I have something deeply personal to share. It's been one year today since my best friend committed suicide. Oddly enough, a journal of his was found yesterday with drafts of suicide notes, some addressed to individuals, some general. Interspersed with notes from his daily life like to-do items, grocery lists, job interview stuff, etc.
Reading the note he wrote me gave me such an intense feeling of relief and closure. I had already made my peace with the complicated, tragic situation that it was, but his journal answered so many of my lingering questions. Thank you, Chris, for the most important friendship of my life and for helping me understand.
Mental illness is heartbreaking.
Oh don't worry. I spent all yesterday and the day before on the phone with friends, going over the notes he wrote to us, reminiscing about old times, and catching up. Chris brought people together while he was alive and still does even though he's not with us. I just felt like sharing here after logging in for the first time in almost two years.
Wow, I opened up hubski for the first time in a while and this is the first thing I saw... Both heartbreaking (for you/Chris specifically and in general mental illness/suicide) and heartwarming. I'm glad the journal and message to you surfaced (particularly with the timing that it did) and that it provided feelings of relief and closure.
Thank you. I'd actually just gotten back into hubski myself when I posted it. My last activity was almost 2 years ago.
Re: Chris' words, the part that really stuck out in his note to me was this:
- There was always an emptiness in me that no amount of partying and merriment could ever fill. But it's not to say we didn't try. And if anyone could cure somebody's ills with a good time, it would have been you.
I was welling up reading the note for the first time obviously, but the flood gates opened when I got to that. Made me feel special and so fortunate to have known him.
So I'm doing CRISPR this week.
Starting with 30 million stem cells, I worked my way down to about 500,000 that survived electroporation, 2% of which actually showed a marker of Cas9 expression.
Of those, maybe 10% will survive this week and grow from single cells back into full colonies without losing their pluripotency. Of those, maybe 10% will actually have a change that I want (destroying gene function). I believe it'd be an order of magnitude lower if I actually wanted to actually wanted to make a mutation in a more targeted way.
So 0.0003% of my starting cells will actually be gene edited and usable afterwards. I personally only need about 10 in total to make it through the whole process, but it's hard to look at those numbers and feel we're a longgg way from designer babies.
Yeah, the technique is still in its infancy, and targeting is still problematic.
But maybe you are the person to innovate a "rifle scope" for CRISPR? Who knows?
Accuracy will come. Science will refine the methods and techniques. And you are a part of that.
YOU ARE SO COOL!!!!
I'm jealous.
- But maybe you are the person to innovate a "rifle scope" for CRISPR? Who knows?
Doubtful, I'm just using it to make separate cell lines, I have zero plans to optimize anything if I can get my 10 cells that look alright by the end of the year. But thanks, it's nice to hear encouragement.
"Nucleofector – Amaxa" and "Human Stem Cell Nucleofector Kit 1 – Lonza", I may need to play around with it though, as the protocol appears to have not worked very well (it was ~6M across 4 cuvettes, which may not be the optimal cell:cuvette ratio?...)
I used Mirus solution. It's been a while. That does seem like a lot of cells. For hMSCs, I'd do more like 500k per cuvette if I remember correctly, but they are big. Also, it was key that the volume was exact. I think it was 200ul. I want to say that I used the A-27 program, but I don't know if that is conserved.
Trip report
Went on a road trip with the family through South Africa's closest relative of the Empty Quarter, the Northern Cape. It's both the biggest and least populated province and the landscapes are beautiful in their brutality.
The journey started driving up through the Tankwa Karoo, where the SA version of Burning Man takes place.
According to the people on the other end, only an act of God saved us from a flat tire on the shale dirt road where donkey carts are a serious form of transport. We stopped over in Calvinia, where my great uncle used to run the show with a massive sheep farm, on the other side of those yonder mountains:
He sold it when he retired (at 70-odd) but apparently couldn't stop the itch so promptly started farming again further south. Go figure. Passed through a bunch of frontier towns that have all seen better days and could use a bit of hope. We slept over on the banks of the Orange river, in between the table grape farms which jut out into the arid veld. Most of the crop is destined for Europe and the US east coast.
