Trumpeter on the balcony

This is my latest asset, a luxury I have always promised to allow myself once I had some extra money (to throw away). Thanks to Valentina's persistence and her volunteering to act as trumpet-bearer, I received my instrument two weeks ago.

Before we start, some clear facts so that you don't rush into erroneous conclusions. I have no idea about music, I consider myself extremely lazy and rather enthusiastic, a combination which most of the times leads me to take up a new task every week only to leave it aside the next one. This is exactly why I am still a mediocre climber, a rather sloppy skater and to my bosses' (both of them) disappointment I 'll go nowhere close to publishing my results in Nature. And that is only mentioning the activities I have undertaken while in Barcelona.

Nonetheless, I have great fun with all of the above and I intend to do the same with music. Filipe has assumed the difficult role of introducing me to some basics of musical theory and I can sense he's already getting frustrated with my lack of progress (which should not be qualified as such, since progress -or its absence- is only to be defined as in reference to a previously existing condition). The truth is that I still have a lot of trouble distinguishing a C from a D on a musical staff (which makes me appreciate so much the human mind at the age of 6 when "C" and "D" as letters should have seemed equally indistinguishable) and I have adopted a primitive way which includes counting with my fingers when I am asked to built the E-major scale. But despite all that, I am having a lot of fun when at it. It looks like I am learning a sort of arithmetics, starting all over again, although sadly lacking the special abilities of 6-year-old.

When it comes to practicing though, a major inconvenience suddenly rises. If you have ever tried to blow through a trumpet, you 'll probably know what I mean. After the first desperate attempts which lead to nothing more than a stream of air flowing through the pipes, you may manage (if you are lucky) to produce the low squeaky tune of an elephant farting. And only after a lot of effort will you make the instrument sound like something that remotely resembles a trumpet. In all cases though, be it an eerie, otherwordly voice or the natural sound of a dying animal, there is one common thing and that is that it is simply too loud! Hence the obvious inconvenience, when trying to practice in a flat, which you share with two more -non deaf- people and whose walls -although not exactly with the susceptibility of those of Jericho- are thin enough to test the neighbours' acoustical stamina.

This left me no option but my balcony. Last Saturday night, with my flatmates dining out, assuming that the neighbours were doing the same and hoping that the noise of the cars rushing down Passeig de Colom would cover my unbearable, hearing-damaging squeaks and tweets, I practiced playing the trumpet. Of course at my level -to which the word "beginner" would make absolutely no justice- this meant that I only managed to get only three consecutive notes right. And even though I went on for a good half hour the fourth note of the first measure of the "Autumn Leaves", an E-flat, for which my lips should stress more than my cheeks can handle, would only sound right one out of ten times.

Still, one out of ten times, it felt really good. I would then take a small pause, look at the people walking down the road from the hight of my third floor, hoping they had heard it right this time, and I thought that even if I was not exactly the "fiddler on the roof" I could one day become the "trumpeter on the balcony".

PS. The sleepless "eye" of my tutor (really "sleepless" since he posted a comment at 2.30 am) spotted one more mistake. Namely, that this E-flat is not the last note of the first measure. The piece starts off tune, therefore the hard E-flat is simply the first note of the second measure. Am I saying it right, master?

today

Durante años no pudimos hablar de otra cosa. Nuestra conducta diaria, dominada hasta entonces por tantos hábitos lineales, había empezado a girar de golpe en torno de una misma ansiedad común. Nos sorprendían los gallos del amanecer tratando de ordenar las numerosas casualidades encadenadas que habían hecho posible el absurdo, y era evidente que no lo hacíamos por un anhelo de esclarecer misterios, sino porque ninguno de nosotros podía seguir viviendo sin saber con exactitud cuál era el sitio y la misión que le había asignado la fatalidad.

