Trying to post smiley cell.

I am: Kurt Vonnegut For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Three pints of bass, am still not great at ping-pong

My classmates are defending. Not all of them, sure, but several.

And so many of us are coupled up. Even some intra-class pairings. I remember when M and L met; it was Halloween of our first year at Avalon and now they need to move north to share the commute.

I guess that's how that happens.

It doesn't seem strange because it makes perfect sense, until I start to think about the meta of it, but then shit I'm married and not entirely sure how that happened!

You always think maybe you know how it will be and then it always takes you by surprise.

I don't feel old but my god did all those kids at the pool place look young tonight. And pop/rock songs are for the settling down hormone souffle of the late teens/early twenties, when you are just about figuring shit out but still really angsty about it. Angsty in that sort of fun way, the melodrama of every emotion, when things that don't matter that much really matter. You have no idea about the things that are really going to matter soon and you wouldn't want to because they are way less fun.

Still enjoyable, the way pudding pops might still be enjoyable if I could buy them again, but not the same as they were on the porch in the summer when I was a kid..

What I'm saying is, I was there when they met and we all thought it was one of those drunken pulls and now they're having commutes and moving north and no more drunken pulls. You can still get drunk but it's not the same.

And not the same is okay. But the more things end the more sad you can be, the more sadness there is to draw upon period. More good things, of course, more learning that this or that is what it is and needn't be worried about anymore.

The odometer clicks over another time and the paradigm changes. Are you there, too? You climb to the next scenic overlook and gaze down at where you've been with very different perspective and it's all the same rocks but now you know what the guide book was talking about. You couldn't know before. That's just the way it is.

I always have to fuck it up first before I can sit down and do it the right way. Sorry, that was a sidetrack, I meant that about science.

Sometimes you hear the click of that odometer. Best not, at those times, to think about what death is.

Used to play ping-pong to have to drink more beer. But now just play to play.

Tiny little snow flakes are tumbling under the street light like flakes in a snow globe and the City is jackhammering in the street opposite at 2 a.m. Whay the hell is going on outside?

Leather Under My Lab Coat

Someone got to my blog by searching for "waterman-storer leather". Which is pretty funny to me, because when I met Dr. W-S she was in fact wearing leather trousers. If you don't know who Clare Waterman-Storer is you are missing out because she is possibly the coolest person in the entire world.

Who Needs Sleep?

I haven't been sleeping.

Last night I was awake until 4:30 a.m. Fortunately Springy was awake by then, it being a reasonable hour of the morning in the UK, and he read to me from the Guardian for a while.

On Monday night I didn't sleep either. Not one bit. In fact, I was so high on slow-release Sudafed (240 mg! how is that legal?) that I sat up in front of the computer in the "chit-chat room" at the lab and analyzed time-lapse videos of migrating cells. All night. Seriously, all fucking night. I saw the sun rise over the scaffolding next door. I scurried off to the 'scope room in the morning so my advisor wouldn't walk into the office and find me in the same place I'd been when he left 14 hours before. That would have been embarassing.

Got some good numbers, though. And I found a smiley face cell. Maybe I'll show it to you.

Last week (I think) I woke up at 1:30 and was up till 5. So bored I almost tidied the apartment. I said almost. I do have limits, people.

Is this the price I pay to the cloning gods when things are going okay at the bench? Or is it combination of the semi-manic stage I'm in post "sabbatical" plus the general lack of coherent schedule as a result of not having a domestic partner who works regular hours and cooks dinner? Or perhaps I have a brain disease.

It's probably a brain disease.

You know what's sad about this, though? I'm more pleased about experiments w*****g (dare not spell it out) than annoyed about missing sleep. (It's true, I am having magic hands these days. I don't recall having sold my soul at the crossroads, but then I'm in a bit of a daze, so who knows?) I also caught myself thinking, "I bet not sleeping burns a lot of calories." Silver lining, kids, silver lining.

In other news, the Man has got me down. I can't really talk about it, but there's a proverbial crystal stream that would solve all my problems running past my feet and the Man will not let me lean down and partake of its healing waters. This is because the Man are asshats who pretend to have my interests at heart but are really looking out for themselves and making my life more difficult in the process.

No me gusta El Hombre.

To quantify or not the quantify?

Did I tell you I am the chosen acolyte of the cloning gods? So now is the time to make constructs, before they change their fickle minds.

