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.