Intelligently resigned

Strange things can happen in this world of science, where boundaries between scientific rigor and individual perception are constantly blurred. So, I was sitting at my desk this morning thinking about some way to skip this afternoon's meeting with my boss (an effort which as you might expect finally proved fruitless), when Tyler brought me one of this little pieces of paper every egotistic scientist loves to receive. A reprint request of one of his papers. To be honest it looked a bit a strange for a guy in the US (and not some backward country where internet access is still non-existent) to be asking for prints of two papers published in free access journals. And by surface mail no less.

That was a just hint, that there was something interesting in this request and the name of the institution ("Liberty" University of Lynchburg Virginia) made me curious to find out more about this. Soon I came up with details about his controversial founder, Jerry Lamon Falwell, pastor and tele-evangelist, the guy to whom the famous quote "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them" is attributed. It was then that I let out my first "oh no!".

I carried on with the Liberty University itself, an educational institution whose 9600 students have to pay fines for attending dances, viewing R-rated movies or drinking, should restrict intercourse with the opposite (check that! strictly the opposite) sex to holding hands and abiding by a dress code which prohibits hair covering the ears or eyebrows for guys, piercing in any place else than the ears for girls and shorts for both sexes. Being just a bit prepared I thought "hmmmm..."

But then I went on to check the Biology Department. After all that was what interested me the most since the request was coming from there. I was a bit prepared from noticing certificate programs such as "Liberty Bible Program" but when I saw the list of classes being taught, I could not say neither "oh no!" nor "hmmmmm...". Looking at courses such as "Evangelism and Christian Life" (3rd year) or "New Testament Survey" (4th year) just left me speechless. So, apart from having to miss all that constitutes college life or being obliged to remain sexually inactive until they reach the age of 22 (unless they get married before they graduate) the biology students of this institution have to read the Bible not as leisure reading but as part of the process of getting their degree...Oh, and by the way. They 'll probably be informed about something called evolution as an alternative theory to God creating everything within 7 days!

I now had serious doubts about where I was sending the reprints of my papers (which by the way were juuuuuuuust a little bit more in favour of neo-darwinian evolution against creationism and intelligent or un-intelligent design). Nonetheless I thought that dialogue and interchange of opinion is the only way for the progress of science and in this case perhaps my sending the reprints could contribute, only slightly but still contribute to this dialogue, whose outmost goal should be redefining the borderline between provable scientific hypotheses and hand-waving-argumented, emotionally-charged perceptions, that are seeking not to comfort or relieve but to oppose and infuriate. Because deep down I think that people preaching intelligent design maybe should be intelligent enough to resign...

Or then perhaps, maybe if we don't get to have this dialogue after all, maybe WE should resign from trying.

Damnatio memoriae

Last weekend has been as interesting as it has been tiring. A three-day excursion to Donostia in the Basque country left me with the usual lack of sleep and slight excess of alcohol levels. It seems I am old enough to have noticed the first of the side effects of such abuses. My otherwise strong long-term memory attenuates. I am not talking about memory lapses regarding the previous night but slight long-term memory failures, resembling more a "slow disk access" (to speak like the geak I am supposed to be). To cut a long story short I cannot remember things, names of songs or writers, books or films or dates I would normally remember. The whole things is a bit disturbing but gets resolved with a bit of sleep and a little bigger effort to keep the disks running.

Some names though, cannot be easilly forgotten. Augusto Pinochet's is one of these names. It is funny that my trip with its consequent memory lapses and the dictator's death coincided. And although my initial thought was "at last!" I think it would be better for me and probably for the rest of the world if Pinochet's name did not ring any bell anymore, if it had retreated at the back rooms of our collective memory, condemned by history to utter oblivion. The Romans used to force this oblivion as the worst punishment for men of state having failed them. The process involved taking their names out of the archives of history, bringing down their statues and destroying all road signs that carried a reference to them.

They called that Damnatio memoriae and it was considered the ultimate humiliation.

On the other hand, maybe what worked for the Romans, is not fit for our case. Probably because the Romans did not entirely lack the sense of duty as opposed to their people, as dear Augusto or his friends like Maggy Thatcher did and still do. I sincerely doubt that the fear of oblivion, the fact that he might not be remembered, would have been able to stop Pinochet from "dissapearing" thousands of his people or sending to swiss banks the millions he stole from the country he had sworn to protect and was supposed to be saving from the "communists". In that sense maybe it is better for us to vividly remember him than punishing him through forgetting his crimes, because even if history does not spontaneoulsy repeat itself it is actually us that let our errors repat themselves.
And in this case it will be probably wiser never to get any tired so that we forget the life and works of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

A world gone crazy

All right it is December and I am walking around in my T-shirt! Whatever people may tell me, this cannot be normal, not for this hemisphere at least. Global warming is a fact and there are multiple proofs besides my sweat.

