Randoms on Research
Newsflash: I still suck at writing. My PI wants me to start writing up a paper for the research I haven't yet done but hope to accomplish in the less than a month I have left in the bay.
But dammit, I just can't focus. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than reading research papers. I hate how the wording of everything is so damn precise. How every other fucking sentence is backed up by a reference I have to look up. Which leads me to another boring paper I can't understand with another trail of references I have to look up, but stupid PubMed only has about half of the papers online and I'm way too lazy to actually get off my ass and look in a real live library journal, but it doesn't matter anyway because I've already forgotten what the original paper was that I was looking at and which arbitrary point it was making that made me sidetrack 10 papers down the road.
It's just so fuckin hard to write an intro to a subject area when I have such a poor understanding into what's been done before. Especially all of this acoustics stuff with with impedances and moduluses and bioengineering crap I just can't wrap my head around.
See this is why I got out of the engineering world. It's so much easier to pretend to be smart in medicine. Then a bit of physics or math comes along and reminds me that I'm stupid. Doh. I should have just collaborated on a case report or something lame like that.
All I really want to do is work on my other side project/company i'm trying to start which may (probably) turn into nothing but at least it's really fun to code. We'll see in about a month.
...
People must wonder what the hell it is I'm doing when I say I'm doing research. Whenever people tell me they're doing "research", I haven't the foggiest idea what that means. For some people I think it means they're on exel for 2 hours a week every 8 weeks trying to make some numbers look right. Others from what I gather pipette shit into oblivion. I don't know why or what for I just hope I never have to touch a pipette again for the rest of my life.
Recently I've been doing a lot of playing around with the PACS workstations looking at CT scans of infant skulls. I really can't fathom why radiologists get paid so much. After 2 hours of looking through scans I could pretty much diagnose "craniosynostosis" immediately before even looking at the chart. Now, I know there is a lot more to radiology than evaluating for suture closing and narrowed skulls, but don't think it'd be unreasonable to outsource that little bit of radiology to me. I could start a website and hospitals could send me their xrays of their narrow-headed kids to me to evaluate for only 2 easy payments of $29.99. I'd be rich... bitch!
Does it make me a bad person for wishing more babies got dropped on their heads or have suspicious congenital anomalies so that I'd have more potential patients for my study? I really don't see why we can't just xray these little dudes' skulls without medical justification. It's for science, folks... SCIENCE!
Tomorrow after much ado I'm going to get to play with this fancy http://www.dextroscope.com/ machine which looks kind of cool. Originally I had thought I was going to have to write all of the 3d algorithm modeling thingies myself but now it seems we've outsourced me to this nifty little machine. A good thing I suppose because I don't know how to write 3d algorithm modeling thingies.
...
Oh yeah, HIPAA is a bitch
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One more thing, you should all go out and watch Jericho. The overall production value of the show isn't quite as polished as Lost, but it has a very interesting storyline which isn't as fucked / enraging like Lost can get. It also has some decent looking chicks, which is always important. My jerk brother got me started watching it and it wasted my entire weekend. I watched all of the first season in 2 sittings. 22 episodes. That's 15 hours. Yes, I have no self control.
Ok back to the grind...
But dammit, I just can't focus. Nothing puts me to sleep faster than reading research papers. I hate how the wording of everything is so damn precise. How every other fucking sentence is backed up by a reference I have to look up. Which leads me to another boring paper I can't understand with another trail of references I have to look up, but stupid PubMed only has about half of the papers online and I'm way too lazy to actually get off my ass and look in a real live library journal, but it doesn't matter anyway because I've already forgotten what the original paper was that I was looking at and which arbitrary point it was making that made me sidetrack 10 papers down the road.
It's just so fuckin hard to write an intro to a subject area when I have such a poor understanding into what's been done before. Especially all of this acoustics stuff with with impedances and moduluses and bioengineering crap I just can't wrap my head around.
See this is why I got out of the engineering world. It's so much easier to pretend to be smart in medicine. Then a bit of physics or math comes along and reminds me that I'm stupid. Doh. I should have just collaborated on a case report or something lame like that.
All I really want to do is work on my other side project/company i'm trying to start which may (probably) turn into nothing but at least it's really fun to code. We'll see in about a month.
...
People must wonder what the hell it is I'm doing when I say I'm doing research. Whenever people tell me they're doing "research", I haven't the foggiest idea what that means. For some people I think it means they're on exel for 2 hours a week every 8 weeks trying to make some numbers look right. Others from what I gather pipette shit into oblivion. I don't know why or what for I just hope I never have to touch a pipette again for the rest of my life.
Recently I've been doing a lot of playing around with the PACS workstations looking at CT scans of infant skulls. I really can't fathom why radiologists get paid so much. After 2 hours of looking through scans I could pretty much diagnose "craniosynostosis" immediately before even looking at the chart. Now, I know there is a lot more to radiology than evaluating for suture closing and narrowed skulls, but don't think it'd be unreasonable to outsource that little bit of radiology to me. I could start a website and hospitals could send me their xrays of their narrow-headed kids to me to evaluate for only 2 easy payments of $29.99. I'd be rich... bitch!
Does it make me a bad person for wishing more babies got dropped on their heads or have suspicious congenital anomalies so that I'd have more potential patients for my study? I really don't see why we can't just xray these little dudes' skulls without medical justification. It's for science, folks... SCIENCE!
Tomorrow after much ado I'm going to get to play with this fancy http://www.dextroscope.com/ machine which looks kind of cool. Originally I had thought I was going to have to write all of the 3d algorithm modeling thingies myself but now it seems we've outsourced me to this nifty little machine. A good thing I suppose because I don't know how to write 3d algorithm modeling thingies.
...
Oh yeah, HIPAA is a bitch
...
One more thing, you should all go out and watch Jericho. The overall production value of the show isn't quite as polished as Lost, but it has a very interesting storyline which isn't as fucked / enraging like Lost can get. It also has some decent looking chicks, which is always important. My jerk brother got me started watching it and it wasted my entire weekend. I watched all of the first season in 2 sittings. 22 episodes. That's 15 hours. Yes, I have no self control.
Ok back to the grind...
1 Comments:
You amuse me, Gerald :) You can diagnose craniosynostosis without x-rays!
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