For the record…

So, I’m going to mention this now, well in advance. This year, 2006, I’m going to root for the Cardinals. Crazy, I know…but I don’t make this decision lightly… While I’ve always been a KC Royals fan (…if you even count me as a “baseball fan” in the first place…), they haven’t had a winning season in what seems like 20 years…that, and I’m living in St. Louis now, so I should root, root, root for the home team. Finally, I’ve kinda rooted against them in the past two playoff bouts (since Truman is 80% St. Louis kids, so I have to go against the grain…), but I kinda felt bad last time since the Cards weren’t really playing at their best and, practically, gave up the playoffs this year.

I mention this now because I generally hate it when people are “fairweather fans.” For example, there were lots of Bulls fans 10 years ago…are there any anymore? Nope. I saw a lot of Rams fans running around a few years back…but now that they aren’t doing so well, I don’t see as many jackets as I used to. Granted, some people have “always been a Cardinals fan,” but not that many people… I figure that now that they’ve lost two playoff bids and many of their key players have been traded, etc., I can safely begin to support them without becoming a “fairweather fan”…perhaps…

Therefore, I hereby make it public knowledge that I will support the St. Louis Cardinals in their next season, be it successful or not. If I’m going to live here for 5 years, I guess I’d better get used to having a hometown team.

P.S. Busch Stadium was only 40 years old. I don’t understand the hoopla behind selling bits of it off to fans… If you know nothing about this, they’ve torn down the old stadium to make room for the new one…but they sold off things like seats, dirt and urinals from the old stadium for hundreds of $$$ to idiots. I don’t understand this need to retain memories of a 40-year-old stadium. I mean, if it were Wrigley Field or something, I’d understand…but…this isn’t Wrigley Field…

So, I miss Kirksville…

I miss the people I met over the years
I miss getting up 5 min before class and still making it on time
I miss the lack of traffic
I miss a good Super Wal-Mart
I miss being able to care very little about classes
I miss the Dukum and everything about it

…but…

I don’t miss the fact that it was 10 F when I woke up today in St. Louis…but it was -14 F in Kirksville…

Friends in Kirksville? You kids have a nice day 🙂

5/26/06 will be good…

…’cause that’s when “X-Men 3” will be released… USA Today has an article about it out today… It’s looking like the switch from Bryan Singer (“X-Men 1 and 2;” “Usual Suspects”) to Brett Ratner (“Red Dragon;” “Rush Hour 2”) won’t be as bad as it could have been…

But, damn if Kelsey Grammer doesn’t look tight as the Beast…I was a bit worried about that one…that, and they got Halle Berry to play Storm again, even though it was thought she wouldn’t return (…as she has an Oscar now and doesn’t really need to do superhero movies…).

…and on a semi-related note, Bryan Singer is all about doing a “Star Trek” movie in the future…w00t!

Click thru for the Official “X3” trailer.

Review: Aeon Flux

So I went and saw “Aeon Flux” yesterday… The Wehrenberg Theater chain ran a deal yesterday that gave you a free movie ticket if you brought 3 cans of food for donation, so I saw the movie on the cheap…

Anyway, I didn’t think it was that terrible. I mean, it wasn’t a particularly awesome movie, but there are certainly worse movies out there (…”Battlefield Earth?”). I think I would consider it to be most like a somewhat little-known movie called “Equilibrium,” starring Christian Bale. It was a decent movie with a good story and a few decent actors…but mostly bad actors. The fight scenes weren’t quite as impressive as I would have liked to see, but were passable nonetheless.

So it goes with “Aeon Flux.” Charlize Theron was good and her fight scenes were well-choreographed…but could have been better. The effects were good, but not awesome. The story itself was relatively creative, yet somewhat confusing (it all became more understandable late in the movie). On the other hand, the movie was interesting and held my attention throughout and the ending wasn’t entirely unbelievable. It even had an amount of social commentary involved, which is always welcome. Personally, I’ve never seen the original anime series that appeared on MTV in the early 1990s (which, I’m told, was equally confusing), but the movie was still entertaining.

So yeah, overall, the movie could have been better…but it sure as heck could have been a lot worse… If you go see it, don’t expect anything awesome; just buy some soda and popcorn, sit back, and let your mind stay open. If you expect an Oscar winner, you’ll be disappointed.

Something to worry about…

So, we talked in class today about transposons. For those who don’t know what they are, I’m going to give a brief description. For those who usually stop reading by now when I start talking science, keep reading ’cause there’s a relatively important point toward the end that warrants discussion…

A transposon is also known as a “jumping gene.” They are pieces of genetic information that can code for the machinery to either copy itself to another location in a genome, or even excise itself from one location and move itself to another. Cool, eh?

Well, think of it this way. Let’s say a transposon lands at some location in a bacterial cell that’s pretty close to a gene that codes for tetracycline resistance (that’s an antibiotic…). Let’s say another transposon lands on the other side of this resistance gene. Now, what you have is a bigger transposon that, at either side, can cut itself out and move the whole thing (including resistance) to another location, or replicate itself.

Why is this bad? Well, that’s one easy (and scary) way that antibiotic resistance is spread between bacteria. Apparently, for example, there’s a transposon in the fruit fly that is found in all fruit flies…but wasn’t there 50 years ago…so within a span of 50 years, all fruit flies on Earth got this gene. Do you know how fast bacteria divide? It’s insane to think of how fast bacteria can get these “jumping genes” and then become resistant to all of our antibiotics.

