• Expression Patterns by Eva Amsen

    It's a blog. I don't really know what it's about either.

    • Slice and Dice

      Tuesday, 24 Nov 2009

      Two medical art related things:

      Slice
      I’m in Gerstein Library at the moment, and one of Gunter Von Hagen’s Bodyworlds pieces is on display in the lobby , to advertise that there are many more of them at the Ontario Science Centre. I saw his last exhibit there when Shelley came to visit a few years ago and don’t really feel the need to brave the crowds again, but seeing a sliced up man for free at the library where I was working anyway is pretty cool.


      Slicy in the library lobby. He’s officially called “6 Meter Man” but I’ve named him “Slicy” instead. (Photo from UofT )

      Dice
      I still need to watch the episode, but I’m already excited about it. My friend Brett is an illustrator/cartoonist, and he has been selling some stock images lately that have popped up here and there. Most recently, a cartoon he did of a sick guy was used to make a box for a fictional board game shown on my favourite current comedy show, How I Met Your Mother. Yay! In terms of medical art it’s a bit of a stretch, I know, but look how fun this looks:


      Diseases! I so want to play this game!

    • Bands

      Saturday, 21 Nov 2009

      So, I’ve been launching myself into something I actually have the time, but not the inspiration for. Or maybe I have inspiration and time, but no confidence. Whichever it is, I have an excuse for not blogging, and that’s what matters.

      You see, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. It’s hard. I’m very behind. NaNoWriMo lets you update your word count on the site, and you can see where you are and where you’re supposed to be. This is what my graph looks like today:


      Procrastination, visualized.

      My love of graphs, seeing the brown graph go up fast enough to cross the blue one in time, is the only thing that’s motivating me to actually finish this. And my inability to leave things unfinished. And the fact that if you reach 50,000 by November, you get a 50% discount on the writing software I’ve been using, and it’s nice.

      If you peek around on the forums at NaNoWriMo for a while, it’s immediately obvious that people love writing about dragons, vampires, space, vampires in space, the future, aliens, crime, the middle ages, or romantic teen novels (set in space, and featuring vampires, natch).

      I’m not that imaginative, so mine is about a bunch of regular people, and the story is set in Toronto, in October 2009. Because outer space and the future is way too difficult. Last month and my own city are complicated enough. And oh gosh I made it so difficult. You know how in the movie “Love, Actually” there are like thirty characters and everyone is somehow related? It’s kind of like that, except with dragons the characters and stories are completely different.

      I had to jot down some notes to figure out what was happening simultaneously with whom, because eventually things converge in outer space. There’s a guy who works in a lab (because I wrote what I know) and he had to be done with an experiment at a certain time, so I was working out what he had to do when, and figured out that he had to put his blot in antibody on Wednesday night. (Mad creepy flashbacks to writing my own schedule for lab work, of course. Eerie, that feeling of panic about making a fake person get his stuff done on time and accounting for overnight steps.) In that same week, there’s a big event for another character. Her band is performing their first big show in a local pub.

      So I wrote down: “Thursday: bands show.”

      See what happened there? I meant to write “band’s show”, forgot the apostrophe, and on rereading my notes a few hours later, I thought that part referred to the guy’s Western blot experiment. Because Thursday would have been the day he’d see the bands show up!

      You know what, I’m going to work that in somehow.

      Also, does this count toward my word count?

    • To science!

      Monday, 09 Nov 2009

      I’ve had a bit of a weird week.

      I was in London last Monday, for a job interview. I didn’t get the job, but I did get to see Jenny and Stephen for a few minutes after their Fiction Lab, so it was still a worthwhile trip.

      I’ve been looking for work since I came back from vacation this summer, and it’s hard. I’ve been doing some freelance work in the mean time, but that hasn’t been enough to live off, and I had to give in and admit that I qualified for Employment Insurance. I don’t like living off goverment money for doing nothing, and I’d much rather work.

      When I defended my thesis in December, I told myself that I’d take one year of freelancing to figure out what I really want. At the time, I said I didn’t want to do a postdoc, but I was afraid that it might have been too inspired by a lack of data and frustrating experiments during my PhD, rather than a real desire to do something else. A year should be enough to get some perspective, and was still short enough that I could find a postdoc if I changed my mind.

      When you’re in grad school, there is this one path laid out in front of you, and that path leads to a postdoc, and then probably another postdoc, and a tenure track job in the far, far, foggy distance. Leading off from that path, left and right, are scary, dark alleyways. “Teaching”,“med school”, “business”, “law school”, “editing”. There are stories of people who strayed on these paths. Many of them are never heard from again. They “left science”.

