same shit, different country

On the left side, Jean Charles de Menezes, a 29-year old Brazilian citizen who lost his life two and half years ago in the London Metro. On the right, Osman Hussain, the supposed terrorist, after whom the Metropolitan Police of London were after in the aftermath of the July 2006 attacks. The striking (???) similarity between the two men, tragically misled two Scotland Yard firearms officers who gunned down de Menezes inside the train at Stockwell Station before he could even say a word...

The jury initially rejected the two officers' recount of the "incident" and a significant amount of doubt is still remaining on whether the killing could by any means be justified.

Despite of all that, I read on today's news that Scotland Yard is about to allow the two officers to return to frontline duties.

And I can only think that for as long as governments keep drifting away from the majorities that have elected them, for as long as the establishment keeps turning its back at the people who are supposed to sustain it, and for as long as the "law enforcers" think more on the enforcement than the actual laws, then tear-gas cannisters are about to be going out of stock more and more often. 

today

Κάποτε θα 'ρθουν να σου πουν
πως σε πιστεύουν σ' αγαπούν
και πως σε θένε
Εχε το νου σου στο παιδί
κλείσε την πόρτα με κλειδί
ψέματα λένε

Κάποτε θα 'ρθουν γνωστικοί
λογάδες και γραμματικοί
για να σε πείσουν
Εχε το νου σου στο παιδί
κλείσε την πόρτα με κλειδί
θα σε πουλήσουν

Και όταν θα 'ρθουν οι καιροί
που θα 'χει σβύσει το κερί
στην καταιγίδα
Υπερασπίσου το παιδί
γιατί αν γλιτώσει το παιδί
υπάρχει ελπίδα

Λευτέρης Παπαδόπουλος
Κάποτε θα 'ρθουν

on the sunny side of the street

Walking back home late last night, alone through the streets around Arc de Triomfe and la Ribera, as my two most beloved cities stood at the opposite coasts of the same sea.

Athens in flames, finally facing its mostly underestimated contradictions, while Barcelona was serenely cruising into the uncompromising limbo of an enduring prosperity.

Going down carrer del Commerc with Interpol singing through my headphones:

"sleep tight, grim rite, we have two thousand couches when you can sleep tonight"

I passed by the front of a bank, one such as those burning in the Athenian major avenues, when I saw a homeless guy -one more of the many- who, unable to spot one of the couches Interpol were singing about, had found refuge in the little space, cramped between to ATM machines.

I wondered what he might think if I told him about my angry compatriots' bank-burning back in my home town. And whether he would even care knowing. Equally unaware of his thoughts, his dreams or nightmares, indifferent to the sufferings of Athens, Barcelona carried on her gaudy, sleepless night.

Tomorrow, this homeless guy will wake up. And maybe one day, he too will stand up between two burning ATMs.

...but seriously

On the bus today, going to work, re-reading my favourite parts of Marcuse's "One dimensional man"...

Next to me I saw a young mother with a baby carriage. Inside it her baby daughter was sleeping, her tiny little hand holding tightly to her mom's mobile phone.

It must have been the saddest thing I have seen in a long time. And the saddest confirmation of what I was reading.

a one-dimensional man

I happened to re-read the "One-dimensional man" by Herbert Marcuse a few months ago. I was hoping to get a better grasp on it being older and -supposedly- more mature than when I first read it during my early university years. But although I did not, I got a pretty good reminder of a number of concepts related to this so disturbing uni-dimensionality, which Marcuse puts at the center of his attention. Most of all, after re-reading the book I regained part of my revolutionary reflexes, which I seemed to have lost after a hectic summer full of useless work. Today, after a full 36 hours of increasing pressure and with a terribly busy rest of the week ahead of me, I realized I am about to lose them again.

I find myself in the rather unpleasant situation to have to produce, interpret and present a significant amount of work in a very short period. The way my boss put it -in a rather stressful way- yesterday night I have "a lot of work and too little time". This stems from a number of things.
One: I am not the finest example of a hard-working scientist. Always too easily distracted, always getting my hands on too many things just because of curiosity, most of the times leaving unfinished business behind me. Well, this business needs to be finished now.
Two: The business to be finished looks quite stubborn to remain unfinished. Numbers don't exactly fall into place but rather need to be "massaged" into it. It's something I am supposed to do, but more and more I find I am quite reluctant to do so.
Three: The business remains unfinished because my bosses thought it could go on forever. Now that they know that I am about to leave soon, they find this to be a comfortable way to put some extra pressure. A pressure not exactly that comfortable to me though.

Still, my laziness and increased sense of inertia notwithstanding, I have put myself to the test. How about getting up earlier and leaving from work later than usual? I can save two more hours of work this way. How about a bit less of reading before going to bed? That would help me wake up earlier. How about skipping climbing on weekends while trying to put some of my results on paper? That will compensate for the fact that nobody feels like writing the papers his name will be on. How about a bit less blogging, a bit less of reading the newspapers, a little less (meaning almost null) of practicing with my trumpet? This way I can run three or four different analyses at the same time, while preparing slides for my upcoming presentations.

Well, guess what! It works!

Now don't get excited, this doesn't mean science is progressing at a fast pace, nor that major breakthroughs are being accomplished. Nonetheless it means that I am being more productive. I program faster, I design the analysis pipelines more efficiently, I optimize my time in such a way that I am getting an unprecedented amount of things done and I manage to put them into slides or on paper in a sort of fashion that resembles a factory's production line. In brief I have convinced myself that I can be what I thought myself completely incapable of. Work like there is nothing else in life. No music other than the one that helps me program (Rage against the machine mostly). No books other than science-related ones. No leisure activities other than the necessary rest to keep me going. Even this post is to be seen as a major distraction but it's just because all my CPUs are working to burning temperature.

At last, after three years of being a post-doc, I have managed to become the one-dimensional man. And you cannot imagine how utterly boring it is.

today

"There remains however a difference even if one takes into account the fact that the scientist never carries on a dialogue with nature pure and simple but rather with a particular relationship between nature and culture definable in terms of his particular period and civilization and the material means at his disposal. He is no more able than the 'bricoleur' to do whatever he wishes when he is presented with a given task. He too has to begin by making a catalogue of a previously determined set consisting of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, which restrict the possible solutions."

Claude Levi-Strauss
La pensee sauvage

the -almost- greatest moment ever...

There are a number of reasons for which I love football.

Most of the times football is beautiful to watch, like a nice film, only that you witness it taking place right there in front of your eyes. In striking contrast to people considering scientific results as "exciting", football IS exciting. In fact it is more than that. It is fascinating in a sense that it lights up passions and allows reactions that would otherwise be considered inappropriate for adults at my age. (For those who disagree, try about imagining the members of a certain "scientific" community celebrating their latest "exciting paper" in the streets).
Most important of all. Football means bonding, football means roots, in the sense that we all support a team that carries at least a distant connection to our social, national or familiar background. I support the team of my home town, the team of my father and my late uncle. It could not and should not have been otherwise.

The "greatest moment ever" is the title of the chapter that Nick Hornby devotes to his dearest memory as a football fun in his -great- book "Fever Pitch". Last night, in the loneliness of a half-full pub named Palace, somewhere in the Born, I was lucky to live my own greatest moment ever during my days in Barcelona. The "loneliness" stems from the fact that I was the only one passionately watching the game of Inter against Panathinaikos in one of the two screens available. The rest of the people were either boringly glancing at FC Barcelona thrashing Sporting Lisbon or indifferently having a beer while chatting. It was in the midst of this sort of surrealist atmosphere, when at the 68th minute a sudden scream of joy pierced the pub from end to end. "Yeaaaaaaah"! The rest of the people only momentarily turned my way to look at my blushing face, swollen with a slight embarrassment and a great deal of pride. My friend Julien, who "high-fived" me and the nice barwoman, who shouted "Happy hour!" in solidarity, were my two sole companions in that joyful moment. But I did not care. We were about to beat Mourinho's Inter and take a great step forward to qualify for the last-16 of the Champions League.

