helen-louise's journal

Also, if you're wondering what I'm doing up at 8.30 in the morning, I'm having "fun" with Powerpoint. Usually I'd use OpenOffice, but for the presentation I'm giving on Thursday, I'm "not allowed" to plug my laptop in to their projector as it will take too long for each student's laptop to be connected and disconnected. So I have to transfer my presentation to their computer using a memory stick, which means I have to use fucking Powerpoint.

Since Office 2007, the Mac versions are substantially more usable than the PC versions since Apple "banned" the stupid "ribbon", but Powerpoint in particular is still in "burn it with fire" territory. You're regimentedly forced to use THEIR themes (I suppose geniuses can make their own, but it seemed like it would take far more effort than it's worth), and it's a ridiculous pain in the arse just to do something simple like have 3 frames on the screen instead of 2. I've worked out how to do it, but... ugh.

20 minutes ago, I was cursing because I deleted a row to make some more space, and it randomly resized my slide from my choice of 24 pt to *26 pt* to use up the "wasted" space! I NEEDED that space to type another sentence in! I guess if I'd ignored it, it would have resized the text back again - but really, it shouldn't do that automatically! There should be an option somewhere... but I did look, and couldn't see anything obvious.

It's weird that I love my Xbox 360 so much when I generally loathe everything else that Microsoft have ever done. Well, that's not true - Office 95 and Windows XP were both pretty good. It just all went to pot after that. In my opinion. Obviously.

Does anyone know roughly how long a 10 minute talk should be in terms of word count?

I know that I'm not supposed to write the entire script of the talk and read it out, but it'll be much easier to learn if I write it out first at least in bullet points. But I can't work out how long that should be.

I also don't understand why giving a talk should be so much scarier than teaching a class. How come I have a kind of intrinsic knowledge of how long it will take to present material in that context, but not in this context?

The 6-slide limit really doesn't help.

On Friday, it it was bothering me that not only was I not getting on with my college work, I wasn't panicked about how far behind I am. Yesterday, I went out and bought a goddamned lightbox. Since I got the lightbox, my ability to concentrate has come back...

...but so has my EXTREME STRESS about how late I've left this work! Now the panic is getting in the way. I would like it at the level of "motivator", not at the level of "paralyser". Stress stress stress.

Kind thoughts welcome.

Back home now. Haven't exactly been keeping up either with livejournal or the real-world news. (American news is full of people I've never heard of and very little about the world outside the US).

Tuesday night dinner was at Blockheads, a typical American Tex-Mex, but one that knew what vegans are. I get Mexican food when I'm in Seattle at the lovely Taco Del Mar, but they do vegan by simply leaving out the dairy. Blockheads do vegan by substituting tofu sour cream and vegan soy cheese. Food was rich, but tasty: OM NOM NOM NOM NOM! I also appreciated their minimalist approach to onions - none visible in the black beans or rice, only a couple of small soft pieces in the salsa, which was otherwise full of plump tomato flesh. Why does salsa at so many places mean tomato skin and onion? I don't understand how anyone would want to eat that.

Literature report got emailed about 2.30am on Tuesday, which was Late according to my deadline, but there really wasn't anything I could do about it. Got back from dinner ready to finish it off, but there's an annoying bug in Mac OpenOffice whereby if you try copy & pasting from a PDF that doesn't let you copy & paste for copyright reasons, you get a massive object in the middle of the document that then crashes OpenOffice. Due to excessive panic, my brain fell out of my head when this happened at 11.50pm, and I hit "save"... meaning that I corrupted the file. Normally I have compulsive backups of everything but for some reason (as I got more panicked about getting it done) I forgot to keep resaving with new names, and my more recent backup was apparently 6 hours old... argh! We had to download the newest version of Windows OpenOffice over the hotel network (which took over an hour!), install it on Richard's PC, put the corrupted file on a USB stick and open it on the PC to clean it up so I could finish formatting the references. Ewww. Haven't completely finished the lit report - I sent what I had so that something got submitted. Will finish it off over the next few days.

We went to bed about 3am on Tuesday and got up again about 11 in time to pack our bags and check out of the hotel. We went for lunch at Fresh & Co which had vegan soup, pasta and falafel sandwiches, as well as the New York-style baked cheesecake that my Mum had spent three days moaning about the lack of. Spent the afternoon shopping, which was what I'd planned to do this trip anyway. Just... I'd planned to do MORE of it than I got to do. Bought everything I wanted from the Hot Topic in Queens Center, not that there was very much there :/ (I'm sure it used to be in a bigger shop within the mall). Haven't bought anything for the few people that I am buying Christmas presents for, yet. Principally because I have no money, and I can't borrow money from Richard for his own Christmas present! I need to claim back my money from Student Finance England, and hope that my two old students who bugged me with phone calls while I was away want to have lots of lessons. But not so many that they get in the way of finishing my literature report. Ugh.

