So, 2007, Adios

It's been an eventful year.

2007 will, no doubt, be remembered mostly for LOLcats, which rapidly developed into LOL everything else. Ah, culture. So easily overwhelmed by cats with words.

It was a year of mixed blessings in science, I have to admit. In the plus column, I got a paper in PNAS, a major triumph! In the minus column, I have now been scooped on everything I proposed to do at my prelim. Ah, well. I have other projects. (I'm starting to see the wisdom of Jorge's system.) Hopefully, the first half of 2008 should see a couple more papers hitting the presses. I'm starting to feel like I need to wrap things up and graduate.

Anita discovered the local zen dojo, and has quickly become a hard-core zen woman, meditating and firing arrows all over the place. She's only shot herself once. (And completely refused to make the obvious "becoming one with the arrow" joke. Sigh.) In fact, she's off to a late night New Year's zen party even as we speak. It's good to see her with something to do other than work.

New bands were discovered (by us, anyway), and we struggled to stay up late enough to take advantage of some of Madison's music scene. Jonathan Coulton is lots of fun, and Trampled by Turtles (along with a rocking Old Crow Medicine Show concert) gives a fellow hope for the youth. We also caught both Ravi Shankar and Solas at the Overture Center. Good shows all around.

Nearly lost in all the excitement, Anita and I did manage to get married in June. So far, so good! Seriously, though, thanks to everyone who came. It was great to see everyone, and the whole weekend went better than we could possibly have hoped. I only wish we could throw a party and get all of you together again without having to be all freaked out about getting married.

It seems to be marriage season - Sarah's all engaged, the next door neighbors are off getting married at this very moment, my coworker Jeff got married this past September, and now I hear that Abbie and Joe are finally going to make it official. Something's in the air... Perhaps we're getting old.

And so, on to 2008! Let's hope the politics is less depressing (hah!) and that life continues to be good. All the best to all of you! See you soon!

The home stretch...

We had a lovely dinner last night with our old friend Autumn, who we haven't seen in ages. Turns out that not only were we getting married, but she and John were also organizing their "commitmentpalooza", which amounts to approximately a wedding. We had a good time swapping pictures and tales of adventure. They took a commitmentmoon to Malaysia and Laos for 3 weeks, which makes our 5 days in Hawaii (1 month to go!) seem downright pedestrian.

We went to Inka Heritage, the new Peruvian fusion restaurant on Park St. It was good! Lots of nice seafood. I had a fried bass sort of thing, sprinkled with calamari and mussels, with a sort of tomato-base sauce. They also make a mean sangria.

Next time I may have to try their seafood soup. Described on the menu as "100% aphrodesiac!" They also had aphrodesiac rice with a couple of dishes. I wasn't quite prepared to cope with that much aphrodesiac last night, sadly. If it had been 50 or 60%, maybe.

Whew.

Another Holiday Season(tm) successfully avoided! It's really amazing how little Christmas crud a person has to be subjected to if they're willing to turn off the radio and not go into any stores for most of December. On the other hand, Anita's parents did send us the first two seasons of the Muppet Show as a Christmas present, so I shouldn't complain too much. :-)

It's been a nice couple of days. The HPLC robot and I got a fair amount of work done, I wrote my very first useful computer program, we watched two episodes of the Muppet Show and "Six-String Samurai", and Anita demonstrated amazing skills of wifery, making homemade fried wontons, Japanese curry, and daifuku mochi while (simultaneously!) doing laundry and dishes. I think I may be obliged to go out and kill an antelope or something now. Or possibly stand on a rock beating my chest and frightening away other, lesser males. Ook!

Hope you all had a nice weekend, too!

Best Laid Plans

Had big plans for today - Anita's off at early-morning zen class, so I was going to zip into the lab, screen some clones, get the HPLC set up for tomorrow, inoculate for overexpression screens, be home in time for lunch, ta-da! Not so easy, though.

Got all bundled up, went out into the bluster and found my car completely frozen shut. The locks are OK, but the doors are completely iced up. It feels more likely that I'll pull the handles off than that I'll get the dang doors open. Sigh.

So here I am, drinking tea and dinking around with the internet.

Hope you all are having a nice morning.

P.S. Substantial end-of-the-year post is on it's way. Stay tuned for all the excitement of a life in science.

