Funny prank even I appreciate

The current crop of interns have this running gag where they show up for their shifts wearing aluminum foil helmets. Kind of takes the sting off things.
In private Igor laughs about it so hard he squeezes out tears.

Protein vector problems

I have been puzzling over this since January of this year. A big downside is there really is no one out in the 'real world' I can call to trade ideas since I really am in a science-world of my own. My vocabulary is understood by Igor and the interns, but that's only through exposure to instructive hands-on familiarization. The terms I use would not correlate to an "outsider's" frame of scientific terminology reference. It would take too much time and effort to rename everything on the off chance I may want to call a lab at Oxford or Moscow University and swap notes. Not to mention that I can't really talk that much in depth about the bulk of my work because I would be seen as committing some kind of heinous affront to the ethical codices so studiously enforced everywhere else but here. You should see the interns when they've been around for a few weeks and then some report in the news will discuss the carping over the use of stem cells. They all start laughing; and it's particularly funny to them when they have been recently involved in the urgent disposal of some of our more 'avid' lab samples. Especially when those lab samples make urgent vocalizations (screams) as the interns shove them into the flame booth.

 But back to the protein thing. I am nearly completely consumed with this current obsession. At the end of it I see a means of creating a protein based neural network in not only the brains of the beings I create but this concept could work in real people. It would be used to line the blood vessels of the brain with thin microscopic lines of protein adapted to respond to the brain's natural processes, and would autonomously create many more synaptic connections - intentionally. It would use the oxygen in the blood for power, even with a natural brain's normal use there is still plenty of oxygen content in the blood to spare... as long as the Earth's atmosphere  oxygen portion doesn't fall below 16.22%.
 But there's a long way to go. Even longer if I have to figure out a way to get the end result into everyone's brain without them realizing it.

Still interested in the space thing

But the trouble is I would have to get the equipment up and running quickly (meaning well out into space) so that American and German air defense coverage doesn't get tripped up and they send jets or something to investigate. Not like it wouldn't be hard for their senior staffers to quickly hush things up, telling their subordinates just to ignore what they are seeing, but those characters aren't always out there on the consoles. Some giddy sergeant gets a look at something very unusual then whips out his smart phone and takes a picture of what he sees on the screen. Next thing you know Reuters is pasting it all over the world.
I am pretty much indifferent, but it does strain the 'arrangement' I have with those powers who run the world outside of our valley. Like the time the interns turned an old MRI machine into a rail gun and nearly took out the international space station when they started feeding the 'launcher' some old metallic bone prostheses. I never would have guessed that just goofing around with the thing could result in exit velocities of that magnitude. It's funny now, but the space agencies involved didn't waste any time sending me a huge bill. It's not so much knowing it's my unspoken responsibility to have to pay to replace wrecked pieces of a manned orbital laboratory, but more a reminder of knowing that when this sort of thing happens, who do they think of first?

Up to speed

 Everything here has been going pretty much apace with the exception of my blog entries. New ideas for chimeral proteins has been the big push since the earlier part of this year and has kept me distracted from aught else. Igor managed to download some interesting base modeling programs, and I learned how to adapt them to model some theoretical constructs. Any model I punch into it runs as a visualized 3D simulation, complete with a timeline that can be sped up or slowed down.

 One of the smarty pants interns got a hold of it and programmed in something that at first I thought was a brilliant derivative of one of my trace logs until I let entire patch run and it turned out to be a construct of bacterial vectors intertwining to create Bavarian chocolate. It might be a great idea but there is less energy expended to make Bavarian chocolate the old fashioned way, according to Igor.

  Had this happened a hundred years ago I would've had the intern hung by the wrists in the courtyard and whipped for his insolence.

Sometime I have to get back to this thing

Been stuck these past few months fingertip deep on the keyboard. Trying to let these infernal computers work out some notions I have on protein modeling vectors. I should just be trusting my instinct and intuitive leaps, like the old days. Mary Shelley would've had nothing to write about if we had the use of computers back in the early 19th century. All my early obsessive meanderings would've only blazed trails in silicon and software rather than being taxed at figuring wily methods of dodging graveyard nightwatchmen. Useless, useless. The most I can hope for from these past few months of toil is to get this work distilled down to some published paper. It might make the rounds in some of the more Teutonic flavored universities until some adman from Silicon Valley derives some search algorithm from the vector studies and then cites it in the footnotes. Then his algorithm gets absorbed into someone else's intellectual property package through a buyout that only passes as 'news' on some tech-geek website.

