It's been a long time.

I put this blog on semi-permanent hiatus. But now, instead of naked under my lab coat, I am fixing to be naked under a diaphanous magenta robe, with a funny little beret and a black velvet cassock!

Big changes are afoot. Stay tuned, possibly, for details and/or resumption of blogging activities.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, put in blue the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Please Step Away From the Bench

Had a meeting with my advisor today (that sound you heard before was the furious scramble of me converting cryptic IPLab image files to tifs) wherein he told me to STOP doing experiments.

Oh, but that means I have to start writing up.

This is good news. Obviously writing up is good news, and he thinks what I've got is just about "done". Of course, since it's my story I will never think it's done. I want to include every single fascinating scene - I mean, experiment - and every single beloved character - I mean, tangential potentially important molecule.

He's right, of course, but this is all getting a little scary. I mean, how do I know I am ready to move on?

The cliches ... I thought, every step of this arduous journey, "It'll be different for me! I won't become a jaded bitter third year. I won't get so bogged down in my lab that my social life declines. I won't lose the ability to interact with non-scientists. I won't develop bad eating and sleeping habits. And I certainly won't stall out at the writing-up stage because I've found a comfy berth and am a little petrified of leaving the nest!"

Strike every single one of those things off the list, because I succumbed to them all. Ah, so naive, little G1 Joolya.

Managed to keep the yelling to a minimum last night watching the NOVA Dover trial show. Thoughts on this but, damn, it's just too dark to think clearly. Only 6:35 and I feel like I shouldbe getting ready for bed. Maybe Coturnix can recommend a remedy for seasonal affective disorder. Do those light boxes really work?

I Know You've Missed Me

And I'm still here. Barely. I'll post a real post some day soon.

In the meanwhile, and in honor of the Dover trial PBS premier tonight which I may or may not be able to watch, please feast your eyes on this, my beloved people. You weren't really doing anything this afternoon, were you? No.

So, take a little trip in time and space with John Scalzi to the Creation Museum! You'll laugh, you'll cry ...

Mutating Genres Meme

Here's the dealio, yo. Pharyngula started this meme to see how it mutates over time.

First, the rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is: Children of Men
The best sexy song in pop music is: Real Love by Mary J. Blige
The best cult novel in American 20th century fiction is: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The best high-carb food in Italian cooking is: cheese lasagne!

My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My parent is Thus Spake Zuska.

I'm tagging the Pooflinger, Ethyl Benzene, Ennui Herself, Transcript, Jane, and everyone else on the blogroll. Go!

Hello again

Sorry for the prolonged absence. It's been a busy few weeks at lab and doing things. Things and stuff.

You know what's nice? I did a DNA maxiprep the other day, eluted with 1 mL of water, and got DNA concentrations of only .11 and 0.08 ug/uL. I like to have at least 0.5 ug/uL for doing transfections into cells, so I put the tubes of DNA into the SpeedVac, which spins them around in a warm, dry chamber to evaporate the water. I reduced the volume from 1 mL to 0.1 mL (100 uL) and then measure the DNA concentrations: 1.4 and 0.7 ug/uL respectively!

I know, why am I so pleased? That's what you would expect if you reduced the volume 10-fold.

Exactly. I love it when stuff actually works like it's supposed to, with numbers and volumes and things.

Hey, I'm a cell biologist. This doesn't happen all the time for me! It's the little things in life. Like bands on a gel that actually add up correctly ... it's like beautiful magic. Ahhhh. Everything else I do is so much more fiddly.

Anyway. I've been playing on YouTube far too much the last couple of days and found this video of the Solid Gold Dancers counting down the top ten songs in the mid-80s (sorry, can't embed it), which is especially awesome because the #1 song of the week was one of my absolute favorite songs when I was a kid: Part-time Lover by Stevie Wonder. Also featured are Never by Heart, We Built This City by Starship, and Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears - three other childhood favorites.

I wanted desperately to be the dancer with the long, long, long hair (Darcel; she's from Pittsburgh, aw yeah). I used to dance around in this gold bikini, handed down from a cousin, and imagine my long, long hair whipping around as I kicked and spun through the Number Ones.

That, and I wanted to be an astronaut. A solid-gold astronaut. (Like David Bowie?)

I don't think I've really changed much since I was little, actually. If I could hook that up I would totally still be a solid gold dancing astronaut.

Karaoke star biologist is, I guess, the next best thing.

In retrospect, though, why was a six-year-old even watching Solid Gold? It's pretty smutty.

You got here from where?

Google Search: he absolutely LOVED her and was so springy and joyful!