from the desk of stinkpot

a hilarious exchange took place today with one of the folks processing my gut microbiome samples:

lab member: uh, lawrence, i’m not quite sure how to tell you this … we’re having some issues filtering particulate matter out of your samples. have you been eating a lot of seeds lately?

me: well, i’ve been eating at the asian food truck and having sesame chicken this past week.

lab member: sesame seeds! so that’s what’s been clogging our filters! can you please stop eating chinese food?!

view from a restaurant we ate at last night.

bangkok is like the dollar store for dinner: pad thai, pad see yu, noodle soup, or duck and rice — a plate of it will invariably run you about $1 on the street. food carts are shipwrecked all over the sidewalks in our neighborhood and each has its own set of dishes. it’s like the entire city is an enormous outdoor dim-sum. if you like asian food, this place is heaven.

last friday, i thought i’d try and reach food nirvana with some thai friends chris and i made at (where else?) a local restaurant.

oil, mei and me

we took a cab to chinatown, the delicious love-child of las vegas and a chinese restaurant.

chinatown cab

bangkok chinatown

i ate some weird things that night:

1. pig tongue
2. chicken lung
3. pig blood patties
4. pig gut
5. grasshopper
6. fish intestine
7. gingko and mushroom ice sou

mushroom and ginkgo dessert

durian carver

fried cockroach, mealworms, and grasshoppers

street squid

oddly enough, it wasn’t this night that gave me a case of the bangkok bathroom blues. instead, chris and i both fell ill after eating some accursed thai yogurt from a local supermarket. that’s what we get for eating indoors!

just grabbed my first meal of street food in bangkok. i made sure to take ice in my glass and pour myself some water from the table jug of green tea.

your move gut microbes.

christina and i are escaping for one last summer adventure before the real world sinks its talons into us.

we’ve just gotten into bangkok where we’ll be based for the next two months. simply getting here was exciting, as a volcanic eruption in russia nearly forced our flight to turn around over the pacific.

more updates though after we unpack!

I’ve recently started my last (hopefully) thesis project on my way to my PhD. The project will be a study of the human gut microbiome; to analyze it, I’ll be embarking on an investigation of several months worth of human feces.  (And, if that high-level description grosses you out — be very afraid of the details that, in the name of basic human decency,  I’m witholding from this blog.)

In any case, I’ve been discussing this project a lot lately in the lab as I’ve tried to work out the logistics of this project.

I had no idea though how much notoriety I had gained until yesterday, after dinner with some friends.  As we were heading home, a labmate confessed, “Everytime I poop now, I think of you.”

Finally, my research is making a difference in someone’s life!

heard larry wall, creator and benevolent dictator for life of the perl programming language, speak today.

glad i went.  the first 15 minutes or so was a bizarre stream-of-consciousness race through about 100 1-word slides.  it was both profound and absurd, both celebration and diatribe.  equally fun was seeing MIT in its finest geek culture glory: in a room of approximately 100 programmers, there were maybe 15 women, 30 ponytails, 1 female ponytail, and a clear correlation between beards and BMIs.

real jewels of the talk:

• hearing someone trained in linguistics describe their philosophy to computer language design.  (noticed how he referred to variables as “nouns” and methods as “verbs.”)
• learning that hashes in perl are preceded with the “%” sigil, because the 2 dots in the percentage character are supposed to represent the key and value in a hash.
• hearing “we want perl 6 to be the martha stewart of languages — it’ll do everything everything better than any other language (except get incarcerated).”

Now that spring has sprung itself upon us, I’m hoping it’s safe to start posting pictures of what winters in Boston are like:

I gave a 20-minute talk today to about 200 grad students, post docs, and faculty at a departmental retreat. I think the talk went pretty well — I don’t think I rushed at all and I stayed on time. Folks I met afterwards also appeared enthusiastic about my material / delivery.

The relative ease I felt while giving speaking stood in stark contrast to how anxious I was leading up to it. I’d never spoken in front of so many people before and was frankly a little intimidated. So much so that it spoiled my weekend a bit — I was having trouble giving my attention to non-talk-related tasks Saturday and Sunday.

I thought I’d make a note of this, since one of the reasons I agreed to give this presentation was my hope that I’d get some ease speaking in front of large audiences. Now that the talk is over, I recognize that it’s not comfort with speaking that I’d like more of (although that’s always nice), but rather comfort leading up to the talk. It’ll be interesting to see if that comfort increases in the coming years …

wonderful transaction seen scribbled on a bathroom stall here at school: