Re: Solstice letter

[Robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

 > From: Mark Reimers <http://www.yahoo.ca/~mark1reimers>
 > Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:38:35 +0100
 >
 > Hi Robert,
 > How are you and Noelle doing?
 > I didn’t see a letter from you this year. Here’s mine. Hope you are well. 
 > Drop me a line sometime.

As mentioned, I forwarded my solstice message to you in the previous
email.

My responses are intertwined below.

 > DeAndra and I both remain in decent health for our age. DeAndra has been 
 > retired for 2 1/2 years now while I am still working at Michigan State 
 > University.

I'm still too young to retire at this point.  I was hoping that I'd have
enough to retire but (my solstice message outlines this) I do not.

 > Although the Unitarian Universalist church has been an important part of my 
 > life over 30 years, we have both resigned membership because of their turn 
 > towards dogmatic ideology, especially as instantiated in the new article 2.

Too bad.  My birth grandmother was involved in her Unitarian church in
Tucson, but that's my only connection to that institution.  Noelle and I
have attended a few Atheist and Humanist meetups locally; I guess that's
the extent of our religiosity.

 > We were very dismayed, though I was not surprised, at the outcome of the US 
 > election. We are thinking of moving to Canada; we have been looking at 
 > properties in Victoria, BC. However, Canada is very expensive, and furthermore 
 > it’s not at all clear how I would get an academic position in a place that we 
 > would want (and could afford) to live in Canada

Yeah, some parts of Canada have a much worse housing problem than even the
United States.  Not sure that either I nor Noelle will be able to afford
to move from our current home.  Even my mom is having problems selling her
place at the moment in order to downsize.

 > As you may know, I do not have tenure at Michigan State University, because I 
 > brought in less than $1 million in grant money during my first five years 
 > there. Four years ago, during the pandemic, I taught an online advanced 
 > statistics class to graduate students. Most of them could not add fractions and 
 > didn’t understand basic statistical concepts, and so they struggled with my 
 > course; several participated in a cheating ring. So I did not give them the A 
 > grade that they had expected. Several of them were minority students who were 
 > very skilled at manipulating the DEI apparatus of the university and those 
 > students escalated complaints to the highest levels of the university 
 > administration. Because I did not have tenure, the department canceled my 
 > teaching contract. So I have been struggling to pay the bills from grant 
 > funding.

Again, that's sad to hear.  I loved statistics in college; I recieved more
than 100 (with the bonus questions) on the final in my course.

 > However, there is some good news.
 > After four years of struggle, we’re beginning to get some results from the 
 > new brain imaging system based on the design that I came up with six years ago.
 > I thought it would be fairly straightforward to generate the kinds of mice that 
 > we would need; after all, several labs had already done so and published their 
 > protocols. I didn’t understand that making transgenic mice is less like 
 > science and more like medieval alchemy: many essential steps are known only to 
 > the initiated and not written down anywhere. We are just now getting fairly 
 > high quality recordings, from over 1000 cells distributed widely over the 
 > accessible upper surface of the mouse cortex. That is much less than I had 
 > anticipated, based on my analysis of images from another lab that had higher 
 > expression of the calcium indicator in neurons, but is comparable to or better 
 > than what well-funded researchers today get from state of the art equipment 
 > that costs five times as much. 

That reminds me of a Youtube video about the history of DNA sequencing we
watched recently:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ

The whole process seems very strange.

 > I have also been working with the lab of Dani Dumitriu, the director of the 
 > nurture science program at Columbia University, to apply machine learning 
 > techniques to infant mother interaction. This is finally some progress on my 
 > aspiration dating back to my ears at the University of Utah.
 >
 > Although I’m no longer working in psychiatric genetics, I have been doing 
 > some interesting work with spatial genomics and single cell genomics, in the 
 > brain and have developed a method for estimating the proportions of different 
 > cell types at different locations at a resolution of several microns.

Cool, that's great!

 > I’m still giving online talks on various subjects and enjoying that. I’d be 
 > happy to send you some links if you are interested

Yes, always.  We may be busy the coming week and next week since our niece
is coming to visit, but it cannot hurt to send the links.

Thanks.

 > Happy new year
 > Mark.