Matt

Beijing

Matt

For those of you who don’t know, I will be attending a meeting in Beijing, China, for the next 10 days. I will go to this meeting the first part of the week and then get a chance to sightsee around the city– the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Ming Tombs, and the Great Wall of China. I will have wireless access in the hotel (or at least that’s what the Interweb tells me), so rather than keeping a written journal, as is my custom, I plan to do the very 21st-century thing and blog it.

Ordinarily I’m very nervous about traveling– people who have flown with me will testify I’m usually a nervous wreck– but right now, waiting in the Newark terminal, I’m mostly excited. I woke up at 3:30 AM this morning, even though my alarm wasn’t set to go off until 4:00 PM. I get to walk on the Great Wall of China. How cool is that?

A quick update (and a plea for local help)

Matt

Okay, so I’m good at planning, not so good at followthrough. I’ve actually been more productive in terms of writing than I have been in a long time, but it’s papers for work. Writing long technical treatises on the molecular mechanisms of nucleotidases is a very different kind of writing than the kind of introduction to my work I hoped to do here, so that project lost steam. I did drink most of the beers of the world, and write essays about them, but I hoped to put non-beer-related posts in between them lest you think I devoted my summer to alcoholism. (I did not.)

Anyway, the update is that next Saturday, 19 August, I will be moving across town to what we informally call the Hinton House, next door to Hinton Ave. UMC. I’ll be living with Andrew Marshall, Jimbo Hughes, and Brian Vaughan. The address is:

513 Rialto St. Charlottesville, VA 22902

We also have a land line, but in the interests of some privacy I’d rather not put the number here. I’ll probably be sending out an email to everyone I’ve ever met with complete contact information pretty soon. I will have the same cell number, which I’d like to use as my primary phone.

The plea for help: If you live in Charlottesville, or can be in town next weekend, I would greatly appreciate your help loading and unloading the truck at 2:00 PM on Saturday, 19 August. (Yes, I do know that that is student move-in day, but both the old place and the new place are a few miles away from the University, so I think we can avoid the traffic.) Depending on how many folks show up, I hope we can get everything loaded and unloaded in a few hours, and then we’ll either fire up the grill and have a little picnic or order some pizza, whatever people prefer. If I were mean, I’d also remind you that I’ve helped move many of you over the years, and you owe me. But I’m not mean, so I’m not going to say that. 🙂 If you can help, please send me an email or give me a call on the cell, so that I know you’re coming.

Update at 10:00 AM, 16 Aug: The address is Rialto St., not Rialto Rd. Corrected.

Beers of the world: Skol

Matt

From: San Paolo, Brazil
Type: “Beer Style Pilsen”
Price: $2
Alc. Content: 5%

As I began my tour of beers from around the world, I was in a good mood. I went to Starbucks that evening with a friend and wrote almost a page of a paper I’ve been working on. If a page doesn’t seem like a lot to you, my guess is you haven’t been in grad school, ’cause I walked out of there feeling like I was Captain Productivity.

I got back home about 10 PM, and pulled out the first bottle from my shopping spree at Wine Warehouse, a Brazilian beer called Skol. This one seemed a little more accessible to a beer neophyte such as myself; it was relatively cheap, it had a screw top (there’s even a little logo of a bottle opener with a line through it on the back), and didn’t have insanely precise directions about how it should be served (as do many of the others). The label said it’s a “Beer Style Pilsen”, which I can’t find described anywhere, but after a little bit of poking around on Wikipedia I decided that “Beer Style Pilsen” is poorly-translated Portuguese for Pilsener.

Skol is a very light beer, like a good Pilsener should be. (Apparently, at least, according to Wikipedia.) It didn’t seem very “hoppy” to me, but I say that admitting that I don’t really know what hops taste like. I once smelled a vat of hops in the Coors brewery when I was 15 and I remember thinking that was the most horrible stench I ever encountered. So now I automatically associate hops with horrible taste, with little to no evidence to back up my claim. I’d probably deny the presence of hops in a good-tasting beer just on principle, which was probably what I was doing here. In fact, the label said that this was brewed with “rice choicest hops and best barley malt”. Hey, I don’t know what those are but they sound pretty good.

