= February 2006 = Main = April 2006 =
Marie and I threw a long-overdue housewarming party last Friday. A good time was had, and Karaoke Revolution was a crowdpleaser, as expected. I might have - just maybe - tippled to excess and called it an early evening, but happily my friends left me a keepsake to remember the evening by:
I'll try to upload the pictures in their entirety soon.
It's spring break in Berkeley, and the holiday season has me yearning for Arrested Development.
SPRING BREAK!
Marie and I paid our first visit to the newly-opened (despite some web-related mishaps) Epicurious Garden last night. It seems right in our neighborhood's wheelhouse, but almost to the point of self-parody. Finally, (finally!) we won't have to drive all the way across town for our many caviar needs. And the chocolate-covered peppercorns I sampled were, politely speaking, the perfect waste of both.
But eff if the food wasn't good. And the idea of high quality and easily-procurable sushi already has me concerned for my bank account. So while it wasn't the affordable burrito place I was hoping for, I'm still pretty pleased with the development.
It's flattering when things you do at work pop up in the news, which is why I've been closely following this story about clinical drug trial in England which went horribly, freakishly awry. The quotes from a patient given a placebo - though medically fascinating - read like something out of a horror movie:
"First they began tearing their shirts off complaining of fever, then some screamed that their heads felt like they were going to explode."
The drug in quesiton is an antibody designed to bind to CD-28, a protein on the surface of T-cells involved in the activation of an immune response. The native ligand for CD-28 is a protein found on macrophages and B-cells called B7-2, which is a protein I expressed and purified in lab just a couple weeks ago. This morbid story is my PhD in action... maybe if I were a little better at my job we'd understand what went wrong with these people.
It's easy to expect Constant Gardener-style foul-play on the part of the drug companies when something like this happens. But there's always a possibility that tragic, unexpected consequences will arise in clinical trials, even if the laws are followed perfectly, (though it looks like the might not have been). But then, everything I've read cites how non-toxic the drug was in test animals... I'm no big-city drug designer, but it seems that if you were developing an antibody against a human protein you'd be especially wary of animal models. since your drug, by design, won't bind nearly as strongly (if at all) to functionally similar but structurally different proteins from mice, rabbits, etc. But the scientists working on the project must have thought of that already... right?
I'm not normally one to link to the Economist, but this article about razor blade proliferation is pretty outstanding. Trends indicate we can expect fourteen blades by 2100.
I would be remiss in my friendly duties to not remind everyone to get tickets to see Pants Pants Pants at NoisePop on March 30th. The bands for whom they're opening are probably pretty solid too, but I'm not with-it enough to have heard of them.
I realize they're just cycling through their playlist, but following Pink's "Stupid Girls" video with a song by the Pussycat Dolls seems somewhat like an Onion-style point-counterpoint. I wonder which pop outfit will capture the hearts and minds of America's young women.
And thus ends my ten-minute breakfast.
My boss once told me that graduate school should keep me exceptionally busy: "you should expect to be working 60 hours a week when things are going well, and 80 hours a week when they aren't". I sort of laughed off this comment. My boss's email persona has been known to say some ridiculous things, but this past month or so, for the first time I feel like I could actually be in lab for 80 hours a week and not run out of things to do. I'm not doing this, of course, but I could if I had the drive, energy, etc.
Yadda yadda yadda. I'm a bad blogger and I'm making excuses.
I filed my taxes today. I had to make some tough decisions, as I do every year, regarding various nuts-and-bolts issues hottly debated among the graduate community round these parts. Can we claim the lifetime learning credit, where and how do we enter TA stipends, etc. etc.
I find it mesmerizing me how these issues confound my peers and I, year after year. I'll grant the federal government that we graduate students are in a trickier-than-average tax situation. The source of our salary changes almost every semester, and it's a mess figuring out if and where taxes were witheld and by which state or federal agency. But I think it's fair to say that people in my line of work possess some of the sharpest minds in the nation, and if we still have no clue how to fairly compensate the government, doesn't that signify a deep, deep flaw in the system? Good engineering promotes proper use, you know.
On Joe's suggestion, a group of us drove up to Chabot Space and Science Center last night for a viewing of Domefest, the brand spanking new trend in digital media. It's basically a film festival designed for the giant, 360 degree, 70-foot diameter screens found in planetaria across the world. It was definitely worth it, if it ever plays in your town. Thoughts immediately turned to the possibilities of dome-projected video gaming. Remember how you could set the field of view in Quake to 180 degrees? Yeah.
Also, there was a dusting of snow on the ground! I tried to make a snowball, but it turned out to be about 70% dirt. Obviously I threw it at Marie anyway.
The endless, soul-crushing rain was one thing, but is it really supposed to snow in Berkeley tonight? Wtf?
Just a little global climate change, as my uncle always says. Nothing to be worried about.
I recently returned from a whirlwind road trip to the Southland with Marie and her parents. It was fun, if not a little strange.
The highlight for me, oddly, was a traffic accident. I'm pretty sure no one was hurt, so it's okay to laugh, but we saw an honest-to-God beer truck flipped over on I-5. It turned out not to be the Homer Simpsons fantasy I would have expected: imagine three of four lanes about a foot deep in shattered amber glass, and the overwhelming smell of Bud Light baking on asphalt. It was awesome.