Quite A Haul

Good trip to Half Price Books today: a complete works of Shakespeare, a complete recordings of Robert Johnson, Sujata Massey's The Salaryman's Wife, and a computer game called "Splinter Cell", all for $25. Life is rich and sweet.

Canonical Literature

On a whim, I got Harold Bloom's The Western Canon out of the library and just finished it up. He's an opinionated guy, but it's an interesting question, I think: What forms the "canonical" literature of our society, and what does that even mean? Ibsen and Keats may be part of the "Western Canon", but I couldn't tell you the first thing about them, or name a single book they wrote.

So, then, what books do constitute the "canon" of this generation? Not at all who are the best writers ever, but which authors can you reference offhand to people you know, assuming that they will have read them, or at least know what you're talking about? Here's my list. What am I missing?

• Shakespeare
• Tolkein
• Dr. Seuss
• Lewis Carroll
• H.P. Lovecraft
• Robert Howard (even if they haven't actually read any Conan stories)
• Mark Twain
• Homer

And maybe:
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (again, maybe not as widely read as known)

And I suppose you can't get away from the Bible in a list like this. Everyone's heard those stories.

You could probably also throw in Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye, if only because every English class in America reads them, but I don't find them high in my conciousness.

Bloom seems convinced that the whole idea of literature is dying in an age of video and short attention spans. I don't know. I just think it's interesting to ponder which books out there really do form part of our "collective conciousness".

Edit: Forgot at least one biggie: the Brothers Grimm.

Whew.

> We are pleased to inform you that Rudolf K Thauer, the editor for
> your manuscript, and the PNAS Editorial Board have given final
> approval of your article for publication.

Long-delayed, but finally accepted! A weight off my mind.

A Very Buddhist Hannukah

Still sick, but boy did we get lots of good swag for Hannukah this year. Kind of a heavy Buddhist theme. My parents got us both The Jew In The Lotus and Zen Judaism (For you, a little enlightenment.), and Anita also got a book by the Dalai Lama and the Buddha statue in the background there. Other highlights include a banjo video by Mike Seeger, a mad science t-shirt, and a new (super fancy) digital camera. Yay!

Just remember: The Torah says "Love thy neighbor as thy self." The Buddha says "There is no self." So maybe you're off the hook.

Gack.

Desperately ill. Bleh.

However, did pass qualifying exam. Woo. Tremendously demoralizing experience, though. Carefully designed to undermine all vestiges of confidence. Mneh.

And so, back to bed. To summarize: Pfui.

However...

Regardless of what I said in the previous post, I have, in fact, had time to discover the most awesome thing ever. Just so you know.

Dropping Off The Face Of The Earth

Just a heads up for folks dancing on the edges of their chairs waiting for blog updates: qualifying exam is on the 21st, and I probably won't be doing much beyond immersing myself in the literature for the next few weeks. All questions will be answered under the assumption that they're about Sox-regulated nitroreductases, cobalamin synthesis, or mapping point mutations in Salmonella.

But I Do Still Remember How To Play!

Well, I may no longer be this stylish, but I do still seem to have this banjo on hand, and blimey if I haven't actually gone and recorded some music tonight! Call it a celebration of 10 years of jug band music...

So mosey on over to Old Timey, Dammit for the first update in nigh on a year. It's a Kevin McKrell tune called "I Don't Remember", which is, ironically, a fiendishly difficult song to remember all the words to. Every other line starts with "I don't remember..." something or other. Oy. It's a sort of a love song, and sort of a drinking song, and definitely a song about womens and the way they is.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it, and hope your day was as successful and promising as mine.

Booze Pie!

Continuing in our series of photogenic foods, here we have a "Shady Lady" cordial pie, a truly delightful concoction. It's essentially a merangue / whipped cream filling, full of booze and a little bit of gelatin to set the whole thing, in a chocolate graham cracker crust. Mmmm.

Check out the link for the story of the recipe (Thanks, Dad!) and a whole chart of variations. We're going to attempt the eggnog version for the lab holiday party - it may be the only form in which I'm willing to consume eggnog.

Do all Canadian bands have a pirate song?

Check it out! It's a music video for "Last Pirate of the Saskatchewan", featuring Captain Tractor, my new favorite Canadian celtic-punk-folk-rock band!

