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Did you receive a gorgeous orchid as a gift? 🤩 You admired its beauty 😍, took care of it… and then, one by one, the flowers fell off. The stalk dried up. 😔 Yeah, yeah… we’ve all been there. 😅 I wanted to master orchid reblooming all by myself. 🌱 And guess what? It’s possible! Here’s what worked for me. 👇 💧 The #1 Rule: Less Water, More Consistency! ✅ Orchids only need 1/4 cup of water per week. ✅ Stick to a strict schedule – pick a day and write it down. 📅 Example Watering Schedule (Tuesdays): ✔ 2/18/25 – 1/4 cup water ✔ 2/25/25 – 1/4 cup water ✔ 3/4/25 – 1/4 cup water ✔ 3/11/25 – 1/4 cup water + 1 drop fertilizer 🌱 🔄 Repeat the pattern! 📌 Pro Tip: Automate reminders on your phone 📲 or keep a physical note! 🚫 What NOT to Do! (Avoid These Orchid Mistakes!) ❌ Don’t wash the entire plant just because the leaves look dusty. ❌ Don’t submerge the whole pot in water—this can cause root rot. ❌ Don’t overwater! Even if the soil looks dry, stick to the schedule. ❌ Ignore viral hacks like garlic water, tying up a half apple 🍏, or other “root rescues.” If it’s dying, it’s probably too late. 😬 ☀️ Light & Placement: Where Should Orchids Go? 💡 Place near a window for natural light. 🌅 Mine faces northeast and sits on a homemade flower board in the kitchen. 📏 Keep it 3-6 inches from the window for ideal light exposure. 🌱 What’s Okay to Do? (Things That Help!) ✅ Repot when necessary – If roots are exploding out of the container, move to a bigger one! ✅ Trim bad roots and refresh the soil occasionally. ✅ Use the right planting mix ✅ Use breathable pots 🎯 Recap: The Secret to Reblooming Orchids! 💦 1/4 cup of water per week (no more, no less!) 📅 Stick to a watering schedule (every Tuesday works great!) ☀ Place near a bright window (but not direct sunlight!) ⚠ Avoid common mistakes! No weird internet hacks. 🌸 Let your orchids thrive & bloom again! 🌸 💬 Do you have any orchid tips that worked for you? Drop them in the comments! 👇😊

It has been snowing for two days. My kids listen to a Turkish cartoon song (Kukuli): 📌 It is snowing, it is snowing, 📌 In thick, fluffy flakes... Later in the song, they sing: 📌 Autumn to summer, spring to winter, 📌 Days flowed like water... The word “flow” struck me. What flows? Why does it flow? What happens when things stop flowing? Rivers flow to oceans. Collected water in dams flows through turbines, generating electricity. Traffic flows, energy flows, investments attract more money. Inside our cells, ions rush through microscopic channels, opening for only milliseconds to prevent depletion. Chemical reactions in our bodies flow in cycles, in perfect feedback loops—just like the glymphatic system clearing plaques from the brain during sleep (NIH source) . Beyond Earth, our planet flows through the galaxy, carried in an unseen current of time and space. Emotions flow too, filling hearts and spilling into words—songs, poetry, speeches that strike a chord and ripple through generations. The poet Necip Fazıl once wrote: 📌 Human it is, like water, flows fold by fold... 📌 Water moves down slopes, step by step, 📌 Yet my fate is to be thirsty on the slopes. There is beauty in flow—when things move as they should. But when they don’t? Vessels clog , nerves tense, energy/idea/breakthrough generation halts. Funding cuts stall research. And I wonder, how hard is it to keep things flowing? Maybe the only answer is this: Let it flow. Let it flow, please.

