We all know how the game works. Hip chefs find some food that is totally plebian, the opposite of glamorous, and then remake it with high quality ingredients, and do interesting things with it.

It’s the cinderella factor in food.

This is part of the appeal behind all the recent hip foods: bacon (breakfast staple), cupcakes (childhood birthday parties / bake sales), sliders (bar food, white castle), meatballs (school lunches?), tacos (street food, Taco Bell), banh mi (the taco of vietnamese food), and with food truck food in general.

And I’m not complaining. Not at all. I love it, and I love all these foods.

I just want to add my personal recommendation to the list:

Pizza rolls.

Because what’s less glamorous than a tiny roll of dough that contains all the ingredients for a pizza inside? It tastes like pizza, but is a totally different shape. And it’s delicious. It’s an opportunity for chefs to add their personal distinctive tough, it’s a challenge, and it harkens back to sleepovers and junior high.

Imagine this on your next menu:

Pizza Rolls – Locally sourced chorizo pepperoni, sauteed heirloom tomato puree, fresh mozzarella di buffala, a hint of Maytag blue cheese, organic fennel, semolina flour crust.

Why hasn’t this happened yet? Or has it happened but hasn’t made its way to Cold Weather City yet?

My wife and I have a guessing game called “What’s the next cupcake?” where we guess what food will become hip next. We are both predicting the pizza roll. They dont require silverware and aren’t too greasy, so they are perfect for food trucks.

Yes I am running for the SFN program committee *

* Not really

Here is my platform:

1. Submitting your poster also registers you for the conference. One easy step.

2. It also allows you to get your hotel. This in turn incentivises you to submit before the last minute (avoiding server malfunctions) and lets you do all your SFN planning in one day, rather than doing it in multiple steps across the summer.

* UPDATE * Come to think of it, why require people to get their membership in December? Why not let them do it all at the same time?? Let’s stop pretending that anyone joins the society in order to get a free subscription to Neuroscience Nexus.

3. Anti-linking groups. There are numerous reasons why you might want to have two posters be at different times. For example, I have two students who both take an interest in each other’s project, and they want to be there for the other one to answer overflow questions, go fetch water, see what questions are, learn the mechanics of poster presentation, etc.

4. 3 month window between deadline and conference. 1 month to fix the program and 2 months for attendees to browse.

5. One member wants more than one poster? That’s fine, make a check for $600 to the SFN. It’s a $-making opportunity, say I. Nothing wrong with it. Your third poster will cost you $1200.

6. Somewhere, a link to acceptance rates for nanosymposia. I mean, ideally, the submission deadline for nanosymposia is 2 weeks before the poster deadline, and they give you a thumbs up or down on that before the poster thing. That reduces the weirdly byzantine stragetizing a lot. But if it can’t be done, at least a plausible guess on acceptance rates.

7. Optional poster upload database. That way, no need to hand out copies of the poster. No need for people to try to sneak photos, etc.

8. Prominent links to good poster-design sites.

I have a to-do list and it’s served me well for 8 years.

Until recently, I used to go through it every day and try to get as much done as possible.

In the past few months, I have started to divide it into the “urgent” and “less urgent” sections.

In the past few weeks, I added little *’s in front of the things in the urgent things that are truly truly urgent.

This morning I decided to make a new category called “ABSOLUTELY DO OR DIE”.

Im very ready for my first year to be over.

I missed the boat on the carnival of Imposter Syndrome since my wordpress has been acting really weird since I upgraded. That gave me a chance to read all the other posts first.

Here’s my two cents on Imposter Syndrome, and I speak as someone who is very familiar with it, from personal experience. I also have had lots of friends with this, and have tried to help them through it. I also have seen many of these same people give up on science, due to a variety of factors, but I felt that confidence was one.

In the past, my inclination has been to try to say things like ‘Hey, just don’t worry about it.’ or ‘Think about how fun it is to get away with it!’ And In retrospect, I think that’s not all that helpful.