Trip back was uneventful. Watched Harry Potter 6, which is awesome, the first two episodes of Glee, and the pilot of My Name is Earl - all good inflight, brain-isn't-working entertainment. Richard and I failed to get any sleep at all, my mum managed about an hour. Got back about 12 noon today and promptly crashed out the whole day. Woke up about 1.30am and now wondering how on earth to get myself back onto UK time. Also desperate for a holiday. We'll be going to Boston at the end of the month, but not for very long, and I'm wondering if I can rearrange my flight home so I can get a bit more time in the US. Anyone want a visiting h-l? Of course, I don't actually have any money right now, so this may be completely impossible.

Things I need to write about: travelling whilst disabled, and the approaches of various airlines and airports to "special" meals. Might leave that until after my trip to Boston, depending on spoons and how much else I need to say.

Dear uterus,

Please fuck off. Now is not a good time for pain. Have literature report to do. Thanks!

No love,
h-l (who came into London today without a supply of dihydrocodeine).

I'm going mad trying to find a citation. Wikipedia says that 96% of neurons in the neostriatum (part of the brain) are medium spiny neurons (they are medium-sized, and look spiny or hairy). This is relevant because that type of neuron is destroyed preferentially by Huntington's disease.

So far, I've found references claiming numbers from 95% to 98.8%, but for the density of medium spiny neurons in the neostriatum of MICE or RATS. I'm not sure that numbers applicable to rodents would necessarily apply to humans. Certainly, our brains are much more complicated!

After about 2 hours of searching, I've found references for "over 95% in rats and mice, and 75-80% in primates" (in a textbook, published 2007) and "90–95% in rats and over 85% in humans" in a paper published in 2008. But nowhere have I seen a value of over 90% for humans, let alone 96%.

So I've posted on the relevant Wikipedia Talk pages asking people with more time than me to look over the numbers. I don't have time to try editing Wikipedia myself, not when it's more than a very minor edit and I don't know all the codes, and I have a literature report to write. I think this will be my new thing to do whenever I find mistakes on Wikipedia and don't have time to correct them myself. It's not as useful as making the correction, but at least it points people who have time to the data.

Today I have been trying to get some work done after having procrastinated for TOO LONG. I got to the point where I hadn't done academic work for so long that I had The Fear about starting again. I have been and still am ill, with some sort of virus - I half-wrote but never got round to posting a discussion of whether it is Epstein-Barr again (bloody thing comes back whenever your immune system is a bit low) or "just" a killer cold, but whatever it is has been totally wiping me out. I've been ill for three weeks now, and am only just now breathing well enough to have some semblance of my normal energy level. Also, Not Breathing Well Makes You Stupid (copyright artremis), so for two of these past three weeks I really couldn't think at all.

The thing about being behind on work is that in order to start again, I need to get to that magical point where the fear of what will happen if I don't do the work is higher than the fear of what will happen if I do. It's paralysing until then, which is why there's fairly weighty psychology behind the idea of "tell yourself you'll do 10 minutes and then stop". It's the initial activation energy of getting going that's the problem, not the work itself. It's doubly ironic in that explaining science things is one of my favourite activities, and I actually like and enjoy this particular subject! (In an intellectual sense, of course - I don't like the concept of horrible genetic disorders).

I am also still annoyed that, as usual, the university authorities are dishonest as to the true reason why I have to write the first chapter of my PhD thesis now. They are claiming it solely as an assessment exercise, but it's clear that isn't the full story. More likely, it's because every year, hundreds of PhD students fail to complete because they don't write up their theses, because they look at the blank computer screen and go into a wild frothing panic of procrastination. I suppose they think if we have to write a report every year, then the final thesis is just combining the existing reports and writing a bit more on top, and therefore it's much more likely that we'll finish. I would like it so much better if they admitted that was the reason - not least of all because it would give reassurance to those of us with anxiety problems, for whom every report is as difficult as the first.

...I think I shall feed that back through the Anxiety and Depression Group and see if it can get pointed out to any highers-up.

Having given up and gone to bed two and a half hours ago, work is now happening. Well, WHATEVER - I don't care what time the clock says if I have a concentration span and am able to get useful work done. However, I am now reading an article by this man who is obsessed with the word physicochemical, and it's annoying me greatly. I'm not joking about his obsession - on the same page, we have:
"the physicochemical features of protein folding"
"the physicochemical basis of protein folding"
"the same physicochemical features of the polypeptide chains" and
"under the physicochemical conditions found in the living systems".

