Hey, have I ever mentioned how cool it is to be a researcher? Well, it is extremely cool!
So far the project I work on has been all about programming. We were developing an educational tool to help teach maths (more specifically, network theory) to biologists, i.e. people who are supposed to hate it. As you might expect, it's not the easiest job in the world, especially when you work with a team of zero and the schedule is tight. Fortunately, I managed to get my hands on an incredible piece of software, very well thought through, and relatively easy to use and it that save me a lot of time. However, what I did was still a programming job, and as you might imagine, it is not the most fascinating of activities. At this point I ought to make an important clarification-it is quite a pleasurable experience to work (i.e. program) in a team of talented people. Just imagine it: the relentless pace at which ideas are thrown around, the pressure of all those bright minds sitting around you working at full capacity, the devastating feeling you get if your idea is not so great. You have not other choice but to keep up, and it seems like everyone else is doing their best to prevent you from that! If you are the least bit competitive, you will come to love great teams, simply because they are...well... great!

And since I did not get a lot of this, I'm glad the job is done and I can move on to some even more amazing interdisciplinary stuff. The paper is still in preparation, so I'm not allowed to say an awful lot yet, but it is simply great! We are designing a computer model of a complex biological system, which is meant to improve on a previous model. I feels rather good to know that you “correcting” the work of someone who has been around for 40 years longer than you and has published more papers than you can read in a month! Besides, as one of my colleagues said today, change is better than a break. Over the last couple of days I had to go over an awful lot of biological literature, gather ideas, identify other people's assumptions and figure out how to get rid of the biases they've introduced. In the process I got to talk to some very, very interesting and knowledgeable people. For example, did you know that fish shoals have designated “scouts”, who are supposed to swim toward predators and challenge them to give the shoal time to escape? And did you know, that those scouts tend to “hang around” (to the extent a fish can hang around with another fish) with the cowardly fish, but their “real friends” are other bold scouts? So, is science not cool?