<p>since as long as I can remember, I&#8217;ve been the 29th century digital kid. the first time I thought about the functionality of the human body as a 6 year old kid, I decided robots were way better, because all that circutry garanteed functionality without all that mushy messy stuff maybe going rotten or not working right. it just always seems that digital/electronic was cleaner, more permanent, and more consistent than anything maleable. chemical. analog. digital was the way to go.</p>

<p>this carried over in all sorts of ways that are really kinda funny for me to look back on. little ways, like the fact that I&#8217;ve never owned a tape, ever (went straight to CDs when I was in 7th grade). or that I&#8217;ve never owned, nor do I really know how to read analog timepieces (the hands always confuse me. the ones with no numbers on the faces &#8211; forget it). but bigger ways too. I hate driving, because it&#8217;s an analog process. you start, there&#8217;s all this intermediate time, and then you&#8217;re there. I hated that. e-mail became my instant addiction as soon as I started using it, because it was sent and then immediately recieved, with no real fuzz in between. digital. I always hated sending real letters and packages, cause it was always such a process. and even in interpersonal matters, I was able to separate my emotions into black and white and place myself on one side or the other for any situation. things like getting heartbroken for the first time threw me for a loop, because there was how I felt, how I needed to feel to move on, and there was this crappy transition that drove me nuts. waiting to move towards some emotional state end point that I could already appreciate and anticipate, yet somehow had to wait through some uninfluenced grey area in between was agony. worse than the distress of the actual situation. wierd, right? </p>

<p>my whole thought process was always represented in polarized opposites; here/there, like/dislike, accept/reject, need/discard, what have you. similarly, my approach to problems has always been extremely goal-oriented. some would call this a male trait, but after alot of thought (and realizing that my thought process is essentially female by modern psychological standards), I don&#8217;t really agree with this. I think it&#8217;s more a function of my binary thought process, rather than some Y-chromo function. the goal/endpoint/extremity obsession came from the idea that things were cleaner, simpler, better when they were on or off, black or white, up or down. homework was either not started or finished. a bill was paid in full or it wasn&#8217;t at all. a dispute was settled or untouched. I either loved someone or didn&#8217;t. I was, in effect, not only trying to be a robot (29th C Digital Boy =29CDB), but I wanted to world within my grasp to be streamlined into an optimized environment of binary switches. transitions take time, and waiting is inefficient. therefore, if something is either here or there, it&#8217;s defined, solved, known. if something is in flux, who the hell knows what&#8217;s really going on.</p>

<p>the strangest part of all this was how much it played into things with other people. I&#8217;ve been admired and cursed for being able to polarize my emotions so easily. if I got dumped, I&#8217;d slam the toggle over from romantic to platonic, or in one case, from love to detest. and my entire interaction would change with the person. just like that. if something was amiss in a relationship with a friend or significant other, I&#8217;d want to sit down and hash it out right there and then, in its entirety, untill something was defined that gave resolution and a future direction to whatever had gone awry. and it played into other stuff too. </p>

<p>you can see how this could drive someone insane. but somehow it didn&#8217;t. I really lived like this. for decades. </p>

<p>I think it all started with mark. </p>

<p>he&#8217;s been the analog boy (AB) for years. and to my 29CDB self, this was kinda upsetting. now, mark and I share many, many interests, get along well, and look way too similar for comfort. but this one area really separated us. on the superficial level, I was all minidiscs and CDs, whereas he was in love with tapes and vinyl. I use photoshop, he&#8217;s into stencil art. etc etc. but on a deeper level, I bear the unmistakable mark of the 29CDB, in that I&#8217;ve always been concerned with keeping things on one side of the fence, or the other. whereas his sheep are all in some constant state of floating back and forth, sitting on the fence, sneaking under it, etc etc. it always seems like things in his ballpark are all in progress, whereas the exact same things in my realm where either completely explored or not at all. </p>

<p>then I bought a record. seemed innocent enough. I mean, come on. it was the 1977 pressing of music from star wars, by the fucking electric moog orchestra. how could I help it? </p>

<p>he pounced. gave me his old turntable, opened me up to that wild world of hurt that is analog music. and I took it all, hook, line and sinker. I&#8217;m in love with the shit now. and while I&#8217;ve always loved music, and records are wonderful, as silly as it sounds this minor change threw alot of things into the grinder for me. let&#8217;s take records as a metaphor everything about life. consider first that I used to be a CD-based organism. zero seek time, identical results every time the same track is played, a degree of permanence to everything. now look at records: every single one out there is different. two things that are supposed to be the same aren&#8217;t. furthermore, everytime it&#8217;s used, it gives a different result. furthermore, it&#8217;s manipulatable. with CDs, you play a song, it starts, it ends, you listen in between. with records, speed them up, slow them down, spin them backwards, skratch them up, whatever. it&#8217;s the in between that&#8217;s the interactive part. </p>

<p>so I&#8217;ve been taking apart things in my life, one by one, and making them analog. this idea that things must be hither or yon in any number of respects has got to go. I&#8217;m teaching myself how to enjoy the trip. sometimes, the ends are nice, but the means aren&#8217;t by definition a pain in the ass (even if they are). and the ideas of permanence and gratification based on instant completion of an objective are equally confounding to an analog thought process. things change, things slow down and stop without reaching the end, and that&#8217;s all part of the game. </p>

<p>these aren&#8217;t mutually exclusive ideas, they&#8217;re two parallel ways to describe the same medium. again, like music. same shit, different approach. such is my life. formerly a pure digital stream, now seeking definition in an analog mode. I&#8217;m pulling my own plug in different situations to test if I&#8217;ll merely stop the needle in the track, and pick it back up when I&#8217;m ready, or if I&#8217;ll kill power to the system and have to cold boot and start over. somethings in my life are better served by a digital process, but for the first time I&#8217;m appreciating that some things are best enjoyed as analog. it&#8217;s integration, not replacement. </p>

<p>there&#8217;s only digital/analog converters I know of. I&#8217;m curious to see what type of music a digital/analog hybrid will makes. </p>

<p>we&#8217;ll see.</p> 

<p>the cool upshot was that I had plenty of free time, so I got to see some of the old crew, including colin, lani, bri &amp; alex, and sara. it dawns on me that despite living next door during all those years I was growing up in bawlmer, I know jack shit about DC. it&#8217;s actually kinda a nifty town, with a decent metro. I only went to shows in the bad part of town when I was in high school, and I guess it set the mode for my impression of the city. it&#8217;s come time to guess again, I guess. </p>

<p>fun fact: there are not one but <u>four</u> Mariott hotels in Crystal City. and I guess there are enough John Connolly&#8217;s around such that another one had a rez in the <span class="caps">REALLY</span> nice one, so for 10 minutes I was checked into the wrong suite. damn shame, cause the room I ended up in didn&#8217;t have the high speed data jack, whirlpool tub, balcony or 50&#8221; TV the first one did. the $585 temporary authorization on my credit card is sure making me nervous though&#8230; could be the most expensive 10 minutes of my life. crystal city is interesting. it&#8217;s an endless strip of <span class="caps">HUGE</span> hotels, conference centers, nameless government buildings, and nothing that looks like it would support human life at all. it looks like a level from unreal tournament or something, I&#8217;d expect to see rockets screaming at my head rather than people walking around. my theory is that it all transforms in a giant robot with the pentagon as the head to defend us when all hell breaks lose. kinda like the <span class="caps">SDF</span>-1. </p>

<p>the speakers at my orientation included Dr. Junku Yuh, whom I learned is not only a male (whoops) but is also an underwater robotics expert. him and another one of the speakers were pioneers in <a href="http://www.snakerobot.com">Snake Robots</a>. pretty cool things, used in the september 11th tragedy and other S&R operations. the presenter actually showed some grusome images taken from inside the rubble including a severed arm and a head, which I thought were in somewhat poor taste. but I digress. also there was Dr. Rita Colwel, director of the <span class="caps">NSF</span>. a member of my thesis committee was a post-doc in her lab, so I got to shake hands and convey a greeting. I touched a famous person, wow. she was telling us about how the <span class="caps">NSF</span> was looking to increase graduate stipends to ~30K per year, which seems like a rediculous sum of money. but I ain&#8217;t complaining. she was also telling us about the new <span class="caps">NSF</span> initiatives to ramp up spending on nanotech and biocomplexity integrative studies; all in all the <span class="caps">NSF</span> is doing some good work. too bad dubyah was looking to cut their funding. hope he doesn&#8217;t. </p>

<p>and finally, on a dismal note, this dartmouth kid who has stalked several of my friends, and is a notorious asian fetishist, is being sent to korea on our tax dollars. sigh. creepy kid. </p>

<p>anyhow, that&#8217;s my week.</p> 

<p>so, I should be at Osaka University, which I&#8217;m kinda psyched about (cause I&#8217;ve spend enough time around Tokyo). things I&#8217;m not psyched about include the heat, and the fact that I&#8217;ve gotta publish a paper or so and write/defend my masters before I leave. </p>

<p>it&#8217;s not 110% final &#8211; they need to nail down all the logistics with Osaka U. but, I&#8217;ve been accepted on this side of the pacific, and they&#8217;ve got a bunch of dollars lined up to spend on me. </p>