The guy who made the video got it wrong - the Arrogant Worms did a lovely cover of this tune, but it's originally a Captain Tractor number. However, he gets full credit for cool use of video game technology.

A Memorable Anniversary

Ten Thanksgivings ago (ten years ago on Thanksgiving), near as I can figure, Hot Pants there came up to me, looking for an expert opinion on washtub bass construction. He had the washtub and the broomstick, but was operating under the delusion that the stick went in the middle, with the string on the rim. This, of course, is wrong. I set him straight, and we proceeded to Cowcliffes, where, in one of the most dangerous activities I have ever personally embarked on, we took a string out of the doughnut machine and put together the first version of Delores, the lovingly hand-crafted washtub bass.

I'm not entirely certain of the date, but I'm sure it was the fall of 1996, probably sometime near Thanksgiving or Halloween, and it was definitely on a Sunday. Certainly, while Pants and I were plunking out our first rendition of the "San Francisco Bay Blues", we were surprised by the appearance of Genny Nesslage bursting through the doors in full Rocky Horror regalia. Kommittee was meeting, you see, and it was an in-costume meeting, presided over by Rayhawk in his Viking helmet. Genny insisted we play, and after some hemming and hawing, we did. It was probably awful.

Regardless, we caught the attention of Roman and a few other passersby (including Brian Gohackie on the jug, apparently, although he didn't stick around), and made as much noise as we could manage. And that, children, is the story of how the Prudence Risley Travelling Moonshine Orchestra - a surprisingly successful exercise in meeting pretty girls and learning to play the guitar while mildly drunk - was born.

In celebration, here is a video clip from the famed Fulton Chocolate Festival concert. I don't know what's up with the funny fade-in at the beginning, but it turns out to be surprisingly time-consuming to generate these things with my creaky old computer. You can get the essence of the thing. It was a good time, and you really haven't lived until you've been paid in chocolate pizza by terrifying children dressed as Oompa-Loompas. Or at least you haven't fully grasped the oddness of reality.

Hope you're all having a good holiday weekend!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, things were pleasantly quiet in the Gray and Taylor household this Thanksgiving, and I think we have to call it a success, even though it was just the two of us. We'll certainly have leftovers to last us the rest of the week, if only because I don't know how to make seafood bisque for a party of fewer than 12. Ah, well. It did turn out well. We got some nice scallops on sale at the new Trader Joe's, and they were the highlight of the dish. The garlic bread turned out well, too.

We gave the cats some juice and meat from the can of salmon I tossed in there, but it only confused them. They were expecting tuna, and weren't at all sure about this new fish. Kaiyo ate his, but Tobu just drank the juice. Not an adventurous soul, that cat.





The turkey was a bit experimental. We got a 3 pound turkey breast, rubbed it with Penzey's Bavarian spice rub, strapped some bacon to it, and rotisserried the sucker in our little George Foreman electric rotisserrie. Mmmmm. Mashed sweet potatoes and broccoli on the side were pretty easy. We cut corners a little with the stuffing - it's StoveTop, but it was good.

I think I need to start tying bacon to more foods. We have declared bacon to be the new Official Condiment of the House.





Pumpkin pie seemed a fitting close to the day. We're both nicely filled, but not overstuffed. It's nice to have a big Thanksgiving party with firends and family, but this was a much-needed break for us. It's good to have a day off with nothing to do but cook every once in a while.

Yumminess

Fridays have become our eating out nights. We generally cook a lot on the weekends, and then again on Tuesday, but the rest of the week is kind of hectic, and by Friday we've almost always run out of leftovers. Anita also refuses to eat the same food more than 3 days in a row. (A totally unreasonable position, if you ask me.)

Tonight, we went for the second time to Osteria Papavero, the new Tuscan bistro on Wilson Street. Lovely little place. All of their food is either locally grown or shipped in from Tuscany. The food is really high quality stuff, but comes in small portions so that it's actually quite affordable.

We started out with a salsify flan with pecorino fondue as an appetizer, followed by (for me) chicken deboned, stuffed with kale and egg, and wrapped in proscuitto on a bed of rosemary roasted potatoes or (for Anita) baccalaó with polenta. Wine on the side - a nice Barbera (dense fruit with clove notes) for me and a roseto (a sort of slightly sweet Italian rosé) for Anita.

