Meme me!

As I mentioned in yesterday’s procastination excuse/hypnotic-cute-fuzzy-critter post, I was, without warning or provocation, viciously tagged by The Apprentice Lab Rat with a nasty case of the “5 Things” meme. O Cruel Fate!

I still need more audio to assemble Stir-Fried Random Episode 3. Meanwhile, here’s me meme:

(Note: These answers should not be used for psychiatric evaluation purposes. Unless it amuses you.)

5 things I was doing 10 years ago
Continue reading Meme me!

Perhaps a cute picture will distract everyone…

Banshee the Catlet, in a bent/twisted pose

The Apprenticing Lab Rat went and tagged me with a meme…I’m almost done with it, but I’m being alerted by my Minister of Domestic Affairs that it’s bedtime. Also, I still have to get more audio recorded to assemble a worthwhile next episode of Stir-Fried Random for the two or so people who listen to it (if you’d like to help, I’m taking questions and/or suggestions for topics in the comments…). I’m planning to do a segment on my “Giant’s Shoulder’s” submission for this month regarding Lactic Fermentation, and some bits about what I want for christmas (surely at least 75% of The Internet wants to hear about that…), but obviously that’s insufficient…

Hopefully the picture of the Bendycat will keep everyone making “Awww, how cute” noises and distract you all until I have time to post tomorrow…

(Why is “mnemonic” such a hard word to remember, anyway?…)

“On the lactic fermentation and its bearings on pathology.”

Lunchtime – time to get this posted…(Let me know if this page is loading way too slowly…)

For this month’s “Giant’s Shoulders” I offer you mouthwash and yogurt.

Indirectly, at least.
Continue reading “On the lactic fermentation and its bearings on pathology.”

RSS Feed Fixed

Oh, now this is interesting. I finally realized my RSS feed was Fupped Duck. Now that I have it fixed, the “Visual/HTML” mode switch on WordPress’ built-in post editor is working properly again, too. Most peculiar.

Seriously though – RSS throws a hissy-fit if there’s a single blank line at the beginning of the output? Really? Jeez.

Okay, enough whining from me for now. Let me know if everything still appears to be working and if the RSS feed is indeed fixed for all y’all. And listen to my podcast and let me know how it sounds, or either I’ll drive over to your house and kick your butt, or you’ll hurt my poor little feelings (pick whichever form of coercion works better for you.)

Thanks.

Stir-Fried Random Ep 02:Sex, Violence, and Cinnamon Bears, y’all!

Only about five more days until the next “Giant’s Shoulders” blog carnival. I still need to pick a paper. ARGH!
(UPDATE 20081126: I’ve removed the embedded flash player – it seems to ignore me when I explicitly tell it NOT to automatically start playing rather than waiting until you intentionally hit “play”. Sorry for anyone annoyed by the autoplay. The embedded player will not return until I solve this.)

Meanwhile, here’s this week’s episode of “Stir-Fried Random”, weighing in at a MASSIVE 12 WHOLE MINUTES or so. As before, there’s an “<audio>” tag pointing directly at the Ogg Vorbis audio for those of you running a beta of the Firefox 3.1 series, a recent version of Opera, or (I believe) the current Safari on a system with the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component installed. There is also the usual embedded Flash®-based mp3 player and direct download links for both versions.

Somebody please let me know if I’m making a fool of myself here… Anyway, here are the show notes:
Continue reading Stir-Fried Random Ep 02:Sex, Violence, and Cinnamon Bears, y’all!

Stir-Fried Random: Alferbeetagama!

(Update 20081104T1050: added a minimal embedded flash-based player at the bottom of the post, if you’re willing to settle for mp3 quality and want to listen from your web browser…)
(Update again 20081126: I wish I had realized before that the stupid thing was autoplaying despite explicitly including “autoplay=false” in the parameters. I’ve removed the embedded player again until I find a way to prevent autoplaying. Sorry about anyone that was annoyed by this.)

I was going to post this last night, but there appears to have been another bout of database connection errors again at my ISP (“host blocked due to too many connection errors”). I’m guessing either someone is DOS’ing the database server or one of the other users had some very badly behaved custom code running. They’ve got it fixed now, so here we go…

After staying up too (insert profanity here) late again despite having to get up extra-early this morning to vote before work…here’s the first real episode of Stir-Fried Random. Still only about 10 minutes long – I’d like to make it longer, but it’ll still probably take a few episodes of building up to it. An actual shiny new <audio> tag is included for those with bleeding-edge browsers that support it (let me know if it works – hypothetically the 3.1 Beeta[sic] version of Firefox and I believe the most recent Opera support this.). Otherwise, direct-download is available below the show notes:
Continue reading Stir-Fried Random: Alferbeetagama!

The “Stir-Fried Random” podcast, et al

Almost time for the first real episode of “Stir-Fried Random”. It’s still a bit short (about 10 minutes or so is what it looks like I’ll have) but the sound quality is a bit improved. It’s not all frivolous, either – there’s high culture (Opera) and science (the first of my Microbiology Microlectures) in it.

I was also plotting to intermittently post what I’m thinking of as “Book-And-Record” audio files, each associated with a single picture (embedded as “album art” as well as likely in the blog post presenting it) saying something about subject of the picture…

Continue reading The “Stir-Fried Random” podcast, et al

I was going to call it “Oxygen Sucks”…

I mentioned I’ve been “working” (playing) with recording audio during my commute to and from work, in hopes of turning the audio into a regular podcast. I was originally going to call it “Oxygen Sucks”, which is why today’s attached/enclosed audio (only about 7 minutes long) refers to itself as such…

Officially, though, I think “Stir-Fried Random” is a better name, so I’ll go with that henceforth. The first real episode is under way already, so I could put it up as early as the next few days. Today’s episode is in mp3 format, though starting next episode I’d like to offer both mp3 and Ogg Vorbis, at least, the latter format having better audio quality at the same bitrate (and being Legally Free for use). As a bonus, I gather Firefox 3.1 should offer native playback support for it, too…

I’d appreciate commentary on the content (even if you don’t listen but merely want to comment on the show notes) and audio quality. No login needed, anonymous comments allowed.

Show notes may be found below This Direct-Download link for the audio

Continue reading I was going to call it “Oxygen Sucks”…

“A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids”

Hello again, girls and boys and whatever else may be out there reading. It’s time once again for this blog’s contribution to The Giant’s Shoulders (hosted this time over at “Second Order Approximation“). This month I’m looking at something even smaller than usual. Inspired by my new job in the biochemistry department where they seem to do a substantial amount of X-ray crystallography (which I do not – yet – understand as well as I’d like), I thought I’d drop all the way down to the molecular level and talk about a fundamental discovery that helped make modern molecular microbiology possible: the structure of DNA.

Yes, it was over a half-century ago that an accomplished scientist, working with X-ray images produced from crystallized nucleic acids, published the first proposed structure for for them – the famous Triple Helix.

Continue reading “A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids”