October 30, 2004

• This makes me even more happy I am in the numbers side of science. Though growing a giant flower would be cool.
• I once had to go people's houses, ask them for their garbage and segregate it into recycleable and non recycleable waste. NOT fun.
• If 'tis flatus ye crave, get yourself an elderly dachshund. Small but powerful.
• The story of Stubbins Ffirth is one of the saddest I've ever read.
• My wife recently quit science (toxicology, to be precise) for art (glass mosaic & crochet, to be precise) and one of the last things she had to do in the science world would have to qualify as a Crap Science Job. For some reason, her lab needed samples of pig intestines. So, it was her job (and the job of one other poor lab schmoe) to go to the pig killing room, where the pigs would be ushered in, flooded up to their ankles and electrocuted, then sliced across the neck to have their parts harvested. The last time she went, though, they held one of the pigs back for some class to come in and observe, but there was some kind of scheduling snafu and this last pig had to watch the others get killed and hang around snorting and fussing for an hour before its time was up. So the job already sucks, but here's the really bad part. To get the intestine samples, the people doing the slaughtering just bring you a big tub full of guts. You pull out the intestines and then have to scrape all the crap out of them, detach membranes, etc. And there's a lot to scrape and detach. So now she has no regrets about not becoming a big rich pharmaco researcher.