Stained Glass Wings

11:34am: writing: Armageddon Dreams
IX.12 (Malcolm): 1111 words. Nice and easy to remember, that.

Which takes part IX over 47,000 words, and the whole thing over 490,000.

2:32pm: it would really help
..if the download for supplementary files to back up the claim that the methods used in this paper are statistically sound actually sodding worked.

Journals that do not store supplementary information locally but allow authors to put them on their own homepages seem to me to be somewhat questionable, policy-wise.

Also, I have a user who is taking a remarkably long time to grasp the difference between "these are all the sequences that could be read clearly enough to use" and "these are all the sequences which could BOTH be read clearly enough to use AND turned out, on checking, to be what we were trying to sequence, rather than the cloning vector we were using to contain said sequence", and keeps asking why the numbers are different.

The new userpic I saw somewhere on lj and liked muchly, but have no idea whose it is; if you know please let me know.

3:45pm: film review of sorts: 2012
I really must avoid reading the m15m reviews of things until after I have written my own.

I went to this expecting complete rubbish of the sort where focusing on something further away than my monitor or my book might be good for my head, and not strainy on a brain not at its best from ill. Given that expectation, it was surprisingly good on some unexpected levels.

Points for:

- although the pseudoscience was Really Markedly Rubbish, there was pleasingly little of it.

- the connection to misinterpreted Maya end-of-the-world balderdash was utterly negligible; basically nothing to it but an excuse for a date. (Could have called it The Jupiter Effect: The Movie if anyone still remembered that.)

- Chiwetel Ejiofor and John Cusack can both act quite a bit better than one would really expect from the context, and they do.

- if one must do the divorced-dad-reconnects-with-kids plot, doing it in ways that put being sensible, coping with getting along with people you don't like that much for the benefit of people you care about, and working together to save people's lives ahead of stupid emotional melodrama is a big plus.

- generally pro-science is a big plus.

- while doing that, not disrespectful of or hostile to people whose response is religious in nature, but not presenting that as a solution on the scales on which science is or vice versa.

- Danny Glover has the right kind of dignity to play the president of the US.

- lots and lots of emergency-services people in the background shown as doing their competent best to deal with extreme circumstances.

Points against:

- being quite a bit less Stupid than one might expect does not by any means mean it's completely lacking in Stupid.

- Roland Emmerich's "cute little dog" thing makes me wish that just once we could have a character in a disaster movie who would stress that saving humans comes before saving pets, follow through on it, and be clearly flagged as a goodie because of this.

On the spectacular global destruction front; see it in a cinema, because it will be a frontrunner for Most Pointless Movie On A Small Screen Ever.

9:47am: life is a box of wormgears
I appear to be, on the whole, well again at last. I credit this to lots of nice sushi yesterday and also to 2012 being surprisingly not-terrible in several ways.

$boss1 has written an exam with an extra-difficult SQL question on the end. The last time she did this the question was something that nobody in their right minds would do entirely in SQL (rather than with a procedural language wrapper so that you could answer the hideously complex question one step at a time and put in some sodding debug text). Realising that the answers are on the baroque side, and kind of not really in her core area of focus, she has given them to your humble narrator to correct.

4:46pm: note to self
The phrase "X is defined heuristically" seems to be a surprisingly successful way of saying "we made X up off the top of our heads and have no theoretical justification for it" and getting published anyway in the papers I have been looking at recently.

4:20pm: psychedelic pop will eat 808 state. film at 11.
It seems that one consequence of this value of ill is that I am damnably suggestible to earworms and puns (even more so than normal), and also to visual images, which is not normally all that much of an issue.

I can endure another half-hour or so of work even earwormed with "Touched by the Hand of Cicciolina"*, damn it.

*O Patricia Morrison how far art thou fallen.

4:13pm: on the nature of axioms
j4 observed, a week or so ago in a discussion I meant to have time to go back to, that one can't reason people out of positions which they did not reason themselves into.

I am disinclined to believe this as a universal, because I can think of several examples from my own experience of succeeding at exactly that. Usually starting from a variant perspective or an additional datum which it has never occurred to the person in question to consider in the context of the position in question, or which has not been known to them.

When I have some brain I need to think about where in general it's worth applying this.

3:53pm: feeling progressively grottier as the day goes on
If I were home in bed, I would feel enough better that I would be tormenting myself with guilt about not being in work.

Nonetheless, I am far from sure it was optimal to actually go to work today.

1:54pm: still tired of being sick
The thing I am most disliking about this particular manifestation of the sick is how it is possible to think one might be well but only manage to walk a third of the way to the Metro before needing to stop for a bus, and to be more or less well enough to do something at work (now that the team are all back, and $programmer says this is what he was out with a couple of weeks ago so at least I can't give it to him again) while still headachy and exhausted.

No seminar today, which means mine is deferred another week; one more week and it will be after Christmas, if I am counting right.

A silly video: Dracula's considered response to the Twilight phenomenon.

Seen several places on my friends list, The Matrix as a silent movie of the Chaplin era.

9:52pm: *hiss*
Still sick. Still not enough brain for writing. Not an exemplar of saintly patience with these two data.

Accordion-playing buskers really make me wish that it were socially acceptable to indicate one's feelings about street entertainment by taking a dollar or two from their boxes as well as by positive reinforcement for the good ones.

3:39pm: oh good, that was real.
A little poking around online has confirmed that both my Domestic Advisor saying "I'm not even supposed to be here today" and my Military Advisor saying "Sleep is for the weak" are genuine easter-egg messages that show up on rare occasion in Civ III rather than things I imagined.

Considering that the last few nights' dreams have included "being pulled up on stage for a new audience-participation Stephen Sondheim musical with Morgan Freeman", "The Amazing Adventures of desperance, markedformetal and The Twelve-Metre Albino Crocodile*", and one of the nastiest nightmares I have ever had (detail of which I am not going into here), this is something of a relief.

*From the crocodile's POV.

10:47am: "..but if we shut the puppy mills, where on Earth will we get the flour to make dog biscuits?"
I am less than entirely well. I am quite a bit better than yesterday, nor do I think it is flu; it's basically exhaustion, the odd spot of dizziness, and the glands in my neck doing the your-immune-system-is-BUSY-right-now thing. It appears, thus far, that neither the $bosses nor anyone else in my team is in today, so I suppose I do more seminar today.

(Oh, and scatter-brainedness. The several other things that I wanted to put in this post have fallen out of my head.)

1:38pm: fade to grey
A very happy birthday to redbird, with big hugs and best wishes.

$programmer is out getting vaccinated, as one of his kids has a medical condition such that the family are in a high-priority category; $curator has had to leave because of a crisis at her other job; $bosses are home and the note suggests that at least one of them is ill; $former_grandboss wishes to try installing $complex_annotation_program at his site and running it himself rather than waiting the three months or so it would take us to run all his data through it.

I think I have found a paper on which to give my seminar, which is for the good as I am seriously limited in ability to do anything else productive today.

Also, still feeling a bit shaken by the magnitude of the paradigm-shift in DNA sequencing technology that was made clear by the colloquium last week, which is at the "If you ran this currently available handy desktop box for a year it would generate the same amount of data as the entire contents of GenBank at the start of 2008" level. There will need to be a comparable shift in data-handling capacities, but I'm not going to be able to do that with the team and hardware I have now.

1:37pm: concentric circles ever greater
Well, I'm back.

The colloquium was mixed. Mostly great scientific content, some of which was really exceptional, in various modes from really well-done systems biology to innovative bits of paradigm-pushing to classic genetics. The general standard was extremely high, with only a couple of exceptions. The judging posters process was kind of gruelling in terms of trying to make fine distinctions between mostly very good entrants. The whole thing was gruelling in a people-stuff way plus basically going for a whole day with a single half-hour break and no online time. And several of the talks had links from them which lead in dorections out of which I might get seminar material, so that is good.

Annoyingly, 2001 turns out to be on in duParc at 9 pm only, and making my way home from duParc that late on a night before I have to go to work is not appealing. We did however watch, on DVD, both Twelve Angry Men, which is totally brilliant, and the original The Wicker Man, which definitely has its powerful moments and elements but also does not manage to steer entirely clear of farce at some points; one can tell that people did their research, and also which wrong sources they used. (Caesar writing about the Britons has enough of a propaganda slant that taking his descriptions as accurate is a mite problematic.) Other than that, over the weekend, I basically went flop, played Civ, and read Dante; Z and A were over for dinner one evening which was really nice, and I am I think getting my groove at least somewhat back, though I was not up to writing at all.

Also, links c/o ashbet:

Christopher Walken reads Lady Gaga's "Poker Face".

The inevitable mash-up of the above with the original.

and, found by myself:

Christopher Walken doing "Let's Misbehave" from Pennies from Heaven (possibly NWS).

9:28pm: a video to keep you happy while I'm away
The last word in Nirvana mash-ups.

1:35pm: out of contact reminder
I'll be at the colloquium essentially all day tomorrow and Friday; I will not get mail or see journal posts between this evening and whenever on Saturday I wake up, which is not likely to be early.

3:06pm: not the plan you're looking for
The bit where I went into something of a breakneck panic in re getting to the cinema in time to see 2001, because of $boss2 finding something to object to ten minutes before I was leaving work, pointing me at the wrong place to waste five minutes, and then pointing me at the right place (which was something to which he had given an imprimatur prior to the last release as All Fine), and then when I got to the cinema discovering that it was a movie-club-only showing, was annoying. They are however showing it for a week or so from Friday, so shall likely see it over the weekend. Also, Triumph of the Will turns out to have only been on Fri/Sat/Sun, so no awkward decisions to be made there.

Instead we watched Green for Danger, again picked up inspired by sovay's remarks thereon, and most fun it was; an amusingly eccentric WWII hospital murder mystery with an amazing performance by Alastair Sim as a brilliant and sometimes utterly foolish Scotland Yard detective. I have also read the first part of the Dorothy Sayers translation of the Divine Comedy and am liking it much.

1:48pm: I am not always you
Very fun weekend of visiting daharyn. Friday night was Haunted, review may follow, play about a late-nineteenth century poltergeist case in Nova Scotia which was a lot of fun and had some reliably good local actors being good. Also there was lots of wandering around bits of Montreal daharyn had not yet explored, with daharyn taking pictures, and a failure to get cupcakes at a cupcake place recommended by daharyn's roomie (because they had sold out by the time we had got there, not for a ny problematic reason), and brew pub with pink hibiscus beer, and pizza, and finding of L'Age de Tenebres on DVD, and lots of good hanging-out time.

The political party to which $downstairs_neighbour belongs seem to have achieved very little indeed in the municipal elections; as he has bloodied and dismembered baby-doll parts hanging from the front door along with much other notably tasteless Halloween stuff, I find it hard to summon any sympathy here.

Tonight papersky and I are going to Cinema duParc, as they are showing 2001 at 6 pm. It would appear they are at the moment getting a bit more repertory-focused and less arthousey/obscure current movies, which is more likely on the whole to attract our attention. They are also this week showing The Triumph of the Will, to which my reaction is one part "important historical document of the sort one should be cognisant of" to three parts *shudder*.

$programmer is home with flu. $curator has had to leave to handle an emergency. It was a productive morning, but it looks like the rest of the day may well be more trying to find the will to assess more seminar-candidate papers.

3:29pm: it took five helium balloons to work out that "if you love something, let it go" is not a universal
Team members present: 0.

Papers looked at for potential seminar-worthiness: lost count after about 30 abstracts and 3 or 4 full texts.

Potentially seminar-worthy papers found: 0. It seems that everything that looks both interesting to me and of some possible use to my mostly lab-biologist audience turns out on examination to be either more abstruse than I could well follow or more abstruse than I could well convey. (I cannot actually visualise a six-dimensional space, but I can follow the logic of its properties fairly clearly in the relevant context in ways I would find very hard to explain to someone else.) Papers composed largely of equations are not generally either my professional meat and drink or theirs.

The cartoon convention of character's eyes turning into little spirals for some sorts of overload could be applied to me rather aptly right now. Not breadth-overload but depth-overload, if that distinction makes sense.

2:48pm: happy birthday
to cattitude, wishing you a good day and a great year to come.

4:37pm: zootlewurdle zootlewurdle
We have had $visiting_professor's presentation. He reckons three months for gathering all available relevant data (which with a modicum of google-fu is a week's job), three months for an analysis of said data (which is about two years' work; a small fraction of it was one of my four-month summer student projects year before last so I think I know whereof I speak) and four months to write it all up for two papers. (His plan said "Publish!" in precisely the way that parodies of such things say "Profit!". I managed not to giggle. Also, he either had a lot of people trying to call him during the presentation, or something on his computer was playing just-about-audible Japanese-sounding electronica in the background of his presentation.)

Sleep patterns not great. Just wrote a reference for $former_programmer in Ohio, who is, alas, applying for another job in Ohio rather than coming back to Montreal.

( Civ3:SolarSystemMod thoughts )

daharyn will be here this evening. Yay !

12:00am: writing: Armageddon Dreams
IX.11 (Raphael): 7357 words, which is just under 3000 new. I think that's done.
IX in total: 45,960 words.

Only one more to go before the epilogue, but it's huge and may easily split. maybe I should declare November NaLastChapterMo.

3:37pm: incidental which I forgot to mention a couple of weeks back
The Last Night of the Proms this year got a cinematic showing in downtown Montreal.

This strikes me as cool.

12:08pm: what a fascinating modern world we live in
Watched Down with Love last night, which papersky picked up from the library following on from sovay's recommendation; it was really fun, in an unlike anything else and completely mad sort of way. Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger as the romantic leads in a forty-years-on pastiche/parody of Rock Hudson/Doris Day battle-of-the-sexes comedies, with everything turned up to eleven; self-aware and extremely skilled at the little visual details, including glorious faux-Technicolor; with a wonderful performance from David Hyde Pierce (ETA: I suspect that name will never stop blurring with Wilfred Hyde-White, ever.) as the male lead's nebbishy best friend/employer/sidekick, and a nice cameo from the chap who used to play Rock Hudson's nebbishy best friend/employer/sidekick. A lot of it is right on the edge of too much but the balance works.

It would appear that, following on from the console and cellphone incarnations, the next iteration of Civ will be native to Facebook. Which is all well and good for people who use Facebook, but please, Mr. Meier, is there going to be another Civ game for the PC ever again ?

I am adapting to boots again with glee; my summer shoes were sufficiently worn that there was next to no sole left, so I'm a good half-inch taller now. I also while looking for these boots found a couple of examples of the summer shoes I actually like in one of the downtown Paylesseseseseses, so shall purchase same when next I get paid.

2:37pm: happy birthday !
...to rivka, hugs and best wishes for a great day and a rewarding year to come.