Why the silence?
So I apologize for the lack of blogging lately, I could say the reason is that I was just too busy to blog, or I could say that I have not been up to much other than studying and settling down at Brown, or I could say that now I'm in a research lab I can't blog about my research until it is published, I could even say that in the hope of becoming a respected scientist that I must put away the trappings of youth, photos of parties, links to cool websites, ramblings, ranting, ravings... whilst each of these has some truth to it. The real truth is actually that I didn't want the world to know how I've been failing over the last 2 months. Failing to keep up with mathematics and calculus, failing to take in and to understand genetics, failing to keep myself motivated and failing to manage my time effectively. And... as a yardstick to success, failing my final exams this semester too (I think).

But real failure would be not learning from all of this. I'm making the transition from computer scientist to biologist, no body said it would be easy, and if it were easy then I would not be interested in doing it. If my goal of increasing the human lifespan by promoting mechanisms of healthy aging are to be achieved, then I still have a very long way to go. Not only am I having to learn from scratch the biology needed to understand the mechanisms of aging, but also I'm having to learn the mathematics needed in order to quantify parameters and model the cellular systems that underlie the mechanisms of getting old.


You can do a lot in computer science without mathematics, and between the ages of 8 and 22 I avoided it like the plague, I hated it, didn't understand it and always used a calculator. In the last 4 years I've been changing my attitude but only now coming to Brown, am I being forced to jump through the hoops and do page upon page of exercises to get it into my head. It is slow progress, but I am making headway. I no longer "don't get it", there is nothing "not to get", just a series of steps to follow to solve a problem in a logical way. However it has taken me a semester to understand this, and a tough semester at that. I hope that this one can be written off in order to start with a different attitude, and a different approach to studying. The system here in the USA is tough, I can no longer get away with doing no work during the semester and then cramming for exams that ask the same questions as the year before. Both the work, and the assessment come thick and fast.


Living in the USA Living here is strangely normal, strange in that I was expecting something different, something bigger, better perhaps than the rest of the world. Whilst this is what most citizens think, and this is what is portrayed to the outside world via the media, this is not what life is like on the ground. It is normal, the same as everywhere else in the world, people want the same things, peace, friendship, happiness. Rhode island is quite a liberal state though, and Brown a liberal university. I've only met 3 Bush voters in the 4 months I've been here. Maybe I just don't hang around with them? My news is from the BBC still, it is played on NPR (National Public Radio) here.

The Work Apart from the tough courses I've been taking the work is going great, I continue to be involved in organising student symposiums, the abstracts from the first one were published last month, the second took place at Harvard Medical School in October 05, and I'm involved in two more, one in Japan in October 2006 and one in Manchester, January 2007. I've also joined the student council of the International society for Computational Biology and will help to organise symposiums at those meetings too. I've planning a wet lab project when I come back in January and hope to have some results by the summer.

The Play I am lucky enough to have made some really great friends here. The lab I'm in is exceptionally friendly and everybody has been really supportive, especially at times when I have found things tough. I feel at home already. Seeta and I get on well our parties are well renowned, of course, I miss my girlfriend A Ying, who just finished her finals (now a qualified chinese teacher) and will be starting teaching at a secondary school in sarawak, Malaysia on the 28th.