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trinityvixenCan I just say I am in love with Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd? They are the columnists I would put at the forefront of any list of "Must Read." I'm going to try and find Frank Rich's book. Even though it's an autobiography, wouldn't slow me down in the slightest if he writes anything like his columns. Anyone know if Maureen has a book of her own? On anything? I'd listen to the pair of them read the phone book, seriously! They're the only consistently interesting, funny, and informative writers in The New York Times. Krugman, Brooks, Kristof, meh, they're great and all, but not as "WHEE WHEE COLUMN!!!" excitement-worthy. (Though one of them does have that sexy, sexy 1920s bicycle mustache....if only he weren't a chubby baby)
It's important to mention the columnists I do like because it's relevant to something that happened this week: I watched The O'Reilly Factor. Lisa, Carrie, and I all admitted none of us had actually watched it, we were bored, and it was on, so we decided to see what all the hoote-nanny was about. Unequivocally, I can say that Bill O'Reilly is the Devil. No, wait, I equivocate, he's not the Devil. He's...okay, he's the diet pepsi of evil; he can only rant about his conservatively biased POVs, whereas people like Cheney and William Safire a columnist I LOATHE at NYT) are the full-on 160 calories-per-serving real Pepsis of evil. But Bill O'Reilly comes close. With his I-look-so-stupid-I-must-know-what-I'm-talking-about face, and those beady eyes buried in that wad of dough, he came on and gave his 'Commentary.' Only at the start and end did he point out that nothing he said was just his own opinion. No "I think"s, or "It seems to me," which, as part of a television and not written media, is assuming a lot of the audience's attention span. The Op-Ed section of The Times is at least segregated--you have to go find it and you'll know where you are thanks to URLs and page headings in hard copy--but Bill just began yapping his fugly face off and then threw in, "By the way, this is what I think, this isn't fact."
This all comes back to columnists at NYT, I promise. O'Reilly spent most of his time yowling about Bob Herbert, possibly the biggest disgrace of a columnist employed by the NYT. Herbert, as I've ranted before, is the type to notice 9/11 happened at all sometime in December. He consistently writes about events and makes judgments on them months after the political jingoisms have already made the rounds just about everywhere else. If someone like me, only moderately informed on any given day about the rest of the world, knows more than he does, that's a bad sign. He called Iraq another Vietnam about a month after the Swift Boat Veterans thing went away, whereas the Vietnam analogy was floated ages before the Dems even had their nominee locked. Herbert will be talking about moral values sometime near my birthday in April as if it were suddenly relevant. This is the kind of reporter he is. And apparently, a few months after the rest of his fellow journalists, he attack Bill O'fucking Reilly (well, who knows when he did? O'Reilly wasn't about to present facts or anything, so this is my assumption--it could be even older, since O'Reilly can probably hold a grudge and milk it for ratings longer than anyone else at that sorry network).
So, thanks, Bob, for giving O'Reilly another lame-ass to target back for what he perceives are unfair character defamations (if he really thought so, you'd think he'd do the truly American thing and sue). Bob Herbert doesn't speak for liberals, Bill. Herbert shouldn't even speak for himself because he's validating the adage about opening your mouth and confirming your stupidity for those in doubt. If O'Reilly really fancied himself the speaker of the people, if he's even halfway intelligent, which I try to believe those who don't share my views are because it makes me a better person than them, he should know better. But, seeing as outside Fox News there's precious little media saying O'Reilly's a great guy these days (what with that sex scandal and all), I guess he had to take it where he could get it.
Also, he's evil. He presented no facts in this argument at all, just used op-eds for his evidence (using Bob Herbert as evidence ought to be grounds for expulsion from the human race, let alone from any delusions of intellect), then signed off to talk to his guest. He argued with the same points. He had zero facts. The guy must have a staff the size of the department I work in (larger, probably), and he couldn't get one of them to get off their internet porn long enough to find him some facts? Numbers other than percents of people reading certain things say...? The guy talking to him looked ready to vomit all over him in rage. The suite watched 10 minutes in utter shock, horror, outrage, and then just plain murderousness before it had to go off. We talked three-four times as long about how that was probably the stupidest, most infuriating thing we'd ever seen. I then offered this tidbit of joy for the cheering: at least we hadn't watched Hannity and Colmes after (it's hard to believe, but there's something worse than Bill O'Reilly and that something is called Sean Hannity, the smug bastard), and, before O'Reilly, I got to see just how alien Shepard Smith was outside of ads. The man is clearly not human--this is no judgment of his personality (because he hadn't got one as far as I could tell from the segment we saw at the end of the show), it's just plain biological fact. He is not of this world. And not like Nicole Kidman's an alien (which she is), I mean he's really funky looking, all the time. Thus ends any attempts I might ever make to watch Fox News, even in the spirit of scientific research. But I guess I have an answer to the question posed by that Daily Mirror front page: Why are 59 million people so dumb? Check your cable listings under "F".