I saw something neat happening in my mutant cells yesterday and had a fruitful discussion with my lab mate. He'd asked me a difficult question and I was dreading talking to him but actually it was useful. I told him what I was doing and he didn't raise his eyebrows, which is what I'm always afraid of. Then i found a paper that mentions something similar to what I just noticed but the mechanism is not what I had expected. It doesn't not make sense, in the context ofmy stuff, though, but it's something we've never looked at.

I'll see if I see it again, and then tell my advisor. I already have too much work to do just filling in old stuff and moving existing stuff along, but this might be cool and relate to the other things as well. But possibly annoying to quantify.

Someone seems to be playing basketball in the apartment next door.

2008

This is going to be a very interesting Democratic Primary. I'm excited already. Just read the article on Salon about Barack Obama. The thought of Obama having a good chance at the white house makes me get all misty and choked up. I do like me some Hilary, but she kind of sold out on the war ... and besides, the Clintons are very 90's and I don't think they translate into the post-millenial mal humour.

It's So Cold In Here I Can't Feel My Fingers.

Or my nose.

There are certain circumstances where it would be most advantageous to have either a) a lab-based partner, b) a car, or c) a non-lab based partner with a car.

What circumstances might these be? How about: 7:30 p.m. on a dark, cold, rainy Sunday night when I have run out of things to do whilst I wait for my cells to do their business. And I'm hungry. But mostly bored.

Why the hell am I studying migration in cells that creep along at a paltry few microns per hour? Why the hell isn't there another decent restaurant within 3 minutes walk of my building? Why is it so cold and rainy???

The gym's not even open, and there's no good place to take a nap. (The atrium couches are comfy, sure but they have the damn track lights pointing right in one's face and the maddening ping of the elevator is audible over three floors. Not to mention, it's Baltic in here.)

See, if I had a lab-based significant other, chances are good that they would also be in lab and they could come play with me while I wait. Better yet, if I had a car I could go home for a couple of hours and then come back, fix my cells, and drive back home (and not have to wait in the cold for a bus). Even better than that would be if I had a partner with a car, then he could come and pick me up, take me to dinner, double park while I ran upstairs and fixed my cells, and then drive me home.

That would be so awesome. I would totally give anyone reading this a hundred dollars if they would come pick me up in a warm dry car, take me to dinner, bring me back here for just 10 minutes, and then drive me home again.

I'd even pay for my own dinner.

Avenue Q Fiddler on the Roof Everyone's a Little Bit Jewish

This is the epitome of musical theatre ironical satirical spooftastic brilliance and appeals to me in every way.
Basically, you know everything there is to know about me when you know that I love this clip.

Lab Voodoo

Today, class, I would like to address the very important topic of lab voodoo. You know you have some. Little oaths and incantations you might employ to feel an element of control in an otherwise chaotic world. Or magical type explanations you might resort to when things go wrong (or right!) for no discernable reason.

You don't really believe the lab voodoo . . . but you don't entirely not believe it, either.

As scientists, we are proud of our empricism. We tout our analytical abilities, our skills at problem-solving. We reject (if we are not Michael Behe) supernatural explanations. We do not believe in interventionist gods.

Or so we say.

Let me entertain you with some examples of lab voodoo and magical thinking culled from real life.

1) The cloning ritual.
I worked with a post-doc who, every time he did a transformation with a new vector, would sing the Transformers theme song: "New Transformers - more than meets the eye." He made me sing it, too. I mean, he wouldn't let go of the pipettor until I sang. I think he's got a faculty position now, in the South someplace.
Similarly, but less ritualistically, every time I transform and see "XL1-Blue" on the little box in the freezer, I sing a song that was in our program musical spoof a few years ago. (Lyrics can be found below.*)

2) Action at a Distance.
This is the belief that actions unrelated to an experiment can affect the outcome of that experiment. For example, I know that the only reason my ligation worked yesterday was because I prophylactically did another restriction digest of the same plasmid with the same enzymes just in case the first one didn't work. Every biologist knows that had I not done that, there would be no way in hell I would have had any colonies from that ligation/transformation today. Right? Extra effort makes experiments work if performed prior to knowing whether it will be necessary. It's sort of like how taking an umbrella guarantees that it won't rain.

