= March 2006 = Main = May 2006 =
Remember when Bart was about to steal Bonestorm from the Try-N-Save, and Donkey Kong appeared over his shoulder saying, "it's the company's fault for making you want it so much."? That's kind of how I feel as I sit here downloading the second season of Battlestar Galactica.
I'm ready to throw my support behind Bravo's Top Chef as the best cooking-themed reality show in recent memory. The Food Network's thing is too cutesy, and Hell's Kitchen on Fox a while back was never really in the running. For me, it was a toss up between Top Chef and Ming Tsai's almost-identical show on PBS. But at this point I'm convinced... higher production value and hot judges gives Top Chef the winning edge.
Unless, of course, you consider Iron Chef to be reality television, which would clearly surpass all competition by a pretty wide margin.
Once again, my only noteworthy activity as of late involves boardgaming. After much work, Chris wrangled together seven of us to start a mostly-online game of Diplomacy. Big thumbs up. If you're looking for a good way to turn a group of friends into deceitful, Machiavellian children, I highly recommend it.
Despite all the rain and mudslides, spring is coming to the San Francisco Bay. Marie and I are celebrating by taking our tenuous first steps into the exciting world of plant-ownership. I've managed to keep a mint healthyish and alive for almost a year, so having mastered the Mediterranean weeds I'm ready for new challenges. So we threw some money at the problem, picked up some sweet houseplants from the Botanical Gardens, and the apartment is now well on its way to becoming a lush, urban garden fit for a Babylonian king.
Anal scientist that I am, I want to ensure each plant's optimal growing conditions, but it's a difficult task. There just isn't enough quantitative instruction out there. I'm sure wineries and the like guide their growing with clear measurables, like inches of water or soil pH, but the rest of the plant kingdom is left with no more vauge guidelines. The little plastic card stuck in my neanth plam tells me it wants "low sun". But what the heck does that mean? Direct sun 5% of the day? Continuous, indirect sun all day? I have a dank closet which might work nicely. Without defining the extrema, squishy descriptors like "low" and "high" don't mean anything. "Water sporadically in winter", one plant tells me. Wtf?
I stress over this sort of thing. Thankfully there are some kind souls out there such as the American Orchid Society who know how I feel. Check the link - they classify orchids by the number of foot-candles of sunlight needed to survive. Orchid A will flower nicely with 3,000 foot-candles. How sweet is that? Granted, I have no real conception of how many foot-candles spill into my living room each day, nor do I have a good way to measure light intensity, nor is it an SI unit. But it's a start, and I salute them for it.
I don't want to start sounding like a Pharma apologist (though the odds are high that I will one day be in their employ), but I genuinely feel bad for this company Parexel who've been absorbing much of the blame for the disastrous clinical drug trial in England last month. Check out this article in Bloomberg, scrutinizing the consent forms signed by the eight healthy volunteers for TGN1412, accusing the drug-testing company of coersion and presenting misleading information.
Sure, all is not well in the business of drug testing, and it's important to keep a watchful eye on how clinical trials are conducted, but it looks to me that Parexel has become the global whipping boy for watchdogs and ethicists to vent their frustrations with the pharmaceutical industry. Isn't Michael Goodyear, Canadian cancer physician and research ethicist, going a little overboard?...
"I think it was misleading not to tell participants that that this drug was genetically engineered from hamster cells and that it was designed to alter their immune system, . . . Reasonable people would think twice before allowing an experimental drug to change their immune system."
Is he really claiming that it's Parexel's job to disclose that a drug was produced in hampster cells? Would that make the drug in question more or less safe than one produced in bacteria or yeast? Does it matter at all, so long as the production process includes the sufficient, government-mandated purification and sterilization procedures? Nor is it clear why "resonable people" would hold sacred their immune system over their cardivascular, nervous or any other essential system. It's not as though Parexel hid these facts with the intention of disgusing a substance they knew to be toxic. Isn't it far more likely that Parexel, like everyone else in the business, has slipped into a level of regulatory laziness, and just happened to get screwed with this particular molecule? I mean... it's not their job to scare away every blue collar joe and college kid who wants to make some quick cash by talking about the potential dangers of hampster cells.
Those primarily at fault for this calamity are, I think, the scientists who thought it would be a good idea to tinker with the immune system in this way. I'm guessing in vitro testing could have revealed some human-specific cellular response to the drug, thus making everyone wary of using rabbits and mice as model organisms. But that didn't happen.
Clearly in the (near) future they should be paying sharp-minded chemical engineers such as myself to prevent this sort of thing.
I've got my tickets to the Tenth Annual Boonville Beer Fest.
Do you?
We like to pack our Saturday morning tv with as much culture as possible, so after an hour of Namaste TV it was only fitting that we switch over to USA for a re-run of Nashville Star. Not that I'm admitting to my American Idol fandom, but some of these Nashville kids could sing circles around Kellie Pickler and company.
On a related note, I'm getting a little tired of these yuppie-targeted Walmart ads. Did you know you can get sushi at their new shi-shi "laboratory" store in Plano?
Discounting the days I didn't come into work, this has probably been my least productive day of 2006. And it's been fantastic - affording me ample time to catch up on my blog reading. Blog writing, clearly, continues to suffer.
It came a little late in the graduate student lifecycle, but I just submitted the abstract for my first poster presentation at a scientific conference. The ACS National Meeting, here I come.
That's right - I get to travel all the way to San Francisco! The City by the Bay! It's very exciting... I can't wait to taste the local fare, ride a cable car and see "The Rock". Good thing I'm getting reiumbursed for my $5 travel expenses, or I don't think I could ever afford a trip like this.
A good friend of Marie's has begun training for a triathalon with his wife. Fitness is a marvelous thing, so good for them I say. But as it turns out, their decision is bad for me.
The friend in question is filling Marie's head with all sorts of crazy ideas about couples races and how much fun they are. Thankfully Marie agrees that triathalons and marathons are a bit too intense, but she's found something a little lower on the grueling-o-meter: the annual Muddy Buddy. It's a six-mile biking/running/obstacle course built for two, to be run this summer in cities across America, (San Jose for example).
I hate to seem like a wet blanket... the race looks like fun in theory, and it has a definite team-building, good-story-for-later quality to it, but ultimately I can't get past my deep-seated aversion to running. Unless it's to something good or away from something bad, I'd rather walk briskly or just stay put. The abstract notion of "finish line" just doesn't do it for me, even if it's less of a line and more of a giant pit of mud.
So I said "no". Is that the lamest thing you've ever heard?
Is anyone else as tickled as I am by this Washington Post image of some poor woman running across a highway at Tyson's Corner? It's a frank reminder of what thousands of Christmas shoppers already knew: Tyson's is just about the worst place in the Universe.
As promised, here are the rest of the pictures from the housewarming party. A one-week turn around time isn't so bad for ol' jeffnye.org.
Also, this is my one hundredth movable type post. How about that?