I've Been Interviewed

I must be famous. I've been interviewed by BlogInterviewer.com. Here is the published interview:

http://bloginterviewer.com/education/angry-lab-rat-anonymous

When you visit, be sure to cast a vote for me. The top three blogs with the most votes receive $25, $15, and $10 respectively at the end of the month.

Yowsa! I'd be rich. Rich, I say!

And The Winning Hole Is ....

Back in June I published a post on some rather . . . um, how do I put this . . . novel methods of extracting a patient's gall bladder from the body. Instead of slicing open the abdominal cavity, leading to significant pain, scarring, possible infection, and slow healing, some doctors decided it would be a better method to pull the organ out through an already-existing orifice. Yes, choosing a hole already made in your body. Less scarring that way, quicker healing, and less pain. Which orifices do you think they chose? There are only so many you can choose from! The question is, which of your holes do you respect the most?

Doctors considered removing the gall bladder from the anus. That would be one hell of a dump! But, sadly, they apparently rejected the idea.

Instead, one set of doctors removed a patient's gall bladder through the mouth (HERE). Yum!

Another set of doctors removed another patient's gall bladder through (drum roll, please) her vagina (HERE)! Yow! Congratulations, it's a bouncing baby bladder!

Yet, for some odd reason, these options just haven't caught on in the medical world. Gee, I wonder why?

Well, now a different hole has been tried, and it's catching on. More and more hospitals are pursuing it. Quick! Run over in your mind which hole you think it is – I'll wait.

Did you figure it out? I'll give you another moment.

Yes, it's the belly button. That wonderful little spot in your rotund tummy which serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever after the day you are born.

HERE is a video of news footage on the procedure.

Is yours an "inny" or an "outy"? Well, it doesn't really matter when you want to have large organs yanked from your innards to your outards.

So far, surgeons have removed not only a gall bladder through this half-inch incision, but, according to the video, an ovary, a uterus, kidneys, a spleen, and an appendix, and have performed corrective surgery on a hernia and a colon.

I don't know about you, but I'm a bit relieved. I would MUCH rather have organs come out that way than through the other holes.

So the next time you're in the shower and look down at that little hole of yours (no, not THAT hole, you nasty person! Your belly button!), give it an extra little soapy scrub. You never know, it may not have finished serving its purpose on the first day you breathed!

Yes, I'm Alive!

Oh man, have I been gone a long time or what?! My life has suddenly become a swirl of new job, a business trip, children, home chores, and a non-profit organization I'm in that's in chaos. Ugg.

But hey! You haven't lost me yet. I'm still kickin', as hairy and smelly as always! Time to get back to the blogosphere!

The World's Largest Bubble Bath

I love bubble baths. I've loved them ever since I was a little boy and my mom would put Mr. Bubble bubble bath powder in my tub. It was pink!

I'm still a kid inside, and I put the same fruity purple bubble bath gel in my baths as I put in the baths of my little children (do they still make Mr. Bubble??). Why not? And besides, my bathtub is ridiculously shallow, such that when it is filled to nearly overflowing, my big gut still sticks out of the water. Having bubbles around gives me a sort of "insulation", keeping my gut warm. Now isn't that handy? And I have the added bonus of coming out of my bath smelling like grape jelly.

But somehow I don't get the same fuzzy, silly feeling when I saw this little news clip, but I still think it's way cool. Nature has made the world's largest bubble bath:

http://www.comcast.net/providers/fan/popup.html?v=489416179&pl=490651047.xml&config=%2Fconfig%2Fcommon%2Ffan%2Fhome%2Exml

Just north of Sydney, Australia, the ocean produced a rare phenomenon. A stretch of some 30 miles of beaches and shoreline businesses were inundated with massive amounts of sea foam produced, according to oceanographers, by natural processes of sea salt and plant decomposition.

Now THAT'S a bubble bath!

But it still doesn't seem complete to me if it doesn't have a fruity scent.

An Experiment On Memory Retention

I'm busy preparing for my new job these days, a job I'll start in less than a week. Other than organizing and packing eight and a half year's worth of office crap and moving it from one building to another in some semblance of planned chaos, preparation requires only one thing: STUDY.

My company sells nearly 3000 products, not counting the ones sold at other sites globally, and I will have to know or be able to retrieve obscure facts about nearly every one of them at a moment's notice to help the customers. The one best way to do this is to read and be able to regurgitate the product literature, especially the tome-like company handbook that we distribute to customers.

It's over a thousand pages long.