Next day we were on the last leg of our Kalahari anabasis. Remarkably, it rained on the way. At some point the geography changed and we started to drive through the dune veld - where the sand has been grown over and stops shifting. It creates an interesting effect where you get to glimpse into one "dune row" after the other as the road cuts through. Maybe one will have a bird or some meerkats, or a wind pump. And then just grass and acacia forever, as far as I can tell.
The last 60km were along the most harrowing dirt road I've ever been on. Saw a dead kudu along the way which means someone fucked up - they go for $3000.
I thought I'd seen the milky way before but apparently that was all a ruse and you need to head out into the Kalahari to see the real one.
Mmmmmm... tasty, tasty kudu!
When I was in Cape Town/Stellenbosh area, I talked to some people from Namibia, and asked about what it was like to get back there. From their reactions, I took it that traveling across the Northern Cape was about as easy as getting to the Moon and back!
Your photos show a more lively landscape than I expected. Beautiful. Sparse. Amazing.
Thanks for sharing.
Thirsty is a good word.
The Cederberg is equally stunning in its own way. We stayed on a farm there on the way down and were quite excited to check out the prehistoric Khoisan rock art they apparently had.
Turns out the previous guests who stayed there had chiselled it out of the rock face and taken it with them... utterly mind-bending. This stuff is sometimes thousands of years old...
Everything in my life right now is great, with one exception:
this fucking crab apple tree that is positioned right over my roof.
There are no fewer than 100 crab apples scattered throughout my yard at the moment, which in and of itself would not be a problem; it's how they get there that is driving me insane.
Every time there is a strong wind, I hear a heavy thump on the roof, some rolling, and then something hitting my chain link fence. It's woken me up the past 4 nights because I keep thinking someone is outside my house or something. The first night I couldn't connect the sound to the apples, so I was getting really paranoid. Now I know what it is, but it seems that this is just the beginning - whole lot of apples left on the tree...
This is one of those things that seems funny and light hearted in nature. ...UNLESS it's happening to you.
Sleep is important. I been going months now without enough and recently resolved to fix this.
Hello from Connecticut!
All is good here, getting into a rhythm and driving is even starting to become enjoyable :) My vlog has been really lagging behind. I have plenty of excuses, but I also spend a couple hours on Netflix every day. I don't know how people have the mental energy to do things for more than 8-10h a day. Maybe it's the decision fatigue of constant travel, or i'm just a lazy bum (cause i'm honestly not that productive at home).
That one summer 3 years ago when I had my 35h bank internship, managed an airbnb, the beard oil company and saw my friends 3-4 times a week is still one of my most productive time ever. I don't think I even watched youtube videos that summer apart from my lunch hour. Wondering how I can get back to that level somehow.
In Hartford for the night but driving to Providence tomorrow. I think by aug 2 i'll be around Boston - I basically move every day and it can be really hard to plan. I thought I was done with that part of the US, moved on and just got 2 more projects added in New Jersey and one in New Canaan, CT.
Where in CT are you based? Might not be that far...
I just have to write and grade a final exam and grade a few projects and the summer semester is over! Then I have a few weeks "off" until August 14 where I teach algebra for a week and then start the fall semester.
The chicken coop is nearly done; the oppressive heat has kept me from working on it as much as I'd like to. I think the plan is to put a small computer out there with a couple web cams so people can look at birds ~over the internet~. If any of y'all know anything about using the Raspberry Pi camera interface or streaming video on a low-bandwidth connection, I am all ears.
Would there be any interest in a Shopski on shortening bar piercing jewelry? It's not terribly interesting but there have been a few twists involved because the work is so small.
Here's Bertha napping under my leg:
Lion, being handsome:
Hank, being the sweetest lil bird:
Personal experience, my parents got four birds, named them Eggs, Bacon, Toast and Jam.
Within the first six months a fox or racoon had taken Eggs, and my mom went out to the coop one day to find that a hawk had killed Toast and dragged the body into the coop to eat it, in front of her friends.
