Blather Fragments

1) Has any research been done on the viscoelastic properties of instant mashed potatoes? I cannot help but wonder if they'd undergo wave-form or blunt deformation from wind resistance at high velocities. At the same time, could you efficiently pump mashed potatoes through a tube at similarly high velocities or would such an endeavor necessitate the use of gravy to reduce the frictional coefficient? Dr. Isis has already told me how to get the mashed potatoes into a balloon, but it remains to be seen whether those balloons are efficient projectiles. I am concerned that the deformability of mashed potatoes may inherently make mashed potato ballistics very difficult to aim. And if anyone knows where I could get 20kg of instant mashed potatoes, please let me know.

2) I think I truly need one of these, although I'm not sure what for. Anti-bear defense?

3) I have recently found that when you say to someone, "Yeah, I can fix that, just let me go get my gun," it is best to clarify that you mean a soldering gun first.

4) Volleybadminton is a most excellent game. Volleybadminton is, essentially, badminton played with volleyball rules. There are no back-bounds to the court so you can hit the birdie as far away as you'd like and laugh as the other team sprints backwards to try to get it, but beyond the sides of the net remain out-of-bounds. You may pass up to 3 times on one team to get the birdie back over the net, and if you're venal you may spike. Volleybadminton is best played at dusk when it is difficult to see where the birdie is. I play volleybadminton with more grace than skill. Credit for its invention goes to this deranged old professor.

5) What do you suppose the volume of a shopping cart is?

6) In the course of the Scientists' Duel that Hermie and I fought, we have tied to win PLoS Blog Pick of the Month when Coturnix's attention fell upon us. I wonder if he would have noticed our scrap without Twitter? Anyway, we get T-shirts (one each, luckily we do not have to share)! Unfortunately, they do not say "AWESOME BADASS SCIENTIST!" They do, however, say "PLoS", which is just as good. Those two terms are practically synonymous.

7) In a recent local Mad Scientist meeting*, which involved a Godzilla costume, it came up in discussion that I was the least massy of everyone in attendance, weighing even less than Sister Doom. This makes me sad because I'm 10cm taller than everyone there. I have been trying to gain weight for the past year, and although I've had some limited success it is also really difficult to eat 2.5-3Mcals/day without resorting to cake. The problem is that I don't particularly care for cake.

8) Ever since I bought a cape and awesome goggles to play Superhero Tag, I have been having a difficult time resisting the temptation to wear them everywhere (I am using the goggles as sunglasses, though)! I know it isn't entirely rational, but I cannot help but to feel that my experiments would just work so much better if I wore a cape while doing them. In reality, though, it'd probably mean I'd just spend 3X as much time walking to where I need to go because I'd wind up optimizing my routes based on the prevailing wind direction so that I'd always have a head wind. I'm not sure if this would increase or decrease my scientific credibility. I suspect I need tenure before I'm allowed to be eccentric.

9) I've not been cursing as much here as I usually do lately, so instead I'll post something a little bit racy to make up for it (NSFW, contains pasties):


10) I'm very intrigued by the answers that are coming in to the poll on the left of your screen. I hadn't figured that anyone would pick psychologists as holding their own in a fight against molecular biologists. I mean, what would they use as weapons? Therapy couches and hurtled copies of the DSM-IV?

11) This is something well worth reading, if you read German. Spektrum der Wissenschaft interviewed Bora Zivkovic of PLoS and A Blog Around the Clock notoreity fame and did a very thorough job explaining the breadth and relevance of the Open Access publishing movement. For those of you who don't read German, let it be known that I am waiting for permission from Spektrum to post a translation.

*Yes, for reals. We meet monthly.

Disjointed Mind Blather

1) I am one week away from a solid habit of being mostly drunk by 6p each Friday evening.

2) Drunk people aren't nearly as interesting as they think they are, except for me. Apparently I am fascinating (people keep talking to me). I've been partying with the other young scientists lately at bonfires, and I am quite impressed at (almost) everybody's ability to retain their scientific acumen whilst sloshed. I got into an argument last night with a plasma physicist about nuclear fusion and had to resort to using immunology jargon as an escape hatch.

3) I regret not going to ASM. I would have had to pay my own way, but now around the labs its like everyone else has seen the newest, coolest movie and I have to just nod along and pretend like I know what they're talking about. I've been poking through the literature of the talks that keep getting mentioned, but this is frustrating because the papers are always ~18 months behind the actual science that was seen at the conference.

