Saturday, March 28, 2009
Calling all ancient Greek sea monsters
Ahoy! The world's biggest dickbag has departed dry land and is now tweeting feverishly from the bounding main. A Carnival cruise ship was renamed the "Mayer Craft," thus ensuring that it is no longer worthy of the title "Fun Ship," and is slowly chugging its loathsome cargo from Long Beach, California to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. 
Yes, in yet another failed attempt at wit and humor, the Emperor of All Things Douchebaggy, John Mayer, donned his nautical-themed coochie cutters and welcomed his unfortunate fellow seamen aboard. When I die, this is what I expect Charon will look like as he prepares to ferry me across the river Styx to my eternal damnation: a dickless apparition born from an unholy alliance between old "Love Boat" episodes and any given roofie-slipping frathouse date rapist. Like the former, John Mayer isn't particularly amusing. Like the latter, he is obviously guilty of greatly exaggerating his manhood and thus suffers from a pathological need to overcompensate. I've been hearing all these rumors about how big John Mayer's wang is, and have been disputing them ever since. In these photos, I'm only seeing the slightest hint of knob, and SKINNY knob at that. Please believe that with a set of trunks like these, a veteran cock enthusiast such as myself could easily spot an impressive specimen from 50 nautical miles away. Thanks to his bulgeless short shorts, I am now confident that I am right about how NOT hung his bitch-ass is. John Mayer is, was, and ever shall be a golf pencil-rocking assclown. Trust.
John Mayer is busy turning a perfectly good cruise ship into the modern day equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, a harbinger of ill fate and maritime disaster, so the least I can do is hope that the innocent tourists aboard are put out of their misery before suffering through four days. As this isn't hurricane season, the only option seems to be a seafaring tragedy of mythological proportions to befall the Mayer Craft immediately. Since Scylla and Charybdis seem pretty content to stay put in the Strait of Messina, I'm thinking the Kraken is just the sea monster for the job. Hopefully, John Mayer will soon announce that his beauty surpasses that of the goddess Thetis, drawing her ire. Then she'll pester Poseidon to summon the Kraken, and since Perseus is busy being a constellation, there will be nobody to stop it from totally owning the Mayer Craft. Admittedly this plan is a little far-fetched, but hell...it worked in Clash of the Titans! And not only did that movie rule, but Thetis AKA Dame Maggie Smith is indeed hotter than John Mayer, so my hopes are high. With regard to Mr. Flat-Front Seaman Shorts here, the Kraken needs to get cracking.
[RAZZY Note: Yes, I know the Kraken is actually Scandinavian, and the correct Greek monster in the whole Perseus-Andromeda story is actually Cetus. I did read Edith Hamilton's Mythology like 50 fucking times. Clearly the people behind Clash of the Titans should have too. Either that, or they just decided that my Viking people had better sea monsters than those so-called "classical" Greeks. Either way, the movie still fucking rules, and John Mayer does not. The end.]
Labels: assholes, John Mayer sucks, nerd alert, ranting, seamen, small penises
Thursday, February 26, 2009
I WANT THAT COPY OF PoV!!!!!!
So my PI (boss/mentor) has this blog and podcast, which I was once a guest on in what a Razzyphile deemed "the geekiest thing ever." Yes, I am a huge nerd. This is not news.
Anyway, my PI is having a contest on his podcast that if you put up links to him and drive enough traffic his way, he'll give you a free copy of the third edition of Principles of Virology, his textbook. I only have the second edition and you might think that he would bless all the students in his lab with free copies of the new version. Not so...the book is over $100 a copy and he apparently doesn't get enough free copies from his publisher to be generous. So I've got to earn mine with webmastery. And since, as many of you regular Razzyphiles have noticed, I've been awfully remiss on the posting because I'm finishing up my dissertation frantically and getting ready to move to Seattle for a virology postdoc there. In addition to just wanting the newest, hottest edition of PoV, I'm actually going to need it.
I did double check with him that he wanted his considerably classier web ventures associated with a lowbrow site purporting to be the ultimate source of useless bullshit. He did explicitly state that he doesn't mind getting traffic from RAZZY.org, and in fact, I'm his second highest referrer after the American Society for Microbiology's website! I should think that fact right there should earn me one of these free copies of PoV, but just in case, I'm shamelessly plugging the AWESOME VIROLOGY BLOG and EVEN MORE AWESOME THIS WEEK IN VIROLOGY PODCAST here. I especially encourage those of you who like when I occasionally drop a little science on your asses to go. Neither are designed for a hardcore scientific audience, and my PI's writing/conversing style is engaging and easy to follow. Besides, my PI is basically a legend in the field, and you will definitely learn a great deal from him about the fascinating field of study I've chosen. Okay, I know I bitch about it all the time, but that's just because I've been in grad school forever. I actually think virology is really great and I am very glad to have chosen it as a career.
So GO READ THE VIROLOGY BLOG AND LISTEN TO TWiV!!!!
Labels: down with OPB (other people's blogs), epidemic geekery, nerd alert, science, viruses rule
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Twi-LAME
When I travel, I have a ritual that I almost always perform. I stop at the airport gift/book/junk food/drugstore, and purchase a trashy piece of reading material. This is the only time I allow myself to read crappy paperback bestselling works of fiction. I prefer books with murders, sex, and an utterly predictable mystery to solve, particularly the Mother Goose-inspired titles of James Patterson. I’ve also been known to indulge in some Stephen King and John Grisham from time to time. Sometimes this ritual works out well, and by “well” I mean I enjoy this guilty pleasure, I finish the book right around the time my flight is landing, leave it in the pocket of the seat in front of me with the SkyMall for the next passenger to enjoy, and immediately forget about whatever the cookie cutter plot was. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, such as the times that I’ve made the foolish mistake of reading anything by Dan Brown. When I read Angels and Demons, I was literally reminding myself that audibly cursing out a book on a plane surrounded by strangers is probably not a good idea, even if said book is as offensively retarded as Angels and Demons.
When I decided that, in spite of the A&D debacle, I was going to read The Da Vinci Code, it was even worse. I had some hippie computer programmer with a fucking ponytail hitting on me via incomprehensible jokes about coding in Perl and inviting me on sailing trips through the San Juans on one side, and The Da Vinci Code pissing me off with every poorly composed page in front of me. I was only reading The Da Vinci Code because so many people, including ones who normally don’t read these types of books, were talking about this shit like it was the best thing since the Bible, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As I read, I grew angrier and angrier that The Da Vinci Code, which I rated as the literary equivalent of a frost-bitten Lean Cuisine chicken cordon bleu , was something that a significant number of people had recommended to me as both mindblowingly awesome and educational. I was insulted that Dan Brown conned a lot of otherwise intelligent people into believing that a bland, patronizing, Grail Quest-flavored retelling of a Learning Annex art appreciation course is some sort of phenomenal contribution to the canon of great literature. I thought that after enduring The Da Vinci Code without either falling into some state of catatonia or murdering anyone, I had suffered enough. And then last month, I wandered into the Hudson News at JFK and purchased a book that made The Da Vinci Code look like War and Peace
That book, which may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, is called Twilight.
In case you aren’t a fat, ugly, bespectacled adolescent preteen girl and you didn’t notice hordes of the same swarming your local theater a few months back, you might not know about Twilight. It’s a Mormon vampire fantasy with legions of extremely dedicated tween girl fans. I normally don’t read books for children because I hate kids, and I normally avoid vampire stories, because I don’t care about what annoying goth fruitcakes get up to when they’re not exsanguinating random bitches. I assume shopping for crushed velvet frocks or appropriately spooky wine goblets for their decrepit old mansions and castles, listening to "Toccata and Fugue," and practicing their Transylvanian accents. However, several of my friends liked this trash, so I decided to give it a try. After all, I’d spoken derisively at length about Harry Potter, but after reading it became a serious HP nerd so dedicated that I cut in front of children at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble TWICE trying to get my copy of book 7 . Maybe I’d likewise be pleasantly surprised by Twilight. At least I expected that it would at worst be solid trashy plane reading.
