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.

maybe space travel next

  I always had the notion that the Russians demonstrated more of an earnest zeal to travel in space compared to the American's "big-team-winning-score" approach.  The Russians skew towards the more pragmatic where the Americans take a dynamic approach. Russians  still use the Soviet era Soyuz spacecraft; if the Americans had stuck with the Apollo/Saturns who can say how much farther along in terms of cost per pound to orbit they would be if they had not blown so much time and money on that shuttle.
  But funding, building and sustaining lots of big hardware projects is America's hide-in-plain-sight secret to sustaining a massive economy. Really it's just sustaining the idea of a massive economy, since nearly every parameter that is used to measure performance can also be taken as an abstract metric. Remember that notions like 'inches' and 'minutes' are human inventions, not forces of nature. A dollar may accumulate with others of it's own kin to represent significant buying power, but against a steady wind they are all just small pieces of paper flapping in the breeze. Put your faith in the wind, but build your tools out of dollars. 
 Push all cost recoupment into a theoretical future, and then issue contracts. As long as all participants in the food chain honor each other's billing attempts to collect, you have a working super economy. Kind of like a giant perpetual motion machine, where the assumed collective force of will is the primary driver sustaining the parameters of it's currency's value.

  Consider alone the cost of spacecraft recovery. Apollo splashed down in the ocean, requiring an aircraft carrier for recovery, with it's massive cost per hour. The shuttle glided down, but once on the runway had to be secured and then the accumulate cost and logistics to move the orbiter to the refit facility ended up surpassing the system-thru cost of the single-use Apollos. The Soyuz capsule uses a parachute and a short burst descent retro rocket package to land on some small plot of Russia, a big target that's hard to miss. All that's needed for recovery is a flat bed truck with a two ton winch and a van for the cosmonauts. Plus a tool kit to get the cosmonauts out of the Soyuz. Or they could just leave the capsule where it is after stripping out what they need. Someone could be hired later to roll it away, seeing as how it is a mostly spherical object.

   Past my lofty goals and major achievements in bioscience and biomechanics, I have always had a reserved passion for space travel. I could contract with the Russians to build the large nuts and bolts parts of the ship; then get some American company to build the  computers and write what software I might need. I've done this kind of thing before, on projects that my creatures can't build. The components could be disguised as parts of several luxury yachts, then shipped to my island off the west coast of South America. It straddles the equator, so if I had to use rockets to launch this location would necessitate the smallest needed rocket.

 Seeing as how I am immortal, what would I have to lose? Build myself a very large interstellar craft and launch myself into the void. Igor will probably come along, seeing as he is immortal too; and I will need someone to mind the greenhouse and attend to the husbandry needs of the food supply.

the subject of genius

   When I was younger and in the long duration of my school days I frequently would find myself in some classroom situation where following my contribution of a small faculty of observation I would hear in hushed tones or open gasps of astonishment the application towards myself the title of 'genius'. Some other students would shout or proclaim it loudly, as if suddenly awoken from stuporous slumber or otherwise scripting themselves in some unfunny pantomime where their part constituted witness heralding eurekas.

    I first assumed I was the butt of a joke, as gathered midgets might amuse themselves calling the shortest amongst them 'a giant'. Only after poking nimble prods of mock sincere modesty I was loath to discover in the flat candor of their expression they were serious. Worse was to come when those in some frame of academic need on topics outside the context of my (or their) talents would come to me in earnest hope that I might lend benefit of some 'ability' to remedy numerous failing attempts o'er hurdles loftier beyond either's scope. Most seemed to understand explanations that although I may appear to be good at mumbletypeg I was all thumbs when it came to darning the wool they sought to unravel from the sheep. Egomaniacal idiots avowed I was holding out, refusing to help them by way of feigning ignorance in an effort to supress their ambition.

   Among the ambitious lurk some various personages of wishful Damocles failing to notice the sword swinging threadborne just above the summit of the goals they desire to accomplish. It is a waste of time to do something imagining postscripts labeling your efforts as that of a trailblazer, for then you will modify your stance unwittingly attempting to fit yourself to the mold of desirable foresight rather than seeking solution to what lays in the immediate path of your vocational duty.