Fun Weekend

Went to see Jonathan Coulton at the Majestic Theater Friday night, which was more fun than it had any right to be. It's a great old theater, and the music was a hoot. A geekier crowd you've never seen in your life. A good time was had by all.

Now, if only I could find the chords to "Mr. Fancy Pants" somewhere... (Dan, in my role as geek enabler, I have to point out this little device.)

The opening act, Paul and Storm (funny, he doesn't look like a "Storm"), were also pretty funny, and sang the roof off the place. One song in particular that they did will appeal to the former Cornell Ag School crowd...

Ooh!

Here's something to play with:

Digital Library of Appalachia

Lots of audio clips of old-timers, including "Rabbit" Muse, finest of the American blues ukulele players... (Which is what I was looking for in the first place.)

New Toy!

The Hannukah season is off to an early start this year! I'm now the proud owner of a lovely baritone ukulele and what is easily the nicest instrument case I own. It's a great sounding little guy; lots of fun to play.

I was poking around the web, looking for uke chord charts, when I made a terrific discovery. Check out The Cipher. It sounds like a Dan Brown novel, but it's actually a really cool and intuitive system of music theory for stringed instrument players. I haven't dug into it very deeply yet, but after reading the first few pages, I can play you a major scale in any key in multiple octaves across the guitar fretboard. Powerful stuff!

Of course, I found it because he's got the system all worked out for a bunch of other instruments, too. Ukulele for sure, but you know that viola da gamba that's been collecting dust in your hall closet all these years? Now you know what to do with it.

The only fretted instrument he doesn't cover is the banjo. Ha! Take that, music theory!

It also turns out that the baritone ukulele is tuned the same way as a lute, suggesting a whole new source of repetoire, once I figure the little sucker out...

Irish Adventures

We had ourselves an evening of Celtic entertainment last night. (Man, we need to get out of the house more...)

We went downtown and had dinner at Brocach, the "Irish" pub on the Capitol Square. They try a little too hard, but the food's not bad, and I have nothing to say against the beer. A nice little cultural warm-up for...

Solas, at the Overture Center. They were amazing, as always. They've gone through another singer, though. The woman who's been singing with them for the last several years has decided to move on, so they had a new girl, who was actually pretty good. More Appalachian than Irish vocal stylings, but it worked. I may have to pick up her other band's album, which sounds like it's probably good, from the demo clips on their site.

We did pick up a copy of Solas' latest, a live recording CD and DVD of their ten-year reunion concert, with all the current and former members. Haven't had a chance to give it a listen yet, but it can only be good. (It's occurred to me that I first saw Solas at Kennedy Hall, which must have been in 1997 or so, which means [if last year was their 10th anniversary], that they'd only been together for a year or so then. They were pretty good then, too, if I recall.)

Anyhow, I should go and inoculate some bacteria. Life continues to be rich and fascinating, right? Of course right.

Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! We're off, through the snow, to Jeff and Tara's house with seafood bisque and sweet potato pecan pie in hand. I hope y'all are having a good day. I can get wholeheartedly behind any celebration that demands pie.

Conference Report

Dropped off the radar for a little bit, there (science is a harsh mistress, who sometimes calls for 72-hour growth curves, with timepoints taken every 6 hours), but I'm back and more or less well-rested now, so, as promised, the full story of last weekend's adventure.

The whole premise of the thing was to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the archaea by Carl Woese and George Fox at the UI at Urbana-Champaign. Archaea are, of course, the third great domain of life, along with the bacteria and the eukaryotes, and Woese was the first one to recognize that the methanogens weren't just wierd bacteria, but something else entirely. (That's Carl Woese with me and Jorge there in the picture.) He's an interesting character; a real crotchety, opinionated old dude.

The connection to me is that Jorge was a first-year graduate student in Ralph Wolfe's lab at Urbana in 1977. Wolfe had been studying the methanogens for years at that point, and was naturally excited by the phylogenetic data coming out of the Woese lab down the hall, so he played a big role in the whole early days of the field. Jorge was one of the speakers at the conference, along with Wolfe, Fox, Woese, and a whole bunch of other guys from those early days. It was very odd to hear him talking about my results.

It was a neat weekend. Lots of interesting characters (Karl Stetter, the German who's identified most of the archaea known to grow above 100°C, is a nut.), funky organisms (like Pyrobaculum spherical virus, which has a 40kb genome with about 50 ORFs, none of which have any homology to anything in the databases), and strange stories. Bill Balch, who was a post-doc in Wolfe's lab back then, was reminiscing with Jorge about the time that "Boom-boom" blew up their anaerobic chamber and knocked down a wall in the lab. ("Boom-boom" has apparently gone on to be a librarian...)

Urbana seems like a nice place, actually. We had a native guide; Chi did his undergrad there, and he took us to a really excellent Korean restaurant, but there was also some pleasant schmoozing with microbiologists in bars. The campus is really pretty, too. Overall, I thought it seemed like a pleasant place to be.

Archaea-ology

I'm off to the conference celebrating the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the archaea this afternoon! Should be a great conference, and Jorge's even using some of my data as part of his talk there. Anybody got any pointers on places to eat in Urbana-Champaign?

Best Wedding Present Ever

From the Wine-Of-The-Month Club's October selection:

2005 Lo Tengo Torrontes
Made from 100% Torrontes. The wine is a lively straw color. Intense floral aromoa along with aromas of tropical fruit. On the palate it is flowery and vivid with excellent fruit, a truly explosion of the senses. It has good acidic balance. The wine is ready to be enjoyed now. Serve chilled with Pacific Rim cuisine such as mushroom dumplings in chicken broth, herb stuffed zucchini with basmati rice, tuna with mango sauce, Alaskan butterfish marinated in Torrontes and Miso, lobster with papaya sauce, and steamed bass with caramelized onions, ginger, and scallions.

And here I'm plumb out of mango sauce, too... :-)

Still Alive...

The lab is moving... It's like pouring 5 gallons of crankcase oil into a pint glass. No major disasters so far, although at one point this morning Jorge was about ready to have us start packing up again to move back. Don't ask.

Things are a little...tense at work right now. Everyone's overworked and a little cranky. It doesn't look like we'll have any science happening until next week at the earliest. Pfui. Maybe someday I'll graduate, but not if I don't manage to get some data collected, dang it. That hot pink mutant strain has been sitting in the fridge for a week and a half now, waiting for me to figure it out...

Wow!

So, this robot was inspecting an undersea oil pipeline, some 900 meters down, when along comes this whale... That's about it, actually, but it's so cool!

News of the day

Well, it looks as though we'll actually be moving to the new building early - October 16th. The animal facility and biosafety level 3 labs aren't ready, so most of Medical Microbiology can't move, and we've been pushed up. Better start packing up, and hope the water in the new building doesn't change any of my phenotypes...

We're having a cocktail party tonight! Time to learn how to mix a proper Wisconsin brandy old fashioned.

Phew!

Two weeks of craziness, but I made it! Presentation went well (it's a good thing I wore a tie, they took pictures!), the class I'm teaching looks like it'll be fine, and the data is shaping up nicely:


Mmmm... Mass spectrometry! They're trying to turn me into a biochemist, but it's all right. Perhaps I'll discover something interesting. The trick is to do it before we have to move to the new building in November!

What A Wonderful World

Well, this just made my (otherwise insane) day:

Err...

Excellent advice for all locomotives, I should think.

The Bonds of Matrimony

I know I promised to scan all the wedding photos from the disposable cameras, but the scanner here at work is just too painfully slow to make that practical. However, I did want to make sure everyone got a chance to appreciate this terrific (and very symbolic) shot.



Nothing like a good solid hadaka jime judo choke to remind a fellow why he married that woman, right? :-)

A Lucky Cat

Not every cat has a custom-made llama felt basket liner. Kaiyo says thank you, Mom!

Quick Movie Review

Rainy, miserable day, but we went to see Stardust, which is a wonderful movie. You should all go see it. It reminded me very much of The Princess Bride, in all the good ways. A delight!

Got to run!

Photogenic Phood

In celebration of today's success at science, it's time once again for Pictures of Dinner! Today, we're featuring food from the Dinosaur Barbeque cookbook, using the sauce mentioned a few posts ago. For the main course, we have the chicken and andouille sausage (with peppers and onions and lots of tasty sauce), with a side of honey-glazed cornbread. The Smoking Loon Merlot seemed like the appropriate wine for the occasion, and they had it on sale at the corner liquor store, so you can't go wrong.

For dessert, we had this lovely chocolate icebox pie. Mmmm.

A thoroughly successful day. Life is rich and sweet.

Woo!

