Quote of the Day

The semi-ancient electrophoresis power goes on the fritz, so of course we open it up to see what's what.  Lot's of discrete logic, some massive (1 milli Farad each!) capacitors, a couple of Motorola 68000s.  Nothing obviously amiss, and no hope of figuring out what has gone wrong.

But we did get this gem: "Oh, that's where the beeping noise comes from."  That's what makes it all worthwhile.

Well, that's it, then.

Finally, the book is done.  Aside from reviewing the proofs in a couple of months, and writing an afterword, it is at last out of my hands.

The title, finally, will be "Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and Business of Engineering Life".  It will be in the Fall 2009 Catalog from Harvard University Press, with atoms showing up at approximately New Years.  I'll get around to updating the web site text eventually.

My brain is presently mush.  I haven't blogged in so long I'd forgotten the user name and password for my account.  I have a couple of posts in mind that I hope to get up over the weekend.

Otherwise, I can't wait to get back to actually doing science.  What a concept.

First: sleep.  No -- second sleep.  First: beer.

Mostly Moved

Thanks to the efforts of the team at LivingDot, I am mostly moved in to the new space online.  As I am still learning MovableType there will no doubt be a few stumbles over the next couple of weeks.

If you are looking for articles, I'll try to get those posted in the next couple of days.

Biodesic: It's Alive!

This little post serves as the official launch of Biodesic.  As the book is finally done, or at least mostly in the hands of the publisher, I can turn my full attention to getting the start-up company out of my garage.

As the website says:

Biodesic is part of the new bio-economy. We provide technologies and knowledge to organizations building the future.

Our mission is to transform business and society through the development and distribution of biological technologies.

Here are examples of recent consulting projects.   Our first product is a parallel protein detection tool.  It is similar to Tadpoles but detection is much simpler, and there is no need to amplify a signal using PCR.  We believe the technology will provide novel and useful capabilities for clinical diagnostics and for engineering biological systems.  For more details, see "Technology for Sensitive Multiplexed Protein Detection".

Massive Technology Failure

If anybody reading this has emailed me within the last 14 days, I haven't received it.  After 5 years, and many, many miles, my trusty 12" Powerbook had a serious hardware failure a couple of nights ago.  Took all my email with it.  Then, when I was trying to rescue some data, the failing Powerbook took out my backup drive.  Ouch.  I seem to have a talent for finding really good technology problems...

I have normal email access now, but if you don't receive a reply from me on something sent before this weekend, please send again.

And remember, kids, back up, back up, and back up again.

Changes Afoot

I've now moved on from the University of Washington to spend more time with bio-era and to get my start-up out of my garage.  The transition has left me little time to blog, but I hope to get back to writing more as things calm down a bit.

I'm writing this from the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, where I am on a trip for bio-era.  More on this in posts yet to come.

The raindrops outside are enormous and copious.