Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Crab's Adventures

There once was a crab named Crab. Born a hermit crab but not really wanting to follow Rule 1: Your shell is your best friend of the Hermit Crab village, Crab boldly threw off her shell and decided to explore the world. Crab was fortunate enough to get an internship in a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, so she hopped on a plane and flew over to Switzerland.

The first weekend, Crab was very hungry. The stores closed too early on Saturday, and Crab was too tired from the flight to go grocery shopping before the stores closed. On Sunday, Crab's hermit nature emerged  and she stayed in her lair the entire day, which was not such a bad choice except for the lack of food.

comfy couches

table that no one uses

Crab's room!

The kitchen

  Work started the following Monday. Like a lost tourist, Crab got very confused at the metro ticket machine, but successfully arrived at the correct metro stop to meet up with her supervisor . 'WHARBARGLE! Today is such a challenge!' thought nervous Crab. Despite her worries, everyone at work was friendly and fun, and over time, Crab became very fond of her lab.


What did Crab do in her lab? Well... she worked on a project to increase the half life of bicyclic peptides (or monocyclic in some cases depending on the number of cysteines in the peptide) by binding them to human serum albumin. The lab's overall goal was to synthesize therapeutic peptides that can be used as effective drugs. Crab liked the project very much, and was very happy with her lab: half of her lab mates were Italians, and they invited her to their social gatherings (where almost everyone was an Italian), and the view from her desk was just splendid. 

View to the left from Crab's desk - the city of Lausanne (a bit far away)
View to the right from Crab's desk - Lake Geneva and the Alps


For the first two weeks of Crab's stay in Switzerland, the weather machine was still being fixed, but clouds had finally fixed the weather machine by the second weekend of her stay, and Crab and her lab mates and their close-knit Italian community (with occasional Germans) went to a park for barbecue (people bring their own portable grills in this country!). When she was not eating, Crab tried to understand Italian and absorbed the Swiss lake culture by observing:

There were people playing recreational sports and chilling baking on the nearby grass....

There were people just socializing.... 

and some people even brought their own picnic tables.

Crab also got to swim in Lake Geneva with the view of the Alps (including some snowy peaks) and the little French towns on the other side of the lake. 


The water was cold, but the view was amazing
After lunch, Crab's friend decided to "cook in the sun", so Crab joined her. Crab has never gotten sunburned before, so Crab thought that she would be okay without sunscreen. The intensity of the sun was however, too damn high and Crab became an "oompa loompa" or a "plum tomato".

The nice weather also made Crab aware of an interesting fact. One day, Crab was hiking back to her flat from the metro station, and turned onto her street. After a step, however, Crab noticed something different from usual and took a nervous glance to the first house on the street, and saw...

GOATS.
Crab was tempted to go befriend the goats but alas, the fence stopped her. So instead, she just took the above picture, went home, and just thought about the goats for the rest of the week.

-------------------------------
Narrator's note: 
Crab has not yet updated herself on what comes after the second week, so this is all that can be written of her adventures so far. Crab apologizes for the abrupt end to the post and would like to console the possibly confused and annoyed minds of her dearests with the following picture.

stray cat?





Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Meetings of the future.

Salut!

I am currently in Beaverton, Oregon and would like to share some of my feelings about this place, and my work.

1. It is my opinion that Oregon has the most roses of any place ever. There are so many roses, they put them  along the HIGHWAYS. There is a thing called the Rose Festival which I just missed. Sadness. There are also roses at the house I'm staying at! Unsad now.

2. Everywhere I am smells good. The house smells good, the bathroom at work smells good, the food my host family cooks for me smells awesome, my dresser drawers have these little spice-filled things that make them smell good and the path that I go running on smells like nature! mmm...

