Only an empty can bears witness to the work that was accomplished here.
Splitting five cell lines into six parts each. That’s thirty flasks to fill with cells before I can go back to work on my poster.
Rachel’s friend was driving a Mercedes CLX 430 and offered to let her take it out for a spin. She disappeared “around the block,” only to return about fifteen minutes later. I guess she realized she was getting a little far away from the apartment when she saw the highway signs. I got a bit more practice attempting to take pictures in little to no light, sans flash. Continue Reading »
I finally got tired of waiting for my AC to get fixed and started turning computers back on. About…goodness, about a month ago, we tried our hand at making pizza from scratch. The last time we did was back in Maryland with our friend Jeff Chiu, whom we greatly miss. This time we used Angie’s family sauce recipe and Andy’s dough recipe, which were both delicious. We were a little too enthusiastic about making a thick crust, so each slice ended up having about a whole breadstick attached to it. I was so enthusiastic about eating it post-oven I forgot to take any more pictures – maybe next time. Continue Reading »
There's a hole in our house where the new AC is going to be. Visible progress my friends, I will dare to hope that we will be able to sit in our living room without pouring sweat within the week.
Most, if not all IP maximalists and a great many misinformed journalists equate the sharing of digital information with the theft of physical objects. This misuse of language has been debunked may times over, but in a recent article, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones remixed the argument in favor. I think he’s still making a poor case.
Kevin’s key example is that if somebody took unpublished material, say a draft article or in-progress song, and shared it with others, they have deprived the original author of an opportunity to do something else with it. First of all, this isn’t what is happening with the majority of shared works, which have already been published and are being shared and distributed amongst fans using the most efficient means possible. Even so, this specific situation is also not theft; rather, it is a violation of trust.
Violating somebody’s trust is a separate issue to be dealt with in its own right. The language of stealing is very specific and does not apply here; it is inappropriate to conflate the two. Whether or not the unrestricted sharing of information is the best option in a given situation can be discussed, but never is that sharing, however “damaging,” identical to depriving someone of a physical object.
In Kevin’s example, it’s hard to put a monetary amount on something prematurely shared – somebody could just as easily have paid a significant sum of money for it as they could have considered it trash. What has been truly lost or damaged is the trust in the person who had access to that item and chose to share it. In an emerging post-scarcity world, this is far more important, and a challenge to accurately measure.
Violations of trust or privacy aside, it really is as simple as this: copying is not theft. It’s straightforward and to the point – everything else is an additional layer of debate on top of the core concept.
The past several weeks have been some of the hottest of the year, with temperatures frequently going over 100 ºF. It’s during these times of extreme use that home climate control systems tend to simply give up, a fate that befell our air conditioning unit one week ago today.
Even the nights are in the balmy seventies, meaning that, while it is lovely weather for strolling, our poor apartment doesn’t get much opportunity to expel the accumulated heat of the day. Thus, our house has been regularly reaching 99 ºF, which may be the maximum temperature our thermostat can read (I haven’t noticed a third digit).
Thursday our landlord gave us a portable air conditioning unit for the bedroom, allowing us to create a little oasis of comfort amid the hostile temperatures of the remaining rooms. We’re now able to get some sleep at night, but our ability to use our living space remains cramped.
One of the first things to go were the desktop computers – they generate far too much heat to be allowed to run under these conditions. Since I often use Summer to process and archive my pictures, I haven’t been able to upload any of the interesting ones I took last week. Even the laptop is difficult – despite installing a third party fan controller application, the MacBook Pro is more like a Cookbook Pro, cheerily heating any adjacent body parts to the point of pain.
From a wider perspective, it’s not like we have the humidity levels of Maryland or are dealing with hurricanes. However, a near-constant outpouring of sweat from merely sitting in my living room does affect our ability to accomplish things. If Fortune smiles upon us, this will be a non-issue before the week is half over. Until then, it’s another cold shower for me.
It took me way too long to process the collected pictures from our camping trip to Convict Lake, but here are some of the highlights (taken by all of us across several cameras). I’ve kind of surprised myself with how much time I’ve been spending outdoors lately. It’s a good contrast to all the time spent in lab during the week, made all the more enjoyable by some fantastic company.
Convict Lake is absolutely gorgeous. We tried to capture what we could in the pictures but nature has a way of insisting that you need to see it for yourself.The (freezing cold) water was a vibrant blue-green and dropped off to treading-water depths only a few feet from the shore.
