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Do you suppose that it is perhaps past time I went in search of new running shoes? These guys are less than a year old, and I can already see my toes through those holes. I am disappointed - it is either that the high humidity here in south Florida is absolute hell on shoes, or that Nike just isn't making them like they used to, because I sure as heck am not running as hard or as often as I used to.
Finally! After first promising that we would move in by November of 2006, the graduate student housing at TREC is open for inhabitation. These buildings are a far cry from the trailers (referred to by staff as "our little legal liabilities") that I have lived in for the last year and a half. While the houses are intended for eight students to share, there are currently but four of us living here - and we have more than enough space between us.
Better still, this is a place that all of us can be proud to live in. They're brand new houses with all of the latest amenities, and I finally have my own amazing kitchen with a truly awesome ceramic-surface oven and a giant refrigerator. My mattress is brand new, and is not rotting with mildew - and neither are the walls! Above and beyond the trailers, I cannot emphasize how nice these places really are. When I leave here, I really do not expect to live in a place this nice again for years to come.
In the meantime, I really don't know what to do with myself - except to graduate and get out of here. While I will never be a fan of south Florida, I finally feel that I have someplace I could call home.
Sometimes the Onion is frighteningly accurate, and no longer a humor magazine. For example, this piece was written in January of 2001.
There is so much that I want to say at this, but I think that he is his own best advocate, and so I will let the man speak for himself.
"We are young despite the years, we are concern.
We are hope despite the times.
All of a sudden, these days
Happy throngs: take this joy wherever, wherever you go..."
"Early morning, April four
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky.
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride."
The server upon which this site is being hosted is being reset and improved. As such, files and articles may come and go, talking of Michelangelo...
With a new year, new deadlines. My life for the next four months, summarized (all apologies to Bungie):
"But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Sometimes shedding a little light into the darkness reveals terrible things.
Let me make something perfectly clear: we are the United States of America, and we are supposed to be the good guys. As Ronald Reagan once suggested, we are the folks wearing the White Hats, and we should be held to a higher moral standard. If this means that we sometimes must fight with one hand tied behind our back, then so be it. We can not use the tools and techniques of our enemies to fight them, because to do so is to become them. We need to seize the high moral ground precisely because we are more capable than our foes. We need to take the hard road, if only to demonstrate that we are a people of honor.
Part of that path will involve some painful self-examination. Mistakes were made. Sometimes the truth hurts, but we have to face it in order to begin redressing those wrongs against ourselves and others.
I spent the latter part of this afternoon converting excerpts from my thesis' literature review into the Wikipedia entry for Scirtothrips dorsalis, so now the truly bored can learn more about this critter than they ever possibly wanted to know. I am probably going to continue to expand the article, adding sections on management of the thrips - but converting all of those citations makes my eyes want to bleed, and I keep finding things that should be linked into other things. I mean, I can't leave a section on putative Tospovirus transmission in S. dorsalis without first improving the page for Tospoviruses, now can I?
Please feel free to contribute to or to vandalize these articles as necessary. This information needs to be shared, and right or wrong, Wikipedia has gradually become one of the most prominent references for common knowledge. It is amazing what ten minutes of expert opinion can do to improve an article, and conversely, what ten seconds of vandalism can do to ruin it.
Last night was also the NCAA college championship between UF and OU under the politically fraught and controversial bowl system. While I am not a fan of the lavish attention that college football receives at the expense of academic programs and other sports, it is interesting to see the madness up close and personal.
Since the championship game was being held in Miami, and I receive no other benefits for attending the University of Florida so far from Gainesville, I sort of felt obligated to attend. Of course, getting tickets was near impossible. As a student of the University of Florida, I can enter a lottery to win permission to buy tickets to the game. Had I won one of these tickets, I could have paid $175, and would have had to pick them up at the ticket office in Gainesville - after presenting two forms of picture ID and a valid credit card. I later learned that OU students paid only $110 for their tickets. These were tickets discounted for students in the nosebleed seats. I'd hate to think how much seats in the front or middle tier might have been worth.
Still, lacking for entertainment in Homestead, I figured it was worthwhile to attempt to crash the game, or to go tailgating in the parking lot. Parking was supposed to have cost my small party an additional forty dollars, but we were fortunate to arrive a little late to the opening ceremonies. I say fortunate because the person responsible for collecting money for parking had run off to watch the game, and his staff told us to just park and to enjoy the game.
While we never got inside the stadium, there were more big screen televisions in the parking lot than there usually are at a sports bar. There was considerable food about as well. While we did not so engage ourselves, had we wanted to, we probably could have stepped into one of many drunken lines and taken some barbecue and booze from someone watching the game. We ended up circling the stadium most of the night, just watching the people watch the game - until we found an ideal spot outside of the VIP lounge where there were three giant screen televisions.
I was not entirely surprised to find that local fans were not as enthusiastic as Texas football fans, but few people are. You can usually hear a Aggie or Longhorn game long before you see it. Still, whatever their level of enthusiasm, these were still southern football fans. Some folks were friendly, and enjoyed the game. Others were more bellicose. We watched a drunken skinhead pick a fight in front of four police officers. We watched a man in MSU green (and not much else) bicycle by. Our celebrity sightings outside the VIP lounge included the Miami chief of police, former President Bill Clinton's heavily armed security detail, and the wrestler Mankind. We saw a lot more people in Oklahoma red than I normally expect to see in Miami on any given Wednesday. I got to try and explain the "Sooner" nickname to South Americans.
After a tense first half, Florida won it in the third quarter.
Then we all went back to our trailers.
My old company just axed another quarter of their staff during the weekly meeting this afternoon. It was an unpleasant surprise to most of the assembled staff, and apparently the CEO was too craven a coward to make the announcement himself this time. I am rapidly running out of people that I met there who still work there. This is their third round of layoffs, and each one has cut staff by at least twenty percent. This does not bode well for the future of the company, but I suppose that they are slimming the workforce in order to concentrate all of their diminishing resources on one of their three drug candidates currently in clinical trials.
Once again, I must reflect and recognize that I am lucky to have left when I did. I almost certainly would have been fired in the first round; I was in a superfluous and overstaffed department, and was a malcontent and rabble-rouser. I do wish that it hadn't unemployed so many of my friends quite so suddenly.
I wish them all the best on their roads ahead, and I even hope that the company does survive this latest downturn. Whatever reservations I have about the conduct of certain scientists employed there or the management team, the biochemistry recorded was amazing in its breadth and depth. Many of their drug targets show incredible promise as treatments for debilitating and terrible diseases, and I suspect that given sufficient time and resources, Lexicon will eventually produce a product of note and value.