 At the moment my view is that of an immortal person safe behind the clear barrier of our specimen suppression safety cache as just a few yards away five thousand degrees of scorch plasma envelopes the hideous writhing mass of raging monstrosity I had been toiling over for the last nineteen hours. My hopes had been to extract an undiscovered enzyme that theory instructed me lay in one of the beast's two hundred and thirty two hard-to-find pineal glands. In wonder I count to myself the full scorch plasma duration of fourteen seconds and then find myself gaping in astonishment that the creature is still viable. The clear barrier protecting me vibrates with the shock wave of it's bellowing, for now it is even angrier at being burned than it was at being slowly dissected.
   Just as I am measuring how soon it may formulate an idea that it could at least try to get at me behind this transparent safety barrier, our new electrical gridwork suppression protocol kicks in, and the beast is stunned to quick silent apoplexy as nearly 100,000 watts surge through it's mass. It is quickly reduced to a smoldering black lump the size of a pot roast there on the floor next to the exam table. In a few seconds the lab's environmental control will neutralize any residual atmospheric problems and the safety cache door will swing open and I will get a good whiff of what gasses smolder from the pot roast sized lump. 

  That Igor is a genius to have thought up the mechanism of the electrical gridwork shock-em-to-death thing. I would much rather congratulate him for his keen foresight and acute intuition following the first successful application of it's intended use than to see myself grateful to him for having killed the creature with his axe when he came back to the lab to find that beast hammering away at the transparent door attempting to get me. 

 Or maybe, since I see that Igor is again nowhere to be found, I could just drop this scorched blob in the trash and mention nothing. Doesn't take a genius to see that would be the smartest thing to do lest risk of Igor getting a swelled head.

More of the Helsing-Dracula situation

    Igor shows me evidence from a succession of hidden camera video feed files demonstrating that Detective Helsing is no longer in residence at Deichtenstein's Inn. Then he shows me some infrared and satellite images indicating that something about the size of a skinny bear or man may be camped on a high ridge across the valley. Bears don't stay in one place like this. The strategic location of it's position keeps us from directly spotting what or who it might be with the telescope or far ranging infrared imager, it is behind a large ridge fold about twelve kilometers away. I forget just enough geology to be able to describe this rock formation accurately by it's given term. I instruct Igor to keep an eye out by a hack into (name of sovereign country)'s surveillance satellites as they pass over to see if whatever or whoever this is ever moves itself into a line of sight position with our castle.

   If this is Helsing himself and he is camping up there with some new manner of surveillance device of his own then he is isolated from the view of other mortals. From where he is if I can't see him then no one in the village can see him. This valley is remarkably picturesque for it's unique rock formations. Even if he moved to where I could see him then still no one in the village could see him, the lower ridges occlude a line of sight from it's location to that high spot. I wonder if he has noticed that he can't see the village from where he is. Further maintained surveillance on our part will reveal if he is in contact with anyone; if anyone is bringing up supplies, etc. If he has a cell phone he would need a solar charger, and would only have about six hours of direct sunlight to charge the batteries, the ridges here are that steep. If he is operating some kind of electronic surveillance device it too would need batteries...but if it was set up on a line of sight to our castle then it would receive about three hours of additional sunlight, and he could be monitoring the device from behind the ridge outcrop wall formation thing, whatever it is called. 

  I summon Igor back to get him to look carefully to see if he can also spot some kind of small device on a line of sight to us situated on the ridge facing us, in front of this hiding spot. I suppose I could laser away part of the occluding rock formation, but there is a sheep farm in the hills below where the many tons of rock debris would fall. That translates into another episode with the torches and sharp farm implements outside our main gate, and rude behavior towards any interns unaccompanied in the village by Igor. Also of late the American intelligence community seems to have a real talent for detecting the use of high energy particle projection devices anywhere on the surface of the earth. Except they call them "weapons" or "your laser cannon" in the explicitly terse communiques I have received from them after some recent test shots aimed at the moon. I'm fairly sure I didn't hit anything with their flag on it, they didn't send me a bill.   

  All current index A4 specimens are all away to various corners of the globe, doing what I designed them to do best. The index A4 specimen server cluster monitors and archives all incoming signals. We are currently out of inventory any kind of organism that I could program to go over there just to watch Helsing from up close without the risk that the same organism would try to eat him.  Had not Dracula asked that I seek some course of action that will inspire Helsing's return to that neck of the woods (heh) in Romania where Dracula lurks and into the waiting fangs of his number two bride I would probably set about the use of that hungry organism forthwith.
 Let's see what the satellites tell us.