There is one reason, for which I hate football, though. And that is excess of love.

Which meant that the twenty-five minutes to follow were -as expected- an agony with no end. There is one thing in trying to achieve victory -or in my case, watching your team trying- and a whole different one trying to hold on to it. As the minutes were passing by with the scoreboard still the way you see it in the photo on top, my nerves were becoming more and more fragile. I hated football or I hated myself for loving it and I wished I was one of these indifferent people that only hear about results on the news and say "Really? they won in Italy?"

Now I know that I cannot be one of them. Simply because once you experience the uplifting effect of a great footballing victory, you can never go back to being a bored "couch-fun". Games like yesterday's are to be seen at the tip of your toes. After all, this helps you jump around more freely once the final whistle is blown.

a thousand splendid suns

"A thousand splendid suns" is the title of a book by Khaled Hosseini, which refers to his native city of Kabul. It is a direct reference to a poem by 17th century Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi, entitled "Kabul", which talks about the city's beauties. A certain couple of verses -loosely translated into english- talk about:

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls"

Living a few thousand kilometers far from Kabul, I have had enough time to appreciate Barcelona's uncountable moons. On the other hand, I have been somehow missing out on its splendid suns, an accidental negligence I only realized this morning. In a city like Barcelona, the sun is more perceived than actually seen. One simply knows it's there but never manages to directly look at it. Except of course if he tries to do so very early in the morning. Which brings me to my main point.

Wednesdays are always difficult to start with. Stuck right in the middle of the week, too far from the weekend, but with an already accumulating weariness, they become even worse when I remember the lab meetings, scheduled every Wednesday morning at 9.30. To my bad luck, it happened that today, Barcelona's coldest day of the year so far, this time was pushed half an hour earlier, which meant I had to set my alarm for sometime around 7.30. Coming out of bed was as difficult as expected but I finally managed a few minutes before 8. As I was preparing a coffee-to-go and while getting dressed as fast as possible, I realized something of which I was subconsciously unaware until then. The fact that 8am is a quite reasonable wake-up time -for some people.

It was more like discovering an unseen world. As I was trying to be as quiet as possible, I noticed Giuseppe already having breakfast in the living-room, welcoming me with a rather ironic smile. I was in the shower, when glimpsing outside the bathroom window, I saw people already at their desks in the building next door. As I came out, hurrying for the bus, thinking I would find myself in a dark, deserted town, I saw people walking their dogs, reading their newspaper while having coffee, some of them having even finished their morning jog. A new, unknown world, lived and breathed under Barcelona's splendid sun, the same sun I came face-to-face with as soon as I turned right on Carrer Braille. A glorious sun rising out of the Mediterranean horizon, waving good morning to us all.

And a good morning it was. On the bus, the driver let two homeless people ride without a ticket.

Pessoa's trunk and some useless papers

I mentioned Fernando Pessoa in a previous post and I got bombarded by comments about him and his work. (Most of the comments were communicated orally so don't bother to look for them here, most of my readers are either too shy to write or too direct to come and talk to me in the face).

Then I got into a conversation with one of them about the legendary trunk, where the great inventor of his own antonyms kept most of his work, unpublished until after he died. Apart from the obvious appeal old, wooden trunks may have on everybody, recalling treasures kept in wooden chests, there were connotations -for us "informaticians"- of storage, memory and registries. The mythical literary treasure, which you can actually see in the photo above contained 25,426 items (a precision that our "informatician" reflexes highly appreciated), which have still not been fully catalogued. Parts of this material have been incorporated in the Book of Disquiet, a fragmentary collection of texts Pessoa must have been writing throughout his life, taking notes on envelopes, back sides of old manuscripts or even pieces of carton.

It was then, when I thought of my endless efforts to present my -mediocre- scientific work in an appealing way for a journal editor, all the attempts to start, complete and most of all to wrap-up a scientific paper. For a moment only, I committed the sacrilege to see my incompetence as an analog to Pessoa's shyness or introversion. I imagined a trunk in my bedroom filled with pieces of paper of various sizes, colours and shapes, carrying all the unfinished abstracts I have started to write, the summaries I never managed to expand, the brief reports that never made it to become real papers, last but not least a couple of papers I have actually finished but which I doubt will ever make it to an editor's desk, due to various reasons, not necessarily relevant with the quality of the presented work.

Then I realized, that I should not take it so personally, that probably every scientist on the planet could have his own trunk full of failed or incomplete attempts to communicate his work, to send a message out there, to become heard, noticed and accredited. It is all a matter of exposure in the end, it is the same exposure dreaded by Pessoa, that we are longing for. It is thus inevitable not to fill drawers, hard disc drives or even trunks with all our fruitless endeavours. Only that, contrary to the case of Pessoa, there is the additional fear of becoming obsolete, that is in plain words, forgotten. In fact, the constant fear that drives scientists is the fear of their work being forgotten sooner or later, in the worst case -of the papers that fill trunks and never make it out- being rendered unnecessary, forgotten before it could even be remembered.

It is this fear, which marks greatest difference between works that actually matter -like Pessoa's-, works whose persistence against time and oblivion cannot even be bent by deliberate attempts to withhold and work that doesn't really worth any mention apart form in posts like this one. All we can hope for is that during our wonderfully, joyfully mediocre lifetime we have the luck to produce a couple of papers that would be remembered at least for a while and be worthy to be held in a "cultural arc" like the one of Pessoa, only much, much smaller.

today

Θα 'ναι δύσκολο τώρα να βρούμε μια γλώσσα πιο της κερασίας,
λιγότερο δυνατή, λιγότερο πέτρινη,
τα χέρια εκείνα που απόμειναν στα χωράφια,
ή απάνου στα βουνά,
ή κάτου από τη θάλασσα,
δεν ξεχνάνε.
...

Δεν χρειάζεται να θυμηθείς.
Η φλέβα του πλατάνου έχει το αίμα σου.
Και το σπερδούκλι του νησιού κ' η κάπαρη.

Γιάννης Ρίτσος
Ρωμιοσύνη

my own personal "third circle of Irrigation"

Some few weeks ago I remember warning my friends about my intentions to switch my working mode into the one of a Greek civil servant. It was to be considered as warning since Greek civil servants are not exactly famous for their commitment and devotion. In my case, however, it had more to do with a sense of a lack of objective and an increasing decline of interest. You see, in my mind, working as a civil servant is less about lack of commitment and more about lack of goals. People think civil servants are not working enough, I think they are simply doing meaningless work. Instead of working for something, they are working for someone. In the end, they have been obliged, or have simply accepted to channel their efforts into something other than what they would like or consider fruitful.

As my main research project was growing to be more and more like the boring job of a ministry clerk and my main focus was shifting from doing something original to re-doing all the things other people have been publishing before I was allowed to, I started to feel like the life of a civil servant would be more suitable for me. I saw myself in a grey office, with piles of papers all around, in a world somewhere between that of Kafka and that of Pessoa. It looked less and less like my sunlit desk at the side of the Mediterranean and more like the one in the photo.

It was then that in order not to get completely depressed, I somehow subconsciously remembered of probably the most famous of all Greek civil servants of all time, Constantin Cavafy. For those unaware of this great man, I can simply recount a couple of biographical facts. He was Greek, living in Alexandria around the turn of the previous century and he was a civil servant for the Ministry of Public works, a position he held throughout his life. There you have it, your Greek civil servant. What makes Cavafy so special, is the fact that at the margin of an extremely boring life, spent between his desk at the "Third cycle of Irrigation" and his rather small, badly decorated, apartment in Rue Lepsius, he wrote a number of poems, whose number was big enough to qualify him as a poet and whose essence and style so supreme as to qualify him the great of them all.

I reflected a bit about this life of his, which most of his friends and acquaintances would describe as rather dull and ordinary, nothing like the tragically, romantic trajectory of Byron, the glorious magnificence of Goethe, or the bohemian voluptuousness of Beaudelaire. I saw Cavafy on his way home, back from work and I imagined him completely detached from the daily routine, drifting away in his timeless universe of interweaving pasts, the Byzantine emperors, the Alexandrian notaries and the forgotten lovers. To him, being a civil servant was simply a condition of subsidy, the irrigation plans, the daily correspondence and the translations were all but the side-effects of a conventional life he was too coward or too wise, (or perhaps both) to renounce.