Every now and then we like to pretend we've got a high-class lifestyle. The fact that I was wearing my clunky boots and farmer jacket may have detracted from that a little bit, but they didn't kick us out for breaking the dress code, so I figure it was OK.

Yes! And Yes! But that means...

Heard back from the reviewers - we're in! With revisions due as soon as possible, plus one or two more experiments...

The new protein overexpresses fine, and I've got 160 milligrams of it digesting in the coldroom. Which means I need to set up crystal trials on Monday. Nothing's more fun than a solid 4 hours at 4°C.

Oh, and there's that prelim to schedule.

If only I had a stronger work ethic, this would all be fine. Dang it.

Adventures in Photogenic Cuisine, Part 1

Anita made a super tasty dinner tonight! It's all from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, this amazing Southeast Asian cookbook my parents got for us last Hannukah. What we've got here is Vietnamese grilled pork balls (with some sweet chili sauce for dipping) and silky coconut-pumpkin soup. The soup is amazing - the liquid is half chicken broth and half coconut milk, and the "pumpkin" is actually a sort of squash which is almost (but not quite) a Japanese kabocha. The pork balls are quite a concoction, actually. They have a flavor powder made from toasted jasmine rice, kaffir lime leaves, and lemon grass in them, which necessitated elaborate cleaning rituals for the coffee grinder to prepare the stuff. I hear that it was an epic project. I just ate the final product, and it was good.

Kaiyo thought he might be able to get some, but he was wrong. He completely failed to demonstrate proper chopstick etiquette.

A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal — Panama!

Check this out. More palindromes than you can shake a stick at, and lots of ones I hadn't seen before.

P.S. Fear not, proper adventures will ensue shortly. Just emerging from under the summer work schedule is taking some time. Pfui. Time to take life by the horns and, uh, try not to get gored too badly! Right! Onward...

Leaning back towards sanity

Not too bad. Not too bad at all. Here's hoping we've started a trend.

Step 1...

The editorial board of PNAS has decided my paper is interesting enough for them to actually consider publishing! Woo-hoo!

Now it's off to peer review. Maybe a month until we hear whether it's accepted or rejected, but at least we're through the first step.

Also, Gary Roberts (a professor on my committee) said my prelim proposal was "not too painful to read". Academia is a wonderful, nurturing environment. He pointed out some places where I was being stupid, too, so we'll count it as an all-around win.

Type 'Til Your Fingers Bleed

Oh, so full of Science...

Paper goes out to PNAS today, and first draft of the prelim (sorry, "Preliminary Qualifying Exam Proposal") now reads from beginning to end without stopping. Still missing a couple of graphs, but that's half an hour with Prism, and then it's off to Jorge's desk, followed by presentation of lab meeting at 2:30. Whew!

Should be a good weekend. Madison Food and Wine Show tomorrow, pumpkin pie and boardgames with Jeff and Laura (who also just got engaged - I expect a good deal of ring-showing-off will go on) on Sunday. Time for a break. Let's hope Anita can wind herself down from work enough to actually enjoy herself...

Literature

I just finished Michael Chabon's novella The Final Solution. Really a lovely little book. The last, bittersweet case of Sherlock Holmes, in 1944. Chabon has a feel for that period of history (see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), and a deft hand with a melancholy mood. The feeling I have after finishing The Final Solution is very much like the feeling I had after first reading Peter Beagle's A Fine And Private Place: quietly sad, nostalgic, but hopeful. It's a good thing.

Best Brand Name Ever

Happy birthday to Anita! Her present just arrived in the mail, and it's even more exciting than we had imagined. Fanciest damn rice cooker money can buy, right there. :-) I like the brand name. We also hadn't realized that it has a musical signal system to let you know when the rice is done.

Everything I Need To Know In Life I Learned From My Dad, But I Forgot And So Did He #17: When in doubt, buy kitchen gadgets.

Also, we went to see "Fearless" last night. It's a pretty good kung fu movie. A restaurant was trashed, violence didn't pay, and enlightenment was achieved at the end, but alas, too late. Same plot they all have, basically, but Jet Li was good, and I think it was worth seeing. The real guy the story is "based" on sounds like he was an interesting character, too.

