Currently ...

Playing


If you love strategy games, you have to try the Advance Wars series. Two Gameboy Advance titles, and two DS titles.

Listening To

Space Cannon!

The space cannon would shoot astronauts to the moon from the ocean.

The basic concept behind a space cannon is simple: A hydrogen explosion shoots the payload -- Hunter is concentrating on delivering rocket fuel at first -- up the lengthy tube. The tube's mouth sits just above the surface of the water, and when the payload emerges, it's aimed directly into outer space.

Re-positioning an underwater cannon would be easier than moving one on land, and the sonic boom would be nearly eliminated due to a concept called impedance mismatch, which predicts that over 90 percent of the explosion's ear-deafening sound would be reflected into the atmosphere.

A couple of problems though ...

"I'm not sure where in the world's oceans you'd put it so that the cannon remains aligned," he mused. "Remember, at the exit speeds described, extreme precision of alignment is required, in a variety of wind and water conditions. This would be a very large target, and if placed in international waters -- where you need at least 700-800 meter depth, given the angle of the cannon -- ownership and guardianship is questionable."

Laugh or Cry?

Bin Laden blames US for global warming, calls for boycott of American goods.

$60 Billion Theft

Ridiculous!

Officials said Medicare pilferage is so widespread, with so much of it never detected, that no one can accurately say how much it costs American taxpayers. But a figure widely used by law enforcement officials suggests a staggering $60 billion a year is stolen from the national entitlement program, which funds medical treatment, equipment and prescriptions for 45 million seniors and the disabled.

I'd rather we create jobs hiring people to better police Medicare, which would cut down on this theft in the long run ... than continue to let this happen without doing anything significant to prevent it. Say we spend $100 million (1/600th of the $60 billion in fraud) hiring people to combat this fraud. Say we set the average salary + benefits at $100,000 per person hired. That gives us a thousand people to track down these cases. Seems like that would get the job done, no?

Probably not.

Change I can believe in ...

... when the President of the United States says that the USA needs to be the leader in clean energy initiatives, jobs, and technologies because whichever country does so will be the one with the largest influence on global policy, I believe it and agree with it.

Now, can our government make it happen?

Currently ...

Listening To



Gasoline
So you tried to put the fire out
But you used gasoline
When the congregation gathered around
You're screamin' "It wasn't me,"
So there is a sickness that's going around
But no one's got a vaccine
I think it drowned in holy water
I think it's time we all come clean

I swear it's like dying
To catch a ghost
It feels like I'm trying
To hold smoke
I swear it's like dying
To catch a ghost
It feels like I'm trying
To hold smoke

When the army had to hold the line
Well you were nowhere near the front
Before the kids could tell their dog goodbye
Well you were loadin' up your gun
I want to know why there's a great divide
I wanna know what I've become
You think that no one else is lonesome?
You think that you're the only one?

It feels like I'm jumping towards a train
It feels like I'm jumping towards a train
We all try to make our way

It feels like I'm jumping towards a train
It feels like I'm jumping towards a train
We all try to fake a way

Lasers!

It's true, lasers CAN make you slimmer.

Overall, participants in the treatment group demonstrated a total girth reduction across all four sites of 89 millimetres (3.51 inches) compared with control subjects who showed a 17-millimetre reduction. Maloney says the reduction in the placebo group is a reflection of the typical placebo response. The results were published last month in Lasers in Surgery and Medicine (vol 41, p 799).

Sheesh, that sure would be easier than what I'm currently about to do ... P90X.

Yep, I'm an idiot. I've finally decided that I just can't tolerate my *ahem* girth any longer. It (my body) is a far cry from what it looked like during my track and field days, and I just can't stand it any longer. So I got P90X, an iron gym (that doorway pull up bar) and resistance bands and I'm going to start torturing myself soon. First I need to get everything together to keep my nutrition in line with what the program recommends because I figure if I'm slurping down Mickey D's every day, no amount of pull-ups is going to help my waistline.

So why am I telling you about this? Well, for one simple reason. I hope that by putting this out in public, if I don't follow through, I will be publicly shamed. A perverse sort of peer pressure I suppose.

So while I'm out grocery shopping, I suppose I need to look and see if I can get myself into one of these laser trials.

So close, but yet ...

... so far. For the first 28 minutes of the game last night I thought it looked like the Jets could be going to the Super Bowl for the first time in my life. Then Peyton Manning found Austin Collie* not once but twice, the last time in the back of the end zone for six, and things started to fall apart at the seams. Manning, Garcon, and Collie abused everyone in the Jets secondary not named Darelle Revis ... in particular Lowery and Sheppard. It's obvious where the Jets need to focus this offseason.

With that said, I don't think anyone (except maybe Rex Ryan) thought the Jets would make it this far this year. There are high hopes for next year though.

Congratulations on the win Indy. A friend asked me how many scores I thought you guys could muster and the Jets stll get the win, and I said two. Well, I would have been correct if that had happened, but it didn't. You definitely outplayed us and you deserve that berth. Now I hope you get stomped by New Orleans.


*What is with my teams losing to BYU players this year?

Errr ...

... I'll pass.

I don't know how FOXNews finds these stories.

Here she is ...

... one of several organisms my lab has putatively identified as novel. I have a name picked out for her, just need to finish the ubiquinone and DNA:DNA hybridization analysis to the next closely related type organism/strain and then we can get her published and named.

TEM image

Coverage

Water covers approximately 70% of the Earth's surface, the rest is covered by Darrelle Revis.

Go Jets!

Owning a home bites sometimes (part deux) ...

... so in the comments section of the last blog entry detailing my woeful attempt to spruce up my laundry nook, I said things got even better with the whole fiasco. And boy howdy did it ever.

I woke up bright and early on Sunday (and by bright and early I mean 10AM-ish), got dressed, and just decided to get it over with. Grabbed a broom, the new dryer vent hose, and my big Maglite, and opened up my crawl space. Got on my hands and knees, looked inside and saw about a million spider webs. Fun ... I hate spiders.

Started whacking the webs with the broom, allowing me access without getting a face full of sticky gunk. Located the outside part of the vent, made my way over and took off the old hose. It was lined with at least a half inch of lint, so it was a good idea to replace it. Tried getting the new hose on but it just wasn't fitting. The fact that my crawlspace is about two and a half feet high meant that I didn't have much space to get good leverage to slip the hose on. I lose my grip on the clamp which is to hold the hose in place, it hits my thumb and splits it wide open. So now I've got blood pouring down my hand and the hose is all sticky with blood too. Fun fun! Finally manage to get the hose on (which involved a trip back into the house to get duct tape to really make sure the darn thing isn't going to come off). Meanwhile my dogs have decided to see what all the fuss is about, so now I have three animals wandering through my crawlspace ... not what I wanted because they don't really know the concept of "if you knock that out of joint, I'm going to have to fix it". Fortunately, they didn't do any damage (I think).

I stretched the hose out and made my way towards the opening in my floor ... and came up about eight feet short. Ack! So had to run out, buy a second hose, jury-rig the two hoses together (relying heavily on duct tape) and then spend a half hour getting the end of the second hose through the floor. Spent another thirty minutes behind my washer and dryer trying to get the hose onto the back end of the dryer in a position such that it would stay on.

All of this because I wanted a a peg board in my washroom.

I hope when I start hanging my pictures things aren't this hectic!

Forget a lifetime ban ...

... Jose Offerman needs to go to jail! What a no-class punk.

Jose Offerman was banned for life by the Dominican winter league for throwing a punch at an umpire during an argument on the baseball field.

Minor compared to what else he's done ...

On Aug. 14, 2007, he was batting for the Long Island Ducks against the Bridgeport Bluefish in an independent minor league game when pitcher Matt Beech hit him with a fastball. Offerman charged the mound with his bat and swung at least twice, striking Beech and Bluefish catcher John Nathans.

Sounds like assault with a deadly weapon to me.

Owning a home bites sometimes ...

... especially when you're doing "home improvements". Lately, I've been trying to tweak little things in the house, before I start my major projects. Things like changing all my knobs so they're not these drab beige things which are found all throughout my house. So now I have some rooster knobs in my kitchen (going with a rooster theme), and some pewter knobs in my bathroom, along with different patterned knobs throughout the rest of the house (Hobby Lobby rocks). I also have been hanging more pictures and things in my rooms (which had been pretty sparse until this point), as well as fixing the tiny little things which have worn down but I didn't give much thought to. For instance, replacing a couple missing screws in the screen door frame, gutting my toilets and installing new flush kits, taking down some ugly ceiling fans and putting new lighting in.

