I'm just going to go ahead and assume that whatever little fantasy you entertained about going booze-free for the month of January went out the window the moment you set foot back in your lab/office and came to grips with the mountain of work awaiting you, am I right? It's OK! You're amongst friends. And speaking of friends, tonight we're making an Old Pal--winter's Negroni, you might say.

I may have my gripes about NJC, but I will admit that they have one or two cocktail dens whose bartenders are up to snuff. Naturally, my favorite is exceedingly popular, and you can only get in without a wait if you go at, say, 5pm on a Sunday. But it was on just such a Sunday afternoon that I was introduced to the Old Pal, and my life has never been the same since.

Look, we all love a nice Manhattan, but sometimes they're just too sweet for me, even with rye instead of bourbon. The Old Pal takes rye, dry vermouth, and Campari and makes this perfectly non-sweet, fairly bitter aperitif that warms you up without giving you cavities. If you'd like it a little sweeter, you can swap out bourbon for rye and sweet vermouth for dry*, and then it's called a Boulevardier. Also lovely.

Let's make one!

2 oz rye whiskey (Rittenhouse or Old Overholt are solid affordable options)
3/4 oz dry vermouth
3/4 oz Campari
dash orange bitters

Thoroughly stir all ingredients with ice in a shaker, and then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a nice big orange peel (they're in season!).

* a word about vermouth. I just want to make sure you all understand that it's fortified wine, right? Which means that you can't just keep a half-used bottle on the shelf with the rest of your booze for a year or whatever and then decide one day to make a Manhattan--it's gone bad at that point, and your Manhattan will taste like poop. I recommend buying it in small bottles, and keeping opened ones in the fridge. Chilled, an opened bottle will be good for maybe a month. After that, toss it and get a new one, it's like $5.

Hey hey hey! It's the year end meme to end all year end memes! Here are the 1st sentences from my first post from  each of the last 12 months. Thanks for all your reading and comments this year, folks, and stay tuned--later tonight, a cocktail post!

January: Big day tomorrow, you guys.

February: This is for all you folks out there who just kicked ass on your interviews.

March: So, this happened:

April: Neither my grad nor my post-doc PI was the type to say no to a photo op, and so I became accustomed to the ritual early on:

May: It's mailbag time, folks!

June: "approved for funding."

July: One of the things I'm quite sure each and every one of you has been told is that an important part of your training is having the opportunity to mentor people.

August: We've just now passed the year mark in New Job City, folks, and there has been much mulling.

September: The second year is nothing like the first year.

October: Over at Pondering Blather, the inimitable Odyssey shares his Five Stages of Grantwriting, an apt twist on the old Five Stages of Grief story.

November: Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush here, Sandy is a piece of shit.

December: A few weeks ago, I attended a fancy pants conference for the first time.

Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you're all getting to take at least a little time off in the coming days, and that you're able to spend that time enjoyably with people you love. For the third year in a row, I'm off to an undisclosed location with J and a few of our good friends/siblings/siblings-in-law where we will do little else besides eat, drink, eat, and re-visit the site where J proposed 1 year ago. I can't wait.

This is all, of course, provided the world does not explode in a fiery mess once the clock strikes midnight in Middle America. So just in case, I'm giving you my favorite music from 2012, with Spotify links to my favorite song from each album. If you're not on Spotify, why aren't you? It is pretty much the best, especially if, like me, you're so over owning things.

1. Obvious, perhaps, but Mumford & Sons' new album Babel is really good, and "I Will Wait" epitomizes everything everyone loves about M&S.
2. Beach House has been around for a while, but Bloom is by far their best album, and "Myth" is such a gorgeous, driving, interesting song--one of my absolute favorites of the year.
3. Tanlines' Mixed Emotions is feel-good electro-pop at its best. Dare you to listen to "All of Me" without bopping along.
4. I join the rest of the world in declaring Cat Power's latest, Sun, a truly excellent album. Listen to the whole thing, but here's the title track.
5. One of my favorite new discoveries this year has been Chairlift. Something is filled with unabashedly 80s synth pop, with smooth vocals and catchy melodies, exemplified in "Take it Out on Me."
6. More moody, female-fronted goodness can be found in the Chromatics' Kill for Love. The title track sounds straight out of a David Lynch movie, and somehow manages to sound both low-fi and polished at the same time.
7. Technically, the tracks on Donnie & Joe Emerson's Dreamin' Wild were recorded in 1979, when the brothers were just 17 and 19, playing around in their home studio. But their album didn't get formally released until this year, and the world has been pooping itself over it.  "Baby" is total backseat make-out music.
8. I would never say that I'm a country fan, but I guess that's what First Aid Kit is (sort of?), and I am head over heels for the haunting harmonies on The Lion's Roar--especially the title track.
9. After ghostwriting for some of R&B's biggest names, Frank Ocean's first solo album, channel ORANGE , is pretty much objectively superb. I love the peppy "Lost."
10. I have no idea what Grimes is saying in most of the quirky, synthy, super catchy tracks on Vision, but I know I like it. "Genesis"  is a perfect example.
11. With Yet Again, Grizzly Bear yet again puts out a great album of smart rock music. "Shields" is one of my favorites.
12. If you ever wished that Portishead and Air could combine into one beautiful, haunting, low-fi/electro hybrid, I encourage you to check out Iamamiwhoami's first album Kin, particularly the first track, Sever.
13. Yeah, it's the HBOGo ad song, but I'll be damned if Electric Guest's "The Head I Hold" isn't one of the most danceable things I've heard this year. The rest of Mondo doesn't sound much like it, but is worth a listen anyway.
14. Like her big sister Béyonce, Solange has dropped the "Knowles" from her stage name, and she's also dropped some damn fine pop music on her EP True. The whole thing (all precious 28 minutes of it) is amazing, but I especially love "Losing You."
15. Shintaro Sakamoto's How to Live With a Phantom is, I don't know--Japanese Yacht Rock? It's totally groovy, and I don't mean that ironically. Just listen to "You Just Decided" and you'll see what I mean.
16. Sleigh Bells have always been so impressive to me because they manage to be the kind of music that you play really loud, but are at the same time so melodic and controlled. No idea how they do it, but their new album Reign of Terror is exquisite, and "Comeback Kid" illustrates perfectly what I'm talking about.

I think I'll stop there, although it's worth noting that Twin Shadow, Wild Nothing, and Yeasayer also all had new albums out this year that are seriously great.

A few weeks ago, I attended a fancy pants conference for the first time. I was very nervous about going--worried that I would only know two or three people, feel impossibly out of my league, and retreat into a corner and cry for the extent of the meeting. As it turned out, I knew something closer to 20 or 30 people there, and it was one of the most fun, stimulating, and rewarding meetings I've ever been to. One of the people I reconnected with was someone my grad program had tried to recruit, but who'd ultimately decided on somewhere warmer. He's now an assistant professor like me, and so we bonded/commiserated on numerous assistant professor talking points, which naturally included the NIH grants system.

What struck me in this conversation was something he said when the topic of R21s came up. "The problem with R21s," he bemoaned, "is that you need preliminary data." Now, I found this to be a surprising thing to say, since my R21 was funded without any preliminary data--for that particular project. I did include a few figures to show that my post-doctoral work had taught me the techniques I proposed to use in that project. But it made me wonder whether different people have different ideas about what "preliminary data" actually means, and how necessary they think it is when evaluating grant proposals.

It's been said that when you submit an application, you basically need to have half the thing done already. Do you think this is true? If so, why? Where did this attitude come from? Do you think about R21s vs R01s differently?

Please take my handy poll! And please expand on your answers in the comments. I love comments!

When you're a grad student or a post-doc, you might be working on your main project and get a little idea about something. A connection between your work and a talk you just heard, something sticking out in your data that you didn't expect to, so you decide to explore it a little further--an extra western blot, a different angle of analysis. You would probably do this on your own, maybe not even mentioning it to your PI unless something interesting came out of it.

I am now fifteen months into PI-hood and overseeing a cadre of exceptionally adept people who largely don't need me around anymore. Moreover, I am burdened with tasks that mostly tether me to my desk. So when these little ideas occur to me, instead of quietly testing my theories on my own, I have no choice but to burst into the lab, Kramer-style, declaring "I JUST HAD AN IDEA!!!" I then explain my thoughts briefly, give them but the vaguest of information on what they should do to incorporate my brilliant plan into their projects, then retreat back into my office.

I'm pretty sure my grad students and tech think I'm totally bonkers, but I hope that they chalk it up to being a socially inept genius as opposed to, say, someone who simply hasn't the wherewithal to write things down and bring them up at a more appropriate time.

Neuro-friends, have I got a grant for you! If you thought the BRAINS RFA demonstrated the epitome of acronymical dexterity, I invite you to feast your eyes on EUREKA. This FOA--for Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (for Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System)--is basically the Cadillac of award notices. No longer is it enough to be significant, innovative, or even transformative! You must be exceptionally unconventional, and you must change the velocity of knowledge itself!

There's lots of juicy goodness in the description, too. A few highlights:

"Reviewers...will be reminded that risk is a hallmark of exceptionally innovative research and, in most cases, should not detract from the merit of an application."

"A PD/PI’s record of overcoming difficult scientific hurdles, appropriate to his/her career stage, may also be useful in assessing the likelihood of success."

Also of note--Research Strategy is limited to 6 pages, with a mere 3 dedicated to Approach. Moreover, you must include a statement within those 6 pages on "Likelihood of Success," in which you must address the following: "If ...you have not yet made a paradigm-shifting discovery or solved a very difficult problem, which aspect of the logic of the experimental approach suggests that there is some probability that the proposed research will be successful."

It's also worth noting that there's a discrepancy amongst ICs in terms of how many awards, as well of the size of each, are available:
-NINDS, $1,500,000, 4-6 awards
-NIMH, $1,500,000, 4-6 awards
-NIDA, $1,000,000, 2-4 awards
-NIA, $500,000, 1-2 awards

There's a bunch of other stuff that's different about the period of funding, renewability (non) and whatnot, so much so that it almost doesn't even sound like an R01 anymore! I encourage you to go read the whole FOA, it's pretty fascinating.

So, are we all going to apply? I'm not sure--I feel like this may not be the kind of thing that a new investigator would do well on, despite the lip service to "appropriate to his/her career stage." How do we prove that we've overcome difficult hurdles? Do I talk about the time that my PI handed me a box of 30 year-old Stoelting parts and I jerry-rigged a stereotax?

Very curious what your initial thoughts are on this, folks. I'm just waiting for NIH to just come out and name the next FOA "PARADIGM SHIFT," and come up with some amazing acronym for that. Feel free to have a go in the comments!

So there's cooking and there's baking, right? You've heard the metaphor a million times. Baking requires sticking relatively rigorously to the recipe, lest your cake turn out dry or your (hypothetically speaking) pie crust comes out tough and chewy. Cooking, on the other hand, lends itself to a little more...personal flair. Leave an ingredient out, add a couple in, and NBD, right? Your dish still tastes awesome, and your dinner guests think you're a culinary genius.

Is finding a tenure track job cooking or baking? I think we all know deep down that it's cooking, but we WANT it to be baking, don't we? We are, after all, scientists. Give us the protocol! Tell us the exact ingredients, and we'll do them, we swear, as long as a well-funded position at an R1 with minimal teaching load comes out of the oven when the timer goes off.

I've noticed a lot of conversations in the 'sphere lately about what is "needed" in order to land a job. I can't be bothered to look them all up, but just go read all the comment threads over at Drug Monkey. Today, Arseny Khakhalin did a neat little analysis of the "cumulative impact factor" (literally adding the IFs of all 1st author pubs, plus a little extra for non 1st authors and reviews) of his friends, and divided them up based on their TT job situation. Putting aside the issue of whether his criteria for judging a uni as "really cool" vs. "quite decent" vs. "terrible offers at some weird places" are in any way scientifically legitimate (let's face it, we all have our biases), his findings were inarguably fascinating/terrifying. Those in the first two categories had cumulative IFs of at least 60, within ~8 years of getting their PhD (he does not show for each person what their CIF was when they actually got their TT offer).