Helpful lab hints #4 specimen anesthesia protocols

 Foremost in the maintaining of operative functions for the type of work we do here is to first specify in the long view the most essential of tools to keep ready at hand. Aside from  those such as found on the standard surgical tray in any operating theater scoped in the practice of western invasive procedures are the instruments comprising the anesthesia protocol. A refined art in itself, the application of anesthesia aids greatly whilst in the midst of the practice of many types of procedures. Should the unusual situation arise where more time is needed to complete the task at hand, especially when it is noticed that relied upon assistance is suddenly nowhere to be found, it is considered prudent to have additional implements of anesthesia at the ready.

 A situation arose where the eventual outcome forced me to remind Igor that though I had trouble during the rising drama of the situation seeking the anesthesia tool when it was most needed I found myself recalling quite well where the bullwhip was hanging in it's spot on the wall. 

 I felt ridiculous saying it to him. Over these past two hundred years it has grown fruitless in attempting to instruct Igor by means of corporal discipline. He has obviously grown immune to such a degree that the last time I whipped him I discovered that he was merely engaging in some silly pantomime of agony at each stroke of the lash. Either through excessive scarring or sheer endurance of will he had become immune to the sting of the whip. He was in fact mocking the ritual. He wasn't mocking me, he belittled the ritual of corporal punishment by placing it in the scope of absurdity where it belongs. It made me look foolish instead of feeling guilty.
 We had both become anesthetized within the necessary suspension of dignity required when one person tries to inflict his will upon another by means of disciplinary brutality.

Eyeful for the interns

   When Igor is giving the indoctrination speech to new batches of interns he likes to regale them with stories of previous lab assistants who went on to greater heights and wider avenues of recognition. Nikola Tesla seems to make a big impression, and in the past 30 years his name has received a much larger scope of recognition, as well it should. Heisenberg also seems to raise eyebrows, of all the more recent big names.
  That so many more young people are able to even go to college in the  past thirty years than in the previous centuries prior to WW2 adds significant levels of dilution to the prospects that any of these recent bunches will go on to distinguish themselves, at least to the level of celebrity (or in some cases, infamy) that previous workers have gone on to achieve. That they will go on to be part of a vast workforce divided into small groups all working together precludes the possibility or even the real need for there to be a personality associated with any new technology breakthrough. New breakthroughs or advances are now associated with the labs or organizations where teams of scientists work together. Cern is an excellent example. I have a serious desire to get down into that tunnel and poke around with the innards of that super collider; but they probably have swarms of workers mulling over it 24/7 like frantic bees. My guess is even if I could pull it off I might be disappointed at what I find. Probably if I put my mind to it I could get comparable results much faster merely using bacterial chimeras with model constructs in microscopic media. Except then I wouldn't need to build a circular multi-kilometer tunnel under two countries, so Cern and it's backers do edge me out there in the fun factor.
 Maybe a tour for Igor and the interns could be arranged.. I could implant image collation bacteria in the eyeballs of the interns while they sleep. This bacteria triggers a layered image set banked as phosphor stacks on the back of the eyeball. As different spectra of light comes through the cornea the bacteria is triggered to a cycled emulsion that adds layers. All a person has to do is turn their head or blink to delineate differing spectra of light. If only I could develop a method of retrieving the phosphor stacks without having to replace the eyeball itself. I mean, what if I replaced an intern's eye with a different color eye because I was out of the needed matching color of iris?  Plus some of them might get curious when they all stand around noticing that they all have itchy eyes yet no other symptoms nor subsequent development of conjunctivitis later. And it would be a stretch to drug them all and hurry to complete the procedure on all of them in one night, and that's if everything went smoothly.
 I would try an index A4 specimen, but if they go that far underground I doubt we could maintain contact considering the intensity of the electromagnetic fields they would be immersed in down there.

Castle Newton-Steyn in sunny Bavaria

 Actually, no. This is not a picture of our castle where everything that you read about in this blog takes place. This is Castle Neuschwanstein built by mad King Ludwig in 1869, not Castle Newton-Steyn built by mad Doctor Frank______'s family starting sometime in the 12th century.
 Though shockingly similar in appearance, Castle Newton-Steyn is built of black stone, and that's not really the name. The villagers call it simply 'the castle' and everyone knows where they mean. You won't find it on the map, though on some older maps (those in archives where Igor hasn't gotten in yet with his big bottle of white-out) you will find the humble village of Heidelweiche Constabulary, and then an undefined dark mass just up the mountainside from it's valley. Somewhere near Bavaria and Austria.
 Obviously though, an architect in the employ of mad King Ludwig seemed possessed of a remarkably photographic memory at a time when taking a real photograph was a feat of near magic.

