From a recent paper in our field.

"Other challenges for the Alix field include understanding the physiological significance of its interactions with lipids and with endosomal, cytoskeletal and apoptotic proteins."

Yeah, no kidding. This essentially summarizes and defines the entire field. Perhaps now that they've (the lab that published this paper) conquered HIV, they'll look into these other issues.

Derik Lowe's in the pipeline has a bunch of stories from readers. Fun to hear about. The worst thing I've ever done is catch fire to the fume hood, that was in undergrad. No damage, but it was a near thing (considering the idiots left the flammable reagents all close together in a CARDBOARD BOX. The box caught on fire. Like I said, it was a near thing. I imagine the explosion would have seriously damaged me and possibly caught the building on fire. Yeah, that lab was pretty dangerous, looking back.

Since then i haven't worked much with really dangerous things. I once dropped a plate filled with 32P, i had to strip out of my clothes, change to scrubs, decontaminate the entire lab, and walk home in bare feet. 6 months later i got my shoes back. Humuliating, but not dangerous; and nothing was damaged (later i found out that 32P wasn't all that bad, despite some people's claims to the contrary).

Oh, okay, this almost takes the cake. I was assigned to refill the liquid nitrogen cell storage tank, along with another guy, for a few weeks. I forgot about it, he forgot about it, until someone noticed that all the liquid nitrogen was evaporated (well, mostly evaporated). I don't know what happened to the cells, they probably all died. Fortunately I left the lab soon after, and the cells weren't for our lab (another lab which occupied the same space).

The other liquid N2 story is more tragic, and happened to my current lab. Somebody was supposed to autoclave the racks that hold the boxes of cells of an EMPTY N2 tank. Instead, they autoclaved my PI's tank, destroying years of cells. That really hurt; we lost irreplacable cell lines and antibodies.

It's strongly dependant on cost; consumers will use whatever energy that is cheapest to use. A new Swiss company boasts that their solar panels will be half the price of carbon-based energy (ie oil, natural gas) in a decade. If that occurs the results will be phenominal.

The armor controversy has been laid to rest (hopefully once and for all) by the excellent reporting of Michelle Malkin and US service personal (army peoples)

From the Museum of Natural Science frog exhibit
The exhibit has it's own website here.






This is from the butterfly exhibit



Sorry, i can't remember the species names!

At age 5?? Amazing (and disturbing - the father is unknown). It's likely the poor girl had some bizarre disorder which greatly accelerated the maturity of her sexual organs.

Its a mad world! Cute pict!

Why not medical supplies to Palestine? A new report shows that life under Hamas is very hard for Palestinians. I agree that humanitarian care should not be stopped to governments which we don't support (and the Palestinian govt is perhaps the least threatening to America). ALso, why does the average Palestinian, or average joe-on-the-arab-street always say 'America, fix this', usually when we are not responsible for whatever the problem is (usually, its Iseral's fault). There is the automatic equation that America really rules the world, which, the past decades have shown, is hardly the case. They should be looking for new regional powers such as Iran to fill in the gaps...

The problem is, that Iran does come to the aid of people, ie Hezbollah, Hamas, Shiites in Iraq, but usually this aid is in the form of weapons and terrorists. The US position (as shown by Condi Rice's many statements), is that Iran should assume the responsibility of a regional power and actually bring peace to the region, not conflict. I agree with that.

By love letters to their gadgets, what else?

Just in time for Valentines.

From the stuff that we don't need and makes us look bad dept.

here at Michell Malkin's blog. Very nice swath of the blogosphere; nobody is sad to see her (Marcotte, the Edwards blogger) go. My wife and I were discussing today; thats one less prospective voter that Edwards has. I wonder if this event has brought him the kiss of death (probably not).

So a 'breakthrough' in the talks yesterday - NK will stop it's nuclear reactor in exchange for fuel oil. But i agree with John Bolton (former UN ambassador)

"It sends exactly the wrong signal to would-be proliferators around the world: If you hold out long enough and wear down the State Department negotiators, eventually you get rewarded," said Bolton, who was also involved with North Korea earlier as the State Department's under secretary for arms control.

"It makes the [Bush] administration look very weak at a time in Iraq and dealing with Iran it needs to look strong," he said.

Yeah, so if Kim has a dozen nukes, does he need 100? Not really, he thinks. So, he gets something for nothing (again). Why else would they suddenly have a change in heart after 4 years of negotiations? The only thing this treaty will do is lengthen the time of NK's implosion, and make the implosion more spectacular and catastrophic.

US negotiators: "The Koreans faced five other united members, and they realized they were standing alone."

Yeah, right. The administration is really stupid, and they just confirmed it for the world to see. Thanks Bush, and thanks Clinton for getting us into this mess in the first place. Unfortunately, since the US has zero credibility in the eyes of the world, especially in regards to intelligence, no one can say for sure that NK actually has nukes; thus its very easy to say 'we have no nukes' and without proof, there is nothing to be done. Ditto for Iran.

I just got a very convincing email requesting clarification of an ebay item. However, I don't have any listed. I clicked on the link, and it sent me to some bogus website. Luckly, also, Mozilla (ver 2) was able to detect the bogus website and give a very obvious alert. As you can see, this looks just like a normal ebay email (html stuff removed, why help the spoofers out?), so it's very convincing. The point is that spoofers are getting increasingly sophisticated in their requests for personal info, but you can almost always see if the website is fake by looking at the address bar. In this case the address should have been www.ebay.com, but it was something else. This is the major thing to look out for with fake websites.

The email subject was "Question from eBay Member — Respond Now"

And the body included:

eBay sent this message!
Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay. Learn more.

eBay sent this message on behalf of an eBay member via My Messages. Responses sent using email will not reach the eBay member. Use the Respond Now button below to respond to this message.

Question from user

hello,
i am K.Terson and i am real intersted in your item .. please tell me how much is shipping to Roma (Italy,Europe)?? i have the money and i am ready to pay this item only through ebay (PayPal). Let me Know

Sincerly Karl Terson


Respond to this question in My Messages.

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story here. Texas radio stations refuse to play their music (no link, sorry, but i haven't heard them played on the station we listen to at work). I doubt this will change. I'm somewhat apauled by the Chicks disdain of our country and our president. But he's a very lame duck, and very prone for bashing (and practically no one approves of him, not even me).

Well, anyway they didn't win any country music awards, but they got 5 grammys. To me, this just means that the RIAA adn the CMA are very different on the political spectrum; the RIAA people wanted to make a very clear message that bush bashing is all the rage and quite acceptable. Or maybe they just really really liked the Chicks' latest album.

Update: Looks like my impression vibes with country listeners (i don't consider myself a country listener).

Another episode, here.

Key quote:

After watching this episode, I finally understand -- no, I grok -- exactly why so many people hated Wesley so much. Hell, I played him for seven years and probably have more invested in him than anyone else in the world, and even I hated him after this.

Heh. Not really.

MMORPG to be exact. Anyway here is the list. I wonder how many of these suck? But, surprisingly, KOL didn't make the list.

Cool blog here. Essentially it's a collection of letters to the editor from student and professor perspective. Its a response to the very popular 'rate my professor' which apparently is more about hotness than anything else.

here. I have to be careful not to fall into this trap; its very easy for me. I am very fortunate to have a wonderful wife, though, who helps me with these issues. Its an issue mostly of not wanting to deal with the world and all its issues; for me when science gets bad i fall into a black hole of despair.

Gah! I'm barraged by spam on this blog. Today i got 40 emails informing me i had comments on posts. Great. Its all spam. Not good. So i made it less easy to leave comments, they will all have to be approved by me. If that doesn't work, i'll disable comments (but i'd hate to do that). I'm also getting trackback spam, and occassionally mailing list spam. Gah.

Update: due to spam issue (50 messages in a few hours) comments are disabled for the time being. I'll wait until the spam storm is gone to re-enable them. Meanwhile, feel free to email me at gibbie99 at yahoo dot com if you have comments.

Damn, no more porn movies from her. Probable cause: O.D. (my guess). I'm sure her family is crushed, but i'm somewhat sick of hearing about her and having our city dragged through the mud every time she does something stupid.

Update: prescription drugs found at the scene. It's sad, and if there was something wrong with her, then i sympathize. But she was only 40, and looked in okay condition. I guess my take is that i can't really sympathize with people who are born healthy and screw up their bodies through drugs and whatever.

Update: This story contradicts all this, saying she was an animal lover and a vegetarian. Anyway i shouldn't be critical of dead people...But still, here are the facts. She was a stripper in houston, 'fell in love' with very rich, very old guy, married him, a few years later he dies, and then she fights for a decade to get his estate (with the dad's son, who, interestingly, also just died.. Then she had a baby, and 3 men have said it might be theirs. That means she's sleeping around *alot*. And she was found dead with perscription pills nearby. So, likely o.d. It's great that she's an animal lover, but still, she's a freaking ho. And that's the word.

Woohoo! Finally finding birds of a feather is a cool thing.

Found! Their experiences are similar to mine own, except she actually discusses hers, while I don't dare (since i use my real name).

Check out this post from Dr. Sanity (HT: Glenn) "This story makes me glad I don't do psychological consulting for NASA anymore.". I was discussing with J today and we basically agreed that this myth that astronauts are superior people is not really founded in anything. Yes, their training is hard, so is mine. Yes, they do dangerous things, so do I. Yes, they risk their life for their country, and for the advancement of mankind. So do all scientists...Well, okay there are various degrees, and scientists have a much lower on the job mortality rate. I don't equate scientists with astronauts, but at the same time, astronauts are still people, with human issues. If we turn them into rock stars, should we get surprised that they start acting like them?

Recently a few documentaries have come out discussing the addiction of online games, specifically WoW (Worlds of Warcraft). They are capsuled here.

The dollar is sliding against all major currencies in the world, because people are losing faith in our ability to repay all these loans. We’re living on borrowed financial time. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Those are the facts.”

Says Sen. Tom Coburn, the heroic anti-pork crusader. This is an excellent article about the man and his crusade against wasteful spending in Congress, a must read for anyone who cares about our national future. How much of a future will we have if we owe 9 Trillion to China and Saudi Arabia?

Of things to buy used. Of those that i buy on the list, i tend to buy used. (except cars, i don't want to buy a turkey with no warrantee).

THe Mouse is extremely funny. The rest are here HT: Mudville

Dorritos are also good

The AHA has a good spot too, but at 2.6 Million dollars for 30 seconds, i wonder if the ad's worth it?

Here is the top 10 ranking; not surprisingly AB takes 7 out of the top 10.

Who knew that Henry Kissinger would play an important role in its spread?