WRONG. Twilight sucks. Actually, “sucks” isn’t strong enough. Twilight is so bad that the very word should be stricken from the English language. I’d be happy to exclusively say “dusk” just to ensure that nothing could remind me of the mind-numbingly horrific experience of reading this shitty fucking abomination of a novel. I think I would probably rather read The Notebook fifty times without stopping than Twilight once. I hate Twilight so much that I’m tempted to bring my copy into lab and destroy it with whatever kind of hardcore acid we have in our "Corrosives" cabinet. Actually, I’d like to piss on Twilight before burning it and destroying the ashes with acid. In fact, I think the actual paper the book is printed on is begging me to do so. The book is that fucking appallingly terrible.
For starters, the story’s narrator, the protagonist Bella, is the dumbest bitch I’ve ever encountered in the world of fiction, and that includes legendary dumb bitches like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Daisy looks like a damn rocket scientist next to this hooker. Bella spends the entire book pining away after Edward, her obnoxious vampire boyfriend. In fact, Bella seems to have no interest in anything whatsoever besides obsessing over Edward. Occasionally she takes a break from figuring out how to better craft her entire reason for living around her statuesque undead paramour to do some domestic chores around the house, but that's about it. What kind of a personality devoid loser does fucking dishes and laundry for fun when she's not devoting herself slavishly to some dumbass guy? Not any slag I would be rolling with. The minute Edward and all the other devastatingly sexy vampires roll onto the scene, I was hoping one of them would bite the fuck out of Bella and call it a day, because I was so sick of reading Bella's utterly idiotic musings like "there's no way this godlike creature could be meant for me", "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him," and (my favorite) "you're exactly my brand of heroin." Oh, bitch, please. Save it for some bad poetry in your diary and get a life, and that's real talk.
When I decided that, in spite of the A&D debacle, I was going to read The Da Vinci Code, it was even worse. I had some hippie computer programmer with a fucking ponytail hitting on me via incomprehensible jokes about coding in Perl and inviting me on sailing trips through the San Juans on one side, and The Da Vinci Code pissing me off with every poorly composed page in front of me. I was only reading The Da Vinci Code because so many people, including ones who normally don’t read these types of books, were talking about this shit like it was the best thing since the Bible, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As I read, I grew angrier and angrier that The Da Vinci Code, which I rated as the literary equivalent of a frost-bitten Lean Cuisine chicken cordon bleu , was something that a significant number of people had recommended to me as both mindblowingly awesome and educational. I was insulted that Dan Brown conned a lot of otherwise intelligent people into believing that a bland, patronizing, Grail Quest-flavored retelling of a Learning Annex art appreciation course is some sort of phenomenal contribution to the canon of great literature. I thought that after enduring The Da Vinci Code without either falling into some state of catatonia or murdering anyone, I had suffered enough. And then last month, I wandered into the Hudson News at JFK and purchased a book that made The Da Vinci Code look like War and Peace
That book, which may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, is called Twilight.
WRONG. Twilight sucks. Actually, “sucks” isn’t strong enough. Twilight is so bad that the very word should be stricken from the English language. I’d be happy to exclusively say “dusk” just to ensure that nothing could remind me of the mind-numbingly horrific experience of reading this shitty fucking abomination of a novel. I think I would probably rather read The Notebook fifty times without stopping than Twilight once. I hate Twilight so much that I’m tempted to bring my copy into lab and destroy it with whatever kind of hardcore acid we have in our "Corrosives" cabinet. Actually, I’d like to piss on Twilight before burning it and destroying the ashes with acid. In fact, I think the actual paper the book is printed on is begging me to do so. The book is that fucking appallingly terrible.
For starters, the story’s narrator, the protagonist Bella, is the dumbest bitch I’ve ever encountered in the world of fiction, and that includes legendary dumb bitches like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Daisy looks like a damn rocket scientist next to this hooker. Bella spends the entire book pining away after Edward, her obnoxious vampire boyfriend. In fact, Bella seems to have no interest in anything whatsoever besides obsessing over Edward. Occasionally she takes a break from figuring out how to better craft her entire reason for living around her statuesque undead paramour to do some domestic chores around the house, but that's about it. What kind of a personality devoid loser does fucking dishes and laundry for fun when she's not devoting herself slavishly to some dumbass guy? Not any slag I would be rolling with. The minute Edward and all the other devastatingly sexy vampires roll onto the scene, I was hoping one of them would bite the fuck out of Bella and call it a day, because I was so sick of reading Bella's utterly idiotic musings like "there's no way this godlike creature could be meant for me", "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him," and (my favorite) "you're exactly my brand of heroin." Oh, bitch, please. Save it for some bad poetry in your diary and get a life, and that's real talk.
The only sensible thing Bella does in the entire book is show disdain for Forks, Washington, where most of the action takes place. I have been to Forks on several occasions, and if given a choice between eternity there or in Hell, I'd strongly consider Hell. It's a tiny, piece of trash town with absolutely no redeeming qualities, which is apparently why domesticated (ie: non-people-eating) vampires like living there. There's not a lot of sun (which just causes the vampires to glitter like a bunch of really attractive disco balls, but it's apparently really obvious and distracting) and the place is populated exclusively with ignorant hicks, so it's clearly a great place for a clan of statuesque Volvo-driving (seriously) Mormon vampires to blend in. Just as a further indication of the type of people living in Forks, the teenagers in the book all take time out from their parents by cruising over to La Push. My family spent a couple summer vacations salmon fishing at this fetid shitshow of a Quileute reservation town, and those were the crappiest summer vacations ever. La Push was always cold, I invariably got seasick from being on the north Pacific in my uncle's 20-foot Bayliner, and the beach was covered with broken glass, because the kids in La Push do what every other bored-ass teenager from a crappy economically depressed town: drink cooking wine stolen from the coolers outside tourist fishermen's RVs and smash the bottles on the beach. This happened like four times before it occured to my aunt to keep her salmon poaching-grade chardonnay inside the trailer...and yes, note that we were the "rich," faincy out-of-towners and we were worried about losing four jugs of Gallo from outside the RV, which should give you an idea of how classy the denizens of La Push actually are. However, that's not the way the kids roll in Twilight. They go to the beach and there isn't a drop of liquor anywhere in sight. They build beach fires and look at tide pools. Those aren't the drunken Forksian/La Push hicks I remember. UNREALISTIC. FAIL, STEPHENIE MEYER, FAIL!
Apart from the lame setting and lead characters, Twilight may actually be one of the most poorly written, relentlessly cheesy novels I've ever read. Half the fucking book is this bitch Bella gushing about how incomparably gorgeous her vampire boyfriend is, and how she literally faints when he pecks her on the cheek. The rest is them exchanging lame dialogue while they smell each other because that's about as hot and heavy as they can get. Apparently, though he is a boring Volvo-driving vampire who only eats random wild animals, making out too passionately with Bella will cause him to lose control and eat her. Clumsy teenage boning is thus definitely out of the question. So instead they just snuggle and sniff each other and have lame exchanges like this:
I could feel his cool breath on my neck, feel his nose sliding along my jaw, inhaling."I thought you were desensitized.""Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet," he whispered. "You have a very floral smell, like lavender...or freesia," he noted. "It's mouthwatering."
Seriously, dumb vampire, that is not the smell of your fucking destiny. It's the smell of a $7.99 bottle of Bath and Body Works lotion. Get with the century, loser. And as long as Edward is learning about modern customs, he might read up on how the women of the present regard STALKING. This moron vampire actually tells stupid-ass Bella that he fucking hangs out in a tree and watches her sleep every night. Instead of being creeped out and ordering him the hell out of her life, Bella, again demonstrating her total and utter lack of any sense or intelligence whatsoever, thinks it's fucking cute and endearing after he assures her that she repeats an endless litany of "Edward" in her sleep. Then again, I would expect no less from a bitch so completely clueless she refers to NyQuil as "gratuitous drug use" and thinks exchanging body odor with her man is hot. Granted, I like a man to be on top of his hygiene and smell nice, but at the end of the day I want a dude who I can blow without him either whining about how dangerous he is or trying to exsanguinate me. That's something Edward can fucking work on, and it shouldn't be THAT hard if he's so "godlike."