4) Apparently I'm a good teacher in the lab. In the past week I have taught a complete lab n00b everything from how to micropipette to DNA extractions. I've also somehow become the departmental point-man on immunofluorescence, which I guess makes sense since experts are only experts because they've made and fixed all the possible mistakes and invented new ones.

5) I do not have enough projects in the laboratory. I want to be busier, or at least doing something that will turn out data. The ELISA I've been trying to develop has been a long series of failures with non-specific binding of antibodies that are supposedly specific at every turn. I've been putting a lot of time into it, but still, it requires some very long incubation times that I'd rather be doing something else useful during.

6) At this point I suspect that my wash buffer isn't washy enough (0.5% Tween-20 in 1X PBS). I'm tempted to reformulate it but haven't yet figured out what I could use that wouldn't also destroy the proteins I'm trying to get to stick together. It's also possible I'm being entirely too gentle with the plates. I've been pipetting 300ul wash buffer into each well 3X. Maybe I should be flooding a flat dish with wash buffer, plopping the plate down face first and shaking it like I'm trying to drown a Gremlin.

7) On that note, the Megablocking Buffer I made up works beautifully (for immunofluorescence at least). It contains 1% FBS, 1% BSA, 1% NGS in 1X PBS.

8) I bought a little Crassula monstrosa the other day. It's so freakishly cute! I have no idea what to name it.

9) The Dirtbombs are awesome. I have been stuck on their music for the past several months. I don't entirely know why they have 2 bass players and 2 drummers, but I don't really care either.


10) I'm really hoping that the PIs in my favorite Friday meeting decide to make another schedule and keep meeting throughout the summer because it's really my favorite meeting of the week. Vaguely: it's several PIs with tangentially similar interests coming together to float data, research proposals, and grants before each other and their labs and hash them out. It's really cool to get to see the bigger context of everyone's research and hear, and take part in, the discussion of the big ideas in the field. It's an escape from daily lab notebook tedium.

11) Speaking of which, I have really got to find a better way to keep notes in the lab. I tend to print out protocols and make notes on them as I'm doing the protocols and then collate them into binders, but then to also write down everything else on a growing stack of legal pads. So far I haven't been copying from one to the other to save paper because I feel bad using so much of it, but perhaps it's worth it. I also feel bad about printing out papers to read, but that's the only way I can make my notes in the margins and strike out what's important. Papers I read tend to have blocks and arrows and doodles going all over the place synthesizing the information (well, the good papers, at least) and until I save up enough for a nice Wacom tablet there's no other way for me to do this. Maybe there are alternatives?

Trepanation

I am curious about this, but to try to answer this one with a scalpel or welding torch would be deeply unethical and terribly illegal. I mean, unless you like trepanation...

How do you perceive yourself?

Not you yourself your physical self and fleshy presence. I mean, how do you perceive of your own consciousness(and/or/)sentience? Not so much in the sense of "I think, therefore I am", but more of where your thoughts are thought and your memories are stored, how the stream of your consciousness moves, if it moves, or the shape of the container thereof.

I've given a lot of thought to this, but I'm not going to reveal how I perceive myself right now lest I bias your responses.

More Percolationy Mind Blather

1) I find myself increasingly tempted to place bumper stickers reading "CAREFUL: MORON DRIVING!" on large SUVs parked in 2 or more spots in parking lots. If you can't competently handle your vehicle, you shouldn't be driving it.

2) I am coming to peace with the joggers on my walking route home. Or maybe they've learned and have been running more heavily so that I hear them over traffic. I still, however, favor mandatory jingly bells.

3) I wonder if I should actually start dressing like a tech. Most of the other techs wear jeans and T-shirts. I wear Dickies pants, a dress shirt tucked in, a belt, and Converse sneakers. I recently found out that many people in the department thought I was a post-doc. I hadn't thought I'd yet acquired that stench of quiet desperation and soullessness.

4) Something that smells worse than 2-betamercapthenol actually exists. A 3-day old plate of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron smells absolutely terrible, the kind of reek that makes you want to scrub your eyeballs out with lye and burn your clothes. Also, my boss doesn't seem to even so much as notice the smell.

5) Today I had sprayed down a bench with 70% ethanol and had an open flame nearby. The undergrad asked why I didn't just set it on fire. Naturally, I thought to myself, "Why don't I just set it on fire?" So I did*. Pretty blue flames!

6) At what level of autonomy do robots ascend to androids?

