The Cartoon Door 5

The Cartoon Door 5

The Cartoon Door 4

The Cartoon Door 4

From Lab, With Fly

I was having lunch in the conference room, which doubled as a dining room at lunch time. Suddenly Q, who was a secretary of the department and sitting next to me, waved her hands in front of and above her for about 5 seconds. When she finished waving, she turned to me and said accusingly:

"A fruit fly! Lei! It must be you! You brought it down here!"

"But," I protested,"I thought I killed all of them before I stepped out of the lab."

She laughed:"Blame your lab, then."

Yeah. It's like my lab is responsible for every fruit fly in the building.

This reminded me of a story told by a faculty candidate over a welcome lunch.

The lab he worked in as a post-doc had a fruit fly lab neighbor. From time to time, they would find fruit flies lingering around their lunch boxes or coffee cups, which affected their appetite to a certain level. They could have run over to their neighbor and yelled at them. But their high education prevented them from doing so. So they just set up a fly trap and caught quite a few of them. Then they put them into a test tube, put the test tube into an envelope, sticked on the address-labels printed out by a computer and put the envelope into their neighbor's mailbox. When their neighbor received the envelope, they thought it came from some governmental "Biohazard Control Office". In the envelope they found the test tube and a note saying:

"We believe they belong to you."

Body Fat Meter

Today at Sam's, Xing bought a lot of stuff, mostly "healthy food". He is on a no-fat, low-sugar diet, you know, being weight-challenged and all. He also bought an electronic body-fat meter. $28. Very fancy.

At the exit, the woman who checked the receipt and the cart stopped us. While she was checking, she got very curious of the body-fat meter.

"What is that?...Oh, a body-fat meter!"

Since I was holding the cart, she thought I bought the meter. She looked at me for a second and seemed very confused:

"I know you don't need a body-fat meter just by looking at you."

OK. Am I that skinny?

I think I really need to put on some weight. In a way, I am weight-challenged, too, just as Xing. He has a hard time losing weight. I have a hard time gaining weight.

Tolstoy was right:"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If Anna Karenina were a "self-improvement book" published in the 21st century, he might have changed this famous first sentence to:"All fit people are alike; each unfit person is unfit in his/her own way."

The Cartoon Door 3

Black Bellied Dew Lover

The boss let me grade the first quiz of the Genetics Lab, of which I am the TA.

The last question was:"What is the scientific name of fruit fly strain you are using in your experiments?"

"They have to be exact right to get this credit," he told me when he gave me the answer sheet of the quiz,"EVERY LETTER."

Everytime he teaches this lab, he asks the same question. To know exactly how to spell the scientific name of fruit fly is a big deal to him. "Now look at this name,"he would say to the class on their first day, while pointing to the name written in big, bold, black letters on the PowerPoint slide,"and really memorize it. I will be offended if you don't know how to spell it."

That's their cue that this name will be on the quiz.

But still, few of them got it right. "Drosophilla melanogaster", "Drosophillia melanogaster", "Drosophila melanoganster", "Drosophila melangaster"...

All wrong. It is:"Drosophila melanogaster". "Drosophila" means "dew lover". Beautiful name. And "melanogaster" means"black bellied".

One of the students wrote:"Drosophila....I have dyslexia and I can't spell. :)"

Sorry, appreciate your sense of humor, but still 0 credit on this one.

Firefox 1.0

Firefox finally reaches its 1.0 milestone (although still a preview release)! Bravo!

I still remember the excitement when the Netscape 4.0 Navigator first came out. It looked so cool! The only offer from IE at that time was IE3.0. And it was...eww! I just loved Netscape.

That was why I hesitated to switch to IE4.0 when it seemed everybody was using it. I resisted the IE tide until IE5.0 came out when I sadly found that the Web was no longer Netscape-friendly. I had to switch.

It felt so bad. It was like I was cheating on Netscape with IE. Although I always kept a latest version of Netscape in my computer, I seldom used it. It was like sleeping with IE with a picture of Netscape on the nightstand.

But everything is back to what it should be now! Firefox, the new Netscape, is my default browser. My affection to it increases day by day. I rarely touch IE now. Even MyIE2, once I liked, can't drag me back.

Hope Microsoft won't destroy it.

The Cartoon Door 2

One item from our "Cartoon Door", made from a TIME magazine cover by Rich, the undergraduate student.

Deep question, isn't it? Also note the slogan of our lab:"Flies, Maggots and Liberty".

Bad News

NewScientist says keeping a diary makes people more susceptible to "headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness."

Uh oh.

Is this why they call it "blog" instead of "diary" now?

