John's Blazing Blog

Boundary Waters

2009-08-25T10:32:00.004-05:00

Spent four days in the Boundary Waters with the Broady's. Drove up Thursday night and stayed at the Super 8 in Grand Marias, then after eating the world's best donuts canoed in on Ram Lake a few miles up the Gunflint Trail. More pictures.

Tubing pictures

2009-08-14T15:55:00.001-05:00

Yay, Chris posted the rest of the pictures from boating last month: gallery.shadoweyes.com

Superior Hiking Trail

2009-08-03T15:54:00.002-05:00

Went on a four day backpack trip on the Superior Hiking Trail with Maria and another couple. We hiked from Oberg Mountain past Temperance River State Park to Cook County Road 1.

Big Woods

2009-07-20T15:51:00.003-05:00

Went camping with some friends at Nerstrand Big Woods State Park, near Faribault, over the weekend. Went for a nice hike in the woods and ate lots of delicious food, yum yum.

Again with the Boating + Chris = sweet pictures

2009-07-13T14:50:00.004-05:00

Maria logging some airtime on the St. Croix

Devil's Lake Climbing

2009-07-06T08:52:00.000-05:00

Maria and I spent the three day weekend climbing and camping at Devil's Lake State Park, the most popular climbing area in the midwest.
Queen's Throne, an easy 5.5 route on the West bluff.
Brinton's Crack, a nice 5.6 on the East Bluff. From the same anchor we were also able to climb a fun 5.9+ just to the right of the crack that both of us completed. At ~70 feet our tallest climb yet. Not the easiest to set up.
Orgasm, a 5.8 on the East Bluff. Easy to set up, we both completed it. A fun move coming out from under the overhang.
More pictures here

tube-o-licious

2009-06-29T09:39:00.004-05:00

I hauled the boat up to Leech Lake for the weekend for some boating with the Mitchells. It was very windy out on the lake, but we found a protected bay that was great for tubing and wakeboarding. As usual Chris took some amazing pictures, which he'll post after processing them.

Dodgeball is a sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation.

2009-06-22T16:21:00.003-05:00

Chris posted pictures he took at the TNT dodgeball tournament I participated in back in early April.

First Route Set! Ely's Peak

2009-06-14T11:00:00.001-05:00

After a little shopping spree to fill out our rack, we ran up to Duluth for the day and climbed at Ely's Peak. We set The Flake, a fun and challenging 5.7. This was the first time we set a route by ourselves, and it went pretty smoothly.

Here fishy fishy fishy

2009-05-20T11:34:00.001-05:00

The annual lab fishing trip was less than successful, five days of fishing and I managed to catch two fish, a nice brook trout and a healthy smallmouth. The worst part is that I caught more fish than everyone else. I got a neat picture of a seagull that was diving for fishguts in front of our campsite.

Climbing School

2009-05-10T10:56:00.003-05:00

Venerable gym rat Pink Pants Mike took Maria, Wyma, and me out to Taylor's Falls and taught us how to set up top-rope anchors. We practiced setting up a few top-ropes, and then did a couple climbs.Not sure what route this is we set, but it was easy to set up and an easy climb.

Climbing at Palisades

2009-05-04T10:49:00.001-05:00

Went climbing over the weekend at Palisades State Park just outside of Sioux Falls, SD with Maria and a bunch of Rovers. More pictures.

Work work work

2008-12-29T14:50:00.001-06:00

Well, as people keep pointing out to me, I must not me doing anything interesting or stupid since I haven't been posting anything on the 'ol blog. That's mostly true, but I have been working hard preparing for PAG, an annual genetics conference in San Diego in January. This year I'll be presenting two posters, and put in work on three others:

Design And Annotation Of The Next-Generation Swine And Bovine Oligonucleotide Microarrays. J. R. Garbe et al.

Hepatic Gene Expression Profiles In Holstein Cows That Differ In Parity And Genetic Merit For Milk Yield: Using The BOMC 24K Bovine Oligonucleotide Microarray. J. R. Garbe et al.

Differential Gene Expression For Feed Efficiency Detected From 6 RFI Angus Steers: A Comparison Between A 24K Bovine Oligonucleotide Microarray And Expressed Sequence Tag Analysis. J. W. Kim et al.

Performance And Gene Expression Differences In Ewes Identified As Tolerant And Intolerant To High Dietary Nitrate. R. R. Cockram et al.

Genomic signatures of artificial selection in U.S. Holstein cows. T. S. Sonstegard et al.

Rover's Extravaganza

2008-10-05T18:36:00.000-05:00

Climbing at Ely's Peak near Duluth with the Rovers.