I could probably rage on about this abortion of a novel for hours, but I have to get back to work on my thesis, and frankly, I'm not sure the internets are big enough to contain all my anti-Twilight hatred. I'll just try to work on getting my breathing and heart rate under control, and leave you with a reminder that all the bitches who love this trash look like this:
Before you start criticizing me for knocking on these children, let me remind you all that I am a huge nerd. I can tell you that Gandalf's sword is named Glamdring. I know Hermione Granger's middle name. I can tell you who Cthulhu is and that in his house of R'lyeh he waits dreaming. And I've been remiss with the posts lately because I'm on the home stretch doctorate in science. My nerdiness is well-established, and is in fact my profession. However, I am like the fucking captain of the cheerleading squad in comparison to these fugly, custom-shirt-crafting losers. Even when I was a poetry-writing, morbidly depressed, Sylvia Plath-reading baby dyke wearing hideous Eddie Bauer fleece pullovers and ill-fitting Salvation Army khakis I was like a prom queen compared to these bitches in terms of our respective spots on the social hierarchy. These are the bottom of the high school barrel. These are the kids who lettered in band and got jackets made anyway. They were the kids who you thought you would rather be stretched on the rack than kiss. The ones who had bad skin and smelled weird and still wore stirrup stretch pants long after the early 90s were over. They are the ones who read Twilight. Don't be one of them! Leave sexless Mormon vampire romance novels on the shelf (or better yet, the garbage can) where they belong!
Labels: destroy all children, epic geekery, librophilia, nerd alert, pro-apocalyptic zeitgeist, ranting, retard rage, scathing indictments
Sunday, January 25, 2009
My byline will never be as good
Since I've spent the last four days pulling 10 to 14 hour days in lab frantically trying to get as many experiments done as possible before my thesis defense (and, essentially, graduation) in April, I haven't had much time for anything non-scientific. I got the postdoc I interviewed for, so I'm going to be moving cross-country shortly after my defense and I won't have much time to finish up any lingering last minute experiments. Therefore, I've been practically living in lab.
In the course of my work, I've been up to my tits in scientific literature trying to finish the discussion section of my two papers. Today I was reviewing a paper which I know only too well, since J-Sexy e-mailed me an article a year ago from the BBC in which this English asthma expert was claiming to have developed a mouse model of rhinovirus infection. As that is what I have been slaving away trying to do for the last five and a half years, this was deeply upsetting to me. Add to it that the paper was published in a goddamn Nature journal! For those of you who very wisely chose a career outside science, Nature, Science, and Cell are probably the best journals you can get published in. This paper wasn't in Nature proper, but it was still in Nature Medicine, which is definitely a respectable publication.
After freaking out for a while, I realized that the paper actually leaves a lot to be desired for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with. I also took comfort in the fact that this paper has a zillion authors. Apparently it took a village to produce a model that barely produces any measurable infectious virus. It's hard to beat twenty-some authors from four collaborating labs on your own in terms of sheer productive output, so I can't beat myself up too much for getting scooped. Besides, I've developed my model and it's sufficiently different (and better) that I can still publish in a quality journal.
Anyway, I've read and re-read this paper so that I can do some studies to compare my model with theirs, and also so I can do some different studies and include some new information in my paper. Today I was reading it yet again and making snotty comments to myself in my head about their experimental methods. When I got bored of thinking things like "no DUH virus production is going to be statistically significant if you're comparing it to UV-inactivated virus that DOESN'T REPLICATE AND ISN'T INFECTIOUS," I idly flipped to the front of the paper and for the first time noticed the names of some of these authors.
While I believe my model is superior in terms of actually mimicking human rhinovirus pathogenesis in a mouse, I know that inevitably their byline is going to be better, and not just because it has a big Nature Medicine logo on it.
It's like this paper was authored by a cadre of gay porn stars. My name is nowhere near as awesome as "Bruno Guy," "Alberto Papi," or (my personal favorite, the obvious power bottom) "Dallas M. Swallow." Are these even real names? I'm imagining these dudes finishing up an ELISA for Th2 cytokines in BAL fluid, then traipsing over to the set of Bareback Mechanic Fuckers 4. I hope that my paper is regarded scientifically as an improvement over this model, but there's no way that unless I use a stage name my byline will be more entertaining than one featuring the name Dallas M. Swallow. In this area, this group will always be superior.
RAZZY EDIT: Oops. I just Googled Dallas Swallow, and it turns out Dr. Swallow is in fact a woman, and her expertise is mucin expression. "Gel-forming mucin" is a fancy way of saying "snot." So...now that I know Dr. Swallow is a respected mucus geneticist, well, I'm still laughing. I have the maturity of a ten-year-old boy. It's like when my mom starts talking about the goings on in the world of ultrasound and mentions "Siemens." HA-I'm actually snickering thinking about that now. I should grow up.
Labels: epidemic geekery, grad school bullshit, nerd alert, science, viruses rule
Friday, October 31, 2008
Horrible movies
I like horror movies a lot. I'm into tits, violence, and nerdy shit, and horror movies usually have at least two out of those three key elements. Thus, I've been very happy about the proliferation of horror movies on the old idiot box leading up to Halloween. Unfortunately, with horror movies being on constantly for a month, channels like AMC run out of decent ones and have to resort to digging through the $0.99 DVD bin to fill up the time. In the course of watching craptastic shitshows like The Rage: Carrie 2 and Hellraiser: Inferno, I've learned a few things about horror movies that are SO fucking bad, they're not even unintentionally funny.
John Carpenter's _________ often=ASS
If a movie title begins with "John Carpenter's" ANYTHING and it doesn't involve Kurt Russell, there is a very good chance that it will suck cheesy balls. Have you ever been unfortunate enough to sit through John Carpenter's Vampires? It involved James Woods being an annoying, leathery old lech while one of the lesser Baldwin brothers banged Laura Palmer from "Twin Peaks" in the midst of some lame ancient-vampire-rising-and-we-have-to-stop-it plot. One time my buddy and fellow horror enthusiast and I spent a solid two hours watching John Carpenter's Shameless Creepshow Knockoff Body Bags and shouting obscenities and derisive jokes at the television. Then we got really, really high to erase our memory of the experience. John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness is only good because the protagonists are a bunch of grad students at the "University of Science" who inexplicably get charged with transcribing scientastic equation-looking gibberish emanating from a big jar of Satan that some priests were keeping in their basement. And don't get me started on the time I endured the audiovisual abortion known as John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, which was like the unholy child of Total Recall and a body modification conference sponsored by Hot Topic. Not even the combination of O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson, Pam Grier, and hot-ass Natasha Henstridge could salvage a mere second of that appalling shitshow. However, I was excited to see that the woman who plays Arnie's mom in John Carpenter's Christine is the same actress who played Steve Sanders's lesbian primetime drama TV mom Samantha in "Beverly Hills, 90210," which was an excellent non-Kurt Russell casting choice in my opinion. Not coincidentally, this is also one of the few decent Kurt Russell-free films John Carpenter has made.
Rabies does not make you want to drink human blood
David Cronenberg really should have hit the books harder in his microbiology class. That dude's understanding of rabies virus, parasitology, and infectious disease in general is lacking. Maybe science education in Canada is even crappier than here in the United States of Asskickery.
Go back to Hell, you overpierced losers
Hellraiser movies do not scare me at all. Seriously, you solve a fucking Rubik's cube and open a dimensional portal that lets in a bunch of piercing enthusiasts who look like they just knocked a few back at a S&M leather bar? I would leave that dumb Puzzle Box alone just to keep the pasty PVC-wearing Pinhead set from showing up to piss me off with their crappy style.
STFU, ROB ZOMBIE!
Robert Barlett "Rob Zombie" Cummings (snicker) is probably the most irritating horror movie personality ever. Not only is he constantly accompanied by his vapid skank of a wife, he has this smug attitude that makes me want to gag him with his own unshorn stank dreadlocks. Suffering through even a minute of Sheri Moon Zombie's giggling, monosyllabic critical analysis of the movie Willard is bad enough, but I would rather be trapped in an abandoned knife factory with Michael Myers than topping that off watching Rob Zombie congratulate himself for his fanboy-turned-auteur genius at ruining (John Carpenter's) Halloween. I had enough when Rob Zombie made his first movie House of 1,000 Corpses (which by my count was around 989 corpses short of the body count advertised), a film that amounted to a ninety minute White Zombie video retelling of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Since then, I've had to suffer Rob Zombie shooting off his mouth like he's the next Wes Craven every time he gets to go on camera. If he wants to do something really useful, he could put a sock in it and go get a fucking haircut.