We tried to catch fish without success. Every so often they’d swim to where we could see them just to mock us – Andy attempted to impale them with a hand-fashioned spear, but even that was fruitless. The best our group was able to do was Rachel catching a minnow in the shallows like a cat. Angie was a camping hero: She had a modeling gig Friday afternoon, but came directly from that to meet up with us. She packed all her gear and brought it to the photoshoot; we brought some dinner and makeup removing wipes.
Despite the warm days, there was still snow on some of the mountains and rapid temperature changes when the sun changed sides of the horizon. I’ve never seen Rachel go from bundling into a mummy bag with sweatshirts and extra blankets to a tank top and shorts in so short a time. I did not bring enough cold night gear, and I managed to dump the blanket Rachel gave me into some burrs in my sleep. I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to get them all out, or if we do, if the blanket will retain its desireable softness.
We spent one of the days hanging out by an inlet to the lake, where the rushing water sliced through the rest of the lake. We skipped stones: Andy calmly gets ten or more skips deep into the lake, while I struggle to get more than four, which is neatly explained by my “chicken attempting to fly” throwing posture. Another day, we climbed out onto a fallen tree and ended up seeing how far we could walk onto the slippery end before falling in.
Other interesting things: Natural hot springs, a tree knot shaped like an eye, carving a Pocahontas tattoo onto Angie’s arm, mountain shadows forming a smiley face. California summer!
Because you were so consumed with longing to know what I do in lab all day, here's a picture of some immunofluorescence staining I've been working on. Blue is cholesterol (labeled with filipin), which has accumulated in these cells as a result of treatment with a special drug. Red and green are two proteins I'm hypothesizing may experience changes as a result of the cholesterol accumulation (NPC1 and APP, respectively).
This is a single human fibroblast (skin) cell at 100x magnification. I imaged each channel separately and combined them in Photoshop with screen blending mode, adding individual levels adjustment layers to reduce background and make the signal more visible. This is helpful for visualizing where things are located within the cell, and if your fluorescent labels are colocalizing, that is, in approximately the same place. This could allow me to draw conclusions about which proteins are interacting with each other and where they move within the cell in response to stress (like cholesterol buildup).
A picture like this is the result of growing cells in culture for a number of days, permanently fixing them in place with chemicals, treating them with antibodies to label things I'm interested in with fluorescent tags, and a few hours under the microscope focusing and taking pictures. Filipin is especially difficult to image because the light required to excite it also rapidly burns it out. I get maybe a second of good blue glow before it's gone for good and I have to find a new cell to image.
Immunofluorescence: Kind of like throwing stuff glows in the dark into single cells and looking at them one hundred times larger than life. While the work itself gets tedious, seeing it through the lens never gets old. Go science!
Back in June and bunch of us bought Groupons for the local amusement park, thinking that there was no way we’d have a problem using them before they expired “in August,” the exact date being today. Thus we had no choice but to spend the afternoon riding water slides and playing mini golf (and a little running through sprinklers). Several of the water slides had some steep drops, making for quite the adrenaline rush. It was possible to rent tubes for some of the slides, but we opted to forgo that and merrily bypassed the longer lines of tube-carriers. Silly people paying to wait!
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- Came back from Oak Glen with some real apple cider. We'd been missing that bunches. #fb #autumn 2010-11-13
- Passed by the "Royal Trailer Park." Now if -that- isn't a contradiction in terms... #redlands 2010-11-12
- Lame: People who study in chapel. Text, play games on your phone, talk, but don't try to read your notes in the dark. #fb #school 2010-11-10
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Interesting Links
- Half-Life: Origins (Live Action)
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Listening To...
- Acid House Kings - A Long Term Plan
- Acid House Kings - Will You Love Me In The Morning?
- Acid House Kings - Sleeping
- Acid House Kings - Saturday Train
- Acid House Kings - Tonight Is Forever
- Acid House Kings - I Write Summer Songs For No Reason
- Acid House Kings - 7 Days
- Acid House Kings - London School Of Economics
- Acid House Kings - A Long Term Plan
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Bookshelf
Malcolm Gladwell -
Blink
Patrick Rothfuss -
The Wise Man's Fear (Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
Jodi Picoult -
My Sister's Keeper
Rudy Rucker -
Postsingular
J.D. Robb -
J.D. Robb In Death: The First Cases (In Death #1 & 2)
mistypedURL by Michael Castello is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.