A Restorative For The Weary Spirit

So, here's what you need to do:

Mix in a saucepan:
3 eggs
2 cans of unsweetened coconut milk
1 cup of sugar
3 or 4 kaffir lime leaves

Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until it starts to thicken up (15 minutes or so). Don't let it boil. Chill overnight.

Pluck out the lime leaves. Pour the custard into your ice cream maker. (You do have an ice cream maker, don't you?) Stir until smooth and frosty, then store in the freezer to let it harden up a bit.

Eat.

Edit: For extra credit, add crunchy gingersnap cookies. Mmmm.

Stranger than truth

I recently learned, from the inimitable folks at Websnark, that the archives of Teaching Baby Paranoia have been opened to the public. My productivity has been ruined, so I'm sharing with you all, in the theory that if everyone stops working, no one will notice my lack of progress.

Science remains awesome

At the risk of getting somewhat repetetive in my linking, mosey on over to The Loom for Carl Zimmer's lastest article, which is about the evolution of whales. Cool stuff.

I am at the lab this evening, tending to 18 tubes of pale pink bacteria in front of a carefully arranged bank of light bulbs. Pfui. No matter how I arrange these experiments, they always seem to be ready for me to collect the data at midnight. No sacrafice is too great for science, right?

Band camp

We seem to be having a drum and bugle corps convention on campus this weekend. The campus is full of uniformed platoons of improbably thin, muscular people goose-stepping around wielding sousaphones and what-not. Since when do marching bands have rippling biceps? Very odd.

Cool science, with dogs

From the New Scientist (and also discussed on Carl Zimmer's blog): very cool new studies showing that a particular form of canine cancer can transmit itself from one dog to another. The neat thing is that it's not a virus that causes it, it's the actual cancer cells which are the pathogen. Pretty spiffy.

(Yes, life goes on, and is pretty good here. Just busy. Blogging will resume gradually.)

It's All Dry Now

So, it turns out it was a total of about 5 inches of rain in less than 90 minutes. I think this is a picture of Regent Street, about 6 blocks from the lab, but downhill. A couple of apartment complex basements and underground parking garages ended up with 7 and 8 feet of water in them, so it looks like we were doing OK, despite the water spurting through cracks in the walls. No serious damage done to the Escalante Lab or to our house, which is mostly just cleaner.

Still, a little unsettling. Must be the monsoon season coming on.

Rain, Hey Rain

The great deluge! (20% chance of precipitation, my ass.) The skies opened up, the thunder rolled, and it poured for a good 40 minutes just now. The radar shows the storm moving off to the south, but man, that was the most amazing rainstorm I think I've ever seen.

Apparently there was waist deep water on some of the roads in town, and certainly our building was popping leaks here and there. Rocco in the courtyard here isn't an especially short guy...

It seems to have mostly stopped now, but it'll be interesting to see the papers tomorrow. The isthmus is probably a disaster. I'm glad the landlord cleaned out the gutters last week.

Amazing, This Modern Technology

In the interests of expanding our little corner of the blogosphere, I've added a link to Amanda's blog over on the right side there. Go forth and comment upon it! There's a picture of a little poofy bird, which is a sure sign of quality!

Holy Flying Crud On a Stick!

Man, YouTube is great.

Lab Morning

Ah, yes, another delightful Sunday morning in the laboratory...

I think I'm starting to get a handle on how to make my experiments turn out pretty enough to publish. It's a little frustrating - I know what the gene does, which is the cool and interesting part, but to actually publish it I need to make pretty pictures, which has been a real technical hassle. Ah, well. It'll work eventually. With a bit of luck, I'll have all the data I need for this paper done by the end of the week, when my parents are arriving for an extended weekend of fun and excitement.

Anyhow, I'd better go check on the HPLC. I think I've managed to clog another column, but it's possible I'll be able to unstick whatever's in there. It involves acetonitrile, of course (all the fun properties of methanol and cyanide in one convenient package!), but it could be worse.

Mneh. I should make tea, too.

And She Said Yes!

Exciting news! Anita and I have gotten engaged!

I've been living with the most wonderful, amazing woman for over three years now, and I finally realized that it would be really dumb to let her get away. It's a really strange and scary and wonderful feeling. We feel very grown-up. We even went to the jewelry store and picked out an engagement ring, so it's official.