Glorious victory! Finally figured out how to knock out genes in Rhodobacter sphaeroides! Only took 3 years, but I've got the little punks now. Turns out the secret is that the excission event only happens in about 1 in every 10^11 cells. Do the counter selection with a 100 ml inoculum, and you're golden.

I hope it has an interesting phenotype, after all this time. :-)

False Advertising

So, now that labs have started to move into the new building, yesterday afternoon thay had the first of a new series of departmental social gatherings there: the "BacTea at 3". It was lovely, and very nice, and they had lots of cookies and fruit and things. But there was no tea. No Tea.

Sigh.

New Building!

As you may or may not know, the university just built a brand new building for Microbial Sciences, and I finally got a chance to go inside and check it out! The place is enormous - bigger than anything else on campus except for the basketball stadium.

The first thing you see once you're inside is this tremendous atrium. The stairs are not for the faint of heart, but I suppose they probably won't collapse in the first couple of years. There are actually two atria, but this is the big one, which will have a cafeteria / cafe in it, which should be nice.

The place is full of comfy chairs and places to sit and socialize. One feature I especially appreciate is all the rolling whiteboards. There are dozens of them, which is going to make scientific chattering really easy and fun. The place is set up to increase collaboration among labs, which is a nice change from being isolated in the basement of the Enzyme Institute.

Heading up into the lab areas, it's divided into "neighborhoods" of 4 to 6 labs each. We're in neighborhood 4 of the 6th floor, along with the Downs, Forest, and Thomas labs, who should be good neighbors. We share this corridor with the Downs lab, and eventually it'll have a bunch of equipment (-80°C freezers, etc.) in it. The student offices are through the windows on the right there. They're cozy, but should be workable.

And here's the bench which'll be mine! (And my chair, apparently.) I have shelves! And drawers! The luxury is nearly overwhelming. The lab space is considerably smaller than the space we're in now, but it's not as bad as I had been led to believe. We should have lots of room for most of our stuff.

Turning 180° from the last picture, here's the view from outside my bench! Pretty nice. I've never worked in a new building before. I've always been crammed into spaces which haven't been renovated since the 60's. I'm not sure I know what to do with nice things. I'll have to be careful with stuff. :-)

We move in November. I think we're about the last lab to go, but that's all right. It means they'll have plenty of time to figure out all the things that don't work before we get there. Hopefully our "neighbors" will leave us some room in the coldroom.

Ahhh...

My parents have been bundled off onto the train, and I have a full day of not much to do ahead of me. Life is good.

We had a fun weekend. They stayed at a bed and breakfast just north of town which was very nice and had sheep and llamas (Anita was happy!) and a very pleasant dog. I think my Dad's favorite part of the whole vacation was the dog. :-) We went to the art museum, to Sardine for French dinner, saw Canned Heat play at the Atwood Summerfest, and went to New Glarus for Swiss-themed lunch and a brewery tour. We also went down to Verona to hang out for a bit at the Sow's Ear, a combination yarn and coffee shop. The heat was brutal for the last ocuple of days, but we found enough indoor things to do. And this year I didn't get horribly ill.

They also brought presents! Terrorists have not yet tried to capture a train using barbeque sauce, apparently.

A Memorable Party

More wedding pictures! My parents' friends Pat and Robin took a bunch of pictures at the Saturday barbeque, filling a critical gap in the documentation... Look out for dogs, relatives, assorted little girls, and bratwurst! Also, an ominous number of kazoos. Perhaps it was foreshadowing of some kind.

Honeymoon Preparations

It's official! We're going to Maui in February for a week! We worked out a good deal with the AAA travel agent lady, and we're going to have a little 1 bedroom condo right on the beach, near all sorts of goofy tourist things. It also looks like it'll be whale-watching season, so that should be fun.

Mostly I'm excited about not having to spend all of February in Wisconsin, the fabled Frozen North.

Another Music Video

So, I admit to listening to a lot of Jonathan Coulton lately. I blame Dana. He's an excellent nerd troubador, and lots of people have made YouTube videos of his songs, which is also kind of fun.

Here's one which is really good, by "Kagatoamv":


(No adventures of my own to report, although we did have a -80° freezer crisis this morning, which is always a treat. Pfui.)

More Pictures!

For those keeping track, the Flickr group is growing rapidly! I just uploaded a whole bunch of photos from my Dad's friend Keith, and I've got a big stack of pictures from the disposable cameras to scan. You've never seen so many pictures of empty Chinese food dishes...

