slightly off topic, but strange and boss-related none the less.
I came into work today and noticed a bottle of holy water on my boss' desk. It kind of reminded me of those Skin so soft bottles from Avon, but with a cute little gold cross. Now this is strange because my boss was born Moslem in Iran and is now approximately an atheist. And I work in a cancer research lab. So I asked him about it and he's apparently decided that it was still worth it to try it out, whether or not he believes in that brand of religion or not. So he's already sprinkled it on one coworkers' bench, and since her experiments are going really well, he wants to know if I want some too. This is the same guy who gets all freaked out by me running 13 lanes on a gel, and who knocks on wood so often that I know the location of the nearest wooden object in most parts of the lab.
Now I kind of want to bring in those candles you can get in the supermarket - like the Virgin de la Candelaria ones. I can only imagine what the radiation safety guys would think if they saw this.
I know what you mean about the (I'm going to leave out the shouting because I already have a headache) "It sucks. It's 788 pages. am I supposed to read all that?"
If a book is designed to be used as a reference guide, why the heck do people get their panties in a bundle about its length?
Sometimes I feel that the writing of book reviews should be limited to people who like books. Personally, I like books, but I have a hard time explaining what it is about a book that makes it good. This is why I don't write many reviews.
I have used Amazon a great deal when looking for books. I have found that it doesn't have information on out of print books. This is frustrating as things are published and then go out of print all within a year or two. Some of my favorite books are out of print now. I'd like to be able to share that with other people so maybe they can find the books in their libraries, but amazon doesn't deal with books that don't give profit.
The other thing I find difficult about amazon is the amount of pointless reviews I have to wade through to find something that actually evaluates a book beyond the simple, "oh mi gawd, it sucks. i had to read this for english class and it rilly rilly sucked."
I've always appreciated the structure of imdb. The ability to search it intelligently (which may be possible with amazon, but I've yet to have it do a real library catalogue style search), some of the fun trivia sections including biographies and so on.
I do look forward to using this new site and seeing how it develops.
Wild boar attacks 6, leaves 2 seriously injured
Strong winds strike fatal blow to do-gooder
Public servant disguised as delivery man rob mother, daughter
Osaka legislator slurs Asians
Computer cock-up continues plaguing domestic travelers
Prison death trial to see violent video images
Marine steals from cabby
Man sits by unaware as neighbor plunges to death
Jilted man busted for forcing woman to wear sailor suit
Old man slits own throat with paper cutter
Women call for sex scandal governor's resignation
Education evolves from coeducation to social equality
And the rest of the items were similarly strange. The thing is, you know how you watch the local news on television and they only seem to report items involving spectacular suffering or small fluffy animals. I think they get extra points if they can find a small fluffy animal suffering. The news items seem to be the standard fare but without the feel-good pieces that we're (that's the royal we, if you don't agree with me) used to.
Well, they say that the lottery is a tax on the mathematically and statistically illiterate. I guess this is just another kind of tax. The only problem is that at least with taxes, a certain proportion usually goes to some good things. Like my salary.
When I was a kid, my dad and I read about Bentley and took my little microscope out in the backyard and looked at snow flakes for a few hours on a couple of different snowy afternoons. The scope was a little unweildy, but a simple magnifying glass was great.
If there are any parents out there, or people who resemble kids, I suggest trying this out on the next snowfall if you're not too distracted by digging out your car or drinking bailey's and coffee (with or without whipped cream).
But we all knew that. If people are interested in reading a well written account of the years surrounding the elucidation of DNA's structure, I'd strongly recommend Horace Freeland Judson's book, The Eighth Day of Creation. Judson does a good job of discussing Franklin's contributions to the structure of DNA as well as dealing nicely with Watson's interesting personality. The book is probably one of the best books written about scientific discovery and the people involved.
On Watson and his reputation as a "ladies man". Um. Let's just say that my mother was in college in the mid to late 1960's and she remembers him well. But not fondly.