So, life is good, and things are happy here in Madison this week. Hope things are good for you all, too!

Tap that thing!

For those who don't read BoingBoing obsessively, here's something I think you'll enjoy. It's Roy Smeck! Something to aspire to...

Update of Recent Developments

1) The art fair is nice.
2) Sunstroke is less nice.
3) It's really very difficult to adequately sunscreen on the top of your head.
4) Smoothies are easy to make, as long as you remember to add more liquid than you think you should.
5) The independent video store on Willy St. has the new Battlestar Galactica.
6) Billy is totally a Cylon.
7) Kaiyo and I are both meant for cooler climes. We're also sleepy.

4th of July Vacation

Jorge went to the Bahamas for summer vacation, but our resources are a bit more limited, so it was off to sunny Mineral Point for us! We spent a lovely weekend (well, Monday and Tuesday) in the 3rd oldest city in Wisconsin, about an hour from Madison. We stayed in this charming bungalow, which was part of a little artist's collective.It was fun, actually. The place was nestled into this little wooded nook near the downtown, with lots of old buildings from the 1830s - 1850s. That's when the Cornish lead miners came over and settled the place, building a lot of quite nice limestone cottages and things which are still around. We took a tour of one of them (called Pendarvis), which was interesting. Remind me not to get into lead mining.
Here's Anita out back of the bungalow, posing in front of the flowers. One of the buildings back there is the oldest one in the town, and dates from about 1825. They use it as a classroom for teaching art to kids now, and are hoping to refurbish the old blacksmith equipment to start smithing.

The rest of the town was nice, although I must say I'm glad we didn't stay at this "Guest House". It looked like the sort of place you lock your insane cousin Freddy.

The big excitement of the day was sampling the Cornish cuisine. We had pastys and saffron cake and figgyhobbin, which together seem to constitute the whole of the Cornish diet. Pastys are potatoes and rutabagas and meat and onions wrapped in dense pastry dough suitable for schlepping into the mine, figgyhobbin is the same dough, but filled with honey and nuts and raisins (tasted a lot like baklava, actually), and saffron cake is a sweet quick bread flavored with saffron. I thought this was a weird thing, considering how poor the Cornish were, but apparently they had a habit of luring ships to wreck on the rocks so they could "salvage" the cargo, and they managed to score enough saffron that it snuck into the cuisine.

Finally, of course, there was the Fourth of July parade! Here's a picture of the cutest little baby horses, but the whole experience was great. They had the high school band, the junior high band, and the talented children's band, they had American Legion guys with guns, they had scary clowns, and they had the sorriest looking bunch of Civil War reenactors you've ever seen in your life. These boys had it down. They looked exactly like the lowest dregs of cannon fodder scraped out of the gutter and on their way to the front.

It was a good vacation. Not the Bahamas, but hey, it was cheaper! And had more lead mines in it!

P.S. Turns out Wisconsin is the "Badger State" not because of the animal, but because the early lead miners (not the Cornish, the other, inferior class of lead miners) were so transient that they didn't build houses, they just dug out little "badger holes" in the sides of the hills to live in. Who knew?

Data!

Hey, look! A chlorophyll phenotype! The black line is wild-type, the red line is my mutant, and the green line is what you get when you add back DMB to the medium. Trust me, it's awesome. :-)

Anyway, stuck at the lab 'til midnight tonight. Cursed protein is mighty damn slow, and I need those 10, 12 and 14 hour time points. I have beer, a book, and a banjo, though so life is good. My career is weird, but fun.

I finally picked up Scientific Method in Practice by Hugh Gauch from the library today. Chris Jones had recommended it last time I was in Ithaca (lo, these many moons ago), and I finally remembered it while over at Steenbock. It's a textbook on the history, philosophy, and fundamental principles of science. You'd figure that sort of stuff would be standard in a scientific education, but you'd be wrong. It promises to be an interesting and valuable read. We'll see how it goes. The first chapter is good.

Wascally Wabbit!

Cursed wildlife! Something (presumably a bunny) climbed into my herb planter and ate the baby parsley plant! Grrr. Time to unleash the hounds!

I suppose I should be happy that bunnies don't seem to like cilantro, basil, oregano, or thyme, but still, I could have used that parsley. And now there's an empty spot right in the middle of the planter. Sigh.