What's really scary? The Oxygen network
I have seen the most horrifying thing on television, and it wasn't even a scary movie. I made the mistake of switching to an episode of "Coolio's Rules," and there is definitely something to be said concerning the adage about curiosity being potentially fatal. Shudder.
So is the E! channel
As long as I'm talking about not-intentionally-scary-but-actually-terrifying pop culture trends, if you're looking for a homicide spree trigger, I highly recommend watching the episode of "The Girls Next Door" where Girl Next Door #2 Bridget plans a "haunted murder mystery" party.
Die, Mac dude, DIE!
Every time I watch Jeepers Creepers, I just pray for the imminent consumption of the douchebag Drew Barrymore-fucking Vassar dropout Justin Long guy who plays the Mac in all Apple commercials. Sadly, this doesn't happen until the very end of the movie. Sorry if I just ruined Jeepers Creepers for those of you who haven't seen this exercise in cinematic assfuckery, but don't worry: the ending is actually more horrifying than just the eye-explanting demise of the Mac dude. After ninety minutes of being a complete dumbass who will not cease with alternate juvenile sibling bickering and obnoxious attempts at collegiate wit coupled with repeated STUPID fucking attempts to get killed (ie: sliding down the pipe which acts as a monster body dump conduit out of a misguided desire to play Hardy Boys), this asshole's shrewish harpy of a sister doesn't get killed as well.
Late sequels are crap
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is quite possibly one of the stupidest fucking movies I've ever seen. Seriously, the premise of the film is that the world's hottest foster kid psychiatrist, who happens to be Freddy Krueger's long-lost daughter, decides that it will be beneficial for her psychotic sleep-deprived patient to take a vanload of ragtag misfits back to Elm Street for a nice visit. Once there, they find the creepiest, most cockroach-and-smoking-clown-infested local fair in the history of small town horror movies. The genius visitors observe that conditions are so grim because there aren't any kids around (which sounds like paradise to me, except for the fact that Roseanne and Tom Arnold make a hilarious cameo to explain that this is on account of Freddy, who takes time out of his child-murdering schedule to chalk self-portraits on the town sidewalks.) After a lot of retarded wandering around through the world's lamest high school class/pathetic attempt at bringing whatever sorry fools somehow saw this movie who somehow didn't know the premise ("Freddy 101") and Freddy fucking around with people's demonic dream hearing aids until their heads explode, playing an evil variation of Pitfall on a satanic Atari, and blasting Iron Butterfly simply to provide a context for clumsy peri-homicidal puncraft, these geniuses figure out that the solution is to bust out some dream kung fu on Freddy's ass, which the street kids are luckily proficient in. The main thing we learn from this movie besides "don't go to sleep if you happen to be somehow related to either Freddy or his fucked-up hometown" is that after many sequels, most horror franchises really do need to go the way of the main villain's victims. When Freddy has to resort to terrorizing people with gigantic maps that say "you're fucked," it's time to hang up the knife-fingered glove, get some skin grafts, take up shuffleboard, and hopefully invest in a new sweater. This one is right up there with Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, in which Jason actually spends most of the movie murdering retarded horny teenagers on a Circle Line cruise rather than anywhere on the fair isle where I reside, in terms of bullshit unintentionally hilarious movie premises.
Mommy issues don't scare me
Ed Gein is only good when you listen to his scary mom say "you'll be nothin' but a blubberin' pantywaist for the RESTA YER LIFE!" or "KILL THE EVIL-TALKER, BOYYYYYYYYY!" and watch flashbacks of her whipping him for reading sexually suggestive comic books in the bathroom. Otherwise, I'm just reminded of how not-scary mama's boy slashers (in other words, 99.99999% of them) are. Frankly, in the original, Jason's MOM was fucking scary. However, once Pamela Voorhees passed the machete she was decapitated by on to her undead son, Jason himself was pretty lame, slow, and lucky to have the dumbest bitches imaginable to easily dispatch. His only stroke of genius or style was his adoption of the hockey mask, but in every other respect Jason completely sucks. I could probably outrun his slow ass, if I were stupid enough to take a job as a summer camp counselor at Crystal Lake in the first place. Given the high (100%) unrepentant slut murder rate there, I imagine that even as an inexperienced and annoying teenager I would probably look elsewhere for employment. Ed Gein's irritatingly cliched control freak of an evangelical Christian mother doesn't hold a candle to Pamela Voorhees. For that matter, Ed Gein doesn't hold a chainsaw to the mama's boy horror villain based on himself. Leatherface hung screaming bitches on meathooks while wearing a patchwork mask of human skin. Ed Gein just shot a bitch after talking to himself a lot, drove her to his house while she feebly slapped at him, acted creepy while she slowly died of sepsis from the non-fatal gunshot wound, and then made some ladies' accessories and a titty vest with her fatass carcass. God, what a fucking pussy. Not scared of you, loser. NEXT!
Pelicula de terror
Halloween Seis: La Maladición de Michael Myers is not nearly as scary as Halloween VI: The Revenge of Michael Myers. "Esta la casa de Michael Myers, es verdad? Serio." This does not keep me up at night, although now that I think about it, it didn't keep me up at night when I saw it in English, either.
Good thing it's Halloween, and as of tomorrow, I'll be back on the football and not throwing stuff at whatever idiotic trash AMC is showing. Happy Halloween, fools!
Labels: movies, nerd alert, retard rage, spooktiness, TV
Friday, October 03, 2008
And in other science media news...
I've noticed that on some completely non-science websites (like fucking GAWKER!), snarky bloggers noticed this week's front and back covers of Nature and are questioning whether or not this Sigma-Aldrich ad with the yellow and chocolate Labrador retrievers isn't just a little TOO similar to the front cover with McCain and Obama to not be racist.
I doubt there was any intentional racism at work, since Sigma has been bombarding me with leaflets of this very ad at work and were probably just continuing their marketing blitzkrieg on the print edition of Nature. In fact, we just got a bunch of chemicals from Sigma the other day in lab, and the box contained a stack of crap talking about the unique forensic properties of dogs' nose prints. Somehow this is supposed to make me want to buy oligos from Sigma. What it does in actuality is make me say "awww, cute dogs" for about two seconds, then say, "FUCK SIGMA AND THEIR SHITTY-ASS OLIGOS!"
Oligos, also known as oligonucleotides or primers, are little snippets of DNA we use in PCR reactions. PCR is basically a technique for photocopying specific stretches of DNA, and that specificity is conferred by the oligos you use. I think that's Sigma's point about the dogs...their primers are as unique as a dog's nose print. Too bad Sigma takes forever to synthesize their primers and half the time they mail you the wrong ones! We used to use Sigma primers in my lab, until we realized that they charge way too much, fuck up orders all the time, and don't synthesize or ship them in a timely manner. I'm way less offended by the perception of accidental racism than the notion that cute dogs and their cute noses should be exploited to whore out Sigma's inferior-ass primer business. Cute dogs never make me wait two weeks on doing some PCR I need because they haven't gotten around to doing quality control on my dumb oligos.
Labels: grad school bullshit, media whores, nerd alert, science
Science says that dissent over descent is dumb
I was just catching up on this week's scintillating issue of Science, and was surprised to see that the editors have obviously been keeping up on this week's debate on creationism versus evolution here on the RAZZY.org comment pages. While I'm hardly surprised that the obviously smart person who puts together the "Books et al" section of Science reads my website, I was a little shocked to see that they selected a book review to contribute to the debate.
The reviewer, Michael Ruse, doesn't think much of philosophy professor Steve Fuller's support of the intelligent design theory, either as an expert witness supporting its relevance in a Pennsylvania classroom or as a competent philosopher. This is probably not surprising, considering this review is published in America's most highly regarded science publication, which also happens to be called Science. However, Ruse nails exactly what those of us in the scientific community reject about intelligent design as a viable, reasonably sound theory on the origin of life. Specifically, after you strip away all the scientastic lingo intended to discredit Darwin's reasoning and give some sort of scientific credibility to Biblical accounts of the origin of the species, you're stuck with something that is based on faith and religious conviction rather than experimental evidence. Ruse scathingly notes:
Intelligent design theory is a form of Christianity made up to look like science. The judge correctly ruled that it has no place in science classrooms. Reading Dissent over Descent should not change anyone's verdict. As a historian and philosopher of science, I can only hope that the science community does not judge us all by Fuller's example.
Well said, Michael Ruse. Could you please get on my comment boards and start explaining this?
Oh, and is anyone besides me disappointed that last night during the VP debate Gwen Ifill didn't ask Sarah Palin if she really believes that Adam and Eve coexisted with the dinosaurs, and those dinosaurs weren't so much "dinosaurs" as mythic dragons? I wanted to see Joe Biden grimace smugly as she tried to tackle that question with Joe Six-Pack in mind. Missed opportunity, Gwen Ifill!
Labels: Dear God, nerd alert, scathing indictments, science
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The Razzy.org monkey trial
When I wrote this past weekend's post about my planned Sarah Palin Halloween costume, I didn't expect to get that many comments, if any at all. Who really cares what my Halloween costume is beyond a couple "oh, ha ha, you're pretending that gross dog of yours is a baby with Downs syndrome" quips? Therefore, I was surprised when the comment section blew up with readers hotly debating the merits of evolution versus creationism. The back-and-forth is getting a little heated, so I figured it was high time I stepped into the fray. Besides, if you want to know about evolution from the top down, there's nobody better to ask than me. I'm one of the most highly evolved human beings the world has ever seen. This is true, and you'll find diagrams like the one below in most reputable biology textbooks. Look it up!
The comment that started all this was by the ever-wily "anonymous." Actually, it was a couple of anonymous comments, the first one suggesting that I shouldn't be so happy about voting for McCain because he's a dick and because he represents "extremists who want to ban books and teach creationism in public schools." This baited some anonymous creationist, who responded with the spark that ignited the powder keg:
Why is teaching creationism extremist? It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation.
My buddy Morrissey'sHair vehemently disagreed with this, and proceeded to set it off with some of his patented comment page bitchery. Some other people got in on the action, and I have to say I can't blame them. The above comment makes no sense whatsoever to me, along with some of the quips this person has since posted, such as "I beleive [sic] there is more evidence for a Creator (not throwing religion around here) than there is for the evolution 'theory'" and "there is more proof for creation than evolution."
Before I get into why I think the theory of evolution is correct, however, I would like to note that I am also a creationist. I believe in God, and that this God created the heaven and the earth and the birds and the bees and all that trash. However, I don't believe that God did all this in 6 24-hour days and then took a day off exactly as described in the Book of Genesis. I am well aware that the Bible (or any other account of divine creation from other faiths) is not intended as a scientific text, and that the whole Adam and Eve business is a myth to explain a religious truth (God's omnipotence and creative power) rather than an accurate account of how the whole creation business went down. For this reason, I have never found my creationist beliefs as a Catholic to contradict my understanding of evolution as a fundamental principle of biology as a professional scientist. Belief in God is inherently a matter of faith, since God wouldn't be God if you could prove his existence or otherwise understand him by our imperfect human means. Therefore, if you believe in God, you can't prove anything about what he gets up to, and you'd be an ignorant moron to try and take some four millenia-old Hebrew mythology and try to spin it as credible evidence capable of proving or disproving any scientific theory. Creationism is an inherently unprovable belief, while the science that yielded the theory of evolution is a method for answering questions through experimentation and reason. Because reason and faith operate within different realms, I have never thought that creationism contradicted or disputed evolution, and I do not think they should even be discussed in the same conversation.
That said, the unfortunate proliferation of slow-witted, excessively religious idiots in this country have somehow convinced everyone that creationism, despite being entirely rooted in faith (which is by definition irrational), is a scientifically legitimate alternative theory to evolution. I don't care what faith your creation narrative of choice is based on; believing in a divine creator just because it suits your individual spiritual beliefs is a theory which cannot be proven or even tested experimentally, and thus has no business in a debate about biology in the first place. I think that the creationist movement has illustrated this by going out of their way to give "creationism" the trappings of science. I don't care if it's called "intelligent design;" if it's based on the notion that God is somehow involved, it's not scientific and has no business being described as such, much less taught in science classes. If you're going to teach "creationism" as legitimate science, then how do you even decide which creation story to go with? Who is to say there is any more proof backing the Judeo-Christian version of things than that earth was a chick named Gaia who banged a sky-dude named Uranus and begat the Titans? The fact is that the only "proof" behind any tale of divine creation is the conviction of the faithful who subscribe to that particular mythology and their selectively chosen claims about pseudoscientific instances of evolution being contradicted that only serve to illustrate their ignorance of biology.
I've noticed that the creationist crew likes to point out that evolution is a "theory," not a fact, and has busted out with a bunch of supposed "evidence" about how evolution contradicts nature. For example, evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For those of you who are rusty on your high school chemistry, let me remind you that this is also known as the law of entropy, or the notion that all ordered systems proceed toward disorder. The creationists argue that since Darwinism mandates beings evolving to a "higher" or "better" state of being, this can't be consistent with our understanding of entropy. However, this argument ignores the molecular basis for evolution, which is genetic mutation. As a commenter correctly pointed out, this is a random process, both in terms of how mutation is generated and the environmental conditions that lead to specific mutations being selected. Now that we have the technology available to sequence and apply bioinformatics to entire genomes, we can trace specific genetic changes between evolutionary relatives. For example, we can use sophisticated analytical techniques to mine sequence data and determine roughly when the human lineage diverged from the common ancestor we share with our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee. Suggesting that evolution has a "goal" to somehow result in a "higher" or "better" being demonstrates nothing save ignorance about the molecular basis of life. But just in case it isn't enough to point out that the old "second law of thermodynamics" attempt at disproving evolution is a bust, I should point out that a proper application of scientific fundamentals also negates creationism. The laws of conservation of mass and energy essentially demonstrate that something (whether matter or energy, and life certainly constitutes BOTH) cannot be created from nothing, which is inconveniently THE essential feature of any creationist hypothesis. I suppose it is convenient supporting a theory that allows the most fundamental principles of any branch of science to be violated due to the presence of an omnipotent God.
Another pseudoscientific argument I expected to come up in this debate is the issue of "microevolution," and sure enough, I was not disappointed. The concept of "microevolution" has been developed by the so-called "intelligent design" community to discount experimental data supporting evolution. Microevolution is the notion that changes occur at or below the species level (such as phenotypic differences in dog breeds or pathogenic bacteria evolving drug resistance due to antibiotic overuse), but not at a larger level (such as dinosaurs evolving into modern-day birds). The only difference is the time scale, as over millions versus thousands of years, organisms accumulate more and more mutations distinguishing them from their evolutionary progenitors. I suspect what the creationists like to call "macroevolution"–or distinction at higher taxonomic levels–will be proven eventually. The only difference between genetic variations distinguishing an eagle from a hawk compared to those distinguishing a velociraptor from any extant bird are the cumulation of many mutations over time. Unfortunately, we can't extract high-quality DNA from dinosaurs to prove they are the "macro"-evolutionary ancestors of birds with existing technology. As soon as we do have that technology, I expect that the fossil record will be linked by molecular means rather than the simple linking of common phenotypic traits. I find the evidence of "microevolution" extremely convincing that ALL evolution proceeds in this manner from personal experience.
