Changing careers.

Apparently it is quite common for people these days to have more than one career. With this information I decided that it is time for a change. Up until now I have been a scientist and yesterday was my last day. This is a exciting career that I would highly recommend. I really enjoyed it.

However, from now on a whole new set of challenges awaits as I will try to grow a small business into a stable sustainable source of income. I will be making and selling designer wooden objects and hope most of this will be via commission. I started a small store on Etsy where some of the products are available - have a look here (some example items below):


Thus a new phase begins, also let me know if you are interested in something.

R&C

 p.s. Both Carina and I became Swedish citzens recently - Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.

An encounter with an elephant.

One time long ago I was sampling figs in the Kruger National Park with Christoff. This was hard work since we needed to carry the equipment to sample, which included several very long poles with pruning shears attached to the end. Additionally we also had to carry all the collected material back to the car - each bag of samples weighing several kilograms. This was all done in the sun, walking over rough terrain and wearing long trousers to limit the likelihood of gathering ticks. In essence heat was one of the main factors affecting the experience.

Our strategy consisted of driving on the park roads while checking the GPS*  and the map where the trees are located until we were as close to the sample tree as the road would allow (*note that we used an old-school GPS that only displayed the coordinates and we needed use a paper-map to orientate ourselves). This is where we parked the car, took all the relevant equipment and continued on foot. We also had a armed park ranger who accompanied us on these extravehicular activities. Since the trees of intrest often grow next to rivers we would sample several in one go if they were located reasonably close to each other by following the river or river bed, rather than returning to the car every time.

On ons such an occasion we sampled 5 or 6 trees and had quite a number of bags of figs with the accompanying sticky fig tree latex everywhere, scratches from the falling branches, our entourage insects and the ever present sampling poles when the guard suddenly told us to stop. We were at that time busy sampling the last tree that was also the closest to the car before we would drive on. The reason - a curious elephant was approaching us. All our stuff were strewn around the tree we were sampling, all the sampling poles fully extended and all the maps and collection papers ready to be annotated when this happened. We were to drop everything immediately and move away slowly, preferably downwind from the elephant and if possible also out of sight. We did as instructed and left several hours of work while following the park ranger.

The elephant approached the tree and saw all the stuff. From a distance we saw the elephant. Our fear at this stage was not that the huge beast will see us and try to trample us to death but rather that he/she would destroy some or all of the day's samples and the equipment. Luckily for us this did not happen. After a short while, cautiously walking around the tree, and not-stepping on any of our things or samples, the elephant moved on and disappeared into the bushes several meters away. We waited a while and the guard led us back to the sampling site. We continued, keeping a ear out for any sound but nothing strange happened.

This is one exciting event that happened a lifetime ago while doing field work. Since then life has changed quite a lot. I did, however, recently sprint back home and stumble over the steps next to the house when I thought I heard a beast rapidly approaching from the bushes next to our garden but this turned out to be something different altogether...

R&C

How I spend my days...

I often get the question what do I do. My usual response is that I work at the Swedish University of Agriculture, where I am involved in developing methods to find some genes that explain complex traits in animals. But this does not say very much and definitely does not give an impression of the daily struggle with DNA, statistics and some or other feature from an animal that is inherently difficult to measure. Since I love cooking I thought an analogy with food may be a nice way of describing what our group is doing.

Imagine that DNA like is a recipe book (this is an old analogy that I am just borrowing and customizing). Different pieces of DNA are like the different instructions of what to do and which ingredients are required for different dishes. For example a chocolate cake is an analogy of one feature of an individual.

Now imagine I want to know how a chocolate cake is baked. The procedure I would follow is: I would go to many different people (at least a 100) and ask each of them to bake a chocolate cake. I would measure, taste and rate, many different features of each cake. Then the 100 bakers would supply me with own unique recipe for their cake BUT it will be in a language I don't know. They also will cut the recipe into pieces each containing one word. For fun, each of them also cut a whole recipe book into word size pieces, and mix it with the chocolate cake recipe words. This bring me to what we do in the group where I work. We only get the mixed words and the ratings (we never do the tasting ourselves). We look at differences in the ratings comparing them to differences words and try to find the words that may be important in chocolate cake baking. Of course this is not done manually and we mostly spend the whole day in front of a computer telling it what to look for and evaluating what it finds.

This is how I spend my days at work. Except for fika and lunch.

R