Busyness
Well well well, what a busy little weekend we’ve been having over here. There’s been a fancy mix of things which are required (such as shipping g back and forth to Syracuse for exams) and things which are fun (such as spending g’s one hundred dollar gift certificate on copious amounts of alcohol.) In fact, just ten minutes ago we arrived back from an exclusive wall-size movie viewing session. One of the perks of being a grad student is that we can “borrow” things such as HD projectors from the lab.
Given the huge-assed nature of the screen we can spray out of the projector, the film choice was a toss-up between Aliens (one of my absolutely favorite movies of all time) and Children of Men (which most of us had not yet seen). We ended up choosing the latter, and saving the former for when we have some surround-sound action.
So CoM is a somewhat harrowing watching experience, but a pleasurable one. It’s pretty kick-arse, to use the technically correct critical language. Its also rammed full of sneaky highbrow type references, which most of us probably failed to pick up because the cultured parts of our minds have been corrupted by all the science we do daily.
I did manage to pick out a couple of the classical music references though, particularly the Shostakovich 10 and Prokofiev violin concerto which get about half a minute of airtime when they run into the Russians in the refugee camp. Like I mentioned last week, when you know a piece of music well it really jumps all up in your grill. My non-classically inclined friends probably didn’t notice anything much about the music during those scenes, but for me it was like doing that snapping awake thing when you are falling asleep in a lecture. A bit of your brain goes from fuzzy to focused after a few familiar notes.
Oh yeah, it also had “Omgyjya Switch7″ by Aphex Twin. Extra awesome.
The PCR Song
Oooo, I can’t resist this. It’s a song (and viral advert) for PCR, or polymerase chain reaction: probably the most ubiquitous and useful technique in DNA research, which is what I do.
If you don’t fancy reading the whole wikipedia article, it’s basically a technique for multiplying a very small amount of DNA (which is what you tend to get from biological samples) into a very large amount of DNA. It uses something called Taq polymerase which is a special enzyme extracted from bacteria which live in thermal springs and can stand really high temperatures. Basically all you do is throw some in with your DNA and a bunch of bases, and keep heating it up and cooling it down. It’s amazingly simple and remarkably effective.
And a rather unexpected subject for a song.
Now we just need one about DNA helicase!
PopularConvert.com
Here we (I mean I) are (I mean am) at the end of the first sort of proper work-week of the year. Another 51 of them loom ahead. Just over 2% finished, etc, etc. Happily, my supervisor is permanently perched in her fifth floor aerie, screening and preening over grant applications so that all we lowly graduate students keep getting funded. This means that every one of our meetings last week, and all in the upcoming week, have been indefinitely postponed. Hooray! Minus the threat of our overseer inopportunely appearing in the doorway, the lab is about ten times more cheerful. It also means I am way less likely to come in on the weekend and instead can concentrate on such necessities as estimated tax payments, fixing the broken blinds and going to the annoyingly off-semester scheduled gym.
To celebrate this surprisingly pleasant start ot the semester, here are couple of our (me, girlfriend, friends) favorite absolutely non-classical, popular, four-on-the-floor, music videos.
The delightfully NES styled Move your Feet:
And the delightfully slutty Perfect Exceeder:
