On stardom and future

The Operon seminar room is not that big. EMBL was built for four hundred people and, despite twice that number working here now, the seminar room has not been expanded. Still, it has a very respectable size. Last Monday it was filled to the brim. There were people on the steps, people standing at the entrance, people standing behind those.

Surely the speaker must be big. The Nobels had just been announced, could it be one of the recent laureates? The last talk of a outgoing very popular in-house PI? Darwin himself, raised from the death to discuss with zombie Mendel the implications of genetics in evolution? No, that would not take every single PhD student of this place out of their labs. It was something bigger. Jorge Cham was in the building.

For those of you who don't know, Jorge Cham is the author of the widely known in academia PhD Comics, which depicts in dark humorous tones the life of a postgraduate student, the lack of money, the working hours, the advisors and so on. And that day everyone was gathered to hear a man who has made a livelihood of pointing out how much their lives suck. Not to throw stones, as one might expect, but to laugh at his jokes.

And laugh they did. Jorge had it easy. He barely had to approach a subject before the crowd roared into laughter, which is a bit scary for me. Everyone was finding it funny because it's true. And if it's true, that is what expects me for the next four years... Goodie.

Look, a photo!

Nothing new to add from the last post. Classes and extra-curricular activities were normal and pleasant. The latter were the usual going out for a beer, going to see the town, doing groceries, pyjama party. Normal student life.

For the weekend I rented a camera from the staff association. The weather did not coperate yesterday, though, and today the internet is refusing to do any serious uploading, so I leave you with only one photo of the old part of Heidelberg, as seen from the other bank of the river. Click on it to go to see it bigger. Enjoy!

On Frankfurt, lodging and gaming consoles.

Did you know that Frankfurt airport has oversized telephone booths for people to smoke indoors? They look like fish tanks, the people standing in there vacantly looking out while they smoke their cigarette because what else can you do in there?

That was a rhetorical question, so no lewd suggestions in the comments, please.

Anyway, the smoking booths are my most striking memory from the flight, followed by the sheer number of airplanes flying into Frankfurt. I don't think I've ever flown as closely to another flying airplane as I did on Saturday. After landing, as the plane turned to park, the lights from at least six other planes as they started their landing approach could be seen.

The rest of the trip to Heidelberg, in a brand new Mercedes with a driver, was unremarkable. Upon arrival, I met the apartment where I'll live for the next three months. The good new: it's a duplex. The bad news: it's a small duplex. Still, me and my roommate have already found the other students who are staying in a big apartment in the guest house, so we already know where the parties will take place. The stove is going to be hard to get used to. It's a crappy electric thingy with two heaters so close that if I want to use the frying pan, it takes all the space. At the moment my first experiment with it and rice is underway.

Speaking of parties, social events where the reason I haven't written a proper blog post yet and why you get this condensed version of the last five days instead of individual funny stories written with time to spare. It's just hard to sit down to write them after arriving from the course and grocery shopping when I only have one hour to cook and go downtown for drinks.

The course started on Monday and so far has only been basic biology for non-biologists and basic computational stuff for biologists. The most fun has been the gymkhana that the administration section has prepared for us, where we have to chase signatures from a dozen different rooms in the various buildings. I have no shame to say that I eventually I got lost. Yet I can hold no grudge against the institute: this place rents Nintendo Wiis and Playsations 3 to any member of the staff! How cool is that?

Hello from Germany

Just to let you know that I arrived in Heidelberg, I am safe, and internet connection at home is now established.

I am in a hurry to cook dinner and then go into town, but I'll try to have a proper blog post tomorrow.

Until then.

FYI

It's done.

And now I rest.

To whom it may concern

Thank you.

Old habits die hard.

So. Still here.

Lots to write about, that with hectic weeks of thesis writing and what follows that, but since it’s still ongoing I don’t want to say a word about it before its over.

Instead, I’ll tell you about something that happened today.

I’m at a lab retreat. Not my lab, but a sister lab. Since one of the projects I’ve been working on has a strong collaboration with them, my boss, my replacement and I were asked to join the retreat for a few days to discuss it. My boss and I arrived today in the company of a foreign collaborator. The car trip from Lisbon was spend listening to and talking about music, with an idea for a start-up that will make us multi-millionaires popping up in the middle.

We arrived past work time for the people already at the retreat, so the rest of the evening was spent eating, drinking in moderation, talking... you know, enjoying ourselves (although at a certain point some people were singing karaoke). Jabs were taken at my young age and the advanced chronology of certain members of our gathering was brought up in retaliation. I received advice on where to get drunk and what clothes to wear in Cambridge. Science was discussed. Jokes were told. Good fun.

Then people started playing a mimicry game. You got told a name of a person and you had to impersonate him or her. I quietly moved to the side. It’s a fun game to watch, but I don’t really enjoy playing it myself.

Several rounds later, I am told that I’m next. After respectfully declining, I am told that I can’t stand to the side, enjoying myself and laughing at others without putting myself in their position. It’s only fair. C’mon, it’s going to be fun, you’ll enjoy it. Do the next one.

