The Chamber of Secrets

I like this title. Probably not the book though, though Harry-Potter books are generally very well-written. But today I do not want to talk about Harry Potter, but about secrets.

The ability to distinguish a secret from a non-secret is a thing that, as every parent can tell you, is not innate. Countless are the jokes/anecdotes such as

Aunt: My, Johnny, you are very silent today!
Johnny: That's because mummy promised me 2 dollars if I would not say anything about the big wart on your nose.

While secrets do come natural in a way (children love secret societies, though they can be so enthusiastic that they start to brag about them), it is a long and often painful process to learn what is and what is not acceptable to say. It is OK to say that your father is a doctor, it is not OK to say that your mother is 45 years old. It is OK to say that your brother has won a scholarship, it is not OK to say that your sister weighs 300 pounds.

Of course, as a kid you are most often heir to the little, harmless secrets, mainly because people out of vanity try to pretend to be otherwise than they are, though fooling people in such cases is mostly vain hope: if you are 300 pounds, people might think you are between 275 and 325 pounds, but they will not think that you are a hundred pounds.

For bigger operations and bigger interests, secrets can be vital. In war and politics, when the security of millions is at stake, politicians and generals must often hide the truth and protect it, as Winston Churchill said, "with a bodyguard of lies". Secrecy and lying are not sins then, but virtues. Fortunately, hiding the truth and telling lies are things most politicians are quite experienced in, so this gift can easily be called upon in times of need.

Nevertheless, "secretive" is seldom a adjective that is used in a positive way. For your enemies you may be secretive or blind them with lies, secrecy to your friends can unsettle them. Friendship is often based on reciprocity, and if you tell something to another, especially something you would not tell to most people, you expect the other to return a similar story, so the information power balance remains the same.

But let us talk about my secrets. In particular, my experience with secrecy in science.

Secrecy in science is already very old. If I am correct, when Isaac Newton had discovered calculus he kept it a secret for over ten years. Why? Perhaps he hoped to use it so solve many more scientific problems than his colleagues who were still groping in the dark with outdated mathematical tools. Knowing more than your opponents gives you an advantage.

Of course, after a while this went awry since Newton was not the only brilliant man in the world. The German Leibnitz discovered -and published- calculus, and became quite famous. This meant that now Newton not only had to contend with competing scientists who had tools as good as his, but also that some people considered Leibnitz the inventor of calculus! A long and bitter feud ensued in which Newton used his scientific reputation and influence to crush Leibnitz. A waste of two talents. Nowadays, though we must consider Newton to be the true inventor of calculus, we should approve the behaviour of Leibnitz more since he gave his invention to the world willingly. Whether he did this to achieve fame and fortune is not so important at this point; the effect outweighs the motivations, and the effect was that mathematics took a large step forward, in contrast to the effect of Newton's shadowy proceedings.

Undoubtedly, there are still many minds around, perhaps not equal to Newton in terms of genius, but certainly equal to him in terms of secrecy. The chance that you will profit much by keeping your invention secret has dwindled enormously, especially since nowadays patent offices give rights to the first one who files a patent, not to the first inventor who kept his findings to himself. Also there are now so many scientists that the chance that your invention will be rediscovered within a few years is quite large. Yet there are still many secretive persons.

Is this good? According to Nobel-prize winner Peter Medawar, in his booklet "Advice to a young scientist" it is not. First of all because exchanging ideas and criticizing another's research is a key feature of science that serves to refine and test your ideas. Two brains is always better than one, just as the optimal size of a programming team is never less than two. Second, if you are secretive about your research, others are also less willing to share their experiences with you. Applied consistently, this would lead to secretive science which would only proceed with the speed of molasses. The third reason is that such paranoia is usually unnecessary: most scientists are so in love with their own subject and/or so busy with their own research, that they cannot or will not take time to hijack yours. According to Medawar, the illusion that everyone in the world wants to steal your research is a cute misconception fostered by the youngest and most naive of scientists.

And, perhaps, by others.

While in my undergraduate studies at the Free University I never was commanded to keep my work a secret, this changed as I went to another university and another professor for my PhD-studies. One day, about two months after I had started, he told me: "Do not tell people outside our group what you are doing here. A better, bigger group may hear it and beat us in the publications." While I argued that the dangers of such were small, and that it would not be wise to arouse suspicion and isolation by remaining silent about my research, my promotor was not convinced. So I heard and obeyed, describing my research only in the most general of terms.

When a course on computational techniques made me write an essay on how I wanted to use computational techniques in my own work, I was ordered to hide the truth and come up with another research idea using computational techniques, something I would probably not do but which would be useful for substituting the truth. Actually this went quite well (I got a new and, in my view, interesting idea for research), although it gave a somewhat awkward situation two years later when one of the course leaders, who is a professor at Utrecht University, asked me how the research I had pretended to do was going.

