Moving forward!

Today, I finished a major step of my data analysis for the first project I have been working on for my postdoc. I've avoided the temptation of graphing out the data as I was analyzing it to avoid having to re-do it and get an incomplete (or wrong) picture of what is going on. The first glimpse of what my numbers are and how they are falling out with my treatments was awesome. Totally hot science! Getting through this tedious task helps me really feel like I am moving forward with my project as well. Finally!

Of course, moving forward = finishing something = moving on to something else. This final step is all wrapped up in its own little ball of strife, but we'll get into that next time...I got up ridiculously early to bake a pie this morning for a dinner party and need more sleep.

Dot-ology

One of the cool things about my department is that students are put in offices with students from other labs and walks of research life. My two officemates are basically both in different programs. At another university, we would all be in different departments. Despite this, when we get into the data collection phase, we all speak the same language because when it comes down to it, we all just count dots. After careful and difficult manipulations, one officemate counts different colored dots, the other counts differently shaped dots and I have done quite a bit of dot counting in my time as well.
Currently, I am seeing what happens to a dot over time and the way my experiments were run, I can observe my dots from the comfort of my AC lacking, cat and dog filled home*. Unfortunately, collecting dot data is tedious and boring. After a few hours, I can hardly see straight and my mind is mush. I am about halfway through and can't wait to be done.

...back to the dots....








* post coming soon on wonders of working from home.