h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I've made some updates to http://miki.typepad.com/ , and it will soon have some pictures of my new apartment. And of the cats getting used to the new apartment.

The idea of toliet training your cats is just soooo adorable!

I'm glad your settling in, how's your new job going?

Oooh Ooh Ooooooh I have news for you, something I'm very excited about that I'm sure you'd be able to share. I've had some real grown up science published!

http://www.rcophth.ac.uk/congress/index.html I don't particually want to put my full name on h2g2 but I'm sure you know it.

Ok it's only a poster at a conference, that proved the bleedin' obvious, and I'm the third name, but I'm still pleased.. () and the scary thing is that we did all the stats ourselves with a calculator, because we couldn't work out the stats programmes.

Awwww! Mikey, just looked at your pics! Gone all soppy!

Tisha looks just like a cat i know called Sputnik (Z, it's Mickey's cat!) I honestly thought Sputnik was the only one on earth with that smudgy "aspiring to be Siamese but deciding unique is better" look!

I bet Tisha is better behaved though, Sputnik is a savage little beast!

with the toilet training, i managed it once but only 'cos i had a bidet he could use.

s off to look at Z link.

*de-lurks*

zdt

It's not very intresting, just a list of topics and the names of people who did the research.

Found it!! SHO's & phakothingywotsit!

(don't accuse me of not lurking thoroughly!)

i know the Mayo Hospital Lahore, only too well unfortunately.

I am supposed to see an opthalmologist soon wonder if he has studied all this lot?

Well done, Z, the first of many papers i bet!

zdt

Congrats, Z! I remember being incredibly excited the first time I could find my name in Medline. And the first time someone else cited one of my papers in one of their papers. Oh, and the first time someone wrote a nasty letter to the editor about one of my papers.

Oh, and the job is going swell-ly. Is swellly a word? If not, why not?

Ooh that's good, I'm glad you're enjoying it, it's a bit of a change isn't it?

I'll be very excited if we get it published in journal because that means I'll be able to find my name on medline. It's not going to be a big deal career wise becasue it's not a subject I can ever do. I don't have the manual dextrity for ophthalmology.
I'll be surprised if we do, because whilst it proves something no one's proved before, they've only not proved it because it was so unbeliveable obvious!

Hey, some of my published papers are unbelievably mundane.

Of course, I have a boss who firmly believes that their is a journal for every paper. Given that, though, twice we have ended up placing a paper with a non-Medline journal after it got rejected too many times from Medline ones. And one of those was actually a good paper -- it's just that we got scooped on it.

Oooh how annoying! We've got rejected from the BMJ (surprise surprise) and our project supervisor/first name was very annoyed and convinced they were on a personal vendetta against him. Really it's just not intresting!

We proved

(wait for it)

That cataract operations take longer if done by a junior ophtalmologist.

And (surprisingly)

That they take even longer if there is a complication. (Don't worry other papers have shown that complication rates aren't higher for juniors).

Hey, do you realize how mundane some of my papers are?

Let's see, I have papers in which we count how many kids are hospitalized for different things

I have papers in which we estimate how many people die of different things

I have papers in which we spend the whole paper saying little more than "all of the studies on this subject suck"

The paper I'm finishing right now shows that doctors keep giving patients a medicine that we know doesn't work, just because we haven't found anything that actually does.

None of this is earth-shattering, to say the slightest.

I sometimes start to snigger when my boss suggests we send something over to JAMA....

Yes but that's at least relevent to general clinicians, sometimes you do need to have the obvious proved to you.

And the BMJ recently did a theme issue on 'why we use treatments that don't work' http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/content/vol328/issue7438/

Best of luck getting your cats to use the toilet! I've never had a cat that was smart enough to figure it out. We even bought one of those toilet-training kits, with a plastic insert that fits under the seat. We finally got kitty to sit on the edge of the toilet and whiz, but when his pee hit the plastic, all that litter jumped around and made a rattling sound, scaring the cat off the toilet (and he sprayed urine as he went!) I see that the website recommends plastic wrap, or duct-taping a roasting pan to the seat - that's a smart idea, and would eliminate the rattle.

*slightly puzzled*

Does the human get to be able to use the toilet whilst all this is going on, or is it necessary to retrain them to use the litter tray?


zdt

That's why I waited until I had a place with 2 separate bathrooms before delving into this.

Once they're trained, there's no need for the plastic wrap, but there are a couple weeks where it would be really awkward to have to dismantle the setup every time the human needed the toilet.

Since their litter box was in the downstairs bathroom next to the toilet anyway, I'm using that one for them, and the upstairs one for me.