So that problem was the paramount motivation for dragging my ass out of bed at 5:45am today. I hadn't slept again, but I got to Mt. University alright (even found a place to stow my beige beast in under 10 minutes!).

I kept thinking how out of touch the person was who originally wrote down those experiments. I was pissed in that mischievious gun-totting way about it all. I knew, though, that Dr. Zivago would either make it clear or call it bullshit and we'd dance and eat cake.

I was supposed to see him at the lab meeting we have every monday at 8:45am. It's like any corporate meeting: you repeat things from last week and weeks before that, 'strongly encourage' your staff to 'participate' and lay the PC smackdown otherwise.

Lo and behold, though, Dr. Ziv didn't show up. L and I were confused and pissy. Had I really come in at 6:30am with nothing to do for the rest of the day? L had some welding and plastic mounting to take care of, but I didn't have closed toed shoes so I was more or less human driftwood...

As a major aside, though, you might wonder why L needs to weld scrap metal and mount plastic. It all starts with her simple experiment. She's shown that if you give Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to a rat, that mental condition will fade away if you replace their regular water with sugar water. They guzzle the sugar water, their blood-sugar (i.e. glucose) levels rise and their mental health stabilizes.

**If you hate science, this will bore you to tears and you should skip it**

What she wants to tease out is exactly when the furry bastard guzzles the sugar water: RIGHT after getting traumatized, later that night, or maybe days later? To do this, you need to register when the rat drinks. How? The cheap way is to make the entire metal cage a giant (non-harmful) electric circuit. When the rat drinks from its water bottle, the circuit is disrupted and that signal and time stamp of that disruption is sent to a database. The only problem is that water bottle nozzles are thrust straight into the cage, so the rat can brush against the thing and it'd technically be registered as drinking. The solution is this complex plastic-metal Bladerunner mounting frame that holds the bottle such that the rat can only get at it with its tongue

**end of engineering fun**

So, where was I? Yeah, I was human driftwood with fuck all to do for the rest of the day since Dr. Zivago was gone. Awhile later, though, the phone rang and the man himself was on the line. He sounded good for being sick. Later on he called again to ask about what I was doing. After he hung up I saw what I was doing and came to an epiphany: I was being dumb. I didn't need to re-enter all of that data. I could just take these fancy averages of all of those scores and plug those in to get pretty graphs in Excel.

And then Dr. Zivago came by without notice, which threw me off completely. He looked fine but I kept wondering if my being a dumbass had gotten him out of bed and straight to Mt. University. We argued about graphing techniques, programs to use. He tried figuring out a program he'd used before like an injured war elephant. Part of me wanted to cry for how awkward I felt right then. But in the end he seemed to like what I was doing.

The whole reason I bothered updating, though, was to bitch about this review article I'm reading for my audited class with Dr. Ziv. I've read dozens of science papers, but there's a major difference between today's science papers and even ones from 30-40 years back--especially in psychology. These authors use words and jargon that confuses the bloody hell out of me. It's basically as if I'm learning the Mandarin Chinese characters for some big words (in English) that I already know well.

2 pages down, 27 to go. It did take 30 minutes to read those two pages, true, but there's gotta be a learning curve to this thing.

Then again, maybe I'll need some sugar water of my own before I'm done with this article...

previous - next