The SFN meeting

BIG... thats the first thing you realize when you get here. The convention centre is huge, to give you an estimate, there is one large hall about a mile in length, the hall hosts about 4000 posters a day, probably more. Apart from that, there are 33 meeting rooms, each of them have slide presentations/symposia going on throughout the 5 days of the meeting. I didnt know there was so much neuroscience research in the world, and this isnt even 25%.

I have on the average about 40 posters to see a day and maybe 4-5 talks I want to attend. By the time you get all that done you are exhausted, both physically and mentally. I feel like a long-distance runner, you are constantly walking somewhere and nothing is close by. I can see why people who attend every year are so jaded by the entire experience.

Its amazing just how well organised all of this is, though there are thousands of people here at any given time, its never crowded, you still have place to sit, even if its on the floor. The most impressive thing for me, especially after my airport WLAN debacle was that there are hundreds of plug-points scattered all over the convention centre - in the main poster halls, in the corridors and in common areas, where people just plonk themselves (like I am), plug in their laptops and access the internet over the WLAN.

Its pretty impressive being here and seeing all of this work as well as it does and I'm happy to be here for the science and for the experience.

Hi SAN-Diego

I am staying at a dorm in downtown SanDiego, whats called the gaslamp quarter. Its a very nice and lively part of town to be in, there's always something happening here. We're on Market street, which I absolutely love, there a ton of restaurants and its just very alive all the time. I'll try to steal/borrow a camera from someone soon and post photos. We're staying at probably the cheapest rooms in SD right now, its basic with bunk beds and common loos but it works and its cheap, highly recommended if you arent fussy and are looking for a deal.

I hate quarters

Anyone who has been to America for even a short while will know what I am talking about. I'm sitting in LAX, the international airport at LA waiting for my next flight to San Diego and I can make calls from any of the 100 payphones around here (I'm not exxagerating, there are probably 100 here) because I dont have quarters. This is I think uniquely american, anything here, whether its a bus-ride, a wash of clothes, a phone call, all need a quarter. And you just cant find them. Sometimes if you are very lucky, someone gives you change or you find a change machine - a machine that changes dollar notes of different denominations into quarter-dollar coins. Well, I haven't been lucky today, not enough change to make a call back home to R, she'll be spitting mad by the time I get enough change to call.

Airline Puke-bags

Apologies to all for this post, but I just have to... airline-pukebags, they actually work. I was unfortunate enough to use one on the flight from Tokyo to LA, asian food disagreeing with my intensely Indian stomach I think.

Wireless Internet on the go is dead

I left India assuming that I would be able to access the net from different airports along the way. The hope was to not only do things like check mail but also to post blogs alogn the way, how cool would that have been :)

In any case, the hard reality that slapped me everywhere is that its almost impossible to get a WLAN connection on the go at airports. Bangkok International Airport and Narita are both supposed to have free WLAN access for people passing through, thats what their websites claim and they even have details of how to log on. The catch is that these airports are huge. Let me explain, the average WLAN point, the actual hardware that connects your device to the net has a short footprint, about a 100 feet on the average. We walked 1200 feet to get from one terminus to another or within termini to get to our next connecting flight.

Unless you have some kind of meter that can detect WLAN or precise and tell you signal strength, or precise directions about where to look, you're as good as dead. I mean where do you search? I had precise directions for Narita, go to Satellite 2 of Terminal 1, good enough? Actually not really, my flight left from Satellite 3, Satellite 2 was pretty far off and I simply didnt have the time to go wandering about an airport I didnt know looking for a WLAN signal I couldn't see.

You have to turn on the comp each time and search for networks. I have just about given up on all this, the SFN meeting I am going for is supposed to have WLAN access, we'll see how that goes. I hope I can post this from there.

The Nobel prize in Physiology & Medicine 2004

Working in the field of Neuroscience and not commenting on this year's Noble Laureates would be heresy. I will not be covering their Nobel prize in the same way as popular press, ie. CNN or BBC. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about what I found out about the background behind their Nobel.

