Dr. Jim Watson

Dr. Jim Watson (along with Francis Crick) discovered the structure of the DNA double helix. However, they was lazy and didn't do all of the work, and Jim was especially sneaky, zipping off to snoop at the university where Rosalind Franklin, the REAL hero of the DNA story, was showing her chemical and mathematical findings to her colleagues. Somehow, he did this without being noticed... almost as if he were actually a fly on the wall. Their first attempt was wrong, but their second attempt (after Maurice Wilkins, one of the major inventors of the atom bomb, showed Jim Rosalind's photos of an x...) was right and they got the Nobel Prize, but Rosalind Franklin (the real genius behind it all) died before the world found out. Jim Watson also predicted that fertility treatments and test tube babies would become common practice by the 90's.... which it certainly did. So-- either Jim Watson can see the future or he is a genie.

Aside from being a total jerk, this guy is a racist, and a proponent of a modern version of Eugenics where, and I quote "all girls would be pretty." His continued existence drives me crazy. He can't keep his mouth shut... Someone should really help him with that. It wouldn't be hard-- if the muppets could restrain John Cleese, scientists should be able to put a collective hand over Jim Watson's mouth.

But I'm not just mad a Jim-- I'm nervous about messing with the genome. We're not quite there yet, scientifically, but we're close-- and as I said in a discussion board posting to my fellow classmates, though I think people are smart enough to take steps toward genetic perfection-- we're simply not moral enough. If you've read Brave New World this won't seem bizarre to you, but here's my fear:

Humans start playing with genes, but only the rich can afford genetic manipulation of their children-- so the rich become beautiful, super intelligent, and no longer susceptible to disease. Sounds great, right? But what about the rest of us? And if our country continues to refuse to change over to socialized medicine, won't it just be that much harder to get health insurance? Think about it. It would create a new race-- homo sapiens would become the slaves of the over-race simply because we would have to work so hard to produce what they could do without thinking. It would be the end of the world as we know it-- and what a terrible world it would be.

What are you afraid of?

Keeping my cool...

It seems lately that I'm having a lot of trouble keeping my cool... like I'm right on the edge of tearing someone's head off at every minute. I don't really understand this-- because really, I want nothing more than peace and happiness. I was, after all, raised by the muppets.

So what are some ways that you know of that help you keep your cool in times of stress?

Sometimes I:

1) Watch Due South.

2) take a nap

3) talk to my dog

4) make lists

5) call my best friend

Occasionally, even these time tested remedies leave me in the lurch. It might be all the coffee, but I think not. I'm no hippie, but I do believe that there is just too much negativity being thrown out into the universe and if we all did our best just to be positive about things, maybe the world would be a less stressful place to be. E=mc2 after all, and maybe, just maybe, if we spread enough love in the world it might rub off on other people... who might spread it and so on until things got... a little brighter.

It's a dream, but it's a nice dream.

It's the little things...

This morning as I was slurping coffee and working on some research, the power kicked out. This really doesn't happen often in my neighborhood, so I was puzzled. When I called the power company to report the outage, I was informed by a recording that a large part of the city I live in was experiencing an outage and that it might be a while before the grid was back up. So I cussed and slurped my coffee faster and decided to do some reading instead.

What caused this massive power failure? One small insignificant little rodent. Yes, the ever devious gray squirrel.

They run rampant in my neighborhood. How did the little bugger pull off his evil scheme? Well, my father happens to work for the power company, and on take your daughter to work day I witnessed this happen several times as we patrolled the lines in his kicka** orange truck.
As a squirrel runs along a power line, occasionally they get lazy and instead of jumping from the wire to those big gray-green cylinders (transformers) they step. If the squirrel is touching both the power line and the transformer, their body creates an arc that blows the grid.
This got me to thinking... A squirrel can take out ¼ or more of a city's power... and a goose can take down a plane... isn't there something that can be done?

We are so technologically advanced and yet 155 people almost went down because of a freaking goose (not to mention what would have happened if the pilot hadn't been the James Bond of commercial air pilots and able to land the plane in a river with NO ENGINE POWER instead of, I don't know, crashing in the middle of the city. Someone get that guy some models and bottles). We can land a man on the moon, but a lowly furry rat can blow a transformer and take out the power in several neighborhoods. WTF??!? What are some little things that cause big problems you've encountered that make you wonder?