The Cartoon Door

It seems every lab has at least one door that is covered by cartoons or pictures cut out from newspapers, magazines, or stuff printed out from the internet. I call it The Cartoon Door.

It is also The Personality Door. It reveals the lab owner's personality more than he/she probably wants. For example:

• Is he/she funny?
  
• Where is he/she from?
  
• What is his/her research area?
  
• Does he/she use fruit fly, mice or worm as his/her model animal for research?
  
• Is he/she married?
  
• Kids?
  
• Does he/she have a dog or a cat?
  
• What newspaper does he/she read?
• Magazines?
• What is his/her hobby?
  
  or even:
  
  
• Is he going to vote for Bush or Kerry?

Here is our Cartoon Door:

The Lucky Cricket

The Lucky Cricket is singing again.

Last Saturday, when I walked into the lab, I found a 200ml flask on my bench, and there was a cricket in it.

Feng came up from his bench and explained:"I caught it on my way to the lab. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Yes, it was a very beautiful cricket. All black, shiny, and mysterious. A little evil-looking, too. Like Darth Vader.

"But," Feng continued,"it's very stupid. It just sat there for me to catch it. No intentions to jump away at all."

Yeah. I don't blame it. Who would have thought a 27-year old Biology Master student, who is a father of a one-year old son, would suddently jump into the meadow to catch a cricket in a beautiful Saturday morning?

I put it into a milk bottle with corn meal food at the bottom, the kind of bottles we usually keep our fruit fly strains in. Thus, it officially became our lab pet.

Feng showed it to everybody and everybody said:"Oh, a lucky cricket! Very nice!"

It seems happy in its new home. From time to time, it sings its happy songs. Not what you would expect to hear in a genetics lab. That's why people passing by would come in and ask:"What's that sound?"

Today the boss said:"It's so nice! It's like we are camping!"

Yeah. And last night when I was lying in my bed at home, I heard the singing of crickets from the meadow outside my apartment. For a moment I thought it was morning and I was in the lab, working.

The singing of the crickets somehow warped the time-space in my mind.

Maybe that was how Einstein discovered relativity.

The Devil Within

Last night I had the weirdest dream.

It began with a strange visitor in my house. When he walked from the dark doorway into the bright living room, I found he was actually a white rabbit with a brown hat on his head. He walked out of my living room and quickly disappeared into some other rooms. As he was walking, some kind of liquid dripped from his ears, like spores flew out of white fungi branches. When the liquid drops touched the floor, they became alive and I somehow realized they were liquid monsters and going to kill me. So I quickly plugged in an electric iron and before they attacked me, I pressed the hot iron onto their bodies. They sizzled, or screamed. White steam came out of their rapidly shrinking bodies. One by one they were killed this way.

But then the monster rabbit showed up from nowhere. I grappled with him. I pressed the electric iron on his body. He also vaporized and turned into steam. The only thing left of him was his T-shirt, now very flattened. Exhausted, I collapsed onto the floor. But to my horror, the rabbit materilized out of the thin air and in a second he was standing in front of me again!

He stared at me with his red eyes and said:

"You can't kill me. I am the devil within your heart."

I woke up at this very moment.

It was 4:25 am.

Unable to decipher the meaning of the dream, I decided to go to the bathroom.

On my way back, I checked my email. I just couldn't help it.

There was one new message. I replied it.

Oh, how I am sickly addicted to the internet!

Maybe that is the devil within my heart, the internet!

Lost And Found

Xia walked in this morning, looking pretty upset.

"I can't find my keys! I looked everywhere yesterday afternoon and couldn't find them!"

I was not surprised at all.

She has about ten keys and several grocery store saving cards on a big key chain, which makes it impossible to fit in her fashionably tight jeans pocket. So she always carries them around in her hands and leaves them wherever she does her experiments (we have different places for different experiments). More often than not, she forgets to take them with her when she finishes her job.

It was not her first time she couldn't find her keys. But it was the first time she couldn't find her keys for so long.

So the whole lab was recruited for searching. Even the boss. We looked everywhere. The main room, the "west wing" (what my boss calls our other room, which is west to the main room), the kitchen, the autoclave room, the secretaries' office, the ladies' room (she went in herself), on the benches, under the benches, even in the garbage cans.

Not a trace.

She lost hope and sat down in front of her desk:"We can't find it. Maybe if we stop looking it will show up itself. Let me do some experiment first."

With that, she opened a red binder in which she kept her experiment records. And right there, lying between two sheets of yellow filler paper, was her chain of keys.

In her binder! Who would have thought!