Book Meme

I haven't done a meme for a while. This one comes from Lemuel, who has been my primary meme source in life. It's also yet another excuse to get all geeky on everyone:

1. Pick up the nearest book (at least 123 pages).

2. Turn to page 123.

3. Find the 5th sentence

4. Post the 5th sentence.

I'm at the breakfast table right now. This is from the book sitting right next to me:

Within the genus Cicindela alone, numerous examples of this geographic pattern are found among species in the subgenera Cicindina, Ifasina, Lophyridia, Calochroa, and Cosmodelia.

Aside to Lem- I'm sure you now regret asking. My site meter will go into free fall at any moment.

Slime Molds and Computers

A slime mold about to form fruiting bodies
From the University of British Columbia Botanical Gardens

Yesterday, Gary Lee left a comment mentioning slime molds in conjunction with computers. Slime molds are some of the weirdest and most fascinating organisms that you are likely to run across. Unless you are in a lab, you are most likely to see them as slimy masses growing on bark or decaying vegetation. They are much more interesting than their humble appearance, however. Slime molds are social amoebae. Now, you might not think of amoebae as having much of a social life, but you'd be wrong.

Dictrostelium amoebae
From the National Institutes of Health

Imagine, you are an amoeba oozing about on the forest floor, occasionally engulfing a tasty morsel but otherwise minding your own. Suddenly, you find that your food supply has dwindled. You feel lonely, unfulfilled (OK, I'm anthropomorphizing. Work with me here). You need the company of other amoebae. The others near you feel the same way. Slowly, you begin migrating towards on another and aggregating.

The slug-like phase of Dictyostelium
From the University of California at San Diego

Eventually you come together and form a slug-like structure. What was once a group of independent, individual organisms is now a single multi-cellular organism, complete with a front and a back end.

Dictyostelium fruiting body
From Oxford University

The change continues. One end curls upwards and forms a stalk. A fruiting body forms at the tip, ripens, and releases tiny spores which hatch into a new crop of amoebae.

Slime molds, particularly Dictyostelium discoideum have been incredible tools for scientific discovery. They have been particularly informative in terms of their chemical signalling (the cues for when and where to come together during the aggregation phase), and the development of cell polarity. Their genome has recently been sequenced. I've never worked with them myself (beyond writing a term paper on the role of cyclic AMP in cell signalling back in the early 1980s). But I have always found them fascinating.

So what's the connection with computers? Back in the mid 1980s I was part of a group called GATES, the Gay Association of Technicians, Engineers, and Scientists. Leon, Gary Lee, and Gary Lee's partner were also members. In practice, the majority of the members were software developers, computer technicians (nobody referred to this as IT back then), and technical writers. Meetings were often dominated by talk of personal computers (which then could do considerably less than most cell phones and PDAs do today). I had little interest and eventually began changing the subject to slime molds every time people started talking about how much RAM they now had. My reputation stuck, although Gary Lee is one of the few people from those days whom I keep contact with.

Meeting Harold

In my recent geek post, I mentioned a brush with fame that I had earlier in my life. In the summer of 1978, I was preparing to enter my senior year in college and working a summer job at EG&G. EG&G stands for Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, and Edgerton was Harold Edgerton, the famous pioneer of ultra high-speed photography. I was working as a machine operator at the time, stamping glass bits to become parts of flash tubes of the sort found in copying machines. It was a pretty good job. The work was very repetetive, but otherwise not unpleasant and I was making reasonable money.

One afternoon in August a whole bunch of the company was off on vacation. I had been asked to spend the day manually injecting resin into the ends of the flash tubes so that the company could complete an order on time. The head of the department walked through with three guys in suits. He paused at my work station and said "This man is adding a stiffening agent to xenon tubes." It was a bit of a thrill for me. I was a lad of 20 at the time and looked about 14 (I'm not exaggerating). It was one of the first times that someone had referred to me as a man rather than a boy. One of the guys in suits handed me a postcard. It was a copy of the photograph Making Applesauce at MIT (shown above). I thanked him and they walked on. Someone later told me that it was Edgerton. I was both elated and crushed. Harold Edgerton! And I hadn't even realized it. I still deeply regret that I did not know at the time. I absolutely would have asked him to sign the postcard. I still have it.

Hi. My name is Doug and I'm a geek.

Ten things that give me away.

1. I love the periodic table of the elements. It’s one of the coolest things that I know of. Mendeleev rocks! A coworker owns a copy of the table that is actually autographed by Glenn Seaborg. I totally covet it.

2. I wear Dockers. And I don’t care.

3. In the 1980s, after I saw a Nova episode about his work, I developed a crush on Stephen Jay Gould.

4. I have never seen a single episode of Survivor, American Idol, or Dancing with the Stars.

5. I know how to use a slide rule (though I’m badly out of practice).

6. Growing up, the TV programs that most influenced me were Jonny Quest and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. This combination marks me not only as geeky, but gay and geeky.

7. When I still lived in Massachusetts, I met two famous people. I was much more taken by meeting Harold Edgerton than by meeting Liza Minelli.

(OK, that one loses me all of the remaining points on my gay card).

8. From the time I was about 10, the two things that I listed as what I wanted to be when I grew up were a scientist (really meaning a field biologist) and a meteorologist. Option #1 won.

9. I was on the debate team in high school.

10. My one possession that could be described as fag-fabulous is a test tube rack.