Time for a Recession

With the holidays nearly upon us, it looks like everyone will be shopping at DLTR, DG, WMT, and the Treasury. Given falling commodity prices, healthy yield, and the need to feed your children, I’m shopping at K, JNJ, SWY, and KMB.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Tissue Culture Experiment 1

Man, having a job really infringes on my plans for world domination, no matter how much I intentionally suck at my job. This update is long overdue.

This all began a few months ago, when I decided to learn to do tissue culture so that I could ultimately clone myself. I started with plants, since plant tissue is easy to work with, and I have had a lot of practice with, uh, herb gardening. My first attempt at tissue culture succeeded only in growing plates of mold. I threw those out, although I suppose I could have harvested some penicillin.

For my next attempt, I put some venus flytrap seeds in plain agar with no additives. I was still quite lax with my sterilization techniques, but none of the plates were contaminated this time because there was nothing but agar.

Newly hatched flytraps in agar

I moved one plate of seeds to peat moss shortly after germination because the agar was drying out. The other plate remained for about a month after germination. I finally moved the last plate to soil because the specimens were looking sickly.

The plant in the middle and on the right were moved to soil shortly after germination, and the plant on the left was in tissue culture until one month after germination. Obviously, I didn’t do it right.

There were a number of things that I did wrong with my tissue culture.

Sugar: I had originally thought that adding sugar to the agar would be stupid because, wtf, plants don’t eat sugar. But one reason why the ex-vitro plants did so much better than the in-vitro ones was the availability of light. Plated samples cannot be kept under direct sunlight or they’ll cook. Thus, plant tissue cultures do not rely on photosynthesis as an energy source. Sugar must be added to the growing media — apparently, plants can absorb and transport sucrose. (This doesn’t work well with ex-vitro plants because the bacteria and ants will get to it first.)

Venting: I used those swine-flu-epidemic surgical masks as lids for my cultures. Keeps the germs out, but still allows airflow. Not necessary, and allowed the agar to evaporate quickly. If photosynthesis is not transpiring, then there will be minimal need for gas exchange. Cleaner to use a closed lid.

Replating: The seedlings should have been replated after the first traps started forming. The nutritional requirements of a growing plant are different from those of a seedling which is still deriving nutrients from the seed.

Other additives: Thiamine is essential to carbohydrate metabolism, macronutrients such as N, P, K as fertilizers, plant growth regulators like cytokinins, and other stuff but I stopped reading because I got bored [1].

I’m going to try one more time.

1. Trigiano, R. and Gray, D. Plant Tissue Culture Concepts. CRC Press, 1999.

HackerDojo

Warren and I went to HackerDojo in Mountain View last week. HackerDojo is a self-run community center where hackers can congregate and write code. It’s mostly funded by donations, but our company has a paid membership.

Hackerdojo

We thought we’d try to work in the Dojo for a while, since it was noisy back at the office (we were in the middle of moving to a new location in Palo Alto). The inside was a cross between a Southeast Asian backpacker hostel and a soup kitchen. The air was musty, the surfaces sticky, and I was afraid to touch anything.

The problem is, self-assembly simply does not work for this demographic. The personal hygiene standards of your average 20-something is already abysmal; pair that with a house full of male computer programmers and a close proximity to Indian takeout joints and you end up with a Dojo that smells like a squat toilet outhouse.

HackerDojo offers a valuable service, a safe haven where nerds can escape the oppressive confines of their mother’s basement to congregate and play Magic: The Gathering. But computer hackers still need their mommies to clean up after them. That’s not an affront; they’re just too busy changing the world to worry about throwing away their leftovers.

There’s an existing solution to all of this: Public libraries. Free wifi, tables and chairs, and underpaid civil servants who ensure that the interior meets Department of Health standards. Maybe Mountain View Public Library doesn’t quite have the sex appeal of HackerDojo, but as Warren would say: If your intention is not to actually do work but to be noticed, go sit in a Starbucks with your shiny new MacBook.

Support your public libraries, folks.


This video clip gives a fairly accurate portrayal of life inside HackerDojo. Just picture it without the mommy character.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/52248349 w=500&h=281]

Looking Back to Move Forward

Useful reminder for those stuck in a rut:

When were you at your very best? What was the period of time during which you were firing on all cylinders and were the most satisfied. What are you doing differently now? Moreover, what were the things you were doing and feeling then that aren’t happening now?

And what changed?

Looking Back to Move Forward –The Reformed Broker