And, although I cannot prove it, this same promotor (I have three) also discouraged me from writing about my research, until the thesis came very close and the other promotors insisted on publication of my main research. While this may be justified somehow since by now we had almost finished the commercial version of the software, it forces me to write all my articles in the last year of my PhD-study, which is hard work. Also, since writing articles generally helps you to sharpen your ideas and get ideas for further research, this has given me little time to improve my work with their inspiration. There are things to be said for the traditional cycle of research-write-research-write, instead of research-research-research-write-write-write. Advice to starting PhD-students: write articles as soon as you are able, and if your promotor disallows publication, write them as if they should be able to pass peer-review. You will learn much and get new ideas.

Now the end of my PhD-study is nearing. The bonds of obligation of secrecy will be broken as soon as my contract ends, for then my employer is not my employer anymore, and since there is no standard competition clausule in a PhD-students contract - after all, we are supposed to be educated, not to spend four years learning but not being allowed to use what we have learned- and my hands and mouth will be free again until I choose another employer to bind them as he will - though I will prefer to choose one who doesn't bind them too strictly.

This situation was of course clearly unacceptable to my professor. While he cannot legally control me when the university doesn't pay me anymore on a mutual consensus, that did not discourage him from trying to control me from "over his grave". Back to the chamber of secrets…

So a month or two ago I found my professor in my office waving a three-page contract, to his own admission copy-pasted from the internet, which forbade me (and my students and colleague) to make any information about the Molecule Evoluator public which had not been made public before. Forever. Actually I would scarcely have believed my promotor would be content with controlling me merely for eternity, but here it was in black and white.

Of course my professor presented it differently (especially when I had said that I saw no advantage of signing that contract which did not seem to do me any good and also was not obligatory for me to sign as I am no employee of his company), he said it was not meant to make me silent, but to reward me for all the hard work I had done inventing and implementing something that could yield money. Also it would come handy for him if investors wanted to know that no-one else could use inside information to come up with a competing product.

In any case, after some legal advice, I have asked him to at least come up with a Dutch version instead of an English one (legal language is difficult enough, and even more so if it is not in your mother tongue) and make a clausule that this contract will not hinder me in making publications for my thesis.

Upon which my professor exclaimed that I was among friends and that the contract was not meant to hinder me in publications. It just didn't say so. And translating such text is difficult enough, and he wanted to do this just without any of that expensive legal fuss.

Perhaps it is a problem that someone experienced in programming computers, such as myself, knows by bitter experience that computers do what you command them, not what you intend them to do unless you command them correctly what you intend them to do. For now I therefore insisted on clarity. Let what we mean also be what we say, that there may be no grievous misunderstandings between each other, in which I do what my promotor has thought he had forbidden me to do but which he had not because of a poorly-composed contract. As my father's promotor said to my father "Goede afspraken maken goede vrienden" - "Good agreements make good friends."


However, I should in this story not suggest that all scientists are thus: one of my other promotors encourages free and elaborate publication. Perhaps this is because he believes in it, or because in his particular field of computer science you generally cannot earn much money with ideas themselves, usually only by combining lots of ideas and implementing them.

What should we therefore conclude from this tale?

Secrecy may be necessary for war and commerce, for science in general it is bad, though for individual scientists it may be occasionally good. Would private benefit outweigh public cost? This is a choice made by many individuals, but it generally does not reflect well on humanity, looking at for example the littering of public parks. You cannot hold something without being caged by it, and you cannot have a house full of jewels without guarding it. Perhaps the best scientists are those who do not burden their minds with keeping secrets and coveting riches, but those who use that brain capacity to generate and communicate new ideas and their days to work and build instead of to hold and protect.

Let me now be silent in respect for the persons who gave me with this PhD-study the possibility to pursue a career in science. Let me absorb their wisdom and lessons, and let me throw aside the fetters and repulse those ideas which I cannot agree with. Let the secrecy of promotors be like the crutches of a man who has broken his leg; circumstances may make them necessary, but by choice the man would want to walk freely on his own two legs and throw the crutches aside as soon as their service has been done. I do not know whether my intellect and creativity will outweigh my openness and morality if I would further pursue a scientific career, but for now I hope I can go on and further, as far away as possible from the Chamber of Secrets.


Thought for today:

It is interesting and useful to talk not only to, but also with God. If you are willing to listen, you can hear God answering your prayers and your complaints. Have a conversation with him. He is your Friend. Though your partner in this dialogue may not be the real God, it may be just the God-like part of you which can distance itself from your own habits and viewpoint and give some wisdom, perspective and advice in return.

Why not talk with God today? If He has something interesting to say, write it down.

