I thought 'coding' was what you did when you wanted to send a secret message to your best friend

I am willing to admit that as a 13-year old, my best friend and I made up symbols for certain people and things (boys we liked, girls we didn't like, types of food, places to go after school). She would draw beautiful symbols and I would crudely copy them when trying to formulate a hidden message for her. We also had code names for the same types of things. Part of me wishes I could remember what those code names were. The other part of me is satisfied just knowing we had them, without the embarrassment of actually remembering what they were (for example, I think one particular boy's code name had something to do with falling...because I fell for him. I know what you are thinking...what's embarrassing about that?.....Only everything) Anyway, the maybe-even-more embarrassing part is that as a 21-year old, my friends and I still had codes! Different friends, different code names. Again, for boys. Apparently it's really fun or something.

And this is why it's so shocking to me that I had barely even heard of actual coding, you know, like computer programming, until graduate school. You might think I should have been an expert given my past experience developing our fake 8th grade lexicon and using the words and symbols profusely, much to the chagrin of the boys whose names were subtly hidden by our creative codes. But either no one taught me or (the more likely possibility) I didn't pay attention when I should have figured out that our world of technology is essentially run by foreign, mysterious languages.

When I started my first year at Knox, I had planned to take a computer science course. I thought, that sounds like something I should start to understand. My advisor quickly rearranged my schedule saying, "If you are going to do Neuroscience, you need to get started right away on biology and chemistry. You don't need computer science."

I NEEDED COMPUTER SCIENCE.

Knox rarely led me astray and I have little complaints about my education. However, this is one of them. I admit that no one is really to blame. I just wish someone had said, "Oh, if you are planning to go to graduate school for neuroscience or psychology (which I was planning for all along) maybe you should think about learning some different types of programming. It might come in handy."

It would have come in very handy.

I am doing fine in graduate school (I think). But I do think I've had a slow-ish learning curve with the different types of programming languages that I should be learning by now. For example, we use one language to communicate with the computer operating system, we use another language to tell our very cool computer program what to do to make the experiments we run with participants in our study, we use another language to tell a program what to do with all the numbers (data) we throw at it in order to make sense of our experiment results.

I am still on the beginner side of understanding all of these. The thing that is most striking to me, however, is how much faster I started to learn the second one after I got a handle on learning the first one.  For this reason, if someone said to me "well, you don't need to know HTML (the language used to design many websites), so don't bother learning it",  I would say to them, "It's not the specific language I need to learn....instead, I need to learn how to learn these types of languages." I need to understand the concepts behind why we need symbols and codes to talk to computers. I need to appreciate and be in awe of how much control and flexibility users can have if they know how to use the right tools. I need to feel free to be creative, instead of thinking of using programming languages as "plug-and-chug". As far as I can tell, yes there are grammatical-type rules, and yes there are syntax-type rules, and yes there are definitely spelling rules, but, like writing English, just because you CAN write a message one way, that doesn't mean you HAVE to write the message that way. You can get the same (or better!) idea across in a different way, one that makes more sense to you.

I know this was kind of vague as to what programming languages really are; maybe I will write a more detailed blog about coding in another edition of Stream of [Neuro]science  (http://clarkonneuroscience.blogspot.com/), but for now I just wanted to reflect on how important this skill I do not have is and likely will be in the future. I was inspired to write this by a very fascinating Kickstarter project I stumbled upon. If you're not familiar, Kickstarter is an online platform to share ideas for projects and ask people to be involved by pledging certain amounts of money. The cool thing is that "backers" (the people who provide the moo-la for each project) get rewards from the project based on the amount of money they give. So then, as a backer, I really get to follow each project as the developers make progress. I've already backed many projects, which I get a weird amount of joy out of doing. Anyway, I get emails each week highlighting the coolest Kickstarter projects. This week, the email struck my eye because the subject line read "Projects we love: Code and Canned Goods".  I honestly didn't care so much about the canned goods (it was the idea for an art installation of knitted pieces that looked like spam, beans and tomato soup. creative), but I was intrigued by the Code part. I went on an at least 20 minute adventure reading all about this idea for HelloRuby, a children's book written by a woman computer programming teacher from Finland with the goal of getting children excited about the world of technology and introducing them to programming. Where was this when I was 10??? (Don't worry, mom, you didn't miss anything -- there was no such thing when I was a kid!)