Microbiologists in the mountains

Here's a picture of all the microbiologists who were at the conference in Colorado. A fine bunch of folks. It's always nice to spend a few days in a crowd which appreciates drunken jokes about sporulation...

I'm making a very goofy face in this picture, but luckily it's hard to see at this resolution.

What! No Pictures?

The thrilling excitement of my life is such that I am reduced to blogging while I wait for three small bottles of clear liquid to cool down to room temperature so I can put bacteria in them. Woo-hoo! Also, Anita is convinced that I go to work only to spite her.

Regardless, great fun and progress is being made. I bought some little baby herb plants at the farmer's market and planted them in a big half whiskey barrel outside the kitchen door today. Hopefully they'll grow up to be tasty. The herb man (hereafter referred to as "Herb") was pretty helpful, and said that I'd probably be able to start picking things in a month or so. I've got cilantro, parsley, oregano, thyme, and two kinds of basil. Mmm. Thanks, Herb!

We also rented the new (well, newish) Battlestar Galactica miniseries and watched through the first half of it last night. Good stuff so far. Definitely an improvement over the original, despite my fond memories of channel 24 Saturday afternoon bad sci-fi marathons... (Original Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers, back to back. It was a gloriously mind-numbing way to spend a geeky afternoon.) If it continues to be this good, we may be forced to rent the TV series, too.

All right. That should do it. Excuse me while I return to my regularly scheduled toying-with-the-very-stuff-of-life.

I'm Back!

I have returned from an extremely successful and surprisingly isolated scientific conference in the mountains of Colorado! No more 900-mile road trips for me anytime soon. Sleeping in my own bed is also a plus.

It was an excellent trip for animal-spotting. I personally saw:
• cows (lots and lots of cows)
• horses
• a pony
• sheep
• goats
• llamas
• turkeys
• a truck full of pigs
• donkeys (both miniture and full sized)
• an ox (in a truck labeled "Mormon Ox Association")
• buffalo
• 3 camels (in Wyoming, hanging out with a herd of buffalo)
• deer
• pronghorn antelope (they're so cute!)
• elk (up close and personal in the parking lot of the lodge)
• mule deer
• a bighorn sheep
and, after nearly giving up hope in the farmers of America,
• chickens!

A successful journey, all in all. And now, back to work!

Hooray!

We just got back from Dan and Amanda's wedding in Oklahoma. It was a really beautiful ceremony, and we had a tremendously good time. Congratulations, guys!

We stayed two nights at Amanda's parents' house, along with pretty much everyone else. It was cozy, and Amanda's parents are clearly the sweetest, most accomodating people in the entire world. No one got bitten by any of the poisonous critters scurrying about, and it was generally a spectacular success.

Oh, and for my parents, here's a picture of me and Anita all dressed up and looking respectable:

And now I need to go pack. I'm off to a conference in Colorado tomorrow. Busy, busy...

The "GTP" guy is the best part

Just when you were beginning to despair for the state of the human race, once again the internet proves its worth, by bringing us the infamous protein video in a convenient digital form.

While, alas, my research has next to nothing to do with protein synthesis, it has taken me into the realm of chlorophyll, which is a fun molecule to work with. It's green! And can be detected with a spectrophotometer, which is one heck of a lot more convenient than the damn HPLC, even with the robot.

Fun And Excitement

It was a hectic weekend, but lots of fun. My small sister came to visit, and we did the Grand Tour of Madison. Farmer's Market (it's morel season, apparently), Great Dane brewpub, all the highlights.

We also went to the House on the Rock, which is far and away the strangest place I think I've ever been. It's just up the road from Frank Lloyd Wright's house, and I think the guy spent most of his life trying to outdo Mr. Wright and be the strangest man in Spring Green, WI. He wins. On the strength of the "Organ Room" alone, he wins.

Anita didn't care for the clutter. :-)

To tide you over...

Lots of things going on, life is rich and sweet! No time for substantive blogging today, but here's today's installment of Good Things From The Internet:

A Leopard That Eats Too Many Books

and

Pasta

(Hitherby Dragons is on a roll this week...)

Pouncing Cat Style!

The ever-reliable Roman has discovered another beautiful example of what the internet is for. Putting goofy captions on inexplicable pictures. :-)

Photo courtesy of Dan W., who is the only known person to take a picture of Tobu that didn't reduce him to a black blob with eyes.

