Research, rats and insomnia

Coming home from my questionably brilliant overnight mix of insomnia, alcohol, failing computation and aimless wandering around west London i thought i caught something crawling on the kitchen floor through the corner of my eye. Unsure, dazed and confused, I did the only reasonable thing under the circumstance, said to myself f* it, grabbed my wakizashi and sat down in the living room to see what was on tv. And then there was that noise. Without hesitation I went to the kitchen in order to investigate. After demolishing the lower part of a kitchen counter with the wakizashi and for a second marveling at the fruits of my as always innovative handiwork a rat jumped towards my direction from the now diseased counter and then hid behind the kitchen sink. There were now to courses of action available to me:

a. repeat my handiwork, destroy the kitchen and finely chop the rat with my wakizashi
b. call my landlady and religiously bitch about it.

Being ahead of your time is tough. For example although i knew my handiwork is something that one day humans all over the planet are going to appreciate as the founding basis of an unimaginably distinctive wave of artistic (and not only) deconstruction( and destruction) being the tired, lazy and angry sob I was at that point of time i decided to go with plan b. Soon enough I had my landlady setting traps all over the kitchen for me. Wanting the smell of fresh rat blood to be the last thing i smell before going to bed and being greeted the next morning by the sweet stench of a decaying rat corpse, i decided to wait for it a bit more. I waited and waited, and then I waited a bit more. During that weight period images of what can be done with a rat had been running through my head. BTW: IF YOU FIND KILLING RATS INEXCUSABLE ETC PLEASE DIE FROM LEPTOSPIROSIS YOU RAT LOVING HIPPY. Anyway since the rat didn't seem to be hungry I said to myself well dimmu, you might as well move on to your daily routine. So 40 hours with no sleep at all, more red bull and working with matlab for which in the past I have expressed very angry feelings. My idea of applying a classification algorithm to a regression problem seemed to work. The ideas about the rat were stalling tho. And because of the whole being tired factor getting in my way and possibly messing up what I thought might work, i decided to go to sleep hoping that the rodent would soon meet the great rat-catcher in the heavens above and I would wake up to the beautiful stench of its dead body. En contraire to my beautifully planned master-plan i woke up sometime next noon from the manic beeps of msn messenger and a doctor friend of mine asking to see if i once again managed to miraculously survive from yet another manic binge.

Sharing my experience with the good doctor also enabled a different perspective in the whole matter. You see research suggests that people who have been awake for a long amount of time, and consumed alcohol have been reported to be suffering from hallucinations. And, the most common hallucination is, you guessed it, rats. NOW, i've paid good dollar in my youthful days for a nice hallucination, and I must tell you, although I'd hate to advocate the use of central nervous system stimulants, this was a much more welcome alternative to the one of a living rodent still at my place. However, I must for the record state that this was not a salient stimulus of a rat walking past the corner of my eye. That was a rat coming at me and making sounds. However, it did bring up a couple of ideas/suggestion. Yes dear acid-heads if you can't get your supply, just wait. If you see a rat there's a pretty good chance you might be getting freebies from your cns. On the other hand if you live in a rat infested house, how about trying some booze and staying up all night? Might not take the rat away, but it will fill in the void of loneliness your unwanted roomy was down with lately. Anyway, further exploring the possibility of what I had experienced being a hallucination, 24 hours later the rat still hasn't gone for the bait of the 6 traps set exclusively for him in the kitchen. Except if the rat's French and waiting for the cheese to turn blue. In which case maybe i should get a bowl of red wine for him out too. On the bright side of things tho, i definitely didn't hallucinate about the algorithm working while waiting for the snappy sound of a rat trap choking a rodent to death to fly like music to my ears. So, i sat down again today, verified that the whole thing works and send an email to my supervisor, who also thought the experiment was good, and then gave me a load more to experiment with, but hey, I'm the one who wants a degree and a phd next year so I shouldn't really be complaining now should I? I mean I might have a rat in my house, and writing some more code is the problem? Well, as long as matlab doesn't crap up on me again it shouldn't be now, should it? And I am really happy to be working on something interesting instead of pottentially reducing my life span due to oversleeping as the latest study suggests. However as my current research habits indicate I might be in for a treat as the following picture illustrates:


But hey, you know, i'd take lung cancer and psychotic breakdowns to a bacterial infection from a rampant rodent any day of the week.