We don't name chickens anymore.
Same deal first year we lost 3 chickens, 2 got taken out during the middle of the day by a racoon, one just up and died one morning and the chicken corpse got pecked a bunch. Never named them and glad I didnt, my wife would have been a lot more upset if they had names.
A Man Inside a Computer
A Man and a Dog
A Man in a Mask (It was originally supposed to be an elephant, but I fucked up and decided to run with it)
A Kite on a Cliff on a Windy Night
A Man in the Desert
Space Monsters (The one on the right looks better in portrait mode than landscape and I really just made these drawings so I could absent mindedly fill them in line by line as I watched TV. Look at the big picture and you'll see how they're kind of layered)
Lights
I have decided I like lamps with light bulbs a hundred times more than I like fluorescent lights. I think when Dala and I get our own place, we might start our own lamp collection. It'll be both functional and fun.
Hubskiers
I appreciate every last one of you guys.
An amazing and vibrant friend won her battle with malignant brain tumors, by living life by her own terms, and ending her life on her own terms. She took the time to connect with friends, make plans, and move on before she was unable to make the clear-headed decision for herself.
It was kinda beautiful.
And so - inspired by her lifelong role as an instigator of silliness and fun - a group of about 50 of my friends got together and staged a truly silly performance in honor of her.
They performed a complete, Buzby Berkeley-esque, ankle-deep water ballet.
In a public pond.
Last weekend.
http://www.espressobuzz.net/Events/2017/07-24-AnkleDeep/i-M6zdXjj/A
Fair
The County Fair is opening to the public tonight, and we're walking distance from it.
What time is it? FRIED FOOD TIME! WHOOOOOOoooOOOOoOOOoOOOOoooOooo!
Reading
I'm now a fifth of the way through Wealth of Nations. I feel asleep reading it last night, so I've probably got to double back and skim.
That's my problem with summer time: the heat just saps my energy. Since I read in the evening, it is a constant struggle to keep my focus. Coffee helps, but then I'm up till midnight and that leads to me getting my ass handed to me the next day at work. Which then means I'm more tired the next evening.
I'm enjoying the bits of the book that aren't long tracts of accounting for the prices of silver and corn.
Maybe I'll give audible a shot. Seems expensive, though. Project Gutenberg ebooks are free...
Family
My niece is going to Germany as an exchange student soon. My brother and his wife announced yesterday that they're having a Mandatory Family Dinner on Sunday for her. They've known that this meal would be happening for ages, but they have the planning horizon of a Labrador.
They also haven't actually told me about it. They just told Mom and assumed she would disseminate The Word.
Frustrating.
- They also haven't actually told me about it. They just told Mom and assumed she would disseminate The Word.Frustrating.
Are we secretly relatives?
Also, enjoy some ridiculous fried food for us and report back. I hear fairs have crazy stuff like fried oreos and fried butter.
- Are we secretly relatives?
Apparently we all are. Time to stop calling meetups 'meetups' and start calling 'em 'reunions'?
- Also, enjoy some ridiculous fried food for us and report back. I hear fairs have crazy stuff like fried oreos and fried butter.
First night's report is rain. It runs until Sunday, though. Can't rain all the time, right?
Funnel cake is my favorite fried fair food. Oreos are also good, as is cheese!
We all might be relatives. Everyone in my family has plans in their head, but they don't share them. Mom plans lunch at 12:30. Sister plans to arrive around 12:30-1:00 expecting to socialize for a while when she and her family arrive. Brother wants to have lunch at 1:30 because of jet lag. But nobody shares that with anybody and then they lament the stress of the holidays.
And then they all act exasperated when I hammer home a plan in email after email, even when someone changed something in the previous email chain.
Dang. Are all us Hubskiers related?
Everyone in my family thinks everyone else talks to each other way more than they actually do.
Family Member: "So, are you and the wife coming tonight?"
goobster: "Coming? To what?"