When I was a kid I wrote a mini song: My rose bowed its head When it wept. Its petals fell away When we parted. Source I used to sing this around the house. Yesterday my daughter was adding lines and music to my broken glass poem. I asked her to pay me my fair share if she becomes famous and rich with her song 😂 Thinking of my rose song made me think more about roses. What was so special about them? Is it the snuggled layers of velvety soft petals, smell, thorns, or the aesthetic beauty overall?  Why so many layers ? Is it more beautiful if it has more layers? Then I thought about where else I see “layers” in my life. We got my daughter’s hair a pixie cut today along with “layers”. With the approaching cold front, I should wear “layers” to keep warm.   When I look up at the sky, I see that the atmosphere has seven layers. When I look down at the Earth, I find that it has seven layers too. The soil itself has layers of living things as history, geological events and sandwiched time in it.  What about a human life? The training and accumulation of knowledge happens as incremental layerings. A baby first crawls, then stands up, then walks and then can run. Competency increases with each layer and experience. If I want to learn Bioinformatics, I can take 101, then 102 and so on. There is a strategic layering system to learn everything. Scientific or historical layers of knowledge gives strength to an argument. A small business can incrementally reach financial success, layer by layer; sale by sale.  Let me talk like a molecular biologist for a paragraph. When we think about regulation of gene expression, we see many many layers as well. To enable gene expression, you would need to untangle the heterochromatin to euchromatin to make it accessible. Then, a whole gang of regulatory proteins along with RNA Pol 2 will transcribe a gene. The nascent mRNA undergoes a series of modifications: capping, splicing , poly A addition. It will travel to the cytosol to get translated -- only if it does not get degraded by RNAses or by an acting microRNA . Another gang of proteins work with the magnificent ribosome to make the new protein, which is further subjected to a whole gang of post translations modifications to regulate it further. Phew! This is a whole semester class if you are interested in learning :)) Are there cases where having layers is not helpful? I could think of unnecessary bureaucracy. Especially if the additional paperwork is not adding value or regulation. Sometimes having too many layers would unnecessarily complicate things. Sweeping unresolved fights under a rug, making a pile is not good. Processing fights requires scientific methods and is essential to a healthy relationship. So maybe not all layers are good.  Getting back to the pretty rose— in the religious corner— it symbolizes Prophet Muhammed. There is mention of him smelling like roses and people expect to smell roses if they happen to have a metaphorical visit. Many religious songs refer to him as rose and he is depicted as a rose since drawing faces of Prophets is prohibited in Islam.  I was surprised to find many layered things in our lives and appreciated the beauty of roses once more. If you happen to pass by a rose, bend down and smell it. Maybe if you are lucky it might have a couple pearly water drops on it too. So naive… Like a drop of water Resting on a rose petal. Do not bow your head, Do not let your pearls fall— Like a cherry branch Swaying in the gentle breeze.

Here we go! It is almost 2025. I will be 40 this year. I have 3 kiddos: 4-8-10 years old now. I am working as a research scientist, lab manager, clinical research assistant at VCU and also taking courses for a Master's Degree in Biostatistics with a Genomics focus. I feel like this is what keeps me going: finding meaning in biological data with hopes to help humanity, learning and sharing what I just learned. This year, I also increased the number of books I am reading. Recently I finished Atomic Habits, 12 Rules for Life, The Job Closer, The 2-Hour Job Search, The Professor is in, How to Write a Lot, The Housemaid, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Better Small Talk, 4 Essential Keys to Effective Communication, Fight Right. From Steve Dalton's book, I learned about the Strengths Finder Quiz on Gallup . I discovered my 5 top strengths: Learner, Responsibility, Harmony, Connectedness, Futuristic. I believe future holds great things for us, if we keep building layers everyday. To make this work with the best potential for myself; I should keep learning, make promises for progress, live and work in harmony, learn to manage conflict, see the bigger picture and connections and think about the future as I get overwhelmed with what the day holds. Hoping that 2025 will bring wisdom, happiness and all the things you need. Hope to keep in touch!

-- So do you buy cauliflower every week? -- Ahm, yes. -- Do you like it that much? -- Not really..but it is available in Walmart and does not go bad quickly. (Teeth grin). (some sort of silence). -- So how was your winter break? -- Much like a baked cauliflower coated in blue cheese and topped with a cheery on top. -- Interesting. This winter break was interesting: I had days waking up at 9:30 am. (whoa!!), but mainly because I could go to bed at 3:30 am (supporting my daughter in the restroom, for doing a good job dealing with Norovirus). Stomach flu sounds terrible to parents, it travels every one in the house one by one. So, I know it is my turn next. Let me be grateful for the things I was able to accomplish: 1) Finishing my "Data Science: Probability" course, by binge studying over 3 days. (wow that sounds even more interesting than her recipes). 2) Finally finalizing the figures for the dogfood paper (haha everybody knows there is no final version until published). 3) Upgrading from 10 lbs dumbbells to 12 lbs dumbbells for my leisurely arm workouts. 4) Connecting with Turkish friends and again binge reading a book (my poor eyes). (Well that is better than binge netflix). 5) Sticking to my diet plan, written by the best dietician in Turkiye, ( Diyetisyen Melda ). No commissions earned here. (Wait what is she talking about? This is just her second blog 😂) 6) Discovering that CodePilot is actually making numbers up (wait this is scary). What am I looking forward to next week? 1) Pick up on my to do lists for work, get to the bottom of the lipidomics dataset. 2) Pick one of the 3 new books I just received from Amazon: maybe I will start with "Think Again" from Adam Grant. 3) Start my High Dimensional Data analysis course on EdX. You never know how satisfying is to see the % pie chart fill up. That should be pretty much it. Oh here is something similar to the recipe I shared if you were ever curious. (please, stay curious!)

I have 4 orchids, the very difficult to re-bloom flowers. I only had 1 originally, then my friends gave me 3 of theirs as fostered plants.  This year all four of them are blooming. The key was to act like a “persistent tortoise” to them.  Orchids want the same amount of water every week. I chose Tuesday as my day of watering. They all prefer only 1/4 cup of water. Three weeks of water only watering, followed by a week of water + 1 drop of fertilizer. I have them placed on a wood tray angled on my kitchen windows which is facing north east (it may or may not be the deal breaker). To follow this diligent schedule, on a notepad I scribble the dates of Tuesdays and mark as water only or w+f. I have been doing this for years now. Such persistence may bloom other aspects of our lives as well. Today, as I was humming ”I am a gummy bear; yes, I am a gummy bear” to engrave this thought into my soul, I read Adam Grant’s book on rethinking. Chapter 1 Flexibility to reconsider and rethink is wisdom. In the event that you are faced with saving your life; as was the case of a fire fighter, starting a new little fire to create a safe zone could be one dumb looking but genius way to save yourself. (See the book cover and opening story) We have certain mindsets: preacher, prosecutor, politician. But best is to have the scientist mindset and accept that ‘we might be wrong’. This also ticks the clock from having pride to being humble. There is evidence that lack of rethinking can lead to disastrous outcomes such as what happened to Blackberry. Chapter 2: As we accumulate knowledge we climb up the “mount stupid”. If we feel confident that this is the ultimate end of knowledge. we stay there as an “armchair quarterback”. But there is more knowledge, always, and the more we know the humbler we get. Then, there is the risk of falling impostor, being suspicious of our knowledge and abilities and tools. Luckily, there is the happy medium of not being arrogant or impostor which is the “confident humility zone”. One day, the persistent tortoise will eventually cross the FINSH line. One day, all four orchids will have flowers and I will be able post them here. One day, I will manage to steer my ship in the confident humility zone.  Until then, I will keep dancing to the song: “I am a gummy bear, yes I am totally a gummy bear”.

