The going price of home

I'm moving to Boston next week and am cleaning out my current place. I came across a car rental map of the Bay Area from a visit I made back in Feb. of this year. It was for a job interview, which lead to a job offer that I ultimately declined. It was a difficult decision. I really, really wanted to move back West. But the job, while I would have been good at it, I felt I would eventually outgrow. Yet, I came this close to moving back West.

In academia until you get established professionally you tend to live a nomadic life. In the 8 years since I've graduated from college I've lived in the following places: California, Arizona, Wisconsin, and New York. But its difficult to make geographic preference a high priority because it can limit your job prospects. And you kinda just have to go where opportunities are. But I've met some really great people at all the places I've been and I'm sure to meet a lot more when I start my PhD in Boston. But on this New Year's Eve day when its been snowing off and on all day with a biting wind, I wish I was back in Phoenix eating oranges from my parents backyard citrus tree bathed in warm December sunshine.

I'm going to be spending alot of time on Google maps

So I'm moving to Boston next week. I go from being a country mouse to a city mouse.
I'm a little nervous because streets in Boston go every which way. My friend who lives there said the way he got familiar with it was he would look up places he need to go on Google maps and commit it to memory. The more places he went, the quicker he got familiar with the area. I think I'm going to do the same.

Quietly walked away

Today was my last day at Cornell. Besides my stint in undergrad, this was the longest I had stayed in any one place for work or school in the past several years. Initially, when I arrived I was like how did I decide to come to such a podunk town. But in the past year, in particular the town grew on me. And I really enjoyed the University atmosphere. There was a big snowstorm today and many people didn't show to work or left early, so it was very quiet. When I finally logged off my computer for the last time, it finally hit me that my time here was over. But it was time to move on in my career, so here I go to grad school to earn that PhD I seemed destined to get. I just took the long way around to get here.

Rediscovering my feel for the water

My time at Cornell is winding down and I'm feeling a bit sentimental about a lot of things, but one thing in particular. Fall of 2006 I took a swim class through the employee Wellness program. I hadn't *touched* the water in 8 years. Not even a flip turn. But I guess swimming is like riding a bike. Once you learn, you never forget. After the six week class was over, I got into a good swim routine, doing workouts any where from 2-4 times a week. Over the past two years I'm sure I've swam several hundred thousand yards. I met some new people in the process. Out of the pool I spent far too long on YouTube looking at racing clips and technique of Ian Thorpe, Grant Hackett, Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin, and Brendan Hansen to name a few. And this semester I met some hard core swimmers and finally had enough pool time to do some intense workouts (at least 3500-3800 yards) The best part of swimming for me though is when I push off the wall in a streamline position. I feel the water flow past my 6'7'' frame dnd even though its maybe only a few seconds I'm in a streamline off the wall, all my troubles go away and I'm just a part of the water. I missed that feeling and I'm glad I re-discovered it in of all places at an indoor pool in the middle of rural New York at a University I'm going to miss for a lot of reasons.

GWAS and Missing Heritability

I read pretty good overview of a set of papers in at Nature Genetics advanced online publication about genomewide association studies for several metabolic traits at the ScienceBlog Genetic Future . I agree that the papers are based on *huge* amount of data - one used over 20,0000 individuals to SNP genotype.
As a person who is in the trenches with genome wide data on a daily basis, I can definitely appreciate how far the scale of GWAS has increased in the past few years.

But if you look at the bar chart in the blog post above showing what percentage of variance the SNPs explain, its six percent or less. These results again highlight the case of missing heritability . Currently, most GWAS studies use SNP genotyping arrays which type common variants segregating in the population. But as a soon to be graduate student in next-generation sequencing informatics, I think within the next 5 years you will see large scale GWAS using sequence data from sequence capture arrays and whole genome runs that will survey the entire spectrum of variants common and rare. And hopefully some of that missing variance will be uncovered.

Phelps interview

Watch CBS Videos Online

Around 3:22 in the interview - 10,000M for time? On a good week, I do 10,000 in 3 or 4 sessions. He seems so laid back in the interview, I'm still not sure if I appreciate how competitive this guy is. He deserves every accolade and financial award from his historic Olympic performance. Lets hope he shows just as much drive when he returns to training in January because I want him to kick some ass at the FINA World Championships in Rome in 2009.