You see, from a proper point of view -proper to the proper people that is- everything is as normal as usually. The sun keeps shining over their heads even in December, maybe even during the evening. The perpetual antitheses of the city could not be making more sense to them. Almost homeless lonely people are there to feed the pidgeons, pidgeons are there to fly over the heads of the almost lonely homeless people sleeping on the benches. Over there a streetcleaner is throwing up, disgusted from the smell of the alley, two blocks away a hooker gets nauseous from the memories of last night. Or maybe it's the other way round. But the sun is still shining and unless you are an ever-wining, over-reacting, so-lazy-that-looks-all-around-instead-of-rushing-to-work kind of guy, everything is business as usual.

In the meanwhile, hundred-year-old dictators refuse to die, or death refuses to have anything to do with them and in Hong-Kong some hot-shot NOKIA executives talk about cellphones that will be able to capture smells. They may be missing the point here, ever since there's only music so that's there are new ringtones. Odours may be a bit more difficult to download but hey! we 'll make n-th generation computers to do that. In the meanwhile, hookers will still throw up on the streets of Barcelona, but the worst thing is that they will still be willing to die crossing the Atlantic all the way from Senegal to the Canary islands just to have the right to vomit somewhere in the Barrio Gotico. And in the exact same meanwhile, new dictators will spring up to take the place of the old-vampired ones in Fiji, Afghanistan or wherever else our "democracy exports" have not yet reached, this democracy that will presumably come from above like sacred rain, although it should be rising up from below, but then again, it's too darn hot to be thinking about such complicated things.

The world has gone crazy and it makes no sense. We have faster cars but spend more time going anyplace than actually being there, we have super-fast computers but somehow manage to work more than our fathers, we spent our days and nights reading crap (like this one) on the internet but have no time to read a book, we are healthier and wealthier than our parents, we 're sure to live longer than them but still pop up more Prozac that are kids swallow M & Ms. While the sun's still shining, migrating birds have no idea which way to go to and I am afraid neither do we.

Even time has gone crazy. It looks as if it's running backwards all the way to the times, when people were beeing persecuted because of what they would think, read or draw, we talk more religion than politics, we have slaves of a new kind but with the same, old colours. It feels as if we're back in the times of Shakespeare when "the rain it raineth everyday", only unfortunately Shakespeare is nowhere to be found and neither is the rain. It's only a matter of persistence of this madness until the clock makes the whole turn backwards, then we are back in the ice age, and then perhaps things cool down a bit.

After all maybe then, the absolute necessity of humankind for smell-capturing cellphones is not that absolute anymore.

Things to do when lonely...rediscover the masters

They have always been my greatest consolation and one of the most entertaining companies. My masters, my teachers, my idols. And by this I don't mean either my highschool professors (although some of them I still remember), nor the crude foot-balling genious of Dimitris Saravakos or the legendary figure of Che (whose posters could still decorate my bedroom). By masters, I refer to the people, whose work not only I admire but above all has always acted on my frustrating, vertiginous anxieties with an utterly recomposing effect.

In times of stress, I turn back to my favourite beacons of wisdom, which by doing nothing but having done everything already, by saying nothing but by having written all that is worth to write, by not letting out a single sigh but by having composed music to last until the end of time, they put me back into place. It is exactly then that my sense of what really matters becomes crystal clear. Feeling melancholic on a rainy Sunday morning loses any excuse on the sound of Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin" (perhaps exactly because it lifts melancholy to a level of exhilarating perfection). Getting bored with the daily routine of work, work, work gets a whole lot different meaning when you remember that a previously un-discovered collection of articles by Eduardo Galeano awaits you at home (and I thank myself for choosing this book to give to Bianca as a farewell present).

Because it is the "masters" that come to your aid in all kinds of difficult situations. You think there's nothing left to be said until you come upon a well-placed phrase by Tolstoi. You think there is no way to sort out the simplest possible model about the results you produce on your screen when you remember that Feyerabend once advised you to use exactly what you are completely forgetting about: your intuition. Evenmore, you feel that an inspiring five minutes of peace are impossible until you suddenly discover that Rachmanninov once wrote 14 songs, the last one you think only for you to listen to on this dull Tuesday afternoon (Julien, I ll be forever grateful for this).

