A few days ago, field pollination season started for the field corn labs at UW-Madison. At first, it’s out in the field every day at 8 am, next week it will be 7 am, and no one goes home until everything is done. For new grad students, the first summer pollination season can be quite the shock. Last year, in addition to our own nurseries, we had a huge field known as the NAMs (Nested Association Mapping) that made field season seem interminable.

This year I have about 560 rows of plants to manage, which isn’t a lot when you get down to it.

Anyway, this morning, however, I’m up at the crack of dawn to dilute something in the lab before heading out to the field. It has to mix in a shaker for a good two hours before I get out there at the regular time. Many people would be annoyed at leaving the lab at 6 pm only to be back in less than 12 hours later. But this is the way I see it:

It’s not every day that a guy gets to make mutants!

(Muh huh hah ha ha haaa!)

While sparks may be flying elsewhere in the science blogosphere, Google reminds us that today is Nikola Tesla’s birthday.

So forget your troubles and enjoy some singing Tesla Coils!

Forgive the pun. But I have a little local news to complain about. Ever since I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, I have noticed the awful behavior of pedestrians in the downtown area. Citizens, many of them students, cross high-speed, major streets when they are not supposed to. In particular, the parallel one-way streets of Gorham/University and West Johnson, especially where they both cross State Street - the backbone of downtown Madison.

When driving through town, I often see pedestrians starting across the street, crosswalk or not, and they may or may not be paying attention to oncoming traffic, which is often going at 25-35 miles per hour. Sometimes pedestrians are walking along State Street, a pedestrian/bike/bus-only mall, and instinctively start across a street that crosses it, only to catch themselves as they remember that 2-ton hunks of metal are bearing down on them and they forgot to look.

Considering that kindergarten was not that long ago for some of these people, you’d think that they would remember the simple lesson of looking both ways. Read More…