I work on RNA viruses, which are probably the fastest-evolving almost-organisms known to science (viruses are "almost-organisms" since they are not technically alive, as they can't reproduce without a host cell). RNA viruses have an incredibly high mutation rate, because the enzymes that copy their genomes have an incredibly high error rate. These enzymes, known as RNA polymerases, make an error in replicating genomes 10 times more frequently than DNA polymerases. Also, unlike DNA polymerases, they don't have reliable proofreading capabilities. Also, RNA viruses can reproduce in 6-12 hours, meaning that between their rapid generation time and high mutation rate, they can "evolve" right in your lab incubator. If I want to make a rhinovirus that grows well in mouse cells, for example, I can just culture rhinovirus in mouse cells over and over again. Eventually I will select variants which are adapted to growth in mouse cells, and in fact, I have...that's the basis of my entire doctoral thesis. The intelligent design people can call this, as well as similar variant selection strategies for bacteria and other rapidly dividing microbes, "microevolution" to dismiss it as an actual example supporting Darwin's theory. However, this is no different than evolution of larger organisms over longer periods of time. We can never see humans evolve into different species because our generation time spans decades rather than hours, and we are complex multicellular organisms that need to accumulate more mutations to display an obvious phenotype, much less one significant enough to be considered a divergent species. However, it happens the same way for humans, dinosaurs, whales, and anything else with a genome made of nucleic acids that it does with RNA viruses. I don't see how any reasonable, intelligent person can say that maybe "evolution" in the form of genotypic mutations resulting in the selection of particular phenotypic variants more adapted to growth in their environmental conditions occurs only in the microbial world, but every other living thing on earth was created on days 4-6 of the Genesis narrative.
I doubt that I've convinced anyone on the merits of the "theory" of evolution who was already determined that creationism is more reasonable, more probable, or less extremist. In fact, as I've been working on this post, the debate has raged on and culminated in the creationist implying that all the evolutionists are going to Hell. While that's not explicitly stated, I certainly know a veiled burn-in-Hell threat when I see one:
Oh course there's really only one way to test this theory, and we ALL will test it one day, die. Of course if I'm wrong, what's my loss, I'm dead. If you're wrong well...You better be 100% sure you're right, you have much more to lose than I do.
One thing I am 100% sure about is that our death and ascension to the afterlife is a pretty shitty test of which theory is right. I have no idea whether or not anyone gets filled in on how God rolls with running the life game once they die. Furthermore, I have a hard time believing that using what I consider our God-given reason to accept a theory that has been extensively proven by a number of experiments and observations is something meriting eternal damnation. For one thing, as I said before, I am a creationist who ALSO fully subscribes to the theory of evolution. Evolution doesn't exclude divine creation; it just excludes the six day creation theory. In fact, the more I know about evolution, the more impressed I am at how brilliant God's creation actually is. If anything, I think evolution supports the existence of God more than excludes or denies it, so I hardly think it's something worthy of a neverending trip to perdition. Of course, in my case, this is probably a moot point since St. Peter's just going to take a gander at my file and send me straight to the "Down" escalator, but I doubt it's going to be because I think evolution is a valid and convincing explanation for the wonders of the living world. That's one thing I have a certain measure of faith in.
Labels: Dear God, nerd alert, Razzyphiles, retard rage, science
Sunday, September 14, 2008
This is what happens when you care too much about Fantasy Football
Last night, I had what should have been a positively lovely night. I went out on a really nice date with a really nice guy (and I must be growing up or something, because I actually seem to enjoy doing this now instead of just getting drunk, screwing someone, and tossing them unceremoniously out of my bed before they can bitch about what a bad housekeeper I am). Then I totally did it like what and went to sleep.
While I should have slept heavily and dreamed of sweet things like puppies and pepperoni pizza and beer, instead I woke up several hours after drifting off in a clammy sweat. I dreamed that my Fantasy roster was all screwed up, and that somehow Bobby Engram got dropped off my injured reserve slot and now I was going to have to battle for him all over again on the waiver wire with the other forward thinking owners in my league, and that LT had inexplicably moved to someone else's team, and all my quarterbacks save Joe Flacco had vanished into thin air. Forget about David Garrard and Derek Anderson, even Tarvaris Jackson was gone from my roster? WHAT THE HELL!
Needless to say, upon waking I immediately grabbed my laptop and checked to make sure that this was indeed a bad dream, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Still, what the hell is the matter with me that instead of dreaming of pleasant thoughts like "I just got a proper dicking" and "I'm satisfied and happy" or "Sigghhhhhhh," I'm having nightmares about my Fantasy team. I need to get a life.
Labels: Fantasia, nerd alert, NFL football
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Anthrax ROCKS
I received the following e-mail from a Razzyphile the other day:
Hey, Razzy
Thank you for the useless bullshit. You are definitely fulfilling a societal need.
I was hoping you could post about the anthrax dude who recently killed himself. You are an expert in the field and we razzyphiles would like to hear from you anything germane to our greater understanding of the entire incident.
PS great rack
I'm a recent law school grad but not admitted so I can't help legally yet.
I am always happy to accommodate requests to drop some science for an interested Razzyphile, particularly one who simultaneously compliments my tits, declares the demand for useless bullshit a "societal need," and might be able to potentially join my crack pro bono legal team of criminal defense and bankruptcy attorneys once he passes the bar exam. I'm also always especially happy to discuss this sexy Gram-positive spore-forming facultative anaerobe:
I've had a real scientific hard-on for Bacillus anthracis since I started studying microbiology. By all accounts, it's a hardy little survivor, which is what makes it a successful pathogen and a relatively efficient biological weapon. The above picture (which looks like a colored transmission electron micrograph) depicts B. anthracis in a state called vegetative growth, which is the type of growth most people imagine bacteria do in an Erlenmeyer flask or a petri dish of culture media. They divide by binary fission until they run out of nutrients or growth conditions become otherwise unfavorable. Most bacteria, like E. coli or Salmonella species, will proceed to die or at least stop dividing under conditions of nutrient deprivation, but B. anthracis can do something special. It can sporulate, meaning it changes into a dormant spore form, until it is again exposed to more favorable growth conditions. This is equivalent to watching TV and taking a nap on the couch when nothing good is on, to conserve your strength and attention for when something awesome like "I Love Money" or a rerun of Red Dawn merits waking up.
B. anthracis spores are extremely durable and can remain viable for decades in the soil, which is why livestock are most often afflicted with anthrax. The spores get from the earth into grazing animals' hair and basically hang out there. If they get into vulnerable areas of skin (via a cut or a mucosal surface like the eye), they germinate, and result in cutaneous anthrax. Generally the humans that get this are farmers, herders, slaughterhouse employees, and other people working with livestock. In both animals and humans, cutaneous anthrax presents as an ulcerating lesion that is usually pretty gross, but usually treatable with antibiotics and not fatal.
It's much more serious when the spores are inhaled and germinate in the lungs. Prior to the Cold War era of state-sponsored bioweapons programs, pulmonary anthrax was known as "Woolsorter's Disease," because it typically affected people who worked in places where animal hides were processed and resulted in high concentrations of airborne spores. However, when World War II came around, a number of countries (including the great U.S. of A., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) decided to test the feasibility of using aerosolized anthrax spores as a biological weapon. They are naturally a great bioweapon because not only are the spores incredibly hardy, but pulmonary anthrax is not transmissible from person-to-person. Therefore, you can target an enemy efficiently without worrying about causing an epidemic. However, nobody ever used anthrax as a weapon in an actual war, partly because of the lasting effects. Gruinard Island, off the Scottish coast, was used by British scientists to test their anthrax bombs in the hopes of using them against Germany. They stopped developing anthrax as a weapon when they concluded that, while effective at killing their test sheep, the spores were so durable that they would render any German city attacked this way uninhabitable for years afterward. In fact, Gruinard Island was so heavily contaminated that it was quarantined for almost 50 years after these tests, until the Brits got sick of going back to test it all the time and bombed the whole place with 280 metric tons of formaldehyde.
The major world powers then signed a treaty in 1972 pledging not to develop new biological or chemical weapons. Apart from an incident in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk in 1979 when a number of factory workers across the street from a "vaccine plant" died from pulmonary anthrax (the Kremlin attributed the incident to contaminated meat, while Soviet defectors involved in the Soviet bioweapons program attributed it to a filter being left off an exhaust vent), no government has openly developed anthrax as a biological weapon. However, anthrax is still studied from both a basic research and a biodefense perspective, and there are certainly cultures of highly virulent B. anthracis growing in many research facilities all over the world.
