happy halloween

happy halloween from the staples, who are ready and waiting for trick-or-treaters!
meow.

mcdonald's

it has been a busy week in real life, so it hasn't been such a busy one on the blog. sorry about that. here's a little tidbit to chew on as we enter this halloween weekend. according to food industry blogger katherine glover, when you are at a mcdonald's in the continental u.s., you are no more than 107 miles (145 miles driving) from the next mcdonald's. that's a lot of golden arches.

that's also what i'd call scary. happy halloween.

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correction: when in the continental u.s., you are no more than 107 miles (145 by car) from a mcdonald's.

happy birthday 'on wisconsin'

gratuitous cat photo

where's aretha

aretha likes to crawl around above the pipes and duct-work in the basement.

she also like to sit in anything she can find that is approximately aretha-sized.

tree felling

after last weekend's warm-up session, we were ready to take down the old crab apple tree in our backyard. it drops crab apples and leaves all summer, and is well past prime.

theran came over to lend a hand with his engineering, climbing, and sawing expertise. here he is perched high atop the tree, as he excises a number of the higher branches.

today we cut the wood into manageable segments, and split it all for use in our fireplace*. now we are ready for a long wisconsin winter.
*we managed this part without theran's help.

the tree stump is going to become a table base next spring.

visitors

last weekend, our old buddies chris and olivia came to visit. the reunion tour featured a visit to the union, pizza from the roman candle, a walk around the farmer's market, and a baby shower for olivia. we miss them already!

chris celebrated the visit to the farmer's market with some spicy cheese bread from stella's bakery.
david partakes in hot cheese from brunkow's stand at the market.
cat cuddling.
ahh, fall in madison.

manhole trivia

these pseudo-manholes aren't really manholes at all. any guesses what they are?

women's work

today's modern woman can still look stylish while while wielding a chain saw.

pumpkin patch panoramas

planning prospective pumpkin procurement
perfect pumpkin picked, purchased.

nobel shmobel

i had pretty much resigned not to do any more nobel-blogging after the events of wednesday morning, but i've had some time to cool off, and today's peace prize requires mention. as you probably already know, the nobel peace prize was given to barack obama for his international diplomacy and because he gives the world hope. this pretty much does away with any credibility scandinavia has. i like obama, but he hasn't done anything prize-worthy. many people toil for their entire lives studying, sciencing, writing, and working for the good of mankind, and most of them will never receive a nobel. as for obama: guantanamo is still open, our troops are still in iraq, we may send more troops to afghanistan, we still practice rendition to secret black-site prisons, and we aren't holding any former officials responsible for torture or violations of the geneva convention and other international laws. i'm not really sure what he's done that's so peaceful.

as a colleague of mine just said, "i'm for nuclear disarmament too, but no one is going to give me a peace prize for it."

chemistry

the 2009 nobel prize for chemistry was given for "studies of structure and function of the ribosome," and it is a total sham. harry noller, the world's preeminent ribosome researcher, has been snubbed. venke ramakrishnan, tom steitz, and ada yonath are lesser figures in the field of ribosome research when compared to harry, and should not have received this award without him. unbelievable!

in the interest of full disclosure, i should point out that harry noller was my post-doc adviser at uc-santa cruz. that said, i do not have any doubt that this award was given for political reasons, because of lobbying and smearing efforts, in an attempt to avoid repeating past controversies, and without adequate understanding of the contributions of these people to the field. unbelievable!

harry noller is a great and worthy scientist, and a wonderful human being who has been unjustly snubbed today. congratulations to professors ramakrishnan, steitz, and yonath. all those who study the ribosome owe someone a great deal of thanks.

physics

the 2009 nobel prize in physics goes to charles kao for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and to for willard boyle and george smith for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor." while the practical implications of last year's physics nobel for broken symmetry were not immediately apparent, the applications for this year's split award are obvious.

wikipedia tells me that george kao's great contribution to fiber optics came back in the 1960s with the realization that the high-loss of existing fiber optics arose from impurities in the glass, rather than from an underlying problem with the technology itself.

