Academic sweetness. Really!

I'm finding new projects now, and my advisor referred me to a collaborator 500 miles away whose work I'd always admired, but I'd never investigated because I didn't want to live where he is. Which is good in itself.

But also: the collaborator, equally senior to my advisor, told me to give my advisor a hug for him because "He's one of the most wonderful people!"

How sweet: my advisor's collaborator wants to hug him! Which says a lot about both of them. I hope the collaborator is interesting and as full of good will as he sounds.

The vigilant reader might remember that the first 5 minutes of the very first research group meeting I went to (for a research center in my department not affiliated with my advisor) was spent with two of the four people there complaining about my advisor and how mean he was.

The disadvantage of rarely having appointments

After a week of working at home somewhat sporadically and inefficiently, so not going in, and definitely not looking at my calendar, I missed an appointment with my advisor in a downtown coffeeshop. At least I was actually doing work at the moments I should have been on the train to meet him: preparing for journal club and emailing with the grad student organizer, so I have an alibi.

Fortunately he was running late, and his assistant emailed me to tell me he was going to be late, so I remembered the appointment at all. I dressed quickly cursing myself and wondering if I would show up at the meeting with tears streaming down my face, but grateful that I showed no inclination of crying. But realized with a sinking heart that I also had to call. Even driving I couldn't make it there in a reasonable time.

I dialed the 9 digits, and held my finger over the 10th. I thought about hanging up, but I knew that I had to make this phone call and if I wasn't going to dial the last digit now I was going to have to dial it in a minute. So I pressed the last digit.

I told him, and he said in a somewhat joking manner "You're standing me up!" I said I felt really stupid about it. He said that he could make me feel really stupid, but really it was better just to reschedule, and he was running late too and was meeting someone else there in a little while.

Oh my gosh, I love him. And if I were a different person I would vow always to look at my calendar first thing in the morning, and actually do it. But I don't have that much faith in myself that I won't forget a meeting again. Particularly not in the beginning of a winter post-time-change not-going-to-the-gym not-wanting-to-be-in-my-windowless-and-phoneless-office funk.

Tomorrow I have to take a friend to get his wisdom teeth out early in the morning, and it occurred to me with a start that I might not remember that either.

At least now I am dressed and wearing my coat. And I would like to make my weekly tally of office visits be at least two: today, in addition to Monday.

Flash of insight: why nerds seem obnoxious

I'm writing a last minute cover letter to a postdoc, and I found myself talking about following "more correct" methods can influence results greatly. This letter is of course speaking tangentially to the open secret that most research in most fields is done poorly. As just about every study that takes hundreds of papers in a given field and reviewed their methods and inferences has ever shown, substantial numbers of papers in every field, and sometimes a majority, have big errors; sometimes the errors are big enough that we really do have to worry whether the wrong drugs are getting approved.

Of course I can't use judgmental words like "correct" because they sound obnoxious, even if they are correct.

A nerd, in the fully pejorative sense, is someone for whom being correct is more important than being pleasant. You have to be an extremely charismatic, yet sweet, personality to really be taken seriously when sticking to the point of telling someone that they are incorrect. Most people can't do that, of course, which is why they get labeled nerds. Or geeks. Depending on your language.

That is all very obvious, but perhaps a good reminder of the importance of charisma in these fields where there are such right and wrong. You can be factually right, but you also have to be persuasive, and it's ironic and sad that all undergraduate and even most graduate training in these factual fields selects for people who are correct, but doesn't until the end start looking at whether they are persuasive.

One person who is an enormous model for me (though never my advisor --- long story!) was just such a person: quietly charismatic who speaks extremely bluntly yet in the most pleasant way, as if Barack Obama were a researcher.