A farewell to WoW

The contract has been drawn and signed. A farewell to WoW. Those that know what these letters mean might understand the tragedy. For those that don’t, let me explain.

WoW stands for “World of Warcraft”, a multi-player online role playing game, or, as these are affectively called by the game veterans, a MMORPG. This means that this is a game in which you create a character and let that character explore and fight in a virtual world, inhabited by computer-controlled characters (NPCs, non-player characters) and the characters of other players, the PCs.

Much of the fun in such a game comes from exploring new lands, defeating enemies, completing quests, gaining experience to level up, becoming stronger, learning new spells and abilities that make you even stronger, but also from teaming up with other players to together reach a larger or more difficult goal, for example to beat extremely tough opponents such as dragons, or to organize a raid on an enemy town.

As I said, I’ll say farewell to World of Warcraft. Only - I’ve never played it. It is a bit like saying farewell to a beautiful girl who was your colleague for four years but you did not dare ask out on a date. Stopping a relationship which is still at the most public, unintimate level. So what is my relationship to World of Warcraft, and why am I stopping it?

Obviously, not because I am disappointed with the game, such as the warlock who wrote that he had cancelled his account since the warlock class was “gimped” (= too weak relative to the other classes). There is no hate or bitterness on my part towards Blizzard, perhaps just a bit of sadness at our parting. And still, Blizzard is a game company I admire (and occasionally fear) because of the quality of their products.

My first “blizzard” was probably also the first blizzard product ever: “Warcraft: Orcs versus Humans” (or named something like that). As was usual at that stage of my life (I was approximately 20 years old), I encountered it via one of my friendly computer-science studying acquaintances who happily let me copy it to my hard disk. And then it was time to play.

Hours I spent on finishing the missions. First the human mission number one, then the orc mission number one. Then the human mission number two, etcetera. Each mission getting more diverse troops, from archers and spearthrowers to priests and necrolytes, knights and wolfriders, and even catapults.

Then disaster struck. In one of the later human missions (mission 7 or such) I got stuck. If I tried to free the imprisoned peasants by sending a large part of my troops to slay their captors, the orc counteroffensive came too quick to reunite my troops. If I sent too little troops, they were slaughtered by the guards. I pondered and puzzled an entire day – perhaps even two, and then decided I would never play Warcraft again! I removed the game thoroughly from my hard disk, which would forever discourage me from again playing it, since I would have to repeat all those hours getting back to my old position.

Years later, I found in a game manual that the solution was actually quite easy, though it was a tactic I hadn’t used before: use a small group to lure the guards back to your main force which could easily destroy them, so you could free the peasants without suffering too much damage yourself. Thus you could still survive the enemy offensive.

In any case, some years later (when I could access internet via my university) I read in the game reviews that there was a sequel to Warcraft, Warcraft II. It got a very good review, and perhaps because I remembered the fun I had had playing Warcraft I, perhaps also because I wanted to get revenge for my loss and wanted to prove that I could complete Warcraft II, I asked it as a birthday present, one of my first (perhaps even my first) legally bought non-discount games.

I played Warcraft II and I enjoyed it very much. I even completed it! Well, then I started to play the expansion set “Beyond the Dark Portal” but our old CD-ROM-drive broke down, and when I tried it on my new computer the game ran much too fast to be playable. I believe the CD-ROMs have now found their final resting place in the rooms of two of my younger first cousins once removed. Of course, this did not stop me from spotting a discounted version of Starcraft, another Blizzard product, and completing it. And when I was just starting my PhD-research, temptation struck in an even more beautiful guise: Warcraft III, which offered not just orcs and humans but also the insidious undead and the beautiful night elf race to play.

Though purists could complain that compared to Starcraft the races still looked suspiciously much like one another (though fortunately less than in the earlier Warcrafts), Warcraft III was at least as addictive as its predecessors. Perhaps the better graphics, perhaps a better story, perhaps the addition of heroes, who became your “acquaintances” after a while and for whom you started to care, and wanted to know what would happen to them. Warcraft III was the first game (and so far, the last) which was so addictive that I played it through the night without wanting to go to bed, and only at 10 am, when I had finished the human campaign, I staggered away from my computer to go to the university to work. As you would expect, it was not a very productive day. I got a huge headache and had much trouble not to fall asleep. So I went home early. However, I had to take out the trash at the designated time, and while waiting for that time (in Leiden you get fines if you take the trash out early) I decided to play Warcraft. Incredibly, my entire headache and tiredness vanished, and I could play again for a long time. I do not remember if I got enough sleep that night, however, after a week or so I had finished the game and could get back to normal.

