Well, the New Year is upon us (hm, I suppose it's landed on most people east of here already), and, recovering from my slice of the Christmas Donut, I have a few seconds to reflect that I come by my science-geekery quite honestly.
A non sequitur, you say? Well, yes, but I have to exercise some sort of literary device in order to get me to the rather irrelevant observation that, upon visiting my parents this holiday season, I came across the following reprints from Scientific American, perched on their rather elegant bureau. Four articles, provocatively entitled:
1) Checks on Population Growth: 1850-1950,
2) The Tool-Sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids,
3) THE BLACK DEATH, [yes, the all caps are left sic]
and
4) The Ancestry of Corn.
Can you believe they read this stuff, for fun? And the source of these articles, of course, was my brother. There, the whole family's involved in one convoluted mess of scientific trivia, from the prehistoric through the medieval to the (almost) modern.
The sad bit is, I'm kind of interested in numbers 3 and 4 myself, and Mrs. Ricardipus would definitely read number 2. Sigh.
Now, off to read a much more sensible article that I have on hand, entitled Large-Scale Pyrosequencing of Synthetic DNA: a Comparison With Results From Sanger Dideoxy Sequencing. None of that dorky stuff from the parents' bureau here, oh no.
Happy New Year, everyone.
11 comments:
Wow. That is a lot of geekery.
100% geek. 100% nice guy.
Happy New Year to you and yours.
NICE Blog :)
HAPPY NEW YEAR :)
The Ancestry of Corn? Jesus! That's just plain weird. Mind you, no more so then the fact someone managed to make a book about it.
teri - welcome, and thanks!
rik - not a whole book, thank goodness, but a rather lengthy article... it actually looked kind of interesting, talking about how corn has changed from a wild grass (essentially) into the big fat juicy cash crop it is now, through the miracles of crop breeding.
I didn't read the whole article though, just looked at a picture or two...
Happy nEW yEAR!
obpblvz: small sound that was heard shortly before the proteins in my brain denatured after trying to read the "Large-scale pyrosequencing of synthetic DNA: a comparison with results from Sanger dideoxy sequencing" abstract.
Yes, large-scale pyrosequencing of synthetic DNA is a subject very close to my heart, mainly because of a family tragedy involving a banana, several oligonucleotide sequences and a bottle of brandy...
My brain will never be the same after reading that abstract. Never.
urnkt - sound of my brain mutating
I haven't gotten to the article yet, but I'm anticipating it's not going to be very interesting at all.
Sigh.
What's so great about tool-sharing hominids? Do you think Mrs R would be interested in gorillas?
Gorillas, chimps, bonobos, hominids, she likes them all.
Also other tool-using animals like Black Palm cockatoos and the like.
The post is really entertaining but I love the coloured photo
having JUST LEARNED to post up (not even my own; just generic otherpeople's webside photos) on my blog literally about 7 days ago I know how it feels to get comments on just my daily photo and not the ten million words I spent a day and a half thinking up b4 I posted
but hey
have a great 2008
:->...
gledwood - welcome, and thanks for the nice comment on the photo.
Sometimes those excellent, well-crafted posts that we all spend so much time writing just get ignored... and sometimes the 10-second off-the-cuff ones become classics. Who can tell? ;)
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