Things I have that make me happy

#1.) A poster proof! It's all shiny and everything!

#2.) The first figure done for my paper. And decent revisions of both the Intro & the Methods section. No Results or Discussion yet... next week is gonna be hell.

Today's Epiphany

Just so you know, I finally have a legitimate excuse for horribly erratic posting habits, as I'm currently simultaneously preparing to move across the country and writing my first paper for publication.

So I'm taking a break from the latter to finish revising my poster for SfN (since I realized that the standard turnaround for posters is 5 days, which would mean that if I turn it in today it'll be back the day before we load up our PODS), and I had an epiphany about the difference between writing for a scientific audience and well, pretty much any other kind of writing I've done.

A key element of writing for a general audience is to have a host of synonyms at your disposal, so you can always insert whatever word sounds best into a given sentence. Also, you need to be able to avoid using the same words in consecutive sentences when possible as your sentences will sounds homogeneous and monotonous. But in science writing, you need to choose a some word and stick with it. Use the same term to describe the same thing every. Single. Time. Otherwise, your audience will just get confused and wonder if you're talking about different phenomena. I realize this is not a major grand epiphany for most people, and is probably a bit obvious. But it's part and parcel of explaining all of the writing problems I've had when working on things in the lab. My secret to good writing has always been to write for the ear; I just get the text out there and then revise and revise until the prose has some flow to it. But when I try to do that on my poster or in my paper, it's actually counter-productive since I'm just messing things up when I try to liven up the words.

The L to the O to the R-E-M

I just grabbed my PIs to show them the poster-in-progress. I'd love to take a picture of it for you--if I had a decent enough camera, which I don't--just because it currently consists of a drawn outline on the white board marking the dimensions with 20-odd pieces of paper with pictures and graphs on them taped all over the place, surrounded by notes, arrows pointing all over the place, and random scribbles. It looks like the bulletin board in the tinfoil-hat guy's apartment just at the moment. I'm resisting the urge to start including references to the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the breaking of the Seventh Seal just to make the subtext explicit.

But the amusing thing that just happened was that I accidentally introduced them to Lorem ipsum while showing them the poster. See, I had several variations on "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" distributed throughout the poster to simulate the introduction, conclusion, and various captions, just using it as a placeholder for text (as it's usually used for), and apparently neither of them had heard of it before. I'm not sure if I've previously gotten the chance to tell John something novel without having just learned it myself, so I am immensely pleased with myself for the moment.

Brain. Gone.

I can tell I've been working on this project too hard & too much the past week or so when I suddenly have thoughts like this"

"You know, this would really make a great T-Shirt!"



...

In other news, I've now installed Acrobat Professional & Illustrator 10.0 on my lab machine (ooh! a whole integer of upgrade on Illustrator!), and the conversion of Excel charts to pdfs to Illustrator objects works surprisingly... at all. More importantly, it does everything I want it to in about five minutes. So yay.

Phase 1: Poster Presentation: Conquered

I did my big presentation of the project I've been working on for the last year (aka: since I joined the lab) today. It went pretty well, although I had a surprisingly large number of points where I went, "Why does this slide have this title/chart combination? This chart totally doesn't prove that point!"

Sigh.

Other than that, it seemed to go pretty well. We've already figured out the basics of what charts and pictures are going to get turned into figures for the poster (the poster being phase 2, and phase 3 being the complete destruction of the city, or maybe a paper instead. We'll see how we feel once we get that far. But the current step is figuring out how to convert all of the figures from Excel or R to Illustrator, since apparently I'm the only person in the lab who has ever used Excel or R to create charts.

Seriously. Apparently everyone else uses Matlab or LabView for chart generation.

WTF?