News from the world of fish drudgery

I’ve been away from my office and computer all day doing manual labor. Our little fish facility had a problem: the tanks all drain into these custom built trays (we made them from sheet plastic with PVC angle rods glued and caulked around the edges), which then drain into the reservoir tank. It turns out they leak, not much, just a few drops an hour, but when you multiply that by two dozen tanks and 24 hours 7 days a week, it adds up. The custodians complained.

That constitutes a full scale emergency, you know. As every scientist learns early in their careers, the two groups of people you cannot ever piss off are 1) the department secretaries, and 2) the custodians.

So I bought a bunch of solid strong trays (Christian trays, no less) and a pile of bulkhead fittings, and have spent most of the day with a hole saw punching tidy precise holes in their bottoms and clamping on watertight fittings and adding vinyl tubing for precision delivery of waste water, and then ripping out old trays and putting in the new ones.

Now I’m all damp and sweaty. But now water goes in, and water goes out, and I can account for every last drop, so we’re all good.

Also, by the way, we’re getting steady production of about 50 eggs a day, and I’ve got about a hundred larvae I’m nursemaiding every day, with more on the way. We’re struggling with the science side of things now that the production side seems to be working smoothly.

zebrafishembryos

An evening of satisfying relaxation

The Lone Ranger is playing at the Morris Theater and I had a hankerin’ to watch Johnny Depp mete out justice in the Old West.

So I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. It’s on Netflix.

I don’t know why anyone would watch that glossy hollywood tripe when you can see gorgeous black & white cinematography, a weird and thoughtful movie, listen to a Neil Young soundtrack, and see Johnny Depp playing a stupid fucking white man. Bonus: well-researched portrayal of the diversity of Indian culture, and the actor playing an Indian is actually a First Nations person in real life.

Also, it’s one of those movies where the ending is set in the Pacific Northwest, and it always makes me homesick. When I’m dying, I want to be just pushed out to sea in a cedar canoe, please.

I should have known everyone in the world was going to compare Lone Ranger to Dead Man.

Mmmm, pesticide cut with baking powder, yum!

Matt Cahill is pretty much unqualified to do anything.

Cahill said he had been pursuing a program in exercise physiology, but when questioned by attorneys he couldn’t remember taking any courses in chemistry or pharmacology. He never received any degree. Before the accident, his job experience after high school involved working as a condominium lifeguard and at an ice rink.

But, he said,

“I had a scientific background in school, I just don’t have a degree.”

That’s all it takes to be a hack who markets supplements…supplements that cause liver damage, blindness, or kill. As it turns out, all those companies selling magic pills have a loophole: call it a dietary supplement, and the federal inspectors are mostly incapable of doing anything about it, short of the pill actually killing people with cyanide or something obvious.

But Matt Cahill can cut insecticide with baking powder and sell it as a “weight loss supplement”. It actualy works — low grade poisoning will tend to make you shed pounds. His pills killed a young woman, a crime for which he served a two year sentence, and as soon as he got out he was packaging marginal chemicals as “herbal supplements” for body builders and raking in $30,000/month.

a href=’http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/25/bodybuilding-supplement-designer-matt-cahill-usa-today-investigation/2568815/’>Read the whole disgraceful story (warning: autoplay video at link!).

How did they get that past the IRB?

There was this thing called Drunk Science on Boing Boing, where they got a scientist very very drunk and then asked them questions.

It was a very bad idea, as the drunk scientist, Charles Choi explains.

I ended up having five Irish car bombs, five doubles of Jameson’s, two beers and a good swig from my hip flask. Since Irish car bombs are essentially two drinks in one, made up as they are of a beer and a shot of liquor, and since a double is by definition two shots, I ultimately drank 23 drinks that night. In the span of an hour.

Um, yeah. Their subject just poured alcohol down his throat in a short period of time so that he’d talk funny in an interview. He blacked out, the others thought he might die, he was basically doing the stupid binge drinking that college students do every weekend, all in the service of a really pointless story.

I guess the world outside of science is a strange one. If I were to attempt that ‘experiment’, I’d have to justify it (“it will be funny” isn’t good enough), I’d have to lay out carefully what I was going to measure and what I expected to learn, and any protocol involving another human being is going to get inspected up the wazoo by an institutional review board. I guarantee you my proposal to get my subjects to talk funny for my amusement after drinking uncontrolled quantities of alcohol would not only get turned down flat, the ethics panel would probably recommend immediate remedial instruction in the ethical execution of science, and any pending protocols would be suspended pending re-review.

They’re not going to continue the series, by the way. Smart move.

Shouldn’t it just generate “Creepo McIckydick” every time?

You know how it goes: you’re in some sensitive position, like running for political office, trying to get tenure, or the college of cardinals is reviewing your candidacy for the papacy, but you just can’t keep your cell phone in your pants — you’ve gotta send pictures of your penis to random women. We’ve all been there, am I right, guys? So you need a pseudonym. A cool synonym. One that will look really good when your peccadillos hit the newspapers.

Fortunately for those of us with limited imaginations, we now have a Carlos Danger name generator.

Ladies, check your phones for an extra special message from Diego Smash.

And delete it on sight, because it sure as heck isn’t from me.