Inspiration may remain evanescent, peacefull breaks will always be short-lived, unocmfortable silences will keep occurring and intuitive models will hardly ever work. But what remains is the feeling that we are not alone in this complicated world, full of puzzles and challenges, where we can also make a difference as long as we turn to the right people for advice and councelling.

Insignificance

Here it is, another post with reference to a song title (Pearl Jam again, but I am slightly biased these last weeks since I am listening to their Athens concert over and over).

But insignificance has a meaning in this case. It is meaningless in science so I struggle against it but it keeps occurring with a disturbing persistence.

It often happens in research, that enthusiasm decays exponentially. You come up with a brilliant idea, then you formulate a satisfactory theoretical model, you implement it with a bit of a sloppy programming, you validate it against unreliable experiments and end up with insignificant results. You just can't help it.

Nonetheless, I am satisfied with myself. In my case, this Friday produced results that are less insignificant than already published ones so I can go on to read my papers for this end of the week with no guilt whatsoever. Nucleosomes are somewhere out there (or to put it better somewhere in there) waiting for someone to locate them. I am close to that but it is Friday, Medya just invited us over to her office to have some chocolate she brought from the Netherlands and I am in the middle of three books that have reached their peak of climax...so no more nucleosome predictions for this week!

Jokes aside, science can be stimulating. In fact most of the times it is. It just needs a bit of the right perspective like everything else. In the same way our girlfriends will never be perfect but we still love them, or in the way we normally hate our work but sometimes find it interesting, most important of all, the way our favourite football team is crap most of the time but we never dare forget the good moments the guys in green and white (or whatever the colour) have given us, doing science is equally appealing in a masochist way. We struggle against all our misfortunes, waiting for that 0.5% increase in sensitivity, that positive control that does not proove to be a total disaster, that protein finally making its shy appearence in the form of a dubious band on a polyacrylamide gel.

The right perspective comes in knowing that these moments appear with a rather small frequency, linearly diminishing with the increasing stress of expectance (and that IS the only significant scientific fact my experience would fully support). The right perspective is to keep in mind that if progress was linear we would be not working in science because it would be as meaningless as a factory production line. It is understanding that if our results actually MEANT progress this world would have been a better place since centuries and it is all about realizing that we are just playing around with everchanging concepts and theoretical constructions that probably won't be here when are children decide to do science. People have become rich, famous and reknown not because they discovered some ultimate truths about the universe but because, at their time, they were clever and brave enough to put forward a new concept that explained a certain problem. In the end, all it takes is some guts and some time off work to think "out of the box" for a while.

So maybe, I ll take the rest of the day off to come up with a weird, uncompromising and extraordinarily strange theory about why these bloody nucleosome predictions are so insignificant!

From the Romans to the Muslims to the Christians ...to the "geeks"!

This is Spain! I am not always obliged to be in Barcelona when updating barcabios. So there I was in Zaragoza, the city of the most bars per capita in Spain, home of the "jota", the "piedras del Ebro" and the "Basilica del Pilar".

Zaragoza, capital of Aragon is a beautiful city, built by the Ebro river by the Romans almost 2000 years ago (for a Greek it is not very old of course but for the Spanish it means something). I was there for a geek conference that consumed most of my time but at least I had a few hours off (or more precisely I gave myself a few hours off) to take a long walk around the city center, along the riverside and by the most historical buildings.

The variations of age, architecture and styles reflect the passing of the centuries and civilizations Zaragoza has suffered (or benefited from). From the Roman walls by the river, to the Aljaferia castle built by the Moores originally made entirely out of alabaster and from the mudejar cathedral of La Seo to the "Pilarica" constructed by the Spanish after the "Reconquista". The subsequent layers of the universal spanish soul lie at the feet of the visitor. And when our geek (that is bioinformatics) conference left us time, we also had the chance to have a couple of drinks in "el tubo", Zaragoza's main nightlife zone.

Sitting back at my desk in Barcelona, alternating my playlist from Theodorakis (thanks to Sarah), to Pearl Jam (thanks to Maria) and Brad Mehldau (thanks to Julien) I am trying to dig my way back into nucleosome prediction, based on some ideas I had in Zaragoza. People would say that conferences serve exactly for these things, meaning to steer new ideas to the participants and it is true but only partly. Because the ideas I had, no matter how mediocre, I had them all while walking around the city looking at this cathedral by the river...

Departure Bay

6.00 am: Diana Krall sings through my headphones as the new metro line takes me back home from the airport. It's a strange time of the day, a time I am usually asleep, or just gone to bed, but in any case not on a train on my way home. As the train goes through the stations a complete universe is unravelling before my eyes, the dark side of Barcelona, the side I had not thought about until today, although the silent consequences of its activity have always been there.