Gabriel García Márquez
Crónica de una muerte anunciada

Order out of chaos - A short tale about strange fruits

Once upon a time there was a greengrocer in Barcelona's Boqueria market. He was famous for arranging all the fruits in well-ordered piles like the one shown in the photo. He was a great specialist in strawberries and oranges and was highly estimated among his colleagues. Then, one day one of them, also quite highly esteemed not for his piling of fruits but for their production came to him and proposed him to join in a new enterprise. The producer was planning to go into the grape business and he wanted him to think of a way to pile them up properly. Our greengrocer had never worked with grapes before but he had not become famous for turning down interesting offers so he accepted. He then decided to hire a guy to think for a way to pile up the grapes even before the grapes were delivered. The wannabe "piler" arrived at the market bench full of enthusiasm and started devising a number of ways to pile-up the grapes all neatly and nicely. He made a lot of effort to understand the shape and size of the grapes, read a lot about them in books and ended up with an acceptable piling strategy that could at least work with the grapes he had in mind.

Both the greengrocer and the piler were quite happy, when one day, a guy whose bench was on the other side of the market suddenly appeared with a small number of grapes piled up in what looked to be a nicely-shaped cone. Both our heroes were rather puzzled, because of the fact that the way they had thought about was resembling more a pyramid than a cone. In any case they started thinking about how the two strategies could be combined, when suddenly greengrocers all around started piling up fresh grapes on their benches. The greengrocer was really saddened. Only a short time ago he thought of this strange fruit as a possible prospect which would only moderately expand his customers. Now all his competitors were going into the grape business before him and, even worse, it seemed like everybody wanted grapes. Grapes had become fashionable.

The frustration of the poor piler was even bigger. You see, he had spent a lot of time studying the grapes, he thought he had understood them and now he would see all sorts and kinds of these strange fruits piled-up around him that were nothing like each other. Some would be big enough to look like kiwi, others would come in small beads resembling big berries. Some where bright red like strawberries and other pale-yellow like potatos. When he tried to compare one type with another his frustration increased even more. He realized that some of the merchants, when talking about grapes were only referring to one specific type which would be better piled in the shape of a cone, others would pile their own in cubes and so on...

As time passed by the situation became even worse. The competitor greengrocers were starting to make strange allocations about their grapes, piling them up on top of other fruits, suggesting that grapes were to be piled up with oranges and apples and pears, and as you may have imagined, each one had a different combination in mind. Naturally the greengrocer was more and more anxious and kept asking of his helper to think of even more complex ways to pile up the fruit, while nothing would suggest that there was a good or a bad way to do so. It just seemed like everybody would do their own thing, call it a pile of grapes and not care about each other. The piler had not learned to work like this, and neither the greengrocer. Both of them were coming from a school of greengrocers, were the fruits shape and colour were well defined first and then piled-up accordingly. Thus they were in agreement that they should define the fruit first before the pile.

But the problem was that the more the piler strolled up and down the market, carefully approaching the benches and observing the piles, the more frustrated he would get. It was turning out that some of the competitor greengrocers were using other kind of fruit to support the piles, others would mix more than one type of grapes in the same pile, there were a few that were using two types of piles at the same time and even some that were cheating by taking piles of cherries and calling them grapes.

On top of all that the producer which has made the initial deal with the greengrocer arrived finally with the grapes he had promised in the very beginning. In fact it was his assistant who had come to bring the merchandise as initially arranged. And to the disappointment of both our heroes, the grapes she was carrying were exactly what they feared of. There she was putting in front of them all possible kinds of grapes, small and big, spherical and oval, bright red and yellow and pale-white. She had been working for months in the production of grapes, she new everything that had to do with the production as the piler new almost everything that had to do with their possible organization. And there they were the two of them with a bunch of incoherent, strange fruit that could not be organized in one but in many ways.

