On the left side of my website I have a set of rotating images. Each of them is important to me in one way or another, and I like to mix it up so that the site is dynamic and interesting. Here you can find out what each of them is about.

Mugshot This was the last mugshot that was taken of me for The California Aggie, when I wrote for it. In the expanded picture, I was holding a beaker, and pouring white crystals into it from a test tube. Unfortunately, the image editing for the newspaper made the colors all funky, so it looks like I’ve got a combination of Rosacea and Jaundice. But I’d like to think I had Carotenemia. The full picture is available here.
This is a a sized-down version of my current Mindcast banner. It displays in iTunes and on websites that mirror my podcast. To make it, I took a photo of a nifty glowing neuron and tweaked it up good in Photoshop, to match the colors of my site at the time. I was working with a fun (but garish) dark blue and green theme with a black background. When the Mindcast starts up again later this year, I’ll be updating the banner to match.
If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that I’m a hobby beekeeper. I also give honey from my bees to guests of my show. These are 1 1/2 of three colonies that I had in Davis, CA, in 2006. The one on the left was named “Elena” after Ariela’s mom. I got a good 45 pounds of honey out of this colony that year, and “Elena” currently lives with my parents in Petaluma, CA. I name my colonies like hurricanes, going from A to Z. It’s a fun way to keep track!
*Shudder* This is my meiosis-bypassed offspring, Evil J. Klone (pronounced Eh-ville). He stepped up to debate me in The California Aggie in two of my columns, and this was the last Aggie mugshot taken of him. I have no idea what he looks like now. But I hear his voice from time to time. He comes and goes, and gets involved in a lot of messes around the country and likes to call in my show to gloat. He’s got a knack for finding the cracks in science (and exploiting them for his own personal gain), so someday I might convince him to become a correspondent for the Mindcast. Few, but me, know his real name.
DICER! My favorite enzyme in the whole wide world, so far. I wrote a lengthy post about it, so feel free to take a read. In summary, it’s an enzyme that cuts double-stranded RNA molecules into little pieces that a cell can use to match up with other RNA molecules or DNA strands to “turn off” or “silence” genes. Helps in defenses against viruses, development, gene regulation, and very useful for the RNAi technology used in plant genetic engineering. It helps that it operates on my favorite polymer, RNA.
Hey, why not a cute picture of of silver ink on a black notepad slipped into the pocket of a starry shirt that I sewed myself? You might find that I’ve got a great many projects in the works or already completed that I like showing off.
Ah, seven months of work, screening a population of about 18,000 tomato seeds for mutations. I had about 55 genes, and two plates with seed DNA all pooled together, and a batch of unruly nested PCR primers to tame. This project, at the Seed Biotechnology Center at UC Davis, was a test of my mad PCR skills, and my patience. (Veterans of nested PCR understand this) Month after month of false positives chased down and nothing was found. Then I was told that the project was ending (with no successful hits) in a month, and I hurried to try to finish as many as possible.
Less than a week to go, I found some more putative positive hits, and on the last day, I reproduced one hit, and found it in an individual sub-pool and it called out as a clear positive signal like no other. (Pooled DNA on the left of the multi-lined size-marking “ladder.” The eight lanes on the right make up the pool on the left, and you can see a bright band sticking out in one of them that is also present in the pool - that’s my hit.) This picture was taken five minutes before my going-away lunch!I display it as a reminder to stick with it. Months of work and no positives can lead you to suspect that there’s something wrong with the procedure - but this strongly suggested that I was doing it right. If I had another week, I would have sequenced the sample to confirm it as a positive hit. But as the project was over, and so, too, my time working at SBC, I was not able to confirm that this was indeed a deletion mutant. So it serves as a further reminder that there are some things, through the contingencies of life, that we will never know - but that nothing is conceptually beyond the reach of science.
Processed Corn Walking. That’s the line in The Omnivore’s Dilemma where I had Michael Pollan autograph it after I asked him a few questions during a panel discussion at UC Davis in November 2006. While on that panel, I was dressed as, well, corn. I had just finished my corn-kernel dress shirt (planned long before this event was on the radar) inside of my green suit, and the morning of the panel event, I had my hair cut, highlighted, and dyed green. This is me at the end of the day posing in the hallway.
There’s that starry shirt again - at this moment I’m signing my life away on a truck to take me (& Ariela) across the country to grad school (wherever that might be - at the time it was still up in the air). The truck was also picked because otherwise I would have no way of transporting my bees around. That’s the background behind the photo, but other than that it’s just a good pic of me looking at the camera. Hard to find when I’m usually the one taking the pictures.

This is the ultra-nerdy license plate that I have on my truck. INOCUL8. I was going to go for GAATTC - the DNA sequence cleaved by the first restriction enzyme ever discovered, EcoR1, but I realized that I had the room for something so much more… me. As I’m no longer an Aggie, but now a Badger, my folks got me a couple up-to-date license plate frames. Ariela has my UC Davis one on her car now.Read more at My New License Plate.