If it’s okay with you, I prefer not to. I really prefer not to. I’m not comfortable doing it. I’m really, really not comfortable doing it. All this is blurted out quickly the second time the question is asked. I fidget. My eyes dart around looking for an exit. A deer in the headlights looks more courageous.

When the evening ends, someone with whom I’ve discussed life, the universe and everything during the past year and takes me aside and apologises for asking me to play. He didn’t know I got nervous about that kind of stuff. That’s good. This used to happen much more frequently. I managed to pull off a full year of witty banter and serious topics looking and acting confident. But take a silly game of mimicry and...

Old habits die hard, I guess.

In which I put myself in the shoes of one of my most hated enemies.

I have an issue with translators. Not the automated kind, far away from the Babelfish though they may be. Those are just stupid machines that don’t know better because the geeks among us haven’t come up a way to deal computationally with natural language yet. However, we also don’t have machines fully act as doctors, artists, you name it and we still manage to diagnose people, fill up museums and galleries and do what is it that whatever you named it does by using humans proficient in those tasks. Likewise, we have humans that are supposed to be proficient in translating texts from one language to another. It is those translators that I have an issue with.

To clarify further: I have no problem with the act of translation itself. Since I am only proficient in two languages, three at most, I am, in fact, very grateful that translators exist and have done their thing to books which I would otherwise not be able to read. At its best, a translation is an invisible layer that allows the author to seamlessly reach the reader.

My issues are with the spots and scratches that appear in many English to Portuguese translations*. There have been novels that I couldn’t continue reading until I got the original version, so bad were the glaring translation mistakes. Mistakes that sometimes completely changed the meaning of the sentence and for which a quick internet search for the phrasal verb in question was all it would take to correct them.

It got to the point where I actively avoid any translation into Portuguese. Maybe because there is a bigger market, maybe because I don’t know enough to spot the errors, translations into English seem to be of better quality and are my choice when I find myself linguistically challenged.

Recently, however, I was asked to translate an English text that I helped composed in a small way. Giving it to someone else was a problem because there was no one else. Also, there was a girl saying “please please can you do it” and I’m a sucker for that. It was time see if I could to walk the walk as well as I talked the talk.

For most words where I was unsure about its direct translation, a quick search in the dictionary and/or Google would clear things up. Other were not so straightforward and the final version may not have the same exact meaning, but it’s the one that I think fits best, short of writing down the whole definition. As for phrase structure, sometimes it took some time to think about some other way to write that was the same sentence with translated words, but eventually everything fell into place. On the whole I am happy with this exercise. It was done quickly, neatly and made me put myself on the line on an issue where I usually just fire away criticism.**

The bottom line? I’ll still get frustrated and complain about bad translations. It is a great responsibility to take someone else’s words and reinvent them. On top of that, especially if the source material is good, poorly translated passages stand out and cloud one’s enjoyment of the whole. However, I’ll also have more respect for the good translations I find. I reworked a two-page text that I had helped shape, had access to the original author anytime I needed and still ran into some difficulties. I can only try to imagine what it is like to translate a doorstop novel whose author died ages ago.

*I mean book translations. For the sake of brevity and to avoid the use of profanity, no comment will be made about subtitle translations other than the following understatement: the median quality of a subtitle translation is on par with the Fast Food Song by the Fast Food Rockers (google it at your own peril).

**Some would argue translation is just one of many such issues.

Subway crushes

There isn't much I miss from the daily commute from Oeiras to Lisbon. Sure, the train whistling by the riverside can be beautiful and having the choice to get off the subway at any time to experience what a city can offer is nothing compared to my current walk in the suburbs, but most of the days my commute was nothing more than a boring, repetitive and awkard task to be performed daily.

Let me emphasize the awkward part. The worst situation is being without a book or a window seat in a carriage with just enough people to fill all seats but with no one standing up. You can't move your arms or legs because you are arm to arm and leg to leg with complete strangers and everyone stares at their own little dot in space, trying to avoid any eye-contact. It's just uncomfortable and those were the thoughts crossing my mind when I got on the subway at Cais-do-Sodré.

A couple of stations later, however, a perk I had forgotten about appeared: a subway crush. Those fleeting crushes last just as long you and the object of your afection are in the same train. It's longer than just passing someone by on the street, but not by much. When you first notice, you are smitten. There is not enough time to focus on whatever imperfections she surely has. Of course, as soon as one of us leaves the subway, the crush disappears as quickly as it appeared.

Today's crush appeared, as I said, a couple of stations after my trip started. I was happily strumming with my fingers and tapping my foot to the music I was listening to when she enters and sits in front of me. Dark auburn hair, blue short-sleeve blouse, a tinge of preppy but not too much, headphones in her hears and also strumming along to her music (which, I'm sure, was every bit as cool as mine). Some stations later, she leaves and the crush is over. It felt good while it lasted, though, and today's boring, endless commute was less of a chore.

Note: I remember talking with Hugo Z. about subway crushes some years ago. I don't know how much of what it said made it's way to this text, so some of the credit (or blame) goes to him.