 Satellite imagery? There are some sophisticated light photon disbursement instruments up on top of the keep, aimed upward covering a .24 degree arc. Nobody bothers us about any of it, how on earth would an intelligence agency be able to explain this one without peripheral risk of retreading some extremely sensitive topics? The satellite passes over and takes a picture, and the new guy in the image downlink room looks and sees sheep and maybe a strange barn or two in an alpine meadow. The guy who has been there twenty years supervising this particular download says "next slide, kid; mark this one just as you see it and don't look at it again." The kid who is trusted to work in this room knows what else the weight in his tone of voice implies. 
  It's a good thing the satellite can't look too closely at the sheep.

Piltdown Man vs Newton-Steyn's creatures.

   Did anyone like that movie where the two software engineers built the time machine out of cardboard boxes and duct tape then hid it in a storage facility so their wives wouldn't find out and make them take it apart? Some of the interns and Igor watched this movie the other night after work on the new widescreen. I found out what it was about later after I asked Igor what he was laughing at.

  I used to be fascinated by quantum physics, now it arrives just short of making my eyes glaze over. Grim sinkholes fulla red herrings abound if you deftly posit an unspoken notion of the possibility existing that anything can happen at anytime for any reason. University tenures of every shape and size built on any theoretical construct as long as it contains plethoral plenitude of ten dollar words arranged in ironic or juxtaposed wordplay fascinating enough for the university dons to imagine classrooms full of wide eyed kids mesmerized by not much more than a whole lotta shilly shally and the timely tossing around of reverenced big names. Most of all the dons imagine the kid's parents or some grant shelling out the dough to keep an eye on those kids for four…six…eight+ years…

 Whatever theory results in reliable working hardware renders all theoretical arguments against the theory with the reliable working hardware moot.
  The guy who invented the wheel did it like this: he had no slide rule. He saw some rocks rolling down a hill, a landslide or something. Then he noticed the shape of the full moon and the sun (at sunset when it’s easy to look at). Genius cave man that he is figures: if there was a rock shaped like the sun or the moon…then..but loses the rest of it. Some years later, his grandson, hearing these stories from pop about grandad's sun shaped rock being special for some reason, gets the notion to take a rock and bash it with another harder rock until it IS shaped like the sun or the moon... while HIS son sees him doing it. The great grandson gets the notion to lift it off dad's work slab, turn the thing on it’s side and watch it roll. The invention of the wheel. Too bad great-granddad got et by the panther and missed the historic moment.  
    Or let’s follow our complicated invention-by-way-of-wrangling-the-theory argument. Just reference the achievements of all the proponents of the Piltdown Man during it’s lengthy stretch of academic reverence. Consider the respected scholars of the late 19th century awash in solemn hubris avowing on their pillars of academia that man will never fly. Or those that said the AC motor was a perpetual motion scam. My favorite was the late 19th century academic who said that man should just give up on science because when reflecting on the sheer huge scale of wonders already revealed one can only come to the conclusion there is nothing left to discover. A perfect example of the kind of deductive reasoning plumb from the type of mind that cannot see the forest for all the trees.

  I will say, hidden here in my guise, that within twenty years we will see a working test hardware device that will ultimately result to the creation of a "faster"-than-light-with-no-time-dilation craft in the same way a paper airplane ultimately resulted to the American's SR-71. (using the SR-71 as a metaphor for a flying machine that is quite far up the evolutionary ladder from the paper airplane.)
  And the Big Bang is this generation’s Piltdown Man.

Picture of Igor, back from lunch with interns

I caught this picture of Igor as he was coming back from lunch in the village with the interns. I think the camera adds ten pounds to his hunchback. For this particular photo I had to photoshop out the background as there were objects of a sensitive nature that Igor's hunch did not occlude.