Know what else is bad? And this is the point of the discussion… The government is more concerned with developing defenses for smallpox and anthrax than they are about protecting us from resistant strains of flu, or pneumonia, etc. How many people do smallpox and anthrax kill every year? Not that many. Now, flu and pneumonia (etc…)? How many? Lots. And those guys aren’t resistant to all of our antibiotics…yet…

So yeah, at this point, it’s likely that within the next 20-30 years (or sooner?), all of our current antibiotics won’t be effective against common ailments that are curable today. And we’re wasting our money “protecting” ourselves from dangers that barely blip on the radar in the natural world.

Believe you me…I’m more worried about an antibiotic-resistant strain of influenza than I am about anthrax…and you should be, too…

Update (12/2/05): Case in Point. Here’s an article about a new strain of bacteria that is proving difficult to fend off… Be afraid…be very afraid…

Rotation #3

So, here’s Nathan’s “what’s Andy doing in his rotation this time” blog posting (i.e. he’ll be the only one to comment because no one else cares…). Regardless, I’m working in Dr. Scott Zahm’s lab in the Pharmacology and Physiology department until the end of this semester. He works with neuroanatomy in rats, generally trying to “map out” sections of the brain that are integral to motivation and, consequently, motor skills. By “motivation,” I mean a lot of things. For example, he is currently focusing on the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) in the rat brain, which is involved in motor function. More specifically, consider this: when we’re hungry, we have a few different competing ideas going through our brain, one of which is “where do I get food” and the other is “how do I survive while I try to get this food” (self-preservation). Our VTA works in concert with other parts of the brain to weigh each competing idea and then control our “need” for things like food, warmth, TV, drugs, whipped cream, etc.

Zahm, et al. are working to map the neurons that come in and go out of the VTA (and other structures) in the rat brain. Specifically, they want to better understand the brain “circuits” and how something that is signalled in one part of the brain can signal another part of the brain. They do this using “tracers” that can label neurons in a certain area (injected into the rat’s brain…) and then the neurons take up the tracer and transport it to other areas of the brain.

The cool pharmacological part of this is two-fold. First, his lab deals with reward systems. So, if you are taking a drug and you become addicted to it, you’ll have more motivation to try and get that drug back. The drug itself could completely rearrange different neurons in your brain as well, connecting something to the VTA that wasn’t connected before (thereby leading to addiction). This leads into the second part: we don’t know how the brain works, but perhaps more importantly, we don’t know how a lot of drugs (like Prozac) really work… The brain needs to be mapped so we know where things happen, what’s connected to what, and how a change in one area can affect transmission to another area. My interests in neuropharmacology are somewhat contingent on this fact…you can’t effectively develop new drugs unless you know how the brain is set up. We’ve found lots of drugs that have an effect…but we don’t necessarily know why… We could be prescribing drugs for ADHD that are “re-mapping” the brain of our children and not really know it… This research, and studies like it, will help us better understand how the brain is set up and how a drug can affect its organization.

As far as what I personally am doing, it’s relatively small stuff. So far, I’ve worked with putting brain sections on slides, staining brain sections with antibodies, seen the surgeries for injection of tracer into the brain and, consequently, the brain’s removal. Starting tomorrow, I’ll work on the actual mapping using light microscopes (and electron microscopes, eventually…) to take a look at the neurons and see where they go.

Nifty, eh?

Craziness…

So yeah, do you remember hearing about crazy fools fighting at Wal-Marts at 5:00 am on Nov. 26th? Well, Brooke and I joined in the fun… We saw that Wal-Mart had a cheap-o laptop for sale at just under $500 in the ad on Thanksgiving day…didn’t think much of it… Well, then I went by Slickdeals.net and saw that the deal was actually $378…which is insane for a laptop that has a decent AMD processor in it, a burner and wireless networking… Brooke is getting to the point where she needs a different computer (since her HP is 5 years old and a 1 GHz desktop will only do so much with WinXP installed…), so we decided to make the attempt…

Well, we got there at 4:50 am…and the parking lot was pretty full. We walked inside and everyone was back at the electronics department in a line…like…40-50 people in each of two lines. One line was for the laptop…the other was for a $50 GameBoy Advance… We come to find out that they only had 18 of the laptops. We didn’t get one. We were back in bed and sleeping by 5:30… 😛

Anyway, the weekend overall was pretty good. Got to visit with both sides of the family and got to see friends in Columbia, so that was really good…hadn’t seen Jeff or Jason in about a year (not my fault… :-P), so good times were had.

Now, I just have to get back in the “finish this semester before your head explodes” mentality…

New Quotes

I’ve added some new quotes to the New-ish Quotes section…here’s a sample:

“Let’s be honest – this electorate has switched because that Christian right has taken over the Republican Party. They started it in the 80s with Reagan and Pat Robertson. And like a parasite on a host, they now own it. Let’s examine what ‘moral values’ are. Because I don’t think religion always corresponds with moral values. To me, and they’re very good at conflating morality with religion, just the way George Bush won election by conflating integrity with monogamy. He ran against Bill Clinton and his terrible blowjob by saying ‘I have integrity.’ That’s different than monogamy. Okay, the same way, when we talk about values, I think of rationality in solving problems. That’s something I value. Fairness, kindness, generosity, tolerance. That’s different. When they talk about values, they’re talking about things like going to church, voting for Bush, being loyal to Jesus, praying. These are not values.”
— Bill Maher; “Real Time with Bill Maher”

…so, so true…glad he got another show after ABC canned his ass for speaking the truth…