PD: Day 69 - Brain Dead

I woke up around 6:30 this morning rolled out of bed, let the dogs out and watched the Today show. J mentions that Meredith has on a poor choice of outfit. Spence says he is not feeling well and is really hot. So he lies on the couch, miserable. I head off to work but am still feeling the effects of travel so I'm not very productive. Some where along the way I run into a bit of snag when submitting my abstract as I have 23 co-authors and I can only have 20, now I'm stuck with a decision of who to remove or actually my fearless leader needs to figure that out. I then work on writing a lay summary for an IRB about some results. This is actually a lot harder than you would think. Any scientific discipline develops its own language and so after you become adept at writing for a particular audience it is hard to broaden and explain it to the lay public. This is one of those problems that science has when dealing with the media as well. So most journalists, at least in the US, are told to write for the lowest common denominator, around a 4th grade reading level (sad but true). I have always thought this was somewhat disrespectful to the reading public or the fact that 24 of my 28 years of education were wasted, so I could read the newspaper or cnn.com. Hence this comic


Thanks Kris

I head home, we have Matzo ball soup. I love Yiddish food, thank god J introduced me to it. After dinner J takes a bath, S yaks all over the place, we try and watch Hamlet 2, but C and X are just too hyped. So I take them downstairs to go to sleep, watch Keith Obermann lay into Dick Cheney and fall asleep. I wake up a little after 10, take the boys upstairs and fall asleep with X in his room.