In other news, yesterday was crap. I got yelled at by my boss for running a gel with too many samples. Not over-loading a lane or anything, just that I ran a sample from each tube of minipreps I'd made rather than just pooling them together. She'd not said to do that until after it was too late. Then I had to run a standard quite a few lanes away from a PCR, and that pissed her off. There was no other space on the gel, and I had assumed it was better to run it now, not waste the three gel lanes that were left, than to wait an hour for another gel to set and another hour after that for it to run. Thought I was saving time, fixing the mistake of too few lanes together caused by the mistake of not knowing how to read her brain.
Well, wrong again. I got chewed out for that because how was she to compare? Well, that's what the standard was for, and, really, we have run loads of samples far from the standard and she'd never had trouble before...none of which I mentioned because she was in a temper. It's not that I don't understand any of her point. It's how she makes it. There are all of maybe two people I've see her talk to and like and say good things about afterward. It makes me wonder how she talks of me. She probably is able to come right out and tell her husband that I'm an idiot, whereas to my face she just heavily implies it so that there is no doubt but there is no confirmation either. It's something I don't understand. Why, when someone makes a mistake, does it necessitate making them feel--in addition to their frustration and upsetness from having made it in the first place--stupid and ignorant and useless? I did mention there were no spaces left on the gel and that I thought it would be better to run it now, unless she had an extra gel? (she had a piece of one another time) That made it worse. It was my responsibility to have agarose gels lined up and ready to use at any given moment, not hers. I seriously doubt making the point that the gels contiain Ethidium Bromide, a HIGHLY TOXIC substance, and, therefore, should not just be kept lying around near other stuff in our already over-loaded fridge, would have helped (EB is so toxic that the tubes are kept in the hood, as are the pipette tips used to aliquot it so they may be disposed of specially later--the gels and anything disposal that touches them have their own waste bins--it's that bad).
Let me pause to say that the best news I've ever gotten was that her sitter was out for the day and she isn't coming in today.
Later that day, in an effort not make any more arguments about stupid things, I went to train myself on the picture-taking machine in the other lab. I managed to get molecular weights (based on entering the weights of the standard into the program manually) of bands on a gel that she had run, and I got densities of bands from an X-Ray film which I slaved over, changing the background, reshooting the picture, etc etc in order to make the densities make sense. Someone helped me with exposure checking, the works. I brought it back and ended up being patronized again. The picture was too dark! The background should be almost white! I should know this despite having never made these kinds of pictures before. Frankly, after playing with the exposure times (wow, there's a lot I don't know about photography), someone showed me the feature that lets you know you've overexposed the picture, and, to me, it looked like you'd have had to do that to get it white in the background. I got hell about there being a lighter spot on the background (the light for the camera is a trans-white light, so it's coming from under the film, hence the spot where the light is centered). I was told off for not cleaning the platform. This last one I actually understood because if there's one thing I've learned in laboratory work, no one cleans up after themselves, so, to protect your work, you have to do it yourself. Someone left something on that platform and it got on my film (luckily, not on an important part or on an important film, but there's always a chance).
