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Published: August 2nd 2006
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The Doing-Things Lab
Believe it or not, the less messy of the two. So what exactly is my job like? I arrive at work every day at around 9 in the morning and ascend the 500 feet up the hill from the parking lot to get to my building. Sangyo Daigaku (henceforth Sandai) is kind of strange in that it's built into the side of a hill, and has quite a vertical arrangement. There are four main levels, each of which has buildings that belong to that level. Regretfully, the food is at the bottom and my labs are at the top, so lunchtimes prove to be quite an effort. For the most part, I work in one of two labs: one is filled to the brim with scattered papers and bottles full of chemicals, and the other is the main doing-things area where we perform our experiments. And what exactly do I do?
I have two main jobs. The first is the pretty fun one - I make snowcones for our brain samples. Our samples, however, are quite particular in their taste. So I very carefully make artificial cerebral spinal fluid - the liquid your brain is chillin' in, floating around - and then cool it down. We take out the frozen
View from my lab
Looking down on the north part of Kyoto from my lab's building. blocks of fluid, shave them into a cup of shaved ice, and then pour a little liquid over the top. They always smell saccharine sweet from the 100% artificial glucose (naturally) that I make it with. It's great - it's just like selling ice cream to kids except the kids all want the same thing, can't complain, and you don't have to charge them. They just float around in it, happily firing away.
The second job is performing experiments. This would be fine, except it includes the unfortunate transition state from cute mouse to happily floating brain slice. Which is about as pleasant as you imagine it is. I've mentioned before that I’m fundamentally a techie, and find most of the dissection business distasteful. But I gotta do what I've been hired to do. And unfortunately, like everything else, you get used to it more quickly than you think. The same thing happened with my med school course on the human brain I took winter quarter. It's surprising, but by the end I was always excited for the tea time and cookies that were held immediately following the human brain dissection lab. It's pretty civilized in Japan, though -
View from my lab
Curse these stairs. Set one of four to get me to my lab. They have escalators but, ya know, heart disease and all that. everyone in the lab pauses briefly and prays for its soul.
The first problem is that everything is in Japanese. I've had to memorize a lot of really weird words the first couple of weeks, the sort of stuff I wouldn't normally learn for like 10 years here, if ever. My vocabulary in general is very topic-specific: I can say "Man, it's humid" but have no idea how to say that it's really dry outside. Similarly, I now know the different kanji for distilled water, di-ionized water, and salt water but haven't a clue how to read most children's books. After these vocab weeks, I've acquired the basic necessary words for lab work, and I can make myself more useful.
You also have to be really careful when operating on meeces. Their cute nature also means that their brains are really friggin' small, so you have to be extremely careful no matter how you slice it (ahem). There were an unfortunate few mice at the beginning…
The co-workers, though, are really fun. They are other students, juniors or seniors, at Sandai. When dissecting, they understand where I'm coming from, and use lots of hand gestures to indicate
Whiteboard
The annoying instruction whiteboards, extremely important but impossible to read. Mostly Japanese, some Mathematics, and a smattering of English. what I should do, accompanied with the I'm-sorry-you-have-to-do-this facial expression. They always appear at precisely the right time to hand me the correct instrument I need and then whisk away any unfortunate material when I'm done with it. Most unpleasantries are surreptitiously removed - and having a few people buzzing around, doing all they can to help you, is really quite nice.
One thing I really like about my job, though, is that I'm given a lot of leeway. When reading a scientific paper with my sensei one time, we both noticed an oddity in the data that wasn't explained. When I asked about it, he told me to figure it out the next day. So the entire next day I received all the resources I needed, designed an experiment, and actually got some interesting data. When I have a question about things, he usually allows me to investigate it if time permits.
Also, we are doing Real Science for a change. To help me get oriented in the lab, he had me repeat the process of his last published paper, and then we moved on to ideas that are currently being published or cool things he's just
A Different Level of Sandai
Another level of Sandai with a half-quad. A bi? thinking up himself. I've been doing old science for so long, because of classes, that finally being able to discover new things is quite a pleasure.
In any case, I could talk about my job for a fair bit more, but I have a couple of pressing issues: one, I'm exceedingly behind in my postings and probably won't catch up if I continue at this rate, and two, actually describing what I do would probably warrant a Parental Advisory for the blog, which is something I'd rather do without.
Enjoy!
~Danny
P.S. More posts going up soon. I'm trying to catch up, so last weekend should go up tomorrow or the next day.
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Lasrman
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Yummy
Now I understand why when I met with Edward Teller he kept putting sugar cubes in his coffee (6 of them!)