I imagined how he could safely steer away from all these conventions and slowly, uncompromisingly head towards greatness. Cavafy, was able to achieve immortality. The rest of us, whose aim is the simple deliverance from everyday frustration and the hope for a meaningful life that takes place outside the office and resumes after 5pm, should know that this hope still exists.

And that anyone may be worth his own personal "Third cycle of irrigation".

agreements of gentlemen

I 'd like to take a deep breath and talk about my father.

Not in the way one talks to his analyst -although my Freudian connection with him is probably more complex than I think. My intention is not to praise or put him to trial. It's just that reading the news that come from my beloved country reminded me of him in a very special way. You see, my father belongs to this post-war generation that relieved from the trials and tribulations of the occupation, hunger and civil war, felt stronger and more courageous to take up any task, no matter how difficult. Most importantly he belongs to the part of his generation, that was not subsequently let down by increasing corruption, lack of meritocracy and eventual disdain for any sort of legitimate effort in order to prosper. Throughout his life he has always remained what John Lennon referred to as "the working class hero", constantly striving within the confined limits of a system that rewarded decency with scorn and cunningness with praise.

For his firm stance he was eventually recompensed with an average pension, which he disgracefully considers slim when looking back to all these years of hard work and shattered ambitions. I would also dare saying that he feels a bit ashamed in front of his family, us, me in particular being his elder and only son. Most likely he is completely unaware of the fact that to my eyes -my 30-year old grown-up eyes and not the ones of a small kid-admirer of his strong dad- he IS the "hero" John Lennon sings about. And of the fact that to me he is the prototype of a gentleman, deserving the greatest respect.

What is so shameful is that his own country doesn't agree with that. At all. As I browse through the greek media on the web, reading about the economical crisis about to hit Greece with the strength of a level-5 hurricane, I hear that the Greek Government is preparing a bill to pass 28 billion Euro to the already "suffering" banks. Moreover, we -the taxpayers and my dear dad among them- hear that this "deposit" is to be done in the most urgent and immediate fashion. This transaction, we are told, is going to be conducted in the form of a "gentlemen agreement", bypassing any bureaucratic obstacles and formalities.

Then I take a moment to think about my dear dad, who throughout my teenage and early adolescent years, has relentlessly opposed my criticism to the system, the banks and our politicians, always giving them the benefit of the doubt. I think about him, sitting on his favourite chair (his back is a bit sensible to armchairs), watching the news and listening about how all these bankers and their golden boys are about to put their "gentlemen" hands on his hard-worked earnings, in order to re-assure him of his savings. And I think about him listening to this "agreement of gentlemen" realizing that throughout his working life, no rule was ever bent for him, no bureaucratic procedure was ever speeded up to assist him, no small letters were ever written to his benefit, no bill was ever passed to make things easier for him. And I just wonder if he -tired and weary as he must be growing in his age- gets the wrong idea and thinks that all of this was never done for him because he is not a gentleman. I am worried with him considering the bloodsucking, mobster-like bankers with their obvious hand-shaking and the behind-doors hand-kissing to be the real gentlemen, while in fact he is more of a gentleman than all of them together will ever be.

There's nothing worse than being deceived at the end of your years and I am worried about my father, too worried that he might be deceived. And I can simply wish they never get to him and that someone gets to them first.

It may be that I am talking nonsense once more, that I am missing the point, that I understand nothing about economy or politics. That I am acting like a small kid who somehow gets the feeling his dad is being treated un-rightfully and is pissed off.
But then again, I think it is very healthy to get pissed off every now and then.

today

Hταν γενναίο παιδί.
Με τα θαμπόχρυσα κουμπιά και το πιστόλι του,
με τον αέρα του άντρα στην περπατηξιά,
και με το κράνος του -γιαλιστερό σημάδι
(φτάσανε τόσο εύκολα μες στο μυαλό που δεν γνώρισε κακό ποτέ του)
με τους στρατιώτες του ζερβά-δεξιά
και την εκδίκηση της αδικίας μπροστά του.
-Φωτιά στην άνομη, φωτιά!
Με το αίμα πάνω από τα φρύδια
τα βουνά της Αλβανίας βροντήξανε,
ύστερα λυώσαν χιόνι να ξεπλύνουν το κορμί του,
σιωπηλό ναυάγιο της αυγής,
και το στώμα του, μικρό πουλί ακελάηδιστο,
και τα χέρια του, ανοιχτές πλατείες της ερημίας.
Βρόντηξαν τα βουνά της Αλβανίας
-δεν έκλαψαν.
Γιατί να κλάψουν;

Hταν γενναίο παιδί!

Οδυσσέας Ελύτης
Άσμα ηρωικό και πένθιμο για τον χαμένο ανθυπολοχαγό της Αλβανίας

Pierre Menard author of a scientific paper

Pierre Menard is a fictional (?) character invented by Borges in his relatively famous story "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote". In the story, which is, according to some, an indirect essay on translation, Menard is a French scholar who in the course of his life has devoted most of his efforts NOT to translate, modernize or adapt the most famous novel of all time but to literally RE-write it. That is, not to transcribe it but instead to be able to reproduce it word by word and down to the last punctuation mark.

Menard passed away while still in the process of this unprecedented endeavour, having nonetheless been able to complete chapters 9, 38 and a fragment of 22. After him, nobody has dared to undertake such a monumental work. That is, no fictional character. Because a great number of real people are involved in similar projects. Almost all of them are members of what we call the "scientific community".

The task of RE-writing a scientific paper, as meaningless as it may sound, IS the primary goal of a great deal of scientists nowadays. And apart from its obvious dullness it carries some additional significant difficulties.
First of all, lack of originality. This would not be a great problem if the intellectual activity of RE-search was not -so disturbingly often- preceded by the adjective "original". Over-riding this problem is still considered one of the greatest steps a respected RE-searcher needs to take in his career. And it so happens that once he is over the pseudo-guilt imposed by non-originality he is usually mature enough to be eligible for tenure.
Secondly, RE-writing a paper would imply -in a perfect universe- RE-peating the analyses carried out in the prototype. This constitutes a great waste of time, taxpayers' money and human effort on something that has been done already, but is nonetheless necessary if one is to stick to the rules. On a higher level this tedious activity of RE-petition bifurcates into two options. One is RE-peating the analysis to RE-produce the prototype's results. Let's take a pause here...

This would imply that the results of the prototype are RE-producible. And it may sound ironical but in a world of RE-written papers, results tend to be IR-RE-producible...At least most of the times.

But going back to our bifurcation, the second option provides a more or less simple way around the unpleasant problem of results RE-production. This (not-so-secret) option #2 implies, that one needs simply RE-produce the plots and the tables of the prototype bypassing the upsetting process of actually re-producing the data. This may sound displeasing to many of the inexperienced RE-searchers but I can assure them that it is simply their inexperience which drives them away from the real focus. Which -I dare remind them- is RE-writing a given scientific paper. How this is to be done, is a mere technicality.

Reflection and self-questioning is a grave danger to the exciting project of accurate re-production of knowledge. Once RE-writing the paper stops being the ultimate goal, RE-searchers, especially the young and inexperienced ones already mentioned, may easily follow the dangerous paths of skepticism and doubt, which mathematically lead to innovation, unconventional thinking and sudden impulses to explore unknown problems. It is needless to mention here the dire consequences such practices may have on modern science. Young RE-searchers should be particularly careful on this aspect. Nobody has told them that scientific RE-search is something to be taken lightly and one should be extremely cautious when attempting to RE-state once more, theorems, hypotheses and ideas already put forward thousands of times by hundreds of great pioneers of repetition.

But it is only after he has gone through it all, avoiding the upsets of novelty and ingenuity, that someone really grasps the natural joy that can be felt by the RE-production of originality.

today

To impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea [...]

