I'm not dead yet

Ah, nothing like resurrecting a long-dead medium.  I guess I just got bored with having a blog.

In the past two years a lot of things have happened.  My last post was just after I started my work as a programmer.  It was before my epilepsy was diagnosed, which has been a whole other pile of shit to deal with.

But I've still been knitting, playing video games, doing the things I like.  And I have a huge backlog of things I could have been writing about and sharing but didn't.  A lot of items that I could have written up as patterns but was too lazy to do it.

Here's one example:  the evolutionist's baby toy!  Although it's really easy, it pretty much doesn't require a pattern at all, so this is more of a tutorial.

I present to you the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

(artist's impression)

Sport or fingering weight yarn in an off-white color
Yarn in some kind of brown wool
A piece of something semi-stiff - wire, plastic foam sheets, whatever, to hold up the eye stalks
Plastic eyes, if his noodly appendage driveth you so
A sharp needle with a big enough eye for yarn
Washing machine or a needle felter
Patience or one of these cool bastards

(via JoAnn's Fabrics)

The Embellish-knit is basically a tiny knitting machine with four latch hooks.  You feed in the yarn correctly and turn the crank and out comes a truly ridiculous amount of 4-stitch i-cord.  I bought one as a whim, years ago, and this is pretty much the only interesting thing I've done with it since I had it.

So get it started with the off-white yarn.  I made it work with really light worsted - fisherman's wool - but anything heavier than that will jam the machine.  Make sure to weight the yarn coming out the bottom appropriately - it comes with a tiny little clip-on weight thing that is not near heavy enough for my tastes.  If it's not weighted enough the needles won't grab it and it'll get wonky and fall out of the machine.  .  Find something heavier you can tie it to - it doesn't have to be huge.  I think I used a roll of duct tape.  Now spin that crank until you have a lot of i-cord, a pile of i-cord - 15 feet of i-cord, at least, and more if you want him to be really noodley.  It doesn't take all that long, but if you feel the need for speed or you are channeling Tim Allen and feel that your work just doesn't have enough testosterone yet, I'd recommend this high-tech method shared by 1klik6.

Or, if you are Catholic and have been looking for a penance, you can knit it all by hand!

You need at least three longish pieces so you can make them separately if you like; I didn't want to bother so I just did the whole thing in one go.  It spins as it comes out the bottom of the machine so you have to let it hang freely.  As I made more cord I just bundled and tied it up to keep it off the floor.

Now it's time to make yourself some balls - even if you've got a pair, you need two more for this.  You could knit or crochet a ball, but I just rolled up the brown yarn into a ball and needle felted it around.  You could also throw a couple of rolled-up balls into the washing machine, but make sure they are bigger than you want and maybe wrap em in a piece of panty hose or something to make sure they don't come apart.

Start assembling the main body.  If you have one long i-cord, cut it into pieces and thread the loose end of the yarn through the four exposed stitches on each side of the cut. I had one really long piece to serve as the two main noodles, and two other pieces to serve as body and shorter noodles.  This part is really easy and sort of free-form.  I started with one piece looped into a figure eight, where the holes in the 8 were just big enough to cradle the meatballs, then I tacked the balls onto the noodles with a few strands of the white yarn. You need that sharp needle to poke into the meatballs.

Shape the piece of something pointy into the eyestalk holders.  Bend a piece of wire into a U, or cut a piece of stiff material into that shape.  It has to be narrow enough to fit inside the i-cord.  Slip a short piece of i-cord over it and fix it in place between the meatballs.  At this point you could attach googley eyes or beads or something, I just knitted small balls atop the eyestalks and embroidered pupils onto them.

Now here comes the artistic part where this becomes really you - loop the noodles around however the fuck you want.  It's that simple!  Once you've got them good, you can tack some of them in place too, so he won't just unravel.  Leave at least two longer ones and let the ends of the shorter ones poke out here and there to get that really realistic noodly look.

And there you have it.  Your very own tribute to the gods of Evolution.

Immortal Life

I'm not a cell biologist, so I haven't ever done cell work. But among cell biologists, who hasn't used a HeLa strain at some point? From what I know about it, I would imagine that it's one of the first things that cell biology students are given to play around with. And even if you don't do cell biology, if you do any molecular biology, you certainly read about it - examples in text books, papers on experiments done with it, etc. I'd heard about HeLa my entire schooling and never once thought about what it meant or where the name came from - why should I care, either? It's not like the names of individual Drosophila lines are particularly illuminating. Most of them name the physical place the flies were originally collected from wild populations, or in the case of some others in our lab, they're just numbers.

I got a Kindle for Christmas this year and I absolutely love it, which is a whole other post; but anyway, one of the books I recently read was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. For the first time, I learned where most cell lines get their names. For the first time, I learned in a manner that felt nearly first-hand, more about the things that were done to people in the name of science, as short as fifty years ago. I'd heard about the Tuskeegee experiments, just about every scientist has, even if they aren't in the medical field, but reading such a direct and painful description of the way things were . . . it's hard. Did you have to read Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' when you were in high school? I did, and it really upset me. I used my normal trick of reminding myself that it was a work of fiction, and besides, this was a compilation of every single bad thing that could happen to an immigrant family all happening to these characters. It only made it partially better, because I knew those things really did happen.

But reading this book, you can't tell yourself that it's okay because it didn't happen. It's like reading the Jungle but knowing that these people were real, that they worked and suffered and were lied to and then died. I don't want to give away the particulars of the book, because it's a really, really good read, and anyone who is interested in science or medical ethics should read it for themselves. But if you are like me, then be prepared for the horrible realizations that come with it.

That's just the way things were done. Maybe I could have been one of those privileged doing my work without regards to people or their rights, if I had been born sixty years ago. Maybe I wouldn't have seen how awful it was at the time either, even though my mind rebels at that idea. How many things do we allow because 'that's just the way it is'? Are there things we do today that will be considered atrocities in fifty years? I can think of a few things about society as a whole, but of course I would like to think there is nothing I, personally, do that falls under that. Wouldn't everyone?

Also, it reminds me of why cancer is so very creepy to me. Not just because it's deadly, and we still have inadequate treatment options even today - no, cancer frightens me because of what it represents. Cancer is a part of you that has declared mutiny. A part of you that refuses to cooperate, that seeks an independent existence from the organism it should be a part of. Of course, I'm anthropomorphizing, and doing it to a clump of cells, for added ridiculousness. It's much more like the concept of an industrial robot on an assembly line losing some of its built-in regulations and doing its particular job as much as it possible can, without regards to where it fits in the total assembly line of building a product, like spot welding 37 hood ornaments on to one car's hood, instead of the normal one-per-car it should be producing.

But changing the analogy doesn't frighten me any less. And knowing that I'm not one of those people now, that we don't do that to people any longer in the name of research, doesn't take away my shame that I still get to benefit from the results of such research.