<p>so keep payin&#8217; those taxes &#8211; that&#8217;s my mochi fund!</p> 

<p>the former, I&#8217;ll have to admit, was somewhat disappointing. having never been to a monster truckathon, and only having been promised that on <span class="caps">SUNDAY</span> <span class="caps">SUNDAY</span> <span class="caps">SUNDAY</span> I&#8217;d only need the edge of the seat they sold me for twelve american dollars, I found myself somewhat hunched back, using every last penny of my seat with my 12$ ass. the arena was kinda small, so they basically had one tiny heap of cars in the middle that the kept smishing. the one truck that was supposed to shoot dual 30-foot flame gysers out of it&#8217;s bed broke down in the first 15 minutes. and no grave digger or nuthin. Neema did get a babydoll grave digger tee, which is cute by virtue of being somewhat completely outta place. in any case, it was a nice excuse to take a drive and knock back a lot of cheap beer at lunchtime. </p>

<p>the latter, Mr. Rhymes and co, did not let me down. aside from having enough high schoolers to effectively make the median age about 16, and drawing mostly an <span class="caps">MTV</span> crowd (&#8220;you know, he sings that song with the video?&#8221;) he was working hard to get a buncha stix-dwellers up, on their feet and moving. very entertaining on the stage. and where the hell he dug up Naughty by Nature, I have no idea. another entertainment professional at any rate. </p>

<p>now, if my ears would just stop ringing.</p> 

<p>cracked my first rib wednesday. slept rather well despite the malady.</p> 

<p>so Ron Atlas, the chair of the american society of microbiology (<span class="caps">ASM</span>) was the keynote speaker and honored guest at this meeting. he is also interestingly the biological adivsor of some important sort to the president and congress. his news was less than good. </p>

<p>not only did his office, lab, and home recieve multiple mailings of anthrax spores, but congress is off and running to do some serious damage if they&#8217;re not stopped. first off, we&#8217;re most likely not going to be hearing about these anthrax attacks in the news; they&#8217;re at a high level of both academic and political importance. this fella is the link between all of our current biomedical research regarding pathogens and potential bioterrorism weapons and capitol hill. not to mention he&#8217;s the head of the nation society for all microbiologists (of some personal import to me). whoever is doing this stuff knows where to hit us. </p>

<p>second of all, congress is going apeshit in all the wrong directions. they want to do several things, and have legislation being argued on the floor <i>right now</i> which is aiming to do mainly two things: first, limit the ability of anyone to add drug resistance or additional pathogenicity to existing infectious agents, and second, to basically prevent any and all resident aliens from ever touching another strain of an infectious microbe. </p>

<p>this is bad. really, <span class="caps">REALLY</span> bad. </p>

<p>firstly, the resistance thing. this is fine and well, if and only if you want to bring <span class="caps">ALL</span> current microbiological and biomedical research, as well as pharmaceutical and biotechical production to a grinding, skidding, e-braking halt. adding resistance markers (a gene that allows a bug to resist an antiobiotic) is the main (only) way we have to select for genetically altered bugs; if we&#8217;re trying to stick a new gene or swap out an existing gene from a bacterium, the way to do it is tack on a gene that encodes a protein which allows the critter to survive an antibiotic. this way, only the ones (out of the trillions you start with) that do get (or lose) the new gene of interest remain on your culture plate. these markers are in every strain currently used for pathogen research, and borne on every plasmid (little loops of <span class="caps">DNA</span> we use to stick in and pull out genes) currently in use. in short, there is simply no way to do molecular microbiology, molecular biology, cloning of genes, bulk protein isolation (anyone need insulin?), or just about any other area of research involving little fragments of <span class="caps">DNA</span> without these. you can see how this might stress me out; the aforementioned list more or less constitutes my everyday to-do items. aside from there being NO <span class="caps">POSSIBLE</span> <span class="caps">WAY</span> to regulate this stuff, due to it&#8217;s complete saturation into research labs worldwide, we would have no way to continue producing most of the non-chemical drugs currently needed by million, no way of producing vaccines, no way of continuing any biotechnological or academic research of any kind that utilizes the techniques above. I could go on, but hopefully this paints the picture. </p>

<p>reiteration: this is bad. really, <span class="caps">REALLY</span> bad. </p>

<p>the other thing was basically to make every lab that has the capability to grow over 5 liters of a pathogen (I&#8217;ve done this several times) register all personel, equipment, and current projects with a central governmental source. right. fuck that. does anyone have any idea how many people would need to be in such an agency? it&#8217;d be bigger than the <span class="caps">FBI</span>, <span class="caps">NSA</span> and <span class="caps">CIA</span> put together; you&#8217;d have paperwork flooding in from all over the country, probably at the rate of 10 reports per every faculty in every biomedical department in each school in each state per day. at least. the math gets staggering. not to mention, what the hell would this accomplish? all someone needs is a microliter (1/1000 of a liter, less liquid than a pencil point) of a culture to produce literally metric tons of a pathogenic bug. even if all this was registered, would anyone ever know if something this untraceable was missing? clearly the only answer is government-sponsored door locks on all higtened biosafety level 2 and above labs. in addition, they want to make it such that anyone who is not born an american cannot handle, posses or transport a pathogenic bug. considering, on average, 1/5 people (at the <span class="caps">BARE</span> minimum) in every biomedical lab is not american (I&#8217;ve been in labs where only 1/5 is american), not to mention labs run by foreign-born PI&#8217;s (some of the best labs in the country fall into this category), this is preposterous. not only would you crush an entire community of good, dedicated, hard working academics, but again, the field would be shut down. </p>