Sound-blocking headphones will do fine, thank you.

The music in the restaurant was horrible. Take the worst pimba (corny Portuguese popular music, for the foreigners reading this) and play it as loud as you can with a disco beat thumping in the subwoofers. That was what was being served to us as the side dish and I wished for silence.

Fast-forward a couple of hours. The last train would be arriving at the station soon and I needed to be on it. It was drizzling, not enough to feel the drops, but just to be on the safe side I took cover in a stall in the station. While there, a group of six or seven young men come in. It's the usual Saturday night crowd at Santos: around twenty years old, jeans, sweatshirts, a hoodie here and there. A swagger in their walk that says "We're young, we're together and we're having fun". They sit on the other side of the stall.

As I wait for the train, something is amiss. Nothing's changed. The place is as quiet as it was before the group entered. Where were the usual loud and excited conversations of youth? A look at them explains it all. The conversations were there, all right, and they were certainly full of energy. I just didn't hear them because no words were spoken. All seven of them were happily gesturing with their arms in sign language.

They were deaf. That put my wish for silence in perspective.

Just don't bring up her Sarah Palin impersonation

In case you're wondering, I'm still alive.

Actually, the chances of you wondering that are very slim, either because you are not pessimistic or because you hear from me using other media, so let me start over:

In case you're wondering, this blog is still alive. The fact that nothing has been posted in almost a month is simply due to nothing happened in almost a month that would be worthy of a mention here.

Some things did happen that were not routine. I met my current boss's previous boss, who was as cool as I expected. There was a pretty fun party at the institute where I had a discussion that started with "I stopped listening to new music after the The Wall because there was nothing new left to be said" and got better with every turn it took (and it took lots and lots of turns). I gave a half hour presentation to first-year Master students that lasted for an hour and a half. Just a few hours ago I listened to Lynn Margulis talk. Plus other stuff that I can't remember right now, not to mention national and international events that could be commented upon.

So it's not a complete lack of theme that has kept me from posting; it's the lack of a theme that will inspire me to put fingers to the keyboard and hammer out a coherent and pleasing text. I guess I could write about Tina Fey's witty humour, and nerdy good looks, but I don't want to trade dignity for inspiration yet.

On the nature of blogging

I had planned on using the second post to tell you some facts about me. You know, the kind of anecdotes that, while not giving any real information, would convey some sketches of my personality. That is postponed for the moment. Instead, you get my thoughts on blogging.

This change of plans was brought by an unexpected visit to the blog (if you’re wondering whether I mean you in particular, I don’t). Someone who I hadn’t considered as a potential reader commented to me about my new blog. I was dumbfounded. This was not my intended audience.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Anyone with a computer and some kind of connection can come here and read everything I have written. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t cherry pick who reads what. This is stupidly obvious, but it didn’t sink in until this happened, leaving me feeling a bit exposed and wondering about what that meant to what I planned to write here.

There were two situations that concerned me. The first was that some complete stranger would read me. This must have been a side-effect of a healthy ego: the overwhelming majority of people out there couldn’t care less about my blog and me and, in the odd chance that they do, I don’t care about what they think of it.

The other problem would be that people who I know, but who I wasn’t aware knew about this place, came here. After thinking it over, I realized this was a moot point. This is the internet, after all. I’m not having a private conversation; I’m standing on a room filled with people shouting at the top of my lungs. I wouldn’t be sharing anything that I would want to keep secret from the world to begin with.

So now, with this deep thinking about the nature of blogging and my feelings about it out of the way, let’s see what comes next.

Something akin to a preface

I've been thinking: I've got lots of work to do, I barely have time to keep my social life going and I don't think this will get better in the near future. Why not go all-in and add another way to spend time in the form of a blog? Thus this website was born. If I tried to rationalize my decision, I might say that the idea has been on my mind for quite a while and that some thoughts bouncing on my head could have ended up as blog posts if only I had a place to put them. As an added bonus, chances are that I'll be moving out of the country in a few months, so if I create the blog now I avoid the cliché of the emigrant who creates a blog to keep in touch.

Now, if you are reading this, odds are that you know me personally and you're wondering why I'm writing in English. There are two answers for that. The first is that not everyone that I know and would like to visit this place speaks Portuguese. The second is that most of the time I don't like what I write in my mother language. It gets too long-winded, too pretentious. Maybe it's not much better in English, but at least I don't notice it. I'm not ruling out completely writing a few posts in Portuguese, but they will be the minority.

A note on content: I have no idea what it will be. Probably things about me. Musings, mainly. Thoughts that can't be expressed in the hundred and forty characters or less that Twitter gives me. Rants. Me. The occasional Radiohead-induced post dripping with overblown melancholy. Happy news that I want to share. Myself. Careful analysis of world events. The ups and downs of my work. I. A blog is a place where egotism reigns supreme, after all, and this theme will give me an idea for a name.

As for when I will post... Monthly, hourly, daily or twice a year. You know, the usual for a blog: whatever strikes its owner's fancy, whenever it strikes.

Until the next time, whenever that is.