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September 25, 2009
More Googleless phrases
Well, I broached a whole new steel preservative vessel of vermiform invertebrates here.
The phrase "inebriate vertebrate" (and "inebriate invertebrates") returns no hits on Google! Yey! FTW.
Posted by daen at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2009
A career in science? Not exactly ...
I've been thinking for a while about the trajectory my "career" has taken, and overall, I'm not disappointed with it. I haven't acquired vast wealth, universal adoration or unimaginable power. But I have, over the last eight years, been working in science, something which I always wanted to do as a child. I wanted to be an astronomer, originally, but when I wrote to an observatory as a kid, I was a bit dissuaded by their reply - discussions of first and second degrees seemed like too much work to me. I mean, how hard could it be to stand around and look through a telescope? But they wanted me to spend six more years studying? No thanks! Being impatient and easily distracted meant that once I had found my niche, I just wanted to get on with it. And for me, getting into computers at the age of 10, just around about when it was even possible for a 10 year old to do that, meant that I couldn't wait to finish school and get programming - forget astronomy as a career! I was never the best or most imaginative programmer, but it was an obsession. So I left after my 'O' levels, pretty much as soon as was legally feasible, and of course spent six months on the dole (actually claiming social security). They were actually fun months - I'd wander around Hockley and Southend-on-Sea, enjoying the summer air on the "beach" or in the woods in Hockley, where I lived, or would spend time in the library checking out esoteric concept albums ("Pentateuch of the Cosmogeny", anyone?) and special effects records ("Volume 19 of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: the squeaky door album") and books which I didn't really understand but enjoyed anyway (I seem to remember a satirical book on higher mathematics, and a less satirical but still entertaining book by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll, on representing multiple sets in the style of Venn diagrams - Symbolic Logic Part I, it was called, apparently).
Then I got a job with the Department of Health and Social Security (or DHSS), as it was then.
Wait, what?
Quite. I hated it. The only computer involved in the job was a teletype machine in the corner of the office that we would use to communicate with the National Insurance computer in Newcastle, for NI contribution enquiries, or to set up a new NI number for someone that didn't already have one. Everything else back then (1985) was paper based - there were great tomes of procedures for processing maternity payments and sickness benefit claims (I worked for the sickness benefit section). I bought a Sharp pocket computer with one of my first wage packets (I still have the damn thing somewhere). It had 1K of RAM, a 2 line LCD display and could be programmed in BASIC. So I wrote a small program based on the procedures in the to automate some of the more Byzantine claims procedures, so it would ask "Doctor's certificate? [Y/N]" etc, and would take you to an outcome screen - either approval, or a request for more information, or rejection. It speeded some things up enormously. I'm sure it's all fully automated now. Apart from that, I was horribly bored and spent a lot of the time figuring out square and cube roots using a desktop calculator. I can still remember them today ... square root of 5 is 2.236068-ish ... Yeah, I know - your tax money hard at work.
I lasted six months.
It wasn't that I was lazy. I'd written dozens of letters to councils, banks, engineering companies - anyone I could think of that might have use for a 16 year old computer programmer. Apart from the odd interview (thank you Sumitomo Bank!), no dice. But I kept trying. Maybe my style improved with practice, because in the spring of 1986 I got two interviews within days of each other. One was with the Arab Banking Corporation (ABC) of Bahrain, located near St Paul's cathedral. The other was with a company called Industrial Control Services (ICS) in Heybridge, Essex. Of the two, I was most enamoured of the ICS job. It was engineering! There was programming! And there was a chip-shop next door!
ABC were quicker off the mark, and in March 1986 I started my career as a back-office assistant. I got an ABC chequebook, luncheon vouchers, everything! Shame the salary only just covered the train fare, but hey ho!
Wait, what?
Two days in, ICS came back and said they would like to hire me on their apprenticeship scheme. The pay was less, but we're talking the difference between low and lower, and as I wasn't paying any rent to my long-suffering parents, it was just a reduction in spending money for me. They had been impressed with my knowledge of FORTH, a fairly obscure programming language originally developed by IBM for controlling radio telescopes (it was supposed to be called FOURTH but the file system could only cope with five characters ...). I won't say I was an expert in FORTH, but thanks to having a copy for my Atari 800, I had at least dabbled with it - heck, I even knew what BUILDS ... DOES ... did. Sort of. So I handed in my notice to ABC (needless to say, they were less than impressed ... but more of them later) and started work at ICS in April 1986.
Bear with me. We're getting there.
I'll fast forward a bit - the ICS job was an eye-opener. I learnt some very useful things from some very clever people. They put me on an apprenticeship, part of which involved outplacement at Marconi Communication Systems Ltd (MCSL) in Chelmsford, which was like time-warping into the heyday of British engineering. Lots of clever brown lab-coated guys who could have been extras in a film about the invention of RADAR in World War II, with odd haircuts and moustaches and a world-weary patience with the apprentices who were often interested in some of what they were learning, but who, towards the end of the week, wanted to go out and get drunk and dance with girls.