If any of you have the chance to see Watson speak, you will realize that the man is pretty nuts. I heard him speak at NIH a few years ago and spent most of the seminar with my jaw dropped. He insulted women, of course, big people, Asians (he referred to them as "little yellow people") and then went on to insult every prominent scientist in the audience. Now, while the third group of people deserve some insults occasionally, the rest of it was just stupid. I remember coming out of the auditorium thinking that Watson is a colossal jacka**. A year or two later he lectured at UC Berkeley and several faculty walked out on his lecture because it was so offensive.
Anyway, he did some good science, but he isn't a Great Man in any way shape or form.
Well, we've got a nice tank of helium here so we can degas the solutions we put into our chromatography setup. I'm tempted to actually try this out with some ddH2O and a little immersion oil.
Do you think that NIH knows that it funds this kind of late night experiments?
(I might have to make a few latex glove helium balloons too)
technicality and the carnal side of clones
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I know I'm being a bit of twit for pointing this out, but it isn't methylization, it is methylation. CpG methylation (putting methyl groups on CG nucleotides) can indeed be used for imprinting, but there have been very nice studies on this showing how these things work and don't work with cloned animals.
You might enjoy reading this article in Genome Biology. I'm including a link to the abstract in pubmed. In this article Mann and Bartolomei review a whole bunch of neat stuff, which would be fun to read if I had a subscription to the journal in question. Science journals are annoying that way. (Darn publishers. Go biomed central!)
Another review, this time from Science, comes from Jaenisch's lab out at MIT. It provides a nice explanation of epigenetics and why it is still pretty hard to get live birth clones.
And, on a lighter note, one of my coworkers was out in Scotland a few years ago, and got to go see Dolly. He has a nice picture of him standing next to her which he keeps tacked up on the bulletin board by his lab bench. He also has another picture that is not posted. In this one he is pretending to hump Dolly.
I guess he'll be mourning her in a special way this Valentine's Day.
No, of course I didn't know. That's pretty funny actually. I think I even got my copy before January. I generally pick up the reviewer's copies because I can't afford the hardback copy when it finally gets published.
I don't believe in buying books in hardback or for full price. I read a large enough volume of books that for me to pay more than USD15 per book is impossible on my graduate student's stipend.
Fortunately my university has a good library with a good fiction section. I'm working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson slowly, and have found a great collection of Tijuana bibles in the comic book section. Academia has its uses.
I ended up with a reviewers copy of this book from my local second hand bookstore. (yes, I'm aware that buying a proof is vaguely evil, but I never said I was a nice person) When I read it I couldn't help but notice that much of Gibson's appeal for me lies in his depiction of a wild and frighteningly believable future. Since this book is set approximately in the present, I was not as distracted by gadgets and modifications, but was forced instead to take a long hard look at his ability to create believable characters and plotlines.
The result is that I enjoyed the book, but was very aware of Gibson's limitations. I found it difficult to get lost in the world that he, the writer, creates. His ability to create atmosphere is very good, and that is definitely something I enjoyed.
Speaking as a XX geek, I would recommend the flowers approach. I'm pretty hardcore biogeek (ie I own one dress, and I can't remember the last time I wore it) and even I like flowers. Do remember that even if you think that roses are the necessary flower, it is hard to get really nice ones on Valentine's day. If you can't get nice ones, get a different type of flower.
I'm also a strong believer in the shared bubble bath with a bottle of wine.
The last thing to consider is the following - even if you manage to put together a perfect Valentine's day and gain much much pointage, try to remember that getting your significant other flowers on a random Thursday in October may actually score you more points in the strange game of love.
Over the years, I've learned something important about gift-associated holidays. This idea is mostly directed toward women. If you have expectations of your person, tell him or her what they are. Then if you are disappointed, it will truely be his/her fault. And you are allowed to pull out the guilt cannons. Otherwise, you are only allowed to be somewhat disappointed.