A year later- Warcraft III, expansion set. The day I bought it I could play a bit, but the next opportunity was when I was packing my bags for the ULLA summer school. So I believe that after guiding the night elves through their first few missions, I had to set my alarm clock to go off in one hour and 45 minutes, and got a little bit of sleep before I had to pack for Paris and catch my train. In general, one could say that for me Warcraft was so much fun that it was quite disruptive – but I kept coming back for more, since the fun part was too big to ignore. Perhaps the only thing that saved me from a Warcraft-ruined career was that I was mostly curious for how the story would unfold, and not so interested in multi-player games.

Then, my occasional internet visits to Blizzard and game-review sites alerted me that there was a new Blizzard product on the horizon: World of Warcraft, an online MMORPG. If it has been not clear by now why I was drooling, I will give additional info.

Not only did I know that Blizzard’s games were generally extremely fun and addictive, I had also developed into a fan of role playing games. While a 'Wizardry' had rolled my way but had been tossed aside after a while, the discount game “The Magic Candle 2”, bought for about fifteen guilders in the university bookshop, stole my heart. The graphics were crude, the characters and monsters quite square, the music squeaky, but the story was great and you experienced many adventures, in locations ranging from dungeons to lost cities, from catacombs to trade posts, from hobbit villages to dwarven mines. Lots of text, lots of story (you even needed the "research" skill to find the necessary information in the libraries scattered across the land), which I created a sort of alphabetical encyclopedia for to bundle. I even finished the game after a holiday or so of playtime. The Magic Candle 2 was followed by many more games, most of which were only of passing –often VERY passing- interest, though ADOM still stands out of the crowd, and the successors of Magic Candle 2, MC3 and bloodstone, were nice but did not compare to the “original” MC2 (I’ve later found the original Magic Candle, but it was very difficult to get started due to equipment and money shortages, so I stopped playing after a while). I did spend much playtime in “Shadows of Amn”, and even finished what I consider one of the most interesting and certainly best-written game I’ve ever encountered: “Planescape Torment”. I’ve got about five pages of quotes from that game, more than from any book that I’ve read. The dialogues ranged from witty to philosophical, and the background story was sufficiently complex, the characters multidimensional, and the world detailed and intricate to warrant role playing at its best. Despite the large pile of “RPG-junk”, games like the Magic Candle and Torment have made it my favourite genre.

So enter “World of Warcraft”. A whole new world to explore! An unfolding story! Many quests to fulfill! And all probably with the improbably high Blizzard-quality. A Blizzard RPG would for me be dreamlike combination comparable to a Miss World with a PhD-degree from Harvard. But unlike such a lady, this bounty would also be available for me, for a modest monthly fee.

What stopped me from being sucked right into the jaws of World of Warcraft? One factor was probably a cautionary feeling that this could run out of hand, not for a week but for a month or more. And for a PhD-student finishing his thesis this would not be good. Secondly, a certain laziness coupled to the horror of the remembrance of the last time I upgraded my “easily disassemblable” PC. Having to tug at the plastic front pane till about the breaking point (which was, according to the university shop, the official way of opening it) and having to fight through a graph-theoretically not-untanglible horde of wires just to get a DVD drive installed, I instinctively recoiled from having to install the memory upgrades necessary to play it. So I seemed safe. But was I?

Like a fly that is drawn towards the sun but is inside the house and smashes itself repeatedly against the window, I, being unable to play myself, was able via the internet to keep an eye on WoW. I could visit the official website, the many more unofficial websites, the fan sites, the previews and reviews, the forums, the download pages, etcetera. For hours I have meandered through the internet, learning about the different kinds of spells and abilities of each class, PvP, the talent system, the racial advantages, pets, the different dungeons and some of the quests. Buzz. Buzz. I’ve heard the complaints of warlock players, the strategies of rogues, the talent builds of mages and the boasts of shadow priests. And still there was more to read, more to learn…

Yesterday, though a official free day, I visited the university to do some small programming jobs that I wanted to have finished before the official work week began again. I had scheduled in two hours, which should be sufficient.

After three quarters of an hour I had solved the first problem, and I took a well-deserved break with a cup-a-soup (we nowadays have a soup-vending machine near our lab) and decided to look for a few moments on www.worldofwarcraft.com. When I looked up again it was almost two hours later. I hastily added some functionality but it was not sufficient to finish the project. Then I had to hurry home since a friend would visit me that evening. A relaxed afternoon – filled with something that was not useful at all. Warcraft's world grabbed my attention, but I learned little. It was amusing, but void. And it was not the first time.

Looking back over the past few months I have spent far too much time looking at websites and following the developments of a computer game, while I should spend my evenings writing my thesis and looking for a new job to do after my contract finishes.

I should. That is also the problem. In life, there are so many things to do, reasonable things, commanded things, necessary things and “necessary” things. World of Warcraft provided a dream world to explore and understand, an escape. And perhaps escapes are necessary in life. Yet sometimes one should face his problems and tackle them. And a good general knows that his men will fight harder if he blocks their escape routes.

