Science is so fricking awesome I can't stand it

This link explains it better than I can: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/fractal-genome/ .  The gist is that the macro-scale structure that DNA coils up into has been mapped in high resolution.  The best part?  It coils up in a structure known as a Hilbert Curve, a space-filling fractal first described in 1891.  1891!  Science and math are curving in on themselves — not entirely unlike a fractal.

Travis lumbered up the steps of his fraternity house.  After today’s exam there was just one more between him and the end of the semester.  And tonight there was a party.  At least, there was supposed to be.

If he was truly honest with himself, he knew he should study tonight.  After all, he could party as much as he wanted once exams were over.

Travis stopped cold just inside the doorway.  What was he thinking?  Not go to the party tonight?  Study?  He felt uneasy, he wasn’t thinking like himself.  Just then his bro, Cheese, interrupted whoever he was thinking like.

“T-Rav, what up?”

“Hey Chad, nothing.  I just took that exam.”

“Bro, Chad?  We at some fancy dinner party?  Cheese.”

“Right.  Sorry Cheese, I was just… you know.  I’m going to head upstairs, maybe study.”

“Yeah right.  Have fun pregaming!”

As Travis made his way upstairs, he bargained with himself.  He’d just study a little.  Nothing serious, maybe outline a chapter at most, and then down to the party.

Once he cracked the first book, though, he couldn’t stop.  One outline turned into several.   And, hours after he started, while he was cross-referencing different primary sources, he fell asleep at his desk well before the party below died out.

That morning, when Cheese drunkenly stumbled into Travis’s room instead of the bathroom, he smiled when he saw Travis asleep at his desk.  Then, he saw the books spread out all over the room.  Cheese panicked and his head felt like math, but he knew he had to get Travis to the brospital.

Cheese wheeled the now awake and protesting Travis in through the brospital doors.

“Dude!  I am totally serious!  Dude!” he bellowed.  A doctor stepped out from behind the reception bar.  He gestured toward Travis, who was struggling to get out of the wheelbarrow.

“I’m Dr. Tannenstead.  What happened to this dawg?”

“I’m fine, I just fell asleep studying.”

“T-Rav, you don’t know what you’re saying.  He’s been like this all morning – he’s pretty oriented, totally coherent.  He can walk around and remember things, and I haven’t smell a drop of booze on him.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Look, I don’t want him to get in trouble, but when I found him he was slumped over on his desk.”

“Just slumped over?”

“No… there were books all over the place.  I knew he did it, but I thought it was a once in a while thing.  There were so many, though.”

“What kind?  We need to know what he was reading!”

“I don’t know, they were hardcovers… some were textbooks.  I freaked out and brought him here.”

“Good job, bro.  Getting him here was the best thing you could have done.  Let’s get him in a room and see what we can do.”

After Cheese wheeled Travis into the room Dr. Tannenstead hooked him up to a series of monitors.  Then, still by Travis’s bedside, he picked up the bromote control and said, “Travis, I’m just going to run a few tests, ok?”

“Sure.  I feel fine, but you’re the doctor.”

“Interesting.”

Dr. Tannenstead turned the television on and tuned it to the local college’s football sports game.  The heart rate monitor attached to Travis showed a sedate sixty beats per minute.

“That’s strange.  Hey, would you like a beer?”

“A beer?  It’s eleven in the morning.”

“I was afraid of that.  Cheese, could you hold his arm out like this?  Excellent.”

Dr. Tannenstead dapped Travis, with no change in his heart rate.  He dapped again.  And again.  Each time to no effect.  Cheese began to worry.

“Dude, seriously, what’s happening?”

Tannenstead didn’t want to say it out loud, but the longer Travis remained unresponsive to a stimulus as basic as dapping, the more likely it was he would slip away into a broma, possibly forever.  He dapped harder, his knuckles red and swollen from the effort.

“Don’t you grow up on me!  Don’t you dare grow up on me!”

Travis turned away from his Sudoku to address the doctor.

“Would you please stop that?  You’re hurting my hand.”

The doctor’s eyes widened as he leaned back from Travis.

“Cheese, I need some information from you, and I need it right now.  What kind of beer does your buddy like?”

“Rolling rocks, dude.”

“Actually, if I was going to drink anything right now, which I wouldn’t because it’s eleven in the morning, I’d want some red wine.  You know, antioxidants,” interjected Travis.

“It’s worse than we thought.  Nurse!”

The nurse jiggled into the room.

“How can I… help you boys out?”

“There’s no time for that, dollface.  We need to hang a bag of R negative for this dawg.”

After watching the nurse leave, Cheese and the doctor turned their attention back to Travis.  He was getting a jump on filing his tax return.

I’m back to blogging again. No update schedules this time, since I never end up sticking to them. I don’t have much to post at the moment, but I thought I would share a picture and quote from Carl Sagan that I both like and think is funny to put on a blog.

Earth (circled), as seen from 6 billion kilometers away

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

-Carl Sagan