SfNBANTER - A Review

What can one say about SfNBANTER -the premiere social event of the fall conference season? Once again hostess Dr. Becca excelled with another exemplary venue, menu, cocktail list and guest list. As exclusive as ever, the event was nevertheless overrun with the twitteratti and bloggeratti.

Dr. Zen wins the SfNBanter style award, again!

One must open with a very sincere Thank You to Jonathan Gross and the BioData team for sponsoring the event. It was great to meet Jonathan in the flesh finally, and chatting to the BioData team was fun and added a sense of relevancy to the wired nature of the event. After all, who better to sponsor a Tweetup than an informatics company with a very active social media presence?

This writer met old friends from the IRL (@mocost next time I'll manage more than "hi", @aechase, as ever a pleasure), old friends from the real (on line) world (including the mysterious and prolific @Scicurious and some true pseuds who must remain nameless, but know who they are), and made acquaintance with new peeps. Particular highlights were getting an awesome brain-Xmas tree ornament from @artologica, stalking @loveofscience, punking @mikechorost, losing a bet with @sugarscientist, making @artfulaction blush and swapping zombie tales with @bradleyvoytek. @noahWG and @genetrapper bought me beer, and thus consolidated themselves in the deep, fuscus and wormridden core of my heart for evermore.

A very special moment of the evening was meeting with some of my Scientopia peeps who I've known for years, but never met before IRL. And apologies once again to Drugmonkey for disappearing, and Namnezia for not saying goodbye. I was a case study in nicotine overdose by the end of the night and a brief palate cleaning walk around the block turned into an epic stumble home via a late night pizza parlour and meeting a poor homeless woman who wanted me to help her walk to Massachusetts. The state, not the Avenue...

I wish I could throw out a Heyya to all the folks I met, but the mixture of beer, avatars and real names was dizzying. Even i got confused about how to introduce myself. And that i think is the key to these events. Living online allows us to escape, expand or avoid daily social strictures, be they work or family indicated. Online we can be freer in our expression and find an audience of friends and peers to share our thoughts and writing with.  It was great to meet so many cool, wired and desiccated dedicated folks from all ranks, fields, and social backgrounds.

So join us next year in New Orleans for #sfnbanterIII - in 2010 we celebrated with SfNPosterface in a nightclub with 2000 people. In 2011 we proved we have traction in DC. What will we do in 2012 in the French Quarter?....One positively shudders to even contemplate the debauched science we'll conjure... ;)

It's that time again

I'm late, I'm late, I'm late. Well, it's been a tumultuous yeah and I've not been a very active blogger to be sure. But, that's par for the course. I've been doing this since 2004 and you have good times and bad times, times when you're feeling inspired to write, and times when you're not. But now there's some impetus - The Greatest Show on Earth is coming up (next week!).

The Society for Neuroscience are holding their annual meeting, as is their wont, and this year we're back in Washington DC. last time the meeting was in DC I had to catch the red-eye from Las Vegas the day before my presentation, where I had been attending the orientation for the new members of the Board of Directors of the National Postdoc Association. Ironically, I'm no longer on the Board and now they hold it in DC the week before SfN. Anyway, that was in 2008, I was still a Labrat and the world was only just realising how desperately bankrupt it was.

In 2010 myself and M'Belov'd Colleague Dr. Becca covered the event in San Diego, and ran a serious of semi-coherent videoblogs for it. I think they're fun, and the out-takes are simply FTW. I also ran a review of the SfN Neurobloggers, both before and after the conference.

My comment then, as now stands - the Society is making a farce of its efforts to engage a wired audience. Last year only a couple of the Neurobloggers were actually, y'know, bloggers. Some have kept up with the blogging more or less, but there was no effort on behalf of the Society to seriously screen entries based on anything credible like credentials, experience, following etc.

Surely, and really, fucking obviously, if you're trying to get more attention to your conference in the wired world, it would make sense to gather a stable of popular, talented and proven science bloggers to cover the event. Right?

Right?

They wouldn't make the same mistake twice they?

Would they?

Even after a few of "us" actually contacted the Society In Real Life and spoke to them about it.

Right?

Yes. Yes, they would. #DFS.

They're making no fucking effort to advertise this at all as usual. The SfN hashtags on twitter are being run by the usual Twits, and thankfully it's self-organising well. But once more they've picked a stable of writers, with a couple of very notable exceptions, who are totes WTF.

Zen Faulks has beaten me to the punch this year, so here's linklove to Zen. To whit:

"Last year, I wrote about the puzzlement about the Society for Neuroscience’s choice of official bloggers. I didn’t recognize a one.

With today’s announcement of the Neuroscience 2011 neurobloggers, I confess I am still baffled by the SfN’s social media strategy. Unlike last year, year, I do recognize one blogger, the mighty Scicurious [Ed: I'll add Jason Snyder of Functional Neurogenesis to this too]...I’m most baffled that two blogs didn’t exist at all a week ago, which happened last year, too. The application to be a neuroblogger asked for samples, including previous conference coverage..."

Seriously, I just don't fucking get it. Why bother having a call for applicants if the entire process is so desperately farcical. Last year I worried that the n00bs were opening themselves up for a shit storm because of the possible attention. However, by all accounts traffic was so low it was moot. I know Jason and Scicurious will do excellently, and as usual they'll likely get good traffic. The rest of you, if you actually exist, have fun, but don't sweat it. The entire thing seems to be a waste of time and effort unless you're already up and running. And if you are, you don't need this faux 'boost' from a Society that clearly doesn't give two shakes of a fuck about promoting itself, or you, to the Wired World.

********************************

FWIW, I'll be attending sporadically and blogging when I can - I have some family business to take of while I'm in the area so i'm staying in Annapolis and commuting.

Most importantly::: I'll see y'all at BANTER. mad levels of props to M'Belov'd Colleague Dr. Becca for organising the whole thing while I've been Blogger in absencia this year.

This is the second (annual?) blogger and tweeter hang out and if it's even close to last year, you'll need a free schedule Tuesday morning, and a handful of aspirin with that morning coffee.

Remember, if you don't want to out your Pseud, take your fucking name tag off before you go into the bar, or write your Pseud on the back of it, wear it in reverse and geek with pride.

See y'all on Monday ;)

Google-tube?

Link on BBC new webpage  - Searching for the next Google... along with this picture

(credit BBC I guess)


I get it - it's all techphillic and shit, but couldn't they have picked something slightly more fucking relevent? Either use Google to draw attention or mention chemical engineering or whatever the fuck that you8ng an is doing with that test tube.

...and test tubes? Who the fuck uses test tubes nowadays (shut up chemists)

DFS, at least it isn't the UEoBL* (pronouced weeble)

Oh shit i think my building is on fire. BRB. ETA - nope. false alarm

(*Ubiquitous Eppendorf of Blue Liquid)

Winter Retreat

It's cold. Cold in Memphis. We don't "do" cold very well, which is silly because it's only hot here for 6 or so months of the year. Starting about now the weather gets grey, and chilly. The damp stays in the air and the chill is pervasive, leaching into your bones. It demotivates. All I want to do, and I think a lot of my fellow Memphibians would join me, is find somewhere warm to curl up. Somewhere with an open fire, a limitless supply of soup and good books (substitute TV for anyone not me).

Alas.

The cold. It demotivates in a different way to the heat. The heat saps your strength and energy. The constant grinding humidity. It never cools off in the summer. The nights are a miasma of discomfort.

I am demotivated. I got my "old" job back and a promotion is promised. I still don't have a faculty position so I am demotivated to work on grants for the third year in a row. I do a lot of the writing and editing and am "just" a line item. It's stupid, I know. I need the grants to keep myself and my team employed, and I need them more to prove I am the One who Can and thus earn the faculty position. But, I am demotivated.

I have book reviews to write for Lablit, and they're half written. Discarded and angry passages and paragraphs. Aimless and meandering. I promised a book review; I have others waiting to be written and now even WW Norton have stopped sending me books.

I have editing I should have done, but I lost my motivation and lost my contract with a major publisher to serve as a free lance editor.

I have blog posts to write. I used to love writing and blogging. BANTER and the Society for Neuroscience meeting are coming up. This time last year I was railing over at LabSpaces and getting excited for SfN. My dear friend and beloved colleague Dr. Becca is doing it all on her own right now, and god knows how she finds the time with her new lab.

I am demotivated. Depression is a shitty illness.

Eye witness silliness

Is more proof needed than simple human hatred and the desire for vengence?

"Updated at 8:19 p.m.] The mother of the police officer that Davis was convicted of killing told CNN's Anderson Cooper that she is "absolutely devastated" that the execution has yet to happen.
“I’m absolutely devastated because I want it over with. ... They’ve been through the courts four times there in Georgia. They’ve been to the Supreme Court three times," Anneliese MacPhail said in an interview from her home, referring to previous delays. "This delay, again, is very upsetting and I think very unfair to us."
"I'd like to close this book," she said. "We feel (Davis is) guilty. The evidence and everything that we have seen – that I have seen , because I’ve been to all the trials – he is guilty, and I believe in that. And so does the rest of my family.”

Your heart is broken because a man who might be innocent is going to be murdered by the state that messed his trial up in the first place? You don't want vengeance, you want blood. And the blood of an innocent is just fine, because black blood is cheap.

The jury have retreated because the eye witness accounts are corrupted by all accounts. Corrupted by the police force your son worked for. Why wouldn't you want justice? Or do you just need closure? Humans are good at closure. If Mr. Davis ever gets out I don't think we have to look far for the lynch mob.

In honor of CPP

NFL fucken networke is a fuckine joke. 2 hours before the fuckin game and a room full of over paid has beens are analysing Chad Ochocinco's fucking TWitter stream? Michael Fuckin Irving looks like he's going to have a fucking heart attack roaring about Ochocincos fuckin TWEETS?

What a fuckin joke. No wonder no one gets shit anymore. Hundreds of thousands of zombies are watchng these assholes thinkning that this is entertainment. And these douchefucks are being paid millions o dollars to act like spoiled slightly inbred fucking morons.

I fucking despair. What hope that the gamewill be any fucking better?

Labour Day Mark 12

Today is my twelfth Labor Day, and my first as a Permanent Resident. I still have no idea what one does on Labor Day or, indeed, why it's so important. To Americans it marks the official end of summer and this has always struck me as odd because the weather (at least where I've lived over the last decade or so) is usually glorious and often 'better' than "real" summer (less humid, less hot).

The start of summer, Memorial Day (May), is marked with barbeques (cook-outs as we call them here), as is the Fourth of July, which includes the additional bonus of fireworks. Other holidays have associated phenomena - Martin Luther King Day (January) is a time of introspection and thought, doubly so here down South where the racial divide is still strong, and triply so in Memphis where Dr. King was murdered. (The site of his death, the Lorraine Motel, is now the National Civil Rights Museum and well worth a visit if you're in town.)

There are the pseudo-holidays of Columbus Day (celebrating men who refuse to stop and ask for directions) and President's Day (celebrating...uh, the President or something?). There's Thanksgiving, which to me is a chance to practice cooking a turkey in time for Christmas (my favourite holiday).

And there's Labor Day. A day off of work, but to do what? Some folks have one last hoorah at the beach (too far from here), or "one last" cookout (Tropical Storm Lee has put the kibosh on that in Memphis this year). It just seems a funny anti-climactic holiday.

But in the tradition of starting traditions where none exists, MusicGirl and I have decided there will a Labor Day breakfast and she will prepare it, just like Granddaddy Jim used to when she was a kid (Granddaddy Jim was Native American and she has fond memories of him smoking his cheroots and getting ash in the pancake batter, and then getting the batter in his long braided hair). So, this morning at the crack of dawn *ahem*...9:45...I headed out to The Store to get the makings for breakfast...and over an hour later returned with what I assumed was the correct makings. See, I don't "do"American breakfasts - when possible I make myself an "English" breakfast that most of my friends refuse to eat.

Ho hum...apparently 6 eggs was too few, 'center cut' bacon is wrong and it took me 35 fucking minutes to find the pancake mix - why isn't it with the rest of the cake mixes!? (And, yes we could make fresh, but we're still living out of boxes and some utensils etc. are missing). It took another 15 to find the maple syrup (why isn't it with the rest of the dressing, condiments, unguents etc.?)...and then 10 more  minutes of sorting through the 873 different varieties, all of which were proudly "sugar free" or "lite" before I found something 'real' ("lite" syrup, really? Irony spill on aisle 5).

Well, what the hell! This year traditions clash meet and we get Tideliar's catered variation of the Official Labor Day Breakfast!

At least some folks look like they're existed....Can haz catsup?