Helpful lab hints #3: electric gridwork safeguard

  If the flames don't get them...I can count on the electrical gridwork. The use of this protocol is the measure of resort following evidence that the flames prove 60% ineffective; mostly indicated if the specimen is still moving. If the subject has not been rendered inert following saturation in what amounts to immersion in about 5000 degrees of chemically induced scorch-plasma, the next step (and in certain conditions this becomes an automated response) the grid will initiate and isolate the ‘out of control’ organism in an arc channeling some 70,000 to 110,000 watts through it's mass.
I have to credit Igor with the implementation of this safeguard. Following a particularly close call with subject E-87a that was only resolved with Igor's deft wielding of a fire axe (a very lucky stroke into E-87a's ganglion brainstem) we discussed the idea of a second 'hands-off' suppression option. Igor's plucky axemanship was partially a success owing to the fact that E-87a was designed to function with no visual reception senses; meaning it had no eyes and couldn't detect Igor lurching quickly towards it with the axe.
What I never expected was that even with all that flame it's scales hardly looked burnt. It had only paused it's thrashing momentarily as the flames engulfed it, but we can't operate the throwers in a spurt longer than 14 seconds without risking structural heat damage to the entire castle. Usually that amount of heat is as destructively effective as the flame booth, depending on the survivability protocol designed into the organism (as unexpectedly observed in the case of E-87a).
Obviously, some subjects are intended to have certain invulnerabilities. As of yet I have nothing in the specimen design library that can withstand an electric arc exceeding 50,000 watts for longer than 17 seconds.
Igor double checked this fact after seeing a movie called "The Thing". He then asked me to watch the 1951 film's final scene where the story's protagonists resolve their problem (which involved an inability to negotiate with an extraterrestrial) by running what looked like a few short thousand watts through the body of this unlucky visitor from another world. Igor, inspired by the cleverly brutal resolve of the movie's heroes, explained to me his idea of implementing the secondary 'electrical gridwork' (his term) lab protocol disposal safeguard. Had this not been a week after the event of E-87a with Igor and his plucky fire axe, I would have poo-poo'd the whole idea. But it made sense, and truth be told I was beginning to get ideas following E-87a's autopsy. This exam focused particular attention on the subject's seemingly flame resistant scales. My muse instructed me in the probability of creating an organism that could survive for a short time while submerged in molten rock. But in case of yet another 'developmental mishap' and this time with a subject largely impervious to intense flame we would need that second protocol. Igor's electrical gridwork idea (inspired by something he saw in a movie, of all things) seemed an acceptable solution.
We did, however, manage to destroy more lab equipment than I anticipated during the tests to determine what gauge of chicken wire could withstand all that power.

Remarkable scientific milestones, #1

This nutritional paste is pretty good. We whipped it up for the growth nubs, makes it easy for feeding within hours of their spawn. Just plop a handful into each maw every two hours for 17 days, then a handful every 6 hours for the next 43 days. I’m pretty sure it’s not much more than baby food, except Igor tripled the growth hormone count to cover the nub’s 60 day spurt to mass index A, when the course DNA can be applied.
We’ve come a heckuva long way from digging up corpses and sewing together the most viable parts to make a whole creature. Got the idea for the nubs reading Darwin’s notes on the sea cucumber. I think it was Darwin with the sea cucumber; that was a long time ago. Of course now, (thanks to the efforts of universities and corporate research servers around the world) extensive data on almost any topic is retrievable within scant seconds thanks to the internet. If we’ve come a long way since raiding graveyards, we’ve come an even longer way from the time when I would spend hours in the library flipping through heavy volumes or bound journals to now where all I need is to tote this laptop with me everywhere. Everything we need comes in via the coaxial cable from either the dish array on top of the tower keep or over the cable TV service provider’s monthly subscription. I prefer using the satellite for more sensitive issues.
Last year a clever intern feeding the nubs suddenly made the sea cucumber connection as she plopped a half cup of nutritional paste into one of the nub's maws. She came running up to me breathless, rambling enthusiastically about my brilliant synthesis of a sea dwelling organism and mammalian metabolic functions into one funny smelling chimera macrophyte. I reminded her that around here we call them 'growth nubs' or just 'nubs' and instructed her to mind the nutritional paste she was about to spill from her bucket. She ran gleefully back to her feeding chore, babbling happily to the floor and ceiling about how everything she was taught in bio 101 would have to be rewritten. A budding biotech engineer for the 21st century. I figure, well what are any of these students gonna tell people: "oh sure, we interned for this mad scientist who managed to impart a mammalian physiogyte onto a plant cellular substrate and got them to grow within 60 days to a humanoid zygote that is able to produce varying percentages (based on alternating metabolization ratios) of the oxygen it requires." They know all the other interns would just laugh at them: “what did he do next, get them to walk and talk? ha ha ha ha!”
Walking and talking takes another four months, from index A to index A2; and sometimes that flamebooth comes in handy when the talking gives indications it’s only gonna resolve to endless shrieks after a week of reaching index A2.
At index A2.2 species interaction starts to become important, and Igor transforms from occasionally helpful/bungling hideous hunchback assistant to (of all things) caring nurturer. At least from the maturing A2-A3 nub’s perspective. Even more shocking is when a fully matured properly functioning A4 organism will still look at Igor the way a child recognizes a beloved parent.
Now that’s the basis for a scary horror movie.