James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

This week has been more the way I pictured grad school. Up at seven AM again. Worked a nine hour day at the PGEC. I got my badge today. It’s always a cool feeling to be associated with a powerful organization. It was one thing when it was a major corporation, but now I’m connected to an arm of the federal government!

You may have seen the news about the wholly mammoth genome that’s been published (actually it’s less than 70% of the genome, and normally you need 2-6 fold coverage to be considered a reasonable genome.) What I thought was really interesting was the article published in nature along with these results, discussing what technological hurdles remain between us as the ability to resurrect the mammoth.

This guy thinks Iowa has surpassed Missouri as a bellwether state.

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I finished my first rotation on Friday. It was a lot of fun working in the lab, and at the end I gave a reasonable presentation. And on Monday, my next rotation starts. So this weekend I have no science related responsibilities… what could I possibly do with my new free time?

The answer is here.
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“Groups of students moved along Bancroft Way, Telegraph Avenue and Durant Avenue, and rallied on Sproul Plaza, shouting cheers of “USA, USA” and “Obama”. At one point, a group of several hundred that had assembled on Bancroft near Wells Fargo broke into a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.”

We’re somewhere in that crowd.

It’s 1:30 in the morning as a write this. Obama’s electoral vote total stands at 338 with leads in Indiana and North Carolina, and a Missouri race that looks headed for a recount. The reaction here in Berkeley has been ecstatic. I started following the race at 3:45 local time. It was eight o’clock here when McCain called to concede, and we watched both his speech and Obama’s before heading out into the night. Wandered down Shattuck and into south Berkeley were we were caught up in a giant wave of celebrating students, with drums, people climbing streetlights, crowd surfing, shouting and chanting. Even as I write this I can still hear cars honking and people cheering.
But don’t take my word for it:

 

Walked to my polling location in the building quite literally next door, voting at 8:05 in the morning as voter #64. In less than twelve hours we should know who the next president will be.

“Kisumu [the city where Obama’s father was born], a relatively big city along the muggy, green, hippo-infested shores of Lake Victoria.”

-NYtimes

I drove to the western end of I-80 yesterday. In total I’ve driven across 2,700 miles of the country on that highway. (Far more counting my repeated round trips to Ithaca.)

Got to see my little cousins, aunt and uncle and grandmother.

The election is in two more days!

As if I needed another reason to regret having to register to vote in California…

A poll this week showed my former congressman Latham running within five percent of his challenger Becky Greenwald.

Of course my current congresswoman Barbara Lee, is a far more progressive legislator than either Latham or Greenwald, but she generally wins reelection with more than 80% of the vote.

Before my new processor even arrived I needed to upgrade software embedded in the motherboard in my linux computer (the BIOS) to be able to handle the new high tech processor I ordered.

It’s remarkably hard to upgrade the bios on your motherboard, when you don’t have a floppy or CD drive and are running linux. Some motherboard manufacturers make updates available in forms that run under Linux, and I’d highly recommend those brands to people looking to build a linux PC. Otherwise you’re stuck swapping HDs from your windows computer, which convinces windows that it’s been pirated, plus you’ll have to install the windows ethernet drivers for your computer to be able to access the bios update online, which (since you don’t have a CD drive or a working internet connection) requires a fair bit of work.

All in all, I see this as a vindication of my multi-computer policy as this required three in order to work properly: one to need updating, another to steal a hard drive with windows installed on it, and a third to remain functional for downloading drivers and saving them to flash drives which would then be accessed by the Frankenstein-ian hybrid I created.

Especially since somehow, in the processor of upgrading, I ended up with a “rogue anti-spyware” program on my windows hard drive (no idea how that happened) that proved so persistent that I was forced to reinstall windows from scratch before it would run again on my ACTUAL windows computer. 

Angel Island is in San Francisco Bay. And it’s burning.

For the record, I can’t take credit for taking this picture myself.

I don’t have access to the chronicle of higher education, but this story cites them as a source.

Iowa State is getting rid of land lines in dorms starting next year, as pretty much every college student has a cell phone. Personally the last time I had a land line was my sophomore year of college (the last year I lived in dorms). Besides the occasional form which still assumes everyone should have a home phone number, I don’t notice the absence.