3. People at work are pretty nerdy, and a bit awkward. Everyone at work gets a 4-letter username, which is some pretty random combination of the letters in their name (mine is legc...) and yesterday I met someone named Kyle whose username is kyle and he introduced himself as the person who receives all of the emails to anyone named Kyle in the company. An equally nerdy introduction (in my opinion) would have been that he was Kyle, pronounced like the C compiler Keil which we use at work. I think that guy lives in the office, he won some prize for most debugging of the week...which brings me to:

4. I went to the best meeting ever today. Everyone in the department (~30 people) wanders in causally, gets pizza and then people get awarded gift-cards for the most bug fixes over the weekend. There is a raffle for everyone who fixed at least one bug over the weekend. Then we leave. That was the meeting. WHAT THE WHAT?? I think these software people know whats up--I'd like to think that they are on the cutting edge of meetings.

5. The local strawberries here are amazing. I can't even describe them. I think I almost vaulted over the cube wall when I tasted one that my super-nice coworker Wen gave me. Wen is the best. There is a thing called the Oregon Berry Festival which I will be going to. There is also a Blues Festival the weekend after the 4th of July. Oregon has a lot of festivals--hooray!

6. My project is slow so far, but I like this place. I did not bring a camera but if I can find a way to take pictures I will get one of the garden here and the antique train that a neighbor of ours has. And of my friend Yoshi the Japanese exchange student who's nickname at the house I'm staying at is "Number 4" because he is the fourth Yoshihiro to have stayed at this house since they started taking boarders. He works out every day and eats tons of this protein powder stuff. It looks like dust--bleh!

Miss you all,
Lizi

My First Baby

This morning, I got to work, logged onto my computer, opened the terminal, ssh'd into my supervisor's computer network....and almost cried. I had run a bunch of data analysis processes overnight, because each one takes a BAJILLION hours (there are TERABYTES of data. I use a computer cluster with 11 machines, and it STILL takes a bajillion hours.) As I switched from screen* to screen, I realized that all of the processes had ended with error messages.


*"Screens" in Unix: a tool to run lots of things in the background, without having a million terminal windows open


Heartbreak. 


I looked for the output files. No luck. I took a deep breath, restarted the processes, and sent an e-mail to my advisor (Scott) explaining the situation and describing the mysterious error messages. 


An hour later, he came in grinning.

Scott: Hey-
Me: AHHHHHHHHH I CAN'T BELIEVE IT CRASHED! I'M SO HEARTBROKEN!
Scott: I-
Me: I THINK NIMROD* RAN OUT OF PROCESSING SPACE IT SAID IT WAS OUT OF MEMORY
Scott: Well,-
Me: DON'T WORRY I STARTED IT AGAIN HOPEFULLY IT'LL BE READY SOON
Scott: All the files are there.
Me: IT MIGHT TAKE ANOTHER FEW HO-what?
Scott: The process finished. The files are there.
Me: WHAT?
Scott: Yup! I checked. They're all there.
Me: I-what? Why did it say it ran out of memory?
Scott: It just wasn't able to actually load the images, because of the screens
Me: Oh! Sweet. Wait. WAIT. That means the files are on there???
Scott: Yup!
(Part of the problem was that it put the files in a place I didn't expect.)


*Nimrod is the computer/computer cluster that I ssh into in order to run my stuff.

I started freaking out. Freaking. Out. I was pretty much hyperventilating, I was so excited to see those plots (I've become very fond of plots.) My hands were shaking so hard that I messed up the command line over and over again (Scott was, fortunately, very patient) - and then it appeared! The Plot.


Of what looks very much like a pulsar.

A new pulsar.

That no one has ever seen before.

His name is Terzan5j, and if *actually* confirmed (he has "very likely" status - it's difficult to confirm without lots of different observations of the same thing, but yeah), he will be the 35th and faintest pulsar ever found in Terzan 5, which is part of why he escaped notice before - the other reason is that he most likely has significant scintillation going on (he's brighter at some times than others...basically, he twinkles through the intergalactic medium, like a star.) There is now a picture of him (more specifically, four graphs of his behaviour) on my wall. 