FM: "The big thing we have been planning to do. People are flying in from all over the world for it."
goobster: "The what?"
FM: "OMG! Did nobody tell you?!? You are supposed to be getting the cake for your father's 80th surprise birthday party that is happening in 20 minutes!"
goobster: "I.... WHAT?!?"
FM: "Oh nevermind. Just come over. We'll figure it out."
goobster: "Um. I'm in Canada. Camping. Building an ice hotel in Nunavut."
FM: "Oh! How fun! Well, take pictures, and we'll get together when you get back."
goobster: "..."
Check if your local library has partnered with Overdrive, or a similar app. You could also get audiobooks on CD from the library and copy them to your phone/iPod.
- Check if your local library has partnered with Overdrive
The only one I've tried before was hoopla, which I couldn't get to work at the time. I didn't realize they had additional partnerships, though. Thanks for getting me to check it out.
archive.org has a bunch of free audiobooks. As does Librivox. As does your local library. I can afford it and I like the interface but there are plenty of legal, free alternatives particularly when you're talking about public domain stuff.
https://librivox.org/the-wealth-of-nations-book-1-by-adam-smith/
EDIT: in my rush to be helpful I failed to notice that devac made me irrelevant an hour before I woke up.
- archive.org
I always forget that they're not just the wayback machine.
- local library
They have a physical copy audiobook of Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century that I've been eyeing for a while now.
I forget about the digital stuff though. It's the future, man! Thanks for the suggestions. Many new catalogs to explore now.
I went backpacking. It was nice. The fires were not.
fin
Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada!
Have you ever been to Glacier?
Never! My friends just went to Jasper and Banff - the pictures look unreal. They actually did an extended trip over a couple weeks that included GNP too.
For our trip, we're going up with some couple friends who have a condo on Lake Whitefish where they vacation every year. Staying for a week. We're not doing any hardcore backpacking or camping since it's more of a leisure trip (and a much needed one), but we'll spend plenty of time outside.
I finally booked a short backpacking trip. Land in Albany at noon, drive up to Elk Lake, and hike out two miles to a camping spot. The next day hike some or all of the Dix range. Maybe hike out late that day, maybe spend one more night. It'll be a base camp scenario, with my gear staying put on the climbs.
Speaking of fires, I'm going to try a no-cook trip. Summer sausage and granola bars for two or three days.
Where was your trip?
Oh nice, please take a lot of pictures while you're out there! No-cook sounds...kind of awful in one way, but also no clean-up which sounds amazing.
I was in Jasper and Banff National Parks in Alberta, Canada. Hoping to have a #tripreport up in the next couple of days!
It's definitely awful in some ways. Cleanup is one aspect, but the big one is size and packing. The food I'll take is calorie dense and a good shape to pack. I've done Mountain House dehydrated food before, and they're tasty and easy. But they're awful to pack in a bear canister. And with no cook, I don't need a stove.
I'll look for your post! I haven't done a trip report on my last couple trips, but I'll try to next time. I have 13 summits left. If I can bag all five Dixes, it will put me so close.
Balcony Garden:
My next project is to get some pots or planter boxes and plant some flowers and herbs. Picking plants is a little tricky: our balcony faces north and has a roof and side-walls, so it gets no direct sunlight. Here it is rare to get a first Frost before Thanksgiving, so I'm looking for plants that will establish themselves in the next few months and then survive the short winter here. Any suggestions?
Exercise
Still keeping at it. A couple runs and a weight session last week. Running in the heat has been surprising bearable, though very sweaty. I have been taking it slow, and trying to concentrate on posture/form. I have a history of not sticking with exercise plans, so I'm a little worried I'll quit.
Donezo with my move, or at least most of it. We started at 11am and were done by 4pm! Casualties: one of my mediocre PC speakers is now semi-dead
and I now have a very visible 2 inch scratch on my display. I've long wanted to give my audio setup a big upgrade, so I've been bugging KB, scouring second-hand websites and visited a hifi store yesterday.
