Wedding Ceremony

We got a lot of great compliments on our wedding ceremony, especially from friends who, like us, aren’t really religious. In answer to the questions we got, it was cobbled together from other ceremonies we found on the internet, and we added our own touches where we thought it was appropriate. We were really happy with how it turned out.

So that others can do the same thing, I posted the ceremony on our wedding site. Take what you want, or use the whole thing, if you’re so inclined.

Newlyweds

The wedding was great, and it was fantastic to see our families and so many old friends all in one place. My only regret is that I didn’t get to spend more time with everyone individually.

We’re off on a cruise to Central America, so no posts for the next week or so.

Married Life

C: Come on - it’s time to get up
H: I’m on the verge of getting up
C: You’ve been on the verge of getting up for 45 minutes now
H: But I liiike it on the verge!

Homeward Bound

I’m off to St. Louis for the holiday, then Boston for a conference, so don’t expect much blogging this week. Have a great Thanksgiving!

Working from home

Left: The lab’s Macbook Pro. Not mine, although it is pretty and fun to play with.

Center: Dual monitors for my Ubuntu desktop

Right: An old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Edgy. (I never bothered to upgrade)

all controlled via one mouse and keyboard with Synergy

A New Low

I was looking for something in my closet today, and thought: “Geez - I really need to delete some of this junk.”

I think I spend too much time on the computer.

Corporate Whoring

They say you should keep 3 month’s expenses tucked away in case of emergencies, and I figure that it’s good advice. I got tired of seeing that money stagnate in my checking account, devaluing slowly with inflation, so I did some research into savings accounts with the following criteria:

1) It had to have a high interest rate. The idea here is to make as much money as I can.

2) My money had to be accessible in case of emergencies. As a grad student, I’m not exactly rolling in the dough, so locking up cash in a CD was not an option.

After some research, it turns out that the online sites like HSBC and ING Direct have pretty nice online savings accounts. I signed up with ING Direct a few months ago, and found it fairly simple to set up and use. You just link the account to your existing checking account, then do transfers through the web portal. The best part is that I’m making 4.5% interest on my (meager) savings. I won’t be retiring on that money anytime soon, but hey - it’s enough for a few beers.

If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, I can send you a referral link that will net you 25 bucks just for signing up. (It will also get me a ten dollar referral fee). I don’t want to sound like a corporate whore, but I figure if you’re going to sign up anyway, we might as well both make a little cash off of the deal. You also might want to check out the other sites before signing up with ING. I hear that they run special offers from time to time that might get you even better interest rates for the first year or so.

The more things change…

Four years ago, almost to the day, I took the political compass test.

My results then?

Economic Left/Right: -6.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.85

Today, on a whim, I took it again. My results:

Economic Left/Right: -6.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.74

If nothing else, I’m consistent.

Collegiate Culture

Tonight, I took a little trip down memory lane and read some of the old posts on my college fraternity’s message board. As I remembered old friends and acquaintances, I was struck by how different my social circle is now than it was in college. In college, I hung out with a few science majors, but I had even more friends who studied the arts, literature, history, and politics. Thanks mostly to my involvement in Phi Sigma Pi, I was surrounded by one of the brightest and most diverse groups of people that I’ve every had the privilege to know.

Things are a bit different now. My friends are every bit as intelligent, but they’re also almost entirely from the graduate school at BCM, which is anything but a diverse institution. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to do science, but it’s a research institution, not a college campus. It’s very much a monoculture of highly rational and highly focused individuals. People are here to focus their time and energies on research in one very specific subdiscipline, and as a result, they tend to experience tunnel-vision.

After 18 months of immersion in this culture, I sometimes feel like I’m losing my ability to zoom out and see the world through from different angles. I miss talking philosophy over lunch and then catching a crazy play in the evening. I miss walking through the art gallery while arguing about the inherent flaws in communism. Mainly, I miss talking with people who provided an alternative perspective to my own, and thus complimented my talents. That circle of friends was really a place where our whole was greater than the sum of our parts.

I try to fill these holes by reading on diverse topics and hitting up the occasional jazz concert or art show, but doesn’t even come close to replacing the ubiquitous diversity that you find on liberal arts campus. I’m beginning to realize that I took much of my time in undergrad for granted, and beginning to understand how fortunate I was.

All bemoaning aside, this really has two effects on me. The first is that it makes me realize that I need to work harder to seek out more diverse events and people here in Houston. The second is that it really strengthens my desire to get back on a small campus, in a teaching role this time. Tier I research schools are great for funding and great for research, but I need more than this culture can offer.

Back in Houston

So this is the new year.
And i don’t feel any different.

– Death Cab For Cutie - “The New Year”

You won’t regret it!

Okay, you probably will.. But take my quiz anyway.

I pity tha’ fool who don’t take Miller’s quiz!

EDIT: I got the dog years thing backwards. If I were a dog, 4 is how many human years old I would be. My bad

Average

Reading this is kind of inspirational. I suppose I can relate.

“Today after class I flirted with the idea of being average. There are times when I question whether ‘average’ isn’t a completely acceptable way to live one’s life. But in my moments of empowerment – my moments of clarity – I know that’s just not true. I know that my life is meant to be something extraordinary, and I have to believe that I’ll get there someday. I just can’t let the doubts and the fears wear me down first.”

Today’s schedule

1:00 pm: Face off with my quals committee in what promises to be a gruesome battle to the death.

6:00 pm: pick up the girl at the airport

8:00 pm: either celebrate my victory or drown my sorrows

2:00 am: Crash. Hard.

UPDATE: I passed. Life is good.

Crohn’s Disease

Want to lose 20 pounds in 3 months? Have I got the disorder for you! It’s called Crohn’s disease, and I was diagnosed with it about three weeks ago.

I’ll talk about the interesting biomedical stuff in another post, but for now, I’ll just tell you that the disease causes chronic inflammation of the intestines and it’s exact causes are unknown.

My case unfolded as follows: (more under the fold)

Read the rest of this entry »

On top of the world

I’ve been so prolific in posting the last few days because I’ve been waiting to hear back from my qualifying exam committee about which abstract I’m supposed to turn into a full-fledged proposal and then defend. Until that happens, there isn’t much work I can do. I was supposed to hear back today, but there’s been no word so far. Given that I’m short on time to begin with, this is bad news.

Hopefully I’ll find out soon, and can get to work. When that happens, it’s likely that my posting will be sporadic, at least until I’m done in mid-September.

Big Science

The top funded bio labs in the US are as follows:

1) Landers, MIT, $53m, Informatics & genome
2) Richard Wilson, Washington U, $46m, Informatics & genome
3) Richard Gibbs, BCM, $33m, Rhesus, Macaque & Bovine genomes

I’m not directly under Richard Gibbs, but I do work in the HGSC. My lab does bioinformatics work on the genomes that come out of it.

The HGSC was one of the five institutions that worked on the original Human Genome Project. (Wash U being another that will be familiar to many of my readers). Though more small labs are getting in the game as costs come down, the majority of genome sequencing work is still being done at these major centers.

Its always good to be reminded that I’m surrounded by people at the top of their scientific game. It certainly can’t hurt my career, right?

Movin’ Up (literally)

I recently joined the lab of Aleksandar Milosavljevic, Ph.D., and I’m starting to feel my way towards a thesis project, while working on my qualifying exam abstracts. The general focus of our lab is on comparative genomics and informatics, applied to a variety of systems. This includes both the development of algorithms and the application of these techniques to projects like cross-species comparisons or cancer genome analysis.

My office space is nice, though a bit noisy at times, since I share it with 3 other people. The biggest perk is that I have a window seat on the 16th (top) floor of BCM.

I’ve got scenic urban views out west to the galleria area (pictured) and north towards downtown. I also get to see the medvac copters land on the roof at Memorial Hospital right outside. I used to watch them swoop in and ponder how amazing our ability to fly is, but the novelty of that is wearing off quickly.

In about three weeks, I’ll be finishing the first phase of my qualifying exams, so if you don’t hear from me much until then, you’ll know why.

Ruminations

I’ve always been someone who’s prided myself on my intelligence, and I’ve always been ahead of the class. From the time when I read a book to my preschool class, all the way through my undergraduate degrees, I’ve always felt that I was one of the smartest people in the room.

Here, in graduate school, I’ve reached a level where this no longer holds true. In fact, in many situations, I feel like I’m wearing the dunce cap.

At least once a day, I’m exposed to parts of biology that I knew absolutely nothing about. Sometimes I even learn about whole fields of research whose existence I couldn’t even have dreamed up. While this is sometimes cool, it’s also pretty overwhelming.

It certainly doesn’t help that during rotations, I’m starting from scratch every two months. Due to the variety of labs I’ve been through, it’s a constant barrage of new pathways, new techniques, and a new alphabet soup of acronyms and vocabulary that are unique to every field. For first years, ‘drinking from the firehose’ is an apt analogy.

At its best, grad school is exciting and invigorating. I’m around so many people who are at the top of their field, publishing groundbreaking research, and working towards noble goals. At its worst, it’s disheartening and frustrating. Listening to the best researchers in their fields can make you realize how very far you have to go.

At this point, I’m more than ready to join a lab. I’m tired of classes, tired of rotations, tired of seminars over things I’ll never research. I need to start making real progress toward something, no matter how distant and amorphous that dissertation may be.

That’s what grad school is all about. We’re not here to become the world’s leading expert in biology, we’re here to carve out a small niche for ourselves, whether that be in calcium channel function in mammals, or application of novel bioinformatics algorithms to the human genome. We’re here to pick one thing, and research it until we become an expert in our tiny corner of science.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m ready to begin.

Sick

I am pretty much a walking mucus factory right now. Just thought you’d like to know.

Growing Pains

Chris: When did we suddenly become responsible adults?
Chris: I never signed off on that
Mike: HAhA