Joe, a postdoc who joined the lab about the same time that I did, was asked to give a talk on the boss' behalf at the main conference for the American Diabetes Association last Friday. This meant, of course, that over the past few weeks, he has received insane amounts of crap in the mail from vendors with booths at the conference. The item that provoked the most conversation was this BMI calculator:
In case it's hard to read in the posted scan, BMIs in the blue area are considered healthy, grey overweight, black obese and red morbidly obese. A most standard BMI calculator, until you flip it over:
The entire back of the BMI calculator is devoted to morbidly obsese BMIs. (Also note that they didn't even bother with the underweight BMIs on this calculator.) For someone who vaguely assumes that the scale ended at 45 or so, it's a shock to find out that the scale has been extended to 78. So if you ever wanted to be wider than you are tall, completely housebound and practically immobile, or emulate Cartman from the Beefcake episode of South Park (or all of the above), find your target weight here:
And in more serious and probably less questionably uplifting news, the boss told me yesterday that he will sponsor me for an H1 visa so that I can stay an extra 12 months once my J1 visa expires at the end of January 2007. Since an H1 visa costs over $1,000 in fees (which I'm not paying, Dad), this suggests to me that the boss would probably want me to stay on until until December 2007. I think that there are two reasons why he's finally committing to my salary, visa and project:
- Katarina, a postdoc who joined the lab in July 2005, is leaving at the end of this month because her boyfriend's visa didn't get renewed. That means one less junior postdoc in the lab and one less upcoming paper (or one paper that is going to take much much longer to get published).
- Joe persuaded me to show some very preliminary results from a confocal imaging analysis of some transfected cells. They are possibly the worst images ever shown in group meeting, but they may have been enough to finally get my boss excited about my project.
Whatever. So you all have one more summer to visit me in Portland!
(And I know that I promised to catch up on emails and phone calls in my last blog entry and failed miserably at that task. Umm, I'll try to get to everyone before my trip to Australia next month...)
3 comments:
That's great news that you are getting an extension. Katarina leaving would have been surprising news for John. He really liked her.
If you need to convince John further that your project is on the right track:
Show him an image with 3 colours
Perform RNAi against a protein that has been knocked out from an animal model
Do some work on anything that ends with -KAR
Mention cancer even although it has nothing to do with the project
Ask him about his flight
Make him food, take it to his house and hear more about hid first class flight
Look at his scaby ass after he has fallen of his bike
Buy him a snood for Christmas
way cool, wei. you go girl. uhm... george? that's a good load of work. and john liked a girl? oh wait, it's not australia.
so, according to your bmi calculator, i'm just at 24.8 or 25. close to being slightly overweight. the bmi sucks. even after ironman training i was only at 118, bloody ideal weight is below 110???!?!?
That's great news that you are getting an extension. Katarina leaving would have been surprising news for John. He really liked her.
Yeah, I heard that he was in denial for a while. (Psst, could you not use BJ's real name when commenting? I don't want him to come across my blog by Googling.)
so, according to your bmi calculator, i'm just at 24.8 or 25. close to being slightly overweight. the bmi sucks. even after ironman training i was only at 118, bloody ideal weight is below 110???!?!?
I seem to remember that the BMI scale is not meant to apply to very athletic/muscular people. I measure my percentage of body fat on that nifty scale that I have and go by that - but I am still overweight by that standard too. Sigh.
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