      And I “left”, too. But people have some vague idea what I’m doing right now, and the kind of jobs I’m applying to. I got an e-mail a few weeks ago, from someone I used to do volunteer outreach stuff with. I had run into her at graduation, and told her I was looking for work in science publishing. She e-mailed to tell me that she heard a rumour that someone from my old institute got a job at Nature. The rumour was so vague that it didn’t come with a name, and she had to ask me “Was that you?”

      Sadly, no, that wasn’t me. But it says something about the culture of “people who left” that these stories are passed on from person to person, losing information like a game of Broken Telephone. It’s special, and it needs to be talked about. Who cares who it was, someone got a job at Nature! It can be done!

      In the alleyways off the brightly lit path that leads to postdocs, is a rogue gang of deserters looking for alternative ways to live a life of science. And we’ve got each others’ backs.

      Another girl that I also ran into at graduation e-mailed me this week to say that a medical writing company she worked for is looking for more freelance writers. That came just a week after I got a contract for about 70 hours of work with the writing company of the husband of one of my exam committee members. Meanwhile, I’m still applying for editing jobs, I’m networking a lot, and Jenny is casting her editorially trained eye on my CV.

      Everyone has just been really helpful. I was in a slump about not finding work, about being bored, and feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere, but I do belong somewhere – I just don’t have a permanent full-time employer right now.

      The real turning point came, as turning points so often do, on Friday night.

      I had been invited to a friend’s birthday. I know this girl through a group of local blog friends who since scattered all over the place, and I didn’t know any of the other people at the party. I sat down at a table with a group of her coworkers. They were all media professionals, but with an entertainment angle rather than science. (My friend writes sarcastic reviews of TV shows for a living.) Of course they asked what I did, and I said “I write about science.”

      Earlier this year, I had a minor panic attack every time someone asks me what I did, but I found that the common feature of everything I do is some form of writing about science. Whether it’s a thesis or comments on a student essay or a press release or a job application – I write about science.

      “Science, cool! What kind of science?”
      “Well, my PhD was in Biochemistry, but now it’s more general. Mostly biology.”

      “Wow, you have a PhD?” Another guy joined the conversation, and pulled his chair up a little closer so he could ask me all about the H1N1 vaccine. Did I, as a scientist, think it was a government conspiracy? “No”, I said, “I think they’re just being very careful about pandemics these days.”

      The waitress brought more beer, and we raised a glass: “To science!” my table mates cheered.

      When they all went out for a smoke, I moved my chair to the next table, and met one of my friend’s former classmates from her journalism program. She and her boyfriend were also excited to hear about what I did. “Cool, science! Did you hear that, she’s a scientist!” I explained what kind of jobs I was interested in, and to her, it made perfect sense to look for something in publishing.

      To most people, I am no less of a scientist if I am pursuing a career outside of the lab. Science is science.

      And with that, and two new writing assignments to work on, my week changed for the better. I left the birthday party confident that I was doing the right thing.

      Just then, I heard glasses clinking at the other table. The smokers had come back inside, and cheered amongst themselves:

      “To science!”

    • Can you do any better?

      Thursday, 05 Nov 2009

      There’s an article in New Scientist, all about how having a high IQ doesn’t imply that you’re smart. George Bush (junior) is the token example of stupidity coupled with high IQ.

      It’s true. Some of the stupidest people I’ve met are very smart on paper. And some of the smartest people I know never did well on any standardized tests, including the IQ test.

      The article lists some examples of questions that even people with high IQ get wrong.

      Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George; Jack is married, George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

      Apparently, most people (smart or not) say that you don’t have enough information to tell the answer. You totally do, and the answer is “yes” regardless of Anne’s marital status, but I can see how you can be tricked here when you’re in a hurry or half asleep and you see that “not enough info” is given as one of the possible answers.

      Then there are three other questions , introduced as follows:

      “When researchers put the following three problems to 3400 students in the US, only 17 per cent got all three right. Can you do any better?”

      NO, of course I can’t DO ANY BETTER. There are only THREE questions, how can I do BETTER than the people who GOT ALL THREE RIGHT? Duh.

      Fine, let’s look at the questions.

      1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

      Five cents, and the bat costs $1.05. That’s really cheap. When was this? 1905?

      2) If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

      Apparently, it takes 5 minutes for a machine to make one widget. So, five minutes for any X number of machines to make X widgets.

      3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of it?

      Well, that’s obviously the situation the day before, so 47 days.

      Easy peasy.

      Wait.

      Something is wrong.

      (See extended post, so you can have a think about it yourself before reading what I noticed.)

      continue reading this post
    • Lego and Dissertations

      Wednesday, 04 Nov 2009

      Two things I just found on the internet:

      A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families
      This actually reminded me of labs, where similar objects can have different names for different people. In this article (non-academic – a newspaper column kind of article), though, it’s about seven-year-olds who use different phrases for similar pieces of Lego.

