Classical Convert

Things Not to Do In My Garden Next Year

Things learned as another season of stump farming draws to a close:

• I will try to avoid squeezing fifty-thousand tomato plants into three inches of dirt - it makes it frickin impossible, and uncomfortable, to extract any fruit from within the clutches of all those stems. They need about a two foot radius each.
• No more cantaloupe. Cantaloupes DO NOT work well in this climate. The space required/taste acquired ratio is far too high. Although… it is kind of awesome that they actually grew. Now I can be proud of attaining the life accomplishment: Has Grown Melons.
• Don’t be stingy with the beans. Next year I will use all the cantaloupe space to erect the most enormous bean teepee the gardening world has ever laid it’s green-fingered eyes on. Beans are promiscuous little holy grails. They are easy, delicious, and you can make a bloody teepee out of them. One cannot argue with a teepee.
• Don’t bother planting tonnes of chilis. This year I stuck a Jalapeno and Habanero plant on my pseudo-balcony and they have been way more than adequate. Acres of chilis in the real garden are totally unnecessary, they just end up unused and rotting.
• Don’t put off weeding and turning soil over until the spring. Spring Ben hated previous-Autumn Ben this year for being a lazy so-and-so and letting everything overgrow.
• Do grow… no wait, this list is supposed to be all negatives. Don’t, errr, not grow dyers indigo.

Tags: gardening

Free Sound Samples

This is as much for me to remember as for you to use — I’ve taken to using some of these blog entries as a sort of bookmarking system — but we’re dead dead certain that some of you will have a use for freesound. It’s a library of creative commons licensed sounds, so you can use them in whatever project you feel is necessary to present to the world. Like an animated cartoon (yeah, as opposed to an unanimated cartoon. What are you going to do about it?) about your adventures reading my blog.

My fellow American’s, we must solemnly pledge to add sound effects to everything we create from this day forward.

Tags: sounds effects

Comment Spam

Good god. Every few weeks a spammer will latch onto this blog and start piping hot buttered spam into comments on random posts, despite the supposed protection of CAPTCHA (which, incidentally, is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This results in me receiving in the neighborhood of on hundred emails over the course of a mere couple of hours. THIS results in me getting annoyed and setting Wordpress (THANK GOD for this feature) to automatically block comments which contain parts of the recurring spammy URLS.

So, if you are not a spam-king and are rejected trying to make a valid comment, you might be mentioning something which is taboo. This might be obvious (e.g., viagra, day-trading, etc…) or not so obvious (e.g. groups.yahoo.com) so drop me a line via the contact form if it’s problematic.

On the other hand, if you are a spam-king, go die in a fire.

Tags: spam

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jog

Back from Woodstock this afternoon. Tired, and overloaded with food, alcohol and science. It was our lab ‘retreat’ if you haven’t been following the recent bitching. It actually turned out to be a far funner experience than the prep lead us to believe, despite the 8:30am rising and ten hours of daily science presentations. We still found time to grill and booze and play Wii way into the early-hours, and I fulfilled one of minor life goals of giving a science talk with a beer in hand (and six in the stomach)!

However, we all wish it was not Monday tomorrow. I doubt the lab will see much action until about midday.

Tags: lab retreat, woodstock

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