Skol is also unfiltered, which freaked me out a little as I poured it into the glass. But the cloudy appearance and the little bits floating around in the liquid didn’t affect the taste at all. This was a light, slightly sweet beer that tasted pretty good, if a little bland.

Beers of the world

Matt

Things are getting pretty hectic at work, so I’m going to have to postpone my ‘crystallopgraphy for dummies’ project for now. I’ll come back to it soon. For now, here’s that beer-related project I was talking about.

For my birthday, my friends Brantley and Sarah gave me a gift certificate to Wine Warehouse here in town. And at first I was conflicted. I do like wine, but I spend a lot of time alone and don’t live with big drinkers, so I don’t exactly go through the wine very fast. It even gets worse when the wines are especially expensive or of high quality, because I tend to save them for “special occasions”, which usually means “years from now”. I have a bottle of Chianti I brought back from Florence which will probably never be opened.

Perhaps noticing my hesitation over the gift of another bottle of wine I’d never open, Brantley made a point of telling me that they also had beer, which suddenly made their gift all the better. I do like beer, and unlike wine, I drink it regularly[1], because the smart people who make beer had the brilliant idea to put the stuff into single-serve containers.

The trouble is, despite the fact that I’ve claimed to be a beer snob, I am in reality a beer neophyte. Yes, while I do avoid the Buds, Miller Lites, and Pabst Blue Ribbons of the world, I find myself buying six-packs of the same few brands I’ve liked (Sam Adams, Corona, and Yuengling) over and over again. Furthermore, I don’t actually know anything about beer. I can’t tell a lager from a hole in the ground. And what the heck are “hops”, anyway?

Well, no more! It’s time for me to go out and explore the wider world. I went to Wine Warehouse and selected 11 bottles of beer and ale of all kinds from all over the world, and now I plan to drink each one and then write about them. So stay tuned, and watch the self-education of a beer connesieur in the making.

[1] At this point, I should note that there may be people out there, possibly related to me, who don’t know that I drink. So, um, I drink. Not a lot, mind you! But yes, John Wesley probably wouldn’t be happy with me. Sorry.

Graduate school… of science!

Matt

I am a big fan of Penelope Trunk, a business writer of all things, who writes a column called the “Brazen Careerist”. Yes, I know that I don’t work in business. (Yet.) But I think she always has interesting things to say about how to get ahead in one’s career. And I do have one of those. Okay, maybe I don’t have one of those, but I want one.

Anyway, she wrote a column a few weeks ago about how regular, focused blogging is good for your career. Some of her arguments are frankly a stretch, but she makes a good point overall. Alas, my own blog is neither regular, nor really focused on what I (plan to) do for a living, so I fail on both counts.

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve really written about what I do in my blog at all. I have a little biographical blurb on my main page, but that’s it. Long story short, I’m a graduate student in Biophysics, trying to finish up my Ph.D. on a topic relating to macromolecular crystallography. I have been in grad school for a long time. If you’ve ever read the comic Piled Higher and Deeper, I am essentially Mike Slackenerny, save that I am more suspicious of free food. Read some of the comics he’s in; that will give you a healthy dose of what my life is like.

I do honestly enjoy what I do. The work is interesting, and I spend the vast majority of my time doing it. It’s just that I often fail the “dinner party” test. I can explain what I do to laypeople, but not always quickly enough before they get bored and wander off in search of more hors d’oeuvres. Since I suspect that the vast majority of you out there in readerland aren’t biophysicists, I hesitate to go into the topic.

But I do want to find my focus, and so I’m going to try to talk a little more at a layperson level in this space about the kind of research that I do. Don’t worry; the rants aren’t going away, and I have a beer-related project I’d also like to talk about in upcoming posts. But I hope you’ll bear with me as I conduct a little experiment.

