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It certainly looks like Watchmen -- too much so, frankly: the slavish recreation of Dave Gibbons's artwork borders on the unhealthy. And, in its relentlessly trailery way, it does a trailer's job, which is to hint that there might be a halfway decent movie on the other side. That seems rather unlikely in this case, though.

You do have to admire the chutzpah: they actually have the nerve to describe Zack Snyder as a "visionary director". Augh.

In any case, I guess I can no longer remain in denial about this. The movie really is happening. It is almost impossible to imagine how it can not suck -- but of course I'll be right there on opening day just to see how bad...]]> Read the comments

I especially love the transcendent moment where he dances someone else's steps. The whole thing is just a beautiful trip. Read his site if you want to like him even more.

In other news, it was Ian's piano diploma exam today. Obviously these things are never perfect, but it seems to have gone fairly well, so we're happy about that :)]]> Read the comments

In a sense, programming for a microcontroller is no different from doing so for an all-singing, all-dancing modern computer -- apart from the target being so much less sophisticated. But there's something charmingly tactile about being able to interface so directly -- and clunkily -- to the outside world, with only a few lines of code and some bodged-together components. It has the feel of something much more physical than the coddled environments I'm more used to.

Of course, all I've done so far is blink a few lights and read from the crudest sensors, but it's only been an hour or two. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with some fun things to do with it. Suggestions on a postcard, please... ]]> Read the comments

Of course, I have nobody to blame but myself, seeing as I provided him with it, but it was under duress. Or at least it is coming to seem so in retrospect...]]> Read the comments

After a nice lunch with Handsome Jack, I found myself outside Evans and finally remembered to buy some new grips for my bike. The old ones have been in a bad way for awhile, quite worn through in places and generally slick to the touch:

These were the ones that came with the bike in the first place, and were of the old rubber type that attach themselves to your handlebars by virtue of their own tackiness. I've changed such grips before, and they're an incredible pain in the arse to get off and -- especially -- on. They're specifically designed to cling tightly, and so manhandling the little bastards over the bars is not merely difficult but increasingly so: the further you get them on, the more immovable they become. I actually bought a new pair in this style prior to the Isle of Wight trip, but I couldn't face fitting them and so they have remained on the shelf gathering dust.

At some point in the last few years a new kind of "locking" grip got invented, and it was a pair of these that I finally acquired today. Unlike the old kind, they attach not by their rubberiness, but via some screw-tightened clips. Consequently, they're an absolute breeze to fit, and they look rather stylish too:

I can now take to the streets without fear of my hands slipping all over the handlebars, and grind out another blog entry to boot. I can't imagine just how fascinating this must be for you. Tomorrow we can discuss laundry or cooking or -- I know! -- drying paint.]]> Read the comments

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On the one hand, this means I can look forward to a certain amount of income over and above my research council pocket money for these next few years, though hardly enough to live on. On the other, Gordon fucking Bennett but computer support is a pain in the arse. It is an absolute dead cert stone cold guarantee, for a tech monkey, that merely walking into the computer room will see you besieged by unsolvable requests about the imbecilities of Microsoft Office or somesuch soul-destroying awfulness, requests that will expand to fill all the time you allow.

Abandon your afternoon, at least.

That said, and notwithstanding the fantastic levels of frustration and annoyance that go with this territory like a horse with marriage, it is also quite nice to spend a few hours a week working in an area of relative competence rather than trying to nag away at the limits of a scientific discipline one grasps dimly at best. Computers may be wayward and infuriating and vexatiously non-deterministic, but all that is nothing compared to the vagaries of the scanning ion conductance microscope, or electrophysiology in general, or the whole fucking voodoo world of tissue culture. That stuff really is black magic.

Actually, the SICM/fluorescence/ephys is looking tentatively promising, although there are big question marks over the visualisation just now. Partly this is because phase contrast illumination is pretty much impossible with the paraphernalia of SICM squatting in the illumination pathway, partly it's because of the limited interoperability of high-magnification, high-NA, almost context-free, oil-immersion optical microscopy with the more straightforward, but much lower resolution, air objective version. We're still looking for a workable compromise for both these difficulties.

With all that laid out, it was entertaining, in a distressing way, when two of my supervisors spent the day experimenting with us (ie, my postdoc colleague Simon and myself) and the more senior came away disappointed because we couldn't reliably patch presynaptic boutons just yet. Excuse me? Reliably patch boutons? Hello? If we could do that, we wouldn't be keeping it some kind of secret, we'd be writing the fucking Nature papers already. This whole gruesome goatfuck of techniques is in its infancy. Maybe one day it'll be routinely magical, but give us a chance to get there, please.

