Norway!

This is a little late I know, but that's how it goes I guess.

I went to Norway, Trondheim to be exact, to see Dr Dan (Simpson) who most of you reading this would know, but for the uninformed Dan was a student at QUT a few years ago and is now post-doccing in the far North. Dan and I are working on some Chlamydia modelling. Basically the way I see it is we are exploiting his skills at being able to do funky hard mathematics, dumbing it down to a level that I can understand, and then applying it to biology that I understand. In other words, new better models of Chlamydia infection.

It's great to work with Dan. First off, he's funny as and a genuinely nice person - so it's easy to talk with him, although at times our status as friends gets us a bit distracted (for example the approximately 20 mins spent expanding on the idea of Daryl Somers in black face). But still it's good fun. Second, Dan is great to work with because he knows maths - lots of it - and lots more of it than I know. That's important: always work with people who know more than you. It's like sport - you try to play against people who are better than you because it makes you get better. Same deal here - a) you learn things from them, b) if they can stand working with you, you will end up with better research outputs than you could have come up with yourself or with someone not as "mathy" (or whatever) as you.

Trondheim was quite nice - sunny for the first four days, then snow on the last day that I was there. I got to see a fair bit of the place, including a great pub and some good coffee while I was there too. I'm starting to realise that coffee shops (and I guess probably pubs too) should be classified according to their appropriateness for different types of academic activity. For example, coffee shops with big comfy sofas in dimly lit rooms can be quite good for solo work both on paper and on the laptop and they are also ok for 2-4 person conversations. On the other hand generic, more restauranty coffee shops (think coffee club brisbanites) are much better suited for initial conversations between new collaborators - you can't really get settled in and plug the laptop in anywhere... often people actually look at you strangely when you even go near to this type of behaviour. And of course, there are other classifications in between and off to the side ... perhaps someone could blog this type of thing? Or have restaurant review websites add it as a standard category.

Another interesting thing about Trondheim was the recreational part of the maths department. By which I mean tea room. These guys and girls had the good fortune to have TWO rooms (side by side granted) with a full kitchen, two coffee machines, blackboards and seating for about 50-60 in seminar style! Luxury. There was also a view out to the fjord and over the town itself. I think all departments should have this sort of thing.

Back to the work. We managed to get a good chunk of a paper written during the week and Dan did some coding to get some results produced for our model. I also managed to hook up a contact at QUT who does experiments on guinea pigs, and got some lab books and data from her! This is great - I've never looked at lab books before (more on that in another post). I expect we should be able to submit this one in particular in a few weeks, and begin working on some other soon too. I guess it will be back to skype though for the conversations unfortunately. Norway is a long way away and as much as I love seeing Dan, working with him, hanging out with him and drinking top notch beers with him and his beer geek friends - it might be a while before I trek that way again!