Modern Labor-Saving Technology

Work continues apace, but the pace has recently accelerated enormously.

Jorge used some of the grant money to buy an autosampler for the HPLC. Sounds boring, but what it actually is is a robot which takes over one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks I have to deal with. Hooray! A week's worth of injections done automatically overnight with no human input!

Man, the more of my job which can be taken over by robots the happier I will be.

Scientist needs food badly.

This year, for Hannukah, my Dad got me "Kitchen of Light", a Scandinavian cookbook. Anita and I were a bit perplexed, not having really thought of Swedish as one of the world's great cuisines, but we've finally gone ahead and made a meal from the book.

What you're looking at there is honey and mustard marinated salmon, rosemary apples, and spinach soup with tarragon-poached eggs. Good lord, is it tasty. We're not quite ready to move to Oslo just yet, but my goodness. Even the apples, which are just Golden Deliciouses sliced up and sauteéd in butter with a sprig of rosemary, are really outstanding. Thanks, Dad!

Add a little Annbjørg Lien music in the background for atmosphere, and you'd darn near mistake us for Norwegians. I'll get Anita to stand on my shoulders and wear a blonde wig. The illusion will be impenetrable.

We've got apple crisp (non-Scandinavian - from the ever-reliable Joy of Cooking) in the oven, and it's shaping up to be a very pleasant evening.

It's not that I don't love you all

The problem is, you see, that blogging appears pretty low on the list of priorities, somewhere after work, sleep, school, and hanging out with Anita. It lies in the same range as petting the cat and doing lots of situps - the "gosh, I really ought to keep up with that" category.

The trip home was delightful. Ithaca remains the place I'd really like to be if I wasn't here, and is now full of extremely pleasant children.

Anyway, blogging is likely to be pretty sparse until the end of the semester. Teaching this class is taking a lot of time and the science is not cooperating. Bah. We did manage to construct a pretty kick-ass Chinese feast the other day, though, so I can't complain too much. (You knew that picture had to do with something, right?)

Home on the range

Half-way through Spring Break, and I'm starting to feel actually relaxed. There's a niggling feeling in the back of my brain which says I should be working, but I'll try to appease it by grading some papers this afternoon.

As always when I visit my parents, I have been eating far too much. Getting fat and lazy. I'm not about to get within 50 miles of the Dinosaur BBQ and not eat there, though. I'll have to do some exercise today. (Ambitious plans for a guy who dragged himself out of bed at 8:30 this morning...)

Anyway, things are good. Looking forward to a quick run down to Ithaca this weekend.

Giant squirrels!

"They had secretly relied on the idea that their research assistants would save them from the darkness of their fate. This is because they did not drink from Mimir’s well and so did not truly understand the perfidy of a research assistant’s soul."

Today's distraction brought to you by pyridoxal-5'-phosphate and the letter "B".

Life is full and, um, full

[this space no longer filled with whining]

All I really have to say is that I can only pull so many 14 hour days in the lab before the quality of my work begins to suffer. "So many" meaning, in this case, three.

Going to bed.

Progress!

Busy, busy, busy, but check these little guys out! I need to figure out some conditions to separate the little bundles into individual crystals, but we're definitely getting somewhere. Think happy thoughts about X-ray diffraction.

They're not actually pretty colors like this, I'm afraid. This picture was taken with polarized light. The crystals are pretty much transparent in real life. The little flecks of crud are precipitated protein. The trick lies in getting the protein to crystallize before it crashes out.

I've been instructed to obtain a cat whisker, since that's what you use to manipulate protein crystals. Who knew? Perhaps there's a future in cat ranching for the crystallography trade. Structural genomics is all the rage these days.

P.S. Despite bouncing last season, Jorge's B12 grant (which pays for my project) scored NIH funding for the next 4 years. Woo-hoo! It's good to be funded.

Gratuitous cat picture

Another in a series of pictures of cats on the bed. Aren't they cute? Tobu isn't always this squinty, but he doesn't photograph well. He also gets kind of grumpy when Kaiyo uses him as a pillow, but what can you do? It's -6°F outside right now, so we're all getting our warmth where we can.