Underachieving

Don't you hate it when you go out to get a cup of coffee on a Friday night at the Java Cat, and it turns out to be local youth music night, and the local youth are an absolutely amazing jazz guitar / violin / vocal combo, who were already making you feel bad about not ever really playing music anymore even before you found out that they've never played together before and are just jamming? Darn local youth.

On the plus side, only a week 'til my parents come to visit!

Non-Marginal Posting

You know what the problem is around here? Too much marginalia, not enough music and microbes.

Lucky for you, I just found this:



Music by Jonathan Coulton, lyrics remixed from a Kentucky Fried Chicken training tape, video by some guy on the internet going by the name "DMB". (Very mysterious...)

Wedding Pictures, Anyone?

Hey folks! Anybody got wedding pictures they're just dying to share? I set up a Flickr group for just such a purpose. There's not much there now, but if you took digital photos, feel free to share them!

I have a feeling that once Dan gets his pictures up, and we get the disposable cameras back and everything, this is going to be the best-documented wedding of two thousand and ought seven. :-)

Married!

Heavens to Betsy, it's been a long time since I put anything on this blog. I seem to be mostly recovered from getting married, though, so no more excuses!

It's back to work tomorrow, but in the meantime we're enjoying some of our wedding presents...


It's been a whirlwind month. Everything went incredibly well, and it's nice to finally catch our breath and relax a little. The main thing we have left to do is write thank you notes. Thanks everyone!

Such A Fungi

So, we went to the farmer's market, which was very pleasant, as usual, but a little short on produce, it being early in the season and all. Pretty much all there was was asparagus and... morels. Hmmm.

So I bought a quarter pound of morels. It seemed like the thing to do, and they're cheaper at the market than any other possible place. I had no idea what to do with them, of course. The morel-selling guy was only slightly helpful, so we decided to go for a simple preparation.

First revelation: they're hollow! Big ones are probably good for stuffing. The biggest ones I saw at the market were about apple-sized.

They sauteéd up nicely in butter, and were smelling pretty darn good. And:

Voila! Rotiserried chicken, wild rice, and farmer's market morels and asparagus. A meal fit for a king! The king of Wisconsin, anyway. Morels, it turns out, are very tasty mushrooms. I sort of see what the big deal is, although I'm not entirely sure it was worth the $12 a quarter pound. Apparently you can't cultivate the little suckers - you have to go out into the woods and look for them. The season is pretty much over, so I expect my morel-cooking adventures are over for the year. We'll see how brave I am next year. Maybe I'll get crazy and put the rice inside the mushrooms!

Stylin'

As you know, certain circumstances are coming up which required me to buy a new suit... So here I am, in all my stylish glory. Please to notice the tie. I may have to figure out some way to keep my glasses from going crooked before the wedding. There's nothing I can do about the hair. :-)

Been Gone So Long...

Preach it, brother!

Yeah, yeah, lazy blogger. I'm planning a wedding, what do you want from me?

Happy Earth Day!

Terrific concert by the Old Crow Medicine Show last night.

I had no idea they were so popular! The place was packed with college kids dancing and singing along, girls screaming, the whole bit. Pretty cool. Especially since one of the songs they all knew and sang along with was Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid". Gives you hope for the younger generation. :-)

That fiddler of theirs is setting himself up for carpal tunnel. These boys don't play anything at a speed less than break-neck crazy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go brush up my banjo-picking.

Tobu-robics!

Yes, I realize that 97.3% of the internet is composed of funny cat pictures, and I realize that posting a video of your cat doing something cute is the lowest point to which a blog can sink, but nevertheless...

Musical Adventures

Quick social notes...

We went to see Ravi Shankar (and his daughter Anoushka) at the Overture Center on Tuesday, which was pretty awesome. Nothing like a good raga to get the week off to a rocking start. Somehow, I need to arrange a duet between a good sitar player and a good Uilleann piper. It'll be about 7 musicians worth of noises.

The weirdest thing was the two guys playing the tanpura in the background. As near as I can tell, this is an instrument which you tune ahead of time and just sort of strum as a drone while the sitar and flute and tablas rock out in front. They just sat there with these sort of lute things and plucked them with one hand through the whole concert. It hardly seemed worth their while. Maybe you have to put in your time on the tanpura before they let you play a sitar.

