Cantaloupe

The first snowfall of the season, I pose. Noted through the windows of the CVBD Phoenix [1]: a place not quite home, not quite work, but that comes with a cup of yirgacheffe, a stack of Nature Cell Bio papers and an overrepresentation of Death Cab in the lift music rotation.

This weekend I was an invited speaker at a local meeting of medical physicists. This might be the first time I've given a talk to a group of which I'm not a member; I'm an instrumentation guy, and clinical radiation oncology folks comprised the audience. Although the subject matter was stuff I'm comfortable with in front of a white board for an hour, wearing a tie and standing at a podium somehow makes it nerve-wracking. Nonetheless, it all went well: their challenging questions were easy, the softball questions required clarification, and they had to smile and nod at my powerpoint drawings because they asked me to attend.

In addition to a nice discussion over lunch following the talks, I was treated to a drive through the easternmost part of Ohio and western bit of PA; the first half of the round-trip was completed before sunrise and in not-quite-icy rain, but the return revealed terrain molded by the Beaver and Ohio Rivers and glazed in peak late-October foliage.

[1] The link here is to a nice collection of blurbs about local history, a topic whose interest to me has only a weak space variance. Some updating attention would benefit the site, perhaps even a wiki-like implementation with review by the history department authorities that currently host it.

DNA as art

An Ottawa-based firm offers to take a sample of your DNA, run a PCR, and create a wall-worthy image of the blot. The whole effort runs in the $500-1000 range: a little steep for my pocketbook (I'd go for a plush giant squid first), but I appreciate the "found art" aspect of the endeavor.

As a poor-man's approach, perhaps I should collect some existing blots in the lab and take some photos, then recreate them on canvas for a similar effect.

For that matter, another type of assay might make for a geekier wall hanging. How about a full gene chip analysis, e.g.,

Lungs

As advertised:

Conversation overheard while having one's torso intentionally irradiated:

May I get a copy of the images?
No, they're digital now.

I suppose the information being digital makes it more difficult to copy or transmit? Either way, apparently asking is enough to set some complex system in motion, resulting in the delivery of said digital files on CD (with utmost friendliness). Fun stuff.

I wasn't sure if the word above should have been "utmost" or "upmost". Utmost is correct, as in "uttermost". Interestingly, I think utter (adj) is often used pejoratively, whereas I would use utmost in an exclusively positive sense.