I have one of the worst memories of anyone I know, at least for common day-to-day stuff. If I have to shop for more than three things in one trip, I'd better write a list or I'll have hell to pay from my lovely wife, who never ceases to remind me of my particular handicap, especially if I go to the store for cheese and come back with four bags of not-cheese groceries. My memory is better for work-related topics, but not exactly stellar, and though my long years of developing products has given me a strong basis of wisdom to grow from, it is still a daunting task to absorb so much product data.

I was thinking about this tonight as I pulled out my company handbook, when my wife proudly exclaimed that she had just finished the 759th (and last) page of the final book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Then it occurred to me how one might better be able to retain large amounts of data: Fiction.

Children's books do it all the time – teach lessons by incorporating them into the text and pictures of a fiction book.

I told my fantastic idea to my wife, and she immediately scoffed at the idea. "An adult ought to be able to study information without having to have it in story form." But I wonder. I can recall exquisite details about nearly every book of fiction I have ever read. It seems most any Harry Potter fan out there can do the same. Just ask one what Lord Voldemort's real name is, the name of the spell that scares away the Dementors, or who Mrs. Norris is.

So I am devising a test, and I'm wondering what you think of it. As a writer of fiction, I imagine I could convert your average textbook chapter into a reasonable story that contains the same facts. Of course it would be much longer in order to accommodate all the data plus a tolerable plot and dialogue, but I'd be willing to read extra if I was sure it would help me retain the info. My test would have one group of volunteers read a couple textbook pages, and I would have another test group read a work of fiction which contains the same information plus some sort of reasonable plotline. Sure, it wouldn't be able to compete with J.K. Rowling, but I'd bet that incorporating the data this way would allow it to be better processed in our brains. I'd then test the volunteers on what they read just after the reading, a day after, and a week after, to determine the retention rate. I'd put my money on the fiction-readers.

Do you agree? Would you volunteer for this test?


Image taken from HERE.

Now I've Gone And Done It!

I've finally done it. It became official last Friday. I've managed to escape the oblivion of being the eternal lab tech by leaving my job for a slightly better one which has nothing to do whatsoever with developing cutting edge new science products or experimentation into the Great Unknown. I start in a week.

Oh, don't worry, you Angry Lab Rat blogophiles, you eager readers of biotech woes and ponderings in breaking science news, I am still with the same evil global biotech conglomerate, assimilators of all smaller companies that have anything at all even somewhat similar to our products. "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated." And I'll still be blogging to you on the exciting world of science news and oddities.

I didn't even have to move to change jobs. In this industry, the best way to get a promotion and raise is to move to another company. But I don't care to move. Rather, I've chosen the second-best method: I've changed departments.

Technically I won't be a "lab rat" any more, as I'll be hanging up my lab coat for a long time, possibly forever, though in some circles I'll still be considered a scientist.

I've left the comfy confines of my lab bench and corner office in the R&D department and taken up residence in a cubicle. Yes, I said cubicle. I didn't think it possible, a few years ago I would have scoffed at the idea, but I am now even more a part of Dilbertworld, awash in computer hell and dealing directly with customers as a technical assistance person. You know the ones, the people you call when your product craps out, fails to meet expectations, or completely befuddled you because you didn't bother to read the product manual. Why bother reading such a long document when you'd rather have the pleasure of listening to canned music while waiting on the phone to ask a live person? Well, now I'm that person. And, no, I don't work in India. At least, not yet. [My evil global biotech company has a facility in India (and in China, too!), but so far they've only outsourced our R&D work, oddly enough].

Yes, I'll be The Helpful Guy, like the ones you see on TV commercials for computer or phone companies, headset placed firmly on the temples, smiling and perky (and usually female), answering in a pleasant yet competent voice, "Technical Services. How may I help you today?" When you see them on TV, you get the feeling that they must be morning people, as happy-go-lucky as June Cleaver, and the sort that goes home to read product manuals while listening to fizzy 80's pop rock. If that persona is what makes you feel good about talking to me, be my guest. If you call me, feel free to imagine my appearance any way you wish. No, I'm not short, fat, and extremely hairy. Are you kidding? Think Brad Pitt, baby! Really, I couldn't possibly be exaggerating. It's a good thing all you'll experience is my voice. If you saw me in person, you'd have to jump my bones. That could make answering your technical question difficult, to say the least.

I'm reading your mind right now. I know what you're thinking. I have that super power. It's what will make me good at my new job. Some of you are wondering what parasite crawled into my noggin and affected my judgment. Or you're wondering how many solvents I've been sniffing in the lab. Or you think I've simply lost my mind.

These are valid concerns. But losing one's sanity can be relieving, in a sort of escapist way. Solvents don't bother you once they burn away your nasal membranes. And brain parasites only hurt when they bore through the skull; once they're in the brain you don't feel them any more.

