Ohrwurm

Just Jack - I talk too much




hat tip: Maria

Not a friendly site when in an old east-German basement hospital room

That is one mean looking thing on the wall. Somehow since it's written in German it makes it more scary.
Snapped it with my cell phone.

(translation: Potential Equilization Panel - For the connection of electro-medical equipment)

Not boding well for my future sports entertainment

There are really three things I think I miss most about not living in the USA: Stores open late and on Sundays; having a car; and watching American sports, particularly college basketball and football. Fortunately the last has been alleviated quite a bit by a TV channel I get called NASN - North American Sports Network. Each year their programming has been getting better, and I've even been able to watch my favorite teams play basketball several times this year. But when they have a poll like this on their site it worries me.

Over FOUR times as many people are looking forward to the Stanley Cup playoffs than March Madness?!?! wtf? March Madness, which refers to the college basketball conference tournaments and then the national, 65-team tournament over 3 weekends to decide the national champion, is in my opinion the most exciting time in American sports. Okay, fine, I can see some people excited about hockey playoffs, but FOUR times as many? And more NASN viewers would rather watch spring training than march madness.
spring.
training.
If they start showing preseason baseball games over college basketball tournament championships I don't know what I'll do.

Fight continues against Waldschlößchenbrücke

In the continuing saga....."Construction" started a few months ago - the area is turning into dirt and machines. But the fight continues - now mostly in the form of proposing a tunnel as an alternative. A petition was sent around the city to consider a tunnel alternative to the bridge (The bridge plans include a tunnel anyway up to the river, where it will turn into a bridge). I was unable to sign because I'm not an EU-national, but they've got 20,000+ signatures....

Regenbogen statt Brücken!
-what luck with this photo

Here's the website leading the fight.

New Year's Eve in Dresden

Finally putting up a few pics. We gathered at my place and then headed down to the river for the madness. On this night there are no laws against setting off any fireworks anywhere in the city....and people did.

(click to enlarge)

the aftermath of exploded firecrackers on Alaunstrasse

By FAR, the two best times I've had on NYE have been the two years I spent it in Dresden.

Sächsische Kartoffelsuppe

I've come to realize that one of my favorite foods I've found in Germany is potato soup. I love me some good potato soup. So it's surprising I haven't tried until now to just make it myself.
A quick google search for "Sächsiche Kartoffelsuppe Rezept" (Saxony Potato Soup Recipe) provides a lot of recipes. Learning to make it "Saxony-style" will give me another nice "souvenir" when and if I ever leave here.

I made a giant pot recently.
Of course it starts with lotsa potatoes and veggies

Here it is pre-stab-mixer - one of the greatest little appliances I've got that makes quick work of 5 liters of veggies like nobody's business

I even made a time-lapse movie of myself making the giant pot of Kartoffelsuppe in my kitchen - but unfortunately my camera's broken and somehow decided to do this vignette thing which actually covered up where most of the action was in cutting up all the different veggies.
anyway:

And of course for echte Sächsische Kartoffelsuppe brauchen wir ein paar Sächsische Wiener Würstchen dazu:

Disturbing, concerning, yet not surprising.


and then on top of it things like this.

Favorite song of the moment

Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel




reminds me a bit of driving from Texas to Virginia through NC or TN.

props to Eric for the heads up.

This is awesome

Create your own album cover.

Here are the first three I got:

Instructions here
(and just crop it to a square)
(via punkassblog)


Update:

And here's one where I cheated on the photo - one I found surfing the web. I couldn't resist. But I think the album and title came out more than perfect!

You want some of this?



Then bring it. down to the little elementary school in Striesen on Wednesday nights. They have a small kinda basketball court they let us use. If one of the little old teachers stops you just tell her you're playing with the MPI people and hopefully you can get in.
But seriously.

I think things are healing well. The glue seems to have worked. Everybody feels the need to tell me that "chicks dig scars", which worries me a bit that this will be permanent.

And I've received a lot of Harry Potter jokes, the first from the nurse in the ER.

And the results are in.....

Sächsisch Beer vs. Czech Beer at the MPI beer hour. I think the picture speaks for itself.

One week and counting.....

One week from tonight will be the last evening smokers will be allowed to freely smoke in every bar and restaurant in Saxony. I can. not. wait. It's kind of interesting. In one day, Saxony will go from being about 20+ years behind the US in smoking laws to maybe 10 years ahead of some states/cities. As far as I know, about 20 years ago all restaurants in the US did away with "smoking" sections. I can barely even remember there being such a thing. I don't know how long ago it was they introduced smoking sections. But right now here in Dresden, for about 95% of restaurants, there are no smoking vs. non-smoking sections. It's all just smoke-em-if- ya-got-em, so to speak. You can be sitting down to a fancy dinner filled with delicate flavors and the couple next to you can light up and chain smoke the rest of the evening, so that everything just smells/tastes like smoke.
On the other hand, in many cities in the US, there's still no restrictions on smoking in bars. I guess because of that it wasn't completely shocking coming to Dresden, since I was at least used to the smoke in bars. But as of next Friday, in Saxony bars and restaurants will have to be primarily non-smoking. All of them I assume. Although apparently they will be allowed to have a smoking "section", as long as it can be separated from the rest of the bar by a closed door.
It would seem like it will never work, people will never accept it. But if it's worked in Ireland, Italy, Paris, NYC......I guess it can work anywhere.
Again I wonder what will become of my neighborhood bar Hebeda's. I think I might go this Friday to take some final photos of the smoky mood, and then go again next Friday to celebrate the lack of smoke.

New Scanner (Milk and Sugar, baby)

I realized the other day that when I take photos with my SLR (an old film kind of SLR), it's costing me a fortune to make them digital just to share with people or put on my blog or whatever. For a 36 roll of slide film, it only costs about 2.50 euro to develop, but then my photoplace charges about 12.50 to scan them onto a CD at 2400 dpi. So when I take 2 rolls of film in it costs me 3o euros, and there's no prints or paper involved. For some reason it took me this long to realize if I were to just have them develop them and scan them myself it would be 1/6th the cost. So it seemed obvious to go buy a scanner that can scan negatives/slides and soon it would pay for itself. But then again I want to get a digitial SLR soon and would I then not have a use for the scanner anymore?? I decided it was worth buying a good scanner, then I could also use it for other things or even archiving old slides/film.

So I got this guy (Canon 8800F)

and here's my first scan, of an awesome graphic I had found out on the town. (click to enlarge)

Making a Gingerbread House in Germany

As usual this is about a month late, but had to post some pictures to show that while in Germany I actually helped make a gingerbread house during Christmas-time. There was a cookie competition at work as part of the Christmas party and our lab decided we would make a gingerbread house as our entry....

The walls go up. Not looking like a standard house

Jenn was the master-coordinator of the project, and supervised the American postdocs



A sidewalk and street, and pedestrians go down...

Final touches included a speed bump and smokers outside in the cold. (Gummibärchen, of course)

And BAM! The MPI-CBG in the snow. Complete with funky awning, trees, speed bumps, smokers, benches, pond, and even some little guys playing kicker up on the roof.

First place! And this contest was no joke, as evidenced by the mean looking cookie on the certificate. Notice Till lurking in the background. He was cherry-picking the candy when eyes were turned.

Soon everybody got into the act. It didn't last very long. But tasted pretty good.

Cuts!

Collided heads in basketball tonight and somehow it opened up a one and a half inch cut on my forehead. No stitches, though, they put it back together with hot glue.



I had it coming, though, the last 2 collisions I had sent the other guy to the ER.

Speeding up Microtubule Growth

Molecular biochemists doctor Gary Brouhard and doctor Jeff Stear (of The Stools) have teamed up to present their last couple years of work, published this week in Cell. CELL is perhaps the most prestigious journal in the world for publishing in the biosciences, and here they have pulled off the cover. Gary and Jeff have shown us how microtubule growth is mechanistically regulated on a molecular level, which until now has been the subject of debate, by the protein XMAP215.







Cover design by Gary Brouhard

The authors at their finest

In the authors' own words:

"Microtubules are long, slender filaments with which cellular structures such as the cytoskeleton, the mitotic spindle, and the axoneme are built. These structures are not static. Rather, they are broken down and rebuilt when a cell moves, changes shape, or progresses through the cell cycle. This remodeling is achieved by the disassembly and reassembly of microtubules and occurs primarily through the removal and addition of tubulin dimers at microtubule ends. "

(Here is a movie illustrating microtubules growing in live cells.)

More specifically:

"To distinguish among the different possible ways that XMAP215 might promote microtubule growth, we developed an assay to visualize single XMAP215 molecules during microtubule polymerization. We demonstrate that XMAP215 does not, in fact, act as a tubulin shuttle. Rather, XMAP215 acts as a processive polymerizing enzyme or polymerase: XMAP215 forms a 1:1 complex with tubulin and resides for long periods at microtubule plus ends where it catalyzes repeated rounds of addition of tubulin into the microtubule polymer."

Nice work, dudes.

New Year's Eve in Dresden...

As soon as I get my photos developed from New Year's Eve I want to post some up here.
But briefly I'll put this great video that Sarah took. This captures the attitude of the evening in Dresden. chaos and fire.



This was outside my flat as we were preparing to walk down to the river for the festivities and Sanni thought it a good idea to try a large rocket in the tram tracks.
Garrett with the commentary. Unfortunately there was a guy where it exploded and he wasn't too happy about it.
it's fun to pause it on the frame of the first explosion.

Summing up Tex-Mex in Germany in one picture.



This is a screenshot from a German website selling American foods. This was the only entry under the category "Tex-Mex". The heading says "Tex-Mex - for the exceptional spiciness"

Quote of the year

"Don't tase me, bro."

Adding to blogroll:

Jon Swift.
I like to keep my blogroll there short, so maybe people will actually check out those blogs.
here is a new addition. This one really is consistently a good read, as are the handful there under "Places I frequent". Check it out.