The reason it's annoying me is that physicochemical is a horrible kludge of a word. Technically, it means "relating to physics and chemistry"; but in practice, the features that are being described are entirely physical - as in "relating to physics". But they don't use the word "physical" in these papers for two reasons:

1) Virtually no one reading the paper would describe themselves as a physicist. You'll get a lot of Physical Chemists, a few Chemical Physicists, and a few Biophysicists - but no unmodified Physicists. (Also, the word "physicist" now looks like it's spelled wrongly through having been typed too many times, hmmm). The author doesn't want to alienate readers by implying that these mysterious but very important properties are all to do with physics - even though they are! (We're talking about very basic properties such as electrostatics, here - opposite charges attracting and same charges repelling. Electrostatics cover at least 90% of the "physicochemical" features being referred to in this context).

2) When people read the word "physical" next to "features", many people will jump to thinking in terms of what the molecules look like. After all, my physical features include brown eyes and long hair. Non-physicists don't immediately associate the word "physical" with physics!

So instead, this horrible made-up word appears to try to stop biologists and biochemists^* freaking out at/being confused by the mention of physics.

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate the division of science into three main and a handful of ancillary subjects? There's a huge amount of physics in chemistry, a huge amount of chemistry in biology, and even quite a bit of physics in biology (though I'm not sure there's too much biology in physics); while materials science crosses over everything. Students tell me "I love biology" / "I hate physics" without being aware of how much of one subject is in the other. Tell me you hate a topic - I'll happily accept "I hate electricity" / "I hate Newtonian mechanics". But don't tell me you hate an entire discipline until you've learned how much nifty cell biology and functioning of the nervous system is due to basic physics.

This rant has been brought to you by the letter P for physicochemical, and the letter C for cold. Which it is. 2.4 deg C outside right now, brrr!

^* Interesting note: I no longer know what I am. I used to be a Physical Chemist. Then I was either an Atmospheric Physicist or an Environmental Chemist. Now I could be a Biochemist or a Molecular Biologist or a Chemical Biologist or a Medicinal Chemist... Woo, interdisciplinary!

I have done something Difficult, and need congratulating for it.

I have filled in the Mitigating Circumstances form for College regarding my literature report, which is supposed to be submitted by tomorrow, and won't be because it doesn't actually exist. There was a big empty box entitled "Please explain how the circumstances have affected your work and/or studies", and I had to write something meaningful in it. That took me 3 hours. It didn't help that some FLAPPING MORON from my university managed to produce the form on US LETTER SIZE paper, whereas in this country the standard size is A4 - so all the margins are screwed up!

The form has now been emailed to the correct person, but I don't have a doctor's letter owing to the fact my doctor has gone on holiday for 2 weeks. He agreed in August to write a letter, but I wanted to leave it until I had some sort of timescale on returning to my studies. If he has left useful information on the computer system then another doctor will be able to write the letter from his notes, but if not I will have to wait until he is back.

I am staying up until 2pm, and then I am Going To Bed.

Here are my results:

Appalling pun of the day: Modeling age-related diseases in Drosophila: Can this fly? *groan*

Weird description of the day: solenoid-like proteins
When I think "solenoid", I think of a coil of wire with current passing through it. I don't think of a helical protein!

Awesome journal titles of the day: Brain Research Bulletin and International Journal of Hyperthermia

Misleadingly simple research paper title of the day: Beyond the Qs in the polyglutamine diseases
The only difficult word in that is "polyglutamine", which is really quite something considering that the next paper on the list is Effect of the disulfide bridge and the C-terminal extension on the oligomerization of the amyloid peptide ABri implicated in familial British dementia. To me the title rather implies that you're looking at polyglutamine diseases with names starting with R and onwards... ?

Unpleasant-sounding disease of the day: hand-foot-genital syndrome

"I didn't know they had one of those" award of the day: A drastic reduction in the basal level of heat-shock protein 90 in the brain of goldfish (Carassius auratus) after administration of geldanamycin.
The abstract for this paper features delights such as intra-cerebral treatment of goldfish and These results suggest that in the brain of goldfish, Hsp90 may not be involved as a key factor [...] and support the idea that GA can be used in fish brain as a tool in elucidating the role of Hsp90. Wow.

Also, I'm wondering why anyone would ever rave about the wonders of EndNote Web when there's nothing whatsoever in it to stop you adding the same reference multiple times! It was rather annoying when I went into it and discovered that 31 of my 79 entries were duplicates because I forgot to delete the marked list from Web of Science after sending them there.