For anyone with a basic knowledge of microbiological technique, weaponized anthrax is easy to make. In fact, if you can make homebrewed beer, you can make an anthrax weapon. Anthrax is not like Ebola virus, which is hard to get, harder to culture, and almost impossible to deliver to the intended targets. If you wanted to attack someone with Ebola, you'd have to go to Africa in the midst of an Ebola outbreak, somehow smuggle viable samples of virus through customs (and "samples" in this case would probably consist of bloody vomit or shit from an Ebola patient on ice), find a bunch of monkeys to covertly infect to grow more virus, and try to attack and inject infected tissues from these monkeys into my unfortunate victims since most strains of Ebola (at least the ones that infect humans) don't appear to be airborne. Since Ebola is a virus, it needs a host cell to grow in, and the virus particles alone are not stable for long at room temperature or when exposed to UV radiation (ie: sunlight). You can't just make some powdered Ebola and spray it all over people, and someone is bound to notice if you're running around attacking people with a syringe. There's about fifty ways that such a scheme would fail, and even if you somehow did manage to make some homegrown Ebola, it would be pretty fucking difficult to infect many people before your evil plot was discovered.
Anthrax is much easier to make. I could go dig up soil from a cow pasture in Oklahoma, culture anthrax bacilli from that, grow them in a fermentation tank which can be constructed from materials at my local hardware store, dry the culture, chop it into powder, and mail it to whoever I wanted. Even worse, pulmonary anthrax is usually deadly, because the initial symptoms aren't much different than a chest cold. Unlike other bacteria that cause pneumonia by growing to the point of taking over the lungs, pulmonary anthrax causes respiratory failure via a toxin the bacteria secrete. By the time it becomes apparent that a patient has pulmonary anthrax versus a more common respiratory pathogen, even getting rid of the bacteria with antibiotics doesn't get rid of the toxin, and then it's usually too late. Therefore, it's quite easy for someone with a rudimentary knowledge of microbiology to make a deadly, easily transportable terrorist weapon. Fortunately, most scientists (including myself) aren't looking to break into the bioterrorism business, and have serious ethical problems with biological weapons. Unfortunately, there are some who do not fit that description, which is where the recently suicide-d Dr. Bruce Ivins comes in.
In the wake of those anthrax mail attacks in 2001, the federal government obviously put a lot of effort into determining where that anthrax came from. Like people or any other living organism, anthrax from a lab is genetically distinct from anthrax in a podunk cow pasture somewhere, so the government was able to determine that it came from a virulent lab strain. In fact, it came from a strain that our own government uses to develop anthrax vaccines. That's why the government fucked up royally by running a colossally inept investigation of Dr. Steven Hatfill, the wrong anthrax scientist, who just collected a $5 million settlement from the federal government for the ruin it wrought on his career and his not-a-terrorist reputation.
As it turns out, it was more likely Dr. Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week when he discovered that he was going to be indicted on capital murder charges for being the actual anthrax mailer. Dr. Ivins was involved in all sorts of sketchy activity, including renting post office boxes under assumed names, using his lab after-hours (although as a grad student, that seems like a perfectly normal workday in the slave labor culture of academic research), having a number of unreported anthrax spills, threatening to kill co-workers, frightening his shrink into getting a restraining order against him, and being strangely obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Princeton. He was also apparently a loner and a dick.
While anyone has reason to be skeptical of the FBI's largely circumstantial case against the late Dr. Ivins given their total shitshow of an investigation into the now-exonerated Dr. Hatfill, I can state from personal experience that science has been known to harbor some disturbed people that remind me of Dr. Ivins. Without specifically referring to anyone in particular, a person with a need to dominate, threaten, and harass his colleagues, has a troublesome and obsessive relationship with women, does not respond to reprimands or psychological treatment, and takes no personal responsibility for his actions is not unprecedented in the field of microbiology. Unfortunately, these kinds of mentally unstable people can simultaneously be good enough at their jobs to get access to dangerous pathogens, and sometimes the underlying craziness isn't recognized until it's too late.
Even worse, this personality type can sometimes combine the monstrous need to kill innocent people via anthrax with a desire for personal gain. Because these people are Ph.D scientists, they are obviously intelligent, and can sometimes engineer a situation to benefit financially from their own reprehensible crimes. For example, a person might be able to get away with being a scary, abusive, potentially violent asshole by threatening lawsuits or otherwise manipulating the legal system to get what they want along with a substantial cash award. In Dr. Ivins's case, his numerous patent claims over anthrax vaccine technology would provide a significant financial motive to create a nationwide panic about attacks with weaponized anthrax. Currently, the anthrax vaccine approved for use in the U.S. is primarily reserved for military personnel and the odd first-responder. If everyone in the country suddenly became hysterical over the prospect of a large-scale anthrax attack, the demand for a vaccine would increase logarithmically. Dr. Ivins stood to make millions of dollars personally from this kind of nationwide terror, and that can only be icing on the cake for acting out on his reprehensible misanthropic impulses.
Now, many people are probably wondering whether or not they should be afraid of future anthrax attacks since it's so easy to grow and distribute as a lethal bioweapon. I would say no. Sure, the possibility exists. So does the possibility of a flu pandemic as serious as the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed as many as 100 million people by some estimations. So does the possibility of some terrorist getting their hands on one of the few poorly secured smallpox samples, of an airborne strain of Ebola emerging, of all bacteria developing multiple antibiotic resistance, and so on. The Russians alone have a whole arsenal of Cold War-era biological weapons that could be procured on the black market and released, but I'm not laying awake worrying about dying from a terrorist attack of weaponized Soviet tularemia or glanders. The microbiological world is full of nasty (and fascinating) pathogens, and there are plenty of nasty human beings who would gladly facilitate their assault on us. However, I find it more productive to worry about the infectious problems we already have to contend with than the ones that may or may not decimate our civilization. I think it's much more practical and sensible to worry about getting HIV when I have incautious drunk sex with a fellow New York City resident than to fret that there's a slight chance some lunatic spiked my cable bill with anthrax spores. Hell, I'm even more worried that I might get herpes! I dodged that bullet one time when I ALMOST had unprotected sex with a guy who then advised me that he had it (because he is a decent and ENTIRELY admirable human being), and 20% of adults have the herp. As a microbiologist, I'd advise you all to think more about the scourges we already face than the hypothetical ones that might be.
Labels: correspondence, crime and punishment, epidemic geekery, nerd alert, Razzyphiles, science, terror, viruses rule
Monday, August 04, 2008
Makaveli in this
The other day I was hanging out with FalloniusMonk and we were talking about our usual nerdtastic selection of topics (ie: history, classical literature, office politics, and lesbian sex), when she suddenly got very excited and said, "Oh my God, DUDE, you have to see this!"
She dove into her hipster bag and whipped out a book. It was a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.
"Uh, dude, did you take a history class in high school? Because I've read that," I said. "Several times, in fact."
"NO, dude, I know you've read it. Look at the fucking picture on the front!"
At first I was like, "What? It's just the usual Penguin Classics appropriation of some random Botticelli portrait or something." For a minute I felt like I was playing some European history-oriented Renaissance painting version of Erotic Photo Hunt. Then FalloniusMonk shouted "WEST SIIIIIDE!" and I instantly realized what was going on. I've seen this hand gesture before:
Now I know why Tupac was so into calling himself "Makaveli" and frankly, why he probably picked up his first copy of The Prince from the prison library in his first place. Certainly the Westside Connection's designs on world domination are in keeping with Machiavelli's political theories, although I certainly wonder these days how O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson is going to accomplish that lofty goal via films like Are We There Yet? I can't really see it, but maybe it's how he reconciled the question as to whether it is better for a leader to be loved or feared. He's feared by studio gangstas, police, and Jerry Heller, and loved by children under the age of twelve. It's not really what springs to mind when I think of the word "Machiavellian," but I guess it works.
Labels: FalloniusMonk, hilarious shit, librophilia, nerd alert, rap
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Daily Dude I Want to Hit: teenager phones
DOB: 2008?