7) My dog has a visceral and deep-rooted hatred of the vacuum cleaner, to the point where she will literally try to attack it. She is in battle mode as soon as it comes out of the pantry, and she doesn't understand why when I'm trying to get her to let go of the hose. Maybe she and the vacuum cleaner could become friends if I rubbed bacon on it?

8) I've been increasingly tempted to drink more often so that I can force myself to fall asleep earlier, because otherwise sleep doesn't ever really seem to kick in until ~2am. This becomes a problem when I've got morning experiments scheduled.

9) I am deeply appalled by the horrific quality of childrens' science programming on TV. Johnny Test and Grossology, with some rare re-runs of Jimmy Neutron, are all that's out there. I mean, Discovery Kids also has Boneheads about paleontologists, but that just seems far too narrow. I've made claims along these lines before, but I have been paying closer attention to the programming schedule since. I've yet to find any refuting evidence.

10) I should really stop bobbing my head to the music while riding the bus. The busses here don't play music and I don't use headphones/earbuds.

11) I tried counting out a kilometer the other day recently, just to see, but quickly found out that my attention span is only 0.5km long. At least I got halfway there. It should be noted, however, that this was done mostly on campus, so there wasn't much to look at to distract me.

*Not the first time I have done this, nor the largest amount of ethanol, but likely the largest surface area.

Fragments of Toaster's Mind Blather

1) Debating ethical-ness of studying non-work stuff at work. I already carry around my Janeway's Immunobiology with me, so why not my Llama Book as well?

2) Finished -80C freezer inventory. No one had ever done so and my PI has had the freezer for ~15-20 years. I found tubes that contained the entire GI tract of mice in there, not to mention the many other unidentifiable things floating around (take note: if you're putting it in long term storage, clearly label what it is. "17" is not a valid label!) Now, unfortunately, I'm sorta bored.

3) I only have 2 projects right now, and they're both sidelined waiting on reagents/supplies. The lab is rather clean, too. See Fragment #1.

4) Does anyone have any wise tricks for dealing with student loan companies?

5) I'm going to go see Monsters vs. Aliens tonight!

6) I tried stopping eating cookies and burritos for 2 weeks not long ago and promptly lost 5 pounds. I promptly introduced doughnuts, pie, and pie into my diet and have managed to get 3 back. I'm becoming resigned to the idea that my ribs and hip bones will always be highly visible until I hit the mid-forties.

7) Sooner or later I'm going to wind up shanking a jogger. Not because I want to, mind you, but because that's what you get when you manage to sneak up on Toaster. Normally I can hear them coming many yards away (and smell them; for some reason many of the female joggers spray themselves with some kind of flowery scent before they leave, which I suppose is better than poop), but there's one part of my plod home that's really traffic noisy and I can't hear them when they're running on the grass. One surprised me recently and I had my umbrella out of my coat pockets ready to take out his knees before I realized what exactly was going on.

8) I realize that I've come to the age where little children no longer regard me as being just a big kid and now think of me as an ominous adult. Maybe it's just that children are inherently wise enough to avoid asking a Mad Scientist what's in his backpack.

9) OK, honestly I don't know what's in there anymore either. Let's investigate:

2 mechanical pencils
lead
highlighters
1 tattered index card with the word "gonads" written on front
1/2 bottle Pepto Bismol
8 chewable doses of ivermectin
1 green hair Scrunchie
1 blue hair Scrunchie
1 pair black and grey striped fistwarmers
1 pair blue striped knee socks
lots of batteries
Everlast brand fisticuffs
1 dirty Tupperware container from several months ago
several plastic bags (dog poop bags?)
1 empty envelope
1 burned copy of the Big Lebowski (unwatched and unlikely to be)
5 official transcripts
1 Janeway's Immunobiology, 7th ed.
1 old sketchbook from cartooning job containing various obscenities and stick figures
1 ream of unread papers
2 bars of graphite
3 1m-long high-tension rubber bands

10) Mercifully self-censored complaint about the fit of my underwear.

11) I need to write myself a Perl app and install it on all the computers I use to remind me to eat. Due to a self-experiment that I've not yet blogged, I have developed a rather extreme tolerance for hunger. I have caught myself going 14+ hours without food before realizing that I actually am hungry. Often I don't remember that I haven't eaten in quite a while until I have real hunger pains. And before you tell me that maybe that is why I am scrawny, it should be noted that when I eat it is usually best measured in kilograms and what it is would make a nutritionist cry (e.g., just the other day I discovered how delicious chocolate chip peanut butter sandwiches can be).