sometimes life gets you like that

This was going to be quite a long soul-searching post about the general usefulness of science, based on a conversation held the other evening about whether the Large Hadron Collider was actually worth it. Huge amounts of time, money and energy (and a slight amount of danger) all for ... what? The Higgs partical? Why? Seriously, is there any point to finding this thing except just ... because?

But I am tired, and vaguely upset, and really not in the mood to spend a goodly amount of time talking about how the subject I ended up doing (and will keep on doing) is a mighty large pile of intellectual w*nk. It is starting to look very definitely like science is going to constitute a large part of my life, and I need to be a lot more awake and cheerful before pulling my life apart like that.

So I'm going to read firefly fanfiction instead.

Literature degree? Should'a could'a would'a.

I'm in less of a sciency mood...

...because I've just started watching Firefly. wow. such amazing characters. Such amazing character interactions. Such an awesome mix of sci-fi and western without clogging it with unnecessary romance. Seriously though, is there any other sci-fi movie where the pilot is in a loving and stable marriage? Or where explosions in space happen to the accompaniment of awesome guitar music rather than actual scientifically-incorrect explosions?

On the lab front, we are busy troubleshooting. The DNA extraction technique is extracting tiny amounts of DNA and the task today is to find out why. Which means going through the whole process all over again (it takes about six hours) extracting aliquots every time we so much as pick up an eppindorf and try to find out where exactly our DNA is going.

...

They never have problems like this on Serenity.