Thirty

Matt

While we’re talking about March birthdays, there is another I
must reluctantly mention. It so happens that today is my
birthday, and even worse, my age is one evenly divisible by 10.
If you’re thinking 20, you’re very sweet, but wrong.

Thanks so much for your kind wishes, especially to my
friends in northern VA who threw me a party last weekend. It makes
the feeling of mild depression I’m sure to have all day just a
little better.

Abigail

Matt

My sister Suzanne finally had her baby yesterday afternoon. Abigail
Porter Smedberg was born March 7th at 3:38 PM, and weighed 8 lbs., 1
oz. (Kids in our family come big.) This is her third daughter (and my
third niece), after Ellie, who’s now 21 months old, and Claire, who’s
about 11 months. Here’s a picture I shamelessly stole from Abby’s webpage:

My brother-in-law
Benjamin has
the whole story here, with some more pictures.

Oh, and by the way, there may be a few of you out there whom I
forgot to tell that Suzanne was going to have another baby, so, um,
sorry. Suzanne was about to have a baby. In my defense, she’s been
having them slightly more frequently than I’ve been speaking with some
of you.

Port authority

Matt

Most of the time, I disagree with the Bush administration. They
usually make decisions that baffle and anger and frustrate me. But, as
hard as it is to admit it, I must come to their defense about this
deal to give an United Arab Emirates company control over some port
operations at several U.S. ports.

Politicians of both parties, many of whom coincidentally will be
running for President in 2008, have crawled out of the woodwork to
criticize this deal. Rep. Sue Myrick (R, NC) had the
least literate response (PDF) to the deal:

In regards to selling American ports to the United Arab
Emirates, not just NO– but HELL NO!

But her letter does reflect the basic idea that most of the other
slightly more eloquent critics of the plan have expressed. They’ve
sensed what they think is a rare opportunity to portray Bush as weak
on terrorism. Bush, for his part, has stuck with the deal and with the
Adminstration organization that authorized it, and (so.. painful.. to
write this…) I think he is right to do so.

First, as the administration has stated many times, the UAE company
won’t be in charge of port security. See, we have these people called
the U.S. Coast Guard, whom I’m pretty sure is an American
organization. Secondly, this UAE company would not be the first
foreign company in some capacity in American ports. NPR had a story
yesterday about one of the ports, located in New Jersey, that would be
affected by the deal. They reported that several foreign companies ran
various operations at the port, including one from Denmark and two
from China.

In other words, the UAE company wouldn’t be the first foreign
company at the port, but it would be the first
foreign company with “Arab” in its name. I’m trying to come up with
another word to describe all the criticism, but the only one I can
think of is this: racist.

Leaving on a jet plate / Don’t know when I’ll be back again

Matt

As I write this, I am hurtling in a giant metal tube 31,000 feet above the state of Indiana. I want bonus points for blogging on an airplane. Not that people keep score or anything, but if they did, I want the extra credit, okay?

I used to hate to fly. Every minor shake and shimmy of turbulence, every acceleration in the pit of my stomach convinced me that the flight would end in a plummeting fireball, not a smooth landing. Oh sure, people love to quote statistics about how air travel is safer than cars or trains or walking or, say, getting out of the bathtub, but here’s the thing. You crash your car, and there’s a decent chance you’ll survive. But when you crash in a plane, the question is less about survival and more about how many burnt, charred pieces you’ll wind up in.

(We just flew over Cincinnati. I don’t know what they’ve been doing down there, but there’s a fair amount of turbulence over their city. That’s not very nice, Cincinnati. Stop it.)

But now, I just don’t care, more by sheer repetition than anything else. For the last few years in grad school, my advisor has sent me out for data collection and meetings about six times a year, and the frequent trips have beaten the fear out of me. I’m much more likely to be anxious about the length of the security screening line than whether I’m going to die in a fiery crash. Apparently familiarity can breed indifference as well as than contempt. Who knew?