Digital wiping

First, I need to complain about my bus ride this morning: I had to enter a bus full of 10 year olds on a field trip with standing room only. My understanding is that republican pigs voted to cut even more funding for education, and so now schools are resorting to bussing the yungins on the Metro. Meanwhile, by the second stop after mine the bus was too full to allow anyone else to enter, and so for the rest of the ride I watched stop after stop as people grew annoyed/disappointed/horrified looks on their faces when they realized they would indeed, be late for work (the bus only comes every 45 mionutes). Now... I am all for letting 5th graders (or whatever) go on field trips and teach them how to use public transportation (I'm all for street smarts, better than book smarts) but what really pissed me off is the realization that the result of cutting things such as car tab tax is that it forces even more people to give up taking the bus (because otherwise eventually everyone would be fired for showing up late all the time) and opting to resort to buying a car and taking up nonexistent space in parkinglots and on the freeway. The next time one of you tells me that I should buy a car in order to avoid having to deal with public transportation cutbacks, you can be expecting my fist to be getting in contact whith your face. What I want to know is how some piggish fat fuck republican driving around in his $100k Lincoln Navigator has a legitimate complaint about a $500/year car tab tax or an extra couple cents on gas (like now that the price is >> $2 your telling me that extra nickel is going to break you?) You guys can take your penis extension SUVs and your $5million cookie-cutter house and shove it up your worn out, overstretched farthole.

On another note, I can't figure out why its taking so long for the media to figure out what the motive is behind Kyle Huff's rampage that killed 6 punk ravers (what the media is calling the capital hill massacre). It was already known he was trigger happy Montanan (Hey, I'm all for shooting shit--but not people--with guns... I own them, and I believe that if more people did also, there would be less of this crap) and he was at a rave party with a bunch of drugged up punks... DO THE MATH!!! DruggedPunks+Cowboy = Violence. Come on people, you really think there is more to it? Stay tuned...

The other day I figured out why it is that apes are always smelling their fingers after they play with their poo or wipe their ass.... Its because its kinda hard to tell when your done wiping if your trying to visually detect poo on fingers when you have black hairy hands. Even a monkey knows poo on fingers = poo on food.

happy Thursday.


Today's Random Google Query: became surely air
About Us! Company Experience ; Background Information on Absolute ...
The Galileo Project | Science | Thermometer
Cheers Over California Hot Air Balloons

Geek week, or Weak geek?

For those who can appreciate some nerd humor (see right):

And for those proud un-nerds, 'touch' is actually a command in linux, and since your geek streak was probably left somewhere in the bottom drawer of your childhood dresser, I won't bother explaining what it does. And on the geek wagon we have this little comment made today by our robot tech regarding the control of liquid handling robots: "it requires a lot more programming to feed bogus information to the robot and make it work", I'm not sure if that needs any explanation.

Today I was pleased to find that some old grade-school level [benign] hacking tricks enabled me to deconvolute a list of Genbank Accession numbers and the usefull gene transcripts they were supposed to represent. Its nice to feel clever every now and then. Oh, and I figured that for those friend-(and family)-folk who don't really know what I do now that I'm not a pipette jocky (or a lab-monkey), I should point you to two of the web sites I frequent from several times a week to several times an hour so you can get a feel for what I do (I point you hear because they have good intros geared for folks not in field):

NCBI: This is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, an incredible example of what can be accomplished with tax dollars if done correctly. The NCBI is an indespensable resource for getting anything done in this field.


UCSC Bioinformatics: Especially, their Genome Browser. Ever wonder what one does with the human genome now that its done? See following example:

Here's your chance to look at one somewhat simple representation of a gene we should all know and love: Alcohol Dehydrogenase (it's what allows you to drink whisky or beer without pickling your liver after the first shot).

1) go to Genome Browser, and in the box labeled "position or search term" type: ADH1A (alcohol dehydrogenase 1A) and click submit.

2) Go ahead and click the link under "known genese" and you should see a nice little applet that looks like:

2) If it doesn't look this busy, click the "default tracks" button below this graphic.

Top half: What you are looking at is a cartoon, if you will, of the section of the human genome (thin lines) that contains the guts (the thick parts along the thin lines) that actually code for the alcohol dehydrogenase protein. On the bottom half, there are comparisons between different genomes (armadillos, mice, rat, frog, elaphant, chicken etc) that indicate which areas along the same gene in these organisms are most conserved, (the degree to which the sequence has remained the same through evelutionary distance between them and us). As you might expect, the chicken and frog are less similar to us than are rats (I think chimp might not be on here by default because for some genes like this, they are basically the same.... ;-)


Oklay, so thats enought nerd crap for the day. If your really bored, try playing around with the zoom tools... you can zoom all the way down to the now all-so-pop-culture-referenced A's,C's,G's and T's.

enjoy, Fellow Geeksters!

Today's Random Google Query: opened high caught
DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism Security
Columbine High School massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Isaiah 24:18 It will happen that he who flees from the noise

Frayed Tendrils of Debauchery

Nervousness reins as I traverse dense, yet tenuous memmories of all the things that once made me smile. It is clumsiness, not forgetfullness, that weighs heaviest in this venture.

-------------------

I see Ben Sheppard (was bassist for Seattle band 'Soundgarden') all the time in Ballard, usually hovering around all alone scoping out fresh meat at the bar. One saturday night at a Ballard bar he was sitting alone in a trench coat on a little bench near the entrance reading a magazine. He said hi to a couple of aparent acquaintances that walked in, but otherwise seemed blind to female youngins hovering about the tiny bar and seemed more interested in the magazine. It reminded me that everything is a cycle. It reminded me that after your 15minutes at the end of the day when the roll of gold leaf runs out on your way down, you still have to wipe your ass with toilet paper because just like like any monkey can tell you, poo on fingers equals poo on food. And still, no matter where you are in the cycle, life's random truths are a beautifull thing.

Oh, and for some reason this published in the Seattle PI made me laugh:
'With a tendency to stare zombielike and run into stationary objects, a new species of impaired motorist is hitting the roads -- the Ambien driver.' -STEPHANIE SAUL
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sleeping pill Ambien tied to traffic arrests

Happy Wednesday.

Today's Random Google Query: pleasant our hurt
East End: Point Pleasant Resort - Traveler Reviews - The Resort ...
Psychology and Religion | Spiritual Healing | Spiritual Direction
A Summary of Dr. Harley's Basic Concepts

From the eyes of a monster....

morality is a hoax. To deny the validity or importance of 'animalistic' human insticts that incite fear, rage, or sorrow is to suggest that somehow love and tollerance can be fully appreciated without context. For those who love life without hatred or fear of death, I pitty you. Your life will forever reflect deceptive mediocracy.

On a Brighter note, I have two new orchids to my collection: a Complex Paphiopedilum Hybrid with exquisite geometry within the coloring patterns and a pleasing balance between the colors and the flower morphology. I picked this up at the the Northwest Home and Garden show for only $50, see pic1(note: flower is ~6-inches accross). Then I snagged a $12 special at safeway for my new office at work (L.c. rojo) which would have had a wonderfull spray of bright red flowers but I walked with it 8 blocks to work when it was ~20degF outside, and it seemed to kill 80% of the buds.... oops.

My $12 dollar Safeway special: (four of the 20+ buds survived the 8 blocks in freezing weather):
Okay so I gimped-in a second picture of the same three flowers... (I was depressed that did something so stupid that I had fabricate something to show for my $12 ;-).

On yet another even more random note, I just read about recent research that shows calcium suppliments don't appear to reduce the number of bone fractures in post-menopausal women, but do increase risk of kidney stones (See New York Times , "Big Study Finds No Clear Benefit of Calcium Pills" By GINA KOLATA, Published: February 16, 2006.

Chalk it up to one of those oversimplifications that makes somebody rich off of the gullibility of the majority (calcium suppliments are a 1 billion dollar a year industry).


Today's Random Google Query: himself sir foot
Sir William Wallace
Antarctic Explorers: Ernest Shackleton
The Epic of Mount Everest -- by Sir Francis Younghusband