Training Log Archive: iansmith

After a few hours of talks, we had three hours of designated "recreation time;" I went canoeing with some peeps - Ben, Francis, Karina, James -, then took the James Hawley challenge of swimming out to a buoy and back around to the beach. I mostly swam backstroke, as it was the most sustainable for me. Front crawl is good, but looking down in the lake repeatedly didn't appeal. I also struggle to keep my breathing steady for more than a few minutes of front crawl and not overexerting myself. Afterwards, we threw a frisbee and football around and generally socialized. I put on sunscreen, but I fear some of it washed away in the lake, so I may be lightly toasted.

C • Swimming 3

One of our social events was a team scavenger hunt. The hunt was quite complex - there were twelve teams of five (a mix of new and returning students), and there were three ways of scoring points:

1. 14 Trivia questions printed on the packet (trivial, as it were)
   
2. 30 photo questions of varying difficulties (e.g. a picture of the team with the department head, a picture of the team with a squirrel, a photo of the team on the docks)
   
3. Activity minigames dispersed throughout the facility. The activities were harder to access because you had to have obtained a riddle directing you to the centre to gain access; we were handed two riddle cards at the start - only one of which we solved - and obtained additional riddle cards as we completed minigames. We only made it to three of eight possible minigames before the hour time limit elapsed, but apparently this was more than anyone else. It was logistically improbable to complete the event.

This is notable because while my team did not set out with great ambition, our efforts increased as the hunt went on. Everyone bought in to the maximal effort, and we were the only team that I saw that was running. I had grabbed a paper map of the facility, so I even got to orienteer a little.

Our team obliterated the competition and won eternal glory (and a Starbucks gift card or some such).

C • Geneva Park 2

I am at Geneva Park in Orillia, Ontario for my department's retreat. It has been informative, relaxing, and stimulating. I went for a swim after chatting with a bunch of PIs.

Wow, it turns out Ken wrote what amounts to an essay on his 2015 Highlander:
https://www.attackpoint.org/viewlog.jsp/user_1/per...

This week, I resubmitted our manuscript to PLoS Biology in reply to reviewer comments. We'll see how it goes, but I'm ecstatic to no longer have that work and deadline hanging over my head. Publication is onerous.

I have learned a few lessons -

1. limit the core team to as small a group as is feasible who can all work together well. Overly high maintenance and clashing personalities can be difficult to appease, especially when in principle, consensus is needed to move forward.


2. As a corollary to (1), avoid work situations where you and your boss have incompatible perspectives.


3. It's helpful - even as first author, doing the core work - to have a senior advocate who can assist with navigating the publication process


4. Structure your project in a way to maximize reproducibility; organize everything so that it could run on a new system with the code and data downloaded. Refactoring code is unpleasant.


5. Thoroughly document all your experiments, but keep this documentation separate from the final version of the analyses you implemented.


6. Done is better than perfect.

Consider the following:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StartledCats/top/

An interesting way to summarize each day or longer period of my life (since 2002, say) would be the collection of Wikipedia pages I visited that day or period. Unfortunately, my records are not comprehensive, but perhaps the NSA could help me out.