I miss the days when it was all real action, using lightning to re-animate corpses sewn together, and then struggling hand and foot with Igor to keep the re-animated corpse in it's restraints. Loud blasts of thunder and the blood curdling loud bellowing of the newly awakened undead do much more for getting the adrenaline flowing compared to the video blog of some pinch-faced nerd who takes it upon himself to relate 'important news'  relevant only to other nerds. The guy down the street doesn't give a hoot.

I would pour a gallon of hot oil on those servers in the closet if I knew where Igor hid the key.

my next big project

  Seeing what great success I have had with actually creating new sentient life forms and in two instances (Igor and myself) prolonging it indefinitely, I figure that brainstorming up a method for traveling faster than the 'speed of light' with no time dilation should be a snap.
  Being immortal gives one a certain advantage of having all these years to muse in great depth over topics that come into one's scope of interest. I think I may have stumbled across some conjectural principles that when ironed out into real-world physical formulae can be applied within certain scales of advanced engineering concepts and used to develop hardware that would provide the means for humans to travel at a rate, that would be measurable (from any relative frame) as being 'faster' than the speed of light.
  The notional hardware I will refer to as the 'gizmo', for the sake of reference. Currently there are a few severe considerations.
  To wit:
  1. No post departure / pre return real time communication possible, probably ever. 
  2. Once arrived at a destination, all the passengers could do is observe, and that from an appreciable distance. The gizmo can only get but so close to gravitational wells. It is intended to operate in and out of gravitational planes, not wells. It wouldn't even have windows to look outside, nor would disembarking be possible without external assistance.
 3. The gizmo would have to operate and depart at an appreciable distance from the Earth, beyond the reach of the terminal attraction (or sharp curve distortion) of Earth's gravity well. Probably way way above the north pole so as to not contend with the moon's gravity.
 4. Real time charting of the destination's actual location would be tricky, and an active charting system would have to be maintained en route in order to get back. If the gizmo accidentally fell within the sharp curve of a destination's gravity well, it would require being towed back outside the gravity well (if possible). It has no external propulsion devices.
 5. All of the onboard power would be used for life support and to maintain the gizmo's physical configuration. I figured about 50,000 watts should do the trick. 50K watts means some king-hell batteries or a small nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors make some people uneasy, and it would have to be really small because the gizmo cannot exceed a certain mass in any heliocentric gravitic plane.
  The gizmo uses no propulsion. It's cumulative physical shape is 'rejected' by a space time fabric within the confines of a large equatorial gravitational plane. In our case, the Milky Way's central black hole's equatorial plane of gravity that defines the flat disc shape of our galaxy. The gizmo's shape is 'rejected' out of the equatorial gravitic space-time fabric in a manner (for the means of illustration) similar to a balloon that is being inflated while underwater; the balloon will attempt to rush to the surface as it is puffed full of air.
  The gizmo is actually comprised of two separate physical pieces that alone are merely passive masses but when brought within a certain proximity to one another create the effect. Sort of like a piece of tarp and a raft. Rig the tarp up and connect it to the raft and if there is a wind the tarp becomes a sail, and the raft moves. With the gizmo one piece is the 'sail' and the other is the 'raft', and the equatorial plane of the black hole's gravity influence is the atmosphere; the wind comes in the form of the space time rejection of the shape of the 'sail' piece, and it only works in an equatorial gravitational plane. This means it can only travel within a galaxy, and not too close to it's center. The gizmo only works if the two pieces are in proximal contact (not actual physical contact) with each other, this is the weird part I don't quite yet fully understand. But the combination of the two pieces in various poses of proximal contact also allows for the ability to 'steer' the space time rejection effect, but this must be plotted and programmed under strictly timed sequential control before the gizmo can be used. It would be like having the route down a river programmed into a device that was connected to the raft's tiller, it could not be manually steered. 
 Needless to say, there is still a lot that needs to be ironed out. Funny choice of words, for the business parts of the sail piece are constructed entirely of 100% pure iron. It is not entirely solid through certain parameter edges, it only needs to 'present the density' of the iron atoms in a particular shape within a gravitational plane.
  As for it's shape: think of what shapes that the universe only creates and what shapes the universe never creates.
  More on this as it develops. I would need to have some serious talks with the Russians about long term lift-to-orbit contracts, and I may have to fund a polar geostationary space station where this gizmo could be built.

