Category Archives: Rants

Lithops: Living Stones

I got a lithops, I got a lithops, I got a lithops, hey, hey, hey, hey!

Lithops plants look like aliens because they’re adapted to one of the most extreme environments on the planet.  They’re native to the Namibian Desert, which averages about 5mm of rain.  Per year.  These little guys survive entirely on the fogs that blow in off of the ocean sometimes.

I stumbled across my lithops at a plant sale fundraiser at grad school last week.  As I’d only ever seen lithops at a botanical garden before, I didn’t know you could even buy and sell them.  But then there they were, rows and rows of little 2″ pots of them on the table, right next to the cactus.  Want.

I started quizzing the guy at the table.  How do you take care of these?  They were only four dollars each, but I didn’t want to kill one.  Turns out they’re easy to take care of as long as you remember two things: don’t water them, and give them lots of light.  Up here in Minnesota, I’m going to have to supplement them with an artificial plant light.

So I brought one home, and I’ll see how it goes.  I feel a sort of kinship for the little guy.  He’s a transplant from a very different part of the world, too.

Papers is awesome

If you’re a fellow graduate student, you’ll know what I’m talking about: that mass of .pdf’s you’ve got kicking around your computer.  Journal articles.  The literature.  That stuff you gotta read.

I’d always managed smaller research projects okay with folders inside folders inside folders in the Finder and some text file indexes.  But a dissertation project is an entirely different ball game.  You spend four years on one project and you’re going to accumulate hundreds of .pdfs.  So I finally tried out this program a friend recommended to me:

Whaaaaa!  It’s like iTunes for journal articles.  You can see folders, a list, and front-page previews all at the same time – and, yes, the folders can have multiple labels.  You can read any paper fullscreen within the program just by double-clicking on it, and – be still my heart – all the biblio data is right there!  It’s just there in the panel on the right!

I should probably not be so excited about this program.

Great Primer about Organic Agriculture

Is Organic Food Worth the Cost?

Okay, so the people who left comments on this article can be pretty extreme, but this piece in Mother Nature Network itself does a great job.  It lays out some of the facts about just what organic food is, how it’s produced, and what the labels mean in the grocery store.  And it outlines both sides of the ongoing controversy about organic food.  On the one hand, industrial agriculture does increase yields, which we need in a world with a growing population, but on the other hand, all the pesticides and soil erosion might damage our ability to grow food for ourselves forever.

Microdissection and Coffee Don’t Mix

I’m going to have to preface this blog post with an explanation.  Right now, it is my job to work with little guys who look like this: ––––––––––––––––>

His name is Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, and that’s what he looks like up close, but from a distance, Chlamy looks like green slime.  And for my lab rotation, I’ve been learning about different ways to manipulate Chlamy.

Last week I was learning about how to do tetrad analysis.  You mix two different types of Chlamy cells together and let them cross, then when enough time has passed, they form little clusters of four daughter cells in a sack.  Then you have to tease each of these four cells apart so when they grow and divide, you can study them individually.  This is done with a high-tech machine, you ask, right?  No.  It’s done with a fine glass stick and a really steady hand.

Pushing the little guys apart has a learning curve to it, obviously, but I was pretty sure I was getting the hang of it – until Friday.  All of a sudden I couldn’t separate the tetrads anymore.  Every time I tried to set the glass stick down on the agar, my hand would jerk and I’d gouge a hole in the gel and kill all my cells.  After trying every way of holding my hand steady I could think of (I looked like Dr. Strangelove), I couldn’t stand it anymore and went to one of the other grad students for help.  She took one look at my plate, and the first thing she asked me was, “Did you drink coffee today?”

Oh.

The Trouble with a Badass Trench Coat…

… is you can’t raise your arms above your head.  At least not if you button it up.

I’ll admit, this came up because I want a trench coat.  A badass one, that’s long and black and buttony.  I want the tails to go flapping in the breeze as I go prancing about in frozen-over Minneapolis pretending I’m Neo from the Matrix.  And I found one, too, at the department store.  It was perfect – except some manufacturer decided it would be a good idea to cut the sleeves in such a way that your arms are literally pinned to your sides when you put it on.

How am I supposed to run around beating up Hugo Weaving clones if I can’t use my arms?

Google is getting creepily good at doing its job

It started with the Google Instant.  Gone are the days when you actually have to hit “return” to go look at your search results; now Google will guess what you were trying to look for and give you your answer before you’ve even finished typing your query.  With an eerie degree of accuracy.  It’s only messed up a couple of times since Instant went online – usually it can tell what I want after three or four letters, even if I’ve misspelled the word.