I also liked the piece they played which was a Spring raga, played in a rythymic cycle with 11 beats - two measures of 4 beats and two measures of one and a half beats. Oy. Makes slip jigs seem almost sensible.

And we're off to see the Old Crow Medicine Show Saturday. It's a good week.

Oh, YouTube, Is There Anything You Can't Do?

Lore Sjöberg is a funny man. Also a funny-looking man, but who am I to hold that against anyone?

Happy Together

Two founding members of the Turtles ("so happy together!") relate their woes in the music biz...



Makes me smile, but also makes me glad the PRTMO never had a manager. :-)

Older Than Dirt

Well, some dirt...

Happy birthday to me! 30 years seems like an awfully long time, but I guess I've managed to accomplish a reasonable amount. I've avoided getting a real job for this long - that's got to count for something!

Anita (being utterly awesome), got me this phenomenal t-shirt from xkcd.com, one of my favorite webcomics. Life is rich and sweet.

New Digs

I didn't get to go on the tour of the new building, but here's a picture somebody took out the window of what will be our new lab. Pretty sweet. We're not moving until November, which is good. It means we'll have all summer to work and all the other labs get to find out what doesn't work in the new building before we get there.

Progress...

Wedding invitations have been sent! (Other than the occasional straggler - anyone know how to track down Nadia?) It's enough to make a fellow feel downright productive.

Now if only I could get some science done, life would be perfect.

Weekend Adventures, Part The Second

Well, I didn't manage to get any pictures, so this isn't a terribly satisfactory blogpost, but I promised extra adventures...

Some friends of ours recently bought a big old farmhouse with lots of outbuildings out in Stoughton, and they had a debris-burning party yesterday to get rid of all the straw and old lumber and other crap that was cluttering up the barn. Unfortunately, we only got there late in the afternoon, after the fire had mostly died away. It was a big pile of ashes, but not especially photogenic. Ah, well.

It was about 70° here today. We opened up all the windows and aired the place out. Perhaps it'll be spring soon.

Weekend Adventures, Part The First

Despite having to work this morning, Anita and I went off to see a concert last night at the Union Theater. It was too good to pass up: a double bill of Karan Casey and Lunasa. It was a serious dose of quality Irish music. I've been trying to come up with a good metaphor for how to describe someone playing the Uilleann (pronounced "illin") pipes. It's a little like watching a man wrestle an octopus while taking apart a manual transmission and a little like listening to the bastard child of a bassoon and a hot-water heater. Amazing instrument.

We saw these two acts perform together in Ithaca a few years ago, at Kennedy Hall, and this show was even better, if only because we didn't have to flee from a 15-minute local children's chorus act in the intermission.

Turns out Karan Casey and her band were in Ithaca last week, and got caught in the same snowstorm I did. Who knew?

Indeed I Have Returned

I am back in lovely (well, cloudy) Madison. However, I'm also staring down a metric butt-load of work. I'm getting a wee bit tired of being a year behind those Sinorhizobium people at MIT. Sigh. Looks like time to revise the old "Future Directions" section.

Adventures on tap for this weekend, so stay tuned.

Cute and fun

Still on the road, but here's something entertaining... Sprout is a cute little Flash puzzle game. It's about 10 minutes of pleasant diversion - very nice. Good to see someone putting their hard-won colored pencil skills to use.

Other Blogs...

Running From Camera is not, perhaps, as compelling as the DogBlog, but it does have a certain je ne sais quoi...

In Which Mike Acquires Too Many Limes

The thing is, you see, that once you've made the key lime pie, and used up the bottle of tonic water, you still have half the 2 lb. bag of key limes left, and it's hard to know what to do with the little suckers. Any ideas?

New Lows in Ergonomics

After months of procrastination, new research into the least comfortable of all possible work environments has begun. What we have here (on the right) is an anaerobic chamber. Inside is an atmosphere of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. On good days, not enough hydrogen to make the thing an explosion hazard. Note the large, thick, clumsy rubber gloves. I spent today setting up protein crystallization trays in there, which involves lots of fine manipulation of coverslips and pipeting of microliters of liquid. My wrists feel like I just played the Moto Perpetuo on the mandocello and my neck is considering taking out a restraining order. Blegh.

