ISB faculty playing DNA Twister

I was working at the Institute for Systems Biology when the 50th anniversary of Watson & Crick‘s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA rolled around. I had the great luck of working right next to Rich Bonneau, a brilliant scientist who made sure to interject into every — every — talk or meeting that we should really be focusing more on putting kangaroo tails on humans. Rich was, and I assume still is, all kinds of awesome.

DNA Twister mat

Anyway, to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure, Rich and I got a Twister mat and marked each of the four colors on it as one of the four bases that make up the structure of DNA: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. We used the spinner to assign which hand or foot was in play, but we used an actual bit of DNA to tell the players where to stick it. I don’t remember what the DNA sequence was from — I think it was one of the genes on human chromosome 14. The ISB faculty joined in, and it was so! funny! when we hit a repeat sequence! HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA!

I guess you had to be there.

Baker’s Coconut Animal Cut-Up Cakes

I’ve had this up on my photo pages for a while, and it’s perfect for Junkyard Clubhouse. This Animal Cut-Up Cakes booklet, put out by Baker’s Coconut in 1959, has full-color photos and instructions to make about a dozen different animal-shaped cakes by cutting up standard size round and rectangular cakes — and then encrusting them with unnaturally tinted Baker’s Coconut, of course. That’s Dandy-Lion pictured there on the cover, I had him for my fifth birthday. My brother had Fanny the Fish for one of his early birthdays.

My grandmother probably ordered away for it, it wound up with my mother, and I’ve had it with me since I moved out of the house. Aside from my sentimental attachment to it, I also think it’s beautifully designed and photographed, and it is just so 1959 (right down to the illustrations of a housewife baking in a dress and high heels). I have the whole thing scanned and up at Humuhumu’s Life in Photos, where you can see Tortie the Turtle, Ella Elephant, Quack-Quack the Duck, and all their coconutty friends.

This booklet inspired me to create a cut-up cake of my own design, a hula girl — you’ll find directions for her there, too.

UPDATE: Looking for Easter Bunny Cut-Up Cakes? I’ve got some here: Baker’s Coconut Easter Bunny Cut-Up Cake

Fanny the Fish Cut-Up Cake

A movement I can get behind — a call to halt the chronic infestation of the horrid typeface Comic Sans:

Cringe-inducing abuse of Comic Sans. From the Comic Sans Flickr pool

Like the tone of a spoken voice, the characteristics of a typeface convey meaning. The design of the typeface is, in itself, its voice. Often this voice speaks louder than the text itself. Thus when designing a “Do Not Enter” sign the use of a heavy-stroked, attention-commanding font such as Impact or Arial Black is appropriate. Typesetting such a message in Comic Sans would be ludicrous. Though this is sort of misuse is frequent, it is unjustified. Clearly, Comic Sans as a voice conveys silliness, childish naivete, irreverence, and is far too casual for such a purpose. It is analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.

And it’s not even a very good clown costume.

…and lost 75 pounds (none of it from his head):

[via Defamer]

Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up — that means it’s nearly time for one of my very favorite movies: Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Darby O’Gill is a live-action Disney film from 1959. It doesn’t get as much attention as I think it should.

Darby O’Gill fiddles a tune for the Leprechauns, ©Disney

Reasons you should watch the Darby O’Gill and the Little People DVD:

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I got this from Penn & Teller’s very fun 1992 book, “How to Play With Your Food“. I picked up all kinds of neat tricks from that book, but this is far and away my favorite: the glowing pickle trick. I’ve done this dozens of times. It’s pretty simple really: you just plug a pickle into the wall. You’re probably saying to yourself “that sounds dangerous,” and you’re right — it is. As a matter of fact, Penn & Teller’s book doesn’t actually tell you how to do it — they just point out that it’s possible, without giving instructions. I like you better than Pell & Teller do, though, so I’m going to tell you the particulars. But still — this involves exposed wires, which makes it dangerous, so don’t do it. Now that I have that disclaimer out of the way, here’s how to do it:

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Lustlab ad, by Ellen Forney

Lustlab is the kinky personals section for Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. Ellen Forney is a primo Seattle-based comic & illustration artist, who’s been a fixture on The Stranger’s pages for many years now.

Each week, Ellen takes one of the actual ads running in Lustlab, and turns it into a single-panel comic. She gets really inventive with it — an ad looking for a spanking is in the shape of a handprint, an ad talking about a rather delicate piercing is depicted graphically using the words of the text, and this ad takes the “daddy” and “third wheel” refrerence where it logically needs to go: Ed “Big Daddy” Roth territory. You can see all of Ellen’s Lustlab ads here. Borderline NSFW (more for the text than the images). There’s also a book of her Lustlab ads planned for 2008 by Fantagraphics. [via Robot Action Boy]

[UPDATE: Since this got picked up by BoingBoing, Ellen Forney's web server has seized up; a kind soul has uploaded her Lustlab ads onto Flickr. Besure to check them out on her website once it's back up again, though, because she shares a lot of insight into how she created each ad.]

The Amen Break

The Amen Break is the Wilhelm Scream of modern music: these six little seconds of drum solo have been sampled — in both whole form and in Frankenstein-esque reconstructions — so often that it has practically become an instrument in itself. In 2004, Nate Harrison created an 18-minute documentary about the history of the use of this ubiquitous drum break. It’s a bit long, but at least listen to the first couple of minutes, so you can hear the break, say “oh yeah! I know that!,” and learn where it originally came from. The whole piece is interesting, though; toward the end, the focus turns to the implications of sampling and copyright laws on creative expression and capitalism. I first found it on BoingBoing a year ago, but was reminded of it today when Cynical-C posted it.

Waffle House cheat sheet

This is fascinating: Waffle House uses a complex system of arranging condiment packets on plates to communicate order instructions. From nickgraywfu on Flickr, via BoingBoing.

“Protein Synthesis: an Epic on the Cellular Level” is a short film created in 1971 at Stanford University. The intro features Dr. Paul Berg, who would go on 9 years later to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. As much as I enjoy Dr. Berg’s intro, things really start to get running a bit past minute 3, when the hippies show up, demonstrating protein synthesis “using the dance idiom.” And balloons. And smoke. And a drum circle. It’s actually a very good demonstration of how protein synthesis works, and apparently it’s still shown in classrooms today. I first saw this film a bit over a decade ago, when I was working at ZymoGenetics.