= November 2005 = Main = January 2006 =
Travel fears have been actualized. A lengthy de-icing and apparently a loose dog on the tarmac at LaGuardia (?) have caused Marie to miss her connecting flight this afternoon, so she'll be ringing in the new year in a travel hotel in Salt Lake City. The news has put me in an equally lame mood, so my current NYE plans involve nothing more than a bottle of wine and the first season of The Wire on DVD.
Happy effing 2006.
And now the next order of business: New Years. Who's got something to do?
If I had a little more energy and legal wherewithal, I would start the the Bob Loblaw Law Blog. But as it stands, I'll merely encourage someone else to do so.
UPDATE: Check this out. It only raises more questions. (Thanks, Greeley)
Delaware, you've always held a special place in my heart with your relaxing beaches and lack of sales tax. But after tonight's 10 mile per hour crawl across route 95, I'm afraid that this thing between us just isn't working out. When the traffic begins exactly at the Delaware Memorial Bridge and ends exactly at the Maryland state line, it's like you're lashing out at me for something, and won't stand for it.
The decision is in, and they've awarded the contract for the operation of Los Alamos to the University of California.
I'll freely admit that this is more of a victory for U of C's industrial partner, Bechtel, but even so it's nice not to see it fall into the hands of the hated Texans. Things must have been tough for the DOE... cronyism seems to run deep for both Bechtel and Lockheed. I wonder what tipped the scales, because it can't have been the Golden State's management skills.
I'm slavering over stem cell controversy. I need my fix! More news, more drama! Don't let me down, Woo Suk.
Read up. This beats the pants off the many, many controversies we've had in recent years. All it needs is a name... Clonegate, perhaps?
The family is going to meet my uncle's fiancée this evening. She's a former oboist with the New York Philharmonic and now writes for the New York Times. I feel like it could be a scene out of some horrible modernization of a Jane Austen novel.
My little sister's birthday party is currently in full swing and let me tell you, there's nothing better for a hangover than two dozen bouncing eight year olds. One of the guests was telling a story when I walked in the door, so all I caught was her last sentence: "the moral of the story is, poop smells."
I just wanted to share that.
I'm back in Arlington, safe and sound, and about to make the trek into the Big City for these jokers' second annual Christmas party. And as an added bonus, my laptop monitor is working again. The five-hour hypobaric treatment of being in an airplane was just what it needed, apparently. Don't ask me to explain.
As of this weekend, Age of Steam is my new favorite dorky board game. But Joe gave Marie and I Puerto Rico for Christmas, which you'll notice is in the #1 spot on boardgamegeek.com, so we'll see how that goes.
Note: Don't worry guys, I haven't gone crazy or anything... Fireball Island still supercedes all of these.
Note II: Anyone in DC want to play Fireball Island next week?
Stem cell controversy is great and all, but for my money the coolest science news to come out lately has been the discovery of a new species of carnivore in Borneo.
Swiss-based environmental group WWF said on Monday its researchers photographed the strange animal, which looks like a cross between a cat and a fox, in the dense, central mountainous rainforests of Borneo.
I love the thought that there are still things on this earth which have remained hidden from the gaping maw of Humanity.
See the pictures here.
I'm having some monitor trouble. I type this post with my desk lamp trained directly at my monitor, because the backlight for my laptop's LCD decided to stop working yesterday. It just up and walked out. No thirty days - no nothing. Anyhow, the desklamp sitting three inches from the computer gives me just enough contrast to read text on about 60% of the screen, so the computer is still functional in the strictest sense. I would, however, like to solve this problem post-haste... Hack-a-Day directed me to this DIY guide, but it has me a little concerned. Much of the procedure involves Dremel-ing into a mercury vapor-filled light bulb... but not too far into it! So I'm wondering, world, have you ever done something like this before? Is it worth my time? Or should I just pony up and buy a new screen from hp? Or should I steal a million-year-old CRT from lab and just plug that sucker in?
It's an HP Omnibook xe3, in case that helps.
As a pseudo-biologist, I maintain live cell cultures in lab for various research purposes. On any given day I tend to petri dishes full of cells ultimately derived from humans and fruit flies, as well as the bacteria E. coli, (which is mostly harmless, despite its bad PR).
It's in everyone's best interest to keep these three cell types far away from each other, but I discoverd this morning that, despite my best efforts, some wiley bacteria snuck their way into both my human and insect cells. This is bad news. Higher organisms produce some pretty elegant cellular machinery, and HEK-293s are the cadillac of eukaryotic cell culture, but when you take these guys away from their precious immune systems they don't have many ways to protect themselves. So over the weekend, while I obliviously dicked around my apartment, my most important cells were being slowly eaten by single-celled maurauders. With the death toll well into the millions, this tragedy will not be soon forgotten. Especially since I can't really do any research with dead cells. I guess my winter vacation will be starting a couple weeks early.
Attention world: please stop talking about nanotechnology.
Novel materials, regardless of lengthscale, should be tested to determine their impact on health and ecology. This was as true for the cavemen as it is for us. As such, articles such as, "Nanotechnology Regulation Needed, Critics Say" are misleading wastes of everyone's time.
I contacted the fine people who host my website to complain about my little issue. Their response:
Hello, Your nameservers at the registrar were old. I updated them to the new servers, and you should start seeing this problem clear up in the next few hours. Regards, PhilI'm glad we cleared that up.
Is anyone else having this issue, wherein you try to load this webpage and it tells you that the domain cannot be found? And then you try again and it works? Or is it just me?
Let's face it: it's hard to get too upset about glaciers and migratory birds. But finally there's a consequence of global warming with real tangible impact - the end of hockey!