Lab lab lab

Still working with the yeast! There’s a lot of fun things to work on. I also started reading more papers and skimming new scientific literature via RSS feeds. It’s fun to look at new things that are going on in labs around the world! I love my job.

Back to school

Taking classes on all sorts of natural sciences.

• Ecology, evolution, and genetics. Should be fun. I’m excited to break out python graphing to deal with data from the lab portion.
• Chaos, dynamical systems, and modeling. I’m interested to see what this class is like, since it sounds like an introductory chaos theory class. I decided to take it because dynamical systems are pretty darn relevant to the phenomena I work with in the lab!
• Electricity and magnetism. I like waves. I don’t know a lot about either of these subjects either, so I think it will be lots of fun. I liked David Griffith’s QM book so much that I bought his electrodynamics textbook specifically for this.
• Organic chemistry, part 1. This should be neat.

Reading

Still reading lots and lots of books. Not as many last month as the month before, but still more than enough to feed me. I read Robin Sloan’s Moonbound, which was delightfully whimsical. It made me laugh out loud, which not very many books have done recently. Consistently surprising, silly, and just plain fun. I’ll probably come back to this one in a year or two.

I also reread Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man, which remains one of my favorite portrayals of death as an entity. I prefer this Death because it cares.

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?