Fortune Cookies

Once, I organized the banquet for a small conference and decided to assemble science-themed fortune cookies, including a customized cookie for the keynote speaker, which was, "Your next seminar will receive a standing ovation!"  I figured that fortune cookie statements need to end with exclamation points! I used forceps to extract the original, layman fortunes, and replace them with my own versions. Commercial fortune cookie manufacturers do not bake their product with fortune extraction in mind. Of course, you can order customized fortune cookies on the web, but this requires planning.

Here is a list of fortune cookies from that night, some updated. Given the popularity of this blog (nearly one reader so far), the suggestion that you add your own fortune cookie suggestions in the comment box might seem pathological. But I make the suggestion anyway!

• An autographed copy of your first reprint will sell for $1000 on Ebay!
• The Smithsonian will ask to display the artwork from your recent paper!
• An award winning architect will propose a controversial design for your new laboratory!
• The new Starbucks “Laboratory Blend” will be based on the coffee in your lab!
• You will be invited to discuss your research on the Tonight Show!
• A novelization of your thesis will top the New York Times best seller list!
• Your career will be the inspiration for the next X-Men movie: X3- Mad Scientist!
• You will receive a $1,000,000 no-strings-attached grant from Bill Gates!
• You will be invited to participate in the reality TV series Survivor: Laboratory Technicians!
• Your work will be the inspiration for the sequel to the Lord of the Rings: The Two Enzymes.
• You will appear as a guest character on the Simpsons!
• There will be a bidding war over the publication rights to your next paper!
• You will receive a reprint request from Stephen Hawking!
• Steven Spielberg will make a movie based on your research!
• Your thesis will be made into a Broadway musical!
• Your web site will receive one million hits!
• Your next manuscript will be accepted without revision!
• You will receive an invitation to design experiments for the International Space Station!
• Your next paper will become a Citation Classic!
• The reviewers will increase the budget in your next grant application!
• Your PhD thesis will be added to the Oprah Book Club!
• You will give the keynote address at a prestigious international conference!
• You will be invited to join the editorial board of a major journal!
• The Nobel Prize will be yours!
• Your genome will be the next to be sequenced!
• A new situation comedy will be based on the antics in your laboratory!
• You will be followed by an actor studying for a movie role based on your character!
• The President will quote from one of your papers in a speech!
• You will gain supernatural powers while irradiating one of your cultures!
• You will be invited to write a major review article!
• A popular new comic strip will be based on your laboratory!
• You will be invited to join an influential scientific Think Tank!
• John Grisham will write a dramatic bestseller based on your thesis defence!
• National Geographic will publish a colour pictorial based on your work!
• Bruce Springsteen will write a Number 1 hit based on your recent paper!
• You will be named one of the 10 Most Influential Scientists by Time magazine!

Snow and Smell

Walking in powdery snow among the trees and through the meadows, the tracks left by mice, rabbits, voles, skunks, raccoons, turkeys, deer, foxes and cats and dogs weave around in a not entirely random dance.

If it were not for the snow, all these paths, all these explorations and forays, all these pursuits, would be invisible to me. In the summer, the same things happen, but I'm unaware of them. There are people who can see these signs even when there is no snow. They can tell you how old footprints are, who was running, who was lurking, who was chasing who.

I live with a creature who is preoccupied with these trails, who always insists on knowing the who and what of these hidden paths, and then overlaying them with his own scent. Most of this olfactory skill of his focuses on food. He can retrace the route of his kibble ball through the house, like a child's toy led on an zig zag path by his nose. But on our walks outside, he passes through a different world that me, which I imagine as a smell scape.

We are blind to the universe of odour, and we have no word for this blindness. We are blind to the evidence of our own passage through the world.

A Scientist and his T-shirts

When I was a student, university t-shirts were a part of the uniform. They were cheap, didn't need to be ironed, and most of us had bodies that didn't protrude in unfortunate places. When I started to work and travel, I collected these flags of conformity, including a treasured forest green what-used-to-be-called bunny hug, now with the more macho name of hoody. It said UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN. I loved that word, Saskatchewan. When I went overseas to study in the early eighties, I was distressed to learn that at least in my host country, the university Tee did not yet exist. And nobody could pronounce Saskatchewan.