Then it just got plain stupid. She must have been looking for something to criticize. I had, for the first time, found out how to subtract background density and come up with the density in terms of pixel intensity of the picture for the bands on her film. Given than two of the bands nearly bled together and two were so faint as to be barely visible to the eye let alone the camera, I was feeling pretty good...until I brought the data back. I made the analysis report and was told immediately by someone who hadn't been there that I must have gotten it completely wrong. She was so negative and certain it took me a minute to realize why she was wrong. The densities were listed in a chart, but she kept saying that what should have been the densest bands were reading on the chart as the least dense. Feeling pretty dense myself, I looked at the column of numbers again. It had seemed okay on the computer, so what was wrong with the print out? The answer? The decimal places were not aligned. It looked like something with a density of about 10,000.000 was less dense than something with a density of 8,900.00 because they were written like this:
Sample Density
1 10000.00
2 8900.00
It took me literally about five minutes to make her realize that 2 was in fact less than 1. It wasn't helped by the fact that I couldn't alter the report on the program (not until it was exported to excel) to place the boxes in the order they appeared on the film. To make boxes of equal size, I drew the smallest box possible around the largest sample, then copied it onto other samples. The most spread out sample was not the densest, so the most dense ended up being reported second in the column even though it was rightmost on the picture. More confusion with my boss, and her snapping at me to fix it and present it just-so in a way she would understand it. Because, on top of the admittedly confusing band-place on chart swap, she apparently didn't want the bands reported most dense to least, she wanted them from left to right. This is easily modified in excel, but after all the other witching, I nearly had it.
I'm beginning to understand why Carrie said the lady who hired here was amazed I've lasted as long as I have. I mean, I've always kind of got the idea, but yesteray, while not being out-and-out humiliation, was as close to being the worst bland day I've had here. It wasn't major disaster bad, major mistake bad, or major falling-out bad, but it was just miserable for being so hen-pecked about every little thing I tried to do. At 5:15, she noticed the serum I'd placed on ice to make fresh cell culture medium; "what's this? are you using this?" got me out of my seat where I was working on writing up a protocol (and this is funny) for taking pictures and finding densities for her and out to the hood just to prove something or nothing at all--that, occasionally, I do know what I'm doing. I'd left them on ice to give me time to do all the picture taking, and, no, I hadn't forgotten, I'd been waiting to thaw the rest of the sera (lesser volumes and in thinner tubes which would defrost faster) until I had time to breathe without hyperventilating.
All in all, I stand by my belief that her not coming in today is the best thing that's happened to me all week.
It's important to mention the columnists I do like because it's relevant to something that happened this week: I watched The O'Reilly Factor. Lisa, Carrie, and I all admitted none of us had actually watched it, we were bored, and it was on, so we decided to see what all the hoote-nanny was about. Unequivocally, I can say that Bill O'Reilly is the Devil. No, wait, I equivocate, he's not the Devil. He's...okay, he's the diet pepsi of evil; he can only rant about his conservatively biased POVs, whereas people like Cheney and William Safire a columnist I LOATHE at NYT) are the full-on 160 calories-per-serving real Pepsis of evil. But Bill O'Reilly comes close. With his I-look-so-stupid-I-must-know-what-I'm-talking-about face, and those beady eyes buried in that wad of dough, he came on and gave his 'Commentary.' Only at the start and end did he point out that nothing he said was just his own opinion. No "I think"s, or "It seems to me," which, as part of a television and not written media, is assuming a lot of the audience's attention span. The Op-Ed section of The Times is at least segregated--you have to go find it and you'll know where you are thanks to URLs and page headings in hard copy--but Bill just began yapping his fugly face off and then threw in, "By the way, this is what I think, this isn't fact."
This all comes back to columnists at NYT, I promise. O'Reilly spent most of his time yowling about Bob Herbert, possibly the biggest disgrace of a columnist employed by the NYT. Herbert, as I've ranted before, is the type to notice 9/11 happened at all sometime in December. He consistently writes about events and makes judgments on them months after the political jingoisms have already made the rounds just about everywhere else. If someone like me, only moderately informed on any given day about the rest of the world, knows more than he does, that's a bad sign. He called Iraq another Vietnam about a month after the Swift Boat Veterans thing went away, whereas the Vietnam analogy was floated ages before the Dems even had their nominee locked. Herbert will be talking about moral values sometime near my birthday in April as if it were suddenly relevant. This is the kind of reporter he is. And apparently, a few months after the rest of his fellow journalists, he attack Bill O'fucking Reilly (well, who knows when he did? O'Reilly wasn't about to present facts or anything, so this is my assumption--it could be even older, since O'Reilly can probably hold a grudge and milk it for ratings longer than anyone else at that sorry network).