Blunders of invention.

   Strange to read reputable professional medical periodicals and realize that the people who publish this stuff would consider my work to fall far outside their canon. It's funny, because there is a quite a lot of valuable pointers that I gather from their traditional processes that are very useful in the plying of my nefarious (ha ha) trade.
   For instance, invasive surgical protocols have gone through huge leaps in the past thirty years. Former tried and true procedures considered de rigueur since the beginning of the 20th century now seem as archaic as blood letting to many of today's progressive practitioners. Now I know something about blood letting, for in the throes of various forms of need I have gone into traditional practice at times over the past two hundred years; so I really have a first hand perspective on the wide scope of advancement since then.
    Mostly I went to observe and gather; for back in the 1800's you had to go to where the medicine was being practiced, it couldn't come to you over a wire. From our family's estate the most I could expect were treating accident victims or being called to preside over someone's final moment within the auspices of desperation. It didn't occur to most people to seek medical help until their condition had gone far past the point of being treatable with any reasonable hope of surcease of malady. It was one thing to read about procedures in mail delivered medical journals, but it was another matter to have your hands inside the torsol cavity of a living subject. It's even something else to have your hands in the torsol cavity of a conscious living subject, but that's a larger part of many other stories.
 There are procedures done nowadays through small holes that previously had been accomplished with inch-measurable sutured openings. New instruments augmented by advances in computer science allow doctors the freedom to accomplish their goals using miniature cameras and tools modified to be operated at a short remote distance, guided by the image on a monitor sent from the mini-camera. To me, some of these methods don't look all that different from some of the video games I see the interns playing in their free time.

   Especially useful are the really really small imaging devices using fiber optics and microscopic lenses. These seem a much more practical tool for getting a look inside than my laser resonance grid mapper. I developed this gizmo, the laser resonance grid mapper, which is kind of like an MRI (magnetic resonance imager) but uses two perpendicularly positioned low power wide swath laser beams for scanning.
   The big trick with using this device is to put some kind of physical stopper on the power setting control. Igor's elegant solution was to just jam a wood chip in the slider to keep the dial from going above a certain megawattage. I guess I don't have to go into detail what happens when you don't double check things, but it was the kind of lesson that you don't want to read about in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kind of hard to put into print the eerie vibe one feels when hearing the hideous netherworldly shrieks of an index A4 chimera as it's head is being vaporized from the top down by an instrument that was intended by design to make a 3D map of skeletal and internal architecture. We thought the beast was only in another state of severe self induced panic from being tied down until Igor pointed out all the smoke. By the time the little light bulb in my head went off to check the power setting, the waveguide had moved the two intersecting beams to the point where 80% of the creature's head had been zapped away. It was sort of strange that it could continue to scream until I recalled the new redundant vocalizing sub-processor we grew behind the tonsils in this index A4 version. Of course, in the time it took me to recall this improvement, the lasers had already made short smoky work of it, as the sudden silence revealed. I was about to hit the emergency shutdown button when I suddenly discovered we had forgotten to put one on the control panel. As I reached to yank out the power cable, Igor stayed my hand and indicated we should just let the machine finish the scan. There's less to clean up; at this power level  the lab's exhaust fans can take care of all of it except the bits of burnt rope and what remaining scorched pieces of the gurney there are. All we need to do is get the interns to haul that stuff away to throw in the old quarry.