On the plus side, I have some crystals already, which is promising... I also seem to have screwed up the reduction of my flavins, from which we learn that the semiquinone of FMN is red and that dithionite needs to be buffered. You live and learn.

Snow!

Whew. No need to go to the gym today. We got about a foot of heavy, wet snow last night, and I just finished shoveling out our sidewalk, which (being a corner lot) is about fifteen miles long. Not a huge snowfall compared to you New Yorkers, but plenty for me.

On the plus side, hot chocolate with Chinese five-spice powder is really, really good.

At last!

Well, it won't be in a physical journal for a month or so, but my paper's out online! Woo! That's Gray & Escalante-Semerena (2007) PNAS 104(8): 2921-2926, if you're looking for the reference... :-)

A couple more like this and they'll let me graduate!

Enormous squid!

So, what you need to do is click on this link and check out the super-awesome video of a 7-foot Taningia danae squid attacking an underwater camera at 500 meters or so deep. Way cool.

Courtesy of New Scientist.

Drinking Beers For Justice!

Went down to the High Noon Saloon last night with a few folks from lab to catch the Asylum Street Spankers. They do put on a good show. A couple of new members have joined since we saw them last. I don't know where they find these people. Dobro / mandolin / banjo / harmonica-playing, Tuvan throat-singing, sideburns-and-mustache guys don't exactly grow on trees...

They've apparently been getting a lot of attention (on YouTube and the like) for their anti-war song, which is great. Good to know that the 60's doesn't have a complete lock on the excellent protest song.

Global warming, eh?

Hey, all you New Yorkers, how are you faring with the snow? It's not often I see pictures of my home territory heading up the news sites... We've still got bitter cold (all the way up to 14° F today!), but hardly anything for snow. The graduate student in my lab from Ecuador hasn't stopped complaining for a week. You wouldn't think you could fit so many layers on such a small person.

Brrr.

Well, after a long warm spell, Wisconsin winter has decided to happen after all. High of 5 above today. I haven't checked the wind chill. I do have to go into the lab today, unfortunately. I wonder if Kaiyo would make a good sled-dog.

Submitted without comment

Adventures In Photogenic Cuisine, Part the next

Tonight we made four-cheese farfalle, which is fancy-pants talk for bow-tie pasta and cheese, but ooh boy, is it good. It's a recipe from the Gourmet magazine cookbook, and involves pecorino Romano, mozzarella, Fontina, and Gorgonzola, along with half a stick of butter and most of a pint of whole milk. A triumph. Our arteries are hardening as we speak, but this one's a keeper.

We're also beginning to get our act together on the wedding-planning front. I hope everyone likes Chinese food.

Curse Of The Golden Flower

Went to see the latest movie from the director of Hero and House of Flying daggers last night - apparently the most expensive movie ever produced in China. We were hoping for a good kung fu movie, but were a bit disappointed. It's certainly a spectacle, but the plot isn't very satisfying. All of the characters are murderously insane, and most of them die by the end. Pfui. Maybe Stephen Chow will have a new movie out soon.

Culinary delights

Lots of excitement this weekend... Yann organized an expedition to Sardine, the new French restaurant down on the waterfront. It was pretty good. They've got Anchor Steam on tap, which is a good start, and both the trout I had and the salmon Anita got were excellent. Yummy desserts, too: molten chocolate cake with almond ice cream, and star anise creme brulée. We stayed away from the "oyster of the day".

We were there with a rather startlingly blond group of microbiology grad students. Madison may be the only place in the world where a person at one end of the table can start a sentence with "I went to a Norwegian college..." and a girl at the other end of the table will say, "Really? Me too...", and it turns out they went to different schools. And the conversation is largely about the quality of the lutefisk served at the dining halls. Oy.

And we ended up the evening with an epic game of Carcassone (won by Anita), which lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Ah, youth! I remember it well.

Required Reading

Everybody needs to stop what they're doing, truck on down to the library or bookstore, and get themselves a copy of Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. Absolutely brilliant.

I mean to say, what's not to love about a book where Lester Dent and Walter Gibson (creators of Doc Savage and The Shadow, respectively) team up to solve the murder of H.P. Lovecraft in 1930's Chinatown? It's got kung fu villians, hideous monsters, blonde bombshells, lurkers in the darkness, conspiracies, and cowboys. Everything a red-blooded American boy could ever want.

And now I've got to go track down some old Doc Savage novels. Excuse me.