I confuse people

Since uploading images isn't working for some reason, I'll tell you about this instead. I meet new people at a pretty constant rate here, and often we'll end up having a conversation that runs something like the following:

Random Person (RP): So, where are you from?
Me: ... The U.S. Texas actually.
RP: Oh?? But you don't sound like you're from Texas at all. I mean, you don't have an accent or anything.

My stock answer is that my parents are from New Zealand, so that I don't spend 5 minutes talking about how Austin is fairly international, not all Texans have a stereotypical Texan accent, and what have you. I know plenty of Texans without "Texas accents". But still, people seem inordinately surprised here about where I come from. I've even gotten:

RP: Oh?? But you're not... I mean, you're not big. *makes increasing girth motion with his hands*

Eh? Many question marks. I guess it's bad when all Texans are thought to be overweight.

In Soviet Russia...

When I got on my bike to go to work this morning, I was rewarded after my first few pedals with a horrible, ratchety, screeching noise, the noise you get when your bike chain is about to fall off. I put up with this noise for a few dozen more pedal strokes, but it was abundantly clear that the chain death rattle was going to persist until either a) I stopped, or b) my rust bucket fell apart. At considerable speed, I coasted, took my feet off the pedals, and gave the bike chain two hard kicks with my heel. This solved the chain problem completely, although I hard a hard time keeping myself from making Soviet Russia jokes the rest of the way to work. "In Soviet Russia, bike fixes you!!" Well, maybe if you're a guy...

It doesn't really help that the place I work at looks like some old East German compound. I'm told they lifted in the building I'm in and the one next door by crane, of a piece. Add the non-color color scheme and the fact that most of the FZJ buildings were put in in the 1950s, and you have a pretty grim place.

Generalizations

So last night Will, Torston, and I went to a small wine festival being held in Jülich, where we met up with 4 other guys. I've gotten used to being the only female in attendance at most of these things, but not so much to some of the baffling stuff that gets said. For example, I tried a Rose wine, and then a dry white wine (this is probably not the order you're supposed to go in; I know nothing about wine culture), and was talking about how the Rose was really a bit too sweet, and how I liked drier wines more. Robert then said "Huh, but I thought you would like sweet wines, because you're a girl."

"Sorry, what?"

"Because girls usually like sweeter wines."

"This is based on an n of what?"

There were several seconds of confusion as to what I was talking about, before he said this was based on two other girls he knew. We all had a laugh. Then I decided to go ahead and jump in all the way now I’d started. I said “Usually the variance within a gender is larger than the difference between the genders.” You know, which it is.
He seemed a little taken aback (my interpretation, of course), and said he wouldn’t generalize again, but I’m not sure whether this was just said for a laugh (“I’ll never generalize again! Haha! Never!”) or what.

What I really should have said was “Say the same thing you just said, but put “guys” in instead of girls. Does the statement make sense any more? ‘I would’ve thought you’d like that wine, because guys usually like sweeter (or whatever) wines.’ And it probably doesn’t make sense anymore, because you all recognize that guys are a pretty diverse group of people, and probably all have different tastes. If it doesn’t make sense to say for a guy, the same statement doesn’t make sense to say for a girl – we’re not all the same, weird, different being.”

But then, as they say, this is just how it works:

Aachen

Three weekends ago now I went with some people/friends from work to the Netherlands. What did I do in the Netherlands, you ask? Why, I watched an American movie in English (and went in to a McDonald’s, very touristy things, really.) My friend/mentor at work lives in Aachen, which is about 45 minutes from work by bus, and right on the border with both Belgium and the Netherlands. Since they have an English movie theater just over the border, a bunch of us went over there for the evening. It was too late to catch a train back to Jülich after the movie, so I stayed in Aachen overnight and then Kristin showed me around Aachen the next day a bit, which was a lot of fun.

Kristin’s apartment, a.k.a. a real German kitchen (albeit one inhabited by someone from France and someone from Georgia).


Escher’s Stairs outside of Kristin’s apartment. You wouldn’t want to cross these stairs on a dark night, let me just tell you that. I am still a little dizzy looking at these stairs in this picture, but perhaps that’s just because I experienced how devious these stairs are firsthand.


In Aachen. There are lots of old buildings in the center of the town that they either a) survived the war, and were restored or b) were destroyed, then rebuilt. I don’t remember how much damage Aachen suffered.


Here’s a typical center city street we saw. Notice anything a bit strange about it?


Now notice anything strange?


Apparently Aachen quite often has some sort of art display/event going on in the city center. This week it was elderly people sitting on the sides of buildings. I can think of several things that could be a metaphor for, but I won’t trouble you with them here.


Another such photo. We spotted at least half a dozen of these guys.


Walking up to the cathedral – cool!


Kristin: “This is the only photo you’ll get of me, so make it count.”

