Merry Christmas!

I am currently having to CTRL+V every time I want an s in whatever I type. Because my keyboard has stopped working. It is infuriating. And I hadn't realised how much I rely on that one letter. so (sorry,  I didn't copy a capital s) Does anyone have any ideas as to how to fix it? The little soft plastic nub under the plastic key isn't working either. so the key is not just stuck.

HELP ME.


In other news, merry Christmas. This year, I feel festive :D.

Also, I have gotten used to CTRL+V remarkably quickly. Interesting how easy it is to adapt. Not that I don't want my s fixed though...

Some Things.

1. See there is a new link at the top of the page? I've decided to start reviewing the books I'm reading. Go have a look :)

2. on a trip to Morrisons yesterday three things happened that made me smile.

         a) I met the nicest and politest counterman. It was all Madam and an enthusiastic how can I help you? And then he complimented me on my fabric water drop badge. That is first time anyone noticed it, and it was just nice.

           b) As I wondered past the socks and tights I passed a man looking so very confused. So I helped him. The look of relief on his face was pronounced.

           c) Morrisons have those huge two compartment revolving glass doors. As I was leaving, I had to join a queue. A queue to exit the shop. Does that get much more British?

You know you´re ...

... a biologist when

You open the toothpaste with one hand.
You wash your hands before and after using to the washroom.
When you hear tween, you think of the surfactant not the age group.
For you, media is something which increases your culture.
You can identify organs on roadkills.
You have a callus on your thumb.
You use the word "aliquot" in regular sentences.
Sometimes you momentarily vanish from social activities because of a timepoint.
You've never worn a clean lab coat.
You don't fear rodents, rodents fear you.
You say "orders of magnitude" in regular sentences.
You flinch when you hear the word "significant".
Showing up at 10AM and having a coffee is a productive day.
You can't stand god-like physicians, while secretly wishing you had their job.
You're very good at diluting things.
You're also very good at transferring small amounts of liquid between containers.
You are fed up of people saying alcohol, when they mean ethanol.
You hear the word ‘Molar’ and teeth are the last thing on your mind.
You say “conjugation” instead of “sex”, and "pili" sounds dirty. (giggle)
SOB is not an insult, it's what you grow your bugs in.
You say "mills" and "megs".
No-one in your family has any idea what you do. (not quite true, but the ones who do, do the same thing :D)
You can make a short film in power point.
You consider a green laser pointer to be science bling.
A falcon is not a bird....
... And you have 5 of them with different types of water
When your fruits go bad and you get fruit flies, you can't help but check their eye colour
You own invitrogen t-shirts and actually wear them.
You think that drosophila geneticists have a good sense of humour.
You refer to your children as the F1 (I LOVE this one:-)).
You've suffered carpal tunnel from the pipetman.
You've used kimwipes as kleenex.A timer clipped to the hip is not only practical, but dead sexy.
You've played Battleship using tip boxes.
The front pages of Science is your light reading.
You think the following is a quality insult: "I've seen cells more competent than you!".
The scent of latex reminds you of work, not play. (snigger)
You're looking for a cooking book by maniatis.
You've made dry ice grenades.  (no, but I have made a TV mad Scientist's Lab with dry ice :D)
You've lost many friends to ice grenades...

I don't usually do these, but it made me laugh.

(edited: the you know you're a biologist when courtesy of http://dna-protein.blogspot.com/2011/07/you-know-youre.html?spref=fb&m=1 (thanks!) )

Also, for fun:

 Play battleships with a 96 well plate, and put clear starch solution where your ships are and plain water every where else. and then use iodine as the bombs!

Family trees

Now that I've caught up with Iplayer, and Charmed and, oh everything else time wasting I could remember, I've decided to have another look at the family tree my granddad sent me. I must admit, I was quite overwhelmed at first with the sheer number of people that he and and my Granny Ann have put on there. Going back through my mams paternal ancesters, I soon found lots of cases of what I can only assume are family marrying family, or marrying out of the family and their children marrying back in^^ 

All I can say is it doesn't seem to have done any damage. Plenty of Age-at-deaths of 85+, but it really brought home the differences in culture, at least my culture and that of my parents and grandparents, I guess that is just about the age of mass transport, when it was available and really for the first time, in the case of my grands and great-grands, widely available as well. With all the world to see, why look in your own backyard?

So really, my mother's side of the tree is (heavily) populated, so I decided to turn to my fathers side. Now I never knew my granddad, he died at the start of the 80s and I was born at the end. I do know he had tightly curled red hair as a boy though, and that it lost only a little of the curl when he grew up - much like my father, in fact. And I know that he was tall. 6 foot 6. With my nana being at the (very) short end of 5 foot, I've had to smile at the pictures of them both. I can't help but wonder what he was like, this tall military man. I wish I'd known him.

I guess in a way doing this, and listening to the stories of my granddad, and finding his family, is a way of getting to know him, and it gets me talking to my nana about her parents as well. That's nice. And well worth it just for that.

You know when you'be been watching charmed too much when:

Walking upto the shop you see a man in a bowler hat and rolling a crystal ball across his palm and you think Warlock!

