I posted this generative text project on Facebook but it's something I'll want to come back to again. These kinds of project are just so neat in every sense of the word. I know they aren't that complex in their implementation but it's all a matter of presentation and how context deeply influences our understanding of even perfectly uninspiring text. The source is all here on Github. A selection (anything this project generates is a selection, anyway, as with the Twitter implementation it's nearly infinite, though the possible maximum number of tweets comes to mind):

...I saw stretched upon his back, and gazing up straight at the terrible sun, the man I was seeking. I saw about Miss Vivian's death to-day, and I was afraid Hal would be all alone fretting. I saw that William Oke, in his heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. I saw only a snapshot of her, which showed her to be beautiful. I saw smoke in the chimney this evening. I saw a man talking with a woman there, at your door. I saw some beauties there a while ago. I saw tears in their eyes, tears of joy for the honors paid me; and especially, said they, for the manner in which I had received them. I saw her in the prisoners' dock, the Katusha betrayed by me, in a prisoner's cloak, condemned to penal servitude through a strange mistake, and my own fault. I saw them! The damage amounted to seventeen rupees, eight annas. I saw my Indian fall to the ground. I saw it in his desperate face. I saw my daughter at the theatre in London. I saw her only to love her; nor was it a common passion she inspired in me. I saw absolutely nothing else on the floor...

And so on. The Twitter version obviously doesn't benefit from being studded with excess punctuation but it does feel more like an authentic stream of consciousness, or maybe a stream of collective unconsciousness.

I went over to the MCV hospital cafeteria for lunch today. Lunch is quite inexpensive there due to the VCU discount, though the minor health risks of eating in a hospital are sometimes worrisome. Hospitals are just chock full of pathogens.

I saw Kristin and Joana from the Christie lab briefly while waiting in line at the cafeteria. Kristin said she referred someone to my lab who was looking for places for new microbiology graduate students to do rotations. It would be helpful to have some more help in the lab to handle small projects or even just to provide some fresh ideas. Hopefully any new students won't have to undergo extensive lab-skills training, especially if they're not going to stay around longer than the terms of a single rotation period.

At least I'm not the only victim of contamination right now:

Sergei Bulat,  a researcher at the Laboratory of Eukaryote Genetics at the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, originally told RIA that they that "call it unidentified and 'unclassified' life."they found new signs of life after examining water samples from the subglacial Lake Vostok.

However, on Saturday the Eukaryote Genetics Laboratory head Vladimir Korolyov, spoke to Interfax News Agency, and said that they actually did not find any new signs of life. He said they just found contaminants.

Ugh, I got into lab today and discovered the following:

1. My yeast transformations performed last Wednesday appear to have yielded no transformant colonies at all.
2. The majority of the transformants for our last set of transformations may in fact be contaminants. 
3. My lab PI may not be in the office this week.

I'm becoming quite irritated with the research I'm trying to accomplish in this lab. These should be incredibly basic protocols but we're having little to no success at all with them. I'm almost completely out of variables to test and few of the options I've tested before have expanded our understanding of what is preventing our yest from transforming. All I know is that some of the plasmid stocks we already have are, in fact, incorrectly labeled. All this together is just impeding any process I could be making on an actual project.

Danielle and I were up in Delaware and PA this past weekend setting up wedding things. We got a site scheduled and a photographer booked, plus Danielle got measured for her dress. We also got to sit down and have brunch with the bulk of the Wedding Party Participants and sort out the basic details, i.e. when the event is and what they should (or shouldn't, mostly) be wearing at the time. We also went to see a movie with Danielle's mother and sister, which was watchable, mostly. Entertaining, perhaps.

(The movie was Oz: The Great and Powerful, which I will review parenthetically as follows: bright and colorful but predictable in Titanic proportions.)