Retrospective
sastyk | December 30, 2010This year I have a jump on my predictions - as part of my comparatively new role as Editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary section, I had the fun of asking a whole lot of smart people what they think is going to happen, and thinking about their predictions first.
If you haven't seen them already, you should definitely check them out! Everyone from Ilargi to Jeff Rubin, The Peak Oil Hausfrau to Richard Heinberg to Tad Patzek kicked in, and realistically, you'll probably get a lot clearer view of the future through a lot of eyes than just one.
Which leads me to my annual official caveat,…
sastyk | December 30, 2009The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a…
sastyk | December 30, 2009Today is "Year in Review" day in which I post my predictions and my evaluation of last year's, but first, here's a meme I stole from the fabulous Dr. Isis in which I list the first blog post of 12 months, plus the first sentence of each blog post. I figure they'll make something really strange, which is always good. BTW, all of these are from ye olde blogge which is still alive and kicking, so if you'd like to read more of me (as though this weren't enough ;-)), you can go there.
January:
My New Year's Resolutions came 'round (and were kept about as well as all new year's resolutions)
One…
apalazzo | October 12, 2007I'm on the last bit of my protracted vacation. I'll be back on Monday. To commemorate work (got to get back into that mind-set) here's a little rant I posted last year.
Here's a tale from the lab.
Today we had an interesting discussion. It started off with PBS and ended up on the topic of understanding the principles behind much of the protocols used in a lab.
It all started when a rotation student asked if there was a lab stock of PBS (phosphate buffered saline), a common buffer used in the lab. Another postdoc informed the student that there wasn't a lab stock and she did not have any at…
apalazzo | October 11, 2007By now I should be flying in to Paris to meetup with some old friends. Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at the Universite Pierre & Marie Curie entitled: The Signal Sequence Coding Region: promoting nuclear export of mRNA, and ER targeting of translated protein. Here is a post from a year ago. At the time I was visiting Edgar who was then living in New York ...
After the death of my computer I decided to take the Chinatown express (15$ buys you a ticket from Boston to Chinatown NYC) and visit some old friends. Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese…
apalazzo | October 10, 2007I'm in Italy. Until I get back I've set up my blog to repost some old entries. Here's a post from last year.
Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic.
Living from place to place, moving until you are in your late 30s, an academic is expected to travel and see the world. You live in various places; experience the day to day hustle of different cities, towns and often countries. You absorb the local customs, the ideas, the history. You attempt to…
apalazzo | October 8, 2007I'm in Italia. Here's one of my favorite entries. It first appeared last year.
You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality.
As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around. In some way we all are part of this second group to some extent, but…
apalazzo | October 5, 2007I'm in Italy. Over the past two weeks I've been reposting my entries on technology. Here is a related post on Le Corbusier and his conception of the modern city.
Seed is disseminating questions to its bloggers (I guess a la www.edge.org) so this week the question is:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
The invention I would choose to uninvent? I spent the weekend asking some friends. Some answers were machine guns, the atomic bomb, spam, cars ...
Cars did strike something deep in me. Along the lines of…
apalazzo | October 3, 2007Still in Italy. Here is a post from last year that was a follow-up to the entry that was reposted yesterday.
Lets think about technology for a moment. Here I am typing on this laptop. Ideas flow (misspelled and grammatically incorrect) from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard ... over a wireless network ... into the vast ethereal space (known as the internet) ... to your home/workplace/café.
So what good is any of it?
You exclaim ... that's preposterous. Technology is good.
You would then continue ... All these gadgets and gizmos, they're good on many fronts. They make us live longer,…
apalazzo | October 2, 2007I should be walking around the family olive grove by now. Here is yet another old post from last year.
OK here is a myth that I'd like to explode (or at least be provocative about). Technology is NOT inevitable.
Say what?
We humans think that technology increases steadily. With every space shuttle and iPod, humanity advances by one small step. Sort of like that image of the ape walking more and more upright
... yeah that one. But the steady progress of technology is a myth.
Then how does it advance? Punctuated equilibrium? Not really. Humans are adept at finding tricks and shortcuts. We'…
apalazzo | September 30, 2007Yes still in Italy. Looking back at this post, it looks like most of the small biologists (excluding structural biologists) who practiced the molecule-centric approach have been weeded out by the stagnation in NIH funding, but I still beleive that the temptation to perform such research is still there for many young scientists ... so here goes.
As time goes on my ability to cope with the rich experience of daily lab life requires me to rant every so often. So here is today's rant.
There are two approaches to small biology, studying molecules and studying processes. Stay away from the…
apalazzo | September 28, 2007Yes you've guessed it, I'm in Italy. Here is another entry dealing with scientific thinking.
Spurred on by some comments left by Coturnix on the Three Types of Experiments entry, and by the Microparadigm paper (see my entry, and another discussion of this paper at In the Pipeline), I now present to you ... the significance of negative data.
Now most of the older (and well read) philosophers of data such as Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend were obsessed with the physical sciences, and as Ernst Mayr has pointed out in several books, they're ideas are less applicable to the life sciences. Even the…
apalazzo | September 26, 2007Still in Italy. Here's another old entry for you.
I'm not sure about the history of "the three types of experiments" (3 T's), but they are referred to quite often in the labs I've been in. So what exactly are they?
Here goes ...
Type A Experiment: every possible result is informative.
Type B Experiment: some possible results are informative, other results are uninformative.
Type C Experiment: every possible result is uninformative.
There is even a little saying that accompanies this ...
The goal is to maximize type A and minimize type C.
There are some that even name the 3tes 1 through 3…
apalazzo | September 25, 2007The Nobels are coming up. Here is last year's prediction (note that I had listed Mello and Fire).Who will win this year? You tell me.
Some guesses for the Medicine & Physiology (or perhaps Chemistry) below the fold. Warning - the predictions presented here are highly biased towards cellular physiology.
Membrane Traffic. James Rothman and Randy Schekman. Maybe you could throw in Peter Novak.
There's a rumour that intracellular signalling may win. Tony Hunter (phospho-tyrosine), Tony Pawson (protein signalling domains) and Allan Hall (small G-protein switches).
Structure of the first virus…
apalazzo | August 2, 2007Today I will be coming back from our little camping trip (hopefully!) Until I get back to my labtop, I'll entertain you with another post on microscopy.
Flipping through Nature, I stumbled onto this commentary: The good, the bad and the ugly. Here's a taste:
To correctly capture images using a modern microscope, researchers must have a good grasp of optics, an awareness of the microscope's complexity and an obsession for detail. Such skills can take months or even years to master, and yet, owing to inexperience or the rush to publish, are all too often squeezed into hours or days. Popular…
apalazzo | August 1, 2007I'm away camping. Here's another microscopy post from my previous blog.
Well writing a paper makes you feel beaten-up. But now that it's done I feel better. (Hope the reviewers like it).
PS Guess what's I've captured in this image.
apalazzo | July 31, 2007I'm gone camping. Late last week I preprogrammed my blog to repost all these entries on microscopy. Enjoy!
I read far too many papers where the author claims that their favorite protein "localizes to the leading edge in migrating cells". Then they show a pretty picture like this one:
The problem is that the cell thickens right at the leading edge. So if your protein is freely floating around, there will ALWAYS be more of it (in absolute terms) at the leading edge then in the nearby lamella. To underline this point, the image above is of fluorescent dextran microinjected into the cytoplasm…
apalazzo | July 30, 2007I'm away in California - while I'm gone, I'm reposting all these old entries on microscopy, enjoy!
Here's a micrograph of a fibroblast (connective tissue cell) adherring to fibronectin coated coverslip. The cell was immunostained for regular microtubules (red) and modified detyrosinated microtubules (green, although since these are only partialy modified red+green = yellow).
apalazzo | July 29, 2007I'm off camping - so this week I'll be posting some old entries on microscopy, enjoy.
OK here's a post geared mostly to cell biologists. My big pet peeve about reading the scientific literature is ... colored fluorescent images.
Why do people insist on pseudo-coloring their images? I know that you want pretty pictures and as every kid knows the more colorful the picture the more adoration one gets from approving parents ... but we're talking about data and instructing/convincing your fellow peers about new findings.
So why is color bad for data presentation?
Your eyes are better at…
apalazzo | April 6, 2007I have no time to blog today (and no time for Map that Campus - next week I'll have a new Northwestern mystery campus for ya).
Here's an entry from last year.
You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality.
As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around…