Just as this society tends to reduce and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives [...]

In the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.
It reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of everything, delivers the goods.

Herbert Marcuse
The one-dimensional man

the invisible hand made visible

On my way to the lab today, the usual stop at the reception to check the newspapers' headlines. The front page story being the same in all of them. The awaited rescue of some of the U.S. greatest -until very recently- banks and insurance companies by the biggest state-funded operation in history. I remembered an old post some time ago related to the "invisible hand" of the "markets", meaning their "ability" to re-adjust themselves under pressure and thought that the invisible hand was finally made visible.

It's funny isn't it? I have asked myself again and again even in past pages of this blog about economy-related stuff. Where does all the money go?, what shapes the stock market prices? and similar questions have puzzled me from time to time. It seems that despite all my questioning in older posts (and pardon the substantial self-referencing in this one), there was not much to question about. In this sense, I would urge you to NOT go back and read those previous posts because they simply talk about stuff that do not make sense anymore. It's not that things have changed, no. It's just that under the current crisis (or depression, or whatever you call it) economy cannot hide from itself any longer.

There are no invisible hands. Perhaps someone has tried to convince us about that in times of "prosperity" when everything is going as planned, because (they tell us) the markets function on their own -natural- way (that is without control). But when things really go out of control, situation gets out of hand, and banks go out of cash, then the state comes to the rescue. This -we are told- is done to save the economy, the same economy whose prime advantage was that as long as it run uncontrolled, left nothing to worry about. The new style is this. When all goes well, markets function because they are free and all the state should do is lay off private enterprise. But when the shit hits the fan the state should better put its Superman cape on and pay 700Bi to save the poor companies from going bankrupt. This translates into the following common truth: Taxpayers should get no profit from wealthy companies making money. Instead they should chip-in when the same companies are in trouble. Liberal when profitable, state-funded when problematic.

No wonder, private companies are always well-off and it's only the nationalized ones to bring all the burden.

We should not be surprised. The new dogma is like the old dogma. It has always been thus and will always be so. It's just that now it's too damn obvious not to see it.

say "welcome" to the machine!

This was yesterday's view of the corridor leading to the lab. The usual, crispy clean, futuristic hallway was blocked by what appeared to be some sort of heavy, important shipment of scientific equipment. In fact it was something much more than just that. It was our own "doomsday machine" or in brief "The Machine"!

For the more observative ones that are also aware of the latest(?) advances in the field of genomics (not that you deserve any merit for that) the inscription on the top left part of the wooden box that reads "Illumina" may say something. For the rest let me just inform you that what we are dealing with here is a third-generation genome sequencer, whose capacities involve ultra-rapid, massive DNA sequencing in short read-fragments, genome mapping and de novo sequence assembly. Oh yes! it also disposes of a bioinformatician-repeller!

Assuming this last (add-on) function, the Solexa-Illumina sequencer will soon start the process of expelling us, the entire Computational Genomics Group, from the fine altitudes of the 4th floor of the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona, which we currently occupy, to the ground floor of the same building. I can see many of you raising an eyebrow in doubt of the potential of such a machine to kick out an entire department, but things are -as always- slightly more complicated than they seem to be. You see, this doomsday machine, is only the second to be purchased by our Institute and is very likely going to be followed by 6 or 8 more in the process of "our" Centre for Genomic Regulation becoming the "main node" in sequencing in the entire country. (Quotation marks added the way I feel like. It's my blog isn't it?")

I will skip posing the question related to whether spending tax-payers money on trying to become the "main node" is really worth it. I shall also omit questioning the quality of the data these machines are producing. No matter how hard I try over these last six months, they simply fail to make sense (or I am failing to make sense of their profound, unquestionably objective noise). What cannot pass unquestioned though, is something that has fewer things to do with the machines themselves and more with the people (us, the scientific community, or whoever they are) who manage them. Because one of the main side-effects of our dear Institute becoming the "main node" in genomic sequencing all over Spain, would be the displacement of roughly 30 or more "people who treat our data", formerly known as "bioinformaticians", formerly known as "theoretical biologists", (this last term being a remote reference to science therefore abolished some long time ago). In the course of this displacement, we are to pack books, CD, computers, notebooks and the rest to make space for the installation of "the machines", ironically the same machines which will carry on producing the data we will be asked to treat, analyze and (hopefully) interpret.

The bottom line of all of the above would probably be to ask oneself the obvious question: "Since when did people become commodities comparable to technology?".
But I am afraid the even more obvious answer would be: "When did they stop being exactly that?"

I shall leave that question to you, the (few but loyal) readers. What I shall leave to me and to my fellow colleagues is a slightly more existential (thus also more provocative) question. And that is to what extent are we ourselves responsible for such a treatment. I mean, there is a long distance from the "computational biologists" we started out to be, researchers with our own projects and ideas to the "data analyzers", the last part (human but not much less dispensable) in a high-tech pipeline that we have turned ourselves into.

Is it my idea, or are we in the process of losing something more significant than our 4th floor sea view?

Have a nice (Lady) Day

I must be (in)famous for my difficulty to wake up in the morning. That is a lie. Or at least only a half one. Alike Marilyn Monroe (or was it some other star?), who once said that she wouldn't get out of bed for less than a thousand dollars (or was it more), I find it very difficult to get out of mine when I know that it is a thousand DNA sequences that await for me. On the other hand, I have never had trouble waking up to catch a boat to the islands, a bus that will take me to some nice place up on the Pyrenees or in general to any sort of activity that a normal person cannot but anticipate.

Today being a Thursday, like many others and many more to come, I found it a bit hard to force my body out from beneath the sheets. And as I found myself strolling down Carrer de la Merce on the way to the lab, I sensed I needed the sort of soothing music that would bring my mind in a tranquil and at the same time functional status. I chose Billie Holiday.

As the first notes of "In my solitude" started streaming through my headphones and my mood was slowly going back from frustrated to normal, I realized that I was passing by a number of bars that I have only seen full during the evening. Still, it was 9.30 and most of them had at least a couple of groups of customers who chatted while having their morning coffee, or having a light breakfast while reading the morning paper. I felt an indescribable envy. Right there and then I had just realized what would get me out of bed almost every morning and that was the promise that I could have the chance of starting my day, every day, in such a relaxing way. Walking in a bar, ask for a cup of coffee, a tostada or a scone, sit at a quiet table at the back and unfold my newspaper, or my book, or whatever it were that I might be reading. Now lets imagine that at the back of this coffee-shop there is a wide window facing the beach of Barceloneta, the sun is only starting to shine and Billie Holiday is discretely singing through the bar's speakers "God bless the child".

I could not help of thinking about other places and other times, where other people -more inspired than I am- were lucky enough to consider this dream of mine their daily routine. I thought about Joyce strolling down the south bank of the Seine, Freud walking into some Viennese cafe asking for a fresh croissant, Pessoa meeting with his friends in "A brasileira". And then I went on my walk to the lab, with the useless consolation thought that probably none of them was so happy about their mornings.

And that they all lived before having the chance to listen to Lady Day comforting them in the playful way she was doing it for me.

"Good morning heartache"...

How should one read a science paper?

Yesterday night, while sitting at my living-room's table, having dinner, a strange thing happened. I read two scientific papers.

This was rather unusual because I cannot quite recall the last time it happened and this is something for which I tend to blame science more than I blame myself.

Still, I read two papers, one by a group of people, whom one of my bosses like to refer to as "competitors" and the other suggested by another of my bosses (I only have two but sometimes I feel they are more). As I was going through the first one, I realized I was facing inherent difficulties in comprehending it. What was really puzzling about it, was that although the title and the brief summary preceding it were describing a clear concept in a quite straightforward manner, the main body of the work was going around the subject in a way that to me appeared rather obscure. I forced myself to go on, putting aside my glass of wine and blaming my recent paper-reading idleness for not being able to grasp simple scientific truths. But the harder I tried, the worse I was getting entangled in its twisted structure. Right when I thought the answer would pop up in the next page I would find myself staring at exotic scientific terms, which I was coming upon for the very first time, funny-sounding acronyms which said nothing to me and all this combined with plots, where I could not make out the real data from the simulated ones.