Linda Buck and Richard Axel recieved their Nobel prize for their work on olfaction - the sense of smell. I got curious about where they stood in the overall field of olfaction. The original paper which discovered the genes for Olfactory receptors came from their work. That original paper was published in the journal 'Cell':

A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognition
Linda Buck and Richard Axel
Cell, Vol 65, 175-187, 5 April 1991

There was an account from Linda Buck somewhere in popular press about how hard those original genes were to clone and identify. I can fully understand why, in the 1990's cloning a family of genes was still a heroic task, much unlike the routine task it has become in today's genome age. If you go back and look at her publication record during that period, there's a paper in 1987 followed by a 4 year lull, after which is the now famous paper in Cell. 4-years is a really long time in research to work on one project. If you look at Linda Buck's publications in recent years, she's really prolific, again restating how hard that original set of experiments must have been. Both of them in the years since have worked extensively in the field of olfaction, making many exciting discoveries about how olfaction works.

I guess anyone in Science wishes that at some point in their career, they make this fundamental discovery that opens up new areas of research, I know I do. There is some irony in all of this though. A lot is known about the patterns in which olfactory receptors are expressed and the wiring up of these receptors to the rest of the brain. There is some understanding of how olfactory signals or smell is processed in the brain, but surprisingly people still dont understand how olfactory receptors sense/recognize odours.

Update

I'm starting what I hope is the last week of experiments (more specific than last set :)). If all goes well, I should be done before I leave for San Diego. Yup, I'm off to the sunny shores of California for 10 days. I will be presenting poster - at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Thanks to the glory of cheap tickets, I will be flying to Bangkok and Tokyo before heading to sunny LA before reaching San Diego.. my final destination on this leg. I think I will be flying/waiting for about 36 hours each way, and you thought train journeys are bad. Return leg is equally torturous but with other stopovers :). At least I can say I have visited more countries that I have really visited. On my way back I spend 2 days visiting San Francisco and then back through Tokyo and Singapore. One of those flights is supposed to be 20 hrs including the stopover at Tokyo... aaaahh... I will die sitting in that cramped seat for that long, how I wish it were a train.

Growing Up

Its funny, in how many ways growing up can be defined. My nearly 2-year old son was cribbing about how he didnt want to go to the creche. He came up to me and said "Papa no creche, no.no..". He's been that way off late, ever since he's gotten smarter and come to realize that its going to be a regular feature of his life.

Not knowing what else to tell him, I told him how Papa and Mama needed to go work to make money and the money was what bought new clothes, mmam (food) and toys. If we didn't go to office, there wouldn't be money. He listened intently to the entire spiel and then almost as if he understood it all, kept quiet and talked about something else. I dont know how much of what I said he understood, the concepts I spoke of - money, buying things with money, new toys/clothes and going to office for work are all things he understands independantly.

Whether he put all of that together or not, I will never know, but in that one instant my son grew up far more than I ever wanted him to.

UP-78-Q-????

This is to the owner/driver of the blue Maruti Zen whose registration number is the title of the post. Thanks to your idiocy, stupidity, brainlessness, irresponsibility and overall lack of common sense, I spent 2 hrs last night (10th October 2004) waiting in the parking lot off Commercial street in Bangalore. Let me clarify, you had parked your car in such a manner that 6 other cars parked in the same lane were unable to get out. Your'e very lucky that the Bangalore Police tow-truck was unavailable last night and that none of us were around to greet you when you got back.

What makes this entire thing scarier is that you are in the Indian Air Force (assumption based on all the IAF stickers on your car). God save India and its defences if idiots like you are flying our figher aircraft or even vaguely associated with them. I dont know if it was sheer stupidity or arrogance that made you this way but you owe me 2 hrs. I dont see why the government spent all that money training you if you lack the basic common sense to even park a car correctly.

I hope we never meet again and I hope you read this sometime in your lifetime.

VIP Motorcades

There is something innately discriminatory and rude about how a politician's car zips by on an empty road while hundreds of common folk wait in the bylanes. Just last night I spent 20 mins waiting for Vajpayee's motorcade to pass by. While I like him as much as one can like a politician, I resent the fact that politicians get to inconvenience the very people who elect them to such an extent.

I dont think the average minister in the karnataka government needs to worry about getting attacked or blown up by terrorists. They are just not important enough or worth it. Yet they block traffic, snarl at other road users and act self-important. I think its just about showing off - a 'mine is bigger than yours' fest to show the rest of us how important they are. If I cared about the public as they often claim to, maybe they would start with avoiding travel at peak hours and work at those times instead.

Sadly, I think its a nearly impossible expectation from an Indian politician.. to care.