January 22, 2011

Dear Lucy,

It's been six months since I've sent you a letter!  We've talked on the phone, but that's a very different thing.

This letter includes a couple of enclosures that can't be shared by phone.  The little water pistols were in my Christmas cracker, and they led to much childish behaviour and hilarity around the dinner table.  I filled them and squirted a couple of unsuspecting people, and then passed them to Mom, thinking that she was mature and responsible enough to behave better.  But she promptly squirted Dad so I took them away from her and gave them to someone else...  Perhaps you could have a water-pistol fight with your visitors or your carers.

The other enclosures are copies of various newspaper and online articles arising from something I wrote last month.  (You don't need to read any of these, but you can admire them.)  You might have seen on the news at the beginning of December that NASA researchers had found a new form of DNA with arsenic in it.  But when I read the scientific paper reporting this finding, I found it to be full of errors in both methods and interpretation.  So I wrote a blog post critiquing it, which was widely circulated and admired by other scientists, starting a storm of criticism of the work.  This in turn led to some very interesting articles about the role of informal communication in scientific peer review.  And a few nice invitations for me - a Q&A (fake interview) in a major journal (enclosed too), two talks at the University of Kentucky, and participation in a prestigious informal meeting called "Science FOO Camp" next summer in San Francisco.

Now I'm up to my eyeballs in teaching a radically new genetics course I've developed.  This is the pilot version of the course (only 40 students), but next fall we'll have at least 600.  I'm trying to replace the 'classical' genetics syllabus with a 21st Century Genetics course that teaches students what they really need to know.  Right now all the components of the course are at the hand-to-mouth stage - everything gets done only hours before it's needed.  Sad to say, I get into this state every time I teach - no matter how much I vow to prepare in advance, it all ends up being done at the last minute.

I hope your weather has been bright and not too cold.  As you can see from the above recent forecast, ours has been typical Vancouver winter, grey and dreary.  I was expecting new snow on the mountains, and regretting that I don't have time to get up there snowshoeing this weekend, but now I look out my window I see only bare trees on the slopes so they must have had rain instead.

The other night I went with Mom and Dad and Michelle and Ron to see the movie The King's Speech, about King George VI's struggle with his very bad stammer.  It was excellent, though the previews were mostly for horrible violent stupid movies that none of us would ever be willing to sit through.  But one was for a new version of Jane Eyre, which might be good.

I'll send you some cheese with Michelle and Mom next month, but I don't think I'll be able to send any of those wonderful crackers.  Apparently the Seattle cracker company's oven broke down a couple of months ago.  It's replaced now, but there's a LONG backlog of orders for the crackers so they may not be available for another month or more.  I'm making do with stoned wheat thins.

I'll probably come for a visit (bringing Mom and maybe Trishie?) in May, if that would suit you.

Lots of love,

Rosie