I reached the end of the paper seriously questioning myself and thinking whether I had become inept for activities of this sort. I gathered all the strength I had left and went on to the second one.

I found myself in front of a similarly clear and straight-forward title, so I thought "not again!" To my relief it was not the case. This one was as clear as its title, the concepts were all well-explained from the start, the necessary "catchy" acronyms had been clarified in the very beginning, the plots were self-explanatory. As I was regaining my self-esteem, my questioning gradually started to direct itself towards the writers instead of the readers. Some papers I thought are good and some bad. And that's that. I took some notes at the margins of both articles, washed the dishes and went to finish my wine on the couch with my book.

To this point I should make clear, that the whole process did not take more than what a normal person needs to finish off a salad, perhaps only a bit more, so I guess we are talking about 20 minutes or so. And I hope you find I am right when I say that one should dedicate no more than 10 minutes to go through a scientific paper. It's not that I am a fast reader but I guess if on average it takes one about 10 days to read "Mrs Dalloway" or "Crime and Punishment", it is imperative that he doesn't devote more than 10 minutes to the average science paper he comes upon. (And in case I realize someone has devoted more than 2 minutes in one of my few papers I will be more than happy). This comparison is not entirely unrelated to the fact that right after fulfilling my nocturnal, scientific duties I found myself on the sofa with an essay by Virginia Woolf entitled "How should one read a book?"

The essay is a good and pleasant read, (I assume especially for those who unlike myself are more than simply familiar with British literature) but it was mostly the main point of it that made me think twice about reading in general, and yes -even- science papers in particular. Woolf's main argument is that when it comes to a book the reader has above all a responsibility. For reading it carefully, for realizing the difficulty of writing in general, for judging it with a sincere kindness and a kind sincerity. Furthermore though, -she concluded- the criticism for which we readers are responsible (and in the case of science, readers coincide with critics although not to an extent that I would dare consider desirable) is mostly to be based on brief impressions, images and thoughts that flow as one reads without having to go into detail. Because this is what really matters.

I am not sure science papers are meant to be read as books. But considering the pleasure I get from reading books while my bosses' "paper recommendations" are piling up on my desk, I think I 'll follow Virginia's advice about it. I mean after all, we are supposed to take an expert opinion before serious undertakings, aren't we?

time

Time is relative. This we all know.

What we sometimes do not realize are the conditions that impose this relativity in our daily lives. Time is after and above all, OUR time, and while we are supposed to make of it what best suits us we are also responsible for defining it on the basis of our limited perception of duration within the confines of eternity. The fact that I had to wake up at 6.30 a.m. last Saturday to welcome my friend Kostas had nothing relative about it. It was the simple consequence of Vueling having setting up a flight schedule that is meant to torture its Greek customers.

The relativity of the whole thing makes its sudden appearance only under comparison. And such a comparison was painfully made this morning, just two days after Kostas' arrival. According to the earth's axial tilt and the geographical longitude of Barcelona, the difference in sunrise between two days is marginally less than 2 minutes. I can assure you though that the temporal distance between some days, which calendar-wise seem only slightly distant, can be huge. Especially if we are dealing with the distance between Saturday and Monday.

This was my case, last weekend. Kostas woke me up at 6.50 a.m. on Saturday, but it was a smooth waking up, simply knowing that I would go back to bed. There followed a nice nap, interrupted every now and then by the joyful sounds of a beautiful weekend morning, the smell of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen and the promise of the newspaper lying on the couch. Then all these promises were fulfilled and the day started, carried on and ended in the midst of the Fiesta Mayor of the city of Barcelona, in the company of a rather reassuring sun.

This morning, though, less than 48 hours later, when the alarm went of at 6.30 a.m. so that Kostas would catch his flight back to Boston, it seemed more like life on a different planet. A planet, where every day is Monday morning, grey and dull, with the threat of too many boring stuff piling up on your desk, where the coffee tastes like boiled leather and where there are no more fireworks or disguised people dancing in the streets. Most important of all, you cannot go back to bed. I know because I tried. But it just felt so that the atmosphere on Monday planet is too dense and too humid for me to fall asleep.

At 6.50, as the street lights started to go off, I was already waiting for the bus. It looked like it was about to rain. Through my headphones Radiohead sang "I might be wrong".

and then there were three

There are a number of ways for one to realize he is getting old. The most painful being without doubt, loss. By the time "The dark side of the moon" came out, I was not even but a distant intention in my parents minds, I wasn't even speaking during the "Wall" tour and I did not listen to Pink Floyd until long after they had split. Somehow though, I not only felt that they "belonged" to me, but also that -in a strange, metaphysical manner- I have always been a post-modern witness of their glorious past. It was probably due to the lack of good music after the legendary 60s and 70s and their unquestionable genious, that I felt that more than re-discovering them, I somehow "deserved" them.

The only time they played a gig in a place close to me, on May 31st, 1989, I was probably celebrating my little sister's 10th birthday in our small flat in Athens, most likely completely unaware of such an event even taking place. This meant I never had the chance to see them live and given that a prohibitive number of years had passed since the days of "Wish you were here" and "Animals", I was not expecting to ever have the privilege to do so. Last Tuesday, when Rick Wright left for his own last gig in the sky, he took a lot of things with him. Among those I was not so much saddened with the irrevocable vanishing of hope for a reunion, as with the feeling that actors -no matter how insignificant- of my life's play are passing behind the curtain.

It came to me then that you may know you are getting old when your heroes are long gone, but it is at an earlier stage that you become aware of aging and this is when you no longer create new heroes to replace the ones that have departed. On Tuesday I realized I have no replacements for Pink Floyd. It has little to do with their immortal music but with their physical presence.
And you have to trust me, it is less superficial than it sounds.

today

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.


Charles Baudelaire
L' albatros

Emma Bovary's eyes

Emma Bovary's eyes are irrevocably black.

I spent a wonderful five days in France last week, during which I bought a copy of Flaubert's great novel and remembered how Emma Bovary's eyes have steered a great deal of controversy and how Julian Barnes has so wittingly criticized literary critics, using the colour of Emma's eyes as a starting point, in his great book about Flaubert. (chapter 6 for the lazy ones)

Emma Bovary's eyes are naturally black.
Nonetheless there is a flowing ambiguity when it comes to their appearance. Sometimes they appear blue, others brown, most of the times it's hard to tell. Given my somewhat frustrating situation at work it is hard not to think about Emma's eyes when I look at the results on the screen of my computer. Quite often the numbers appear reasonable, but sometimes they acquire rather unfamiliar values, strange shapes and weird distributions. But science -we have been told- is objective, therefore my plots and numbers should be naturally making sense, or not. There should be no inbetweens, no greyzones, no conflicting conclusions. Alas, this is not the case.

Emma Bovary's eyes are most ardently black.
But the real wonder in them is their ever-changing impression, their transcendental hues, their unequivocal ambiguity. Sadly though, Emma Bovary is a fictional character of a great French novel while my results are the mere outcome of a poorly supported, sloppily applied algorithm. And since poor science cannot even remotely compare to the literature of masterpieces, my plots' changing shapes have nothing transcendental or charming, romantic or mysterious. These are simply bad results. There is nevertheless something comforting about them and this is exactly the fact that when one (me in this case) tries to present them in their lack of clarity, when one tries to explain why a plot of the same kind looks sharp in Figure 1 and suddenly bends over in Figure 4b, the resulting feeling is more to the frustration than to the amusement of the reader. Science, it is, cannot be converted to literature, the romantic ambiguities remain safe under the pen of geniouses of a different caliber and we are ascertained that the joy we get from a good book will never be spoiled by bad science.