As their employers were growing more and more impatient, the grape-piler and the grape-cultivator were quite puzzled, walking up and down the market over and over, trying to think of the solution to their problem which was of dual nature. The cultivator wanted to know which type of the grapes were the right ones, -that is if there were one type-. And the piler wanted to make sure that this type was piled properly. Their thoughts were oscillating back and forth from the most daring hypotheses to the most down to earth compromises. Once they would come to think that there was only one type of grapes and all the rest were fakes, then they would ponder one whether the real grapes were a mixture of all these variations. They could not decide on whether the pile shape was to be one or more than one. And they would come to a real confusion when people would ask them about the other type of surrounding fruit and whether the shape of their piles were to affect the one of the grapes.

All the piler could come down to was that this had become a big mess, that this chaos was not to be put into order.

And I am not very sure but maybe this is the end of the story. Or maybe not.

today (...it is finally raining in Barcelona!)

Son de abril, las aguas mil

sopla el viento achubascado
y entre nublado y nublado,
hay trozos de cielo añil.

Antonio Machado

The boss of me

I spent ten days in Greece a bit detached from things and people to a degree that may have been considered rude. Even my dear mother, whose subconscious wisdom is only very rarely overpowered by her residual drive to pretend to be the "Greek mom" and who very seldom tries to "protect" me from an overtiring schedule, was somehow surprised by this anti-social behaviour.

The reason for this less social holiday was simply that I did not feel like it. As recent posts might have made a bit clearer to the restricted readership of this blog, I have gone from doubting myself, to doubting what I do for a living and have ended up that I am not satisfied with neither. Fortunately I used these ten days in Greece to reflect about all this self-criticism only to conclude that it was not such a big deal after all. This in the sense that self-doubting is something quite common and should not be allowed to have such a great impact on us, especially while on holidays. I therefore decided that questioning myself shall be an activity into which I shall hereon indulge with no guilt, as long as I do not bother providing any answer to this questioning.

Moreover, I think I made some considerable advance in what concerns my own self's management, (if you would pardon the term). Over the last months I felt somehow excessively "guided" by my -multiple- tutors and bosses, a condition which my inherent problems with authority, my increasingly Greek "know-it-all" attitude and the realistic fact that I spend more time with my project than they do, made really difficult in absorbing. But it was in Greece, away from my project, its managers and Barcelona, where I rememebred strolling by the place shown in the photo.

The so-called "forat de la vergonya", (which would mean "shame's hole" in catalan) was once a really under-developed part in one of Barcelona's fastest developing neighbourhoods, the Born. In our -otherwise- interesting times, when developing means increasing in -purely economic- value and under-development is synonymous to de-valuation, the "Forat" was simply a piece of land that real-estate sharks had not got their hands on yet. Hopefully this was one of the few cases where the sharks remained hungry, since the residents of the neighbourhood took the situation in their own hands and changed the face of the place with their own means. Today the "Forat", looks like in the photo -only a bit more colourful than in this image taken on a rainy day anyway-. It has been declared by the residents as "self-managed" park, where -even after some late intervention and subsequent additions by the City Hall- most of the constructions have been carried out by the citizens themselves. The park includes small gardens, hand-made benches and harbors a football goal and a small basket-ball court. On the entrance there is this sign which reads "Self-managed Park: Forat de la Vergonya".

Where is the -not so obvious- analogy? Well, after a bit of thinking and deciding that as in all jobs, in this one as well, having some limited fun is a crucial component, I have decided to become the boss of me once more. I want to make clear here, that this is not a revolution, nor am I objecting to any kind of oppression. There are no sharks here, at least not obvious ones. But to some extent I feel our job, my job is being de-valuated by being directed toward stupid scientific trends with no interest to me and -most importantly- no fun whatsoever. Therefore I would more call it a small subversion, a minor mutiny if you like, as I re-assume full responsibility for my work, the only real asset I possess -isn't that right uncle Karl?
It has paid off in the past, so why shouldn't it work now?

