Dealing with Lion's screwy wifi

I've now twice had to deal with Mac OS 10.7.4 (Lion) having real problems with connecting to either of the two wifi networks at the University of Geneva. One is a standard setup with a captive portal, and the other is the EU shared "eduroam" infrastructure. In both cases Lion's handling of certificates gets somehow messed up (the web has many opinions but no obvious solutions as far as I can see). Anyway, after twice spending an hour searching for a solution the only thing I've come up with so far which seems to work (but then again, ask me tomorrow) is:

1. Disable wifi.
2. rm ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
3. Completely switch off and reboot (NB: choosing "restart" from the apple menu doesn't seem to work).
4. Re-activate wifi.

C'mon Apple. Sort yourselves out!

UPDATE: This doesn't actually seem to work all the time. I did finally find a more technical explanation of what exactly is going wrong, as well as another solution (currently working) here.

Breakfast guest

I was making coffee and toast this morning when I heard some thrashing outside on the balcony. Imagine my surprise when I saw this fellow peering back at me. I'm not sure what drew him to my porch, but he couldn't manage to get back out again. He kept hopping up in the air and trying to flap through the glass at the edge (you can see some smudge marks from previous attempts in the photo).

Initially I wasn't sure whether he was injured or just confused, but eventually I decided (after some remote teleconferencing with Helena) that I needed to mount a rescue operation. I donned a hoodie and some leather gloves and tried to get him to climb onto a roughly 2.5m piece of metal tubing I had handy. After a few evasive hops, he acquiesced to sitting on the end of the pole while I lifted him over the glass. He sat for a moment, swiveled back to look at me (I imagined a silent 'Thank you.') and then flew off.

I took a bad position in the currency markets

Yesterday I withdrew 10,000 Malawian Kwacha (about £40) for walking around money. Today the president announced the currency was being devalued by 1/3. Oops.

The effects of 8 time zones

I flew from LHR to SAN yesterday to come to an NHGRI workshop on "Genomic Opportunities for Studying Sickle Cell Disease", which looks like a really cool meeting (starting in 5 mins). It's a long flight, which I thought would be OK because it was a "day" flight departing at 15:50...but of course when you land 12 hrs later it's 4AM according to your own clock. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to get from the tarmac to a taxicab in less than half an hour (!). The non-US citizen immigration line looked long and depressed, though: yay dual citizenship!

I had a beer at the hotel and hit the sack around 9PM. I managed to sleep (albeit fitfully) until around 5:30, which was another big relief. This morning I worked (during UK office hours) and then went for a walk around San Diego before the meeting kicked off. I had the best sushi I've had in years at 11:30 AM (the waitress generously did not look at me funny for having sushi before noon). It's a bright sunny day, which made the experience surreal, since my body was expecting that darkness had arrived hours earlier. It's also the first time I've been here since ASHG 2007, and seeing bars where I was hanging out 4 years ago while walking around the streets solo has put my mind in a contemplative (in a good way) place.

I'm hoping for a good recharge, both scientifically and personally on this trip, and maybe 8 hours of jetlag is just what I need...

Bob Dylan live

Last Thursday night I crossed an item off my bucket list by seeing Bob Dylan play live (though presumably the real time pressure is him kicking the bucket rather than me). Dylan is easily my all time favorite artist, and I've been thinking for a while that I want to see him live before he retires or dies. Carl and I left work around lunchtime and bringing only the tickets, my passport, wallet and toothbrush, flew to Dublin (on Ryanair, which turns out to be essentially the only way to get from England to Dublin. Horrible.). We checked into a hotel room and then headed to a pub where we had a couple of pints of Guinness and took a conference call. We grabbed some dinner and then headed for the main event.

Words to live by

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

-Steve Jobs

Humility and Science

I was intrigued (as people from all scientific disciplines were, I imagine) when scientists announced last week that neutrinos had traveled from CERN to Gran Sasso faster than the speed of light. I'm skeptical of the result, and look forward to seeing the physics community scrutinize the results. What struck me even more, however, is the humble way in which the authors presented their results.

Many scientists discover something (apparently) groundbreaking and hold press conferences declaring that they've rewritten the rules (c.f. the Arsenic Life debacle), and start reading up on the protocol of how to address the King of Sweden (especially at this time of year). By contrast, Ereditato and colleagues readily admit that this result could be caused by an undiscovered error in their analysis. "We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't. When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."


I just found it so refreshing to hear from someone with a remarkable result who didn't immediately think they were the greatest scientist in the world. A lesson all practicing scientists should take to heart:


"we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy"