Beyond the Drawbridge

I have to complain about the way people use the lab stocks: When you use aliquots and there are not many Eppis left, please MAKE UP MORE!!!
Currently, there are 3 Eppendorfs of Amp left in the stock…

This is not the first time I open a rack to find it nearly empty and I am fed up with making up the stocks for other people.

Since there are a lot of people expressing stuff at the moment, you should make up more stocks when there are 10 Eppis left, also of the IPTG or whatever else you use.

Please be more considerate about others!

Guessing the nationality just isn’t fun any more.

Dear reader,

What do you think to the idea of allowing you to write posts here?  It should be easy enough to turn on.

Let me know.

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.

One of our fearless administrators (and actually, she’s one of the good guys) is trying to reduce costs and simultaneously yet more importantly actually get stocks of a certain consumable into the building.

The consumable in question? Lab notebooks.

We’ve been using these rather nice notebooks that have places for signatures, page numbers and whatnot: they also come with the University crest. But the University has not been able to supply them for nearly six months. So GoodAdmin went to the supplier and found that she could get larger (as in more pages) notebooks without the crest (but otherwise identical) reasonably quickly — and more cheaply. She asked the Cage if that’s what we wanted her to do.

Yay! We cheer.

And then, MediaWhoreProfWhoGivesStudentsUselessProjects says

To tell you the truth, I think we should be spending a bit more and branding the lab books with MMB and USyd logos (other departments do) – to give the students something to be proud of, that also informs them a bit about the value of IP (intellectual property) etc etc. Am I the only one who thinks like this?

It’s taking a great deal of willpower to not write back

Yes

or even

Only if your grant pays the extra for all of us

(Pippadog: Does she even have any grants? Or is it all thirty pieces of silver from the Meeja?)

It’s this kind of lunacy that made leaving industry less painful. I can just imagine this argument from my 8 year old: Sociology brand their lab books, why can’t we?

Note added in proof: Just don’t get me started on why she needs all those things in her .sig … on an internal mailing list.

One of my spies (and not the usual one.  This is good!) forwarded an email from someone who was obviously rather pleased to be asked to review a manuscript:

Respected Sir,

Thank you very much for selecting me as a referee for your esteemed journal. Your journal is one of my favorite journal that is why i am too much interested to be a part of it (as author and referee).

I am sorry for my late reply because of engagements in students tour to different research stations of XXXX and because of the severe electric load-shedding these days.

I have the hard copy of the article (#####), I will check the paper during the study tour from Friday to Tuesday, and the comments will be communicated to your good office as soon as possible.

With best regards:

Dr $NAME

Mangled mother tongues aside, this is precisely the kind of attitude the Black Knight would like to encourage amongst his minions.  Set to it, troops.

Did someone try to leave a comment? I notice my spam guard has trashed one, but I didn’t get to see if it was real or not.  Note that you have to register in order to comment; I’ve turned this feature on to prevent leaks to the outer intachoobs.

xxx

BK 

You may remember me sticking vulnerable bits above the parapet.  The thing about Germans, he whispered, is that there’s never just one.

it came to my attention that people who are not on the list drink coffee.

Achtung!  Coffee drinkers must be on ze list!  Or zer vill be VAR!

I’m just off to dig an air raid shelter.

From an email on Thursday:

what programs do you use for making graphs for submission to journals?
The journal specifically says not to use EXCEL

I had the luxury of a colleague who could photoshop for me before!

Well sweetheart, you’re just going to have to learn.

(And which journal is it, and where do I send the congratulatory champagne? )

So there we were, having fruit instead of cake (Mrs JM thinks we eat too much cake and we should all go on diets) because Thu was going on maternity leave. Boris is peeling lychees and trying to figure out which bits you eat, and which you don’t.

“If you swallow the seed,” says Thu with a smile, “it grows into a tree inside you.”

“Oh,” says Boris, “Then what did you swallow?”

I nearly choked on my char masala and had to be excused.

As you may or may not know, one of my posts from last year made it into an anthology, the best of science blogs 2007. I was pretty stoked about this at first, but then I looked at the state of science blogging and my reaction turned into more of a ‘meh’ than a ‘yippee’.

Basically, science blogging is crap.

Most of it is rehashing of published science (some is exceptional, and done very well) or Creationist/ID bashing, which is a waste of time and effort and does a great deal of harm to science (again, for an exception, see Steve Matheson. He’s coming at it from an appropriate side, though). The weblogs that attract me are witty, well-written, and deal more with the doing of science (and gratifyingly, both those authors are in the anthology) than the actual science itself; which I can get from Nature or Science or JMB or wherever.

So on looking at the list of authors and posts, my enthusiasm was somewhat pissed on, and I decided not to buy the book.

However, it arrived in the post on Tuesday, so I’m kind of stuck with it. The Black Queen was thrilled to bits to see my little piece (ooer) on page 12, and on the train on Wednesday morning read the first entry, written by the compiler/editor of the anthology (hmmm). To paraphrase (because she said it so much more elegantly than I can remember) it was padded, dry, pretentious claptrap. What took three pages could have been said in a paragraph.

And she’s right, of course; she always is.

So I will pay the editor for my copy, because it is only right, but don’t you bother buying it; I don’t get any royalties. I ‘ll lend you my copy.

PS. I’m the only author in that anthology to use the word ‘fucking’ in their post. I thought you should know that.