A new member of the household

We went to the orchid festival today, on the way between the lab and exercising and going to the grocery store, and Anita was unable to resist the lure of this charming fellow here. It's a Phalaenopsis, apparently, which means nothing to me, but the information sheet they gave us claims it's one of the easiest orchids to keep, which is good. The only plant I've really been able to maintain of late is parsley, but Anita is better than I am at that sort of thing.

She refuses to give it a name. I think I'll call it "Phil".

Science!

Well, despite teaching, classes, and obstinate viruses, research progresses apace. Apparently a group at MIT is hot on our heels with the stuff I've been working on, so Jorge's been on my neck about the whole bluB project. Oy.

I have made some good progress recently. For example, now I know why the people who originally discovered this gene called it a "blush" mutant, as you can see here. I've also got pretty good genetic information pointing towards our hypothesis being correct, and towards the presence of a possible transport system. I've even had some progress on the crystallography front! They're tiny and ugly, but it's a start. Cross your fingers and think good thoughts about X-ray diffraction. All I really need now is to show activity in vitro, and I'll have a story.

If everything works out, I may be getting an undergraduate minion to help out, too!

A Night On The Town

We may not be as old and frumpy as rumor suggests...

We went out last night to catch a concert at the Cafe Montmartre, a reasonably classy little place over by the Capitol. Anita noticed that an Ithaca band (J-San and the Analogue Sons) was playing there, and we haven't been to see any live music in a while, so we took naps in the afternoon and rolled in for the 9:30 (really about 10:00, of course) show.

It was cool. They play a sort of reggae/ska-influenced rock, and they play it very well. Lots of fun. Appropriately enough, the Montmartre itself had a very Ithacan vibe to it - something like a cross between Stella's and the ABC, with hints of the old Haunt once it fills up completely. It was an interestingly mixed crowd of old hippies, young hippies, young hipsters, old hipsters, and a few confused-looking Packers fans. There were also make very classy snacks, including a "Chocolate Gooey" dessert which lives up to its name, and delivery of which through a tight-packed dance floor earned our waitress a serious bonus on her tip.

Less Old Timey Than Is My Wont

Hey, hey! Mosey on over to Old Timey, Dammit for my latest recording. "Wagon Wheel" is an old Bob Dylan song, but I don't know if he ever actually recorded the thing. I learned it from an Old Crow Medicine Show album.

Note the three-finger banjo picking, as opposed to my usual clawhammer style. Nothing fancy, but I just wasn't able to make my usual playing fit the texture of the song. No one will mistake me for a bluegrass musician anytime soon, but it's nice to know I can hold onto that rolling rythym for a whole song without losing it.

Edit: I've put up a new, slightly improved version of "Wagon Wheel". After a listen the next day, I did some minor remixing. The rythymic failure at the beginning of the instrumental bridge is less obvious now :-)

Bad blogger. No cookie.

Oof. Sick and overworked, but that's no excuse for blatant blog neglect, gosh darn it.

Anyway, two things I feel that everyone should know about:

1) Carl Zimmer has a a blog. If you're as much of a nerd as me, reading it will make you happy, and give you something interesting to talk about at the water cooler.

2) This is officially the best idea ever.

And now, if you'll excuse me, there's a cup of tea and a warm cat waiting for me. I need to be well and fully recovered to teach a class full of feisty undergrads Tuesday morning.

Yet Another Important Scientific Advance

Progress marches on!

"The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute" from the British Medical Journal, which seems not to be taking itself too entirely seriously this month...

I wonder if we should send them the mathematical quantification of Fun we wrote up over dinner that one time.

Maybe Asimov Was On To Something

Hyperspace propulsion: next big thing, or just a lot of incoherent raving?

You decide! (From New Scientist)

I got your "old-timey" right here

As requested by Dan, I've recorded some more old-time music for you all. This one is called "Reuben's Train", and is closely related to "900 Miles", which you may have heard. Of course, this being the old-timey version, it lacks certain frivolities. Like chord changes...

It also represents the recording debut of the Woodstock Banjo-Tam, an instrument peculiarly suited to this kind of song, since its frets are too close together to be played by human fingers. However, now that I've figured out that the correct tool for tuning it is a screwdriver, I think it works out fairly well.

Enjoy!

Two thousand and what now?

Happy New Year, y'all!