It may be that I find a different route, but perhaps this pause will give me a chance. Perhaps if I find the obvious route blocked, this may give me enough time to come to my senses again and look at the things I really want to do, the goals I want to achieve.

Now just hope that this blog won’t absorb the extra time…


Thought for today (actually, based on a dialogue between the main character and the gitzherai fighter/mage Zak'kon):

We know ourselves by the questions we ask, and the questions we don't ask.

For example, I have often asked how I could be more attractive to girls, or how I could become a better scientist or writer. But I never asked how I could earn more money, or get revenge on my enemies. Perhaps this says something about my desires and the things I find important in life. Perhaps next time I ask a question, it may be good to ask myself then: why am I asking this question?

The Impossible Dream

When I finally read the book “Don Quichote” I wondered why so many people called it a classic…

The plot was long and rambling, the jokes were crude, and most of it was plain boring. An author who goes on in this longwinded way for over five hundred pages is someone I would consider a candidate for capital punishment. Although the historical sidenotes were interesting as they told a lot about life in 16th-17th century Spain, I was at a loss why such a story had ever become popular.

Ironically, the answer came from an artistic genre that in contrast to literature is often considered to be at the bottom of the lowest ranks of artistic status, barely resisting the attempts by some official artists to kick it into the gutter. I am talking about the musical. Since cultural consensus seems to be that the more popular something is, the less artistic it is, musicals are often considered to be only slightly more cultural than the average first-league soccer match. However, some musicals really are very good. Such a one is Man of La Mancha, an adaptation of Cervantes’ book.

In this case, I learned more about the true nature of Don Quichote by reading the three-page synopsis in the booklet accompanying the CD than I had wrestled from 500+ pages of Cervantes. The author, Dale Wasserman, had sifted through the apparent goal of Cervantes to satirize the then-popular chivalry stories (in which he may have succeeded in literature, though they are seeping back through children’s programs) and found why so many people found the character of the Don so appealing: his nobility and idealism.

“Come, enter into my imagination, and see him: Boney, hollow faced, eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision. He conceives the strangest project ever imagined ...To become a knight errant and sally forth into the world, righting all wrongs!”

In Cervantes’ world, as in our own, as undoubtedly also in the “chivalrous” time of king Arthur, such noble behaviour was probably rare to non-existent. After all, are people not always in a world where they have to fight another to survive? Where the word “I” is the most frequently used word in the English language (and also, note, the only non-name which has a capital), and where people seem to spend 95+% of their time thinking about themselves, always asking “what can I get out of it” first.

Yet for some reason this does not seem to be the answer to find happiness, and the most commonly-used remedy, grabbing even more for yourself, does not seem to help either. Far too many people, when they stop to think about their lives (which most of us avoid to do for good reasons), feel an eerie similarity to a text from “trainspotting”:
“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future.
Choose life”.

As I understand, this is a poem from John Hodge, but as all good poetry, it tells us also about other people than Mr. Hodge. Just as our complex brains crave religion and art and yachts and jewelry and parties while cats can lead contented lives just by eating, walking in the garden, washing themselves and sleeping, we may not be basically suitable for living only to satisfy our immediate biological and material needs. Is There More?

And while, as in trainspotting, heroin might be the alternative to “Life”, it is not the answer. Enter the Don.


“Chandler: Hey, you guys in the living room all know what you want to do. You know, you have goals. You have dreams. I don't have a dream.
Ross: Ah, the lesser known "I Don't Have a Dream" speech.”
--Friends

Some people say that happiness is sitting behind the TV with your phone off-line and a packet of chocolate chip cookies. Considered by a soldier marching through a steaming swamp in Bogga-Bogga, pestered by mosquitos, sucked dry by leeches, shouted at by his sergeant and shot at by rebels using the guns his government sold them last year when they still were the “good guys”, this might look like the summit of happiness. Unfortunately, comfort waxes dull after a while. After a while, we become restless, and ask ourselves “is this all?”

And here comes the Don. Having a vision, he has no doubt where he should go. He has no doubt as to what he should do. He has no doubt as to what his task is and what his role is in the world. He knows why he is important. He knows that he will make the world a better place by doing his Quest. By following his dream. An impossible dream mayhaps, fighting against odds far greater than himself, going on marches longer than anyone could endure, facing fears greater than anyone should be asked to face. Yet his vision is the inner fire that keeps him burning, that makes him strong, much stronger than his old body and bony frame seem to support.