Speaking of disappointing, my plans are as follows:
Go to work
Interview new post doc candidate
Get stuck taking new post doc candidate out for dinner because I am the only single person in my lab
Discover that there are no restaurants in the region that have tables available.
Return to work at 11:30pm to finish up cell culture
A frightening thing: I learned most of my Roman history from Asterix comics. My dad read them to me when I was a little kid - I also didn't get the names until I read them myself years later.
While reading these posts, I thought about Michael Chabon's book, "Kavalier and Clay" which concerned the rise in interest in comics during the post WWII years in New York City. I wonder if the Japanese interest in manga is not simply a cultural thing, because the US has already experienced a similar phenomenon. Is interest in comics/manga/graphic thingies tied to some sociopolitical state? (Don't ask me I'm a scientist, not a sociologist).
I guess this argument could be refuted by mentioning the length of time that the Japanese have been interested in Manga as compared to the American interest in superhero comics. I can't say anything about European comics, because I don't know who and how many read them.
the genomes aren't all that big, but when you start playing with genbank, things can get exciting...
(well, exciting for a biologist at least)
Did you know that back in the day genbank releases were distributed on CD? I've got one of the old ones hanging around my kitchen to remind me of how far sequencing technology has come.
According to NCBI, GenBank has greater than 17 billion bases from greater than 100,000 species.
There is a gene in sheep that, when mutated, causes them to have nice butts which is nice if you're raising sheep for mutton. (I'm resisting making the obvious joke). It is called callipyge and is the focus of study for a large number of labs around the world. If you're interested in learning about it, go to Pubmed and type in callipyge. There are lots of articles just waiting to be read.
I have enough trouble walking into a bar and when someone chooses to talk to me, explaning that I'm a molecular biologist. I get two responses: a blank look of confusion and the rapid departure of the person and the always trite, "Oh that's so noble." Followed by a story about someone in their family who has a disease or condition that is not relevant to what I study.
Imagine being the poor person who has to explain that they work on a gene responsible for nice arses in sheep.
I was talking with the guy who repairs the autoclaves at my building yesterday about the challenger disaster. Our autoclave had a compromised O-ring. It turned out that he had done some electronics work for the Challenger and the Discovery back in the day. He ended up getting downsized and remembers thinking how his life was going badly, but at least there was the Challenger that he could point to proudly and say, "I was part of that." Obviously the disaster was both a national and personal tragedy for him.
So this morning, looking at the news on the lab computer, it was a little eerie to read that NASA had lost contact with Discovery.
I'm a fan of yourdictionary.com
It contains a large list of dictionaries in many languages ranging from traditional like several English-French dictionaries to more specialized, like the Somali-English-Italian Online Mathematical Dictionary and the Hebrew-English Basketball Dictionary. There are also word games, rhyming dictionaries, links to places to learn languages and lots of other stuff.
another site that caught my attention recently is
http://oneword.invisibleland.tv/
wordgeeks unite!
And if we really want to quibble, the entire X is not inactivated in the Barr body. There are still some regions that remain unsilenced.
The X is reactivated in the germline and then inactivated somewhere in preimplantation embryogenesis.
The problem with a lot of this research is that it is done on mice and a little on humans. So we're drawing conclusions about all mammals based on two organisms even when it is completely clear that even mice and humans are wildly divergent in the mechanism of inactivation - ie mice always inactivate the paternal X in placenta while humans do random X inactivation in the same tissue.
X inactivation is just about the coolest thing since sliced white bread.
I'm still confused on why X inactivation seems to only be happening on one specific X chromosome - this implies that whichever inactivation that happened to the original cell that was cloned has remained through the entire developmental process.
From what I've read in the past, this should actually cause some problems when we start doing more cloning in the future. There are definitely animals/people out there who only survive because they are mosaic for certain X-linked disorders. Think about all those haemophiliacs (an X linked trait).
But I guess one could select a cell to clone which had the X without the defect.