This weekend I'll be doing a Ludum Dare gamejam with two of my best friends. I can't use Unity to save my life, but I have enough Illustrator chops to make decent-ish artwork. Plus, it's fun to do.
Right after that I'm headed to Sweden for my annual road trip holiday. Our goal was Norway but we decided to plan the trip more frugally, so we're going to Sweden in my parent's VW Touran instead of getting a ferry to Norway and renting a station wagon. If all goes well we'll stay under 400 euros for two weeks. I hope it's as relaxing and enjoyable as the last time we went there. Feel like I could use a good recharge.
I've been listening to the new Tyler, The Creator. Anyone else digging it?
Actually, I do have a question. What are some good or beautiful areas to camp freely in nature? Last time we mostly went to the Göteborg / Vänersborg / Ulricehamn area, just driving around until we found a cool lakeside spot to pitch our tent at. Do you happen to know good areas for that south of Stockholm?
Around Skåne, you could look up Mölle/Kullaberg on the west coast, Simrishamn/Kivik/Stenshuvud on the east coast, or Söderåsen somewhere in between. I'd check out lake Åsnen south of Växjö, but I haven't really spent much time there myself. If you're going up the east coast, you could make a small detour and see Öland. Or, driving up the east coast of lake Vättern from Jönköping to Motala and you will see lots of nice places. Closer to Stockholm, I'm actually not so sure where to go, except out into the archipelago. I can ask someone who's more familiar with the area.
Subheadings
Career
As I stealth-edited last week, I got a job! I'm doing basically the same thing I was doing in the last gig, but with liver research instead of cardiovascular. It's a very interesting patient base and my new coworkers seem to be really friendly and SUPER productive. My PI has more than twenty years doing this kind of work, so there's a very clear system in place for how operations are to be conducted, and the amount of perfectly reasonable structure they have for every process is reassuring.
This is definitely a step up professionally because in addition to my duties in regular research operations, I'm going to be developed for a management position, basically riding herd on a small group of researchers and lab staff. To quote my PI 'I only hire people who can be invested in the work, and I invest in them in return.'
I've signed on for a two year contract with option to extend, and it got me thinking about time. In two years I'll be 27 with four years of clinical research experience under my belt. My Robust Pleasure Source will have finished her degree by then, and will be significantly more employable. Then comes the question of 'what do we do now?' and at the moment I have no idea. I guess one of my biggest goals of the next year or so is to figure out things that we actually want in the positive and how to make those things reality.
Exercise
Took a few days off yoga because of a hectic weekend. Only did 15 minutes yesterday but it felt like an hour, and my muscles protested a surprising amount. Been slacking off with the stationary biking too. Maybe I should pursue some alternative methods for getting my cardio in. Jazzercise anyone?
Related, I'm on a diuretic because my body wants to hold onto fluid. I've found that if I make a point to go to the sauna regularly, I don't need my diuretic as much. Heart failure patients are typically told to avoid saunas/steam baths but I'll be damned if I give up my heritage. Plus, if I can get rid of water by sweating instead of diuresis that means I'm less likely to develop a tolerance to those meds. I'd like to stay off spironolactone for as long as possible, as it tends to give men breasts.
Food
keifermiller I'm getting a small deep fryer from my girlfriends mom. I am going to do my best to use this power for good and not evil. I have issued a household moratorium on anything that could be deep fried that isn't falafel. Hopefully it holds up for at least a few weeks.
Congrats! Is a deep frier on a counter top less messy than pan frying? I'd think it would be, but the only time I'v used a deep frier it was outside. Didn't bother with cleaning up at all.
- I have issued a household moratorium on anything that could be deep fried that isn't falafel. Hopefully it holds up for at least a few weeks.
I think French Fries would be the thing that breaks the dam and lets the oreos come flooding in.
"Hmmmm. These potatoes are starting to go bad. What can I do that's quick?"
I'm super fortunate. The one we are picking up is a cute lil self contained number, seems to be fairly low-mess as these things go.
Eventually I will be at a place in my life where I can deep fry my thanksgiving turkeys because everyone and their mother says that's the best way to cook them.