“Wanted: vision. The bigger the better. Please respond at number…”

Indeed. I want a vision. I feel I need a vision. Working in an university group that probably reflects much of society in its non-Quichotsm, where publications seem more important than research, where money outweighs moraility, where your professor does not condemn you for your lack of vision but for having a vision, no matter how small (visions can be unpractical, after all) I do not feel that I want or should spend the rest of my life this way. Of course, I have four free days now and could go to the cinema and see movies and forget, and go to the bar and have ten drinks and forget, but I’d rather tackle it here and now. It has been said that in life there are only two pains, the pain of discipline (fear?) and the pain of regret, and that the pain of regret can only grow larger in time, while that of discipline and will grows smaller.

So that’s why I want a vision, why I feel I need a vision to stay/become a happy, healthy individual instead of an introverted hermit seeking recluse in books and dreams.

However, even getting a dream is not easy, sometimes it even feels impossible. The impossible dream. Let me tell you what happened to me recently.

Since I do not yet know what I want to do after my PhD, I followed a course on career orientation last week. In it, we were asked to describe a vision. Well, led by the course leader, I had a vision and drew a picture of it, as was required to “activate the right half of your brain”. So actually, the vision was quite easy. The problem was, when I had drawn it, it didn’t seem to be any fun, just a different kind of boredom.

This upset the instructors, since I was supposed to simply use my “right brain” to envision the job I would love, then picture it in detail, and then start to get it. Using one of the classical training paradigms, they advised me that since this method did not work for me, I should try more of it, and create three dreams: a nightmare, an ideal situation, and a realistic situation.

Being a very obedient and open-minded person I have tried to do so during the last few days. Actually, the nightmare was very easy: what I am doing now, only with the bad things enlarged and the fun things eliminated. However, when imagining my perfect situation, I only got so far as to realize that I would like to drink fresh orange juice for my breakfast again, but my dream job remained as elusive as ever. For while in our culture there are opposites for adjectives and such, good-bad, ugly-beautiful, fat-thin, there are no opposites for nouns. The opposite of a boring postdoc would just be “something that is not a boring post-doc”, but that does not narrow down the job search very much.

I felt quite discouraged. And even now I do not feel particularly hopeful.

But then I realized that a vision is not something that is out of my reach. The complaint of my professor that I had too much vision, despite the fact that his own vision capacity seems to be able to incorporate only visions of 1.2 mm in radius or less, indicates that there is some kind of vision seed in me that might just grow if it were watered properly. And I remembered that there had been times in my life when I had been enthusiastic about things. When I was ten years old, I loved to read books on how you could do cool physics experiments at home, like weighing someone with water-scales, or making trees of crystalline silver. When I was eleven, my father found a nice chemistry book for me to read in the vacation, and with enormous pride I wrote down in my personal journal the two first mysterious but powerful formulas to describe and understand the world: CO2 and CaCO3. Then I started to learn the periodic table by heart. When I was 16 years old, I loved programming and computer languages and scoured Hilversum library for computer books. Then my chemistry teacher asked me to participate in the National Chemistry Olympiad, and I had a vision that I would win and a journalist would interview me for the paper. Well, I did not win. The first time. But the second time, the journalist came. Actually, it became a crappy interview in which I was unpleasantly surprised to see myself portrayed as an arrogant, close minded young snob. But the strange thing was that when I had that vision I had a sort of calm certainty that This Was What Was To Be. It was just in the meantime, when I was doing the actual difficult tests and being surrounded by many other very clever students competing that I despaired.

The last time I can clearly remember having a vision –and here this story is biting itself in its tail- was when I saw a musical in Leiden by the amateur company Triade. It was a nice enough compilation of existing musical numbers, but stronger than what I saw was the thought that pervaded me: I want to do this! I had a vision and a strong desire to stand on the stage, to dance, to sing, to act, but above all to stand there and say the Truth to the audience. As I write this down it sounds a bit silly, but emotionally, my fire was kindled.

Despite the gaping unbelief of all singing teachers I have before and afterwards encountered, I proceeded to prepare for the upcoming audition with great discipline and enthousiasm, and indeed got a very good role as the Sheriff of Nottingham, announcing to the audience some of the truest words in the entire musical

“Het volk is dom, laf
Niet in staat zijn eigen keuzes te maken
Dus… doe ik dat graag voor ze”
---
“People are stupid and cowardly
They cannot make their own choices
So I gladly do it for them”

-“Robin Hood” - Ajolt Elsakkers/Jeroen Smits/Sandra van der Thoorn

Indeed, the time has come to be brave and smart and make new choices, unless I want that my father, my professor or someone else makes them for me.

Perhaps, refecting on my visions, they teach me some things. First, that for me a vision is not triggered by sitting in my room quietly watching TV or something, but by a environmental trigger that inspires me, be it a book, a teacher or a show. Perhaps this means that I should not ponder and wait and try to “dream the impossible dream”, but to go out into the world and seek new impulses, and hope that while most will be uninteresting, somewhere there will be one or two that can trigger me.