So I was there for a while, and finally got fed up with the meagre pay. Then, one lunchtime in late 1987, I was wandering around Colchester after college, and spied a recruitment agency. I dropped my CV in the next week, and got an interview with Pont Research (actually the day after the hurricane in October ...). They were developing financial information software for banks. I got the (better paid) job anyway, and spent more than two years there, learning how to handle noisy financial data and noiser bankers. In 1992, I went to work for J P Morgan in the city, then another financial information vendor in 1992 in High Wycombe (who got bought by ABC ...), then back to Essex in 1995 to work for some ex-Pont guys (all very incestuous), then contracting in London in 1996 through to 2000 (and co-founded a somewhat unsuccessful company along the way), until I finally came to Denmark to live with my then-girlfriend in January 2001.
Here the story takes a twist.
Frankly I was a bit fed up with banks. You might think me stupid or odd, but I've never really gotten the hang of money. Sure, I can spend it as well as the next man, and it's nice to see a healthy bank balance from time to time. But these banks: the numbers seemed to be fictitious. You say it's worth x, but someone else says it's worth y (which is usually x plus or minus something, depending on whether you're buying or selling!) As has been so adequately demonstrated in the last couple of years, it really is an illusion. They rely on mathematics which they don't understand, implemented in software which the programmers don't understand (yes, that's me waving my hand in the air). Increasingly, I was writing the same thing for different customers - and when you're impatient and novelty-driven like me, it really doesn't matter how much you're getting paid - you're still going to go mad if you don't do something else pretty damn quick.
But at the time I came to Denmark, I wasn't really caring about incipient madness - I needed a job. So I honed my CV and penned cover letters detailing how I was an ideal fit for the job of programmer/analyst/operator/architect/software development manager at Nordbank/Sydbank/Danbank/whatever. No dice. You see, I didn't have a degree that came from a Danish University, and as such I was scum. Not that they would have ever said such a thing, but with the Danish educational system so intimately intertwined with the employment system - especially pay grades and unemployment benefit - they simply didn't know where to put me. Finally, after five months of applying, I got a job with LEO Pharma. No, not a bank. It was a drug company, and the money was OK - a lot less than I had been getting on contract in London, but I didn't care. I wasn't so engaged at first - what did I know about the drug industry, after all? I'd spent 10 years in banking! The someone showed me a diagram of the drug development pipeline. The particular diagram showed the relationship of the IT systems I had been working on to the particular function in the drug pipeline, and immediately I could see patterns and improvements. Both these systems are using MedDra and WHODrug, but they are importing different versions in different ways separately - surely we can fix that? And this system here needs input from the system just upstream from it - but you're telling me that they print it off from the upstream system and reinput it into the downstream system!?! Whoa, Nelly! We can fix that too!
I was hooked.
It was an amazing tapestry of science and system management and legal process and IT, with all the threads intimately woven together. It still amazes me today. It can take 10 years for a drug to turn from a "well, *that* looks interesting" from a bench chemist to a stress ball on a physician's desk. And the cost! Figures like $800 million are bandied about. This is applied materials science in action - tailored molecules interacting with the complex envionment of the human body to alter a process and produce a deliberate effect by modifiying the behaviour of certain proteins, typically. Forget banking, I honestly don't think there is anything more exciting that drug discovery.
And since then, I have worked (mainly) for biotech and drug companies, in Denmark and now in France.
I seem to have ended up doing discovery data management - a broad canvas consisting of curating chemical structures of compounds and handling experimental data. These days, I have also gotten involved in handling compound requests, generated when certain compounds show up as having promise against certain disease trgets and have to be retrieved from storage and sent somewhere to be assayed. Sounds straightforward enough, but tracking thousands of physical containers containing volumes of millilitres is non-trivial.
When the contract finishes here, I will leave Paris (it's not really where I want to be on my own) and go to San Francisco. I hope I can keep doing what I do here - I like working with scientists, and the science itself fascinates me - both the chemistry and the molecular biology. I'm now doing science vicariously, I suppose, and it works for me.
Posted by daen at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2009
I have a Special Plan for this World
when everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
when everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
when all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
as by a shining brainless beacon
or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
when you are calm and joyful
and finally entirely alone
then in a great new darkness
you will finally execute your special plan
one needs to have a plan someone said who was turned away into the shadows
and who i had believed was sleeping or dead
imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten
the teeth tearing into it
the tongue tasting its savour
and the hunger for that taste
now take away that flesh he said
take away the teeth and the tongue
the taste and the hunger
take away everything as it is
that was my plan
my own special plan for this world
i listened to these words and yet i did not wonder
if this creature whom i had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision
even in his deepest dreams
or his most lasting death
because i had heard of such plans such visions
and i knew they did not see far enough
but what was demanded in a way of a plan
needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh
beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away
and so i began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night
and a strangely shining light
that owed nothing to the light of day
that day may seem like other days
once more we feel the tiny legged trepidations
once more we are mangled by a great grinding fear
but that day will have no others after
no more worlds like this will follow
because i have a plan
a very special plan
no more worlds like this
no more days like that
there are but four ways to die a sardonic spirit might have said to me
there is dying that occurs relatively suddenly
there is dying that occurs relatively gradually
there is dying that occurs relatively painlessly
there is the death that is full of pain
thus by various means they are combined
the sudden and the gradual
the painless and the painful
to yield but four ways to die
and there are no others
even after the voice stopped speaking
I listened for it to speak again
after hours and day and years had passed
I listened for some further words
yet all I heard were the faintest echoes reminding me
there are no others
there are no others
was it then that I began to conceive for this world
a special plan?