Just telling someone their thoughts are illogical or unreasonable doesn’t work that well. They may go along with it, but fighting against those ego-dystonic unwanted thoughts is exhausting. It’s depleting. And when you backslide, and those thoughts reappear, then you feel guilty, and helpless, and you don’t want to bring it up again, and it just gets worse.

I don’t know whether Imposter Syndrome is an anxiety disorder, but I think it’s useful to treat it like one. And that means self-CBT and if the case is bad enough, or if typical comorbid conditions present psychotropic meds.

That means, things like reality testing. Coming up with objective tests of whether one is where one belongs, and then performing those tests. More generally, it means treating it as a serious problem, and getting help from books designed to help people with these kinds of doubts.

I love whoopie pies.
And I love devil dogs.

Whoopie pies and devil dogs are the same thing but a different shape. Chocolate cake bun with cream inside.

I love the name devil dog, since it implies you have a devil’s version of a hot dog. The devil either implies devil’s food cake or the sinfulness of eating it.

Either way, my point is that whoopie pies should be called devil burgers.

Right???

In our quest to save money to buy a house, we have decided to start grooming the dog ourselves. That saves us $$$ every 3 months. You might say that dog grooming is a luxury good, and you’d be kinda right. But he gets really miserable in the summer. And we get the puppy cut, the cheapest cut.

Anyhow, here’s the results of my foray into dog grooming last night. I used youtube and google to learn how to do it.

Before:

Before

After:

After

Although they weren’t posed, the dog’s facial expressions demonstrate the effect on morale. In short, he was miserable getting shaved. He is also miserable when we leave him at the groomers.

All in all, I would grade myself at a C minus for cutting performance. There’s a lot of ragged + rough spots, and clumpy fur in places. Still, he’s presentable, and much less likely to overheat in the summer.

Professors have a ritual called travelling. The visit some other institution and give a 1 hour talk there. They also have 6-10 appointments with other faculty members in their offices, and talk about each other’s research. They also eat lunch, often with grad students, and dinner, often with wine.

This is the professor equivalent of bumblebees visiting flowers, gathering pollen, and redistributing it. It’s a very important element of a scientific career. I think this ritual should be extended to grad students too.

Grad students can benefit from this experience in several ways. (1) They get a chance to speak in front of an unfamiliar audience. (2) They get critical evaluation of their ideas from an unfamiliar group of scientists, typically before publication. (3) They get exposure to their future colleagues, can discover potential friendships and collaborations. But most important (4) they get to see how things are done somewhere else. I think this pollination keeps departments from falling into ruts. [Also, it helps students with weird/abusive advisors realize that they are in a bad/unusual situation.]

Also, it gives grad students a convenient way-station. Grad school is often a long slog with no adventures and no rewards, and feelings of being trapped in lab forever. Finally, it can also be a reward/incentive for students to produce data. A nice carrot for advisors to use in instrumental conditioning of students.

To deal with your likely objections:

(Objection 1) Grad students give boring / bad talks, so no faculty will show up: The audience would be expressly other students (and post-docs). Faculty are allowed to attend, but only if they are keen to learn about the material. This also reduces anxiogenic audience members. As a secondary suggestion, students should write 35 minute talks, and 25 minutes will be given over to discussion. This makes the burden of writing a talk lower, and gives students practice for thinking on their feet.

(Objection 2) Faculty dont want to give up time to meet with students: same deal. The visiting students meet with other students (and post-docs).

(Objection 3) Grad students should be presenting their science in lab meetings: Lab meeting is full of people with very specialized knowledge. Students need practice talking to a general audience. Also, don’t forget the 6-10 meetings.

(Objection 4) Too many talks already: Visitors’ talks will replace the normal student journal club time. Alternatively, these could happen in the summer when there are no speakers anyhow.

(Objection 5) Hotels costs a lot: We need to come up with a more official sounding term than ‘couch surfing’ because that’s basically what I’m proposing.

