nile monitor

fruit bat!

a primate of some sort

cougar

At the Zoo Today

This is an otter. I will be here most of the day and will post pictures sporadically. Enjoy!

The Ken Griffey Jr Experience

Well as I wrote earlier, we ventured from Portland to Seattle via Amtrak to see the Seattle Mariners. Upon arrival at the stadium, I was crushed to find that Griffey Jr would not be playing today. After getting over that fact, I was able to enjoy some quality baseball.

The Mariners got up 2-0 in the first inning off a 2 run home run. Then there was a lot of pitching battles for the next bunch on innings. The first chink in the armor occurred in the 6th (maybe) when the Orioles managed to load the bases with no outs and had a chance for a lead. They blew it and scored nothing.

After the 7th Inning Stretch the game picked up a little more. I knew the only way Griffey would get into the game was via a pinch hit, so I boldly made the prediction that the Marniners would give up their (then) 3-0 lead in disasterous fashion so that Griffey could hit for me.

My infatuation begins because I remember the days of Ken Griffey Jr Home Run Derby for SNES. My buddies and I would play for hours. Then he left Seattle and joined the Cincinnati Reds. After many injury laden years Griffey went back to Seattle to return to his amazingly awesome roots. I discovered that fact a couple weeks ago and was hoping I'd get to see him when we went to this very game. Of course the fact that he didn't play horribly upset me.

Anyways, the top of the 9th came and the Orioles made a tremendous surge on the back of various errors from the second baseman to take the lead 5-3. It was seriously the most ridiculous thing I had seen. The other day on SportsCenter, ESPN showed the 10 Worst Plays from the NY Mets this season and I felt like I had been watching that very highlight reel. So all in all the Mariners blew it and the Orioles take a 5-3 lead before they fell apart.

Here comes the bottom of the ninth. With everything having fallen into place, we try and figure out (Larry and I) who the manager would take out to put Griffey in. There was only 2 possible choices the second batter up (who was 9th in the lineup) or the 4th batter (who was 2nd in the lineup).

First batter, out. Second batter, out.

Third batter - Ichiro Suzuki - singled to right field (right by our seats).

Fourth batter...

...cue theme music!

Griffey pinch hits for the batter and the crowd erupts. I literally become so googly I can't think straight. This instantly skyrocketed to become one of my top 2 moments in a sporting event. I can't remember the last time I had felt so excited. I felt like I had just woken up Christmas morning and there is a present bigger than the tree and it has only my name on it.

Every second Griffey is at the plate is pure awesomeness. The crowd is standing in unison cheering, hoping, praying. I run through the only possible scenario a bazillion times in my head: Griffey pops one up deep to right field, it goes deep, it flies out of the park, home run... tie game.

Prior to his arrival I had been telling Larry this was exactly as it was going to go down. Before the 9th I told Larry the Mariners would self destruct. Before the bottom of the 9th I told Larry Griffey would get to hit. And now here he is.

The pitcher begins to make his move. He goes through every motion of his windup. His arms move back ever so slightly. He lunges forward with all his might. He pulls his arm up and over his head hurling the crimson and white through space and time at unforeseen speeds. All he can think is, "Holy Fuck, this is KEN GRIFFEY JR! I have to pitch to KEN GRIFFEY JR!"

The pitch soars through the air like a softball lobbed at home. Griffey measures up... this is the moment I've been living my life for... and grounds out weakly to the second baseman. Game over.

Shit! What the hell was that all about? I did not come to this game for that? The giant Christmas present under the tree? It was just a huge box with a singly lump of coal in it. Santa couldn't make it this year. He fell in the neighbor's fireplace, got stuck, and suffocated on his beard. The Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy died trying to help him too.

Never have I felt such anticipation in my life, and never have I been so let down. Nothing though, can compare to the feeling in my gut the seconds prior to that awful finish. That was pure amazing.

BTW, when you tell this story to your friends, remember that he hit the game tying home run and that I had to leave to catch the train after that so I don't know who won. The internet failed to work for those 15 minutes and all television shut down too. Remember?

at 12:34 and 56 seconds the world may come to an end. either that or we should all celebrate and rejoice because the first 10 digits of the positive integer system will be declared. at that time it will be:
12:34:56 7/8/09

I know... I'm a nerd. But Dara is the one who pointed it out. So kudos to her for the spot. I'm on the left coast now so I've still got some time...

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Going to Seattle

We are boarding the train along the Cascades route en route to Seattle WA to watch the Seattle Mariners play the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles suck, but the Mariners got childhood favorite Ken Griffey Jr back and I'm stoked. I want a home run from Griffey. I'll update if he does.

Food Poisoned in Portland

Well to follow up from my last post, I have to say I feel much better. I still have a few lingering effects, but for the most part I'm great. The effects of the fp is that I don't want to eat anything, sometimes I feel a little nauseous, and also that I had a headache for a couple of days.

Because I don't want to eat, my stomach is super small. I want to eat everything as usual, but I can't. I'll eat something like 1 egg for breakfast and feel stuffed. Yesterday I had a bowl of clam chowder (it was an average size bowl) and I thought my stomach would explode. Today I will not be eating so much.

