Day 31 - Data, Data Everywhere

Ok guys, an official announcement. My blog "Day #" and the date will no longer line up. This is incredibly sad. I expect you to mourn.

Now that that's done, today was also weird. This is pretty much shaping up to be a weird week. Although this afternoon I discovered that part of it, namely the fact that I've been dizzy, in a sort of daze, tired, and a bit nauseous/headache-y might be due to the fact that I haven't been drinking much water at all for a bit. So I started again. Hopefully this is dehydration and it will go away.

So this morning I was on the TEM with Talmon from 9 am to 12:30 pm. The images (of which there are almost billions) are quite promising, which is great! Also, some professors/researchers have begun e-mailing me back with images from their published papers, so now the data is just a river and I am trying to keep my head up. This is what I mean when I say that at this job, sometimes I'm bored and sometimes I'm very, very, very busy.

After working on the TEM I dropped off my stuff in the lab and headed to San Martin for lunch, where I joined a relatively large group including Ari, Tamara, Rachel, Zvonimir, and Lisa. We were soon joined by Tanmay as well. Afterwards I returned to the lab for a bit, began work on the images, and then headed out again for a 3:00 pm talk about stem cells given by a researcher at Harvard who spent a summer in the KKISS program himself, nine years ago. It was actually a very good talk! It was at about the right level for me (I have a bit of biochem), but I feel like it was also accessible to math and computer science people, and not so far below the biology people that they felt like two-year-olds. A lot of people asked questions, too, so I think it was a success.

From this point until 6 pm, I continued to work on images. XiaoMeng and I had talked a bit about my data so far yesterday, and she showed me a new paper she had read that models the same thing I'm measuring. It's in a journal called "small." That makes me really happy already, but I'll get back to you after I read it.

After work I got ready for climbing and met Alissa in the lobby at 7. We grabbed a train to Tel Aviv and walked to Performance Rock, where we met Tamara, Mena and Jesse for some bouldering awesomeness. The place was jam-packed when we got there, which I found out later from Tamara and some super-sleuthing skills was probably due to an open house from 7-9 with this climbing trainer/coach from England. The place cleared out a bit around 9, and we stayed until 9:30; we wanted to catch the 10:12 train and I wanted to grab a falafel on the way. Luckily the falafel place was about to close and the woman had pre-made a pita (seemingly just for me), because even with this quickness of food acquisition we got onto the platform just as the train was pulling into the station. I ate happily on the ride home. Tamara and Alissa were still with me, while Mena and Jesse had taken another form of transport back to their destination. I convinced them that we needed ice cream bars before returning to Clore, so we grabbed some at the convenience store and sat in the lobby to enjoy them.

After a bit the two of them went to bed. I sat with Zvonimir and Stephen a while longer, chatting about languages and writing systems and other interesting topics for a bit (the most important tidbit I learned being the tendency of ancient languages to be "inflected," while modern ones are usually more "analyic"), then we all joined a larger group also hanging out in the lobby. I was so tired that I soon went downstairs. After a brief chat with Ari, the main topic being that I was bestowing upon him 1.07 gigs of music, I crashed.