The other issue I see here pertains to imprinting - there are genes for which the paternal copy is always silenced (turned off) while the maternal is expressed. When this system breaks down, the organism either dies or has severe problems. (Angelman's Syndrome and so on). I think that the lack of tortoiseshell pattern implies that these genes will remain imprinted allowing survival.
I guess I'm convinced that you would have to lose random X inactivation so you could maintain imprinted genes. The next thing to think about is what kind of genes are on the X chromosome and how do they affect the organism as a whole.
But, then there is this nice science article from Jaenisch's lab http://www.wi.mit.edu/nap/2000/nap_press_00_d pxina ct.html
I worked for a professor doing workstudy for about three years who consistantly sexually harassed me - looking down shirt, trying to ask me to spend a weekend in the city with him, etc. One day while doing some word processing I happened upon a file with a few pieces of poetry. One was about the arrogance of american women, and another was about impotence. That almost made up for having to deal with his idiocy for all that time. I debated for a while printing them out and then using the departmental photocopier and posting them all around campus. I should have done that as a going away present to myself.
I guess if they allowed the Segway on the sidewalk, they might have to reconsider allowing skateboards. Heaven forbid they allow skateboards on the sidewalks. (this is my poor effort at sarcasm, please excuse)
the brilliance of amtrak is glorious. they have now designated the first car in many trains as the "quiet car" this means: no cell phones, no loud conversations, no "yammering"children and so on. it is peaceful.
Slashdot Mirror
slightly off topic, but strange and boss-related none the less.
I came into work today and noticed a bottle of holy water on my boss' desk. It kind of reminded me of those Skin so soft bottles from Avon, but with a cute little gold cross. Now this is strange because my boss was born Moslem in Iran and is now approximately an atheist. And I work in a cancer research lab. So I asked him about it and he's apparently decided that it was still worth it to try it out, whether or not he believes in that brand of religion or not. So he's already sprinkled it on one coworkers' bench, and since her experiments are going really well, he wants to know if I want some too.
This is the same guy who gets all freaked out by me running 13 lanes on a gel, and who knocks on wood so often that I know the location of the nearest wooden object in most parts of the lab.
Now I kind of want to bring in those candles you can get in the supermarket - like the Virgin de la Candelaria ones. I can only imagine what the radiation safety guys would think if they saw this.
Sometimes I feel that the writing of book reviews should be limited to people who like books. Personally, I like books, but I have a hard time explaining what it is about a book that makes it good. This is why I don't write many reviews.
The other thing I find difficult about amazon is the amount of pointless reviews I have to wade through to find something that actually evaluates a book beyond the simple, "oh mi gawd, it sucks. i had to read this for english class and it rilly rilly sucked."
I've always appreciated the structure of imdb. The ability to search it intelligently (which may be possible with amazon, but I've yet to have it do a real library catalogue style search), some of the fun trivia sections including biographies and so on.
I do look forward to using this new site and seeing how it develops.
Strong winds strike fatal blow to do-gooder
Public servant disguised as delivery man rob mother, daughter
Osaka legislator slurs Asians
Computer cock-up continues plaguing domestic travelers
Prison death trial to see violent video images
Marine steals from cabby
Man sits by unaware as neighbor plunges to death
Jilted man busted for forcing woman to wear sailor suit
Old man slits own throat with paper cutter
Women call for sex scandal governor's resignation
Education evolves from coeducation to social equality
And the rest of the items were similarly strange. The thing is, you know how you watch the local news on television and they only seem to report items involving spectacular suffering or small fluffy animals. I think they get extra points if they can find a small fluffy animal suffering. The news items seem to be the standard fare but without the feel-good pieces that we're (that's the royal we, if you don't agree with me) used to.
Well, they say that the lottery is a tax on the mathematically and statistically illiterate. I guess this is just another kind of tax. The only problem is that at least with taxes, a certain proportion usually goes to some good things. Like my salary.