Emma Bovary's eyes are wonderfully black.

today

Φίλοι κι αδέρφια, μανάδες, γέροι και παιδιά,

στα παραθύρια βγείτε και θωρείτε
ποιοι περπατούν στα σκοτεινά
και σερgιανούν μες τα στενά
φίλοι κι αδέρφια, μανάδες, γέροι και παιδιά.
γράφουν σημάδια, μηνύματα στο βασιλιά,
σαν δε φωνάξεις, έβγα να το γράψεις
να μη σ’ ακούσουν τα σκυλιά,
βγάλε φωνή χωρίς μιλιά,
σημάδια και μηνύματα στο βασιλιά

Ήταν στρατιώτες, καπεταναίοι λαϊκοί,
όρκο σταυρώσαν βάλαν στο σπαθί τους,
η λευτεριά να μη χαθεί,
όρκο σταυρώσαν στο σπαθί,
καπεταναίοι στρατιώτες λαϊκοί.
Κι όπου φοβάται, φωνή ν’ ακούει απ’ το λαό,
σ’ έρημο τόπο ζει και βασιλεύει
κάστρο φυλάει ερημικό
έχει το φόβο φυλαχτό
όπου φωνή φοβάται ν΄ ακούει απ’ το λαό.

Γη παιδεμένη, με σίδερο και με φωτιά,
για κοίτα ποιόν σου φέρανε καημένη,
να σ’ αφεντεύει από ψηλά, τα κρίματά σου είναι πολλά,
χτυπούν το σίδερο θεριέψαν τη φωτιά.
Καίει το φιτίλι ξεθηκαρώνουν τα σπαθιά
κάνουν Βουλή Συνταχτική και γράφουν
το θέλημά τους στα χαρτιά
κι η κοσμοθάλασσα πλατιά
κάνουν Βουλή ξεθηκαρώνουν τα σπαθιά.

Τρεις του Σεπτέμβρη, μανάδες, γέροι και παιδιά,
στα παραθύρια βγείτε και θωρείτε
τι φέρνουνε στο βασιλιά
βαθιά γραμμένο στα χαρτιά
τρεις του Σεπτέμβρη μάνες, γέροι και παιδιά.

Ιάκωβος Καμπανέλλης
Το μεγάλο μας τσίρκο

today

Να ξημέρωνε μια μέρα

Μια γιορτή, μια Πασχαλιά
Όλοι να 'ταν εδώ πέρα
Κι εγώ να 'λειπα μακριά

Να γλεντάνε, να γελάνε
Και να πίνουν στην υγειά
Τη δική τους, τη δική μου
Κι όσων λείπουνε μακριά
Τη δική τους, τη δική μου
Κι όσων λείπουνε μακριά

Να ξημέρωνε μια μέρα
Μια καλή Πρωτοχρονιά
Όλοι να 'ταν εδώ πέρα
Κι εγώ νά 'λειπα μακριά

Να τους λείπω, να μου λείπουν
Να με σκέφτονται συχνά
Και τρελά ν' αγαπηθούμε
Μέχρι να τους δω ξανά
Και τρελά ν' αγαπηθούμε
Μέχρι να τους δω ξανά.

Μιχάλης Γκανάς
"Να ξημέρωνε μια μέρα"

steroids for researchers

Since last Friday, I have been trying to follow the Olympics as much as work and time difference permits me. I do it not so much because I enjoy watching archery or cycling but because the flat is so empty that even TV is a good company and -lets face it- any kind of sport is still better than the usual crap of Spanish TV. Over the last four days, I could not help noticing the ability with which swimmers of any nationality, sex or race have been beating olympic and world records, sometimes by three or more seconds. I cannot but be surprised by these athletes who beat opponents, time and their own selves once or twice a day.

I wonder if I could ever be like them, if I could ever become that good at what I do -or pretend to be doing. I quickly realize that I never will. And right after that, I realize that I would never want to. Competition is not my forte, I never found myself comfortable with struggling to be the best in something and even if sometimes I get merit for stuff I do, I fully realize it is mostly based on considerable luck and some residual talent (which is also part of being lucky). You -and by this I would like to have been talking mostly to my bosses- have to believe me. I honestly don't intend to be the best at what I do. Correction: I don't intend to be good at what I do. And by "intend" I don't mean I would not like to. It's just that I am not the least determined to work for it. I believe in luck and talent. If you have it you should not be needing steroids or effort. I don't have it -as most of the people- and since there are no steroids for researchers any effort to convert me into a high-class scientist would be futile. I therefore have to warn you. Do not count on me. My aspirations were fulfilled upon becoming a mediocre doctor of sciences.

Besides joking now, I would like to be good at many things. I want to be a good friend, perhaps someday a good father, I hope I made it through being a good son and who would not like to be a good lover? (if only!) I would like to be a good laugh on Saturday nights out or a good football fun. Once they asked Borges why he would never take up writing a big novel to which his answer was that the world had enough of good writers but was in dire need of good readers. He therefore preferred to read instead. I would also like to be a good reader. And I think I could be really good at it if only work would let me.

Human nature dictates that we aspire merit, recognition and fame. It is all connected to our honest appreciation of what is really beautiful. I grew up admiring great writers, thinkers, footballers and trumpet players. I grew up a bit more and wrote a couple of stuff that made me feel nice, made thinking a profession that pays the rent, played football for the school team and have fun while blowing a trumpet every now and then. At the side of all that, I did not forget to simply grew up. I simply grew up to accept the fact that Maradona, Wynton Marsalis, Castoriades, Einstein and Borges are to be admired because they are out of reach. Geniouses that lie at the edge of the bell curve that are mediocrities define. And I have grown up to know it's not bad to be mediocre. What is bad is not being at peace with yourself by accepting it.

I was making these thoughts and then Mike Phelps came to break one more world record.

fake empire

Posting is like reading books. The longer the abstinence, the greater the difficulty to resume. After a hard end of July and a great beginning of August, I find putting my thoughts in a post as hard as going back to work. Or perhaps even more, since this post comes almost a week after I came back from a great trip in Andalucia and with my "professionally-amateur" working obligations at full pace.

One might think that a long-awaited trip, with "long-time-no-seen" friends would bring back some strength to resume work. Especially somewhere between an empty flat and a half-empty lab. Well, at least I did thought so. But I was wrong.

Over the last week, I have worked my ass ("arse" Colin would have corrected me) off with the scarcest results and experienced days which achieved peaks of unprecedented futility (like last Friday's quest for a periodical pattern in some stupid cancer cells' nucleosomes, but I am sure none of you cares, why should you anyway?). The key however is not there. The key is in the fact that somehow I seem to have lost any joy in the way we (or I) work, or perhaps I am only realizing the fat that I am incapable of working as "we" and can only work as "I". It's not necessarily a bad thing, I just have to keep it as my little secret when future, "aspiring" employers of mine ask me whether I am prone to "work in a group".

The problem in this case is that this group work consists mostly of having to deal with sometimes superficial, often absurd and almost always frustratingly boring orders of my bosses, whose vision of science I start to realize that I am not sharing at all. I found myself, a distinguished citizen of a fake empire whose pillars I am responsible to built and maintain. Numbers don't add up, models fail, all orders of statistical moments have united against me, my plots' curves assume irritatingly mocking grins. On top of all that, I have to make them all look good. That is the very essence of the fake empire. Here, results are discussed before the experiment is designed, the papers written before the analysis. In the fake empire, there is no time to think. Science is like riding a bike, they say. If you stop moving, you fall.

And should my empire decline and fall, I shall fall within it. What really worries me though, is that the thought of it does not sadden me one little bit.

shut it down

Another week with visitors is going on at a frenetic pace. Trying to get some work done during the morning, with numbers growing increasingly stubborn and almost impossible to be put in order. Evenings are devoted to my sister and her friend who are -I hope- enjoying the city at its freshest, despite of it being July. Then, nights are starting to become that part of the day when I recur to work. My boss is officially out for the rest of the summer and his night e-mails are becoming more and more often. It is of course my fault to be reading them at 3 am.

