An iGEM page of DNA

An iGEM page of DNA

Image by jurvetson
I had a fun lunch with Drew Endy today, and with a local iGEM team on Friday.

Here you see my souvenirs, a cartoon primer and a page from the Registry. Don’t lick it, as each yellow spot is a paper blot of DNA. With a special hole punch, you grab the DNA and splice it into E.Coli, the common bacteria in our intestines.

iGEM is the “International Genetically Engineered Machines” contest, where teenage kids reprogram bacteria to smell better or perform various feats, from digital logic with flashing oscillators, to glowing arsenic detectors to biofilms that record pictures (a self-developing "E.Coliroid" if you will).

Each year the projects get more ambitious, as the biological parts are added to the "open source" library of BioBricks.

Recent grand prize winners were from Slovenia and Peking.

Drew is a co-founder of iGEM and a brilliant speaker on synthetic biology. I last saw him when he was still at MIT, and I put together a panel with George Church and Rodney Brooks.

Eastern entrance to the infinite corridor

Image by Ed Yourdon
I can't remember ever having seen this door closed when I was a student here ... maybe it's because the semester is over, classes have finished, and there simply isn't much traffic through this doorway...

... anyway, it leads into the "infinite corridor," stretching all the way to the main entrance on Mass. Avenue.

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It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave.

"Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve."

When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room.

Welcome to MIT.

I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.)

Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details...

I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit.

But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept.

But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them all in this Flickr set; the photos were taken at sunset one evening, and dawn the following morning. But they'll give you an idea of what it was like, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... and what it's still like today.

The Blue Danube Re-Imagined

Image by drp
Johann Strauss II was one of the most prolific composers of the 19th century. He wrote the beautiful Blue Danube Waltz in 1867, when it was first performed with verses by a male choral group. It was not well received, and later restructured into a string orchestra piece as a commissioned work for the Paris Exhibition. It has since become one of the most consistently popular pieces of music in the classical repertoire.

It gained new popularity in 1968 as a result of its prominent use in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's influential film "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was also featured in such diverse productions as the Warner Brothers cartoon "A Corny Concerto," the Japanese film "Battle Royale," and the literally explosive sketchwork of "Monty Python's Flying Circus."

Strauss began his professional career as a bank clerk, but decided to follow in his father's musical footsteps. He formed an orchestra that toured Vienna and abroad playing light Viennese music. He composed everywhere and anywhere, and was always jotting down music notes for later reference. If a piece of paper, napkin or tablecloth was not handy he would write on his clothing. The Blue Danube Waltz was originally sketched on one of his shirts.

Strauss composed more than 400 waltzes, but also wrote dances, gallops, quadrilles, polkas, and operettas as well, including "Die Fledermaus" and the "Tritsch Tratsch Polka."

Go here to get a MUCH closer look of this lovely swan, named Seraphim.

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As a way of returning the extraordinary generosity and support you
have all shown me in this great community, whenever I upload a new
pic or series of shots this year, I'll provide a link to another flickr
photog whose work, personality, or spirit I feel you should discover.

Visit and introduce yourself. Make a friend. Share the love.

Open your eyes to oooh_caro today.

Cool Toys Pic of the Day - Belly Button Biodiversity Project

Image by rosefirerising
Belly Button Biodiversity Project:
www.wildlifeofyourbody.org/

Your Wild Life:
www.yourwildlife.org/

The second day of my college Italian class I wore a jeans and tshirt
to class. The tshirt was just some little mild bit of comedy, in which
a cartoon-style word bubble came out of the bottom center of the
shirt, saying, "Belly buttons need love, too." When the prof entered
the class, he nodded sagely and said, " Ah, gli navelli anno bisogno
di amore anche." I was absolutely baffled, but after many repetitions
and some hand gestures I deduced that he had translated the tshirt
into Italian. I just love the way that phrase rolls off my tongue. Of
course, ever since then I have had a special fondness for
bellybuttons, also known as navels.

That might explain my ENORMOUS fondness for this citizen science
project. Of course, by this time, most of you already know what a fan
I am of citizen science and crowdsourcing in science. This one is just
even MORE special.

In their own words:
"The belly button has captured the human imagination for centuries —
it's made us giggle, it's made us blush, it's made us turn our heads
in horror (just do a Google images search for belly buttons). It's the
portal through which we were connection to our mothers; and it's the
physical reminder of our evolutionary past.
With the Belly Button Biodiversity project, we transformed the meaning
of navel-gazing. We recruited over 500 of you to twirl a Q-tip in your
belly button for the sake of scientific discovery. We inspired
countless more to pause, ponder, and dare we say appreciate the
microbes that call your body home."

They have a lovely collection of informational links here.

Welcome to the Jungle:
www.yourwildlife.org/2012/11/welcome-to-the-jungle/

This includes photo galleries, blogposts, articles, published
research, reactions, and news reviews. Fascinating stuff. Quite
serious science enriched with a dollop of delight and humor.

IMG_4874

Image by 12fh
I took a different route home, heading east on I-70 to Denver, south on I-25 to Las Vegas, NM, then cutting down to Roswell on U.S. 84, 54, and 285. To describe Roswell, I invite residents of Central Texas to imagine taking Georgetown, moving it out into the middle of the desert, drawing kitschy green cartoon aliens on everything (including the Wal-Mart), and adding a persistent waft of horse manure. Roswell has most of your major chain motels, restaurants, and big box retailers; a 2-year college and a military college; and quite a large airport (the former Air Force base) for a city its size. The population is mostly conservative, or so I gathered from the prevalence of McCain/Palin bumper stickers.

I arrived too late on Saturday to catch the UFO museum, but I was the first through the door when it opened on Sunday morning. The museum consisted mostly of peg-board adorned with old newspaper clippings, photos, and placards describing the Roswell UFO Incident from both sides. Probably not enough to hold the attention of most, except for die-hard UFO fanatics like myself, but it has a nice gift shop.