Just check out this astonishing marvel of technology:

What?  What?  How does it know I want to look at the five-day weather forecast for St. Paul?  All I did was type “wea”!  And that sidebar there informs me that with a few simple keystrokes, I could have information access to “everything” or “more.”  What’s more than everything?

And I have just realized that I haven’t had to sift through pages of irrelevant results since 2005.

Screw the flying cars.  We live inside one of those SF movies I saw in the ’90s.

Any Technology Sufficiently Advanced…

I was inspired to write this by a recent post on The Frailest Thing, a blog about the effects of emergent technology on society.  (By the way, I heartily recommend it – the guy’s brilliant.) Michael Sacasas’s point is that we are already cyborgs.  We can use our technology to do everything movie cyborgs can do.  It just happens to be more convenient – not to mention carrying less risk of infection – if the technology is not implanted.  And that got me to thinking about just how many real-world analogs there are to some of the magical things you find in fantasy stories.

  • Flight: check.
  • Ball of Fire: Given sufficient TNT, check.
  • Summon:  Also known as a pager.
  • Artificial Hearts:  Also known as artificial hearts.  They don’t make you turn evil, though.
  • Crystal Balls:  Modern surveillance and communication technology can do pretty much everything crystal balls could.
  • True Name:  Your Social Security number comes pretty close.
  • Monsters:  Too many to count, unfortunately.

Now I’d like to convince you that horcruxes are real, sort of.  So, I’ve got this laptop.  I put all my stuff on it.  Photos, music, recipes, manuscripts, lists of stuff I want to remember, letters from friends.  I use it to work.  I use it to play.  Whenever I can’t recall something with my real brain, I just dip into Wikipedia.  I’m on it right now.  The keyboard interface is so familiar that I don’t even think about it anymore – it’s like there is no boundary between my thoughts and the data.  I always know exactly where this laptop is and I take it everywhere.  I guard it more jealously than any other possession I have.  Is this starting to remind you of something?

What gets me concerned is how much of me is inside that thing.  Obviously, I’ve backed up all my files (and so should you).  But imagine, just imagine, if that laptop were to get destroyed somehow and I was idiot enough not to back up.  …it would be bad.  Not like Bolvangar kid bad, but bad.  Conversely, if I died in an accident, my friends and family could recover a lot of my memories and personality by logging into the laptop.

I’m pretty sure other people feel this way about their electronic gadgets, too.  So now what?  Well, I can tell you, I’m going to keep storing that laptop in a safe place.  And if I ever happen to meet a lanky teenager with a scar on his forehead, I’ll make sure he never, ever wants to kill me.

Everything’s better with electric guitars

I’m totally geeking out about this band called Alestorm right now.  In short, they do sea shanties … with electric guitars!

That got me to thinking about how all music can be made so much cooler with the application of a little amp.  Observe:

Opera … with electric guitars!

Christmas music … with electric guitars!

None of these, of course, can top the absolute coolest event in the universe.  That would be Alan Rickman piloting a dirigible while an electric guitar blows up outside.

Oh, man, that would be so cool.

Santa Clara Bans Happy Meal Toys

You can see the news story here: NY Times.

I strive to keep this blog apolitical, so I’m going to be reserved about whether or not the county of Santa Clara is wrong to ban the toys.  But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it is wrong to market McDonald’s cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets to children.

Now, interesting question here.  Is it okay to ban a practice just because it’s wrong?  There are plenty of behaviors, like cheating on one’s spouse, that are immoral, but we wouldn’t want to see it criminalized because that would make an intrusion of the government on people’s private lives.  (I noticed that the people who are backlashing against this law think that Santa Clara is interfering with people’s freedom to eat cheeseburgers.  The law limits McDonald’s freedom.)  On the other hand, there’s the precedent of Joe Camel.  The Joe Camel cartoon marketed an unhealthy product, cigarettes, to children, and I don’t think anybody objects to this ban anymore.

On a related note, how do executives of fast food restaurants sleep at night?

Get your damn sugar away from my yogurt!

And now for a superfluous rant.

Where the heck did people get the idea that yogurt was supposed to be sweet?  I go to the grocery store, and I have an incredible time finding unsweetened yogurt for cooking with.

I don’t want my borscht to taste like artificial strawberry flavoring.  Yogurt isn’t supposed to taste like strawberries, it’s supposed to taste like yogurt.  You know, sour.  Sweetened, nonfat yogurt has more calories in it than unsweetened yogurt with all the fat still in it and they’re not even happy calories because now the yogurt tastes like ick.

Grr.  We oughta start a movement.  People for the Preservation of Sour Yogurt.  PPSY, it’s got a ring to it, yeah?