utenzi

Yesterday I did some bargain shopping. First I went to Kohl's online store and picked up a hooded sweatshirt, crew neck sweatshirt, a t-shirt, and a fleece pullover and it all totaled up to $22.50 --before tax and shipping, anyway. I love bargains! Most of the stuff was 80% off. Speaking of bargains, Wall Street had a big sell-off yesterday. The stuff I had was all small companies that weren't affected much. I dropped around $150 in value. I couldn't constrain myself from buying more tho--and now my cash balance is practically nil. But at least I didn't stretch out and use margin. I've done that in the past and got burnt bad. Charred limb type burns. I can't say that I've learned my lesson since I was out on margin just a few weeks ago but at least I'm a little more cautious now. Anyway, the lovely stocks I picked up are PCYC and THLD. The first company, Pharmacyclics, is a pharmaceutical company that is developing drugs to treat cancer. Their drugs are...

Everyone who takes Echinacea recovers from their cold. Of course everyone who doesn't take Echinacea also recovers. That's the nature of the disease. It can make us miserable for a few days, but with the exception of vulnerable folk with compromised immune systems, everyone gets better after those few days. So why take Echinacea ? Perhaps you have too much money and want to spread it around a bit. LOL Or more likely, you just feel like you have to do something. This is particularly true of parents who hate to see their kids suffering. But if you have to do something...why not try chicken soup? At least it tastes good. Colds are caused by rhinovirus and many drugs and treatments have been tried over the years to either cure the disease or make the symptoms more bearable. Echinacea and chicken soup are just two of the many things tried. In fact medical studies on echinacea were done as far back at 1908 when two articles were published on that subject in The Journal of the America...

There's a new tv show on NBC tonight, at least here in the US. It's called The Black Donnellys and it follows the trials and tribulations of 4 Irish American brothers. According to the NBC site: this gritty series bears witness to the Donnelly brothers' sudden involvement in organized crime, focusing on how they go from boys to mobsters, and showing how their new life affects their relationships with friends, family and lovers. I saw the 4 actors that play the brothers on The Today Show this morning as well as a few clips from the show. It looks like it has a lot of potential and there's certainly a lot of buzz about the show. Partially this is due to the show being written by Robert Moresco, who also wrote Million Dollar Baby and Crash. The bad thing about this show is that it marks the demise of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip , one of my favorite shows of this season. I can't believe the lackluster 30 Rock is surviving when Studio 60 isn't. (both shows are bas...

The title of this post is actually referring to my post yesterday. If you put yeast in a mild sugar solution, say grape juice, they'll use that sugar to create their waste product, ethanol. You see, many organisms that live in liquids have evolved with the assumption that their wastes will dilute out to the point where they won't hurt them. Yeast and ethanol is one example, certain types of bacteria and acetic acid is another example. In the "wild" these organisms have no difficulty doing their thing--but pesky humans enclose the yeast or bacteria in limited spaces and those waste products build up. We do this because we don't have any interest in the bacteria or yeast--it's the waste products that we really want. Sounds kinda gross, huh? Wine and vinegar are created when the microorganisms create so much waste that they kill themselves--at which point humans bottle the resulting liquids and then sell them. Now you might see how I'm making an analogy here ...

I love my humidifier. Since buying it a month ago my sinuses have given me a lot less trouble. Leaning over the unit and directly breathing in the hot moist air has decreased my sinus difficulties in a big way. However, while I do love the humidifier I certainly don't love taking care of it. Particularly not the scale that builds up quite rapidly on the thermal unit in the base. Since the humidifier goes through a couple of liters of water--and since my water is from a well with lots of mineral content--a night, there's a lot of mineral salts building up. I need to descale every week. The typical descaling method is to soak in vinegar. Vinegar is mildly acidic having around 5% acetic acid and a pH of around 3. Traditionally vinegar is produced by allowing bacteria to oxidize a fermented solution, typically wine or hard cider. This process takes considerable time, weeks at least and more often months. Some expensive Balsalmic vinegars are aged for decades. That's acetic acid...

Cats. Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows I have a love like-hate relationship with cats. For one thing, they make me sneeze, itch, sometimes even wheeze. The other thing is that a pet is supposed to worship you--gotta love dogs for getting that right--and cats decidedly don't do that. No, not even a little. What brings up this subject of cats and allergies is an article in the January Issue of The Scientist titled Felis Enigmaticus . Cute title. The article lightly reviews the science of producing "knock out" animals and more in-depth goes over the claims of Simon Brodie and his company Allerca . This is the company which made headlines last year with their claim that for $4,000 you could buy a hypoallergenic cat from them in the near future. That claim resulted in Time Magazine awarding Allerca's cat with one of Time's honorable mentions as the Best Discovery of 2006. First of all, it's important to know what a knock out animal is. We use t...

I was reading the February 2007 issue of BioTechniques --doesn't everyone?--and came across something interesting in a profile of a professor at Princeton University. It seems that Dr Bonnie Bassler is very interested in communications issues. From my varied relationships with the fairer sex this seems to be a constant interest with women. However Dr Bassler has worked a twist into this issue. Her work is purely with bacteria. Yes, bacteria. Bacteria and communication issues. Germs can talk?! Who knew! It all started when Dr Bassler went to a lecture which had as its core how certain deep sea bacteria use bioluminescence to signal, a topic now called quorum sensing. I still can't get over bacteria talking. Anyway, Dr Bassler quickly signed up to work in this area of research and has since found that bacteria do communicate in a large and diverse number of ways--the method of communication depending on the environment that the bacteria has adapted to . (or for any IDers out the...