Colin Johnson

Dutch-style bauble with 2016 written on it.

I like the items on my Christmas tree to remind me things I’ve done over the years. This one reminds me of the time I went to Amsterdam in 2017, but was too cheap to spend €8 on a bauble with “2017” on it so I bought a discounted 2016 one for €2 instead.

Saved by Stoppard Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec I), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of "adjuvant systemic chemotherapy", ", and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia. Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL r.

Alt text version. Thanks for sharing Harry.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Excerpt from an email ad: "FREE WILL if you're 55+"

Looking forward to throwing off the shackles of determinism in a few birthdays' time:

A club statement from Blackpool saying Steve Bruce has been sacked along with coaches Steve Agnew and Stephen Clemence. Stephen Dobbie and Steve Banks will take temporary charge.

You don’t have to be called Steve or Stephen to work at Blackpool, but it does help.

ever since i was a little kid
when i would walk through libraries
imagining that the air around me was imbued
with the wisdom of all the books and their authors
i always dreamed that
one day
i would grow up
and write something
that people bung into ChatGPT to get a 1 paragraph summary

Milkbaaaaaa! 🐑

Restaurant sign: "Habemus Pizza"

Reminded of this sign on a restaurant around the corner from the Vatican (disappointed that it isn't grammatically correct, though: "habemus pizzam"):

Me: do you know Carl? He’s another parallel line

Parallel line: never met him

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

Quotation from book: "Some programmes try to balance these issues, for example by specifying both the number of recommended meetings and how much daft work can be reviewed."

Glad I caught this typo...

I’ve taken a vowel of slence.

Time for academia to roll out the concept of fan-non-fiction. (eg What would Rawls have said about AI?)

An Instagram post from Taylor Swift captioned "I LOVE THE FALL"

Oh yeah? Name twenty-five of their albums.

Red aurora over buildings in Nottingham

Faint aurora in the sky over Nottingham tonight.

Temperature forecast: 403 degrees (Celsius)

I’m more concerned with the temperature here

Likert survey form with options "strongly agree - agree - neutral - disagree - strongly disagree", or "grudgingly agree - meh - grudgingly disagree", or "this question is annoying"

I just took a survey that would have benefited from the modified 2-D Likert scale I just invented

How Colorful Ribbon Diagrams Became the Face of Proteins | Quanta Magazine Proteins are often visualized as cascades of curled ribbons and twisted strings, which both reveal and conceal the mess of atoms that make up these impossibly complex molecules.

This is such a fun & important history.

Jane Richardson inventing ribbon diagrams catalyzed advances in structural biology like few other inventions.

If she hadn't devised ribbon diagrams, who knows how we would envision proteins 50yr later!

www.quantamagazine.org/how-colorful...
Biosky
Chemsky

My brain is sufficiently university-admissions-coded this week that I just thought “don’t forget to water the yucas plant”.