....
PS. A late Friday night postscript may come in confirmation to the above. The numbers I see on my screen suggest that it paid off this time as well. But lets not get over-excited

today

Desde la infancia apenas se me cae algo al suelo tengo que levantarlo, sea lo que sea, porque si no lo hago va a ocurrir una desgracia, no a mí sino a alguien a quien amo y cuyo nombre empieza con la inicial del objeto caído. Lo peor es que nada puede contenerme cuando algo se me cae al suelo, ni tampoco vale que lo levante otro porque el maleficio obraría igual. He pasado muchas veces por loco a causa de esto y la verdad es que estoy loco cuando lo hago, cuando me precipito a juntar un lápiz o un trocito de papel que se me han ido de la mano

Julio Cortazar
Rayuela

Closing time

Today is Good Friday in whatever is called the "western christianity".
I am starting to get a bit superstitious with the observation (or fact?) that Good Friday tends to be cloudy no matter if it's March, April or May, if it's a Catholic "Good" one or an orthodox "Big" one. Then my well-hidden scientific side rises on the surface with a profoundly sound argument which claims that since we are talking about a whole day and since it is practically impossible that a whole day remains cloudy all over the world we have to be talking about an observer-biased phenomenon. Meaning Good Friday looks to be always cloudy to me, wherever I am, and perhaps to my mother, whose superstition can only be traced back to this same observation, every year.

In any case, cloudy or not, Good Friday in a Catholic country like Spain is a holiday, which means I should be having my siesta instead of seeping coffee in the lab. Nonetheless, here I am, trying to organize my stuff before I leave for my real holiday in order not to come back in 10 days realizing I don't even remember in which folder I keep my e-mail messages, a useful -though admittedly boring- practice I learned from my previous boss Yannis. But it somehow looks that neither today's blue and moody weather nor my slightly hang-overed head can help me in carrying out this task with the minimal decency. Instead I am reading poems by Miguel Hernandez, as a tribute to today's international poetry day, I browse lyrics on the web and keep blogging with musical references. Whoever notices the subtle one in this post, as compared to the immediate previous one, shall irrevocably earn my admiration.

By the time the evening approaches and my need for a late siesta can only be battled against with a huge mug of the lab's strongest coffee, I start putting stuff into order. I sent the last updates to our collaborators, sure they want read them today and supposing they want care even when they eventually do. Then I organize my shell terminals with tags denoting the project I am working on each, thinking that I am doing it (and writing about it) just to piss off Julien and Sylvain ....(got You!). Next I post my to-do list on my google calendar and pile up properly the -mostly unread- papers on my desk. I am left with a bunch of small scripts lying around on my desktop, tiny unfinished lines of code, striving to accomplish a function which lingers undecided, desperately trying to reach the end of the loop while self-aware of their rough-hewed ends. As I try to browse through this incomprehensible stream of dos and whiles it seems to me like I am reading geeky, surrealist poetry of the strangest kind.

Then, disgusted of myself for having dared to think of such an obscene metaphor, afraid of Sylvain preparing his geek-card all the way from North California, I decide to send most of it to the recycle bin, or in any case away from my screen. I am stuck in front of the last one, which is supposed to solve a simple problem but in the fastest possible way. I slightly tilt my head to get a better view of it, thinking that I should be looking like one of this apes of the "Space Odyssey" upon facing the famous black column. Which reminds me of the news of Arthur Clarke's death, which reminds me that it's a long time since I last listened to some classical piece I really like from that great Kubrick film, which, which, which.... the series of digressions can now only compare to my friend Filipe's thoughts. I am confused....

No I am not. I just realize that today is not a day to work. Before I finally leave the lab for good for the coming ten days, I take a last look at my script and decide it would be nice if I placed it somewhere it wouldn't be lost, but without getting in my way all the time. And I guess I 'll leave it there, at the back of my mind, like a small riddle, like this pair of snickers hanging from a power cord in Barceloneta, which Julien captured one day, so insightful of the small everyday problems of a poor bioinformatician at the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It's closing time. I am off to Greece.

Grapefruit moon

Last night I left the lab at 9 pm. It was the fourth day in a row, after having been here last Saturday and Sunday as well. At some point, even the usually indifferent -about such stuff- Micha, turned to me and asked me: "Is something wrong?"

