Beyond the Drawbridge

This post is primarily for the benefit of those who are are not enCagéd.

After the mindless Dilbertism described in my previous post, I had a little email chat with Mr JM, making exactly the point that we’d rather spend the money on something useful. He mistakenly thought I’d emailed the entire Cage, but after that agreed with me that collective tongue-biting was probably in order.

However, my young apprentice had few such calms, and sent the following masterpiece to everyone:

I took a poll of the students in our room. Half of us prefer the red books to the blue as there is more room on each page to write on. Those who prefer the blue based this on paper quality, room for the date, and especially the gridlines. We all agreed that it was not worth branding the lab books as your work should be enough to make you proud, the appearance of the lab book shouldn’t really matter.

I am so, so proud of her.

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.