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?