because it's called epMotion

and it comes with 5 hot (i guess) boy banders! Yay!

Stop pipetting late at night! You might be sung to by a boy band!


Here are the lyrics:



Pipetting all those well-plates, baby, sends your thumbs into overdrive
And spending long nights in the lab makes it hard for your love to thrive

What you need is automation, girl, something easy as 1 2 3
So put down that pipette, honey, I got something that will set you free

And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ‘cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)

DNA
RNA
Proteins
Cell Cultures
Less reagents
Faster workflow
Saves you money
Well, well, well

And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ‘cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)

apes gain rights in spain, still have brains cut apart in u.s.

Nearly everything I ever read or hear about animal rights activism is PETA's bullshit or negative reactions to other animal rights groups. Nothing, it seems, is ever good news in the animal rights world. It's so nice to hear something wonderful:

For the first time in history, an animal is given the right to freedom and not to be tortured. IN A COUNTRY THAT LEGALIZED DIVORCE IN THE 1980's. People kvetch about how how change takes time, but honestly, thank you Spain, for the gay marriage, the Equality Ministry, and the REAL animal rights.

Fuck you America.

sex, london, sex!

I just watched the show, now I want to be a prostitute. Funny how television romanticizes everything... instead I'll just read the book.

But here's the blog that supposedly started it all:

Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl


I like her. If I had the money, I would pay her to just hang out with me and go shopping and swimming and boy-scouting for a day.

I wonder if she's real?

summer solstice (warning, this is an emotional rant)

The night of June 20th was the summer solstice, a holiday that I actually DO enjoy celebrating. (This and Halloween). I came to terms with my past on Friday night. I didn't go to sleep, I stayed up with a bunch of random punkrockers, and I realized that I love who I am. The morning felt different, I felt different, and for the first time since I left Novato, I missed my friends. Tonight, one of them called me to hang out. Going home next week won't be so bad. There are people I need to apologize to.

I met a guy named Bones. He made a bad first impression. But he's just scared. He's been so fucked over by the world, just like us all, and he copes by being tough. But when we were talking at 5 am this morning, even though it started as him apologizing for his friends incompetence with women, I saw a strong yet sad, proud yet angry, rude yet sensitive guy who I should have kissed before getting on the MAX. He told me about his brother being shot by gang members when he was trying to break up a fight. He told me about getting his ass kicked every day after school until he brought a knife with him and stabbed one of the bullies. He told me about how he bought, cooked up, and injected a shot of shitty heroin into the arm of the girl he loved and watched her die.

I am reminded that it's okay to fall in love with someone for a split second, even if they have nothing to give you and you have nothing to give them. I hope I see Bones again someday.

Punks wear leather jackets covered with studs and patches and crass statements (haha no pun intended) I think as a physical manifestation of the emotional armor many of them have built up around their truly intelligent, sensual, passionate selves.

I also met an asshole who got right up in my face and tried to intimidate my friend and me. He went on and on trying to be a tough, unfeeling douchebag, but really he was just presenting himself as a fucked up, attention hungry, scared little boy (reminded me of a lot of Petaluma punks). I've seen his type so many fucking times at so many shows, and I am sick of the likes of him stinking up the scene. Then, later, I met the man who practically raised him (a man who happened to be the one I SHOULD have tried to sleep with instead of that boy). He told me a story about how Asshole went to a bar with him on his birthday, and started crying because he was afraid that when he came out and told his friend that he was gay, his friend would beat him up.

There were many things on Friday night that reminded me of who I was in Novato, and who the people I surrounded myself with were, and why I gave a shit about such shitheads. We all grew up together, went through the same bullshit, dropped the same acid, went to the same shows, smoked pot when we were 13 under the bridge at Sinaloa, behind the dumpster at Pioneer Park, watched Family Guy together at 8:13 every Friday night. My friends may no longer love or care about me, and I could give a shitless about them, but they were my friends for a while, and they have been really important to me.

Tonight I discovered that my ex has been lying to me for a long time. For the first time, I'm not angry, I'm just hurt. I'm finally crying for me, for my own pain, for the past year of emotional hell, for how long it will take to believe in love again. I don't want to see him any more. I don't want to talk to him any more. I will talk to him one more time, to say goodbye, and to say I'm sorry. I wish someone was here with me right now, I wish it wasn't 2 am, I wish I could talk to someone who would just sit there and listen and let me cry out everything. Instead I'm going to go on a bike ride. I might not sleep again tonight, but that's alright. I have a lot to think about. I don't hate that girl any more. I can't have hatred any more. I want to change the way I am, I want to be truly kind again.

How can I be kind when I am no longer naive? I don't know.

I forgot it was the Solstice, but the Solstice didn't forget about me.

gay brains!

Here's a really interesting article.

In short:

Gay men and straight women have similar brain scans.
Lesbian women and straight men have similar brain scans.
Evidence that "if you are gay, you are born gay."

w00t, fuck you Mormons! You can take the brain out of the homosexual, but you can't take the homosexual out of the brain!

jackson pollock and fractals

Via Luke I have just read an article on Jackson Pollock. Here's what I think, but a warning first: I don't claim to know anything about statistics, fractals, chaos theory, or modern art, but I do claim to love this kind of science, or what I can understand of it. I may be wrong in my interpretation of this article at certain points, but I assure you, I get the gist of it.

So I don't enjoy looking at Jackson Pollock's artwork. It's boring to me, chaotic, uninteresting. But I now have an immense amount of respect for it because of an article I just read on the fractal nature of his work. Statistically, his pieces speak the language of nature, which is statistical repetition and similarity. Because of the way he painted with movements of his entire body directing the lines of paint instead of the more limited arm-hand-brush motion of other painters, and because of his drip-splash techniques that mimic the motion of water (a chaotic system that follows fractal patterns), he was able to achieve high statistic repetitions of patterns across many scales. According to the mathematics (which I don't understand AT ALL but I believe the statisticians), his paintings had fractal values that are close to those of nature (lightning, trees, and coastlines for example).

He did all this before chaos and fractal theory were developed/discovered. Art preceding science! Art is science! Science is art! The patterns imagined and expressed by the creativity of the human brain are identical to the ones observed and calculated by analysis. It seems like the way we process our environment and express this processing through art is intuitively tied with the mathematical reality of our universe.

This is so cool to me. I thought you would like to hear about why I no longer hate
Jackson Pollock.

banjo mania with steve martin!,

Holy banjos and dobros, Batman!

Winners of some big fat bluegrass competition doing one of my fave songs (the banjo player of the year is a woman! yeehaw!):




And I have so much more respect for Steve Martin now:




He's a better banjo player than actor.

Yay for the banjo!