Beyond the Drawbridge

This person is not particularly liked around the place. This

I just used [the gel-doc system] and the person before me had left a puddle of liquid on the glass base.  Judging from the photo taken I presume this liquid would have been contaminated with ethidium bromide.

This sort of mess left on common-use equipment shows a certain amount of laziness and disregard for colleagues, not to mention the potential damage to the instrument.

So whoever left the mess, get your act together and clean up after yourself.  If the box of tissues is empty, as it was when I used the instrument, go and get another box – like I had to.

None of this is all that difficult.

Bleh. Please.

We take great pleasure in being able to invite you to the launch of the
new University of Sydney Institute for Sustainable Solutions […] This new multi-disciplinary Institute will be a focal point for some of the world’s leading thinkers, researchers and
educators in disciplines such as renewable energy, land and water
sustainability; economic development; population growth and public
health; and food and energy security.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. People are worried about sustainability, yes? So they’ve built an institute, yes? To be followed by

a debate on sustainability

Let me remind you that this is the University of Sydney (the Sustainable Campus), which has just spent tens of millions of dollars on knocking down several buildings, digging up a park, and building a new Law Faculty and shiny spaceship admin block. And it’s still a fucking swamp outside Biochemistry.

Does anyone have a spare brain? Mine just exploded.

I’ve wibbled about the Honours talks, and the reaction to them (also here, for those of you who don’t know about it). In that post I mention something darkly.

Last year there were a couple of proposal talks where I distinctly remember thinking something like ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’. More precisely — what was the supervisor thinking? My reservations were borne out by the end of Honours talks, in which the killing (although the student, under instruction from the supervisor, probably said they were ‘sacrificed’. As if that makes it better. Or true) of several dozens of pigs and mice were described to zero scientific benefit. This year, although I attended possibly less than half of all the talks (if only because I am fed to the back teeth with LIM domains), one talk sticks out as being particularly whisky tango foxtrot.

The student actually seemed a fairly smart guy, which makes the project even more of a travesty.

So this guy’s project is to take stool — no, let’s say it, shit — samples, shake (some of) them in broth to grow the facultative aerobes, and then streak them on arbitrary antibiotics to see to what they’re resistant. And then repeat this at some undefined timepoint (from the same shitters) to see if it (i.e. the antibiotic resistance) changes. In this way he will see if the population of the tiny proportion of shit that is aerobic changes.

Never mind that this is a stupid assay. Never mind that he’s only going to start with 4 shitters and if any of them has to take antibiotics in the time period their shit is unusable, never mind that the effect of a stonkingly good curry is going to fuck this up good and proper (thanks, m’good friend pippadog) and the hundred and one scientific reasons that this sucks; what kind of introduction to the doing of science is this?

I have my own theories. I think the supervisor in question wants to do this (because she’s a fruitcase) and won’t — or can’t — give it to any one more senior in the lab (because they would tell her to fuck right off). I think she’s stuck in the 18th century and is trying to turn shit into gold. I think a lot of things, but I’m getting incoherent, and frankly, I can understand and would happily defend why points one and two came up.

It is a crappy project, and it stinks, and I am really really sorry anyone has to put up with this.