So, thanks, Bob, for giving O'Reilly another lame-ass to target back for what he perceives are unfair character defamations (if he really thought so, you'd think he'd do the truly American thing and sue). Bob Herbert doesn't speak for liberals, Bill. Herbert shouldn't even speak for himself because he's validating the adage about opening your mouth and confirming your stupidity for those in doubt. If O'Reilly really fancied himself the speaker of the people, if he's even halfway intelligent, which I try to believe those who don't share my views are because it makes me a better person than them, he should know better. But, seeing as outside Fox News there's precious little media saying O'Reilly's a great guy these days (what with that sex scandal and all), I guess he had to take it where he could get it.
Also, he's evil. He presented no facts in this argument at all, just used op-eds for his evidence (using Bob Herbert as evidence ought to be grounds for expulsion from the human race, let alone from any delusions of intellect), then signed off to talk to his guest. He argued with the same points. He had zero facts. The guy must have a staff the size of the department I work in (larger, probably), and he couldn't get one of them to get off their internet porn long enough to find him some facts? Numbers other than percents of people reading certain things say...? The guy talking to him looked ready to vomit all over him in rage. The suite watched 10 minutes in utter shock, horror, outrage, and then just plain murderousness before it had to go off. We talked three-four times as long about how that was probably the stupidest, most infuriating thing we'd ever seen. I then offered this tidbit of joy for the cheering: at least we hadn't watched Hannity and Colmes after (it's hard to believe, but there's something worse than Bill O'Reilly and that something is called Sean Hannity, the smug bastard), and, before O'Reilly, I got to see just how alien Shepard Smith was outside of ads. The man is clearly not human--this is no judgment of his personality (because he hadn't got one as far as I could tell from the segment we saw at the end of the show), it's just plain biological fact. He is not of this world. And not like Nicole Kidman's an alien (which she is), I mean he's really funky looking, all the time. Thus ends any attempts I might ever make to watch Fox News, even in the spirit of scientific research. But I guess I have an answer to the question posed by that Daily Mirror front page: Why are 59 million people so dumb? Check your cable listings under "F".
In other news, yesterday was crap. I got yelled at by my boss for running a gel with too many samples. Not over-loading a lane or anything, just that I ran a sample from each tube of minipreps I'd made rather than just pooling them together. She'd not said to do that until after it was too late. Then I had to run a standard quite a few lanes away from a PCR, and that pissed her off. There was no other space on the gel, and I had assumed it was better to run it now, not waste the three gel lanes that were left, than to wait an hour for another gel to set and another hour after that for it to run. Thought I was saving time, fixing the mistake of too few lanes together caused by the mistake of not knowing how to read her brain.
Well, wrong again. I got chewed out for that because how was she to compare? Well, that's what the standard was for, and, really, we have run loads of samples far from the standard and she'd never had trouble before...none of which I mentioned because she was in a temper. It's not that I don't understand any of her point. It's how she makes it. There are all of maybe two people I've see her talk to and like and say good things about afterward. It makes me wonder how she talks of me. She probably is able to come right out and tell her husband that I'm an idiot, whereas to my face she just heavily implies it so that there is no doubt but there is no confirmation either. It's something I don't understand. Why, when someone makes a mistake, does it necessitate making them feel--in addition to their frustration and upsetness from having made it in the first place--stupid and ignorant and useless? I did mention there were no spaces left on the gel and that I thought it would be better to run it now, unless she had an extra gel? (she had a piece of one another time) That made it worse. It was my responsibility to have agarose gels lined up and ready to use at any given moment, not hers. I seriously doubt making the point that the gels contiain Ethidium Bromide, a HIGHLY TOXIC substance, and, therefore, should not just be kept lying around near other stuff in our already over-loaded fridge, would have helped (EB is so toxic that the tubes are kept in the hood, as are the pipette tips used to aliquot it so they may be disposed of specially later--the gels and anything disposal that touches them have their own waste bins--it's that bad).
Let me pause to say that the best news I've ever gotten was that her sitter was out for the day and she isn't coming in today.