El Prat de Llobregat. A couple of dizzy, yawning latin-american immigrants get on. Changing shifts for the railway workers, the train slides past them, their day has started already but the darkest hour is just before dawn.

Belvitge. Three young nurses from the nearby hospital, climb up the wagon. Their shift has just ended, they are on their way back home, to sleep or perhaps take care of their youngs. They look exhausted but satisfied, maybe no losses at the clinic. Carrying on is what matters. Tomorrow is another night.

Estacio Sants, the commuting branchpoint. Most get off here. Off for a Thursday morning. Unlike a poet once said everyday is not like Sunday.

Passeig de Gracia. Gaudi's attractions are still sleeping, even the earliest of their morning visitors are still dreaming. People working at the hotels in the area, get off here. They strech their suites, tighten their ties, take a last look against the window glass. Perfect hairdo, awfull mood. They rehearse their morning smiles while it is still dawn and practise their "good days" while they dream of their "good nights". Their own time does not coincide with the sun's orbit around the rest of us.

Estacio Franca. Last stop. I get off, pass by the immigrants already lining up outside the immigration office next to the customs. Modern cities can't really distinguish people from commodities. The sky is now powder blue, dark spots mixed with the desperate attempts of dawnlight.

I stop and take a look at the train routes. A line connecting my place with the airport, where I just let someone go. Another one goes all the way to Paris. Soon I 'll be thinking about someone else there. The first sunrays, has just reached Barcelona at a rather obtuse angle. They are scattered into purple. I lift my head up looking for her plane. She must be up there now. I am still at my departure bay. A point on the map of the metro, of a city which is another point in a larger map. As time goes by, we scatter arround, we become points in a graph, no computer scientist will bother to study.

And our lives evolve by joining the dots.

The Battle of Ciutat Vella

Barcelona is a modern metropolis. It is full of all the things that make up the megacities of our times. That is, ambitious executives having lunch in the Port Olimpic, hoards of students having the time of their lives, avant-guard artists experimenting in complete freedom and tourists with the cameras having become an extension of their hands.

Somewhere in the backgound though, a metropolis cannot survive only on these kinds of people. It needs its hard-working lower class, its immigrants piling-up in their ant-like neighborhoods, that everybody detests but nobody could do without, not to mention a significant number of homeless people. Because the bottomline is that the mega-cities are to be fueled by inequalities. Their mode of function is such that you cannot have prosperity without attracting poverty, you cannot have fancy restaurants without being in need of the Algerians to work as waiters. Even modern architecture projects appreciate cheap labour.

The point is that this same machine-steering potential of inequalities erupts to violence more and more often. Last night we experienced one of this outbursts in the middle of the old city, the Ciutat Vella. People residing in occupied houses around the so-called "Forat de la Vergonya", (literally meaning "shame's hole"), started a demonstration against a plan put forward by the City Hall to economically exploit this "forgotten" zone. Actually, those who have lived there ever since this place was initially left in oblivion, just decided to be remembered. To remind to the rest of us, that "el Forat" has been there for so long before the real-estate sharks took notice of how much it has come to be worth. That it has been a neighborhood, a "barri" like all the others, with its people, its families living next to each other and children going to school every morning, before turning into the most rapidly expanding nightlife-theme-park with bars and restaurants packed one next to the other.

They took their protest to the streets. But as often happens in such cases, the mean was subject to the cause. During the protest they even fired a missile against the police and went so far as to throw paint-granades at the Museum of Modern Art, one of Barcelona's most emblematic buildings of the 90's era. Thus, as it happens with almost equal frequency in such cases of blind violence, the cause was eventually obscured by the means.

It nomore matters how these people were initially marginalized. If they choose to or if someone just decided it for them. They are now enclaved in a vicious circle, which they are very unlikely to escape, having to negotiate with that same system that they are confronting, having to put up with the exact same people they have once and for all rejected. This is a hard way they are very unlikely to take. They choose to oppose to all things they reject instead of trying to change them.

The easier way involves the rest of us. Those that get to appreciate Barcelona for what it appears to be away from realizing what it really is. But this turns out to be even more difficult. I spent yesterday evening having drinks in the middle of the Barri Gotic and had absolutely no idea about the "battle" until I saw it on today's news. It seems like we are living in our own happy "bubble" away from all that is going on. And finally, this drifting apart of the "two Barcelonas" is what makes understanding each other ever so harder.

