During a trip with my son to the allergist's today (he's fine - no allergies, just parents who need to slather him with yak butter and Crisco more often) my iPhone fell out of my pocket and under a chair in the waiting room. At the same time, Finn was initiating an investigation the stash of chemicals beneath the waiting-room fish tank. Figuring the iPhone was the less immediate poisoning risk at that moment, I lunged for him instead.
Not sure, in retrospect, that was a good call.
Continue reading "iPhone - I hardly knew ye" »
Heading for a session in the slate-grey Pacific slop beneath a high sheet of grubby clouds, I pattered down the concrete steps of stairway 25 off the VFW's parking lot at Ocean Beach, my 6'9" plastic Wayne Lynch replica board under my arm. Smoke from a wood fire, with some heat still in it, wafted over the stairway, lightly stinging my nostrils. Sitting in the sand just to the south, left of the stairs, were a man and a woman, the fire in a shallow hole, and three yellow dogs. The bottoms of the man's jeans were rolled up and his feet were bare. The jeans wire dirty in a way that money can't buy - dirt-saturated with actual dirt, almost shiny, like leather. Dungarees.
"Smells good," I said.
He grinned. "Have some!"
Continue reading "Friday Brunch" »
Honestly, when I thought of this in 1995, it might actually have been possible for me to learn most or all of the stuff I would've needed to learn to pull it off. Though I must say it wasn't inter-dash-active, the way I imagined it at the outset. Originally it was more of a 3-d environment where I would kind of riff masterfully (huh?) on the varied expressions of genes, all laid out visually in the form of a double helix you could cruise up and down on each chromosome to see the masterful things I had decreed . The verse (oh yes, it was to be verse) would have somehow corresponded metrically and rhyme-ically to the base pairs making up the genes, and somehow I would have been able to cover a meaningful number of genes. Hah. Somehow.
Continue reading "Genome Story Wiki" »