Occupation: texting like what
Hometown: probably some factory in China
Current residence: my hot little hands
Why I Want to Hit that Hotness: I've been in bad emotional shape the last few days, but nothing cheers a bitch up like getting a new toy, whether it be a pair of shoes, a Sharper Image "body massager" (and I think you can guess which part of my body I use those to massage), or some fancy electronic gadget. In this case, it's the latter. My old phone was a beat-up piece of shit that actually got a huge crack in it, so it was time to make like Beyonce and upgrade that trash. Apart from it's general state of mechanical failure, my biggest problem with my old phone was its lack of a keyboard led to it taking FOREVER to send text messages. I generally hate talking on the phone, so unless I'm trying to catch up with my family or friends sufficiently far away to not see in person, I always prefer to text. Needless to say, my old phone was failing miserably at enabling me to do this efficiently.
Therefore, when I went to re-up, I totally purchased this phone with a slide-out keyboard of the class LL Cool Jew refers to as "teenager phones." This refers to the fact that all the kids these days seem to have one of these things that they can text the pedophiles they meet on MySpace easily with, and everywhere you go you see them texting and IMing furiously on these contraptions. LL Cool Jew has a teenager phone herself, and has been encouraging me to get one ever since she acquired her EnV or whatever, so she was delighted when I informed her that my LG Rumor arrived. Her specific response was actually "YYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY! QWERTY MCQWERTERSON!"
I know it's pretty lame to Daily Dude my new cell phone, especially since it's not an iPhone or a BlackBerry or something super fancy that does everything save wipe my ass and walk my dogs. However, if you've been using something for the last few years that, in terms of technical evolution, is barely removed from an empty can tied to a piece of string, you would be elated about your teenager phone too. So text me, bitches!
Labels: Daily Dude I Want to Hit, I LOVE IT, LL Cool Jew, nerd alert
Friday, July 18, 2008
How NOT to throw a virology conference
I just got back from the absolutely thrilling annual delight known as the American Society for Virology Conference. The last time I attended ASV two years past, it was in Madison, Wisconsin and was quite fun. They have a large conference hall in close proximity to both our hotel and the many bars where all the UW-Madison college kids get their drank on. I was expecting something similar this year, except minus the agonizing Northwest Airlines flight home that J-Sexy and I endured with one hour of sleep and a crushing hangover. Too bad I was very, VERY wrong. The only thing this year's ASV had in comparison to Madison was the central theme of virology; every thing else could be considered a cautionary tale about how NOT to throw a major scientific conference. I have conveniently itemized the lessons for your edification, because I know you're all contemplating getting into the virology conference organizing business, and you might want to know what NOT to do.
Everything is a million fucking miles apart. When I arrived, I received a folder saying "Cornell: More than a great resource–a SPECTACULAR setting for academic and professional events." This folder included a pamphlet noting that Cornell is a "a full-service 745 acre conference center in the heart of the beautiful Finger Lakes." What these pamphlets gloss over is that Cornell is atop a gigantic fucking hill, which means that you are always huffing and puffing up some steep-ass grade to get wherever you are going. Furthermore, the "745 acres" mentioned in the pro-Cornell material also ensure that everything is spaced at least a half-mile apart, so if I want to catch a talk about poliovirus replication and immediately after go to some talk about innate immunity in a different session, I have to hope that there is some talk I don't care about in between because transferring sessions means a 15 minute run uphill. Of course, despite the fact that there are large college lecture halls everywhere, the organizers planned all the sessions in the most disparate locations possible.
2. Ensure that the shuttle service runs as infrequently and unpredictably as possible
Given that Cornell is huge, you would think that ASV would compensate by arranging a regular shuttle service to ferry us around from nerdy talk to talk, or back down to the main part of Ithaca where all the hotels are. Instead, they chartered three decrepit old school buses with no air conditioning and semi-retarded drivers who actually asked US for directions. They also instructed said shuttles to run sporadically early in the morning and late at night, so if there was no shuttle, you had to call your hotel or take a city bus. Luckily most of the hotels (including ours) ran free shuttles, but sometimes these were in high demand and you had to either walk or catch Ithaca public transport. I live in New York City and take public transport all the time, so this would normally be no problem...except for the fact that my trusty ASV bag didn't come equipped with a bus map or schedule. It's hard to take the city bus when you don't know where to catch it, you don't know where it goes, and it doesn't run on Sundays.
3. Require use of precious drink tickets for non-alcoholic drinks
When I picked up my hot-ass "ASV 2008" bag and my $200 travel grant, I immediately dove in to find the drink tickets. When I saw there were seven of them, I thought, "BOO YAH!" This momentary elation turned quickly to horror, however, when I realized that you had to use these for water as well as beer. This was a slap in the face to those of us who rely on the generosity of the sober nerds for extra swill, because it guaranteed that those (lame) scientists who don't drink weren't willing to give up their drink tickets to their boozy colleagues as they normally would. Last time at ASV, my drunken crew managed to acquire at least fifteen extra drink tickets from kindhearted teetotalers willing to put their spare booze to good use. This time, all those drink tickets were wasted on Cornell Big Red water and apple juice by the temperance-minded set and by day 3, I was actually paying for alcohol.
4. TOO MUCH VIROLOGY
I know this is a virology conference and I shouldn't complain about hours upon hours of virology talks, but even for professionals in the field, FOURTEEN HOURS A DAY IS TOO MUCH. The conference organizers were not selective about who got to present a talk, and let everyone who wanted give one. That meant that talks went on until ten p.m., and half of them were unfinished crap that had no business wasting my twelve minutes. For every interesting talk in which I heard about "abortion storms" (gross) caused in livestock by Rift Valley fever virus, I got to hear two talks where some dumb skank elaborated on optimizing buffer conditions for some assay they just got working and thus don't have any real data from whatsoever. Thank God Cornell was at least equipped with wireless everywhere and I could spend these talks surfing the internet or simply spacing out.
5. Bad food
It's not like I expect Daniel Boulud to cater this thing, but in Madison they at least had respectable lunch and dinner pasta or taco bars at an indoor facility capable of accomodating chafing dishes. At Cornell, we were lucky to get anything besides a nasty boxed lunch, because in spite of all the empty cafeterias around, our meals were served in a fucking tent on a hill so steep we had to keep an eye on our drinks to ensure they didn't succumb to gravity and slide down the table. The first day, they served something called the "Pacific Noodle Bowl," which consisted of a bunch of horrifically overcooked noodles, shredded carrots, and about five cups of peanut oil. I didn't eat most of mine, but J-Sexy did and paid the price. She said that when she ran to the bathroom, it was full of ladies suffering similar digestive ailments. You know there's a problem when you feed a roomful of virologists something that gives everyone acute gastroenteritis. We all expected to hear a lot about noroviruses and rotaviruses, but I don't think anyone actually expected to learn about them through firsthand experience.
6. No free drinks at the banquet
We all paid $50 extra to attend the banquet "gala" on the last night of ASV. In Wisconsin, we got gift bags of free crap (ASV placemats adorned with structural representations of various virus capsids, ASV water bottles, ASV stress balls, ASV coffee mugs, ASV pencils, etc.). We also got several bottles of wine for our table. At Cornell, we got naught but some marginally edible chicken tikka masala and even had to use our (at that point, non-existent) drink tickets for hooch, as the only liquid they provided was a complimentary bottle of Cornell Big Red water at every seat. Well, we also got a live band that played the disco hits of yesteryear and a DJ who didn't kick me out when I snuck up to his computer and turned on "Nuthin' But a G Thang," the only rap on. He was even going to let me hook up my computer and play some Lil' Wayne until it occurred to him that a song about Weezy being so sweet it makes his woman wanna lick the rapper might offend some people. On the bright side, the band allowed me to singlehandedly change the tone of the banquet for the better by welcoming them back from a break with an acapella rendition of "The PCR Song." You haven't lived until you've taken the stage to drive a tentful of scientists into hysterical cheers by singing "Denaturing, annealing, and extending...well it's amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do." After that, I was high-fived by about fifty people and everyone hit the dance floor ready to party. Thank God for me watching geeky science YouTube ads for Bio-Red thermal cyclers enough times to memorize all the words, because this was the best part of the conference next to the scintillating conversation about strap-ons I had with one of my hot bisexual geek friends from Brown.
There you have it. Next time any of you consider running something like ASV, please heed my warnings and do it up right.
Labels: epidemic geekery, nerd alert, scathing indictments, science, viruses rule
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