Yesterday I made butternut squash soup, one of my favorite recipes from one of my favorite magazines. It’s a delightful soup for a cool fall day, especially with a sprinkling of nutmeg just before serving. One part of the recipe calls for sautéing the seed and fibers of the squash in butter… as this is […]
While unpacking and sorting the boxes from college I came across Campbell’s “Biology” 5th edition, which was my textbook in AP Biology during my senior year of high school. This book (now in the 8th edition) was a milestone in my life, it along with the AP Biology class were instrumental in my ultimate decision […]
Sunday (the 9th) was the birthday of Carl Sagan, one of the most eloquent and passionate ambassadors of science of our time. One can only imagine what he would have said about the developments that have occurred since his passing…
Today I found out that Medford is where in 1982 E. coli O157:H7 was first identified as a novel food-borne pathogen. While it was later determined that O157:H7 had been responsible for outbreaks in the 70s, it was here that it was first identified as a novel serotype. Who would have thought?
No, I didn’t misspell Redoubt.
I’m contemplating a reading/mental version of a “walkabout”. There are topics that interest me that I never had a chance to pursue, and there are gaps in my education that I would like to fill.
I never learned anything about fungi (outside of antibiotics), I never learned anything about botany. Even areas […]
Sciencedebate is a non-partisan campaign to make science an issue in the 2008 debate. I signed the petition and have even sent them a check. Do I think this will actually happen? Not really. Our elections tend to be focused on emotions and image, not rational discourse. Our Founding Fathers, being men of the enlightenment, […]
I’ve had it with the molecular biology software that is available. It’s clunky, buggy and poorly designed. Often this crap is proprietary and expensive.
This leads to people resisting buying upgrades… leading people to use ancient Macintosh software written for the 68020 processor on an Intel Mac. When it doesn’t work (since Apple killed 68k […]
I have to say that I have become very conflicted about one Bill Gates. As a technology dork, I have in the past held quite a few negative opinions about the man, his company and his software.
However, as a person with a microbiology background, I greatly admire the money his foundation has put into research. […]
I have been banging my head trying to write a background chapter for my thesis. I knew it wasn’t going to be trivial (in terms of word count and references, it will be the largest part of my thesis). However each time I would start I would get a few hundred words into it and […]
What a terrible day! Everything I wrote was crap.
Nothing sounds good, I can’t remember my sources, ideas are not making it to the page– I feel kinda stuck. An utterly complete waste of a day.
Damn writers block.
Tomorrow I’ll take my laptop and go to the library to write. Perhaps a change of scenery is what […]