The most fun I ever had in science was when I was a trainee… Notably a post-doc.
The best time it seems for *anything* I’ve done, is when I was an amateur, if you will.
Therefore, I’ll try and make it my goal to make sure that I am as constantly in that “trainee” space in my head as possible. Even though I’ve gotta balance the responsibilities of doing other things…
I never want to lose that sense of… “what am I doing”? and “Oh! That is cool”.
It has been my experience that the best opportunities present themselves when you are in that headspace.
It also rewards itself with the delight in realizing: “What am I doing *HERE*?”
There have been a few moments like that which can often present as imposters syndrome, but...
If you roll with it, and shift your frame of reference, that whole thing can be a delight. It’s not easy, for sure… and easy to start the negative self-talk, but just try… try to look at it from another angle.
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Looks like the unlimited storage that Google promised my university a couple years ago is being discontinued, and the entire institution is being limited to 100TB… I can fill that 5 times over with our data.
This is precisely why I continued to maintain our own servers as a proper investment of taxpayer dollars.
This feels like Google Reader all over again.
This apparently is effective April 29th. Had I gone down that road, I would have effectively had a couple of months to figure out how to migrate .5 PB of data to a new solution on top of the grant deadline I need to make.
God help us if Google decides to kill Google Scholar.
One late night, @robertmarc60 and I were walking after dinner and were accosted by someone on the street.
We kept walking and he got in our faces and said “Hey, you too good for me? You too good for a New Yorker?” to which I yelled $&CK off! Is that New York enough for you?!?!?"
My favorite New York story is the one where my then 90 year old grandma who spent her childhood in New York, gets on a bus where she is trying to find her old neighborhood (circa 1903).
Grandma starts chatting up the bus driver who turns around, shakes her head, and tells my grandmother that she is on the wrong bus, and this bus did not go to that neighborhood.
1) Scientists are having to hold *multiple* R01 grants just to keep on the treadmill.
2) This increases the risk of losing a grant non-linearly, resulting in destabilization of the discovery process.
3) Junior scientists applying for their first R01 need to understand that they *cannot* do the same amount of work that their mentors/predecessors did on the same grant mechanisms 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
4) Study sections need to recognize this and adjust accordingly
Dealing with someone trying to get a COVID test here in Utah this morning...
The hoops they are having to jump through, just to try and get the test scheduled reveals precisely why our COVID case numbers are waaaaaay lower than my models suggest they are.
This is nuts.
We should be testing to saturation here, particularly given that we *know* people can be asymptomatic and still shed virus.
I hear from colleagues at @UCLA that employees on campus are getting screened twice/week whether they have symptoms or not.
I will say that personal experience with dexamethasone was interesting.
After blowing out my back and getting surgery to decompress nerve roots, my doc said: “you’re gonna feel really good. I’ve loaded you full of dexamethasone... so be cool. Take it easy and don’t be stupid”.
Looks like the dexamethasone is kicking is kicking in…