   We had tried using an MRI machine, but it shipped here with an unbelievably huge technical/operations manual that someone would probably have to read. Otherwise we could inadvertently risk several dangerous examples of magnetic attraction by discovering just how many loose metal objects there are in the lab when we fiddle with the controls.
  That giant instruction manual reminded me of the value of inventing things yourself, you know how it is to be operated as you create it because you know what each assembly is intended to do. If some sly dog like Igor assists you in the construction, he can also learn it's operation if you describe out loud how the thing fits together and what it's ultimate function is to be. 

   So the MRI machine got ignored when we started building the laser grid scanner gizmo instead of reading the MRI operations manual.  The MRI sat untouched for two seasons until we got an intern whose older brother was an MRI tech. Our intern had watched his brother operate it. I gave the intern carteblanche, but was a little surprised to find just three days later they had enlisted Igor's help and hauled the MRI machine out to the skeet range and were turning it into a kind of overly expensive skeet thrower. Except unlike a typical skeet thrower it had more technically in common with a very powerful rail gun. But it accomplishes the same thing, even though it has the ability to make airborne objects much larger than skeets, and at full power the capability to send them quite a bit farther due to the very impressive exit velocity potential.
  I know this for a fact, because about two weeks after the interns had been testing it using old metallic bone prostheses I got a secure diplomatic package via the UN on behalf of the international space consortium that operates the space station. Inside was a photograph, a terse letter and a bill. The photo had been taken inside the space station looking out through one of it's small observation port windows, one that faces the Earth. Firmly embedded in the glass was what looked like a metal ankle bone joint prosthesis. The bill was for 762 million dollars: hourly labor cost for three astronauts to replace the window, the cost of de- and re- pressurization airlock sealing the station module for window replacement; and the fabrication cost of the 'space glass' window, or whatever they make it out of. Plus the cost of an unscheduled Soyuz launch to take the new port glass up to the station. That 'pressurization airlock' cost of the damaged module seems a little pricey to me, probably NASA and the Russians conspired and snuck an extra hundred million on the bill, will split it between themselves.
  Imagine what a snit everyone would be in if the interns had put a little more magnetic oomph on the metal ankle bone and ended up destroying the entire space station.
  I wrote a check to the consortium.

Cans of worms

 Sometimes cans of worms are just too easy to open. Funny how they come these days with pop tops; no can opener needed from this point forward. I blame the ever evolving saga of the industrial revolution, and therefore by ultimate turn: the internet.

  Igor raised some concern over my post about Ava Lovelace. Was he hiding behind the curtains or something?

Ava Lovelace

  Daughter of 'Gordy' Lord Byron. Had a real flair for numbers. Helped Chuck Babbage with some of the math theory stuff for his mechanical computer notions, a gizmo called 'the difference engine' and another one called 'the analytical engine'. Smart girl. Father bit of a prima donna. Some more recent assessments of her work have led to her being entitled as the 'world's first computer programmer' for helping Chuck figure out how all those turning wheels in his blue prints would affect other turning wheels deeper in the machine. This guy Chuck Babbage and his machines; look I know obsession and this was an obsession. I used to travel a lot more than I do now, spent some meaningful time in Britain over the years; mostly in the mid to late 19th century. Just ask Igor, he was there for some of it.
  I came about meeting Ava by way of association with her father, Lord Byron (I called him 'Gordy') who was one of Mary Shelley's housemates across the lake from me in the summer of 1816. The other housemate was Mary's husband Percy.
 It was through Ava that I met Mike Faraday. Mike and I hit it off like two thieves, although any actual larceny taking place occurred in the office of his responsibility. I had demonstrated working biomechanical electrically induced life forms when he was just some punk kid dodging magnets around on the desk. Does anyone notice he never went to school? Yet somehow managed to pull all that knowledge out of thin air? And he is credited with the groundwork for electric motors?
  But I don't begrudge him, really. It's not like I could open up the head of one of my creatures and show just anyone the tiny gyro-dynamos I had doing actual work while Mike was futzing around with magnets. Same thing with Jimmy Maxwell. It could very easily have been either of those guys with the whole re-animating dead corpses routine, and me with my picture on Einstein's desk next to Isaac Newton's picture. Ava joked "that it was only because they were both English". Meaning I was not, therefore naturally predisposed to getting my hands really really dirty. Huh, funny joke.
 Obviously I spent some time in England, pursuing various interests. I had a reason for meeting Ava, for it was I who brought the final words of her father to her, being an attending physician at his death. Several long stories, bound to get told eventually.
 I will note something about Jimmy, Mike, Ava, Chuck, and even Al: They will live on in their work for their contributions to sciences and mankind. Yet I am the one who is still actually alive. Now who's top dog, you thieving bunch of skeletons? Ha ha ha ha ha.
  Ava sits lightly in my memory, I still feel the pressure of what forms of illumination she brought to me.
 Isaac Newton died about 50-60 odd years before I was born. He could not have stolen any ideas from me, nor was I likely to steal ideas from him. Too much religion in his menus. Seemed like a kind of kook in some ways.

