… bit me. Of course, they always do. Examining an assumption reveals either that it is ok, to a first approximation, or that it isn’t; in the first case, the conditions are accepted as a reasonable compromise and, in the…
I want to make roots twist more vigorously; instead, I found a way to make twisting almost stop. As I have written about earlier (here and here), root twisting in my trials has been somewhat … flakey. I brought seed…
We live in polarized times: the word polarization is starting to stand in for all that ails us. But today I can write about polarization that is happy, or at least useful (Fig. 1). One day the week before last, I left…
This past week, I vanquished the dark zone but at a cost. Readers of a previous post will remember my main struggle with the project thus far is to get the cellulose-stain, fast scarlet, to stain roots reliably. To recapitulate:…
Yes! I have allowed myself to get distracted. But don’t worry; the rabbit hole in question is scientific. The dye, fast scarlet, does curious things to my roots. A curiosity I have already written about is the dark zone; for…
Skewed roots! Development matters. The tests I ran for the time course of skewing (and described here) finished. I scanned the plates and had a look. Starting with the two lefty mutants (Fig. 1), the amount of skewing is not…
A grindy week. Certainly an exaggeration to say there were a thousand natural shocks—even a dozen is not quantitative; but that’s what it felt like. There was actual Shakespeare tho: Last night, we saw the Birmingham Conservatoire’s production of Much Ado…
Today, Birmingham was definitely a bight zone. Tremendously sunny, not even a passing shower. I seized the day-bright and took my bike north along the canal towpath. I was not dissuaded even when the towpath became a narrow muddy rut….
Last Sunday, I wrote about The case of the vanishing twist. Unless the plates are all contaminated, I’ll get clues tomorrow when I compare mutants grown at 20 and 25ºC. In the same post in passing, I mentioned another mystery:…
On Tuesday this week, I sauntered into my office to find a man at the desk. The actual officeholder, Prof Maxted, had returned for tutorials, first week of school. Wishing he would have warned me so I could have tidied…