Later that day, in an effort not make any more arguments about stupid things, I went to train myself on the picture-taking machine in the other lab. I managed to get molecular weights (based on entering the weights of the standard into the program manually) of bands on a gel that she had run, and I got densities of bands from an X-Ray film which I slaved over, changing the background, reshooting the picture, etc etc in order to make the densities make sense. Someone helped me with exposure checking, the works. I brought it back and ended up being patronized again. The picture was too dark! The background should be almost white! I should know this despite having never made these kinds of pictures before. Frankly, after playing with the exposure times (wow, there's a lot I don't know about photography), someone showed me the feature that lets you know you've overexposed the picture, and, to me, it looked like you'd have had to do that to get it white in the background. I got hell about there being a lighter spot on the background (the light for the camera is a trans-white light, so it's coming from under the film, hence the spot where the light is centered). I was told off for not cleaning the platform. This last one I actually understood because if there's one thing I've learned in laboratory work, no one cleans up after themselves, so, to protect your work, you have to do it yourself. Someone left something on that platform and it got on my film (luckily, not on an important part or on an important film, but there's always a chance).
Then it just got plain stupid. She must have been looking for something to criticize. I had, for the first time, found out how to subtract background density and come up with the density in terms of pixel intensity of the picture for the bands on her film. Given than two of the bands nearly bled together and two were so faint as to be barely visible to the eye let alone the camera, I was feeling pretty good...until I brought the data back. I made the analysis report and was told immediately by someone who hadn't been there that I must have gotten it completely wrong. She was so negative and certain it took me a minute to realize why she was wrong. The densities were listed in a chart, but she kept saying that what should have been the densest bands were reading on the chart as the least dense. Feeling pretty dense myself, I looked at the column of numbers again. It had seemed okay on the computer, so what was wrong with the print out? The answer? The decimal places were not aligned. It looked like something with a density of about 10,000.000 was less dense than something with a density of 8,900.00 because they were written like this:
Sample Density
1 10000.00
2 8900.00
It took me literally about five minutes to make her realize that 2 was in fact less than 1. It wasn't helped by the fact that I couldn't alter the report on the program (not until it was exported to excel) to place the boxes in the order they appeared on the film. To make boxes of equal size, I drew the smallest box possible around the largest sample, then copied it onto other samples. The most spread out sample was not the densest, so the most dense ended up being reported second in the column even though it was rightmost on the picture. More confusion with my boss, and her snapping at me to fix it and present it just-so in a way she would understand it. Because, on top of the admittedly confusing band-place on chart swap, she apparently didn't want the bands reported most dense to least, she wanted them from left to right. This is easily modified in excel, but after all the other witching, I nearly had it.
I'm beginning to understand why Carrie said the lady who hired here was amazed I've lasted as long as I have. I mean, I've always kind of got the idea, but yesteray, while not being out-and-out humiliation, was as close to being the worst bland day I've had here. It wasn't major disaster bad, major mistake bad, or major falling-out bad, but it was just miserable for being so hen-pecked about every little thing I tried to do. At 5:15, she noticed the serum I'd placed on ice to make fresh cell culture medium; "what's this? are you using this?" got me out of my seat where I was working on writing up a protocol (and this is funny) for taking pictures and finding densities for her and out to the hood just to prove something or nothing at all--that, occasionally, I do know what I'm doing. I'd left them on ice to give me time to do all the picture taking, and, no, I hadn't forgotten, I'd been waiting to thaw the rest of the sera (lesser volumes and in thinner tubes which would defrost faster) until I had time to breathe without hyperventilating.
All in all, I stand by my belief that her not coming in today is the best thing that's happened to me all week.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-11 10:42 am (UTC)-- another chunky baby (sigh)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-11 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-11 12:51 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about the damn picture taking. Most of my chemiluminescence data is considered crap because the exposure wasn't just so. Or if there was too much background (and it's even worse with colorimetric stains). The times I tried developing X-ray film to visualize my bands I either overexposed it or the substrate simply ran out. Bah. There is so much more I need to learn - all I have been doing for the past two months have been Westerns! My EMSA and ChiP are delayed until I am done with classes, I am too distracted right now. As for how your boss treats you, just nod and bear it. You'll need her as a reference later, and you can get your name in papers.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-12 08:49 am (UTC)As for the cancer thing, yeah, I'm boned.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-12 12:02 am (UTC)