Portland on the other hand is great. So far we went to the Oregon Coast and chilled on the beach. We went to Newport to get Taffy and Chowder (the chowder was ok). We also spent that last couple of nights with the Easley's (Dara's parents). I've met them before, and they always treat us well... especially in the feeding department.

Today we will venture back up to Portland and see what happens there. Tomorrow I will be off to Seattle on a train ride and to go see a Mariner's game. Should be fun. I'll be in touch.

I'm...Dead.... eeeehhhhhchhhthhpt

So I think I've been food poisoned. It was either because of some bad left over sloppy joe meat which I ate without reheating, or because of some poorly prepared hamburger from Chili's. I can't tell because a lot of my vomit was french fries and cheese, but it tasted like vomitty sloppy joe. I have never been food poisoned before and throwing up is probably the second worse feeling in the world. What's the worst? Probably eating your hand because you are starving, but that's a story for a different day.

Last night around 830pm I started to feel extra tired. Larry and I had been playing MLB 2K8 for hours. We had to get to the All Star Game, which we did and by then I felt so tired that I had to quit. I went straight to bed, even skipped brushing my teeth. Next thing I know I started having fever dreams. For the first 5 hours (1030-330) the dreams were about not being able to get a single out in the video game, with the awful commentating repeating itself over and over again.

I've had some annoying fever dreams, but this was easily the worst... EVER!

Probably like 15 min in to my nightmares, I ran to the bathroom and had the most explosive vomit I have ever experienced. It was so explosive french fries and beef started coming out of my nose! That was very uncomfortable to say the least. I then started to analyze my vomit to see what may have been the problem and that is how I narrowed it down to what I mentioned above.

I easily went to the bathroom 3 times in the first hour of my awfulness. After that it was sporadic for the rest of the night. Finally stopping at around 430. I think I threw up once in the final hour. And that was just the excruciating dry heave when you have nothing left in your stomach to vomit. I was afraid to even drink water because one previous time it had exploded all over the wall on the way to the bathroom, but it was just water vomit.

About 2 hours in I got the explosive water diarrhea. So for about 2 hours I would puke and then crap and then puke and then crap. The poo was pure water too, but it smelled like poo. Once this started happening, I started drinking water to prevent dehydration. It was getting so bad that I could see muscle fibers, tendons, etc.

To go along with the awful fever baseball dreams, I started having body aches which made it impossible to sleep at all. And I started having the chills. I would get super hot, get into the path of my fan, become super cold, get under the covers, and the cycle would continue as such. Thank goodness I didn't have the cold sweats. I only sweat just before I had to run to the bathroom, which was a nice sign of what was to come.

Ever time back from the bathroom, I would just ask whomever is in charge of the world and my illness to please make the dreams stop. I cared little for the bathroom runs, because I felt like I was losing weight, lol, but those dreams had to end. Finally the baseball dreams did end and a new one began.

This dream was about some hardware that could do what you wanted from thoughts. It used some kind of software that had ultra sweet image recognition and make what you wanted. The only problem was the software wasn't perfect before it was implemented and there was mass pandemonium because you couldn't turn the machines off once they started. That lasted until I woke up at 730am feeling like I had the perfect night of sleep, even though it was awful. I'm definitely going to crash later today at some point, but I hope it's on the plane.

My Research Explained: Working Backward

I know in my last post I said I would discuss the basics of the Biology that I am working on, but I figured that I should do a little overview and then start at the basics. While my next post will be about DNA, this post will provide a broad look at what I hope to accomplish over the next 2-3 years.

Without going into specifics, DNA is the essence of life. Everything that controls our body is because of DNA. If your DNA changed, you would change. Some of those changes are harmful while others are not so much (like the gene that gives me super blogging abilities). These changes can come from physical changes to the DNA sequence, organizational changes, chemical modifications, etc.

Using an optical tweezer, we can detect these changes. More importantly we can map DNA. We can map an ordinary normal sequence and compare a non-normal sequence to it. There are loads of other things too, but this is the main goal. What exactly do I mean when I say map?

Well, when you (or I, I should say) unzip DNA the data you collect is a force profile. Each sequence requires a different force to separate two strands. Think of it like a fingerprint. Any given force curve for a particular DNA sequence is different than any other. It might even be unique, but that is unproven.

Anyways, in the upcoming Research Explained posts, I will detail everything I know on the subject and provide some possible applications to our experiments. Stay tuned...

My Research Explained: The Optical Tweezer

I haven't blogged this topic in a while so please forgive me, but let's refresh. A laser through a microscope gives you an optical trap. Done. How do you make tweezers? That my friends require ingenuity.

It doesn't really need that, but I wanted to put you in suspense. Are you ready to be oo-ed and ahh-ed? Good. The key component of the tweezer is movement. If you can't move the trap then it is no good for my experiments. In this first image, I have setup a basic trap using just mirrors and the microscope. The laser is a green 532nm laser so I colored the path green.

