Blessed by the Potato

London, for being a relatively medium-sized city, has a relatively decent bus system. If you want to go to a lot of places on major streets then you can do pretty well for yourself. While there are a few blind spots in the coverage, and some strange route choices, for the most part they even come often enough to be useful. And once they arrive, they’re pretty quick to get to where they’re going! However, I just can’t figure out a lot of the weird burst scheduling they do. For example, today we were at the hospital waiting for the bus to come to take us up to campus. One of my office mates said “oh, it’ll be nice and fast, the #6 comes every 5 minutes or so” and I said “well, it averages out to every 5 minutes, but we usually get 2 every 10.” And that’s actually the way the London Transit system works. In the summer, when there are fewer busses running due to the lack of students, there are two busses running down Richmond (or to put it in a way that’s more relevant, two busses that would take me from my old apartment to work). They each ran on 20-minute intervals outside of rush hour, and of course, they always came back-to-back, rather than being one every 10 minutes.

So there we are in the bus shelter, and 15 minutes after I made my quip about it averaging out with two busses every ten minutes, sure enough, three busses show up. Not just any three busses, but two #6’s and a #13 (which does a very similar route to the #6). Now, during rush hour that makes a bit of sense: when you can see that there’s another bus right there, you don’t try to kamikaze the doors of the already-full bus. But at the same time, the masses of people at the bus stops wouldn’t form quite so much if a bus actually came every 5 minutes instead of getting swarms of them every 15-20.

It got worse as the day went on, though. After seminars were over, it was time to head back to the hospital from campus. On campus there’s a spot in front of the Natural Sciences building where the busses stop for a bit to “get back on schedule” or let the drivers get a coffee and a break, etc. So in front of Natural Sciences are 4 idling busses: 3 #10’s and an “out of service” one. There were a bunch of people queuing up for the #6, which was nowhere in sight. Then, the driver for the “out of service” bus came back from break and started flipping, oh so slowly, through the route signs, keeping us in suspense. So, what did he reactivate his bus as? Not a #6, which a bunch of people were waiting for, and not a #2, which just had two busses come through but didn’t actually have any sitting right there at the moment. No, he came back into service as a fourth #10. That was just ridiculous. Then, a bit later, two #6’s came through, and within 3 stops we had completely filled the first one.

I saw this on boingboing: “Franck and Ludivine Lamande of Cascade Township, Michigan, unwrapped a special DHL delivery on Thursday and found a bubble-wrapped human liver and part of a head…” I couldn’t help but laugh that it was DHL that made this screwup. If you’ll recall, I had some issues with them in the past, and freaking hate their guts. Oh, it’s been over a year, and while I had some useless responses from Disney, I never did hear back from DHL (they cashed my cheque, though I kind of regret paying that nonsense).

I really like the weathernetwork.ca, the website of the Weather Network. Their forecasting is about as accurate as you can expect weather forecasting to be, and they have a bunch of other neat utilities like the highway forecast or current highway conditions. However, lately they’ve been getting really anxious about issuing weather alerts that often don’t pan out, but that’s not what’s been getting me lately. What I really find bugs me is that while you can go back and look at past weather predictions with their site, they never tell you what actually happened. So, for example, if we were to go back and look at December 8, 2006 (or the band of days 6th-9th), London got hit really bad with a huge snowfall that was way above what they were calling for — 30 inches in front of our place (760-odd mm of snow). However, the archives on the Weather Network show a measly 25 mm of precipitation. Now, they might not count a mm of snow as a mm of precipitation, since snow can be quite fluffy and volumous, but still, 760 is nowhere near 25, and I don’t think they discount snow that much (perhaps a factor of 10, and they were calling for 25 cm of snow that night).

I had the same problem this weekend: they were calling for freezing rain, ice, and snow to hit London through Toronto, which was going to make my drive home miserable. Then in the early evening they started changing their prediction: Toronto went from getting a mix of ice and snow (up to 20 cm) to a predicted 5-7 cm of snow. They were still calling on London to get iced in: basically the weatherpeople were wailing “But if you have any friends or relatives in London, it may be too late for them, as they’re already encased in their icy tombs. There may still be hope, however, as scientists ten thousand years from now may thaw them out and ask what it was like to hunt the Woolly Mammoth that was briefly resurrected from extinction by genetic engineering; they will, of course, have to sheepishly admit that they were frozen in the London ice storm just a few decades before that actually happened…”

The snow in Toronto was pretty gentle, and we only got about 2 cm, which wasn’t going to stop me from driving. It made me wonder what London actually got, because I’d hate to get halfway down the 401 just to find the driving impossible. Did we get spared the full wrath of the weather network’s predictions, as Toronto had? Or was Toronto merely spared because the clouds had dumped their load in London? The weather network’s site was pretty much useless for trying to answer that question. Their highway conditions page said that the roads were slushy and awful all along the 401, including through Toronto, but it didn’t look that bad out my window. I kept hitting refresh hoping to get an update, when I noticed that the information was several hours old and not getting updated. At that point I just decided to get in the car and risk it. I’m here now typing, so everything turned out fine: in fact, Toronto was the worst part of the drive, with a tiny bit of slush on the roads and the snow still falling. London’s roads are wet, but clear of snow (I guess it was largely regular rain, as opposed to ice — or the city put down a lot of salt) though there is some slush on the sidewalks.

My hearing, which was never very good to begin with, has really been going downhill lately. My car stereo used to never see the double-digits on the volume (I believe it goes to twenty, but never felt the need to crank it) but now it lives comfortably at 12, going up through 15 for some songs/news reports. Of course, that’s partly because the car is getting louder, too. For the most part, I’m having the most difficultly distinguishing one person talking from another, or a sound from background noise. This leads to much hilarity:

[At a party tonight] “Have you ever seen the A-Team?”

[I misheard] “Eighteen? Is that like 24 but where he gets to take a nap?”

Of course, even more hilarious than my continued slide into senescence is how completely inept scientists can be about certain things. Mailing lists especially. Right now I’ve got four emails that came in today from people sending a message to the whole group asking to be removed after the monthly reminder email came out (this group actually sees more traffic from the montly reminder/unsubscribe message than it does from discussions), plus one email from someone asking to be added to the group! (You can only post if you’re already a member). Another group that sees much more traffic has had nearly half of its traffic lately devoted to morons trying to trade attachments. The mail server strips any non-text attachments, so when the message comes through without an attachment (and with the [attachment removed] notice); they, of course, try again. We’ve tried telling them to put it on a web host and add a link, but if we go more than 3 days without suggesting that, these people can’t seem to figure it out (the same person sometimes!) so then they offer the helpful suggestion that “if anyone wants this just email me and I’ll send you the attachment by private email.” And every time without fail at least 6 people respond to the entire list with their email address and a request for the file.

I won’t even get into engineers putting forks in the microwave because “one’s ok and you need two to close the circuit” because as hilarious as that story is, it’s been told before…

The question of the day is “What do you do with a PhD?” (After you’ve already gone to the bank and insited they put “Dr.” on your cheques, that is).

Graduate school is a long, arduous process, and it can be all the more demoralizing when there’s no clear goal at the end of it. Heck, the “default” career option, continuing in research, doesn’t even really have much of an end, at least not within a tangible timeline. After doing a PhD and getting a small handful of papers published, you’re typically expected to do a post-doc, which is basically doing a PhD all over again on a yearly contract while writing your own grants. You look constantly for professorship openings, which can be at some pretty far-ranging universities… and if you do land one of those, there’s still no real security for a decade yet, until you magically get tenure. And the whole time you have to deal with the peculiar headaches of research: broken equipment, misleading results, constant racing to get results out ahead of the nebulous “competition”, the grant cycle, funding shortages, not to mention short-term contracts, moving around, and research-dollars salary. Whoa, no thanks folks, if we learned nothing else during the PhD, it’s that the academic research path is not for us.

The other side of the academic coin is a good option though: teaching. Research makes you plumb the depths of a subject, looking to push the boundries of knowledge and explore all the subtle pitfalls that it contains (even if that is through a process of falling in every one of them). Teaching forces you to take something and break it down into its components, constantly looking for new ways to view, explain, and apply it. The two complement each other rather well: you can get so bogged down in details in research sometimes that you forget what exactly it is you’re doing; teaching can help bring that back into focus (and also provides you with a constant stream of new questions to investigate from fresh minds). The two complement each other well — but you don’t have to do research to teach. In fact, the vast majority of the teaching that goes on is done in elementary and secondary schools by people who only need a bachelor degree and a teaching certification. So really, the time spent getting that graduate degree really wasn’t necessary… seems kind of a waste, and if you’re in the middle of your PhD, it’s no way to stay motivated to finish.

Back to university research: being a tech is an option. You trade upward mobility and self-direction for stability. Again, actually finishing a PhD isn’t always necessary, though.

There are lots of opportunities in industry. Researchers, of course. Job stability can come a lot sooner, and you can settle in since moving around isn’t typically necessary (most companies only have one research park working on one topic, and would hate to lose an egghead to the competition). While funding is usually a vastly different game, with equipment magically appearing before the desire is even uttered aloud, the research can be very results-driven, which can be extremely stressful. Especially if you haven’t seen 7 am as anything but “really really late, man” for decades. Beyond that, being someone who can talk the talk can be useful in the middle-management type roles; someone to talk to the engineers so they don’t have to talk to the customers. A “people person”. Along the same lines, if you’re good at interviewing and padding a resume, you can try to leverage your decade of higher education into some vague form of legitimate experience and catapult up the ranks (even in completely non-scientific fields). But god, can you imagine being 30 years old with no experience in corporate life (or life in general!) and trying to jump right in to any kind of management role? That leaves sales, which can also require someone who can talk the talk, especially when it comes to pitching high tech things like drugs, medical equipment, or long distance plans (shudder). This route can lead to the pitfall of being “overqualified” though — it can be tough to convince an employer that you want to work outside your field out of anything other than temporary desperation.

Then there’s the stay-at-home option: cookbooks sell better if written by someone with a PhD. Discounting that, more school is an option sometimes as well. Extra training can take one from medical research into actual medical practice, or medical physics (that’s a very competitive alternative, though).

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers — I don’t know what I want to do myself when I “grow up” (though suggestions are welcome). It can just be a little demoralizing sometimes not really knowing what’s ahead (or worse yet, seeing the path ahead and realizing there isn’t enough hair left to lose). Some have suggested the old trick of asking yourself what you’d do if you won the lottery and didn’t have to work. In that case, I’d probably still tinker with science, still keep up-to-date with Scientific American and maybe even Nature, and likely even keep my brain sharp by doing obscure calculations (like figuring out the time for a hybrid car to pay itself off, or the real-world speed vs fuel economy curve)… but there is no way I’d keep up the discipline to go through with rigorous experiments or hinge my hopes and dreams on something likely to go horribly wrong due to random chance. Plus any science writing I did would likely be of a fictional or popular variety (or even advocacy?) rather than technical.