I just want to send out a special message to the following programs.
PV4.0 (Came with MRI console) After spending several hundred thousand dollars on the extremely specialized piece of hardware you control, refusing to even start because of your licensing being locked into the network card. Congratulations! You have protected yourselves from piracy! No unscrupulous hospital/research institute who drops a quarter of a million dollars on a new MRI console will even think about getting a cracked version of YOUR software. And you’ve stopped all those punk kids from trying to reconstruct and analyze MRI data without giving you your due.
Amira (7000$/year) For crashing literally every 15 minutes and for the complete lack of thought given your file structures. So sprawling and precarious that moving anything from anywhere can destroy even saved work. I am sure there is some reason I have to carefully gather the dozens of random binaries you spew out just to crop a single 3D image, but clearly I am not smart enough to understand why you don’t just save it all in one fucking folder.
Analyze (5000$/year) What can I say? Not only do you not allow me to save files outside of your environment, YOUR DEFAULT EXIT ERASES ALL OF MY WORK!!! There is nothing I love more than the thrill that one careless click and everything I haven’t taken great pains to properly export one slice at a time will vanish. Wow what a rush! As a special bonus I am putting up the exception you threw when I was so idiotic as to try and open a file with the SAME NAME as one already imported! What was I thinking? Clearly not even the most advanced software engineers can work around such an insane twist of quantum logic. I should consider myself lucky that I merely had to restart my computer to get going again. I could have torn the spacetime continuum!
Vector NTI (1000$/year) Now I know you guys have been taking a lot of flack lately. Just because you offered your product for free to academic institutions and then 3 years later abruptly demanded a small fee for all your hard work, you have been accused of treachorous bait and switch tactics. Moreover how could you be called to task for intentionally obfuscating all the files in your database so that, unless we pay you your money there is no way we will be able to access the hundreds of sequences we generate each year. No user could be trusted with such a powerful thing as access to their data! You were saving us from ourselves! And for those of us that can’t afford to lose years worth of work or spend the months it would take to export all of our data as text files and reannotate them, you will continue to save us at 1000$/year.
Windows… you know what you are.
As a student I do not pay these ridiculous support fees, but I see what you are doing and I do not appreciate my lab being fleeced. The time will come when it is MY time to choose what tools I will use and develop. I will not be locked into your software just because their learning curve is not as steep as using open source scripts. I will not allow my data to be held hostage. I will always say, “no” to software that separates me from the work I do. And no, we can’t all be programmers, and people should be supported for developing tools, but limiting consumer choice to protect your shoddy work will only alienate those who would buy your product.
After months of failure. I finally succeeded in electroporating my novel reporter gene into the brain of a newborn mouse. As it turns out the equipment I was using was crap, and since I don’t know anything about unipolar square pulses with exponential decay, I was unaware of its shortcomings. So after ~250 mice injected that sacrificed. Here is the result.
The champagne doesn’t pop just yet however. This wasn’t what I was going for. Getting GFP to express like this was an achievement a few years ago, but it is just the control for my real experiment. The question is, does this correlate to an MRI? I have a whole litter of these pups, and hopefully the other 9 have the same kind of expression as the 3 who were sacrificed so far.
But, if they really do correlate, suddenly it is endgame for my thesis and I can start doing some cool stuff with the my new technology.
This began as a sort of joke, but warrants deeper thought. If sexuality is a personal trait then we share a cultural metasexuality through media. Sex organs and their deliberate obfuscation. Make for an obvious example. There more culturally specific memes. Oysters carry a certain connotation in Eurocentric culture, but not in Asian societies. However it gets interesting when we move to octopus tentacles.
This very specific sexual reference dates back to 19th century Japan from a print probably by Yositishi, depicting a fisherman’s wife. Yet it is a central theme in the metasexuality of the Internet.
How and why does a 19th century artist influence the sexuality of digital culture and more importantly how can something as mercurial as the Internet have a definable sexuality?
I have made 9 lines of transgenic mice. The idea is these mice are expressing GFP and my synthetic MRI reporter gene. We are at line 3 with no sign of expression.
I know transgenic mouse technology is not very reliable, but I am braceing myself for the worst case. I added an extra feature above and beyond what a normal transgenic DNA construct warrants. I fear the cost of my futureization habit will be epic fail.
It is in my nature to meddle with elements beyond my understanding.
It is a little known fact the med center is kitty corner to the Chinese UN consolate. It’s also just down the street from the UN. Roll that up with an ER and a helipad and you have spectacular traffic. I like the night traffic more because at least you can watch the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles and think of the playa at night. If China the UN and the police have one thing in common it is that they take themseves to seriously.
Oh the irony of my moniker. (One I did not choose for myself I should add.) Anyway so very long after mobile blogging started, I have finally gotten to it. And what better first post than the place I spend most of my time. Ah sweet purgatory that is lab
When I was a little kid I remember wanting to be an inventor. Oh the things I would invent! I would put together tinker toys and imagine I was building a giant windmill or a shrink ray. Oh those halcyon days of youth.
Here I am actually inventing something and it is not at all as I expected. Sometimes it feels the way I imagined seeing something from my mind take shape in the real world, but most of the time it just sucks. Things fail all the time! If it isn’t some stupid mistake it is a fundamental flaw in my reasoning. Some creeping unknown that stabs me in the back when I least suspect it.
Yes I am just railing because experiments aren’t turning out the way I want them too. And yes I made my bed and now I have to lie in it. I could have taken baby steps forward and worked on something easy. Well… you have a point.
What is it within me that makes me take on a project that demands my ability to distill molecular biology, protein engineering, animal surgeries and MRI physics into one creation? Is it overconfidence or kid in a candy store naivety that makes me reach and reach until I am beyond my depth. Of course it’s both. And maybe that’s OK?
Sigh… back to it then.
Onward I press into the dark. Hopeful that dawn will soon light my way.
The Voltree power supply is a great idea. Can a tree power more than a small sensor? The engineering is there for harvesting a voltage potential. What about a plant engineered for an enhanced gradient to harvest. A biological solar panel? Not so far out.
Really I just wanted to get the Anarchy player running on the site. I can’t decide which is more obnoxious though. The Anarchy splashpage or the Youtube watermark.
Option A. sany0076
Blinkynoise boxes Right , so I was at the Bent Festival a few weeks ago, which turned out to be more of the Chiptune festival, since most of the stuff I saw was made from scratch. These little suckers you could actually buy. They make a nice coffee table item, or you can rock out with them. Blinkynoiserock
While these were cute some stuff looked a bit dangerous. This was a biofeedback setup where the performer was literally electrocuting himself while he played an exposed circuitboard. Yikes! Bioshock-rock