To me it looked like nothing was wrong, except perhaps from a growing headache in a shrinking head, my back that ached, my elbows that felt stiff and my shattered humour. I was coming to the end of two of the most useless weeks of my adult-so-called-productive career, which even for someone like me, whose moto is "we have to do what we have to do" could not simply look like nothing was wrong. In any case and whatever it was, I was getting over with it. Having just sent some uninteresting -according to my not so humble opinion- analysis to some experimentalist I was leaving the lab on the eve of the holiday with the soothing -yes it can be that too- voice of Tom Waits hitting me smoothly on my way out of the elevator.

" Never had no destination, could not get across.
You became my inspiration, oh but what a cost."

And as I was getting out of the patio towards the beach in search for a bike, I saw exactly what Tom was singing about. A big, beautiful "Grapefruit moon" gloriously standing above the Barceloneta. As I rode the bike steering with my right hand, trying to use the left to call Demetra, I could not take my eyes off it. And neither could a great number of people who taking advantage of the holiday were strolling down the beach on this rather cool night at the doorstep of spring. When Demetra managed -by a stroke of coincidence or fate(?)- to reach me first, I had already joined all these modern city, moon-howlers, taking dangerous manoeuvres with my bike, while talking on the phone and whistling alongside Tom Waits at the same time. I guess it had only taken my stiff elbows, my aching back and my weary head, five minutes to return to normality. And it would be rather cheesy to state the obvious that sometimes the simplest things can have such an uplifting effect, so I won't say it. Perhaps because the moon -especially a full one- cannot be qualified as something simple and because it would not do any harm -even to really rigorous scientists like us- admitting the influence the stars have on us, every now and then.

Much later the same night, going down the Rambla at 3am, I found myself walking with the company of a prostitute trying to lure me into temptation on the dawn of Good Friday. As we both walked down, side by side for a couple of seconds, she noticed I was still staring at the moon, still hanging over the top of Columbus' column down the street . Then as if -I 'd like to think- the moon exercised a romantic effect on her she turned to me and instead of the typical "Let's go fuck" line, she told me: "Let me make love to you".

I stopped and looked at her for a very brief moment, until I realized that she was being professional trying to guess what I wanted to hear.

Then I thanked her very politely for that excellent choice of words and went straight home.

Scientist's block

I copy from Webster's dictionary:

Writer's block: a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity.

carrying on from Wikipedia:

Writer's block can be closely related to depression and anxiety, two mood disorders that reflect environmentally-caused or spontaneous changes in the brain's frontal lobe. This is in contrast to hypergraphia, more closely linked to mania, in which the changes occur primarily in the temporal lobe.

I do not really know which lobe or other topological entity of my brain to look for, in order to better define my state of mind, one which I would dare to call "scientist's block". I apologise for this somehow poetic definition but it's the closest thing that my tormented frontal, back and side lobes can come up with, having gone through two frenetic working weeks with minimal if not disappointing outcome. If in the last post I was metaphorically "introspecting", looking at the interior patio of the Institute, today I can only look at it like in this photo, extending upwards, too steep to climb, too tiring just to think about going up there, and that is both metaphorically and literally.

Scientist's block has not so much to do with loss of ability to work. All the contrary, in my case at least it appears to be highly correlated with working overtime. During the last tow weeks, I found myself spending far too much time in the lab (including late shifts and Saturdays). In all, it has been a period during which I felt rather active and prone to work but -alas- it appears that the excitement one looks for in science, (this little spark that comes when looking at a long-anticipated plot) is not so easy to achieve. In the end, a load of data fell into place, some scripts were better organized, a few new R functions were perfected but that is not so much of progress and falls far from being qualified as success.