Assesing inhouse R&D needs

  Being of the 'lone-wolf' variety of inventor (or as the interns sometimes jokingly refer to me: 'a mad scientist') can be daunting when it comes to R&D projects. I don't have a whole department of geniuses I can hand some task to and say 'please explore this and have a feasibility report in XX months'. I have Igor, and sometimes I will get lucky and we will have the services of a gifted intern for a few months or however long they stay. Even the duration of these internships is yet another task that I trust Igor manages through the colleges; if I had to balance that and what R&D I do manage (on top of all the creature making stuff) I would find myself sorely tested in the level durability of my patience. I'm great at multitasking as long as the tasks at hand are of a holistic nature.
 Not to say I can't contract out work, as I have often done. But that work is all finalized and there really is no analytical component or creativity on the part of the contractor. They get a blueprint, order to build and funding, and a due date. Sometimes bonuses if they complete it early. Now I am toying with an idea to maybe try to contract out theoretical development stuff. Of course, I leave myself wide open to the scamsters: oh sure, a flying car? "No problem, doctor; it's a privilege to work with you." Twenty years later: "well, doctor, any day now, you've seen the video and the brief, all we need now is another deposit to cover this issue, as outlined in the last brief. We feel that a stabilized whatsis is workable within months." That's 'workable', but not 'operable' - as in the car now needs another framitz thing somewhere else that cropped up when the stabilized whatsis was made 'workable'. It's like quicksand, I'll bet. The more funds I commit to their struggle the deeper I would sink. Forget it. 

 The odd thing is.. Igor himself really has accomplished some rather remarkable feats of engineering in a wide array of scientific disciplines with no more input than his own observations and the beatings I have administered upon his person. Well, I suppose I can no longer credit the beatings, seeing as how I stopped doing them years ago; it was pointless. Regardless, I can no longer easily count all the major innovations that were the product of Igor's creative thinking and  initiative. I'm really quite lucky to have him. Slavery would never have gone out of style if all slaves had been as deranged as Igor.
   Our relationship has evolved to the level of what the populist

shrinks call 'a symbiosis', though I would be loath to admit it out loud. If I said anything Igor would just start into some 1930's horror movie pantomimed routine of 'the hunchback assistant' complete with lurching clubfoot walk and speech slurred by way of tongue struck between the foreteeth. He does it for the interns to make them laugh when things in the lab start leaning a little closer to the realm of 'hard science'. Addressing me as 'Master': "yes, master"; "no master"; "if it is your wish, master" and so forth. If I was as clever as Igor I could go into some kind of 'mad scientist' routine but I have a back burner suspicion that a few of the interns do see me this way even if they aren't joking about it, as I mentioned earlier. Maybe their jokes mask some real actual anxiety that my work inspires in them. This is where an R&D department would come in especially handy, with a certain level of expected professional autonomy (meaning I wouldn't expect them to model themselves on what behaviour they observe in Igor) I could possibly go to them and tap one on the shoulder: "Say, Gunther, could I ask you something? Do I put out a kind of 'mad scientist' vibe at any time?"

  Of course, these sociological interests would have to fall secondary in importance to what I would be paying them to do. I have what looks like a pretty good idea for a genuine honest-to-god electronic brain.