I was just reflecting how awesome my four postdocs are, and thought that rather than keeping such thoughts to myself, I should write a blog post and show them some appreciation.
Ghaith, Vivek, Ronny, Kathleen (named in order of when they joined the lab!) are all awesome — so smart and independent. It’s a breeze being PI of this bunch! The only problem is that they do make me feel rather inadequate as I look back and realise how totally clueless I was at the corresponding points in my own career :). When I was recruiting the three postdocs for the M3 project, I remember shortlisting these three and telling colleagues “If they all accept, I really will have my dream team.” Well, they did, and later on Kathleen joined us for ASTEROID. I really am one lucky PI and all I can say is, I do realise the fact.

I’ve been reading the new book “The Folly of Fools: the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life” by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. This is my favourite bit.

“That deception might induce anger and attack was suggested to me very forcefully in my own life some thirty years ago. I was taking a walk, carrying my one-year-old son in my arms, when I spotted a squirrel in a tree. The problem was that my son did not see the squirrel, so I whistled as melodically as I could to draw the squirrel closer to us and, sure enough, the squirrel crept forward, but my son still could not see it. So I decided to reverse my relationship with the squirrel and mimic an attack. I suddenly lunged at it. I expected it to scamper away from me. I would have ruined a budding friendship but allowed my son to see the squirrel as it rushed away from us. Instead, the squirrel ran straight at us, chittering in apparent rage, teeth fully exposed, jumping to the branch closest to me and my son. Now my son saw the squirrel, and I had the fright of my life, quickly running several steps away. For my folly, the squirrel could have killed my son with a leap to my shoulders and two expert bites to his neck. Had I begun the relationship hostile, I believe the squirrel never would have become so angry. It was the betrayal implied by beginning friendly, only to attack (deception) that triggered the enormous anger.”

They clearly have some seriously bad-ass Sciuridae where Trivers lives.

I just love how much stuff is accessible online nowadays. I’m old enough that when I started my scientific career, reading a paper meant walking over to the library and looking up the actual physical paper in leather-bound volumes! I haven’t done that this millennium… it makes me feel ancient to think of it.

And increasingly, out-of-copyright texts are being digitised, so if I come across a reference to a nineteenth-century German work, I can probably now find it in an American library somewhere and read it myself. Or, let’s face it, use the fact that it’s digital to search it for keywords rather than reading all 200 densely-written pages. Even if I only skim, I feel so much more in touch with my scientific heritage now that I can go back to the original texts myself rather than relying on what I read in textbooks. What a fantastic development.

Love this building we saw being put up in London recently. The pattern of the windows makes it look as if it’s a single flat plane. In fact, what we’re looking at is two planes which intersect at a sharp angle. Projective geometry in action!

The lab recently had a fun Backyard Brains Spikerbox workshop led by Jannetta Steyn. We wired up a simple circuit to record neuromuscular activity and used an Arduino board to produce a visual display.

The British newspaper “The Guardian” was always famous for its typos. It had a particularly funny one on its main page this week:

The curse of the Gruaniad strikes again…

Such a fun day today. First off, 9am meeting with Paul to refine our Bayesian cue-combination model. Realised we had made some errors in the last implementation but reckon we have fixed them now. Excited to see what Paul produces in the next iteration.

Then a meeting with a senior academic where I got some useful advice on career development. Following that, a brisk bike ride with a colleague down to the Centre for Life. There we attended a meeting on “how can we encourage women into STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers”, organised by the Houses of Parliament Outreach Service, the Institute of Physics and Newcastle Science City. 5 impressive speakers including two local MPs, Chi Onwurah and Pat Bell, who both have a STEM background.

Finally, the lab meeting, with cake courtesy of Vivek, and a chance to catch up on what my talented and productive team have been up to while I’ve been away for two weeks (first at the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conference, and then on holiday). Loads of new data to see. In Claire Rind’s lab, Lisa has been recording spikes from motion-sensitive neurons in the locust. Rob and Nat have been generating interesting new behavioural data on mantis contrast sensitivity, which Ghaith has fit a model to. But most excitingly, Judith, Ghaith and Vivek have been working hard on a new experiment on mantis 3D, which is displaying promising results. We are either close to the breakthrough we have been searching for … or it is a random statistical fluctuation. Another week of data collection should reveal which, and we will either crack open the champagne or be very depressed.

And in a surprise extra, Vivek and Ghaith demonstrated their simulations of different models of science funding. Cool work guys!

Met with a student to discuss project write-up, and finally headed home for dinner with two other academic families: curry and wine for parents while the kids played. End of another week.

How to encourage more women into STEM? I don’t know, but personally I’m loving it here.