mixdown

magnatune finally finished deciding who the winners of its ccmixter remix competition should be... but forgot to include me :(

even without my superb track, however, there are many (free!) tasty offerings amongst the winnners. or if you have some excess cash to help feed starving musicians, you could wait until magnatune is selling the compilation.

i'm a bit disappointed that several of my favourite mixes didn't make the cut. don't miss sweet life by ashwan. but since the most important prize for all the winners was a magnatune contract, i'm sure it won't be long before this and other tasties appear at magnatune.

hang on there a second...

there was a most interesting abc online science news article today about changes in brain structure in people who are pathological liars. (as an aside, this seems like a challenging study to recruit subjects for: Q: "So, are you a pathological liar then?" A: "No."). anyway, the last sentence in the article rather put a bee in my bonnet:

"[This analysis] could also help in criminal justice settings by helping police determine if a suspect is lying, and in pre-employment screening."

Hello! All of a sudden we've jumped from a quite interesting investigation into something we all do quite a lot of the time, way way into gattaca land.

firstly, being able to choose to lie is one of the things that makes us human. probably being a pathological liar isn't all that fun, and all power to research into helping people there. but, and somewhat prematurely, to remove the power of choice puts us on a very slippery slope.

but mainly what gets to me is the complete lack of hesitation in declaring that this could be used in pre-employment screening. no discussion, no questioning, no subltety. it is a very small step from could to can to did. if we want this sort of thing, then that's all well and good, but we should absolutely not let ourselves just roll on in to it.

hmmph. a little bit better now. did anyone get the rose thing yet?

petals around the rose

arrrgh!

i was almost going to have to try go to sleep without having solved this horrible little game/brain twister that slashdot pointed my way. but luckily after an incredibly frustrating hour i have now proven myself worthy of restful sleep.

previously, i was going to make the most of the supposedly superb autumn weather and head up for a walk/run in the mountains, but the rewards of staying in bed and sleeping in until midday were oh so immediate... i saved myself from sloth through an incredibly fun 2 hour mtbike ride this afternoon though. all the way through käferberg, hönggerberg, the next berg, up altberg, and back again. perfect riding weather through the low mist, just cool enough to only just sweat on the uphills, and not so cold so as to freeze on the descents. i get the feeling rain will be coming soon to turn all those lovely trails into muddy pools of slippery roots, which will rather distract from the pretty autumn leaves.

loooong progress report

today was the my third progress report of my phd. presenting half a year or so's worth of work in front of colleagues and supervisor is always quite stressful, but i'd actually had some interesting results in the past weeks and months, and so there was plenty of data to present. fortunately for me, mario, mike, paola and markus thought the data was interesting enough to discuss in depth at quite a few points, and so the presentation stretched from my planned 40 minutes to 85 minutes! my apologies to the audience for delaying their morning tea coffee and gipfeli!

85 minutes of standing, presenting, discussing and thinking was more than enough for me for the day, so i added to my audioscrobbler account (i lag truely much behind hiren the master), cleaned my desk, and waited for it to be appropriately late for a few beers before heading home for a snooze.

go aussie!

that's right, australians have been exceeding themselves again, and this time in more cerebral activities. there was the widely publicised nobel prize winning western australians, but my favourites are the winners of the much more entertaining ig nobel prizes (first you laugh, then you think) - where australians won both the physics and biology prizes!

the prize for physics, from none other than the University of Queensland, was John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years. (i've even walked past this experiment myself!)

and biology went to a bunch of guys from the University of Adelaide, James Cook University, the University of South Australia and the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed. that's the power of multidisciplinary research for you!

however, in my opinion, the best study won the fluid dynamics prize: "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation." it's a pity they can't spell, but the first figure in their paper is fantastic. 40cm is really quite impressive for a penguin.

swiss yeast in geneva

i had only discovered that it was the anual swiss yeast meeting in geneva today on last wendesday, but had managed to pull my act together and get a rather snazzy poster finished for the occasion. i even managed to trap a (small) audience to talk through the story, which is always most exciting. the swiss community is rather small (50-100 people), and being a very popular model organism, the research presented ranged from dna repair, mRNA regulation, protein degradation control, glycosylation (the most important and interesting topic of course), to community interactions and evolution. but even though i only managed to stay focussed for the introduction and conclusion of most presentations, i think i learnt a thing or two, and as well as meeting some new people, that counts as a successful day.

we explored geneva a little after the meeting was over, with a wander along the very blustery and cold lake front, before hitting a groovy little lebanese restaurant for dinner. yum, cheap, atmospheric and fun! can't do much better than that! as good as it was though, it didn't make up for the 2:45 train journey back to drizzley cold zürich. however, cold rainy weather makes for very enjoyable sleeping in :)