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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?

Did you notice the full moon taking up its glorious space up in the sky tonight? So proud and owning, up there. Maybe the sky is so welcoming and opening its darkness for it. Either way it is a celebration for the human eye — the easily amazed, curious and childish one.  Recently, I have been thinking about what belonging means. We went to watch the VCU Women’s Basketball game this weekend. It was not just a game, it was a social gathering where fans celebrate and cheer. There was a band of extremely devoted musicians shaking their bodies up and down with the rhythm. Teams of cheer leaders and gymnasts, dancing and doing flips to the music. In between there was the game too. When we scored a point we all screamed and clapped.  What makes a person identify with a team? You might ask: what is even the benefit of doing this? I used to think watching sports like soccer did not make any sense. Watching 22 men run after a ball, so empty. But this time, I felt different. Maybe this feeling of belonging is what I am craving.  As I walked back home today, under the train tracks there was a homeless lady. She had her "belongings" piled up on a shopping cart. Layers of blankets to keep her warm got wet from melting snow dripping from the tracks. A box of water bottles and gift wrapped tins of canned food was dropped next to her. I wondered what does belonging mean to her. She could not be-long in her apartment. Now she has to find a way to a homeless shelter.  I read on a post today: If you want to change the world, start by making your bed. That would be difficult to find cures for all homelessness problems. I can practice being welcoming and supportive in my house. Once, I saw another young lady in downtown randomly stepping in no direction with her luggage. I heard that she muttered “they are part of the family”. Maybe she decided to leave thinking that she did not belong.  I am grateful that I have a place I call home. It appears, we belong to the place where we long to be. My brain stormed through these emotions as I walked by the lady. Ashamed of not being able to offer any help, I kept going. As I write the story now, I can only wish the full moon is welcoming her at her new home and guiding her to a better path.

Did you feel it? Yesterday evening we all heard a very loud noise; as if my treadmill fell down, or a tree knocked over, or my garage door collapsed on the floor. I went out to see what was going on, and noticed all neighbors were outside wandering around. In the middle of the night, we had an aftershock. My daughter woke up crying that “She is not enjoying this life”. This would have made perfect sense in California maybe, but we live in Virginia, where it is very rare to have earthquakes. We started thinking about what a quake is, how can I teach my children why it happens, how can we be better prepared.  I stopped by the grocery store and the cashier was asking me if the government officials can warn us saying that “An earthquake is coming”. I told her that “This is not possible”. But it would not hurt to be prepared and watch signs from our pets.  Now I am watching my birds to see if they will act weirdly in panic, and trying to listen to neighbor's dogs for a stressed barking and behavior to collect hints for another quake.  Earth, in general, seems to be very quiet. Flipping the letters, earth is “the art”. Astronomically, though, it is far away from being quiet, it moves at massive speeds, rotates and drifts. As humans, we crave for stability. Stable earth, stable job, stable family, stable relationships. Similar to an earthquake, any quake in our supposedly stable lives shatters us.  I noticed this two times in my life. Once when I decided to wear a hijab in college, and once when I decided to take it off in 2022. Outfits put you into certain social statuses that is more rigid than you would expect, especially when it comes to a hijab. Perfect physical condition that allows us to survive/thrive in a stable environment, still suffers if we are in an unstable psychological situation or experience social questioning/rejection. This might seem selfish when part of Los Angeles is burning with wild fires. I pray for them and hope for a speedy end to the fires. These both are instances where we notice how our power is limited to only our arms' reach. Yesterday, when I was trying to get out of the house, I had a hard time collecting three kids inside the house. Even within "my arms reach", it is beyond my control. All these sink again to remind me of how weak we are as human beings. Hopefully the quakes and fires will settle off and disappear without further damages.

Would you believe me if I say “I found the recipe of happiness, in my son’s Ninja book ?” It is true. We need a daily D.O.S.E. to be happy.  D is for Dopamine. You get dopamine from exercise, eggs, fish, avocados and bananas. Also “creating something”, listening to music and sleeping gives you the D.  O is for Oxytocin. Hugging, physical touch, petting a dog, yoga, meditation and socializing will give you a boost of O. Also eating “chocolate”; yay for me!!  S is for Serotonin. Sunlight exposure, sleeping, eating fruits, nuts, spinach will get you S. E is for Endorphins. Laughing by watching or reading something funny, creating music or art will boost the E. Is not that amazing that there is a recipe for happiness?  My sister also sent me a video about 5 reasons of unhappiness.  Reality not matching expectations  Comparing yourself to others Missing the past Giving yourself too much importance  Making life unnecessarily complex All these remind me of the Candan Ercetin song “ For Sure ”. Mesmerizing voice and strong words. For sure, if I am crying today, I will laugh tomorrow. For sure, first I will take off, then I will return. For sure, sometimes I will say, sometimes I will be quiet. Thinking on happiness allowed me to notice why I enjoyed writing blogs , which is a form of "creation". (And maybe also because it does not get a revision from my bosses, to scratch them off entirely in red font, tracked changes) Similarly, my poems -that sometimes I tried making into songs- or the 'paint by numbers artwork', my crochet avocado couple , 500 piece puzzles, or my baking adventures might be serving a similar purpose. Our little brains need little amusements.🤭 How about learning? In that case, " discovery " makes me happy. I also noticed why I fell in love with coding. You could do a western blotting experiment—or a coIP, if you are lucky, you can find that two proteins are interacting upon a stimulus maybe after one month, or two months. But with the power of coding, you hit control enter and "ta da!" the figure is ready! How amazing is that!  In my little circle of friends, this week we discussed “what is true love?”. I wish I had an answer for that too. At this point in life, a nurturing relationship would involve shared goals, shared dreams, supporting each other's paths, healthy communication and sharing duties. Where did the need for 'true love' go, then? Maybe my discovery aspirations are trying to replace such a need. Later, in my life, I may figure out a different version of true love, which is maybe disregarding anything temporary and focusing on un-worldly metaphysical things. Does this feel like connecting the dots or pulling the right thread to undo a knot for you as well? This week, we listened to US Census Bureau director Rob Santos. He gave a talk without slides, on three stories. My main takeaway was that as a Statistician, we may have a role to keep equity, balance and fairness that would impact the entire society. We should listen to our heart, and be courageous to speak up. He was a very happy person and his happiness traveled through the screen. I noticed the leadership is changing in the government these days. I can only wish for the best. As my personal take from the Ninja book, I cooked a large spinach dish yesterday, and ate banana this morning. As I ate the spinach, which is not my favorite, I kept saying “this will make me happy”. We get Monday off this week, which I will use to finish my new book The Last of the Moon Girls . So far the discovery phases in the story are definitely making me happy 😍 Remember to take your daily DOSE, steer away from 5 reasons that bring unhappiness, see how you can contribute to the society with your role and jump on all opportunities for discovery— to be happy! 😃