THE LOVE LAB

This past Tuesday, I attended one of the monthly gatherings held by The New Yorker called The Big Story. This one featured three science fiction writers (Jennifer Egan, Ben Marcus, and Gary Shteyngart) in a discussion titled The Far Side in lieu of the recent New Yorker Science Fiction Issue. I am tinkering with my own SciFi screen play so I figured it’d be interesting to hear from actual writers (turns out some people consider the abbreviation SciFi somewhat demeaning). Some of the points touched upon were: the meaning of the term Science Fiction, the utility of genre characterization, whether all Science Fiction is necessarily a critique or a satire, and the intentions of the writers in their own works and the seeming discrepancy some of the people in the audience had in their personal interpretations of those works. I think that is the part that was most curious to me since it highlights the ways in which we assign meaning to text and language through our own subjective experiences.

Anyway, can I brag? I keep my window open all day and all night and I have not had one mosquito fly in. Ok, may be there was just one, but it was only an astronomically huge and conspicuous male whom I swiftly obliterated with a Birkenstock. Science.At.Work.

Finished my first piece of 2012…

And here is the journey…

There I am…page 22 of the Summer Forbes Life issue. I attended the ‘30 under 30‘ event earlier this year and here is a picture below with my two friends. It was just as a guest – this time   This year’s list did actually feature one scientist – Daniela Witten – and I have to say it is a pretty impressive accomplishment to become an assistant professor while still under 30. Moreover, analysis of large scale biological data is becoming more important now that we have new cutting edge technologies that allow collection of data that needs to be interpreted with statistical and computational tools. You go girl, Daniela!