I think some of these figures are supposed to be the Bremer Street musicians. All of them are poseable - the copper bits that are still copper colored are the joints.

Chocolate! Tempting.


I really liked how Aachen was just sort of a typical German city going about its business. No messing around or just peddling to us tourists.


Aha! The secret revealed.




We spent a lot of time just looking in at the shops. I heard a lot about the best places to eat, drink, and get chocolate, but those don’t make the most interesting photos. One thing I really like is the density of the window displays in German shops. They make up for lack of window space with just a crazy amount of stuff crammed into their one window display, often.


Last: A random, bonus photo for Jessie! Thistle spectacular!!!! This is so you don’t have to wait 5 weeks until I finally post about Frankfurt to see this photo.

Deutschland v Turkei

My friend finally sent me pictures from the Germany-Turkey game! (that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.)

It was a really exciting game, made even more stressful to everyone watching by the number of times the picture from the game cut out (apparently there were high winds near Bonn, or some such poor excuse). The first time this happened, there was quite a lot of noise; the second time, I think the police were kind of worried by all the noise we were making. Riots before the game even finished? It was a definite possibility.

I went with some people from work to watch the game, and we ended up watching it in a Turkish restaurant - what are the odds? The guys in the restaurant were funny - when Turkey got a goal, they would cheer really loud, but when Germany got a goal, they would cheer for that, too. During half time one guy held up a little kid with a German flag and got us all to cheer, and then held up a little kid with a Turkish flag and got us to cheer.
Rehan in his football hat.

For those of you not in the know, Germany and Turkey were tied, 1-1 and then 2-2, until about the 91st minute, when Germany got a last minute goal - very exciting! There was a last minute penalty kick for Turkey too, which was a real nail biter, but they missed so Germany ended up winning 3-2. Jülich rioted.
The riot/celebration, right after Germany won.

Fireworks, right in the middle of the huge crowd - very safe. Luckily I was on the fringes.

There were fireworks. There were flags abounding. There were people climbing up/swinging from the traffic lights. There was lots of shouting. All in all, a good time.

I was also pretty happy about the results of the game; they matched what I had put in our betting pool exactly! 4 points for me. This was curiously the score I was most certain about before the game, and the only one the whole duration of the cup that I got exactly right. I ended up getting 9th place in the pool out of 30 people - not bad for knowing nothing about the football going in, eh?

Cool Biology Stuff

So, check out what I've been doing lately - it's pretty cool:
(NB: Don't steal my pictures! Ask first please :) ) What you're seeing are two different types of protein (one connected to a molecule that fluoresces green, and one connected to a molecule which fluoresces red) printed in two different microscale patterns (the same size as cells) on the same glass substrate.

This is pretty cool, because it might eventually allow us to grow and differentiate neuronal cells in specific, predetermined patterns (given, of course, the right patterns and the right proteins).
This time I didn't do such a good job with the double stamping, and the second stamp is shifted from the first. Supposedly the machine I'm using has micrometer precision, but I've yet to see it.

This stamping works because neurons don't usually like to grow on the glass, and instead much prefer attatching to certain motifs in the protein pattern. This lets you grow cells in discernable patterns:
Here are some neurons growing on a basic grid pattern we did as a test. The axons, which transmit the electrochemical signals, are fluorescing green; the dendrites, which receive these signals, are fluorescing red; and the cell bodies are blue. You can't see the pattern itself here because we didn't stain it with any marker, but you can figure out where it is, no?

Reducing/defining the complexity of the network (it's only a tad bit more complicated in brains!! :P) lets you see which neuron is sending signals to which other neurons. This less complex system is useful if you are trying to understand how signals are propagated in neurons.
We're hoping that by creating slightly more sophisticated protein patterns we can better control the direction the neurons differentiate in - so they don't just grow randomly like you see here. Ideally all the axons would branch off from the cells in one direction, and all the dendrites in the other, but we're a ways away from that yet.

Complicated? Sure, a little bit :P. But it's all been really interesting so far - I only wish it was slightly faster paced.

Places I'm Really Intending to Write About

Man, so behind. Now I've been to Aachen (settling point for Charlemagne), Paris!, and Frankfurt, and not written about any of it. Also, I was going to post on the Germany/Turkey game of the Euro Cup and its aftermath, the Euro Cup finals, my bike ride to work, work itself and my results so far, and various other assorted things. Work, travel, and Skype have taken over my life to the exclusion of almost everything else, unfortunately.

This week I might get to catch up a bit. Any real experiments this week seem to be postponed until Thursday morning, which is to some extent a frustrating repetition of my lab experience from last year. Optimistically, this allows me to do some data crunching (at least I have more data than last year) and planning/preparation and internet surfing before Thursday, which is all good. But still, I wish we could get cells more than once per week so I would have at least the option of a more flexible work schedule.

To sum up, I'm hoping on posting a couple more times today, and once tomorrow. We'll see whether this actually occurs.