Missing home...

It is not the place you miss of course. It is the people, friends and lovers that are left behind. And it is the all and all rarer occasions you can think of these people gathered together, while you are away. These moments you miss the most. And Saturday was one of these days.

Pearl Jam were playing in the OAKA sports hall, back in Athens. Some friends were there, others wished they could and were waiting at a bar downtown to listen all about the concert. I was in front of my computer in my room, having completely forgotten all about the event I have waited for more than half of my adult life. And then the phone rang, I saw Zoe's number and still had not made the connection until I heard her voice, screaming "Hi" over the rythmic introduction of "Wishlist". I talked a bit with Thodoris, who in a -more intense than his usual average- state of mental derangement, tried in vain to pronounce what must have been his best attempt to verbally express his exhilaration. Then they let me listen to the song for a good half minute.
Suddenly I felt more homesick than I 've ever been since I got here. During the following seconds, I did not only miss being at the concert. (Although Pearl Jam is probably the last of the mega-bands of my time -they just don't make them like they used to anyway- and the only one I still consider a must-see before I stop going to big stadium concerts and stick to classy theaters more suited for my early thirties...)

What I missed was the whole package. The days before the concert, listening to all of your university years-albums to warm up. The same morning, waking up with that special feeling that you don't have to do absolutely anything apart from staying well for the evening (the feeling you only get before big concerts and big football games!). Then the concert itself, jumping like crazy on the shoulders of your friends, going for a drink afterwards being hardly able to speak, stinking of sweat, beer and utter happiness!

Come to think of it, the things I miss are all the small pieces of the puzzle that constitutes my youth. It is hard for one to admit he is missing his prime at the age of 28 but how much differently am I supposed to interpret the fact that I long for all the things that were perfectly natural at 18? Maybe it is the longing for such moments or evenmore the fact you still get to experience them once in a while that keeps us young, even at 28!!! In fact, if I was to make a "Wishlist" of my own it would be largely occupied by loud laughters, huge concerts and hoarse-voice post-concert gatherings.

I was missing from OAKA last Saturday, but I promise myself it won't happen again.

Falling in love...

They say you can fall in love with a city, but I would not believe them. You may feel comfortable, you may even feel at home but "love" is a word far to strong to describe a person's realtionship with a city. For me these relationships are more like family. You are born with your city, you carry it with you until you die, although occasionally you may move from place to place. But falling in love with a place?

Last week it happened to me. And it was the kind of unjustified, not-at-first-sight, sentiment-mining love that cannot be explained. Nor was it anything like a movie-style , firework-embellished feeling. Fireworks, though, were included in the proccess.

Barcelona, was at its best during the Fiesta Major of La Merce, a four day festival, sourrounding the 24th of September, which like so many other "fiesta" dates, suspiciously coincides with an astrological timepoint, (this one with the autumn equinox), is suspiciously masked under a catholic religious miracle (the Virgin of la Merce saving the city's harvest from a swarm of locusts) and has unsuspiciously nothing to do with religion itself. This means processions of gigantic statues of everyday heroes instead of saints, "batucadas" instead of religious hymns and pagan parades of torch-bearers (correfoc) instead of devout marches of yougnsters carrying candles. And given that the equinox has been in this world far longer before the locust-scaring Virgin, it seems pretty likely that the turning of the season is behind the whole fiesta after all.

This whole extravanaza, of course, means anything else than calm, peaceful and quiet afternoon walks in the Gotico or in Barceloneta. The usual people-buzzing Ramblas are now infested with tourists once more, there is no place to appreciate the stuffy, humid air in the streets of Born, you can nomore actually listen to the tramondana blowing all the way down from Tibidabo Hill, bringing with it the suicidal tendencies Marques once described. The city seems to be stripped off from everything it would make it attractive to its regular inhabitants. She is no longer the kind housekeeper that welcomes you every day after work. You now look at a glittering, all made-up hostess trying to shine as much as she can, although you know she 'll be out of this dress soon and she 'll also have a hangover.

Still, I fell in love with her exactly then. When I saw this city trying to do her best to make her guests have a bowl! Even more when I felt pretty confident that I would like her more the day after, after all this would have gone. When people would no more be acting like crazy, kicking empty beer cans all around Plaza Reial at 4 in the morning, when Francisco will be back working instead of chasing around his shoes in the midst of all this frenzy. When car-horns replace free concerts, the garbage trucks occupy the streets of the batucadas and fireworks are substituted by the cloudy sky, completely devoid of stars.

Until next year's Merce, I 'll be living with my sweet, loving housekeeper.