Gordon Conference

The 2008 Gordon conference on Single Molecule Approaches to Biology took place last week, and we got a full rundown from Steve on the proceedings. All of the big names came and talked up a storm, including an entire session on super-resolution imaging (one of my hobby horses), featuring Xiaowei Zhuang and Stefan Hell, among others. TJ Ha chaired a session on transcription and translation, and has apparently started looking at T7 RNA polymerase, and is able to see something akin to scrunching using smFRET.

Dude, your physics is showing!

As a biophysicist, I long ago gave up on trying to figure out if what I was doing was considered actual-real-honest-to-goodness physics by other physicists. I figured I would work on what interested me, and if other people thought it wasn't real physics, well, that was just a dick measuring contest that I wasn't going to get into. That being said, there are still some things that warm the cockles of my heart occasionally (or perhaps, as Dennis Leary would say, somewhere in the sub-cockle region). A couple that crossed my browser today:
Via McSweeney's, Physical Theories as Women. e.g.:

Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her aura of mystery is actually just confusion.

Jesus. I think I've dated a lot of wave functions by this criterion.

The second is this rap video about the LHC (avid readers of this blog will probably have noticed that I can't resist posting videos, especially musical ones about science) It's pretty good:


Sometimes, I do miss it...but then I remember that all my condensed matter friends are now working on Wall St.