I’m studying for an Amateur Radio Technician license. I tried this on for size a year or two ago — went downtown, took the test, flunked miserably. Lesson learned: a little bit of study can’t hurt.

I’ve licked my wounds, bought a book and will return to the fray tomorrow as one of a couple dozen testees. Maybe I’ll buy a vanity plate for the pick-up with my call sign on it. Yeah. And a rifle rack wouldn’t hurt either. And a couple of those big spotlights. And some amber flashers for the roof. And I think a winch. And a pair of big whip antennas. Oh… and maybe a radio too.

:-)

No, really… I’ve committed to memory arcane formulae like E = i * r and P = i * e and the speed of light is equal to the frequency times the bandwidth… and my keyboard doesn’t have a lambda on it… and the US is in ITU region 2, which I wonder how that made them feel at the FCC, running around with their big stadium fingers up chanting “We’re number one! We’re number one!” And the Europeans saying, “Mais non… we’re number one. You’re number two!”

I hate tests, but I welcome informed puns about testees.

There’s a book to write about HAM radio culture. I wish someone else would write it.

How about that bagged spinach?

Tell me some post doc isn’t responsible for flushing a recombinant e coli 0157 death vector out into our food supply via the drain in the sink at his underfunded and poorly supervised lab sometime between 1971 and 1982.

The Selectable Marker Gene: Neomycin Phosphotransferase

In addition to the aroA gene, the nptII gene from transposon Tn5 of the bacterium E. coli has been introduced in

[spinach?]

to be used as a selectable marker. This gene codes for the enzyme neomycin phosphotransferase which confers resistance to the common aminoglycoside antibiotic kanamycin (Fraley et al. l986). The DNA sequence of the gene has been determined (Beck et al. 1982). The lack of risk to humans of the nptII gene can be supported by its use in the first human gene therapy trials (Anonymous 1990). The nptII coding region is under the control of the nos promoter and nos terminator.

None of the introduced genes has any inherent plant pest characteristics or poses a risk to plant health when introduced into the modified plants.

E. coli 0157 was first identified as a cause of serious illness in humans in

1982.

Since then the numbers of outbreaks each year has increased steadily. As in other forms of food poisoning, the infection starts with diarrhoea, often bloody, sometimes associated with vomiting and nearly always with abdominal pain. Initially, E.coli 1057 was nearly always caught by contact with cattle, or by eating beef. Now it may infect burgers, rissoles or shepherd’s pie.

Might as well tackle global warming first so I can get on with the day. The solution is easy and doesn’t require us to give up burning fossil fuels, capturing cow belches, or any of that. I offer it here under a creative commons attribution license:

The solution to the global warming problem lies in the creation of floating islands of white styrofoam packing pellets. The carpet should be roughly 100 km by 1000 km (100,000 square km). Solar heat normally absorbed by sea water will be reflected back into space when the carpet is deployed. The carpets are constructed of carbon nanotube netting so they can be easily rolled up at night to release ambient heat from the sea during the dark hours. The math isn’t in, so I don’t know exactly how many of these we need but I figure about five hundred of them ought to do the trick… that would be areas equal to a couple of Greenlands and an Iceland thrown in. I think I have enough packing pellets around to make a significant contribution to construction.

My old buddy Doctor Don writes that his brother-in-law Sam Aronson’s Brookhaven team seems to have been scooped in the quest for dark matter by the folks at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

God’s nose… pick here (Quicktime)

The AIDS thing is over. South African science has come up with an organic cocktail that prevents and cures the disease.

Check out Chris Locke’s amazing MySpace herpetarium construction.

…and here is the promised Snake Preview of Samuel Jackson as the Voice of God in the recent audio remix of the Holy Bible.

On July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong stumbled a little on his lines, but he made history with his feet. Today was the anniversary of that achievement, a project that only succeeded because of our unity of purpose, an achievement beyond the reach of the impoverished imaginations of the neocons and their ilk.

My neighbor Cal and I went to the Town Board meeting tonight to urge a responsible approach to the American Transmission Company’s proposed hundred million dollar build out of facilities including a 345kV line to nowhere across our marsh. Cal is a wetlands ecologist and quite a Christian, a combination that I find baffling, but it works for him. (”Oh me of little faith…”)

Tonight after we had our way with the board, influencing them to file for intervenor status with the State Public Service Commission and to write a letter to the County Board supporting a moratorium on construction of new power facilities until a needs assessment has been completed, we stood talking in the parking lot for a while. Cal was all about how our language gives us away: “Do we call all this black stuff underground ‘fossil fuel’ or do we see them as great carbon sequestration systems that made the planet habitable?” He pointed out that until the ‘enlightenment,’ our metaphor for creation (yeah, the planet - lots of xtians call it “creation” - as distinct from “tarnation” I suppose, and of course “tarnation” in the context of exploiting carboniferous stuff… well you get my drift) … anyway the dominant metaphor for creation was a book, a book to be read. Then somehow it shifted to the earth as a machine, a great storehouse of “natural resources,” goods to be used, to be consumed.

He was talking about this article by William J. Mills, unfrotunately it’s part of the great information sequestration system called electronic serialization, and it would cost me twenty-five clams to read the whole thing. The abstract says:

Metaphor plays a fundamental role in our perception and comprehension of our environment, not just as a means of escape from customary vision but, more importantly, as the means whereby that customary vision first becomes established. Societies differ in “metaphorical vision” because their vision of the world derives from different metaphors. Three periods in the history of the Western world are distinguished. In the Middle Ages, nature was seen primarily as a book. In the Renaissance, it was believed to be organized in the same manner as a human being. In the modern age, the most influential metaphor has been the machine. A society’s choice of one metaphor rather than another as the primary vehicle through which it seeks to comprehend its environment is highly indicative of the needs and aspirations of that society.