Allenby and Ogilvy), cricket teams and whatnot. In the English Premier League I generally support a team with (decent) Aussies - Blackburn, Liverpool. Because of the GS Warriors, I even retain a modicum of satisfaction when the Oakland Raiders win in the NFL - and I haven’t watched an NFL game in about 15 years. (In fact I spent more time in my youth playing the superb NFL PC game where you could make your team really fast, or fat, and we had a guy called My Main Man Maxwell, and one season later in the draft we were shocked and delighted to see that his brother had turned up - Rick Main Man Maxwell, or something like that. Tas, where are you? What was his first name?) So by having a sports portfolio, you can have success all the time, and credibility is just around the corner.

Of course, if you subscribe to the underdog school of sports supporting, you’ll rarely be pleased. But it’ll be worth it when you are. But it’ll be lame most of the time.

An added bonus is that if anyone questions why you follow so many different teams and sports, you can rationally justify it and return to the sports section unfettered.

PGC as Rohrschach Test

Regarding the revealingness of post-goal celebrations, I wouldn’t say that the more subdued the celebration, the closer to insanity. Because I can imagine myself there, on the world stage, and scoring, and perhaps because I’m such a hot player, I kind of expect it. Or I react so quickly, I am able to tone it down and so reveal my utter, utter coolness. Still, Zinedane’s placid display will surely be the last of the finals.

My prediction: whoever scores in the semis will be accosted by their team mates. First beset upon. Jumped upon. Smothered. They’ll crush the air out of him, then tear his clothes off and hoist them skyward, in the manner of days of yore. Content with their fill, and spent, they’ll return to the game. Meanwhile, our poor scorer will have nothing to wear. Shrinkage will inevitably follow, followed by borrowing of Olivar Kahn’s garb, even if it’s someone from the Portugal-France game.