Do you ever feel like a pressure cooker? I notice that my mind or the pool that hosts ideas and experiences wants to “flood out” once in a while. But this also involves pressure, meaning that it is not just sizzling out, it needs to get out. At one point, I thought I accomplished this by writing poems. I needed to fill in my emotion and experience bucket, then it would pour out as lines. If I ignore my bucket, though, it turns into a pressure cooker. So how to vent out?? Talking to a listener could help or writing out into a databases somewhere on earth. Maybe one day, a reader will care to read. As I am munching on my tomato-cucumber-feta cheese lunch, I am contemplating “Did I really need to order the 5th set of Ninja Books ?”. I notice the resourcefulness should help without hopefully becoming wasteful. Maybe all we need is a balance of opposites. How to balance self care with child care, or even with essential survival tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher. How to balance saving versus carelessly spending?  I continued reading “Think Again”. This book is actually very dense. In a way, that you would need to spend time reading the text and spend even more time in your mind reliving the ideas. There was one part about “attachment”. Attaching to an idea, to an ideology, to a tribe maybe. Attaching to “yourself in the past”. The other way around, “detaching from yourself in the past”. How do we respond to changes? I think I resonated most with ‘having a piece of my life that is completely detached from who I am now’. I would encourage you to have your own journey, which is more like surfing on your ideas flowing from one edge of your brain to the other.  Regardless, here is a summary, which is not doing justice to the content in the book, but gives more of a sneak peek: Chapter 3 Rethinking, at times, involves finding out that “we were wrong”. Saying “I might be wrong” is easier than accepting it as a fact. Nobel prize winning scientist, for example, enjoys and cherishes the moment he finds that ‘he was wrong’.  My take was: One strategy could be to say “any answer is better than none”. Saying “at least we have a conclusion”, we can embrace it and have some joy coming out of making progress. As a wild experiment, they have challenged Harvard students by attacking their core beliefs. How much shattered you would be depends on how tightly “attached” you are to the idea, or how much you identify yourself with the idea. If we allow ideas and ideologies to define us as a person, any attack would be taken personally and trigger defensiveness. Chapter 4 Creativity and productivity might be sparked by “good fights”, such as the ones between Wright brothers. Disagreeing on tasks, fighting over solid items is easier than having conflicts purely on the relationship at the personality level.  Such a “conflict loving team” created ‘The Incredibles’ movie. Disagreement increased sharing ideas, and also increased creativity. Being an agreeable person who dislikes conflicts does not mean not having conflicts on science and data. Those are items on the table and can be fought for.  As my son is squeezing his body on my lap for attention, that tells me it is time for me to play some dinosaur cards.  Enjoy the snow Virginians 😍

How do you feel when there is snow all over? I feel like, as the snow settles, the world gets muted; the ground is accepting the coldness with dignity and embracing the new reality. What else does snow symbolize? Hibernation, putting things on the back burner, putting a hold onto things until it is not covered up anymore. Virginia is not used to snow, so every-time it snows, we get days off. Ankara, where I studied, gets a lot of 'snow, ice and coldness' in general, but we would get our butties up under a thick coat and still go to school. Back in the days, I was not smart enough to get comfortable inside clothes that I could wear under the coat. I remember sitting in the pretty warm classroom with my huge coat. Sometimes, I lend my brain to other things I suppose. Another thing I remember about my life in Ankara is that, I was almost always broke. My parents would send me 35 TL from the PTT and I would finish it very quickly and be broke again. One thing I really enjoyed was getting a bar of chocolate with my very limited money. Another limiting thing was my credit on the mobile phone. Each letter counted and we had to get rid of all vowels and find shorter ways to say things. I also had a walkman. I would buy cassettes or record them and listen on my walkman until the battery died. As the battery got lower, the person would start sounding very funny. Having days off at home with kids allowed me to again “binge study” High Dimensional Data Analysis. I got to 54%. This course is teaching dimension reduction, clusters and heat maps. So far, I am truly enjoying the learning process. Well, I am a learner after all. I got to read one more chapter from Think Again: Chapter 5 What are advantageous methods in a "debate" scenario? How can we convince an opponent, how can we bring the crowd to our side? The answer is: "Dancing". Similar to a dancer, someone good at convincing others would be flexible, move back and forth. The action items are like "finding common ground", focusing on limited number of reasons with extended rationale (not flooding with reasons), asking questions at the end to allow others to reason for themselves. This was how a world known debate champion knocked out artificial intelligence as well. I have been in a debate only once in high school. The only reason they picked me was because my English was good. I remember ending my sentences with “right?”. This sounds similar to the advice above, helped us win the debate; though in my case also led to other students to keep bullying me “right? right?”later on. 😂😂 Debate stage is definitely not a place I belong to. How to deal with a hostile interruptor? Dance to the side, focus on feelings, discuss in isolation, ask what evidence would change your mind? Hopefully, we are not dealing with hostile behavior daily, but would never hurt to improve emotional intelligence by learning these techniques. Snow also has a forgiving nature, that would bury the differences, make everybody the same. At that level, we may find ourselves to be questioning, "what was it that really we were fighting about"? Like Elsa sings and I had surely been overexposed, let it go, let it snow and let us all be the same. Let's hibernate and forget what was so damn wrong.