      I Wordled My Thesis
      A Flickr group of Wordle clouds that people made of their thesis. Found it because someone found mine and I was invited to add it.

    • That Mozart Effect

      Wednesday, 28 Oct 2009

      At orchestra rehearsal last night, I failed miserably at keeping up with the Mozart piano concerto we’re playing. I don’t really like Mozart, and we’re also playing Haydn and Shostakovich at the next concert, so I had no motivation to practice it, especially since it’s just an accompaniment. But because I really needed to pick this up, I thought I’d give it a listen. I didn’t have the front page with the exact number of the concerto, and Mozart composed quite a lot, so I leaned over to read the KV number from the conductor’s score.

      KV 488

      Hm, 488 did sound familiar. Maybe I have a recording of it after all.

      Then I realized this morning, as soon as I woke up, that I hadn’t recognized the number as one of Mozart’s famous piano concertos, but as the excitation wavelength for Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein and FITC dye. In other words, the “green” wavelength in fluorescence microscopy…


      KV 488, exciting!


      Excited at 488 nm

    • Eva is inside her cat

      Monday, 26 Oct 2009

      The cat had some blood work done recently, mainly because I might at some point in the future actually find a job outside of Canada, and I’d have to take her with me.

      I just picked up the official document with the results of her rabies titer. Had a bit of a giggle-fit after seeing my cat’s name with my last name on the label. “Penny Amsen” just sounds funny. It would have been funnier, of course, if it said “Fluffy Amsen”, or “Whiskers Amsen”, but I prefer people names for animals.

      The test result was very good. She had to have a rabies-antibody titer over 0.5 to be allowed to travel. Pen did great, and got 3.46 .

      0.5 what? 3.46 what?

      The form says “IU/mL”. mL I know, but IU is strange to me. I tried to look up how it converts to something I know, but it’s weird . IU stands for “International Unit”, and it can be either volume or weight, depending on what you’re looking at. So….moles? It has to be something linear related to a molarity, but I can’t find out how to interpret it. I found this but it gives the amount of units per ampoule, and is probably about vaccines for humans, not cats.

      What’s inside my cat? What does 3.46 International Units of antibody against rabies per mL Penny-blood mean? All I know is that it’s 7 times more than she needs, so she’s all set to apply for official papers should she need to travel anywhere. Still, I paid $300 for this blood test, so it bothers me that I don’t quite understand it.

      Now I’m just waiting to find out where I need to take her, and also still waiting for the fur to grow back in her neck:


      They shaved a spot to take the blood sample. It’s where her hair is the longest (see: lions. No, not sea lions.) and it’s taking forever to grow back. This picture was the day of the blood test, so it’s totally bald. She was so freaked out when I touched her skin there =) She has fuzzy fur there now, but still very short.

      continue reading this post
    • Imagine Science Film Festival

      Friday, 23 Oct 2009

      I went up and down to New York this week, and watched people watch Lab Waste

      I was in a foul mood before the trip, because my web host is evil and I’m bored and grumpy about not working in general, and all kinds of other little things that just piled up. The only reason I even went to New York is that I had already paid for the bus ticket, and I had nothing better to do.

      Even walking up to the Bell House I was still grumpy and considered just turning around. I didn’t need to be there, it wouldn’t matter.

      But once I was inside there was a bar and random nice people who recommended beer to me (I didn’t know 90% of the strange local beers on the draft list) so my mood slowly changed, and only went uphill from there. Once the doors opened, though, I was a bit skeptical about the many chairs they put out for the screening. Nine tiny films, many of which were already online – why would people even show up for that on a Tuesday night?

      But the place was packed very quickly. I picked a seat near the side, so I could look at the audience and see how they reacted. I found Alexis and introduced myself, and heard that there were filmmakers for three of the films present, so we would do a little Q&A at the end.


      So many people

      Here’s the introduction to the films:

      The films were all very different. There were documentaries, fictional stories, music videos, and animations from all areas of science. Sabbi – who I didn’t find until after the screening – said she was going to blog about the first film of the night, “Naming Pluto”, so I’ll skip that. My own favourite was MEPE , which was a funny detective story about a biologist who stole different species of animals to study a protein, and the detective who solved the case. (Here it is online , but it’s in French and this version doesn’t have subtitles.)

      The crowd pleaser was PCR Rap , and Zach was also in attendance. I met him at the question round, and then again on the train back.

