Great video

If you have a spare 50 minutes, then this uncut interview of Craig Venter by Richard Dawkins is well worth watching - he takes Richard Dawkins on a tour of his sequencing facility. And shows him their current machines and the ABI and Roche 454 machines they were also trying out as well as the robots used for cloningin E.coli necessary for their existing technology. For those of us who enjoy seeing what other people's labs look like it is great and it gave me a good pause for thought about the future direction of biology too.

Oooh, but we unleashed a lion.

Take a week or two away from the blogosphere and you come back to mess! It's like we went away for the weekend and our teenagers got drunk and invited the school bullies over to trash the house. Ah.. I love when my shit-stirring co-blogger gets people riled up. It will bring in more traffic for my lovely drawings and of course for Photo Phriday (which, incidentally has no guesses for the last entry!! Your perfect streak has ended dear readers!).

I have not read the entirety of posts/comments regarding Dr J's post on cats as research subjects (because I am still following the links around teh internetz), so I will refrain from making a specific argument for now. What I will say is I know him to be very emphatic in his love for felines (as I am!), and any time we feel such strong emotions about a contentious issue and these emotions are intertwined with stress and pressure in our work/personal lives, we run the risk of becoming irrational in conversation.

I agree with many of the points made by Dr J and some of the commenters on said issue, and would hope that anyone who wishes to have a say on the topic would comment on the thread to inform bloggers and readers if and where the conversation has been continued.

We now take you back to your regularly scheduled program.

Beautiful cats...part 1

As little as I can do to push back against the sick minded evil mo-fo bastards who think animal testing on cats is ok....from now on I will post occasional photos of cats as a reminder that these animals are infinitely better than the low life scum that would put them in a lab and murder them, or would sit on an animal experiments committee and authorize their use in any such way, or cite papers involving their research or in anyway devalue them...I think you are debasing and damaging science by doing so and your moral fabric is in shreds and it is time to get it sorted, there is no acceptable justification.

If anyone knows of a lawful organisation I can join to push for a day when this sick perversion is ended then let me know.

Not for animal testing, leave me alone:

Image from Wikipedia...I have no idea who this cat is, but hopefully they are enjoying the happy life somewhere that they deserve

Music Monday...Pink Floyd

Great live song by Pink Floyd, turn the speakers up and Run Like Hell...



Not many posts from me at the moment, very busy and fatigued at the moment...not helped by not being able to sleep last night at the thought of the evil barbarians that conduct experiments on cats and just the very possibility that it might be going on at my very own university. This is resignation stuff. I need to find a group to join so I can feel like I'm doing something to stop this heinous behavior. I don't think I'll be doing this, but I can see why people join PETA.

I'll be away next week too, I'm going on an annual fundraising bike ride...and I'm not trained which is a bit of a worry. Still, I've done it before and the if the weather behaves the scenery will be tremendous. Indeed if it were not for the fact that there are at least 5 mountain ranges on this trip I wouldn't be too worried, it is only the uphill that is a struggle!

Photo Phraturday.

Last week's clue was promptly solved by Thomas Joseph and tig, it was indeed part of an electrode from the Biorad electrophoresis tank.



Take your chances at this weeks photo!

Phrownie Phriday :(

I suck!! In the haste of getting ready for a big meeting today, I forgot my camera at home, so the Photo Phriday shot of the week will not be posted until tonight. So sorry dear readers!

Ashamed....

The racist thugs of the BNP have managed to get themselves elected to two European parliament seats from Britain. This is true and total disgrace. The reason appears to be partly because of voter apathy with all the mainstream parties, but whatever the reason it should never happen. There is a very worrying slide in Britain, I remember years and years ago when the BNP managed to get themselves the only council seat they had in Britain in Tower Hamlets in innner London, there was a national outcry and all the other councilors refused to work with them. Now years later, like the plague they are, they have crept into many councils and now most shamming of all their brand of poison has spread outside of the UK. These people are corosive and rotten and it is a shaming failure of politics that they are any

The root cause of this is the failure of the mainstream process and it must be addressed. Fundamental to this is the failure of the Brown administration. He simply must go. I used to be involved in politics in the UK and it is extremely distressing to see what is happening to the Labour Party. Brown should never have been Prime Minister. He seems to want to do it for the sake of doing it. He doesn't appear to have a vision and the Labour Party, if it has any self respect or wants any chance of avoiding annihilation in the forthcoming general election must get rid of him and replace him with a new generation visionary. If there was one reason why I was in the Labour Party it was equality - so to see a government minister resigning claiming that Brown treated women in his government as window dressing (an argument born out by the trivial number of women in the cabinet is an absolutely terrible indictment of an out of date brand of politics that must be purged and replaced with a visionary for our times.

Instead this is what we will get in Britain: a government led by a vacuous fart (Cameron) and his rich public school yahoo friends. I'm staying in Canada.

Music Monday...It all went wrong with Abacab

I have a colleague at work who is very knowledgeable about music...and opinionated too. I remember talking about Genesis - a band I quite like - and at mention of the name he said 'it all went wrong with Abacab'. I laughed for 2 reasons, one was we were the only 2 people at the lunch table who knew that song and also I thought that's where it all started to go right!

Photo Phriday Phrom the road.

I am currently out of town but I wouldn't forget about our Photo Phriday Phans!

Last week's clue was solved correctly by Professor in Training - it was indeed the top of a CO2 tank, or a "screw-on lid-thingy". :)



Take your chances on this week's photo:

What the fuck? More cell phone nonsense

Can someone, anyone, explain to me why it is I should pay $12 a month for caller display and voicemail on a cell phone contract?

This seems to me to be an obscene rip-off. And the money grabbing bastards think I should be signing up to a 3 year 'contract'.

Given that in the UK I could 1) get everything I need on a 1.5 year contract and 2) receive free caller display (hardly a costly thing) and free voicemail...and currently on a shitty Windows Mobile smartphone in Canada (yesterday it froze, but I didn't know because it just looked normal so I missed calls all day) I get both free...why the fuck is it that twelve dollars a month on a tie-in of 3 years is acceptable. Screw them, they are ripping us off.

My other questions would then be:
1. Has any managed to get an iPhone in Canada on a plan of $90 a month or less including these things
2. Has anyone tried the new Google Android based phones and can they match or get close to an iPhone?

The truth about late term abortion

CPP has a good post on the truth about late term abortions go check it out:
http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-truth-about-late-term-abortion/#comments

I was hoping to post the George Carlin sketch on abortion in response to the slaying of George Tiller by a deranged fucker, unfortunately it has been removed from YouTube - some copyrighters spoiling all the fun.

We'll have to make do with a couple of quotes instead:

Why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?

The longer you listen to this abortion debate, the more you hear the phrase "sanctity of life," "sanctity of life." You believe in it? Personally, I think it's a bunch of shit. I mean, life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death

If you're pre-born, you're fine, if you're pre-schooled, you're fucked. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life, these people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors, what kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do everything they can do save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it?

In the meantime I seem to be the only one that I spoke to who thinks it doesn't matter a fuck where he was shot - he was shot dead. Most people seem to think it is even worse he was shot in a church. Likely that is just because I find it hard to have respect for any organised religion.

TTFSMIPP!! (Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster it's Photo Phriday!!)

These clues have been much too easy!!

Last week's photo was indeed an agarose gel tray.

Well done CPP, and the rest of you.

Can you guess this weeks photo just as quickly?? If so I am going to have to get a lot more creative with my shutterbugging.

Marriage equality video

Saw this on facebook, amusing video parodying those Proposition 8 voting theocratic tosspot morons.

Science PR

This is funny but I fear frighteningly true.

The issue of PR promotion of science worries me considerably.  There seems to be a need to promote institutions through the medium of press releases.  No problem with that.  Especially good is the positive promotion of science to the public.  The problem is when there is a lack of accuracy - and this is may well not be the fault of the scientist.  Press releases are issued by communications people to promote the science but to also promote the institution.  PR people in the universities are not always aware or perhaps do not even care about the knock on consequences.  Part of the issue is it is not really their jobs to care about it, it is their jobs to promote the university through the press.  The people in the press, well they very often they do not have a science background (must we really read about the E.coli virus again?), may well find the descriptions and science generally daunting (in Canada there are only a tiny handful of journalists that have specialist science education) and even if not they often do not have space for large numbers of caveats and so they seek to distill things down to a very understandable and brief level.  In there the original caution gets lost.   I do not know what the best way of handling this is but I do think some care should be exercised in how we handle promotion of science, but how that is managed, it is difficult to see.

Excessive promotion of potential new discoveries and technological advances in their very early stages can have a very negative impact on people and their perception of science, for example in my own field the promise of gene therapy has been knocking around for years.  The problem is it is always 5 years away and people were being told this a decade or longer ago.  When people have children with a disease they are very likely going to die from and promises are made that cannot be kept, this is devastating and I've heard this from people.  What can I tell them, I'm really sorry people made you promises?  I fear it is still more than even 5 years away, if ever. 

Music Monday: Tunes for DNA extraction!

I have to extract DNA from 300 samples in the next two weeks.. and this morning one of my favorite bands Arcade Fire is providing much needed inspiration to get my butt away from the data analysis and back to the bench.

Here is one of my favorite tracks of theirs, performed with the bands #1 proponent, the lovely and talented Davie Bowie.