I have been reading on Think Again about polarization. This topic is highly relevant to politics. What would be an advantage for a political leader to polarize people? It is somewhat understandable that fans, soccer team enthusiasts etc would enjoy polarization, which, in a way, defines who they are. What can be a benefit to being polarized as a society?  From an evolutionary perspective, we have the survival of the fittest phenomenon. The instinct could be to exist within a winning group and gain evolutionary advantage. But then it does not make sense to be in a losing group, yet still stubborn to change. In that case, the psychological benefit of feeling belonging to the same group and that sustained environment overcomes the need to be winning.  In America, the extreme examples are from Yankees vs Red Sox fans. Scientifically, this is fueled by repeated exposure, being comparable, which also means ‘worth fighting’. The word clouds of how each group of fans describe the other are pretty much the same. In a way, they are comparable groups in all those bad terms that describe them.  So, in a world, where we could be “XYZ” to others as we claim that they are “XYZ”, what is the point of being in groups anyway? The “power” oscillates between groups and who can use the power to gain even more power will dominate. At that point, maybe being called “whatever” does not matter, because the joys of such ultimate power mitigates such negativity.  This brings us back to the topic of attachment. Being such fragile, temporary human beings, we should probably not have strong attachments to things that are more vulnerable than who we are. That way, we would not have to make presumable sacrifices of our personality, social status or “being” to opt for a better future.  Today, I struggled with my High Dimensional Data Analysis course on the machine learning problems. Bro, I am a molecular biologist. How can I code for such complicated kNN problems? I enjoy learning about how people improved prediction methods to make lower rates of mistakes. But I just want to do my own analysis, generate data, publish papers.  The school is still out, the snow is slowly melting. My poor brain has three directions to pursue: study High Dimensional Data Analysis, write a paragraph on AGEs in dogfoods, write a blog on polarization, cook food for kids (yes this is on autopilot).  Let us reconsider why we are so divided. What would happen if we were more to open changes, listen others more, and understand better? It all starts with wanting to do it though.

Why does motivation feel like a bubble*? It can get real big sometimes, but also pops up very easily. What could be a helper to keep this motivation bubble un popped? If I am building it with my own neurons and neural networks in my brain and also popping it up the same way, does that mean I am being dishonest with myself?  I have been imagining different versions of motivation bubbles: one that is made of a regular soap bubble, one that is like a balloon and maybe one that is like a hot air balloon. There you have it. The strength of the motivation lies on the thickness of the surrounding material. How can I better protect my motivations that are more fragile?  We would have to admit that we have been voluntarily dressing our bubbles with different outfits per “changing conditions”. One day motivation to eat healthy and exercise more could be the balloon, on another day when the stress of writing the paragraph for work dominates, we pop the balloon intentionally. So, is it okay to cry, once the priorities reshaped the goals we have in mind? Yes, but it will not help with the -smushed- already popped dreams on the floor. We would need to inhale big and blow new bubbles to have another chance.  I finished reading Think Again. It touches upon many other aspects, teaching kids to rethink, college students to rethink careers, and making a weekly habit of sparing some time to unlearn and have a rethinking session. This could also involve rethinking big things in life, but then if the stakes are high, it should be done with caution. I really liked how he included a chapter that also involved the track changes version, and how he hilariously ended with the work “mayonnaise”. We are going to have a 4th day of snow day tomorrow, because the city of Richmond is still having water disruptions. This additional surprise “kind of working from home” environment gave me the chance to read more and also study more. I noticed that during this time, I saw Rafael Irizzary’s face more than I saw my husband’s face. :) Maybe another practical way to rethink of life is by doing "seasonal recalibrations". Since I cannot throw away the 40 years I have already lived and all the learnings from it, how can I recalibrate, redirect my ship towards a place I want to get? The emphasis was again enjoying the ride, not necessarily waiting for the “day of success” to arrive and then be happy. If people chased happiness and gave it conditional existence, they were more likely to live unhappy lives.  My happiness does not depend on my career and being so called “successful” one day. [It sure does depend on if I took my Vitamin D pill for the day, though]. Even though I want to lose weight and become more athletic, I cannot allow this goal to make me unhappy as I am. Let us blow more motivation bubbles, knowing that many of them will get smushed. Having bubbles on the way is the only way towards progress. Rather than being sad for the bubbles to be smushed, let us focus and enjoy the process of blowing bubbles! *I should properly acknowledge that I was inspired by my dietician for this concept.