Science t-shirts didn't really exist then either, beyond the institutional ones that aligned you with a particular department, say Physics or Chemistry. In Saskatoon, I found a company that made customized t-shirts for baseball teams and other clubs. I borrowed a joke from a newsletter of so-called teaching humour and then spent hours pencilling in a design that could be transferred to silk screen. There was a bulk discount, so I made a list of every biologist I knew at that time, not so many, and placed my order. Recently, about 35 years later, I visited an old professor of mine and there on his memorabilia wall was a photo of him wearing that t-shirt.

My first commercially produced scientific t-shirt was purchased from National Public Radio, another forest green one (yes, a pattern of repeated behaviour) with STOP PLATE TECTONICS in big white letters across the chest. One colleague interpreted this as the ultimate futile activist cause, but I just thought it was funny. I wore it one day as I walked around in Campbell River, BC, waiting for my cousin to finish work. Near the end of the day, I was on the pier and a man asked me, "Are you on some kind of team?" I was puzzled, and answered, "No." "I've seen a whole bunch of you guys around town today wearing that t-shirt," he continued, "so I figured it must be some kind of team." I laughed and explained my hyperactive walking tour, suggesting it was unlikely that more than one person would have this same t-shirt in such a small town. He then became offended that I thought plate tectonics was funny... this was earthquake territory.

One grows out of such t-shirts of course, as bellies bulge and job etiquette begins to demand that work shirts at least have collars. We graduate then to conference t-shirts, most designed by grad students trying to outdo the previous year's winner, and as I started attending conferences, I started accumulating these. The colours became more and more garish (there are a lot of colour blind scientists) and it was more and more difficult to find suitable situations to wear them. Then the BLACK t-shirt fad came in... and I really don't look good in black. A close colleague started producing a series of black t-shirts with line drawings, first for conferences, and then limited editions for authors of papers in a theme-oriented journal he was publishing. Nice idea, but these days I find myself wearing them mostly as pyjamas, or when I'm painting and don't mind some splashing, so people won't ask me what the heck that t-shirt is about.

Does anyone collect such t-shirts seriously? Has the Internet age made it possible for such collectables to accrue any value? For the average scientist, I doubt it. Perhaps I could try auctioning off my old society t-shirts at the next conference, but I don't think the thought of owning clothing with my dried sweat would be as appealing as possessing fragments of concert clothing from some pop star. The current popularity of the Big Bang Theory with all of the colourful and witty shirts worn by Sheldon and Leonard, makes me wonder whether there might a renaissance in the commercial world of scientific fashion. Indeed, there is, but you won't find it on the BBT website. This past Christmas, I found the CafePress website, full of punny scientific ware, and I bought my microbially inclined nephew a "You can't B. cereus" t-shirt. I wonder if he'll be annoyed if he has to explain what it means...

Science light - Manifesto!

This is not a blog about the science of light.

But it is intended to be light in several ways.

Its purpose is to shed some light on what it is like to spend a life working in science. I want to break through the cliché of the robotic, emotionless, nerdy scientist to the real people behind the stereotype. What do we do all day? What do we worry about? What makes us laugh? What goes on in laboratories? What happens at conferences? Who are the real people behind the popularizers, the talking heads, and the science celebrities; the everyday scientists who might be your neighbours or members of your hockey team or choir?

Science writing is often very heavy. I would like this blog to be easy to read, but not light weight. It should be enlightening, but also employ a light touch. Most of the posts will be factual, some fictional... I hope it will be easy to tell the difference.

You don't need to be interested in my field to appreciate this blog, although you might learn a few things about biology as we go along. Occasionally, I will throw some untested ideas out to the web wind to see if some might become air-borne.

That's the concept. I hope you will be amused and engaged, and that you will come back.