boyle and smith earned their half of the prize, while working at bell labs, for developing the charge-coupled device (CCD). ccd's are chips which are used in imaging devices, including digital cameras. the actual workings of a ccd involves more second semester physics (and probably well beyond that) than i'm comfortable with. as best as i can understand it, a ccd is made up of an array of capacitors. an image is projected onto the array, and each capacitor receives an electrical signal proportional to the light intensity at its location. once the array is charged, each capacitor then transfers its electrical charge to its neighboring capacitor. the last capacitor in the array dumps its charge into an amplifier which converts the charge into a voltage. by repeating this process, all the information from the array is converted into a sequence of voltages, which can be stored, accessed, and converted back into an image. basically, the ccd converts the light that enters a digital camera into a store-able form (thanks again to wikipedia for much of this description).

this image is of an array of 30 ccd's used on the sloan digital skys Survey telescope at apache point observatory in new mexico.


it seems obvious that both fiber optics and charge-coupled devices have proved to be very important discoveries. they probably also required a massive amount of physics knowledge and know-how. however, i can't help feeling that this year's physics prize is sort of a populist one. i'd be curious to know what a physicist thinks of this award when compared to last year's award for broken symmetry, or 2006's award for for the discovery of "the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." is a discovery that is important for its applications, as nobel-worthy as one that is important for its pure scientific merit? is it more worthy? who knows?

one more....

thanks to emily and her encyclopedic knowledge of macbook commercials, we now know where we were first introduced to the song "new soul" (see previous post).

we've got another one. i love the song, but again feel like i know it from a television commercial or some viral internet video. our best efforts on google fail to yield answers! we know you readers are smarter than some lame search engine, right?

new soul

i'm digging this song lately, but can't shake the feeling that i know it from a television commercial. anybody know if this song is in a commercial currently or recently running on t.v.?

medicine and physiology

if there can ever be a favorite for a nobel prize, it may have been elizabeth blackburn, carol grieder, and john szostak. the speculation was that they would win for their discoveries of telomeres and telomerase. the speculation was correct, the nobel went to blackburn et al.

telomeres are dna caps on the end of chromosomes that prevent chromosomal degradation. telomerase is the enzyme which adds the telomeric dna to the chromosomes and facilitates its maintenance.

here is an image of human chromosomes with fluorescently tagged telomeres.
interestingly, this image probably utilizes green fluorescent protein, which was the discovery for which last year's chemistry nobel prize was awarded.

telomeres are important because they provide a protective end cap for the the chromosome. while the end cap is in place, the chromosomes are protected, and able to replicate without getting all mutated and old. liz blackburn once compared telomeres to to the ends of shoelaces that keep them from unraveling. the eventual shortening of telomeres, as cells divide, is thought to be a primary cause of aging. once your telomeres get short, after years of using them, your shoelaces start to unravel.

telomerase is the enzyme responsible for building and maintaining the telomeres. it's a pretty cool enzyme because it has both a protein and an rna component. i'm a big fan of rna, so i'm always happy to see a nobel prize awarded for a discovery that's even loosely related. the protein portion of telomerase uses the rna portion of telomerase as a template for synthesizing the telomeres.

one interesting thing about telomeres and telomerase is their seemingly paradoxical implications to aging and cancer. the telomeres protect the chromosomes from damage. as cells divide over multiple generations, the telomeres eventually shrink, and the cells get old and die. it would seem that if we could come up with a way to make telomerase function better in cells, or function forever, we could better protect the chromosomes, and make cells live forever. however, instead of being the fountain of youth, cells which are immortalized through telomerase up-regulation become cancerous. it turns out that telomeres are the key to cancer cells being able to divide indefinitely. quite the paradox.


with roles in both cancer and immortality, i believe one can easily see why this discovery was worthy of a nobel prize. unless there is some grad student who isn't being properly recognized here, or some scorned co-collaborator, my guess is that this won't be a very controversial award.

olympics

as you may have heard, chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 summer olympics. if chicago had hosted the olympics, madison was going to be the site for the cycling events. what a bummer. i guess it's true what they say,

if you want something done right, i guess you have to do it yourself.