(Objection 6) Airfare costs a lot: In my scheme, grad students will only go to institutions they can drive/commute to. This will limit them to the 3-4 hour radius, but that’s fine. There are plenty of good places within this limit for most grad students. Near to Cold Weather University, we have
* Cold Weather Institute of Technology
* Lakeside Ivy League University
* Orange-themed Basketball University
* Napoleon’s Defeat University
* OYU
* Cold Weather State University Waterfall City

In conclusion, I want to add that this is all doubly true for post-docs. They need practice with strangers, giving talks, etc, in preparation for job talks. They need the exposure, and then need the practice selling themselves.

One year ago today, a group of about 24 Navy Seals landed in Pakistan with night vision goggles and body armor and killed Osama Bin Laden.

At the moment he died, to the best of my calculations, it was our first dance. We did some rudimentary dancing to Beyond the Sea, played by a surprisingly good jazz quartet. We were married about three hours earlier by our friend Stephen, who was internet-ordained, and by my wife’s sister, who was getting a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies, which is close enough to being a religious figure. I broke the wineglass with my foot on my first try.

None of the guests checked their news reading apps on their phones, I suppose. Or maybe the news didn’t break until the very end of the reception. I think we would have heard about it, despite the other important stuff going on.

We shooed our guests away and went back to our hotel room. Being us, our first activity alone, as a married couple, was to check our emails on our separate laptops. Next we checked the news sites. She turned to me and said, “looks like something big happened during our wedding.” I said, “Is it related to Will and Kate?”

“Bigger.”

First it was just rumors, then very quickly it was everywhere. We read everything we could while we ate our food and cake, since we had been too busy talking to family and friends at the reception to eat.

We had plane tickets to Morocco and a 2 week honeymoon planned for May 4. Both mothers were strongly encouraging us to cancel the honeymoon since there had been a bombing in Marrakech a couple days earlier, during our wedding rehearsal, and it had targeted and killed tourists. We had pushed back against them – but with Bin Laden gone, many tourist websites were recommending American tourists avoid Muslim countries for the time being.

We relaxed Sunday. We spent our first two days as a married couple frantically rearranging our trip. We ended up getting our flight changed to Venice, renting a car there, and driving down, and then back up, the Dalmatian coast. We called our Croatian friend and got some tips. I spent 30 minutes trying to learn to drive a stick shift the night before we left. I managed to drive around the Balkans for two weeks without hitting anything.

Our aunt got us super-discounts at a great hotel in Split. Rick Steves’ book located us a very nice B+B in Dubrovnik. The New York Times told us to get the truffles in Istria. My wife likes to say we learned more about the Balkan Wars on our honeymoon than any other couple has, ever. We even visited Bosnia, which is kind of like a Muslim country. If I could change anything, I don’t know that I would alter a single detail.

The stari most, or old bridge, in Mostar, Bosnia+Herzegovinia

The Counting Crows new album, in my opinion.

Even the Gram Parsons cover, which sounds good in theory, is pretty uninspired.

The Counting Crows have 6 albums. The quality of each album is objectively a major step down from the previous one.

And that still works whether or not you include their live album Across a Wire.

That kind of pure monotonic descent has to be unique in music history. No juvenilia, no comeback, no “best album since XXX”. Just a straight line, pointing down.

I’m having trouble thinking of any other artist with just a clear descent. Some may say that is true of the Stone Roses, but since they only have two albums, that’s kind of a degenerate case.

I will try to enforce a 3 month window between abstract deadline and the first day of the meeting.

Is that possible?

Don’t know. But I can’t see why not, since it’s all electronic, and how much oversight do they give to the abstracts? They are basically just checking to make sure we don’t advocate creationism, or anything else the society doesn’t want to stand behind, right?

True it takes a while to decide on the nanosymposia. But those are gradually being dissociated from the posters anyhow.