codeblog » Health

catching up on Stargate

kees — Wed, 17 May 2006 06:50:02 +0000

I’ve been catching up on Stargate SG-1 ever since Bryce recommended it. I’d been resisting it, but with no more Firefly, Farscape, or StarTreks left to watch, it was inevitable.

At one point during my catch-up, I realized that I was watching 4 separate time-lines of the show. SciFi was showing new episodes on Fridays, a set of 3-in-a-row on Mondays, and a third chronology running Tue, Wed, Thu. On top of this, Fox(?) was playing re-runs on Fridays as well. About 30 episodes in, I totally lost it, and could not keep things straight. (“What? Where’d Daniel Jackson go? Who’s this guy?”)

To my rescue was my ever-faithful epguides.com to serve as a base check-list for which shows I’d seen already, and the fantastic Stargate Wiki Episode Guide to help me remember which I’d already seen. (They even have full transcripts of the episodes! That’s dedication!)

It looks like very few of season 2 has aired, so I will have to turn to either the library or Netflix to fill the gaps. Once SG1 is gone, I will have to switch my daily exercise routine back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :)

decompiling myself

kees — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:01:41 +0000

Figured I should try to decompile myself. The first step would be get a full dump of my DNA base pairs as letters. Looks like that’s not going to be easy though. Even a DNA stain takes a lot of steps (and I’ll probably never be allowed to do the radioactive steps myself). The real goal here is that with current US law, I should copyright myself (I’m the first performance of the specific base pair “idea”) and possibly patent myself (my methods are a unique variation of other methods).

Obviously this doesn’t take into account my immune system or my memories, but I figure it’s a good start. At like just under 10 billion base pairs, that’s a 10GB program. I think Inkscape is only 45M or so, and that’s not even counting shared libraries.

Since I don’t really want to share my DNA with a company (I’ve got to be the first to copyright it), I wanted to find out what it would take to sequence at home. Since a sequencer is in the $100k price range, that’s not really going to happen. Talking to my NIH-employed friend techne23, she suggested a possible “cheap” way to do it would be in pieces, doing PCRs on specific SNPs, and send those out for sequencing to get back base pair letters. For example, on a gene, the red ones here are considered “interesting”. The PCR machines can be had for cheap, too.

So, in summary:

need all the standard lab stuff (centifuge, gloves, tips, pipets, tubes, autoclave, glassware, etc)
need chemicals to isolate my DNA
need a little space in my freezer to store my DNA
need to buy PCR reagents, about $100 for 50-100 reactions
need two base pair-specific primers at $40 total for up to 500 base pairs per PCR
need thermal cycler to do the PCR in
need electrophoresis equipment to see if the PCR worked (maybe reuse my UV EPROM wiper?)
need toxic (careful!) reagents for the electrophoresis
need a sequencing company that is willing to work with a non-University
need FedEx account to ship PCR to sequencers :)

Or I can spend crazy money doing thousands of SNPs at once in microarrays. (Or wait until they’re in every doctor’s office.)

they be spinnin’

kees — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 04:52:28 +0000

In an effort to use my addictive personality against my lazy personality, I’ve started watching half an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer every morning while riding my bike on a stationary trainer. I can’t thank Doug Mandell enough for letting me borrow his trainer while I was trying to figure out if this scheme would actually work for me.