art, food, music, citylife and other mental stimuli
apalazzo | March 20, 2009As you can see, juggling lab and fatherhood has left me no time to blog. So now that I'm waiting for the centrifuge to cool down I'll take this opportunity to quote a great musician whose words have some resonance these days:
Cranium implants, false debt, funny money, dead sat heart, signs of the empire in decline, stretching the bottom line without regard to time or limits of mankind, paying no attention to the laws of cause and effect, advance and decline, the ways of ancient biorythms, science, no conscience.
-Steve Coleman, from the song No Conscience, off of Steve Coleman and the Five…
apalazzo | March 6, 2009Monday, our son Xander was born. Since then I've been getting to know who this new human being is. I've been taking care of most of his, and my wife's, needs. We've shared many moments and lived a life without distractions. Like Zen Buddhist monks our only concerns are food, sleep and poop. The first few days I shunned my laptop, but now that my parents are in town we've been able to request and obtain the high technology items that permeate every action performed within the 21st century. Now as my wife, and son sleep I am quickly typing this post. Soon they will be awake and a new set of…
apalazzo | February 26, 2009Today's quote is from the first two lines of a research manuscript about the neuroscience of Schadenfreude that appeared in a recent issue of Science.
Envy is one of the seven biblical sins, the Shakespearian "green-eyed monster," and what Bertrand Russell called an unfortunate facet of human nature. It is an irrational, unpleasant feeling and a "painful emotion" characterized by feelings of inferiority and resentment produced by an awareness of another's superior quality, achievement, or possessions.
It's not very often that you read flowery language in a scientific paper. Note that five of…
apalazzo | February 21, 2009One common feature of bench work is downtime. Some activity, such as cutting and pasting DNA, require the researcher to incubate their samples for various periods of time. What to do? Well ideally the scientist in question should take advantage of this time to either, perform other experiments, make reagents such as buffers, or catch up on the scientific literature. I tend to use Google Reader to scan the RSS feeds from various journals.
Of course I scan through blogs as well. Sometimes though your day is filled with some brain-draining activity, such as microinjecting tissue culture cells.…
apalazzo | February 17, 2009In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice, there is.
- Yogi Bera (also attributed to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut and Chuck Reid according to Wikiquote)
apalazzo | February 12, 2009... I have two simple requests:
Stop asking people if they "believe in evolution". Every time I hear some dumb ass politician or right wing theological nut say "I don't believe in evolution", it makes me cringe. Evolution is not some magical mystical process that you take on faith. Do you ever hear the question "do you believe in algebra?" Instead pose the question "do you understand how evolution works?"
Go and read The Origin of Species by Natural Selection and The Voyage of the Beagle. These are simply must reads, especially for anyone in the life sciences. Now I can hear many of you…
apalazzo | February 4, 2009I just listened to journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer discus what's to come in the not so distant future due to accelerated climate change.
The quick summary? The rate of climate change is very fast, the development of technology (good and bad) may be even faster, but the rate of cultural change needed to accommodate these developments is slow and the political will to enact needed reforms may be the slowest of all (although not as slow as evolution, the gradual change that rewires the genomes of most of the organic beings that must cope with our ever more rapidly changing world). What…
apalazzo | January 26, 2009Yesterday, I was diligently working on my computer when my brother suddenly appeared on MSN's instant messenger. His engineering firm had recently sent him to Doha, Qatar, to work on a new factory being built near the harbor and I was pleasantly surprised that I could chat with him. Next I was shunted to a "conference chat" where he was conversing with his wife, a first grade teacher in Montreal. Next we were all notified that our cousin Tim, who is currently in Kiev, had signed in to MSN. If that wasn't enough, Tim's little sister Laura, who is in DC working with a law firm that advocates…
apalazzo | January 26, 2009This has become a yearly tradition. I usually posted near the end of the year, but this time around I had many "distractions". Better late then never:
Click here for a full size version.
Previous years:
2007
2006
apalazzo | January 19, 2009Hello world.