Second, most visions last a while but not your life. I still like chemistry a lot but won’t consider a career in synthesis. I will probably continue programming computers for a while but I do not want it to consume my entire life. Acting can be fun, and singing is nice, but based on my experience with Triade I have decided that being a professional musical star is not the career that I covet most. A vision is not forever, but it gives you energy and a growth spurt, and the consequences gained and the lessons learned remain in you forever, lingering but helping you in odd moments when you can use a stray acting lesson to calm a stage-fearing colleague, or an old chemistry law to explain a strange enzymatic phenomenon. A vision may be a sign to grow in a direction, to achieve it, then to release it and continue. You grow all the time, and God is smiling.


Thought for the day:

Much too often we “go through the movements” of our daily routine. We have allocated some time in our schedules for cleaning our room, checking our e-mail, preparing our food. But often these things are done more efficiently and with more joy if we first think about what we want to achieve with these activities, write that goal down (on paper or mentally) and then do the task. You become more productive, and also happier because you again remember that you do things because you want certain things, not because you should do them.

Exercise: for ten things you “have to” do today, write down what you want to achieve with them, what would be the ideal goal? Then do them, and see how often you reach the goal, or come close…

Fraud for Science

It is often said that a person loses his or her virginity only once,

and afterwards cannot reclaim it (though nowadays operations are available to revirginate accidental female ex-virgins). But while losing your physical virginity is generally something that by definition occurs only once, your mental virginity is often lost several times. You hear that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist, find child-porn under the bed of your favourite uncle, or discover that the admired director of your favourite charity steers a very large amount of your donations to his favourite charity, being a summer house in Hawaii and a 60-foot yacht.

Perhaps it is the only possible fate of ideals to fall. But it can be very painful when they do so.

Today, I was visited by one of my fellow PhD-students, who showed me the reviews of the research proposal he had written (and our promotor had submitted under his own name). I had long been aware that there was some fishy business about this proposal, but today the smell became too strong for me to ignore.

The colleague I am talking about (I will not disclose his name for reasons which may be obvious from the rest of my story) is a very smart young scientist. When he had been in our group for a few months, he developed a very clever idea to improve upon an existing bioinformatics method. Though I aided in developing the idea (and debugging the software), the idea was mostly his, and we got very nice results. It was cute, clever science, and I would have been very proud of it had it been my own work. The project was finished in one month, then about two months were spent on writing the article (intermittently with other research, of course), and was set for publication.

But this was not to be.

Around the time when my colleague wanted to submit it to a bioinformatics journal, our promotor read about special Dutch bioinformatics fellowships. You could send the committee a project proposal, and if they found it interesting, they would grant the submitter money to hire a postdoc for nine months to do it. Of course, this was not an opportunity to be missed. All computational PhD-students (including myself) were called upon to write proposals. I myself did not succeed, being more of a cheminformatician and finding I had too little knowledge of the current state and problems of bioinformatics to think of something interesting, but my colleagues were able to, promped by our promotor. Actually, the professor had a very simple method to generate ideas: submit a proposal to ask for a grant for research you have already done but not published yet. So my colleague was encouraged to write about his research as if it had to be done yet, and elaborate on it with all kinds of extraneous and probably superfluous activities to make it seem to last nine months. Of course, if the money was received, we could do other important things with it. And unfortunately, publishing was out of the question for now.

Today, my colleague came to visit me with the reviews. One was bad, one was reasonable, and one was supportive. So unfortunately he still cannot publish since our professor still has hope that a good defense of the proposal might allow us to get the money.

From this affair I get a sort of queasy feeling. Of course, when I questioned my professor about the appropriateness and ethics of this behaviour, I got the same answer as any time I ask whether doing the things he prescribes us are ethical. “Everybody does it”. While I can imagine that multiple people do it, for some reason that does not convince me that it is right. Perhaps this is an unfortunate consequence from my early highschool years, when I was bullied by several classmates, and “everyone” in my class seemed to accept these proceedings. Of course, there were several of them, and only one of me, but despite that it somehow still did not feel right.

Of course it is nice to have the ideal of science of striving to uncover the truth of the universe, with the only desire for truth, disregarding the consequences to the scientist him- or herself. It is bad enough to see many scientists wasting their energy on squabbling and bickering about ancient feuds that were started by their promotor’s promotors, slicing and dicing articles down to the “least publishable unit”, creating reviews by copy-pasting abstracts, and demanding of PhD-students with bright ideas to keep their mouth shut since the professor might want to start a company. But to delay publication of an interesting and perhaps important article for a year or more, to ask for money when you have no idea yet on what you want to do with it, to spend inordinate amounts of times writing a proposal for something that you have already done instead of creating and executing new ideas, and misleading a committee into believing that the research has not been performed yet and you need the sparse money of the scholarships to achieve it while someone else might have genuine a good research idea that would really need that money to be executed...