So we can now add "cumulative IF of 60+" to the growing list of must-have ingredients in your quest to bake yourself into the perfect TT candidate. Others include:

-at least one first author paper in Cell/Nature/Science
-working 80 hrs/week
-Ph.D. from a top 20 institution
-post-doc with incredibly famous person
-K99/R00

Am I missing anything? For the record, my cumulative IF is hovering somewhere around 40.

As you may remember, this past September I traveled to our country's Bethesd-er regions to sit on a panel of faculty-type people, in front of several dozen post-docs with many burning questions. The most common, though, was: How do I know if I'm a competitive candidate for a tenure-track job? It was clear that they were looking for some sort of validation--that we'd tick off a list of must-haves, and they'd be able to say to themselves, OK, got it, got it, need it, got it.

And I think that that's why we have all these conversations here, as well. If there were just some tangible way to know exactly what it takes in order to guarantee success in this biz, we'd all at least stop feeling like we're standing blindfolded on the edge of a cliff. Or like we're cooking with a bunch of unmarked canisters. Or some other relevant metaphor. More to the point, I also think that it may help us subconsciously justify the glaringly high number of people who would like TT jobs but just don't get them.  Well, they didn't have any glamour pubs/external funding/anyone famous write letters for them/took a vacation, so. And that may make us feel just a tiny bit better.

Look, you guys. I wish I had better answers for you. I wish getting a job were baking, but it's just not. It's cooking. But if you know anything about cooking (or have watched Chopped ever), you know that things that look like they're turning into disasters can be salvaged, sometimes to an even more elevated place than they were originally headed. So stay aware of where you are, talk to people, and be passionate about what you want to do. Try to keep perspective, and good luck.

If, like me, you are a general lover of old things, then I presume you already know about Retronaut, a superb online collection of photos and other media from decades past. Seriously, you could get lost in there for hours. Today I happened upon this gem, a screenplay rejection form letter from an early 20th century movie studio in Chicago.

So many of these are not so far off from scientific manuscript rejections, that I had to chuckle at the idea of today's journals sending out a similar checklist. Wouldn't that make it so much easier? Just eliminate all harrowing death bed scenes from your paper, and you're golden!

And another month of the Donors Choose Science Bloggers for Students Drive comes to an end. Thanks to all who gave in the name of kids learning about science! As promised, I've chosen one lucky donor who gave through my Giving Page to inspire a cocktail. As you can see, the winner is my cats. Apologies for when it sort of looks like the bottom is cut off, I presume it's due to something something aspect ratio.

Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush here, Sandy is a piece of shit. She killed dozens of people, submerged my former neighborhood in 4 ft of water, caused a friend of mine in the ICU to be evacuated down nine flights of stairs, flooded other friends' homes, destroyed a massive research animal colony, and in general has devastated a city that I love like no other.  My thoughts are with everyone up and down the East coast affected by the storm, and I hope that all of you and your loved ones are safe and dry.

If your charitable allotments for the foreseeable future are headed for the Red Cross, that's more than reasonable. However, if you have a little you could spare for some kids in Gulfport, Mississippi who want to learn about brains, I (and they) would be so grateful. As it happens, Gulfport itself is no stranger to hurricanes, having been ravaged by both Katrina and Isaac. Mrs. Hermetz's elementary school class needs $1101 so they can have a kick ass comparative neuroanatomy lesson with human and sheep brains! Neuroanatomy has always been one of my absolute favorite topics, and I would love for these kids to get to experience all the amazingness for themselves.

Now, here's the good news and the bad news, bad news first: this project only has 14 days left until it's taken down, which means we need to act fast, because $1101 is a lot of money. The good news is, DonorsChoose has just released a Match Code for all Science Bloggers' donors to use, which means that your money goes twice as far! The code is SCIENCE, and you'll enter it in the box that says "Match or Gift Code" when you go to check out, starting at 9am Nov 1.  And if you give to "Brainology" through my Giving Page, you'll also be entered in my cocktail video contest to win a cocktail of your very own!

With this Match Code, I seriously think we can do this, you guys! All hands on deck! Let's get these kids some BRAAIIINNNNZZZ!