from the desk of stinkpot

i thought i’d share a picture of my favorite animal, the octopus. they are the singular reason i go to aquariums. well, them and the other fish.

in any case, i finally got to swim with one when we went to aruba. suffice to say it was ridiculously awesome. i even got to snap the picture above!

this is also great:

Injecting drugs into the buttocks may not be a reliable way of administering medicine, research suggests.

Doctors from a hospital in Dublin found many patients had so much fleshy tissue on their buttocks that jabs could not properly penetrate to the muscle.

They found women, and in particular obese women, were most likely not to get the full intended dose.

i bet this researcher has some hilarious stories. (kramer’s dictum: if you find a proctologist at a cocktail party – latch on!)

i thought this was so cool:

How To Force an Elevator to Go Straight to Your Floor Without Picking Anyone Else Up:

1) Get in the elevator.
2) Decide which floor you want to go to.
3) Extend both index fingers.
4) Press the button for the floor that you want to go to, and the door close button at the same time, and hold them down for five seconds.
5) Laugh at all of the people that are waiting on an elevator while you go right past them.

so i just paid off our energy bills for the past month. $85 for gas and $40 for electricity. the electricity seems reasonable; it’d actually be a little lower if i turned off this server

the gas though seems inordinate. we somehow managed to use up 40 therms (nstar-speak for lotsa gas) in one month alone. for comparison’s sake, my parents, who heat up a 3 story house in new york, only used 52 therms during the same month. of course, new york could have been substantially warmer this past month – not too far-fetched when you notice that boston is consistently colder than new york.

there are other possible reasons as well, such as the fact that we live in a 105-year-old house. or, that the portion of the basement directly under the study has a nice big broken window. perhaps i need to spend some of the political capital that christina and i have earned with our landlord and get him to repair the damned thing.

i thought it might be good to think a little about my new lab rotation in the dicarlo lab. however, i’ve realized that i ought to first reflect a little on my first lab rotation, in the delong lab.

ed delong’s group works on microbial genomics; they’re some of the best people around at figuring out what kinds of bacteria and archea live in crazy environments like the deep sea and hot oil wells. since i’ve been very interested in doing research on biologically-inspired ways of generating new energy, i thought it would be a good idea to get some experience working with critters that can turn sunlight into energy. the delong lab fit the bill – i believe ed was the first dude to find that some archea contain rhodopsins. if that protein name rings a bell, it’s ‘cuz those are the little things that sit in the back of your eye sockets and sense the light passing through your eyes.

in any case, my rotation was fantastic. i ended up working on an energy project (although it involved jacking up oil production – kind of a dark-side vibe to the whole thing.) my project was to figure out what kind of archea and bacteria were living at the bottom of an oil well in alaska. this was to be a wet-lab kind of project, where i’d actually get to use my hands to do something other than type or scribble equations. i had intentionally asked for this kind of work – i figured it’d be good experience: it’d be easier to convince some microbial or metabolic engineer to work with me if i could prove that i wasn’t useless in the lab.

unfortunately, at the time, i pretty much was useless in the lab. luckily, ed attached me to steve hallam – post-doc extrordinaire. in the span of two months, steve managed to teach me to how to: runs pcrs, clone genes, run gels, purify all kinds of dna, sequence dna, and pick colonies. most importantly, i learned how not to ruin the lab stocks while running my experiments. actually, what was most important was that steve was remarkably upbeat and excited throughout the entire period; i can honestly say that i had a lot of fun in the lab with him.

it didn’t hurt either that the rest of the lab was super-helpful and -friendly. the lab actually has a bit of an odd dynamic – there are about 4 or 5 post-docs, only 1 or 2 graduate students, and a ridonculous number of robots. i’m still not much of an experimentalist but i’m pretty sure that most

so we went to ikea yesterday. they’ve just opened up a new one about a half hour away, in stoughton.

the place was packed and for good reason. it’s remarkable how much cheap, good-looking crap they sell. so of course, you head over there intending to buy one thing and come home with an order of magnitude higher number of things. i must say, however, the wall clock we couldn’t say no to does look spectacular in our living room.

oddly enough, christina does not like being referred to as, “the christina.” or “the girlfriend,” for that matter.

i’m really disappointed with google analytics. i was quite excited when i initially heard of it being released; i’m tired of statcounter’s small log files. unfortunately, g-analytics’ performance so far has been quite poor: the thing takes forever to log a page load, the website itself loads slowly, and there does not appear to be an obvious way to track where page loads are coming from. yea, i know there’s that map on the bottom left, but it doesn’t really look too useful.

on a related note, this kind of move just screams “dark side.” it’s remarkable how google’s tentacles are slowly slithering all over the web and yet few people appear to be nervous. i mean, they already have de facto control over how you find pages on the web – now they’ll even know who is accessing these pages. then again, they’ve probably already had access to this information already. in any case, this, combined with google’s moves into voip, online classified, maps, shopping, books, video … ok, that’s all i can muster off the top of my head – google appears poised to become really ubiquitous in the coming decade. gives me the willies.

so i’ve never really quite understood the point of a blog – people often seem to post such personal thoughts on them. i thought you were supposed to keep those kinds of things to yourself.

i suppose i’ll see what all the fuss is about.