Think of all the aspects I'm losing: a nice office all to myself, a couple active lab benches, the chance to play with really cool and expensive instrumentation, the snooty glamor of being able to claim I'm a "scientist", and, oh yeah, the ability to invent and develop cutting-edge technologies to help the scientists of the world make the next breakthrough discovery.

It's that last point that led me to get into biotech to begin with. Unfortunately, the way programs are currently run at my company makes innovation very very difficult for folks in my position. And in the past two years changes in the company and my role in it have actually pushed me back about, oh, four years in my career development, to the point that lab rats like myself almost never have the ability to make programs of their own innovative ideas. It makes me feel a tad bit like Harry Potter living at the Dursley's, afraid to show even a hint of my true nature for fear of being beaten back into bland submission. Add to that the extreme overload of work and the expectation that, despite having a family, you should work late hours, come in at night, and work on the weekends in order to meet expectations. No thanks. Been there. I've served my time. This will be the first job I've ever had with set hours: 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, Monday - Friday. Pinch me, I'm dreaming.

Sure, I'll be in a cubicle and dealing with the occasional clueless or even mean customers, and I'll have to be able to pull random specific details out of my ass about any of the nearly 3000 products my company sells within a few minutes of answering the phone (or email) for whatever obscure method the customer is using, but I'm willing to take it for the chance to come home at a reasonable hour and have free weekends, for the same pay and benefits, and working with a close-knit team.

And there's another great benefit: I will become The Great Guru.

. . . at least about my company and its products. After eight and a half years of working at my company, I know a great many details about the products, many dozens of which I invented, developed, or been part of R&D teams on. But that pales in comparison to the huge expanse of additional knowledge I will gain in only a couple years of answering random questions and coming up with correct answers about any of our products, and getting PAID to learn as much as I can about them, and the wide myriad of differing techniques our customers use them for. This is precisely why people who go into my company's Technical Services department go on to business management, program management, and R&D group leadership positions within the company. They are The Great Gurus of the company, without whom my company would suffer. And you'd better believe they get paid a whole lot more than I make now. The two folks who returned to R&D after being in Tech Services for a few years are now walking encyclopedias worshipped by other R&D staff. When one recently threatened to leave the company, the company leadership (one of whom had also been in Tech Services at one point) bent over backward to keep him, giving him a sizable increase in salary and a special position invented just for him so he would stay.

That makes a cubicle seem a LOT more appealing. I wouldn't mind being worshipped a little.

Besides, the Tech Services folks get free donuts. I'm a sucker for free food.


Images adapted from HERE and HERE.

Will It Ever End?

Yes, for the second time in a week, another massive recall has been issued for Chinese-made toys. This time it is for 11 million (yes, million) toys which have been contaminated with lead-based paint or have small, swallow-able magnets:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/14/recall/index.html

Included in the recall are “Sarge” character products from the movie “Cars” as well as Polly brand toys.

These were made by a different Chinese manufacturer than the previously-recalled toys (as I reported in my last post, a co-owner of that company hung himself in a warehouse over the issue).

Also, an unknown number of Chinese-made vinyl baby bibs have been recalled due to high lead content:

http://www.redding.com/news/2007/may/03/wal-mart-issues-vinyl-bib-recall/

These bibs date back to 2004, and have 16-times the amount of lead allowed in lead-based paint, which is already very toxic. Hell, you might as was well use it as a fishing sinker with that sort of lead content. The lead is there as a “stabilizer” and can only cause harm if the bib is compromised. So your baby would have to have teeth and gnaw on a new bib to get poisoned, but if the bib is old and worn, or ripped, well, let’s just say he’ll be riding on the short bus later, if he survives. These bibs are predominantly sold through Wal-Mart.

Gee. Why am I not surprised.

Heck, it seems if you buy crappy Chinese-made toys and baby products, you might as well just tell your kid to chew on some lead pipes and get it over with.

“Here you go, Sweety. I got this from under the kitchen sink. Scrape it with your teeth, now! That’s a good boy.”

So let’s say you discover one of your kid’s brightly-colored Diego toys is lead-contaminated. What do you do? It’s the love of his life. The gleam in his eye. He plays with it, shows it off, sleeps with the frickin’ thing. How could you possibly be so cruel as to remove it??? Lucky you, there’s now a quick guide: HERE.

It’s a sad state of affairs, I think, when Chinese-made toy recalls have become so prominent that CNN releases a “how-to” on how take a toy from your baby. But that’s the world we live in.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go unscrew one of my lead pipes from the kitchen ….


Update (8/17/07): Now Toys-R-Us has pulled Chinese-made vinyl baby bibs from its shelves due to the lead content (STORY).


Images adapted from HERE and HERE.