from the desk of stinkpot

i got a little distracted lately and began designing our lab website.
i ended up getting a lot distracted; iweb is incredibly easy to use and making extremely visually appealing websites with very little effort is addictive.
if you’re interested in getting to see what happens when abercrombie & fitch meets a microbiology lab, check it out […]

arthur c. clarke passed on today.  i just read his obituary and learned that he was the original author of the aphorism:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
the next time i try and explain microbial evolution to someone, i think i’m going to quote mr. clarke.

meet hubert, my octopus.  he came to visit last week while i waited for some particularly long modeling jobs to execute on the darwin computing cluster (more on that later).
hubert’s timing couldn’t have been better, as his visit coincided with ned ruby’s to mit.    here’s a picture of ned:

ned is a microbiologist from wisconsin who […]

i narrowly passed my thesis proposal defense the other friday. it wasn’t catastrophic or anything like that, but it certainly didn’t go as well as planned.
for one thing, the oral examination was much more serious than i had anticipated. i hadn’t been so naive as to think my orals would be fun — […]

while making slides for my thesis proposal this friday, i came across this beautiful triptych of a macrophage attacking an e.coli cell. this painting definitely needed to shared; it does a fabulous job of illustrating how remarkably dense a living cell is. (the fact that interacting biomolecules find one another amidst this mess […]

this is nuts.  blackwell publishing wants $54.83 for a 3 page paper about a program that runs 2 statistical tests.
if not for the institutional license, i bet you’d find half the scientific literature on bittorrent.

a fascinating read this morning on students who receive phds in the natural sciences from secular institutions - and continue to insist earth’s origins were biblical in nature.
i find it remarkable that anyone can sufficiently digest geoscience literature to write a decent doctoral thesis - and still remain unconvinced enough to buy into a “young […]

christina has been taking her first steps towards med school this summer. the hah-vahd post-bac program accepted her and she’s nearly completed with her first general chemistry class.
i’m so proud of her - she’s been kicking the class’ ass.
that having been said, i worry sometimes that she’s in a little too deep. for […]

i think i am in love with dr. laura garwin (pictured above).
i half-heartedly agreed to go to a talk she gave today at school. the biological engineeers here had arranged for dr. garwin to speak about post-doctoral careers outside the sphere of pure research. specifically, she was to talk about her own experiences […]

those poor ivf surplus embroys. already headed for the trash. now, their chance to contribute to science and humanity has been delayed indefinitely once again. (that picture in the article, of bush surrounded by babies born of surplus embroys makes me want to throw up a little in my mouth.  don’t […]