Which house chore is your favorite? Mine are vacuuming and cleaning the dishes in the sink. I even enjoy “the noise” crumbles make as they go up in the vacuum cleaner. What is the benefit of enjoying chores? A new study finds that kids learning to do chores at an early age like kindergarten have a more successful life. This could be one of the most beneficial studies for parents. I keep telling my kids: “If you want to be successful in life, you gotta pick up some chores.” Any repeated task without a rationale is bound to become boring or even unbearable. House chores are no exception to this. Many stay at home parents spend an entire day working on chores only to be accused of doing nothing at the end of the day. I remember my mom complaining about this all the time. What type of mindset can help us weave chores into our life with meaning and compassion? Some realities maybe. We have to eat, therefore we need to cook, and viola we have dishes and crumbles. Since we cannot escape from this reality, how about we embrace it? This is no where near to say that my house is spotless. My house is actually very messy. Right now I have about 40 Ninja books on the floor. We all managed to eat lunch but the table is not cleaned up yet. The girls had to go to their gymnastics lesson and I am now settling down after groceries and cooking. If someone out there is busy making some useful robots for daily chores, maybe it will help if they make it quick. 🙏 My poor Dyson is broken now and I am scared to look at the prices. 😬 I am looking forward to going back to work this week after an extended winter break due to water restrictions in Richmond. This is another example of perspective shift; where I now accept work as a place to rest. Thinking about the endpoint (my futuristic personality) that an empty shining sink is the best sink and a floor without crumbles is the best to step on, I will continue working on my chores with some pleasure. I thought of an old friend Althea Merrick as I wrote this. Once she told me putting ice into the disposal will sharpen the blades. I just put some snow down. May Althea rest in peace. At some point I wrote a cookbook . Why is cooking not making the favorites list? In our house my husband is the one who is "faster at cooking fast food"- making a tornado mess- to settle the kids down. I enjoy baking and cooking things that no one will eat. That also pushed me into the cleaner position. I just picked up the Ninja books from the floor, yes I have 40 of them! I hope you resonate with some of my self talk 💐

What would happen if I were to embrace my failures? Those are the ugly tiny creatures that I made and nobody likes them, including myself. How would my world change if we coexist and enjoy each other’s company? We would have to define what a “failure” is. It surely is a spectrum rather than a cutoff value. Maybe what I vision as failure is pretty much success for another. Does that mean each person has a unique definition and spectrum? Comparing yourself to others definitely creates shifts in this spectrum. How come LinkedIn is full of Co-founders, thought leaders and such? I can define myself as the chief executive officer of vacuuming in our house 🤩 Another idea is to use failures to power future moves. “Well that did not go as intended, what could be detour?” This is not to say, we jump back and are ready to storm right after a failure. There should be the emotional preparation phase, absorbing the changes that come with it. Only to allow the situation to get a 33,000 feet view of our life. This was a concept in Fight Right. You should be out of the boiling feelings and able to watch it as if you are watching a theater from a balcony. If I allow myself to watch my life from a balcony, yes I see bunch of failures. But there are a lot more times I tried really hard. Let me accept those unlucky events and let them coexist in my play of life. Today is my second day of green detox. Yesterday I almost had a migraine. Last week, I ate anything I wanted and my diet plan almost completely failed. As a consequence I have to do a more strict plan this week. I allow myself to quit and make mistakes. Even if this means paying a higher price later. I will embrace my failures and let them reshape my path. What are your thoughts on the play you’re watching from your balcony? So far so good?