from the desk of stinkpot

attended our first underwear party ever tonight.

(technically, it was a “lingerie + loungewear” party.) confuzzled, i showed up in pajamas and a hoodie.

and here i was, thinking that the med students enjoy all the debauchery. (the drinking stories i hear from my friends in med school have convinced me to self-medicate myself and my family.)

hooray for grad school!

so begins my new life as a real lab rat.

christina’s post-bac classes have just started. harvard, manifesting another one of its ridiculous practices, schedules all “continuing student” classes at night (instead of just merging them with the identical undergrad class). that means that christina is booked from 6-10ish every night.

which in turn means 2 things for me: 1) i’m going to have to learn how to cook another dish besides hot dogs + onions + rice; 2) i have no reason to leave the lab every day until 10 pm.

i guess both of those are good; i’ll get lots of research done (really good) and i’ll hopefully turn into a halfway decent cook.

and, at least that leaves me without any reason to feel guilty about running off to practice with the men’s tennis team.

(i’m really loving playing tennis with the team. i’m getting regular 2-hour work outs and my tennis is growing much more consistent. i also get to play with wonderful players: i played a couple of games today with a fellow in his late 30′s who once played davis cup for kazakhstan! how cool is that?! perhaps even “cooler” – i split 2 of 4 games with the dude … he did take the deciding tiebreak though.)

so lately, i feel like i still haven’t been getting enough work done. actually, i’ve been having this problem all summer. i need to work harder.

but, over the past year or so, i’m starting to relearn that old lesson, that devoting more time to work doesn’t produce more results. instead, at least in my case, it results in more time wasted.

so this week, i’m embarking on a new strategy: spending less time working to get more work done. (it actually worked pretty well in high school, when i used to commute about 3 hours a day to school – i recall being super-efficient back then). the idea is that if i know i have only a handful of hours to get something done, i’m more likely to attack the problem quickly and energetically.

sounds good right? well, even if it doesn’t work, at least i’ll be having more time for fun.

and golly, there’s a lot of fun to be had around here. i’ve started attending practice with the mit men’s varsity tennis team – two hours of tennis a day! it’s a wonderfully fun way of staying in shape and in good tennis form. indeed, the workouts have been quite intense – even as i write this, my ass muscles are still spasming from 4 courts worth of lunges … (it’s also crazy to think that i can hang with these guys – i should have played more tennis in undergrad …)

we’ve also been catching a bunch of concerts this week. over the previous year, we had never seen a show @ the middle east (the local indie music stage).

we’ve now seen two shows in the last 2 days.

yesterday, we saw jason collett (of broken social scene fame) and his band of mustachioed musicians who put on a great, as jesse put it: “bob dylanish – beatlesy” show.

jesse (on the right):

jason collett + mustaches:

and tonight, we saw a really fun mates of state + starlight mints show. we had a great spot right in front of the stage, from where we could spy the awesome stage chemistry between the two, er, mates:

hooray for my new work ethic!

golly, ‘been so busy lately w/ TAing and researching and tennis.  thank god the us open is finally over – i can have my evenings back now.

still can’t proffer a real post (my code has yet to bloom into the beautiful flower it wants to be).

instead, i’ll post a piece of poetry i heard at a poetry reading yesterday.   mala radhakrishnan, former TA to christina and labmate of one of my labmates writes wonderful poetry – about organic chemistry.  it’s delicious; the science geeks in the crowd ate up her reading.  all 5 of us.

one of her poems i found online (that she in fact read yesterday):

The Radioactive Dating Game

By Mala L. Radhakrishnan

I used to sleep ’til my electrons would drool
At P-32 element-ary school.
The things we were taught were just totally boring.
A mole of us atoms would always be snoring.

But one thing I learned there I’ve kept to this day:
“Soon, my students you’ll beta decay
To become more mature and to capture the label
Of “S-32″, and then you’ll be stable.

And when that time comes you will celebrate
‘Cause you will be ready to graduate.
So look around now, and count every peer.
Today there’s a mole, but you’ll soon disappear.”

So I watched as my friends around me decayed.
I felt left behind, slow and dismayed.
Abandoned by those who were thought to be deft.
In two weeks there was but half us of left.

