Epistaxis

Do they know something I don't know?

The main entrance to my building is locked; residents have to swipe their cards to get in. Next to the card reader is one of those giant metal buttons with a blue outine of a wheelchair on it - you know the kind; they cause an electric motor to open the door (slowly) and hold it open long enough for someone less sprightly than me to get through.

Well, I've seen a significant number of people who aren't in wheelchairs use the automatic opener when they enter. In some situations it's understandable: if you're carrying grocery bags or pushing a big blue cart, that makes it a lot easier for you to get in. But I've seen people with two free hands - not even a cell phone! - push the button, so that's not it.

Maybe they're just in a hurry, and don't have time for manual labor. But the door opener is so slow. Many press the button, then open the door partway with their own hands rather than wait for it. So that's not it either.

Maybe it's a less personally invested way of holding the door open for the people behind you. I've noticed here, and in the dorm I used to live in, that wherever there's a security door with a card swiper for residents only, people really love to hold it open for strangers. The one at my old dorm was a few paces from the bottom of a stairway. Not only did people hold the door open, but the recipients of this dubious courtesy tended (were expected?) to make a show of hurrying to the door to decrease the inconvenience to the generous party. I remember someone at the door once saw me coming all the way at the top of the stairs; he stayed there, and started holding open the door and smiling at me. Well, there were a lot of stairs, and they were slippery from ice, (and I instinctively mistrust people who smile at me,) so I descended with exactly the same ponderous speed I would have used if no one had been around. It took a little while, and by the time I reached bottom the guy was making an exasperated face, as if to say "I'm not a thoughtful gentleman consciously going out of my way to be polite; this is just what everyone is supposed to do without thinking about it, and you're not playing ball." By the time I got anywhere near the door, of course, I already had my card visible in my hand and could have gotten in just as easily without his help. I convinced myself I was trying to start a trend that would lead to fewer stroll-in robberies, rather than just being a smartass.

So it's not courtesy either. I suppose I also could have figured that from the number of people I've seen who push the wheelchair button with no one behind them; they usually don't look back anyway. The fact that they're letting the heat out and the surprisingly brazen burglars in also suggests they're not doing it for the benefit of their fellow resident.

I'm at a loss. If anyone knows the great secret of why unhandicapped people ought to use the automatic door openers, please let me know. I love to do disingenuous-appearing things for good but nonobvious reasons.

Posted by Joseph Foley at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

"A lecture is where information moves from the notes of the professor to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either." - My old philosophy professor

Today in Cell Bio, the professor put up a slide about microarrays. Now, in all fairness, I'm working on microarrays in my research project, so there wasn't anything here I didn't already know. However, even if this had been new material, I still wouldn't have done what everyone else seemed to be doing.

The hand-drawn slide showed two nuclei, and each contained a DNA strand with eight (8) genes on it, labelled "a" through "h." Well, as far as I could see, everyone copied down these complicated diagrams to the letter. Then the professor shaded in some of the genes to show which ones were expressed in each cell. My classmates copied these shadings exactly. The professor drew an expression profile for each cell - one cell showed red splotches for genes that were expressed, the other green. Finally, he combined the two profiles into one, so genes that were expressed in both cells turned yellow.

It was completely unnecessary to copy every little shading of every gene in the example (and in the same colors, I might add - people bring markers). Anyone who had been listening could have summarized it in two or three sentences. But I saw so many heads bobbing, as people looked up to the screen and down to their notebooks, that I almost got seasick. The professor asked a question that anyone who had followed the explanation could have answered, but no one did, because they were all still bobbing and tuning out the distracting Japanese guy shouting at them from the front of the room. Later on, he showed another slide and said we didn't need to copy it because it's in the textbook and it's not important anyway, but the pencils started flying, and when he took it off the projector, several people made that forced exhalation noise that signifies righteous indignation.

I think these people are on autopilot. They switch off their minds, and maybe even their ears, at the beginning of class. The diagrams travel from the projector to the screen to the student's eyes to the student's hands to the student's notebook, without any extraneous detours through, for example, the student's cerebral cortex. They go to class to copy the notes (which are later available online), not to follow along with the lecture, let alone to think or learn. Maybe that's why they seem so outraged when the lecture goes too long, as if the University were paying them to attend rather than vice versa.

Or maybe some people's minds never switch on in the first place...

Posted by Joseph Foley at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

or, Thinking a Little Too Far Ahead

A subconscious hobby of mine is to gather interesting given names and imagine forcing them upon a poor, unsuspecting child. A lot of them are foreign (especially Hungarian), and others are just archaic, but a select few aren't even words I've ever heard used as a name. With no further ado, I give you my list:

Boy
Joseph, Jr.
Adlai
Aeneas
Æthelred "the Unready"
Alfonso
Alfredo
Alvin
Angus
Anton
Bagel
Bertrand (but Russell is overused)
Bubba
Caesar
Caligula
Calvin (after the cycle, which was, believe it or not, named after one Melvin Calvin, a Minnesotan)
Casper
Chester
Cipriano
Cosmo
Creon
Danio
Dunstan
Dwight
Edgar
Edwin
e.e.
Engelbert
Ernest
Eugène
Felix
Figaro
François-Marie
Frodo
Gland
Grover
Hannibal
Hector
Igor
Isosceles (after Seinfeld)
Jasper
Johann Sebastian
Josquin
Ludwig
Melvin
Millard
Napoléon
Nestor
Niall
Norman
Norbert
Offa
Orpheus
Oswald
Peanut (like a barefoot physics TA of mine, except it wasn't his real name)
PZ
Rutherford
Samael
Schuyler
Spiro
Stewart
Svante
Tiberius
Tristan
Ulysses
Victor
Wenzel
Wipo
Xavier
Accident

Girl
Josephine
Ælfthryth
Aloe
Alopecia
Ambrosia
Anise
Antigone
Artemis
Brünnhilde
Calypso
Chastity
Cleopatra
Clomiphene
Deirdre
Dementia
Dido
Drosophila
Drusilla
Echinacea
Edelweiss
Escherichia
Eucalyptus
Eurydice
Fennel
Fiona
Ginseng
Gretchen
Hildegard
Hypatia
Isolde
Jezebel
Nutmeg
Paprika
Penelope
Persephone
Syzygy
Tatiana
Vanilla
Viagra
Violetta
Xena
Accident

Hungarian Boy
Árpád
Attila
Béla
Csongor
Farkas
Ferenc
Frantisek (actually Slovakian)
György
István
János
Kálmán
Miklós
László
Szabolcs
Tibor
Ugor
Zoltán
Zsolt

Hungarian Girl
Árvácska
Boglárka
Csillag
Eufruzsina
Gyöngyi
Hajnalka
Ibolya
Jácinta
Katinka
Orzebet
Szilágyi
Tünde
Zsa-zsa
Zsófika
Zsuzsi

Posted by Joseph Foley at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Greetings all.

This blog was originally going to be restricted to my complaints about people, politics, policies, and other things that annoy me. That certainly would have kept me busy. However, I realized I might have something more constructive to say from time to time, so I'm turning this into Just Another Personal Weblog with no real theme.

Have fun.

JWF

Posted by Joseph Foley at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)