      I got so nervous when Lab Waste came on. The people sitting near me didn’t know that I made it, so I could observe their honest reactions. Lab Waste was one of the few serious films of the evening so it didn’t get any laughs (and this audience was in stitches about Sir Patrick Moore in another film, so the treshold for laughing was quite low…) but I got applause and some cheers at the end =)

      At the end of the nine films that were on the program, we got to see two bonus films. One was a Bulgarian 1974 futuristic vision of 2000, involving robots and communism and outer space. The other bonus film was Ginger, about the genetics of red hair, and that was awesome because I know all about pigmentation genetics and the red hair mutation is seriously cool, but also because it had Jenny in it! Yay! I tried to take a picture, but in a typical 21st-century mishap I accidentally took a video. As soon as I realized that, it just captured the audience laughing, so I left it on video:

      After all the screenings, there was a Q&A, where I met the other film makers who were present: Zach of PCR Rap, and Daniel and Aron of the Moth and the Firefly . Unlike Zach and I, who made our videos in between lab work, Daniel and Aron were proper film makers. They had screened the Moth and the Firefly at other festivals, but they had never had such a big audience as at ISFF. Eep! The Q&A was fun. I told the backstory of how I was inspired to make Lab Waste after attending some screenings about garbage at HotDocs (Toronto documentary festival) last year, and then going to the lab an hour later to throw out all those pre-wrapped pipettes. There were a few HotDocs fans in the audience, judging from the whoops when I mentioned it =)

      And when that was done, I finally saw Sabbi and we had a drink with Alexis at the bar. They’re planning a London version of the festival for next year, so those of you who are there should definitely go to that.

    • Info

      Monday, 19 Oct 2009

      Normally I would post this kind of stuff on easternblot but I’m having huge problems with my host right now. Whenever I try to update the site, they block my IP and now I can’t reach my own site from house and from two major UofT libraries. I found out that I was being blocked by contacting the people where the traceroute timed out every single time. They were the people who actually own the servers, they rent out space to resellers, and they were very friendly and helpful but can’t unblock me without the reseller’s permission. I just paid for another year of hosting, too, and can’t get the money back if I can’t contact them (which I can’t!) so I’m thoroughly annoyed by all this. I’m looking for a new host, but since I’m out of town for two days I’ll leave it until I get back.

      Meanwhile, I figured: why not post the pretty things I found for easternblot on Expression Patterns for a while. After all, Nature Network is free, and the tech support has a face and name and actually talks back when something is wrong. And NPG doesn’t block my IP address when I try to post. That’s another major advantage. Makes things a lot easier.

      So after all that information that you didn’t care much about, here’s some more interesting – and prettier – information.

      Information is Beautiful makes infographics from information they spend a long time looking up in far less accessible places. Here is the most recent ,“How Safe is the HPV Vaccine?”. It’s pretty big, so it’s in the extended entry. Click below to see the whole post (if you don’t yet)

      continue reading this post
    • Lab Waste playing at ISFF next week

      Thursday, 15 Oct 2009

      The Imagine Science Film Festival kicks off today in New York. I’ll miss most of the event, but since I have absolutely nothing better to do than sitting on an overnight bus, I’ve decided to go there on Tuesday to attend the “Quirky Science Shorts” event. Lab Waste is screening there, together with eight other shorts.

      If you’re in the area, do drop by. That night’s screening is free and doesn’t require any registration.

      Info:
      Quirky Science Shorts
      Tuesday October 20
      Starts at 8PM according to the ISFF site and 7:30 according to the Bell House site.
      (I don’t know which order the films are in)
      Location: The Bell House
      149 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

      This is the full blurb from the Bell House site:

      “Calling all brainiacs and cinemaniacs…The Imagine Science Film Festival teams up with the Secret Science Club for A NIGHT OF QUIRKY SHORT FILMS, featuring Techno Noir, Animation, Documentary & Music Video. Now in its second year, the Imagine Science Film Festival invites film-makers to submit narrative films with a scientific or technological theme, and films that have a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a lead character. This year, the juried festival attracted hundreds of international entries, and we’ll be showing some of the strangest and best at the Bell House, featuring subjects like madness and molecules, time travel and trans-species friendships, and the dwarf planet Pluto. Check out the following films from the USA, UK, Israel, France, Canada, and the Kuiper Belt: Naming Pluto, Animated Minds, The Moth and the Firefly, PCR Rap, Lab Waste, The Exquisite Corpse of Science, A Micrometer from Here, Natural Selection, and more. Alexis Gambis, the festival’s founder and artistic director, will be on-hand to answer your brainiest questions!

      Before & After

      —Groove to tunes from our mixology lab

      —Vote for your favorite film as part of the Imagine Science Film Festival’s “People’s Choice” award

      —Imbibe the wide-angle cocktail of the night, the Digital Zoom

      —Pick up some science swag from the film festival’s generous sponsors

      --Participate in our “Sketchy Science” drawing contest. We’ll provide the paper. You draw a scientastic picture.

      See, it will be fun.


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