I lied in my comments in the last post. I did have some time to tweak around my template. of course, I SHOULD have used that time to knit. Or clean. But something like that just eats at me. TEMPLATE PROBLEMS! POOR, DEPRIVED READERS WHO CAN’T VIEW MY BLOG PROPERLY!

I am nothing but a fan whore.

So I tweaked. New people and regulars who had trouble before - please let me know how it looks. The banner at the top looks weird in IE, but I’m not sure what to do about it. And if you have 800 x 600 screen resolution….well…good luck.

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and boy howdy, if I thought the place I looked at yesterday was expensive…today’s was even more. Yikes! It’s a beautiful venue for a reception…but I think it’s too pricey. Plus no attached hotel for drunken friends.

And no comped hotel room for the bride and groom….I mean….COME ON!

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Enough of that.

Miserable week in science.

There is construction work going on in our hallway - they’re renovating the lab space adjacent to ours. They’re also doing something funky to the ventilation, and on tuesday, we had some kind of weird wind tunnel effect when our front door was open. The pressure would actually prevent the door from closing, and we had a strong breeze blowing through the lab.

Carrying construction dust.

Over the media plates I was using for my experiment.

Of the 300 plates I used in my experiment…I would say that 270 of them were complete covered in…NOT beautiful and perfectly round and happy yeast colonies…but A SOLID LAWN OF WHITE FUZZ.

contaminated. I would suspect it was the water, but there were a few plates unscathed. Must have been the air flow bringing in dirty air from next door. GODDAMIT!!! A waste of a week. Nothing was usable. Even the few left clean don’t help me.

Also a bad week in science in general. EVERYONE is talking about the scandal in Korea. We have a Korean post-doc in the lab, and she’s REALLY taking it hard. Not that we’re disappointed that there aren’t any cloned stem cells…but the fact that they LIED! and SO MUCH other unethical stuff - coercing female techs in the lab into giving up their eggs…ugh. And right now…SCIENCE DOESN’T NEED THIS! Science is already in the limelight for the whole evolution thing. We’re gaining ground there. But this puts EVERYONE’S credibility in question.

not that we aren’t perfectly aware that there are certain labs (which shall be unnamed here, don’t wanna get Dooced) that have stretched their data a little thin. Made sweeping conclusions on flimsy results, and only got published because they’re in the national academy, or know someone on the editorial board.

But something THIS huge hurts us all. I can’t even believe they thought they would get away with it! CLONED HUMAN STEM CELLS?? SURELY NO ONE WILL DOUBLE CHECK THAT!

And then there is the tool from University of Pittsburgh who, once the scandal broke, requested that his name be removed from the paper.

What a jackass. If your NAME is on a paper, you’d better be DAMNED sure that you were actively involved in confirming results, you’ve gone over the date critically, and are sure that the conclusions are solid. That’s why your name is on the paper, even if you didn’t personally do the work. You were consulted. You gave opinion.

If you FAILED to do any of this, and just decided that it would REALLY inflate your ego and boost your career to have your name on a GROUNDBREAKING paper, and you didn’t do your homework…

tough shit. You dug your own grave there. and it’s POOR FORM to all of a sudden say “oohhhh…I don’t want my name associated with this scandal.” You go down with the ship, asswipe.

But that’s just my opinion.

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And ummm…for those that came over here from Erosblog looking for more sex posts…

ummm….

boobies?

sorry. my blog isn’t consistantly naughty. it isn’t consitantly anything.