McRunning

I recently read about a truly amazing guy.  And because I am kind, I will spare you the trouble of reading about a truly amazing guy.

Does anybody remember the movie Super Size Me?




It was a documentary about a guy who ate nothing but McDonalds for 30 days.  He gained a bunch of weight, his cholesterol shot up, and he got pretty sick in general.  This got lots of publicity and McDonald's got in lots of trouble. 

So, enter Joe.  Joe is a marathon runner, and from the little I know about marathons, he is quite good (personal best time: 2:36).  (My personal best time: 7 years).  Joe loves McDonald's, so he decides to do the same thing.  For the 30 days before the LA marathon, he ate nothing that he didn't buy at McDonald's (the only exception being water and that weird sugar-goo that runners eat while they're running).  He continued training, and running, and all that during the month.  In the end, his vitals were as good as they were before, and he beat his personal best time by a few seconds, still finishing in 2:36. 

I love this story.  I could go on about the moral of the story, but I think it's obvious. 

Now if only somebody would run a marathon after eating Pizza from the Diag Party Supply store across from my lab, I would feel much better (I'm pretty sure that Diag Pizza is technically considered a chemical weapon, but a very tasty chemical weapon).

Time to update

Well, friends, it's time for another post.  It's been a while.

Today I am in the lab without much to do.  Not that I'm lazy.  It's the nature of my work that sometimes stuff slows way down.  In order to start some new experiments I need to do, I have to grow up new bacteria.  They are currently in storage at -80 degrees Celsius.  That's cold, in case you didn't know.  Before I can use them, I have to grow them for a day on solid media (think of bacteria growing on top of a petri dish full of Jello), then a second day in liquid media (think of bacteria growing suspended in salty Gatorade).  Then I get to start my experiments. 

So, to try and make the best use of my time, I decided to write a Java program for one of my lab mates.  I'm really proud of it.   I won't go into the biological details of why I wrote it (unless somebody wants me to), but what it does (for Sam and anybody else who would understand this) is digest two proteins to peptides and output an excel file of all possible pairwise combinations of those peptides and the mass of the two peptides together.  It sounds so simple when I can type it in a single sentence, but I promise, it was harder than it sounds.

Anyway, it's been fun.  Lance just passed his prelim, so it's time to go congratulate him.