In the meantime, the iPhone 2.0 software is so close you can almost smell it, and yet still -- despite leaks -- not quite practical to install. Just a few more hours, or at least so we hope...]]> Read the comments

In the meantime, though, here's a little teaser:

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It's funny and sweet and profound, a hilarious reminder of just what it means to be human: how what we do and who we love are what matter, not any amount of submissive posturing to imaginary sadists in the sky. That may be kind of fun if you're into it, but reality is what matters. In all its dirty unpalatability, in all its grim unbearable truth.

I sort of understand why so many people can't deal with reality and seek refuge in infantile fairy tales -- hell, I love weakness, it's maybe the single most important aspect of human consciousness, the thing that separates us from the animals -- but in this particular manifestation it makes me incredibly sad. Religion is an embrace of fuckwittery, a sickness of the mind spread from one to another not by accident or mischance but always in a deliberate campaign of psychological warfare. We wouldn't put up with this shit from commercial interests, and we vilify any individual whose behaviour, however accidentally, spreads biological disease, but somehow theistic indoctrination has special status and must be accorded undue respect.

And yes, by Zeus, by Odin's beard, in the names of the Morrigan and Coyote and Anansi, by Moses and Jesus and Mohammed and L. Ron fucking Hubbard, I know that religion is and always has been an important part of our various cultures, I know it has inspired beauty and occasionally even truth, I know it has been a source of great solace to innumerable peoples as they suffer at each other's hands, but that just locates it as exactly the opiate of the people that Karl Marx -- just another fucking messiah, as it turned out, provider of scriptural antigens to the susceptible population -- diagnosed. Accept it, respect it, understand it, yes. Grant it any kind of authority? No fucking way.

Hmm. Okay.

That went places I wasn't expecting. But it's not out of place. How about this example of parodic modern apologetics?

Isn't this fun? Where would we be without YouTube? There's so much of this stuff out there, just begging to be absorbed. But, since time is short, let's go back to the gospels:

Words to live by.]]> Read the comments

"I don't suppose this strip will ever see another plane."

"No. That was the last. Perhaps there are still a few flying somewhere, but why would they come here?"

"For the cuisine?"

"Ha fucking ha."

There was a pause.

"The old girl wasn't sounding her best."

"She'll make it. Plenty of mileage left in those engines."

"There hasn't been a sturdier chunk of airframe aloft since the thirties."

"The Aurora, maybe?"

"She was a good ship."

"Yes, but just a relic now."

"Aren't we all?"

"I know which I'd choose, anyway. Aurora couldn't take the Grace even in her prime."

"And she had it easy. None of this jungle crap."

"Maybe she has, since then. A lot could have happened in the last twenty years."

"A lot has happened. And that's just the shit we know about."

"We know about the Grace."

"That we do."

"She'll make it."

The dog howled quietly, and for a moment there was just a ghost of a flash in the sky, a shimmer so faint it could easily be taken for a trick of the imagination. No-one did take it as such, but they consoled themselves with other palatable explanations.

"Hush, Bessie. She'll make it."

"She has to."

They walked on. In the twilight it was impossible to see who spoke next, his voice an unidentifiable whisper.

"Do you think she saw us?"

But the question hung unanswered as they turned into the jungle and the shadows engulfed them; and finally someone rescued them all by asking:

"What's for dinner, then?"]]> Read the comments

Its purpose is to ease the process of electrolytically chloride-coating the silver electrode wire used in a patch clamp or SICM pipette. This is something that we've previously done with an ordinary 9V battery and some crocodile clips -- fiddly and annoying, certainly, but not a major ordeal. Turning it into a personal electronic engineering project was, let's say, unnecessary, but it gave me something to play with -- and I quite like having made my own little contribution to the lab's gadgetry. It's almost like being a proper scientist.

Despite its lack of motors, sensors and lethal laser weaponry, what I wound up making was, basically, a robot. Specifically, a BEAM robot. The timing is controlled by a grounded bicore with variable resistors on both parts of the duty cycle, and the outputs are switched by an H-bridge motor driver. I don't have a proper circuit diagram to hand -- it as all cobbled together out of sketches and breadboard prototypes -- but here's a schematic of the stripboard layout I eventually settled on:

For all its superfluity, it's a cute little gizmo and I had fun making it. And the chloriding process is definitely easier now. Those few minutes a fortnight will make all the difference, mark my words.]]> Read the comments

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