"Hold on tight to your genes.
Don't dance with DNA."
The mental experience works well through the Internet,
but the brain life is blocked off by neurodynamics,
which is God's own firewall preventing philosophers
from accessing brain codes.The way of the hacker is hard.
Walter J. Freeman
Molecular machines, probabilities of information transfer at the chemical level -- these are the things that get me going. But I left the bench. I now have business cards that read "Writing, Editing, Information Design." That's how I earn my living. I write multi-investigator, cross-disciplinary grant proposals. It covers everything from gastroenterology core facilities to education in the math department to biodefense to neuroregeneration. Rarely am I bored.
Some of my writing skills were honed by posting on Kuro5hin.org
as iGrrrl. I loosely participated in the Art With Brain in Mind list. I used to participate in the PSYCHE-B and PSYCHE-D discussion lists, but I gave up the third time they debated the definition of "consciousness." Few things make a cellular and molecular neurobiologist more uncomfortable than discussions of consciousness. Still, if you want to read me in full academic mode with typos, here's a post on the neurochemistry of consciousness. The essay has implications for ways of thinking about neural networks in programming. The brain ain't digital.
I used to record my daily life in the lab in my diary on K5. I wrote it in part to remind the computer geeks that there is geekdom beyond computers, and that there are ways to hack of which they know nothing. My rec's:
I'm a scientist by training, and I spent years chopping up DNA and putting it back together as part of my daily work life. I trained as a neurobiologist with a specialization in molecular biology. During over 15 years at the bench I also worked in cell biology and cancer biology. My toolbox of research techniques includes everything from electron microscopy to electrophysiology. I consider myself a wetware hacker.
Since there is no day-to-day lab news to report any more, and most of what I do is confidential, I let my diarizing fizzle out, then migrated it to and have migrated with the same nick to HuSi.
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so that you can meet girls."
Matt Cartmill - Professor of Biology, Duke University.
The site contains a FAQ, because it amuses me to have one. There is also a page of interdisciplinay scientist humor. I've also added the all-important, must-read comparison between Scooby Doo and StarWars.
This is a vanity page, and that is all. It is lynx browsable, and low-key. I dislike web pages with
("Look, Ma! Conscious irony!")
What else? If you've read this far, then you'll learn that I'm an ordained minister. All for now.
Oh, except for this quote:
"Arrogance is always a bad strategy in science."
(Jaron Lanier You Can't Argue with a Zombie)