Lab Cleanup Day

If you are a devotee of CSI or its less attractive siblings, you probably have a skewed view of laboratories. The CSI laboratory is a wonderous place. A mixture of beautiful whites and blues paint scenes of an organized and sterile environment. Sexy people roam this shangri-la using their Bruckheimer-granted skills to do in 15 seconds what takes mere mortals hours or days (no, you can’t get a DNA match from a piece of evidence in under a minute). At the risk of ruining any mystique the show may have given me and my brethren, the show is a lie…albeit an entertaining one. The real-life lab is a dirty and cluttered place, more of a graveyard for old data and outdated technology than anything else. But sometimes a group of scientists with the right mix of daring and foolishness will attempt to impose order on the chaos.

The last attempt at a Lab Cleanup Day in our lab was likely prior to 1997. Either that or in the past decade nobody saw the need to remove a list of lab rules dating to that year and referencing individuals nobody currently in the lab has ever heard of. Either way it was clear going in that it wasn’t going to be a particularly easy or enjoyable afternoon. I signed up to help with the “Corner of Mystery”, which was an area near the chemical hood that people had been using for storing anything and everything they couldn’t be bothered to find a real place for. During the excavation, I pulled out a confusing array of junk:

1) A PC tower with an Intel Pentium II processor and a Power Macintosh G3, both of which Wikipedia assures me were discontinued early in 1999.

2) Carbon dioxide tanks that were still partially full and just left in an alcove. Yes, those are the same kind of pressurized tanks that can fall, crack open, and then be propelled violently around by the gas escaping the cylinder.

3) A huge blue, hexagonal contraption that was outfitted with multiple hoses coming out the sides. Underneath a pile of stuff stacked on top of it was a faded note saying not to store things on top of it. Not being exactly sure what it was but knowing it hadn’t been used in quite some time, we just hid it in the radiation area.

4) Mouse skin samples…maybe. The absence of any definitive labels left the true identity of the samples a mystery but it looked like there might have been fur on some of them. We threw them on top of the blue thing in the radiation area along with some other samples we thought were too toxic to deal with.

So for anyone who’s looking for an old PC or Mac from the late 90’s…I’d love to help you but you’ll have to look elsewhere. My boss had us keep them. You know, just in case.

Coulton+Rock Band= 1337

Missed this video from a while ago:  Coulton performing Still Alive in Rock Band at GDC

Review: A World Too Near by Kay Kenyon

A World Too Near by Kay Kenyon is the 2nd book in the Rose and the Entire series started in Bright of the Sky . The second volume is certainly stronger than the first it still suffers from some of the same problems though the pacing is certainly tighter.  Where as the first book started with the (re)discovery of the Entire; a strange alternate universe created by the strange creatures called the Tarig.  Much of the first book was designed with the obvious intent to acquaint the reader with the intricacies and difference between our universe (the Rose) and that of the Entire.  Given the rather massive scope of that task the slower pace was a necessary element to maintain the story’s readability.

Now that we know much about the Entire, the Tarig Lords, the Inyx and the various problems set forth in the previous volume more attention is placed on the characters of the story, their motivations, and their actions.  Once again the Sydney sections shine in this regard and she and her mount Riod show some particularly devious uses for the Inyx method of heart-to-heart (telepathic) communication.  However I think Kenyon’s characterization really shines with the relationship between, and portrayals of, Johanna and the gond engineer Morhab.  Ideally, I would provide some sort of example here but to do so, I think, would ruin the genuine surprise regarding how things turned out between those two characters.  Needless to say a major theme within the book is the notion of perspective and how it effects allegiance and, with the Johanna/Morhab sections, Kenyon manages to draw the reader into that theme in a very real way.  Or so I percieve

Like the last book, A World Too Near is equally appealing to science fiction and fantasy fans (often two distinct crowds) and employs tropes familiar to both genres.  The Entire employs a type of science that borders on the mystical while characters fight using sword, dagger and knife and, while there is nary a mage, dragon, or elf to be seen, the fantastic creatures that populate the Entire will be based of templates familiar to any fantasy fan.  The novel follows a very familiar quest structure: Titus Quinn must get take a particular object to a particular location (to keep things vague for those who have yet to read the first book) in order to save his world.  That is an almost obscene simplification of Titus’ story but the idea of the hero’s journey in this novel does have an air of familiarity.

Complex characters with shifting, sometimes twisted, motivations and loyalties combined with a tightly paced plot full of political intrigue and tense action make for a much stronger second outing in the Rose and the Entire.  The conclusion, as many middle volumes tend to be (think the awful low point at the end of The Empire Strikes Back) it leaves hungry you for the next volume.  A definite A title.