I couldn't stop watching videos of this woman talking about her project and reading about the exciting characters that will be in her book. It looks magical.

And educational. How can you say no to that combination?

My credit card couldn't say no either. If all goes well, sometime within the next year I'll be a proud owner of a hardcover copy of this magical book.

And then I'll have to find some kids who I can teach about coding.

Here is the link to her project page, if you want to see what got me so excited:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lindaliukas/hello-ruby?ref=NewsJan2314&utm_campaign=Jan+23&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter 

Wow, this was a long post. Thanks for reading if you made it all the way through :)  Time for me to go to work and read about developmental neurobiology (how the cells of the spinal cord and brain are formed) and neurophysiology (how electrical signals travel between neurons to convey information throughout the brain. note: it has a lot to do with math and physics. yikes!)

Stay safe and warm :)
-Rachel

Oh!! One more note: I am officially Clark, R.
That means I am an author on a peer-reviewed journal article. It is a review that our lab wrote this summer about how extended sitting can have negative effects on the body and brain because of what happens to our different types of cells and chemicals when we don't move many muscles for long amounts of time.
It's still in press and I'm not sure if this page will allow you to at least see the abstract or not, but it's worth a try
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755296614000027
To celebrate, last week my mom came to Iowa City and we went to a fitness class at the gym on campus and then went out for a healthy brunch. Made my day :)

New year- new post!!

2014. Sounds really futuristic, doesn't it? The other day I literally wrote 2001 on something. As though that were just yesterday. And then I realized that I was 11 years old then. And holy cow, that was a long time ago! I've kind of changed since then...quite a lot actually. 

So it really is 2014. I'm excited for this year. I think it will hold a lot of challenges (not the least of which is the comprehensive exam I have to pass this summer in order to continue working towards my phD!). But I also think it will be a lovely year for many reasons. Being more settled here in Iowa City after a full year of school means I get to teach Zumba regularly, swing dance at least once a week, know where my favorite coffee shops are and what kind of food to order there...lots of things to be thankful for :)

This year will also include some minor traveling. Lots of trips to and from Chicago (location of Michael's med school....and location of Michael). A few swing dance festivals around the midwest. A conference in Georgia (Cognitive Aging Conference). Hopefully another visit to Michigan (Michael's home state). 

Probably not Europe though. Gotta save up for another trip like that one. Maybe in 10 years ;)

It has been such a long time since I've written a blog post, I feel like I've forgotten how to do it! Most of the time I write for me, in such a way that I first presume no one is going to read it and then later decide it's decent enough to be shared. Right now I just feel like I'm writing a Christmas letter! Maybe that's ok, though. It'll probably be a few years before I write a real Christmas letter. Although this wouldn't be a Christmas letter. It would be a 11-days-post-New Year's letter. (and probably not a very good one, at that) But I do hope these have been a good 11 days for you. 

By the way, one of my resolutions for 2014 is to gain direction and focus for what I actually want to spend the majority of my life doing (no, not just swing dancing or teaching Zumba)...my actual career. I'm torn between feeling like I want to teach Neuroscience (or positive psych, or health psych/neuroscience, or something of that nature) and feeling like I want to be in a lab, writing grants, running subjects, developing projects...but I also have a strong feeling that I really want to work on developing projects that can be implemented in communities- to promote activity, wellness and body and brain health. Can I just do all of them? And also maybe write a book? 

Lofty goals. One step at a time. 

Happy 3rd week of 2014 :)