Here I have a mock-up of a steerable trap. How is it steerable? Well if you notice, there is a 1:1 telescope in there. The beam is imaged throughout this system using lenses. Each time the beam is reimaged, we call that a conjugate plane. The first lens of the 1:1 telescope is the conjugate plane of the laser (likewise the objective of the microscope is another conjugate plane). Moving this lens, amazingly, does not move the beam path on any conjugate planes after this point, but it does change the angle of the light. This change in angle allows us to move the trap.

Another key mechanism for movement is through the use of a feedback loop. We collect all the light from the trap on a quadrant photodiode (QPD). When there is something in the trap, like a bead, light gets scattered, reflected, refracted, etc. The QPD detects this and using some fancy equations we can determine how exactly whatever is in the trap is moving. A computer then sends this information to some kind of moving mechanism to move the stage of the microscope (where our sample sits) to react to the movement in the trap.

Our mechanism will be a piezo-electric stage. A piezo is a crystal that changes shape when a voltage is applied to it. The computer, in our case, sends a signal (in Volts luckily enough) to the piezo and the piezo reacts by either growing or shrinking. This growth or shrink is what pushes or pulls the stage, and is very controllable.

Now we can control the trap, but there is one more aspect to the tweezer, taking data? Luckily the QPD does this too. Because it detects how light interacts with a sample in the trap, it can tell us (with more equations) how much force is being applied to the sample. It is through this that we are able to get data about unzipping DNA.

Hopefully I have thoroughly explained how we get information from an optical trap. Next time I will begin the very long explanation of all the other parts of my research, Biology!

My Travel Schedule

I have a busy couple of months ahead of me:

July 4 - 10: Portland (visit Dara)
August 1 - 5: Chicago (visit Stef)
September 5 - 6: Oklahoma City (concert, Dandy Warhols)
September 11 - 13: Winter Park, FL (Brad's wedding)
September 18 - 20: Las Vegas (Stef's cousin's wedding)

Also of Note: July 24 - 28: Stef returns to ABQ (another cousin's wedding)

Stuff and Things

The internet is awesome. Without it we wouldn't have other awesome things. Those things include Google, Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, SlideShare, Friendfeed, etc. I write this because I am all over the web and wanted to share that with you all. Eventually it will be cemented in one central hub known as a webpage that will be my own. For now I encourage you to Google search my name (or click the link) and explore all the places my reach extends. Also if you want a more direct route than google searching, go to your favorite website and add a "/anthonysalvagno" to it. If its hip and awesome I will have a profile. Except on Youtube... there I am known as gotant6884. There is another place I go by that name as well, but I can't remember... oh well.

Top 5 Funniest Things I've Told Keira

5. "Sloth!" - If you kindly click the link, you will see a lion that looks like a movie star. When I first made this discovery, for weeks on end (and occasionally still) I would yell "Sloth!" whenever she would play with the lion toy. I also like to yell, "Go get sloth." To which she would frantically look around. She would never find the lion because she doesn't understand what I'm asking, but at least she tries... I realize this was a stretch so shut up!

4. "Go shave your gray beard." - Every morning, Keira likes to jump on you when she gets up. She does this to alert you she needs to use the bathroom and also because she wants to play. One morning, I wasn't having it so I wouldn't budge. She retaliated by jumping on the bed. I looked at her with one eye open and calmly stated, "Go shave your beard. You have a gray beard. Go shave your gray beard." She sat up puzzled. I then told her I wouldn't go anywhere until she learned how to use a razor to shave her gray beard. She never did.

3. "Your mother's a whore." - Her mother could very well be one, but the truth is nobody knows. I don't know what made me say this to her, maybe I was bored with saying the next two things, maybe I was just plain bored, or maybe I realized I was the wittiest person alive! Regardless how true option 3 is, those very words came out of my mouth. Eventually I said it so often that I sang her songs about it. The chorus went:
Your mother's a whore
Your mother's a whore
I saw her at the corner store...
The rest is history. Sometimes I tell her that she is the way she is because of her mother's mistakes. Other times I tell her I treat her the way I do because I love her and I don't want her to follow in her mother's footsteps. It's true... I don't.

2. "Go away, nobody likes you." - This is an oldie, but a goodie. The very first time I made this comment, Keira was jumping on me and kinda annoying me. I yelled this at her. She immediately stopped, looked at me, bowed her head, tucked her tail between her legs, and walked toward her kennel. I have never seen such sadness. My heart melted. To compound her sadness, I would call her over and pretend I was happy to see her, then I would yell the phrase and watch her sulk her way to the corner. I must have done that 7 or 8 times that night. Now I more calmly let her know that nobody likes her, but I follow it up by saying that I really do like her, and then respond with a "I'm just kidding, I really don't."

1. "Your rope is a slut." - Every dog has their favorite tug-o-war rope. I had to break the news to Keira that hers was also the favorite of all the other dogs. I would frequently tell her stories of how she would stand on the corner selling herself for $5 a tug. All the dogs in the neighborhood have had their turn! I told her the rope liked to frequent a McDonalds on Central and Yale:

View Larger MapI actually saw it there a couple times. I am now $15 poorer.