Of course I may be as bad as the others for knowing this but not making it known to the committee, somewhat as the evil of the first mate of captain Ahab in "Moby Dick" was not that he was not a good man, but that he lacked the courage to stop his insane boss. And it may truly be a prevalent phenomenon, one of my other colleagues, overhearing our conversation, made the remark that it was also typical of companies. “Its just necessary for survival”.

Which reminds me of Shaw’s remark that the more you defend a necessary evil, the more and more it seems necessary and the less and less it seems evil.

Sometimes it is said that if people spent as much effort in correcting their faults as they do in hiding them from others, the world would be a much happier place.

Perhaps it’s all just a game, and I am just a sort of prudish prig who would, like Dicken’s Thomas Gradgrind, object on having horses on wallpaper because real horses don’t walk up and down the sides of rooms. Am I overreacting, like the old Catholic school posters showing the four sins that get boys in hell: robbery, arson, murder and not going to church on Sundays? Can I blame my professor just because he wants what is best for our group – money? And can I blame my colleague who is just following orders? Do the ends justify the means? Should we just put the blame on the funding committee on encouraging these kinds of behaviour – after all, you get what you reward. Should we say that since my colleague is a brilliant young scientist, the money will go toward a good purpose, as a sort of reward and further encouragement? All these things may be true, but should we really want science to be this way? Should we strive to live so? Could we really close our eyes on our deathbed with a contented smile on our lips, whispering the happy words "we sure fooled them bigtime"?

Difficult questions. Would I bend or burst?

For me, I see no real choice but to go on, releasing my illusions but keeping my ideals, hoping that however I might disagree with some kinds of behaviour, I will always try to do what I think is right for the world, not just for myself. Let's pray that I’ll be able to do so.



Thought of the day (of a previous day actually, but still a very good thought)

The character you display is often the result of the beliefs you have about yourself, others and the world. If you believe that other people are sensitive and easily offended, you will become a shy person. If you believe that there is only one way to live and that you are doing it, you will become rigid and unpleasant. But perhaps this also works the other way around: if we choose to believe that mistakes do not kill us, we might become braver, more playful and relaxed. If we believe that other people are fundamentally OK, we become more accepting and friendlier, and may even gain friends. Behaviour can follow beliefs.

Exercise for today: List your own behaviours that annoy you and try to deduce the beliefs that seem to cause/encourage them. Then look whether these beliefs are realistic. Then look at how you want to be, and what you would have to believe to be so. Then see if you can convince yourself by thinking and doing experiments that those good beliefs are mostly true. We should never become stupid, but very often we get what we expect, so it is better to expect the best.

My first blog

For a change, my professor inspired me...

For those that read this, my name is Eric-Wubbo Lameijer, and I am a PhD-student in medicinal chemistry and computer science in Leiden, the Netherlands. I certainly had read about blogs a seemingly long time ago, in the New Scientist, which ran an article about how blogs were being used in China to express forbidden political opinions. However, expressing political opinions did not attract much interest to blogging from most Chinese - until a Chinese woman began to publish her sex diaries.

I do not intend to publish my sex-life online. Since I have the reputation of being a computer programmer, you readers may truly or falsely content theirselves with the illusion that I have no sex life to write of. What interests me, however, is thinking, and learning, and improving myself. I like very much to learn about myself and the world, perhaps a reason why I became a scientist. Sometimes, when praying or meditating or cycling, I get ideas which I jot down. Perhaps a blog is a nice spot to do so too. Since thoughts caught in the mind of one person may be powerful, but if they are allowed to run free and spark other thoughts, they can be much more fertile. I hope therefore that this may develop in a sex site for mental sex.

To return to my professor. He is setting up a cheminformatics company, and apparently had read the BusinessWeek on how blogging is going to transform business. However, even after reading the article he had not understood what it was. Of course, this may be a common feature of business magazines; perhaps their task is to impress executives with the need to work on X, after which the executive, blissfully unaware about what X exactly is, commands his hopefully more knowledgeable subordinates to do X "since it is obviously the next trend."

I did tell him something about blogs which I hoped was accurate. But then I thought: Why not experiment with it? So here I am. May this blog be the record of my thinking and learning, and may it perhaps help others gain more insight in themselves and the world. And may it inspire them to go together with me on such a journey, distant though we may be on this planet.

Thought of today:

It is very easy to keep ourselves busy with thousands of tasks. But how often do we ask ourselves whether we do them because doing them is important or because we use to do them and other things which we actually should do seem too difficult or frightening?

Perhaps it is good to write down sometimes which tasks you have to do, and which you want to do, and then grade them on how important doing them really is.