2008-05-20T12:12:00.000-05:00

This little piggy went to the lab

2008-05-14T15:00:00.002-05:00

The lab I work in is starting a fund raising campaign to support research to develop pigs for treating diabetes. Check it out at Safe Pigs to Help Cure Diabetes.

Clint Eastwood

2008-04-27T20:30:00.005-05:00

Last weekend I took a Forest Service training class, and I'm now a class B sawyer certified on the cross-cut saw and chainsaw. I was supposed to be on a trail clearing trip this weekend at Gunflint Lodge, but they still have so much snow up there that it was pushed back two weeks, which turned out to be a good move considering all the new snow they got this weekend up there. The Forest service says there's still 2 and a half feet of ice on some of the lakes, and the ice fishing season is still going strong. This coming weekend we're supposed to canoe in to the Souix-Hustler trail, but we go in on a river so the ice should be cleared out by now.
The trusty old minivan broke down last week and had to be towed to the repair shop. They say it needs a new computer. So I had to bike in to work today. At least I can park closer to the lab.

A company in Madison that we're collaborating with sent a lab technician up to work with me on one of my projects. We've got two months to clone a gene fragment, build a couple transgenesis constructs with it, and modify some pig cells with them. Hotel Garbe is providing temporary living quarters, which has been working out good so far. Two roommates isn't too much of a crowd yet.

2008-04-02T15:17:00.002-05:00

A possible role of social activity to explain differences in
publication output among ecologists

Tomas Grim Oikos, Vol. 117, No. 4. (2008), pp. 484-487.

Publication output is the standard by which scientific productivity is evaluated. Despite a plethora of papers on the issue of publication and citation biases, no study has so far considered a possible effect of social activities on publication output. One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking alcohol. In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer and, based on well known negative effects of alcohol consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative correlations between beer consumption and several measures of scientific performance. Using a survey from the Czech Republic, that has the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world, I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality). In addition I found the same predicted trends in comparison of two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also known to differ in beer consumption rates. These correlations are consistent with the possibility that leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.

P_a_n_o_r_a_m_i_c

2008-04-01T21:27:00.005-05:00

Autostitch is a swell image stitching program that completely automatically splices together multiple images into one big panorama, and the full featured "demo" is free! I spliced together some photos from my archive and posted them.

I'm going to push the button

2008-03-30T16:53:00.006-05:00

Thanks to help from Dad and Roger garage door operations are now fully automatic!

And, I now have the sweetest work bench on the block

Some like it hot

2008-03-28T18:39:00.003-05:00

We use P-32, a radioactive isotope of phosphate with a half-life of 14 days, to label DNA. In this video clip Natalie aliquots out 5 micro-liters of P-32 for a probe labeling reaction, with the Geiger counter beeping in the background.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

2008-03-28T18:30:00.006-05:00

With such lovely weather we decided to kick off the grilling season with a delicious lunch of meat lab brats at work today.

Not just for soccer moms

2008-03-25T18:51:00.000-05:00

I managed to get the motorcycles moved up to my garage over the weekend, with a little help from the minivan.

The American Can Company Factory

2008-03-24T21:51:00.000-05:00

American Can Company plant ca. 1925

Silgan plant ca. 2007

The old American Can Company factory is a sprawling heavy manufacturing complex covering eight acres on Prior Ave just north of University Ave in St. Paul. The oldest building dates to 1889, and by 1926 4 more additions increased the floor space to 150,000 square feet. Three more expansions in the mid fifties added another 300,000 square feet, and at that time the American Can Company was the largest supplier of metal cans in the US, with dozens of factories around the country. The complex is currently owned by Silgan Containers Corporation, a company founded in 1987 that bought out the metal food can manufacturing operations of Carnation, Campbell's Soup, Del Monte, and American National Can, and winner of The Canmaker magazines "Can of the Year" award in 1999 for it's 2-piece Spam can. Silgan has discontinued production at this facility and is gutting it in preparation for sale.
Roger has been working on the demolition of the interior of the plant for the the last few months, and gave Dad and I a quick tour last weekend of the now empty buildings.

A newer section of the plant

Older areas of the plant with hardwood floors and wood beam ceilings

BRT Ski trip

2008-03-16T22:15:00.004-05:00

Went on a great Border Route Trail Association organized ski trip the other weekend at Heston's on Gunflint Lake. They had piles of snow up there and they got a fresh snowfall the night we drove up, so the skiing was fantastic. Trish was in charge of the food again, so of course it was delectable. The first day we mostly skied near the resort, the second day most of us did a big loop out to Bridal Veil Falls, and the third day a few of us skied the Magnetic Rock Trail. A road was plowed across the lake and builders were hauling loads of building supplies to the otherwise inaccessible Canadian side to rebuild the cabins that burned in the Ham Lake Fire last spring. Pictures posted at picasaweb.