If there are any parents out there, or people who resemble kids, I suggest trying this out on the next snowfall if you're not too distracted by digging out your car or drinking bailey's and coffee (with or without whipped cream).
yup, I only remembered his comment on big people as I was editing this.
On Watson and his reputation as a "ladies man". Um. Let's just say that my mother was in college in the mid to late 1960's and she remembers him well. But not fondly.
If any of you have the chance to see Watson speak, you will realize that the man is pretty nuts. I heard him speak at NIH a few years ago and spent most of the seminar with my jaw dropped. He insulted women, of course, big people, Asians (he referred to them as "little yellow people") and then went on to insult every prominent scientist in the audience. Now, while the third group of people deserve some insults occasionally, the rest of it was just stupid. I remember coming out of the auditorium thinking that Watson is a colossal jacka**. A year or two later he lectured at UC Berkeley and several faculty walked out on his lecture because it was so offensive.
Anyway, he did some good science, but he isn't a Great Man in any way shape or form.
Do you think that NIH knows that it funds this kind of late night experiments?
(I might have to make a few latex glove helium balloons too)
You might enjoy reading this article in Genome Biology. I'm including a link to the abstract in pubmed. In this article Mann and Bartolomei review a whole bunch of neat stuff, which would be fun to read if I had a subscription to the journal in question. Science journals are annoying that way. (Darn publishers. Go biomed central!)
Another review, this time from Science, comes from Jaenisch's lab out at MIT. It provides a nice explanation of epigenetics and why it is still pretty hard to get live birth clones.
And, on a lighter note, one of my coworkers was out in Scotland a few years ago, and got to go see Dolly. He has a nice picture of him standing next to her which he keeps tacked up on the bulletin board by his lab bench. He also has another picture that is not posted. In this one he is pretending to hump Dolly.
I guess he'll be mourning her in a special way this Valentine's Day.
I don't believe in buying books in hardback or for full price. I read a large enough volume of books that for me to pay more than USD15 per book is impossible on my graduate student's stipend.
Fortunately my university has a good library with a good fiction section. I'm working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson slowly, and have found a great collection of Tijuana bibles in the comic book section. Academia has its uses.
I ended up with a reviewers copy of this book from my local second hand bookstore. (yes, I'm aware that buying a proof is vaguely evil, but I never said I was a nice person) When I read it I couldn't help but notice that much of Gibson's appeal for me lies in his depiction of a wild and frighteningly believable future. Since this book is set approximately in the present, I was not as distracted by gadgets and modifications, but was forced instead to take a long hard look at his ability to create believable characters and plotlines.
The result is that I enjoyed the book, but was very aware of Gibson's limitations. I found it difficult to get lost in the world that he, the writer, creates. His ability to create atmosphere is very good, and that is definitely something I enjoyed.
I'm also a strong believer in the shared bubble bath with a bottle of wine.
The last thing to consider is the following - even if you manage to put together a perfect Valentine's day and gain much much pointage, try to remember that getting your significant other flowers on a random Thursday in October may actually score you more points in the strange game of love.
Over the years, I've learned something important about gift-associated holidays. This idea is mostly directed toward women. If you have expectations of your person, tell him or her what they are. Then if you are disappointed, it will truely be his/her fault. And you are allowed to pull out the guilt cannons. Otherwise, you are only allowed to be somewhat disappointed.
Speaking of disappointing, my plans are as follows:
While reading these posts, I thought about Michael Chabon's book, "Kavalier and Clay" which concerned the rise in interest in comics during the post WWII years in New York City. I wonder if the Japanese interest in manga is not simply a cultural thing, because the US has already experienced a similar phenomenon. Is interest in comics/manga/graphic thingies tied to some sociopolitical state? (Don't ask me I'm a scientist, not a sociologist).
I guess this argument could be refuted by mentioning the length of time that the Japanese have been interested in Manga as compared to the American interest in superhero comics. I can't say anything about European comics, because I don't know who and how many read them.
