Classical Convert

An Example Of Why I Don’t Get Enough Done At Work

This week, I am mostly preparing for our lab “retreat”. This is deservedly inserted between quotation marks, as along the way the retreat concept has morphed from something fairly enjoyable into something fairly terrifying. We are all required to perform multiple presentations on topics which we are entirely unfamiliar with. Starting at 8:30am and finishing at 9:00pm. All weekend.

One of my assigned topics is “Cohesins” which are the proteins that stick your DNA together when your cells divide, so that the copied DNA can be properly distributed between the new cells. Being a good boy (temporarily) I pored over the aneuploidy page on wikipedia. Aneuploidy is what happens when the division gets screwed up and the DNA isn’t divided equally between the two new cells, leading to genetic disorders like Down’s syndrome in which cells have an extra chromosome.

I ended up clicking through the various genetic diseases, getting more and more depressed about how easy it is for the body to accidentally mess itself up. This lead to the discovery of the disorder entitled blue-diaper syndrome, in which a genetic malfunction causes the body to have problems metabolizing the amino acid called tryptophan. This ends up instead being degraded by bacteria in the intestine, which produces a chemical called indole, itself a precursor to indigo dye, staining diapers blue.

I didn’t realize that indigo was a very specific chemical, and so this lead to a very detailed reading of the page on indigo dye, and further to the following company which sells woad seeds. It is now my desire to grow woad in my garden plot next year, extract indigo dye, stain some cloth and sew a wall hanging with the chemical formula for indigo on it:

And then I realized that I’d spent half an hour researching and planning this instead of finishing my presentation.

Tags: cell division, cohesin, indigo

Insomnia

Ahhhhh… I only got an hour and a half of sleep last night and now am pretty much hallucinating, so the awesome blog posting will have to wait until tomorrow.

ReIthacaed

Oooh dear. I’m feeling pretty mentally and physically drained right now after returning today from Manhattan to drop off g at her new grad school. My left arm has sunburn all over it from sitting in the sunlight through the Southerly window of my brave little Civic. Now I have to process all of the menial stuff which didn’t get done last week due to all the distraction of school preparation.

Gonna go for a run in the evening sun first, though.

The Continued Death of Physical Media…

Alright, so it’s really about movies, but the concept applies just as well to CDs:

Historic Blockbuster Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

I’ve been getting back into the Onion again recently. Perhaps I am just running out of websites to browse while doing “work” in “lab”.

Tags: CDs, movies

Why are we this far through April already?

Ah. I mean aahhh! Does that look scary and in peril? It should do, because today my PI (which for those not living in graduate labs is the terse version of Principal Investigator, the ultra big boss of the research group) casually announced that we need a bunch of results before the next grant deadline in order to get funding. Unfortunately the next grant deadline is in about five weeks; and the results are supposed to occur on a new microscope which is currently partly in pieces, and partly a bunch of diagrams on my computer.

This has led me to consider going into lab at 7:30am for the future few weeks, although it is even more likely to lead to huge amounts of guilt after hitting snooze and going in at 9:00.

What I am building is a new optical tweezers setup, which uses a laser beam to pull on microscopic stuff, and measure the forces and positions that the stuff experiences. In our lab we use it to poke and prod on the proteins which do things to your DNA. There are hundreds of tiny biological machines which unwind your DNA strands, or run along them like trains, or chop them up. For the most part we don’t really have a very good idea of how they work. If they were cars it would be as though we understood that they use an engine which needs gasoline and air, and if you rip the wheels off or replace one of them with a shoe then it won’t run, but we don’t understand how the engine actually works or what most of the other things under the hood are for. That’s what we are trying to work out.

So what appropriate music shall I listen to in order to commiserate with myself and pretend I am going to wake up early to? Shosty’s violin sonata I think, it’s a tough sucker to beat for the sparse futility earfeel effect factor.

Tags: graduate school, optical tweezers