All-Clocks-All-Week is now officially over

I know most visitors do not read longer posts, especially not posts on arcane topics likeentrainment of circadian rhythms which filled this blog all week long.

But I wrote them for myself and everything else is profit. I wrote them because I wanted to hype myself for my own Dissertation writing. Even if no one reads those posts, I feel better having written them.

This whole exercise was quite instructive to me. Re-reading my old papers again, after 4-5 years made me see them in a different light. Compare, if you are interested, the way I described the data in my papers to the way I described them in blog posts! With a 20-20 hindsight, I now emphasize some things that I barely mentioned in the papers, while not paying too much attention to the ideas described at length in the papers.

When you just start out on some work and design a series of experiments, you live in that naive, megalomaniacal world in which you believe that all the experiments will work perfectly and the results will turn out exactly as you expect, confirming your brilliant new hypothesis.

A couple of years later, when all is done, you are feeling more than a little down. Several experiments did not work at all. Some worked as expected but the stats are not as clear-cut as you hoped for. Others worked fine but the results do not agree with your pet hypothesis. But data need to ger published so you sit down and explain them, although your heart has not completely changed your mind yet at the time.

But a few years later, bad experiments forgotten, it is easy to look at the work more objectively. Now I know not only what was published before, but also what was published after (and what I did subsequently and did not publish yet). I now know how the other people responded to my papers, who cited them and what for, and how the work slowly changed my own thinking on the topic. Now I look back at them and think - hey, they are not Science/Nature material but they are good, certainly not as bad as I thought they were back then.

I guess that is one part of the learning experience of graduate school - learning to live with a mismatch between expectations and reality and learn to cherish what you got.

Also, in a blog post, I could also give you behind-the-scenes story of how the paper came about in the first place, the true motivations for doing the work, exactly who did what (instead of just a line-up of co-authors), if there was ant competition or colaboration involved, how the work influenced our thinking long-term, and wild speculations that do not directly flow from the data but are only inspired by them.

We'll get back to normal programming next week.... and of course some Firday Weird Sex Blogging later tonight.