They say that people in the Mediterranean are under-functioning throughout most of the summer. That it is rather impossible to be expecting work to be done under 40 degrees centigrade with the sea at your doorstep. And although I am a bit reluctant in admitting that generations of Greeks, Spaniards and Italians may not be wrong, I am still trying to put my numbers in order in the middle of July. At the same time I am forcing myself to share the enthusiasm of the friends who are having holiday right next to me, comfort the sadness and frustration of beloved ones that are still very far from their own vacation and cope with all sorts of internal pressure.

You see, at the side of all that, I still read the news every morning (or around noon). And most of the times they are not good. Beautiful places in Greece, suffer from drought, problems with our Slav neighbours of Northern Macedonia, corrupted politics, ignorant voters. Off the front page of the cultural section: the State Orchestra of Greek Music is to be shut down because of lack of funding. This is becoming all too much. "Memory", Sherlock Holmes once said, "is a closet with non-elastic walls. Once you have to stuff it with something, you have to get rid of something else you were keeping in." And although my memory seems to be still working quite well, I am growing more and more anxious to shut it down. And therefore stop thinking about Greek forests going dry and Greek musicians going out of work, while their minister of Culture is going on holiday with his super-rich friends.

Shutting my memory down is still two weeks away -if it even happens then. But until then, frustrated, dizzy and confused I choose to invent a new term for my memory status. I shall therefore fall into "estatization", (as opposed to "hibernation"). I 'll go into this limbo where, I am not supposed to think, or worry about all this, the corresponding of a summer marmot, only instead of sleeping I shall be dreaming awake about the beaches of Andalucia, my friends and glasses of cold beer. And I will listen to the music of the State Orchestra of Greek Music. And I plan to stay there, in my summer laziness, my "estatization", or what we Greeks would call "ραστώνη" until I feel strong enough to confront my numbers and the newspaper headlines again.

the beauty of it all

Beauty, we are sometimes told, is subjective. One cannot but turn his face away from a Picasso at the same time someone else is praising the genious of the painter. And my friend Sylvain was often irritated at the site of the "too-skinny for his taste" Keira Knighltey, hanging from my office boarder, while I have placed her photo facing him instead of me so that I avoid additional distractions. At the same time I would like to think that there are things in life that are beautiful in a completely unanimous and objective way. Images, sounds, tastes that evoke similar feelings of joy and neuronal pulses of satisfaction.

Or as my friend Filipe would put it: "Beauuuutiful"!

I thought about all this, while during a boring Monday like today, and with a lot of work running on the background, I was browsing the newspapers on the web. As most of the -not exactly countless- readers of this blog would have absolutely no hesitation in asserting, reading the papers is one of my dearest activities. I often think of it to be as important as work, simply trying to ignore the actual fact that it IS far more important than it. And although it should have been otherwise, I always look for beauty in the articles I read. theatre reviews attract my eye more than political analysis and interviews of musicians are preferred to editorials about unemployment. It so turned out this morning that politics, work, beauty and reading the papers got connected today, as I read an article about the fishermen of the Mediterranean and the future of their profession.

Besides a couple of times in a distant childhood when I joined an uncle of mine on a fishing night in the calm waters of Ancient Epidavros, I have never fished on my own, neither can I say much about it. The simple fact, however, that a 12-year old can have so much fun while participating at what someone else does for a living, can say much about the nature of that particular job. Fishing can be tough. Most of the time it's not fun. And most of times it is not done on full-moon, July nights in the beautiful, ancient bays of Argolida. On top of all that, as the fishermen of the article I was reading were pointing out, it is not even profitable anymore. Most of them are quitting or are just about to do so. The new directives of the EU impose on them the same kind of restrictions to which the big fishing fleets are subject, which makes the complications even less bearable. Getting a small boat out in the waters of Algeciras, Antibes, Astypalaia or Antalya simply doesn't pay the bills anymore.

Nonetheless, the beauty is still there. And it stroke me deeply to read what an old fisherman had to say about his seemingly un-rewarding profession. "It's the most beautiful job in the world", he said, "I would never change looking at the sun go down behind the cape of Antibes as I sail out for anything else. It may not fill my plate anymore, but it fills my heart with joy".

Sitting at my desk, overlooking that same sea, the old man was talking about, I tried to reflect about the lost beauty of what I do. And -if it doesn't sound like sacrilege- I thought it should be of the same kind of Picasso or Keira Knightley, subjective and somehow obscure to most. A beautiful equation, a beautiful thought put on paper and proven on the screen, such things are not yet completely out of reach even though everyday obligations and stupid science-management trends make them more and more distant everyday. I thought about the old man and his sea, the sunset at Antibes compensating for his daily struggle and realized that before everything else we owe it to ourselves and to science to make it as beautiful, as rewarding and as appealing as possible.

Even if it will never match the site of this small boat floating on the turquoise waters of the cote d'azur.

Das Schloss

It was back in September 2005, while visiting the lab for the first time. I was in Barcelona for a short stay which included an interview with my current boss(es) when two of my current colleagues kindly offered to take me to lunch. At some point the discussion came to the unusual "structure" of the Institute, which even to the ears of a Greek, accustomed to bureaucracy, sounded quite weird. People belonging to two or more Institutes at the same time, while being paid by a third one, some of the centers affiliated to the state, others simultaneously forming part of a semi-private University, most of them overlapping with each other, being reciprocally part of each other and all of them at the process of being incorporated into the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona (PRBB, also known as the "Alcatraz of western Mediterranean").
"I am telling you it's Kafka's wet dream". My witty colleague and compatriot Karolos could not have come up with a better description of the situation.

Two and a half years later, I officially belong to the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), which is part of the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona (PRBB), my boss is a group leader in the CRG, also belonging to the Grupo de Reserca en Informatica Biologica (GRIB), which is part of the Instituto Municipal de Informatica Medica (IMIM), while he teaches as a prefossor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). All of the above institutes, groups, entities share the common roof of the building you see in the photo. In this labyrinth of names and entities, it is difficult that someone doesn't remember Karolos' words. PRBB is since last week the closest I can think to Kafka's Tower. "Das Schloss"!

Last week I was expecting a package sent by mail from a musical store in Galicia. As I had to attend a PhD thesis defense (my first as member of the tribunal) I was not at the building when the package arrived. I received a phone-call from one of the Tower's receptionist. As her name was not mentioned we cannot resist the temptation to call her "Barnabas", a strange name for a receptionist but not for a messenger in the "Tower". In fact for someone with so little efficiency and such a big mouth, "Barnabas" falls just a little short of perfect. Anyway, the message of Barnabas was that there was a package for me, Mr N. at the reception of IMIM on the first floor of the Tower. When I asked why the package was at her hands since I belonged to the CRG, Barnabas employed the most stylish of the "towerish" accents to inform me that I was Mr. N. belonging not to the CRG but to the IMIM and that I should therefore look for the package at the mailbox of the GRIB!!!

Mr. N., myself could not but feel puzzled. Like some other Mr in a different tower I thought to be working for someone else than I actually was. Upon arriving to the Tower the same afternoon I went to look for my package at the designated mailbox, as the law-respecting Mr N. I am. Not to my surprise it was not there. Nor was Barnabas. And neither was I surprised when the secretary occupying her spot -we can call her Olga- told me she knew nothing about the package, or who I was, or where I worked at. She advised me to look for the parcel at the GRIB, so I went up to the 4th floor to do so. The package was not there and the secretary of the GRIB -whose name could be Amalia, although it is not- suggested that I looked for the person responsible for purchases at the CRG, -I shall call him Gerstacker-. Although this was not a purchase that the CRG would know anything of, I went up on the 5th and after a brief conversation with Burgel, the CRG receptionist I went to look for Gerstacker. By that time I was getting close. My assistant Jeremiah -she's a girl, but "Jeremiah" IS the proper name for Mr. N's assistant- had joined me in my quest and we managed to talk to Gerstacker together. At the beginning he was reluctant in helping me. It was late in the afternoon and most of his colleagues must have been having beer at the "Herrenhof Inn" already -which could also be called Bitacora but is not, not in this story at least-. The only thing he could tell me is that he would look for it and that I should send a message to Barnabas. As I told him that Barnabas is the messenger and that it would be silly to send a message to the messenger he looked at me with an angry look so me and Jeremiah decided to go. It was late and I had flight to catch.

Needless to say I never found the package myself. It just appeared on my desk two weeks later. When I asked how it got there nobody could tell me. Neither Hans, Frieda, Pepi or the Teacher knew how it got there. I tend to think it was Galater, the one who assigned Jeremiah as my assistant but somehow I would like to think that it was not him. I 'd like to think it was Klamm. The one I am supposed to be working for and never get to meet. The one that everybody claims to know, but cannot really describe.

Standing by my desk, looking at the un-opened parcel, I could not stop thinking about my life in the Tower after 30 months. How a lot of things that sounded so clear when I came here now seemed to be completely out of reach like Klamm, or so complicated like getting a package on your desk.

I remembered another tower I had read about once and a distant relative of mine, a distant relative of all of us. Mr K. Was I to end up like him, working as a janitor instead of the land-surveyor I was once destined to be?

today

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time,
far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees,
out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea,
circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Bob Dylan
Mr. Tambourine man

a bloomsday of one's own

June 16th, 1904 was probably a day like everyone else in the lives of those who did not have their first born child seeing its first light on that day, or did not lose a beloved one or got married to their love of their life. It was probably a day like everyone else in the lives of a lot of people. Fortunately for us, it was not an ordinary day in the life of James Joyce, who had his first date with Nora Barnacle, on that same afternoon. As Nora was to become his wife and lifetime companion, that 16th of June, 1904 assumed a special role in Joyce's life and this is how it ended being probably the most famous, ordinary day in the history of literature. Joyce's "Ulysses", acclaimed by many as the greatest novel of all time, takes place in Dublin during that day.

June 16th of June is nowadays celebrated by Joyce's fans all over the world and his Irish compatriots in particular. And since one of "Ulysses"' main characters is called Leopold Bloom, the term "Bloomsday" has been coined for this literary anniversary. The "real" Bloomsday, inside the novel, is a full day from dawn until early the following morning, a single 24-hour trip through the early 20th century Dublin, but is at the same time a long journey in the lives of many people evolving in parallel. An "Odyssey", as the title of the book suggests.
I still haven't manage to read "Ulysses", although I once started it. I hope I do it one day, but until then I happen to think about how one's day can turn into a full "Oddysey" in the way it happened to Leopold Bloom's on June 16th, 1904.

Last Tuesday, June 17th 2008, one day and 104 years after Bloomsday, I thought I had one of my own. The complete recollection of its events seems somewhat impossible right now, mostly because I feel more tired than what I felt a week ago. In any case, none of the occurrences of last Tuesday really deserves to be mentioned. It is mostly their unstoppable flow that makes me think back to it as my own "Bloomsday" and although there is no correspondence of any of the incidents with an episode from the Homeric epic, my whole 24 hour day could qualify as a minor ordeal. It more or less involved an early waking up, after having spent the previous night reading a PhD thesis, judging that exact same thesis as a member of a committee, socializing with unknown people after the thesis defense was over -probably the hardest part-, rushing back to the flat under the rain (on June 17th!), packing for a short trip that sounded nothing like fun, then straight to the lab only to spend 30 minutes looking for a lost package (a story whose weird literary connotations deserve a post of their own, soon to follow) and the rest couple of frenetic hours organizing work with Sonja to be done during my absence. Run to the train station, then to the airport, check-in, have a snack while watching Italy beat France on some big screen, board the plane, fly to Greece, arrive there in the middle of the night, bus, taxi, get to my parents' house around 4 a.m. and to bed around 5.30.

I know it doesn't sound a bit like an Odyssey and I can reassure you it wasn't. But neither would "Bloomsday" feel like one had it not been for the genious of Joyce. And in fact, it would have been one of "those ordinary days" for me as well had it not been on June 17th, one day after the "real" Bloomsday. Funny how a seemingly insignificant date of a young promising writer at the turn of the 20th century, ends up affecting my life 104 years later.

my grandma has a say

Another cloudy Sunday, with Greece already eliminated from the Euro and me instead of following my boss' advice ("work, work and then work some more"), am reading the Sunday papers in four different languages.

On the news since last Friday, the decision taken by the Irish government to refuse to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon (a slightly "made-up" version of the EU Constitutional Treaty), after the negative vote of the Irish people. It is somehow striking how this treaty (or its predecessor) fails to be ratified by any state which decides to leave it up to its people through a process of vote. It happened in France and the Netherlands back in 2005, it happened again in Ireland. On the other hand, the Treaty has been approved by most of the EU members, which chose to ratify it through the vote of the parliament, bypassing direct voting. However, -and somehow misleadingly- the press throughout this frustrated continent puts the blame on the Irish. For what? For simply letting the people decide.

On this "hot" subject, today on the news, I read "funny" articles (use of the term "funny" in order to avoid other, bitterer ones). Articles like this one in Greece's Kathimerini, or this in Spain's El Pais. Articles which suspiciously focus on an "interesting" (I hope you bear with me with these quoted terms) concept of "minorities" deciding over the majorities. It sounds pretty reasonable the way I summarized it (and carefully placed it carefully in between quotation marks) but is it? Is it really? What Europe's most distinguished columnists call a minority is the small margin of more or less 110.000 votes with which the Irish voted in favour of not ratifying the treaty. These 110.000 votes -they claim- stand between the fulfillment of the will of 500 million Europeans. This immense majority, which -always according to them- has been holding its breath with utter anxiety until the Lisbon Treaty is finally put forward.

I know most of the people don't care reading the papers that much, perhaps because the sun is brighter in Greece or in other parts of Spain or even in Poland and they prefer a Sunday afternoon walk instead of bothering to read this kind of crap (there you have it, no quotation marks any longer). But what these people are implying by talking about "minorities" is that we should no longer leave decisions like these to the people. Everyday people -they say- lack information, they vote on the grounds of personal discontent, they are too ignorant to realize what is good for them, too distracted by the fear of economic depression to reason the true advantages that this treaty will offer them. Instead we should be taking these decisions more "democratically". Through parliamentary vote, with less room for fuss on indymedia, preferentially on an evening session, if possible on a football night. You see, our representatives know more. After all it was us who voted for them so why shouldn't we trust them? I mean honestly, would you prefer that the future of our continent be decided by your poor grandmother or by your well esteemed "congressmen"?

We are entering dangerous ground here. I know democracy is supposed to be the "lesser bad" of our alternatives but once we chose it we might as well stick with it. My "representatives" will not be here in four years to explain what has been going wrong with Europe. The ones who chose to switch to the Euro six years ago (the period with the greatest increase in prices Greece has experienced since WW2) are all well off, pretending nothing happened. Morevoer, I have to admit I had little idea that the Treaty has been ratified already by the parliaments of 17 states. Could this be because I am not being "informed" enough so that I can have an opinion about my constitution? Or is it perhaps that it was something so insignificant our leaders -AND leading columnists- did not want to bore us with? How come such a big discussion, exchange of arguments (even as lame as the aforementioned ones) is being raised now, after the Irish "NO"? Isn't this a sign that democracy is still breathing, and that the debate starts when somebody has a different opinion?

The defenders of the "majorities" should have no fear. Now that the people are suddenly interested in the Treaty, they can try to "inform" them better. If they think they don't evaluate the Treaty's text on solid grounds, they can explain all the "benefits" that come with it. After all it is their job. I mean, the Irish "fools" screwed up with Europe's dream but there is still hope for the rest, isn't there? Please Sr. Carnero, Mr. Konstantaras, could you explain to me and my poor grandmother what is really the best for us instead of putting the blame on the Irish?

I promise to be very careful while listening to your solid arguments. But as regrading who should finally decide about my Constitution, I beg to differ and for once more I 'll choose to be the "radical" one, the "undemocratic", the "minority" supporter. And yes, if you ask me, I prefer my grandmother decides what's best for her. After all, if something goes wrong, she 'll need no one to be blame but herself.