<p>I can appreciate the need to somehow limit the availability of pathogens to the global community. but this is fedunkulous. considering things such as anthrax are naturally occuring, repeat, <span class="caps">NATURALLY</span> <span class="caps">OCCURING</span> (i.e. found in nature and all over animals) microbes, is it at all feasible to try and regulate them? nope. can we be as arrogant to think that we can eliminate the availability of types of organisms that compose well over 50% of the entire biomass on the earth? no way. put all labs that have anthrax strain in steel chambers 20 miles underground with retinal scanners, and all some wacko needs to do is swab a horse and grow themselves a few liters of spores in their own kitchen or greenhouse. </p>

<p>I realize we&#8217;re a panicked, frightened nation, but this is, in my opinion, fucking stupid. and something that we&#8217;d all regret. no one is weighing what can realistically be done vs. the impact of what can legally be done. we have the power, because we&#8217;re such a bully of a nation both domestically and internationally, to do alot of harm by shutting things down. but again, the nation&#8217;s classic flaw shines through &#8211; we get all obsessed as to wether or not we could, as opposed to wether we even should. </p>

<p>please, use whatever means this democracy gives us all to ensure that we don&#8217;t do something that would do more harm than good. with this or any other issue.</p> 

<p><span class="caps">DVD</span>s are finally supported, buring from right within the finder is a cynch, the new pack-in version of IE rips, and it comes will full japanese language support and character sets right out of the box. </p>

<p>and I can still play zork in the terminal.</p> 

<p>Jon Stewart proved me wrong last night. </p>

<p>I was on my way out of <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~npd1">Niles&#8217;</a> house, when I caught the beginning of the daily show, and stuck around to catch a few seconds of it. it was nothing short of incredible. he ditched his script, and recalled to his audience other times of great national loss and crisis, citing <span class="caps">MLK</span>&#8217;s assasination when he was in 5th grade, war news in his later years and whatnot. but the man wasn&#8217;t on a soapbox, he was pulling his soul out, word by word. he was crying. the man who usually is all shits and giggles was crying, and being completely and totally honest. </p>

<p>his message was that a &#8220;with us or against us&#8221; war such as the one proposed by Dubyah last night isn&#8217;t so much the answer. but that was almost besides the point. in an age where people paid to deliver us the truth always give us an almost robotic account of the days happenings, and no matter how obvious it is people never say what&#8217;s really going on (like those poor &#8220;analysts&#8221; who have to try and make Bush sound smart after every appearance, when they know full well he&#8217;s an idiot), this was the first and <i>only</i> time I can recall when a journalist, or at least a media figure has ever dropped his script and given me raw emotion, uncensored reaction, and the simple human perspective on a tragic happening, rather than an overanalyzed version that makes it completely statistical and dehumanizes it completely. </p>

<p>it may or may not be on comedycentral&#8217;s site later. I&#8217;ll post it if it is.</p> 

<p>seriously, look at music, for example. posting mp3&#8217;s on web pages is quickly shut down, so <span class="caps">HTTP</span> is effectively &#8220;killed&#8221; by the selection pressure. however, mp3 is established as a better medium than .wav or .aiff. (though to be fair, .mp2 was okay at that point). then napster emerges and does well, until the applied selective pressures (law as the selective antibiotic) find a way to effectively kill it. </p>

<p>now with kazaa, gnutella clients finally becoming user friendly and peer to peer technologies taking over, the selective pressures have effectively selected against centralized, controllable file sharing and lead to the directional selection of multi-drug resistant clients. they&#8217;ve out-evolved the selection pressures, and what&#8217;s emerged is better, stronger, and more powerful than ever before. and still growing. if anything, attempts to shut it down just give the underground a kick in the pants to get better, by applying the do-or-die selection pressure.</p> 

<p>so, in our overuse of antibiotics, we&#8217;ve created the first all-hell resistant bug which is <i>completely unaffected</i> by all known antibiotics. </p>

<p>a little horizontal gene transfer, and popular pathogen, a nice widely-used body of water, and you&#8217;ve got the next plague of the new millenium. </p>

<p>shit.</p> 

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