Monthly Archives: May 2010

Lost Ruminations

i love having titles, i can influence or revamp the whole feel of my post, based on responding to a title, or making a title after creating what i feel is a complete thought. i am coming to grips with having a blog voice again. it’s basically a side of my personality now. free access and recall is a nice touch.

aside aside, let’s move on. yada yada yada,  i can come here and ruminate.

at this point, it’s still around Lost. i’ve had some time to digest a bit now, and come back here. it was a state of shock for me for a little bit, something so viscerally emotional. something i haven’t felt in awhile. and why? why not?  the whole series was expert at manipulating my emotions, both in it’s devices and my willingness to surrender.  it was that suspension of disbelief that really struck me. whatever the creators did, I clicked with it and let myself be carried away by their story.when Lost was finished, it was comparable to the feeling of finishing a great novel, experienced for the first time. somehow, they made me feel exactly the way i feel when i finish a book  that i already have profound love for before i even get halfway through it. you see the voice and structure of the story, and are completely willing to see this story telling voice wherever it goes, whether you agree or not.

the story becomes a voice, and you want to listen to it.

i know it didn’t leave the exact same message with me that it did with everyone else, but i felt that was part of the message it imparted, an open-endedness. the main point of being connected to those around you and what that entails is open for debate, but you know it when you see it. along with such sweeping generalizations though, are the details. they are there if you want to sweat them. but to me, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. being willing to succumb to something you don’t understand, accepting some limitations (faith or no faith), i feel that’s what the show was trying to express that at the end. it can get as meta as you want it to, just like REAL life.

in the end, i think it was just reminding you to turn around occasionally and marvel at the fractals you create in your life.

they may not be as unique as you think.

Nanomachines

there’s alot of buzz right now around craig venter, since him and his sizeable team managed to produce a (basically) synthetic life form. It’s not synthetic in the way that it has silicon parts or anything, it’s synthetic in the sense that they built it from the ground up, using what evolution has already provided to make cellular life form on earth.

even using the simplest bacteria they could, it took years to do this project. the reason i got hired at blue heron bio in the first place was because they accepted a gene building project for this, and they just needed temp work to handle the huge volume. now, we’ve been cited in the scientific publication, which is almost akin to being cited in the human genome paper (also spearheaded by Venter). it’s exciting for the company to get some good publicity like this, especially in this economic climate. go blue heron!

seeing this synthetic building of a life form finally work out is really exciting though. this synthetic bacteria is basically a nanomachine. venter’s group stripped down this bacteria, isolated every single gene, and then built it all back up, seeing which genes were necessary to keep it alive, and finding all sorts of interconnections between genes and gene expression. now that the base form is there, and with a little tweaking, almost any other gene can be added. make some biofuel, make some drugs, whatever gene you can coax it into expressing without dying. eventually you get these things sophisticated enough that they can be in your bloodstream, regulating your blood sugar for you if you’re diabetic.  eating up excessive cholesterol, and cleaning your circulatory system. this is all years off though, lots of FDA testing before this starts happening, but these are nanomachines.

robots we built off of an organic scaffolding, and we can program them to do what we want. nanomachines! science marches on.

Titles

I think i got all the ducks in a row now (or at least an understanding of what’s going on) so it looks like blogging hiatus is over now.

Goodbye blogger, hello wordpress! let’s get this blog party started!