Then came fatigue and an increasing craving to take my iPod and my copy of "Voyage au bout de la nuit" to the Ciutadella park and lay on the grass until it gets dark. And perhaps I should do exactly this. I tend to tell people that working in the lab and thinking are two mutually exclusive activities and although their usual reaction is a smile of consolation, deep inside they know, that like myself, they have had their best -or like myself their less mediocre- ideas exactly when they took some time off work, a small pause to ponder and reflect about a problem of scientific nature. Therefore, having just introduced the term "scientist's block" I would tend to say that it is more connected to "mania" and "hyperlaboria" than the contrary (if not caused by them). And I would go even further to cite some of the most prominent symptoms, which apart from the obvious (fatigue, frustration, depression, denial, appearing in this order) include object-specific side-effects like : failure to blog, persistence in playing chess on the web instead of attending seminars and self-inflicted damage of the inner ear by listening to Rage Against the Machine full blast.

Such is my case. Good thing though the catholics stuck with their calendar. This means Easter Sunday is this week and a long-awaited holiday is just around the corner. Let's hope I take advantage of it to do some serious work. And by this I mean, having ouzo and "mezedes", while waiting for a decent idea to pop up.

.....
Oh and in case it doesn't, I don't care.

with doubt and in denial

I 'd like to take one more look at this photo taken by Julien, just to get a positive feeling. It constitutes of a rather misleading image of our institute, with lights glooming allover. What it fails to capture, what is impossible to be captured actually, is the obscurity of the greatest part of everyday work produced in this -otherwise idyllic- environment.

Yes, I am being bitter, as you might have expected by the title of this post. Over the last week I have been thinking about a great number of very interesting projects. None of them had an even distant relation to science and the only reason for me calling them "projects" is my almost complete intoxication of "scientificism" of the "geakiest" nature. Thus, what normal people simply define as "interests" or "activities" I have ended up classifying as "projects". And it is exactly this introspection that brought about the aforementioned combination of doubt and denial. But let's take it one at a time.

My increasing doubts in the whole meaning of scientific research were largely speared by a friend's and colleague's (Sylvain's) final talk before leaving the Institute, last Thursday, the most interesting and educating part of which was the following: 5 or 6 consecutive slides quoting the reviewers' comments on a paper of his, finally published in Cell (to the unaware, one of the most highly rated scientific journals in the field of what was formerly known as Biology), after two years of submissions, appeals and re-submissions. Ordinary process one might think. Until you took a look at the reviewers' comments themselves, which were usually mean and rude, most of the times impolite and -most importantly- always contradictory. When one reviewer would talk about a "revolutionary work" the other would have no restrictions in considering the "errors so serious and grave that I [he] would suggest that someone else conducted this analysis". It ended up that it was only due to the strong drive of competitive researchers to publish their work -perseverance was a term which was used more than once throughout this part of the talk- that the paper finally made it through. And, moreover, it was only Sylvain's uncontested optimism that allowed him to carry on, until the final acceptance of the paper.

My optimism, on the other hand, has its limits. And although I 'd like to think that these limits can be stretched quite a lot, they appear to be a bit stiffer when it comes to science. After all, I have been raised and educated to think of research as an objective field, where truth, constantly under the strains of scientific rigour, is safeguarded by personal opinions. How could I then explain so contradictory views on the same piece of work? It looked to me that conducting scientific research could end up being no different than putting out a musical record, publishing a novel or painting a portrait and have half of the critics receive it with glorious reviews, while the rest deny to even compare it with rubbish. I conclude that I refuse to deal with this kind of science. After all, if this is the case, why not try art instead? It's more fun, a lot more rewarding in terms of personal pleasure and by far more useful for society no matter what people may tell you. I mean how many times have you admired a nice scientific paper compared to your favourite song or book, and by the way, DO YOU have a favourite scientific paper or theory? If yes, please stop reading.

To sum up, we are into science for two main reasons. Because it is supposed to be objective and because it pays the rent. Since last Thursday I am convinced that I am only in it for the money. And with this I am also through with denial. Now let me go listen to some Led Zeppelin while taking one more look on my miserably discouraging results.