there are no means for escaping this world
it penetrates even into your sleep
and is its substance
you are caught in your own dreaming
where there is no space
and a hell forever where there is no time
you can do nothing you are not told to do
there is no hope for escape from this dream
that was never yours
the very words you speak are only its very words
and you talk like a traitor
under its incessant torture
there are many who have designs upon this world
and dream of wild and vast reformations
i have heard them talking in their sleep
of elegant mutations
and cunning annihilations
i have heard them whispering in the corners of crooked houses
and in the alleys and narrow back streets of this crooked creaking universe
which they with their new designs would make straight and sound
but each of these new and ill-conceived designs
is deranged in its heart
for they see this world as if it were alone and original
and not as only one of countless others
whose nightmares all precede
like a hideous garden grown from a single seed
i have heard these dreamers talking in their sleep
and i stand waiting for them
as at the top of a darkened flight of stairs
they know nothing of me
and none of the secrets of my special plan
while i know every crooked creaking step of theirs
it was the voice of someone who was waiting in the shadows
who was looking at the moon and waiting for me to turn the corner
and enter a narrow street
and stand with him in the dull glaze of moonlight
then he said to me
he whispered
that my plan was misconceived
that my special plan for this world was a terrible mistake
because, he said, there is nothing to do and there is no where to go
there is nothing to be and there is no one to know
your plan is a mistake,he repeated
this world is a mistake, i replied
the children always followed him
when they saw him hopping by
a funny walk
a funny man
a funny funny funny man
he made them laugh sometimes
he made them laugh oh yes he did
he did he did he did he did
oh how he made them roll
one day he took them to a place
he knew a special place
and told them things about this world
this funny funny funny world
which made them laugh sometimes
he made them laugh oh yes he did
he did he did he did he did
oh how he made them roll
then the funny man who made them laugh
sometimes he did
revealed to them his special plan
his very special funny plan
knowing they would understand
and maybe laugh sometimes
he made them laugh
oh yes he did
he did he did he did he did
their eyes grew wide beneath there lids
and how he made them roll
i first learned the facts from a lunatic
in a dark and quiet room that smelled of stale time and space
there are no people
nothing at all like that
the human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion
each of which winds itself upon the supreme insanity
but there are persons of any kind
when all that can be is mindless mirrors
laughing and screaming as they parade about
in an endless dream
but when i asked the lunatic what it was
it swore itself within these mirrors
as they marched endlessly in stale time and space
he only looked and smiled
then he laughed and screamed
and in his black and empty eyes
i saw for a moment as in a mirror
a form the shade of divinity
in flight from its stale infinity
oftime and space and the worst of all
of this world dreams
my special plan for the laughter
and the screams
we went to see some little show
that was staged in an old shed
past the edge of town
and in its beginnings all seemed well
the miniature curtain stage glowed in the darkness
while those dolls bounced along on their strings before our eyes
and in its beginnings all seemed well
but then there came a subtle turning point which some had noticed
and i was one
who quietly left the show
no i did not
because i could see where things were going
as the antics of those dolls grew strange
and the fragile strings grew taut
with their tiny pullings, tiny limbs
the others around me became appalled
and turned away and abandoned the show
that was staged in an old shed
past the edge of town
but i wanted to witness what could never be
i wanted to see what could not be seen
the moment of consummate disaster
when puppets turned to face the puppet master
it was twilight and i stood in a grayish haze of the vast empty building
when the silence was enriched by a reverberant voice
all the things of this world it said
are of but one essence
for which there are no words
this is the greater part which has no beginning or end
and the one essence of this world for which there can be no words
is that all the things of this world
this is the lesser part which had a beginning and shall have an end
and for which words were conceived solely to speak of
the tiny broken beings of this world it said
the beginnings and endings of this world it said
for which words were conceived solely to speak of
now remove these words and what remains it asks me
as i stood in the twilight of that vast empty building
but i did not answer
the question echoed over and over
but i remained silent until the echoes died
and as twilight passed into the evening i felt my
special plan for which there are no words
moving towards a greater darkness
there are some who have no voices
or none that will ever speak
because of the things they know about this world
and the things they feel about this world
because the thoughts that fill a brain
that is a damaged brain
because the pain that fills a body
that is a damaged body
exists in other worlds
countless other worlds
each of which stands alone in an infinite empty blackness
for which no words are being conceived
and where no voices are able to speak
when a brain is filled only with damaged thoughts
when a damaged body is filled only with pain
and stands alone in a world surrounded by infinite empty blackness
and exists in a world for which there is no special plan
when everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
when everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
when all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
as by a shining brainless beacon
or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world
when you are calm and joyful
and finally entirely alone
then in a great new darkness
you will finally execute your special plan
Posted by daen at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)