Getting rid of my drafts.

I... have a lot of free time at the moment, what with the lack of uni and PhDs  and I decided, as you can see, to redesign the blog. Isn't it pretty now? I have also decided to clean up my drafts and post them because to my mind, these post show an accurate window into my state of mind over the last year or so. I wrote the following in April, right in the thick of dissertation writing.

I am coming to the realisation...

...That the last four years have been a waste of space. After university, I had three plans. The easiest by far was to stop at a degree and settle down into a medium grade technicians job, probably for the next 60 years given the way pensions are going. 

The next choice was to find a Ph.D. (depending on my degree) and going into research for my career. Better paid and (hopefully) more interesting.

The final choice was to do a graduate entry medicine degree, get my MD and go into medical research from the clinical side. Which I really really wanted to do, and have, secretly since, well for a long time.

Due to a lot of reasons, my choices are now a lot more limited. I'm stuck to West Yorkshire, and Leeds/Huddersfield in particular, and maybe Manchester or Sheffield at a stretch for reasons I wouldn't change for the world. This... narrows down my choices quite considerably. And then there are the fee changes. This messes up most of the other plans completely.

The area question take the medicine degree out of the running. At the time of looking, for a post graduate entry onto a 5 year course (which is all Manchester and Leeds are offering), because I effectively already have a state funded degree, I would have to pay my own way for the first four years of the degree, and then the NHS would pay the final year. If I was going to enter this September, that would be over £12,000 I would have to find for tuition fees alone. and then everything else such as living costs, course materials, et al, would have to be found on top of this. If I was lucky, and either Manchester or Leeds offered the fast track four year course, I would only have to find the first year's tuition. But I'm not. And I would need to start in September 2012 anyway, as I need to re-do my chemistry A-level, to bump it up a grade from a C to a B. Which means I would be starting when the new fee system did. And be paying £36,000 for the first four years.

Impossible. I have now been priced out of the market for any further degrees I might want to take and so have thousands of others. I know people I went to school with who were put off by the thought of the debt they were going to be in whilst paying the current fee levels. If they were put off by being £30,000 in debt after four years, imagine being £80,000 in debt, and how many people that would scare off. And yet, this £80,000 pounds of debt is their only chance of getting a job decent enough to live on, and raise a family on. And if you had to fund it yourself, well. 

Hello class system. Welcome back to Britain. Have a nice holiday?

But what is even better than that is the fact that I'm getting my degree now, after four years of working hard, and it isn't worth anything. Not a single penny of the tuition fees the government has loaned me. Because I don't have a first class degree. Now, I'm on track for a middling to high 2.I, somewhere around 65%. I know this, and even when I started this would have been a brilliant degree to get. It would have left all those doors open for what I wanted to do. And the degree was in an expanding field, so I was guaranteed a job...

Rubbish. 

So many people have degrees now that unless you have a first you are not going to get a job. Used to be that having a degree was promise enough that there would be some job out there for you. Now, with this certain upper second, and I say this before I sit my exams, I have nothing. If I went for a technicians job, which I wouldn't be too unhappy in, I can expect £13,000 to £16,000 pa. This is more than I live on as a student, but there is this too: Everybody is looking for a job at the minute. All of my year, half of the year above, and come next June, all of the year below. There is fierce competition for every position advertised. And some of those applicants will have firsts.

And  because of this, people are turning to post graduate training. The budget has been slashed. There are less directly funded Ph.D. opportunities. Which means that they are accepting self funded students and competitively funded students, and for the latter, they want the student who will get them the funding for their research. I asked one of the lecturers  what was wrong with my CV after I was turned down for a Ph.D. I was told that the first thing they look at is the grades. If the candidate is not predicted a first, the rest is thrown in the bin. 

That was as far as I got then. Since, looking back, I was right about some things: I did get a 2.i at 64%. Not the best, but decent. I'm proud of it and of the fact the little nagging doubts and thoughts in my head telling me to quit for almost the entire four years didn't win out. Being busy helped me ignore them. I was right about jobs too. A sister of my friend is preparing to defend her PhD thesis, whilst doing her day job. As a school technician. Time was a HNC/D was enough for that, even as a university technician. But in brighter news, in some other things I was wrong. I did get a PhD interview. Even if I didn't do well. Not knowing what to expect is a bitch, no? 

And I still wouldn't change the factors that anchor me to West Yorks. I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have gotten nearly so far through my final year if not for the support a certain person gave me.


Things are more positive now. It's amazing what half a year will do. If I can get one PhD interviews, I can get others. 


And I will.

In support of Libraries

Is this. A sculptor has been creating paper sculptures and leaving them all over Edinburgh, in the libraries and at the lit festival. No one knows who does it but they leave little notes with the sculptures and they are addressed to the twitter account those libraries own. My favourite one is this:
Espically the note that was left with this:

"For @scotstorycenter - A gift in support of libraries, books, works, ideas..... Once upon a time there was a book and in the book was a nest and in the nest was an egg and in the egg was a dragon and in the dragon was a story....."

Isn't that beautiful?