SICP got its reputation by being pretty much everyone's first exposure to functional programming for a couple of decades. When I read it I had professors who thought "functional programming" was a funny way of saying procedural as opposed to OO programming. In that context it really was mind-blowing. Holy shit you can define a function that takes the derivative of another
I got riggity riggity wrecked. Devac is being way too modest. I felt like my opponent was one step ahead of me during all three games. I've come to realize that my strengths are more in recognizing tactical patterns, and I can only go so far with that - I'm definitely inspired to start studying chess more seriously now. Once I get back on Thursday-Friday, I'll send you a challenge again.
Godel, Escher, Bach was the book that taught me to not read to impress other people. I enjoyed the recursive genie parable a lot, but that's all I remember now.
I'll be brief as I have to head to work in a moment. Shit with the mother-in-law went sideways this week, and my goal is to have a new daycare option in place within a few days. My wife is thankfully on board with moving our daughter elsewhere, although is in less of a hurry.
Kung fu is happening most of the weekend, and I definitely need the distraction. My mom is coming up tomorrow to help with the youngin, and to give my wife some sane family time.
My project to read the NT in Greek continues apace.
See those fuckers? See the one waaaaaaaay on the right?
I'm more than halfway through that one.
That's eleven thousand pages if I were reading it, or four hundred and eighty four hours of audiobook as I am.
I am twenty hours from being done.
I can taste it.
Tonight I will work until 2 or 3am, ride 15 miles home, then hop a Lyft to the airport in time to take a 7am flight home. Then either pay $60 to get home or wait an hour for my mother in law to pick me up. Then spend 36 hours with my loved ones and come back.
I'm so sick of this shit.
That's about 20 days of audio, or 10 days on 2x. Audible tells me I'm at 10 days and 6 hours of total listening time spread over three years and 50 titles.
Speaking of which, did I tell you how much I loved Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation? You mentioned it a while ago and it was stuck on my reading list for quite some time. I now notice the 'flight from conversation' everywhere, especially when I do it myself.
It's 3700 miles on the bike.
The last book is particularly challenging because, contrary to what the Internet says, they fully expected to be done at 10 books (which took them 32 years). But then they got bored and decided to write the 11th book in the series, also the 150,001st book on Napoleon (by their own reckoning). Which includes like half the shit they had in the 10th book.
Audible tells me I'm at 1 month, 10 days, 2 hours and 37 minutes. But I'm pretty sure that's per install not overall because it makes you re-earn all your badges every time you do a new install. My library has 240-some titles in it. Assume 40 of those are unread and assume the rest average 20 hours (which is probably conservative) and that's five and a half months of listening.
That might be since switching to Android in 2015.
We got some new faces. Cool people. stevenioann and Gem and StillWaters and a few others. I'm glad they're here.
Aww, we like you too.
I've been quiet because I've been busy but I've been furiously reading; so much so that I'm actually going to have to give the NYT some money! I wonder how much the Australia tax is for that? We always seem to get screwed, well past the exchange rate.
My sister's in Melbourne for grad school (we're from the 'states). She'll be sticking around there after the degree, I can't wait to visit her.
wasoxygen are you still working on War and Peace? I haven't made much progress this summer but am still reading here and there. I'm still enjoying it.
No, I bailed. I was hoping the war would pick up the pace, but it left me wanting as much as the peace.
With nothing to show for February, I am behind this year. Unexpected hit was Star Maker, a forgotten classic by Olaf Stapledon. Modern Times was also very helpful, but The Beak of the Finch was the best nonfiction I've read in a while.
Heading out of town tomorrow and can't decide what to bring along.
I couldn't get through the first 30 or so pages of The Beak of the Finch. It was that good? Huh.
This summer has been a disappointment with reading for me. I've let myself be utterly distracted. Doesn't bode well for the semester ahead.
I think the economist mindset has really enabled a lot of laziness on my part. I'm thinking in short cuts and Pareto principles, marginal utility instead the long-term benefits of dedication and tenacity.