All these things were not much of a problem, nary a hitch. I should have known the gremlins could come pay me a visit sooner or later though. Little did I know they'd all show up today. So I decided I wanted a peg board above my washer and dryer. Not a big deal right? WRONG. So very, very wrong.

Went to Home Depot, bought the plastic peg board (two 16" by 16" panels) along with all the relevant hardware. Bought anchors to put the boards up too. So I drilled the first set of holes and planted the anchors. Put the peg board up against the holes and started to drill, only to see the anchors and part of the sheet rock pull away. Argh! Tried another --different -- set of anchors only to see a similar thing happen. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Call up the dad to ask him what the hell to do. He informs me that the studs should be 16 inches apart (duh) and if I find those, that I can just screw them into the wall. Go back to Home Depot, grab deeper (2 inch) screws and putty, return home, place putty into the holes I had drilled, and then screw those peg boards into the wall. Peg boards attached, I step back to look at my handiwork. Something doesn't look quite right though. Take out the tape measure and measure both ends. Guess what? Damn thing droops a quarter of an inch at one end. Argh!

To hell with it. Damn thing is going to be crooked until the next time I paint that laundry nook. With that decided, I get ready to push the dryer back into the nook. Look at the dryer vent hose and see that it's pretty worn. Run back out to Home Depot and grab a new one. Return home and go to pull the old hose up out of the floor. Yes, it runs through the floor. Foot after foot this hose pulls out, with no end in sight. Finally figure out that the hose runs through my entire crawl space to the vent outside. Lovely, oh and guess what ... I've never ever been in my crawl space. *sigh*

So, no laundry is getting done tonight, and tomorrow I need to crawl under my house to attach this new laundry vent hose up. Oh, and did I mention it's raining?

What are you reading?

Today I'm reading the following:
A widely distributed bacterial pathway for siderophore biosynthesis independent of nonribosomal peptide synthetases.
by: Gregory L. Challis

There is no abstract for this article (published in ChemBioChem). As you can surmise from the title though, it deals with iron acquisition and siderophore biosynthesis. I have a side-project I am working on in which I'm taking some techniques I used in graduate school, studying pathogens, and employing them in the area of soil microbial ecology. We'll see, eventually, how successful I am. I'm doing all the DNA preps now.

Work Related Resolutions for 2010

This year I have two work-related resolutions for 2010, and both were based on hard-learned lessons over the course of 2009.

1. Better Organization: 2009 was a productive year, but there is always room for improvement. To that end, I'm trying the "daily planner" route again, I'm learning the in's and out's of MS's Outlook Calendar, and I'm attempting to resurrect efforts to get electronic notebooks into the lab.

2. Field Work: Make no bones about it, I'm a lab rat. The extent of "field work" I ever did was to go to another state to do some lab work. After debacles with collaborators retiring technicians, samples showing up in my lab without advance notification, and incomplete site histories rendering my efforts all but useless, I've decided that I will no longer rely on collaborators alone to send me samples for analysis. So my lab and I are making a concerted effort to find new locations for our research efforts. We started that this week with a couple of riparian sites which we'll begin studying soon.

Currently a bit waterlogged
I wonder if they'll let me buy a gator?

Currently ...

Listening To

Reading

PlayingThe Sky Crawlers

Woo hoo!

I was waiting for this!

Sweet.

Maybe I'll switch to coffee ...

... in the mornings.

Nearly half of the 90 beverages from soda fountain machines in one area in Virginia tested positive for coliform bacteria -- which could indicate possible fecal contamination, according to a study published in the January issue of International Journal of Food Microbiology.

Researchers also detected antibiotic-resistant microbes and E.coli in the soda samples.

The problem? Most people consider "clean up" to be a menial task which is boring and pointless. That means it either gets done half-assed, or maybe not at all.

Oh, and to everyone who works in the food industry, or in some way comes into contact with items which may be consumed. WASH YOUR HANDS FREQUENTLY*! WEAR GLOVES!

Sheesh, just thinking about these things makes me want to stop eating out.

*Especially when leaving the rest room.

Reason #1

To root for the Jets over the Chargers this weekend.



This is horrible. Yeah, wave to your ma LT ... from the sidelines as the Jets "take the knee" and perform the victory formation!