Meanwhile I’d hoped to impress my young lass
But was now in the bottom half of the class.
I spent all my class time planning to court her,
But remained, two weeks more, in the leftover quarter.

By two weeks more yet, and I still hadn’t parted.
Now six weeks had passed since this challenge first started.
What was my problem? I kept losing faith.
The fraction of atoms left was one-eighth.

Another two weeks and my hope for love waned.
One sixteenth of a mole of us atoms remained.
My lass had now probably found a new mate.
By the time I escaped here, it would be too late.

So I studied the past eight weeks with great courage.
And suddenly a pattern started to emerge.
I realized, from evidence existential
That the decay of the class size was exponential.

See, every time two weeks came and then went,
The class size went down by fifty percent.
‘Twas one mole times e to the minus kt,
Where k was ln 2 over 2 weeks, you see.

And “t” was the time in units of weeks
Since the teacher that lesson one fine day did speak.
This equation did serve as a useful tool;
I could predict, at time t, the number in school.

But then it happened – I had my decay!
I was S-32, and I liked it that way.
Success carried with it the sweetest aroma,
My electrons excited as I got my diploma,

Which oddly contained a most curious addition.
It read: “You’ve earned honors and recognition
For insightfully doing the mental athletics
Of uncovering the inherent first-order kinetics.”

When my love saw this honor she screamed out loud,
“Oh, my brilliant darling, of you I’m so proud!
Your wit has won over my heart in a snap.
Let’s let our orbitals overlap!”

i thought i’d also link to the site of jennifer matthews, a singer/songwriter who put on a 4-song set before the poetry reading.  she was so good that christina and i bought her cd on the spot.  it’s crazy, i can’t recall the last cd i bought before this one.  sadly, i still found a way to shaft the artist: i came up a dollar short and jennifer just let it slide.  hope this blog plug / increase in google page rank score makes up for it!

rather than ingest more crazy apple rumors, christina and i came up with one of our own tonight.

sept. 12: apple introduces the iphone … which rides on none of the traditional wireless carriers, but instead uses VOIP.  it all makes sense – the google CEO just got a seat on apple’s board and google has this massive fiber backbone sitting around for some reason …

apple gets to release new hardware, service will be cheap, and they won’t be beholden to some telco.  brilliant!

“did you know that pickles come from cucumbers?”

thus spake a genuinely surprised christina this evening, after reading a book describing produce.

graduates with highest honors from probably the nation’s top business school – and she thought pickles come from the pickle tree. just adorable [update: christina disavows thinking pickles came from the pickle tree. "i didn't know where they came from!"]

(clearly, both of us missed the tutorial on how the world works.)

busy as we were before yet another long weekend we’ll be spending out of boston, christina and i dropped everything when we heard that agassi was in a fifth set; we drove to the nearest MIT dorm and plopped down in a common room showing the match.

and what a match!  good lord bagdhatis and agassi were really ripping the felt off the ball.  amazing how both of them can take full swings at screamers landing at their shoelaces.  actually, it’s not amazing – it’s simply inhuman.  if you’ve never seen professional tennis live, i highly recommend doing so.  it’ll blow your mind.

in any case, we’ll be back in ny this weekend.  we’re slated to catch 2 days of tennis during the labor day weekend.  forecast doesn’t look good though

things have been very hectic lately.
last week, we spent monday through wednesday in new york, sneaking in 2 days of the us open qualifying. (photos forthcoming)
this past weekend, we backpacked through the white mountains (the longest 6-mile hike of my life) and slept on awesome swiss-family-robinson platforms on the side of mount libery (photos also forthcoming).

this evening, christina went in to give notice to her employers that she was quitting her job. she walked out with 2 free tickets to the sheryl crow / john mayer concert tonight, won in some interdepartmental e-mail giveaway. evidently, choosing to leave the business world == good karma.

i was happy to go to the show, cheesy as it sounded. as much as i’d like to be a hipster/indie-music snob, i really can’t help but find most pop music to be fun to listen to. makes me want to dance.

sure enough, the show was fun. (photos not forthcoming, thanks to draconian tweeter center rules.) i had forgotten how many catchy songs sheryl crow has written. and, john mayer can really make sweet epileptic-like love to his guitar. that heartthrob: we were surrounded by teenage girls; my favorite set of handwritten shirts read, “john, will you mayer me?”

must find time + focus to do science! we’re so close to doing some really awesome work. we’re going to explain how life came about! ahhh!

and perhaps just as importantly, must finally find time to fix the theme of this blog.  this website could look so much better.

i thought i’d share some of the photos i took during our camping trip last weekend to rhode island.

we spent two days at east beach – easily the best beach i’ve ever been to in new england. the water was warm (a balmy 65 degrees) and the beach was uncrowded (as you can see in the picture above). christina’s inner island person loved east beach.

we made camp about 15 bike-minutes away from the beach in a surprisingly bucolic national (state?) park. due to all that family guy i’ve watched, i had expected most of rhode island to look like quahog.

lucky for us, we had ensconced right by a delightful little observatory run by amateur astronomers. even luckier: we arrived the one night of the week that the telescope was open to the public. and luckiest: we had a night sky so cloud-free that we could easily pick out the milky way. one might say our lucky stars aligned that night. (heh)

in any case, we were treated to a great outdoor lecture on how to pick out stars and constellations (i finally learned how to find the north star) by an endearingly curmudgeonly old man, who at various points in his talk, scolded both a 5-year old girl and a young man with down syndrome.

who knew there was so much to do in rural rhode island? later that night, after we stopped at the observatory, we made our way to the county fair. there, we had the good fortune to see all manner of ribboned livestock and shady carnival games. my favorite part of the fair though, was easily the tractor pull (above). it seems that a sizable population of rhode island folk supercharge their riding lawnmowers and enter them into load-pulling competitions. (oddly enough, there didn’t appear to be any events where the lawnmowers were actually tasked with mowing grass.)

midway through one of the tractor pulls, i found myself lost in one of those moments where you realize that the world (or you) is ridiculous. here we were on a friday night, under blazing spotlights firing down on a humongous sandbox, the only non-whites in a crowd of perhaps a thousand (meaning we were constantly being stared at), cheering on men in track suits riding screaming lawnmowers. what the hell were we doing there? it was really surreal.
tragically, it turns out that we missed the dung throwing contest, which took place the next day.

when in rhode island and not on the beach, staring at the sky, or at the fair, we occupied ourselves with burning things. i don’t know why, but i love smelling like a fire. christina too. it must be some primal thing; you figure that mankind built fires daily for 2000 or so generations (50,000 years/25 years per generation – that’s almost certainly wrong). at most, we stopped making big fires (gas stoves don’t count) 10 generations ago. being a pyromaniac is completely reasonable.

besides, all that dim firelight gives me great opportunities for justifying my SLR/high-aperture lens habit. i’ve started a war on flash photography, quencher of natural light.
and, most importantly, campfires enable the best part about camping:

i feel am so scientifically unproductive.

christina and i have just gotten back from a mid-week 2-night trip to NY.  (we went to watch our buddy Cecil Mamiit try and qualify for the US Open, and to bask in the tennis talents of the world’s 100 best players.)  this trip immediately followed the 3-day weekend i took to go camping in rhode island last week.  a camping trip which proceeded by 1 week the 8 days i took off for francis’ wedding in san jose.  a wedding that took place only one month after the 3.5 weeks we spent in europe.

i feel so guilty.  especially because i actually love my work: i get paid to dream up algorithms for understanding evolution.  how cool is that?  in fact  (cross-my-fingers), it looks like we’re about to make a useful contribution to our field.  very exciting!

and yet, i still find it so hard to resist the temptation to run off and play in the sun.  partially because the sun graces this bostonian wasteland only 3 months of the year.  but, i mainly try to escape because i figure most of favorite memories of grad school won’t involve me progamming.  (of course, this kind of attitude usually means i’ll have plenty of grad school memories; you usually need to be in lab to produce a thesis.)

so many things to do and places to see!  someone here at mit really needs to figure out how to squeeze an extra 18 hours into the day.