I should mention that this "discovery" has very little to do with me, in the sense that all I did was run a bunch of Python scripts that my supervisor ALREADY WROTE, on brand new fancy shmancy data collected by the instrument that HE built. But still. I was the first person to ever see that pulsar. And for MILLENNIA after I'm gone, he'll still be spinning at >700 times per second. And that's pretty cool.

Love and scintillation,

Anna

Monday, June 18, 2012

L'été des enfants, 1ère partie


Bonjour mes amis!

Je m'excuse de n'avoir rien affiché jusqu'à cette heure. Aussi, j'écris en français.

Je me suis installé maintenant à Random Hall («l'Halle au Hasard?») sur l'étage qui s'appelle «Pecker». Les gens qui habitent ici sont gentils et aimables, surtout quand on les nouri. Ma chambre est d'une taille faisable (malgré le fait que je n'ai pas de belle vue par mes fenêtres). Je me trouve loin des bizuths, et même de Adrienne et Luis que se trouve à MacGregor. Néanmoins, je suis content de mes logements puisque les cuisines de Hasard sont agréablement grandes. Il y a beaucoup d'espace sur les comptoirs et les cuisinières sont à gaz et bien fonctionelles. Vers les heures de manger (dîner et soupper), il y a des gens qui se trouvent dans la cuisine pour cuisiner ensemble et pour bavarder, ce qui lui donne un peu de l'atmosphère de la Maison, qui me manque beaucoup à cette heure.

Je travaille aussi ces jours avec le labo du Professeur Wexler. Je me traîne les matins partout dans Boston pour visiter des «Day Cares» où, moi et mes collègues de travail, nous «jouons» avec les enfants pour cueillir les données comme les belles fleurs. Mais c'est difficile, cette tâche d'amasser ces données, puisque les enfants aiment formidablement faire des choses qui ne sont pas scriptées ou anticipées. Ils aiment prendre les fleurs dans la main, et les écraser, en riant.

Par exemple, une des expériences utilise les petits jouets pour raconter une histoire.

« Oh! The cow is squishy! » (Ouais ... Est-ce que tu peux faire attention à mon jeu?)
« His nose is funny... » (Oké. Je comprends, mais, regarde! Qu'est-ce qu'il fait maintenant?)
« Haha, the dog's head moves! » (Tous les enfants disent cela. Oui. Ça bouge. Mais c'est pas le tien ... donne-moi le chien et écoute ses paroles, oké? S'il te plaît? Pour moi?)
« Okay, thanks for the toys! » (Prend pas mes jouets, toi-là...)
« That's not a giraffe, it's an alligator! » (Non, mon ami, c'est clairement une girafe...)

S'il y a des problèmes d'attention, on peut attendre un peu pour revenir au jeu, mais c'est le pire quand les autres enfants veulent conspirer contre nous pour nous empêcher de continuer avec un enfant qui fait attention.

« Hé, [current participating child]! Viens jouer avec nous! » (Non, s'il te plaît, fait attention ici ... tu peux jouer avec eux après que nous finissons, oké?)

C'est ça que je fais les matins, et pendant le jour entier le jeudi et le dimanche à la Musée pour Enfants (pas la Musée des Enfants, le nom anglais c'est pas clair ... « Children's Museum »).

Je crois que cette affichage ici donne l'impression que ma poste ne me plaît pas, mais si, j'aime vraiment travailler avec les enfants. Ils sont mignons et amusant quand ils veulent participer. Et aussi j'aime mes collègues de labo, parce qu'ils sont gentils et nous pouvons rire ensemble parfois.

Quand j'ai des histoires concrètes à raconter, je vais peut-être afficher quelque chose à nouveau, mais pour cette heure, je dis « au relire», ce qui et mon nouveau mot pour « au revoir » par texte...

Vous me manquez formidablement tous, et j'attends votre retour à MIT.

Bonne chance à tous.

Avec de l'amour et des fleurs,
Shaun