Once upon a time, I had a laptop. As time went on, its hard drive filled up with pdfs, music files and an enormous (well, relatively enormous) operating system. This pattern of exponential expansion continued for a few years until, the imbalance between data and storage capacity, just like the overpopulation of the Norwegian hills by lemmings with prolific breading capabilities, could no longer be sustainable. A change was needed before the impending threat of mass suicide. And so on January 7th, having realized that my data needed more fertile ground to colonize, I bought a new…
apalazzo | November 24, 2008I love the classics - be it Greek plays, Roman history, all of the great myths or all of the ancient philosophers that lie at the base of our western civilization. (Weren't those Atomists so prescient?) And yes, I also managed to marry a classics major. That's why I thank the FSM that I live in an age where you can obtain all this information for free and downloadable onto your iPod.
So what's out there?
Well a few months back I was in despair (along with hundreds of others) about the apparent downfall of the History of Rome Podcast. Well over the weekend Mike Duncan, just like Cincinnatus,…
apalazzo | October 6, 2008Here are some photos from last week's Ig Nobels:
First up a group photo of my companions for the evening, including (from right to left) Stephanie Miller, Karl Erlandson, Anna Kushnir and baymate (who is apparently signing an ode to the Ig Nobels). You can read Anna's take on the Ig's here.
One of the highlights of the evening was the "Win a Date with a Nobel Laureate (or Benoit Mandelbrot)":
(William Lipscomb and his date)
(Benoit Mandelbrot being presented to the audience - his date was a very young enthusiastic physics student who shrieked as she ran up to greet the famous mathematician…
apalazzo | August 30, 2008This one is dedicated to the residents of New Orleans who for the past three years have been rebuilding that beautiful city.
Long live The Big Easy.
apalazzo | July 31, 2008My iPod has been a great addition to my life. I use it to listen to podcasts and audiobooks on my half-hour walks, to and from work. But recently two of my favorite items have gone into suspended animation.
The first one is my absolute favorite podcast, The History of Rome, produced by Mike Duncan. Starting from its mythical beginnings as told in the Aeneid, Roman history was delivered in 15min segments to my iPod every week. Mike had been producing these for a year now (yes, that makes almost 50 episode). In the pocasts we encountered the Etruscans, the Samnites, Cincinnatus, Hannibal,…
apalazzo | July 22, 2008We were planning to head to Europe so when I discovered that the cheapest tickets were being offered by Icelandair, I jumped on it. Why? I have always wanted to visit this mystic land and Icelandair lets you have a free stopover for up to a week. I highly recommend that you do this once - Iceland was far and away the highlight of our European trip.
Day I - We arrived late in Keflavik where the main international airport is located. This is on the southwest corner of the island and lies right on top of the mid Atlantic ridge in an area known as the Reykjanes. Already you can see that Iceland…
apalazzo | July 14, 2008After Paris we flew to Munich on Airberlin (20 Euros per ticket, 50 Euros after taxes and airport fees.) There we met up with some former colleagues (Julia and Michael) and a current member of the Rapoport Lab (Briana) who will be leaving us soon to start her own lab in the MCB department at Harvard's Main Campus. Also in attendance was Briana's husband and my wife who snapped this picture of us in the English Garden.
Munich is a beautiful city. For anyone who enjoys the music, Munich might as well be the world capitol of classical music. The number of great performers who currently live in-…
apalazzo | July 13, 2008We then arrived in Paris on June 21st. If spending the summer solstice in the city of lights means nothing to you then you've never heard of Fete de la Musique, a one day outdoor party. The streets were filled with Parisians taking in the food, the sights and the sounds generated from live musicians trough out the city. Fete de la Musique is now celebrated in almost every part of France and a good chunk of Switzerland too. There were teenage garage bands, DJs, tam-tam players and of course many troubadours. At one location the musician's distributed lyrics into the crowd so that everyone…
apalazzo | July 9, 2008From Normandy we headed to the Breton coast. But first we passed through Mont Saint Michel, a large rock that sits in the crux of a large bay that divides Normandy from Brittany.
Mont Saint Michel is sometimes described as a tidal Island although it is in fact connected to the mainland by a man made road. There you'll find a small medieval town full of shops and tourists. As you climb towards the abbey, the view is spectacular. To give you an idea, here's an areial shot of the hamlet:
We were fortunate enough to visit the island at low tide when the water recedes for miles. In the…
apalazzo | March 18, 2008Earlier in the month he'd even spoken to a bespectacled blackgirl on a bus, said, "So, you're into photosynthesis", and she'd actually lowered her issue of Cell and said, "Yes, I am." -Junot Diaz, from his latest book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao