Tuesday, December 31, 2019

A Different Birthday Gift

On Sunday mornings, after the service ends, and the benediction is declared and the choir sings a final Amen, the organist plays a little improvisation on the music of the service. Usually the congregation is up and talking and making their way to the door and it's basically, "Walking Out Music". A few weeks ago I mentioned to the organist that it was my birthday. I sing in the choir and so I know the organist well. Pay attention after the service is over he said. And at the end of the service, this is what he played. About half of the choir caught on to what was happening and, I learned later, a few of the congregation also noticed. It was a different but appreciated birthday present.















Our organist has done this kind of thing before. Every Sunday morning, he does a nice improvisational transition from the music of the offertory to the Doxology. Last year, on the occasion of Leonard Bernstein's birthday, we heard this.

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Stolen Bust

A few years ago, I wrote about the foolish stunt that someone in Washington pulled merely for a photo. They wanted a photo of Air Force One flying past the Statue of Liberty and so they fueled her up and flew Air Force One low over NYC while their cameras were a whirling. Turns out, duh, everybody freaked out with a big ass 747 flying low over NYC. So I wrote a blog entry about it. I showed how easy they could have just faked the picture with a little photo editing by showing Air Force One flying past me at the Wright Brothers monument. I really was at the monument for the photo. I just added the plane.

Well, today I read in the WRAL website that the bust of one of the Wright brothers, Orville I think, had been stolen. They're not sure why but apparently, it's not the first time. Anyhow, without checking to see if the guy in the picture was actually the one stolen, I updated my photo to reflect the new circumstances.

Before:
After:

There, fixed that for ya.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Last Sand Castles of the Year

It was unseasonably warm early in October this year, so I was able to get to the beach and work in a couple more days of castle building. I'm not into things that look so much like medieval castles as I am into things that are tall and skinny and defy the notion of a pile of sand. My castles tend to fall a lot while being built. Here are the last offerings of the year, I fear. Unless it stays really warm.



Thursday, August 08, 2019

Sand Castle

Recently, I managed to get down to the beach one afternoon and build a sand castle. It was a little windy but all was going well until the beach Nazis drove up on their ATV and told me I had to take down my umbrella. "Sustained winds at or above 17 mph", they said. That kind of pissed me off since I hadn't slathered myself with SPF 90. Anyhow, I took a couple of pictures and asked a young man to stomp on the castles as I left to avoid sunburn. Here they be:


Maybe I'll get a few more in before the season runs out.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Late Night Lightning

I have a camera at the beach to watch all those people come in and party while we're away. I have it set up to send me an email with a picture when there's movement. Last night I got an email around 12:30 pm with the picture below attached. Looks like it was rocking and rolling out in front of the house. I've seen this before (see below).


I've ordered a couple of new cameras from Wyze to help document my life (as if anyone cared). So maybe you'll be seeing more post on the old blog in the future.

Tuesday, July 09, 2019

MPG to GIF

A couple of years ago we published a paper on the discovery of a TAK1 inhibitor in which we included an x-ray crystal structure. Somebody wanted to use an animated picture of the crystal structure in a website and so I made a few movies and turned one of them into a .gif so I could drop it into a website without any problem. He it is.
This a a ribbon structure with the ligand shown as a space-filling molecule. It spins at about 15 rpm. Maybe too fast! The crystal is 5v5n and the movie was made with MacPyMol.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Blue Shit, Bronze Shit

Over the last few years at work, I've been working with fluorescent dyes. Specifically I've been connecting them to an Hsp90 protein binding ligand to make a compound which, for whatever reason, selectively goes into cancer cells versus normal cells. Anyhow, to make these things, I sometimes have to make the dye which I couple to a ligand-linker construct via a Suzuki coupling. But that's not what this is about. This is about a weird property of these dyes. I've used one dye extensively because it absorbs and emits in a region compatible with widely available instrumentation. Recently, my supply has been running low and so I've been making more. The really cool thing about these dyes is that they start out deeply colored, in this case blue. But when they are purified and concentrated, they form a solid with a very metallic sheen. You can even see yourself in the reflection. Very weird. Of course I have some pictures. Here's the dye:


And here's how it looks when you make a bunch (7 g) of it.
Starts out Deep Blue.


Turns to Bronze.



This is pretty strange considering this molecule only contains carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur.

For the nerds reading this, here's the spectra of a compound after the conjugation. I don't have one of the dye itself, though it should be very close.