NWA - the clean version

Wow, this is hilarious. :)

Karate choptastic

Wow. Ever seen a karate chop of a brick in super slow motion? Not only is his hand like jello at impact, you can see a WAVE in the BRICK!

IRC on the bus

Wow. rjbs spends 2 hours commuting on the bus twice a day, but at least he's online the entire time thanks to his Franklin CDU-680 EVDO and $70/month in Sprint fees...

Crazy kids and their new fangled gadgets. :)

:( Spammers suck

The spam wars rage on. I am angry.

-tirade redacted-

Glyph::dna, Kiva props

My jays.net ISP went "poof," so I made an ungraceful migration to a new one. Between that and my lappie hard drive dying it's been a tough month in the personal computing front. :)

I added how to add a DNA track to the BioPerl wiki. BioPerl is so cool. :)

It's been a month since we made our first loans on Kiva.com, and now our first round of re-payments have arrived! mwoohahaha! Oh, and did you know about Kivafriends and Kivapedia?

Whirligigs

The second-story window in front of my writer's table looks out at a silver maple that has been putting on quite a show. In recent weeks thousands of whirligigs have formed, grown, and turned turned from green to brown. Now they are ready to try their helicopter wings. Though calm prevails in the late afternoon as I write, the wind has been up the past few days and with each gust a fleet of earth-bound kamikazes has been launched. Some of them, in brief defiance of destiny, have caught an updraft and captured my attention for their odds-defying ascent. By contrast, some never catch the wind but fall straight down in a graceless headlong plunge. But the majority describe a rhythmic circular glide pattern as they wend their way earthward. It's an amazing sight, with the ground below, and for yards around, covered with seedlings. From the ranks of thousands, some few will take root and themselves parent seedlings in turn as the cycle of life repeats once more. Since it's all about propagation, I guess you could say the whole event is sexy, just like spring.

Our Logophiles writers group has been meeting monthly for the past five years, and has recently begun "assigning" writing topics. I chose a thought from Rainer Maria Rilke's observation that "to write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of blood." Which prompted the following poem about the writing life:

Shooting Up

Pity the poor literary junky,

high on myth-and-metaphor,

brain seized upon by the

ecstasy

of a well-turned phrase,

a just-so sentence,

heart racing to

scratch out a simple line of truth

in that fleeting instant

when writer’s ink

dilates the pupils and

guides the trembling hand.

Tomorrow the crash.

Yay! I *is* smart!

Sweetness. I'm starting to understand this bioinformatics stuff enough to submit patches to minor problems in the work of Harvard grad students. :)

Evidence this week: Corrected arrows in (1) Denaturation, another PCR glitch.

(Last semester I found a few glitches in professor's slides and even two in my textbook. Yee ha. -grin- ... Come to think of it, there was a typo in my Chem answers book this semester too. That one made me scream. -frown-)