3) The "phase of the moon" hypothesis.
My lab mate many years ago was breeding mice. She was crossing heterozygotes to generate knockouts. Knockouts should have been occurring with a frequency of 1/4. Over the course of a year, the percentage of knockouts did in fact work out to 25%.
BUT: she would go for three months - three months, I'm not even kidding - without getting a single knockout, and then she would get three knockouts in one litter of six mice three times in a row. From the same parent mice! That was the most extreme example, but over two years she would only see knockouts in spurts separated by long dry spells. She tried to link it to the season, to the cleaning products used in the mouse room, to the mouse food, to the geneology of the parents, but nothing ever explained it. Must be, we reckoned, the phase of the moon.**
Hence, "phase of the moon" became shorthand for repeated occurrances that had no obvious cause. Like, sometimes your PCR reaction that has been working just fine for a year simply stops working. For no reason. You re-optimize. You find a new recipe. It works for a while, then stops working. You go back to the original recipe, which now works. For no reason at all. Phase of the moon.

4) The Magic Touch.
There are often many ways to do the same thing, and often there is no real difference between how effective one method is compared to another. For example, we used to always adjust the amount of transfection reagent to the amount of DNA we were using. Someone in lab history had optimized transfection protocol and had determined that this was necessary. Then a certain lab member I will refer to as the Magic Man said he didn't do that and eventually everyone stopped doing that and just used the same amount of reagent no matter what the transfection (depending on cell type, of course). No one noticed any change in efficiency. So much simpler! Why didn't we do this before? Another example: we used to always use nitrocellulose for Westerns, and life was fine. But then Magic Man switched to PVDF membranes. Voila! PVDF is so much better! PVDF is the way forward! Now we use PVDF, and life is good. Or, I'm on the microscope doing live cell imaging and the cells keep karking it. Magic Man, what do I do? Magic Man assesses the situation and tells me to use HEPES buffer. I am using HEPES buffer! Try it again, says Magic Man. I do - guess what. Now the cells are smiling happy little cells.
This is the power of Magic Man: even if he just tells you to do what you had been doing already, suddenly you will see bands/staining/transfection/live cells where previously you had been seeing smudge/no staining/no transfection/dead cells.
Thus, when there are multiple ways of doing something, always ask Magic Man. It doesn't matter which one you do, so long as you have Magic Man's blessing to do it that way.

5) The Sunny Saturday Rule.
If you come into lab on a sunny Saturday when everyone sane is at the beach, there is simply no way that shit is going to work. No way. Why did you even bother? You knew it wasn't going to work. Ditto starting an experiment after the dinner hour. Dude, you shouldn't be in lab at 10 pm. You shouldn't ever skip dinner. And you certainly shouldn't go into lab when you could be at the beach! But you do it anyway, thinking you are virtuous and hard working.
Ha ha ha, the lab orixas giggle, dancing madly around the ducts overhead. Silly person! We'll show you what happens to keen little experimentors!
But you never learn, do you? You think, I'll just get this done and then I can go to the beach secufre in the knowledge that I have advanced the cause of science.
Obviously, then, it rains on Sunday.***

What's your lab voodoo, boys and girls? Commentez-moi, sil vous plait.

* To the tune of Like A Virgin:
"Like a roton, transforming for the very first time. Like a ro-o-o-o-ton, experimenting with E. coli . . . " Now the whoah-whoah-whoah part: "XL1-blue ... DH5-alpha (ah!) ... One-shot TOPO ten! (uh, uh, uh!) New pipets, and you're set. Make us proud, now you're on your own, cause we'll make you feel ... Yeah, we'll ma-ay-ay-ake you feel - there's no gene you can't clone!"

**By which we meant not so much the predictable, monthly phase of the moon (it wasn't that, we checked) but the more complex moon-in-second-house, Jupiter-aligns-with-Mars type of astrology thing.

***This final piece of voodoo is related to the Action at a Distance theory. Together they prove conclusively that the universe has a juvenile sense of humor and enjoys a good snicker at earnest people's expenses.

USA: Wack Right Now But Still A Better Option Than Most

I heard on NPR that there were 105 reported self-immolations by Afghan girls last year. "Suicide is the only choice a girl can make here," one woman (who had attempted suicide herself) said.

I am reminded of the words of the immortal Mrs. Banks, the Suffragette mom from Mary Poppins:

Although we adore men individually,
We agree that as a group
They're rah-ther stupid.