Did you know that back in the day genbank releases were distributed on CD? I've got one of the old ones hanging around my kitchen to remind me of how far sequencing technology has come.
According to NCBI, GenBank has greater than 17 billion bases from greater than 100,000 species.
I have enough trouble walking into a bar and when someone chooses to talk to me, explaning that I'm a molecular biologist. I get two responses: a blank look of confusion and the rapid departure of the person and the always trite, "Oh that's so noble." Followed by a story about someone in their family who has a disease or condition that is not relevant to what I study.
Imagine being the poor person who has to explain that they work on a gene responsible for nice arses in sheep.
i realized that a few minutes after posting this. color me stupid/ignorant.
I was talking with the guy who repairs the autoclaves at my building yesterday about the challenger disaster. Our autoclave had a compromised O-ring. It turned out that he had done some electronics work for the Challenger and the Discovery back in the day. He ended up getting downsized and remembers thinking how his life was going badly, but at least there was the Challenger that he could point to proudly and say, "I was part of that." Obviously the disaster was both a national and personal tragedy for him. So this morning, looking at the news on the lab computer, it was a little eerie to read that NASA had lost contact with Discovery.
I'm a fan of yourdictionary.com It contains a large list of dictionaries in many languages ranging from traditional like several English-French dictionaries to more specialized, like the Somali-English-Italian Online Mathematical Dictionary and the Hebrew-English Basketball Dictionary. There are also word games, rhyming dictionaries, links to places to learn languages and lots of other stuff. another site that caught my attention recently is http://oneword.invisibleland.tv/ wordgeeks unite!
And if we really want to quibble, the entire X is not inactivated in the Barr body. There are still some regions that remain unsilenced. The X is reactivated in the germline and then inactivated somewhere in preimplantation embryogenesis. The problem with a lot of this research is that it is done on mice and a little on humans. So we're drawing conclusions about all mammals based on two organisms even when it is completely clear that even mice and humans are wildly divergent in the mechanism of inactivation - ie mice always inactivate the paternal X in placenta while humans do random X inactivation in the same tissue.
X inactivation is just about the coolest thing since sliced white bread.
d pxina ct.html
I'm still confused on why X inactivation seems to only be happening on one specific X chromosome - this implies that whichever inactivation that happened to the original cell that was cloned has remained through the entire developmental process.
From what I've read in the past, this should actually cause some problems when we start doing more cloning in the future. There are definitely animals/people out there who only survive because they are mosaic for certain X-linked disorders. Think about all those haemophiliacs (an X linked trait).
But I guess one could select a cell to clone which had the X without the defect.
The other issue I see here pertains to imprinting - there are genes for which the paternal copy is always silenced (turned off) while the maternal is expressed. When this system breaks down, the organism either dies or has severe problems. (Angelman's Syndrome and so on). I think that the lack of tortoiseshell pattern implies that these genes will remain imprinted allowing survival.
I guess I'm convinced that you would have to lose random X inactivation so you could maintain imprinted genes. The next thing to think about is what kind of genes are on the X chromosome and how do they affect the organism as a whole.
But, then there is this nice science article from Jaenisch's lab
http://www.wi.mit.edu/nap/2000/nap_press_00_
I worked for a professor doing workstudy for about three years who consistantly sexually harassed me - looking down shirt, trying to ask me to spend a weekend in the city with him, etc. One day while doing some word processing I happened upon a file with a few pieces of poetry. One was about the arrogance of american women, and another was about impotence. That almost made up for having to deal with his idiocy for all that time. I debated for a while printing them out and then using the departmental photocopier and posting them all around campus. I should have done that as a going away present to myself.
I guess if they allowed the Segway on the sidewalk, they might have to reconsider allowing skateboards. Heaven forbid they allow skateboards on the sidewalks. (this is my poor effort at sarcasm, please excuse)
the brilliance of amtrak is glorious. they have now designated the first car in many trains as the "quiet car" this means: no cell phones, no loud conversations, no "yammering"children and so on. it is peaceful.