Category: Doodles

ARB Comics!

This is an almost completely true account of me using ARB today.

Using ARB can be dangerous.

Apart from discovering the button that kills people in ARB, today was the first day that I thought about the absurdity of using 3 different alignment programs to get my work done:

  • I use SeaView to align my sequences and to view already-aligned sequences.
  • I use Clustal primarily for its “range information” function, to trim my sequences at my conserved trim targets.
  • I use ARB to import the alignments and make phylogenetic trees.

Perhaps one day, there will be one aligner program that does everything I need it to.  Do you hear me, you bioinformaticists out there??

I am melting like those Nazis that opened the Ark of the Covenant

Christine, don't look at it. Shut your eyes, Christine. Don't look at it, no matter what happens!

Holy guacamole we’ve been having a summer heat wave in San Francisco.  And by “heat wave” I mean temperatures between 70F-80F / 21C-27C.  Sooo, not very hot.  And yet, I am convinced that this is exactly what death feels like.

It must be part of the human condition, to always feel like you are about to explode if the temperature varies by a few degrees outside of the average for your area.  Because living in Bermuda, Australia, and wherever, I not only tolerated scorching hot days but enjoyed them.  Alas, this is all that remains: a Christine that looks like a melting wax figurine.

Lemon is the sneakiest of flavours

This is a true story; this is my story

This is an ancient tradition amongst bakers: if your pastry contains lemon, you should name it something like “Walnut Awesomeness,” “Pistachio Bliss,” or “Contains Absolutely No Citrus,” and find it unimportant to indicate the citrusey contamination anywhere in the name or description.  In fact, do everything you can to avoid indicating lemon as an ingredient anywhere on the label or in the name.

And lemon isn’t something like chocolate or nuts or most other fruits, where you can visually identify its addition to pastries.  Oh no, lemon is the same colour as neutral baked goods, and relatively texture-free.  Thus it lies in the pastry dormant, hiding, dead-but-dreaming; waiting for some innocent victim to take a bite unawares, and be forced into tasting its vile tartness.

A common encounter between myself and somebody sharing baked goods:

“Hi Christine, want one of these blueberry cupcakes I made?”

“Oh wow awesome I love bluberrMMMMMMPHHHHHH!!! SONOFA-“

Lemon.

This is why lemon is the sneakiest of flavours.