Saturday, August 03, 2002

How is my Saturday night?  A slow but relentless flu bug makes its way through our family.  Maggie puked on the couch. I cleaned it up with wet paper towels and dish soap.  Kate is on a retreat at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville with Francesca.  I am doing my duty as a blogger and sampling the wares of my peers.  I found two that I enjoy.  Blogenheimer found this page of chandlerisms.  I also enjoyed Girl Detective who posted a neat psychological test (Friday, July 26 - she should really have permalinks going) which I passed with flying colors but need to try out on my co-workers. 11:37:07 PM    comment []

One thing I found that I don't like about Radio Userland is that if you put an image in a post, the editing page wants to load it from the web every time you fire it up to write a new post.  So when I am on a slow connection, I have to wait for that image to load every time before I can begin.  To avoid this I can either not post images or set the number of previous posts show to a lower number. 11:22:47 PM    comment []

Prions are some scary shit.  Prions are implicated in Mad Cow Disease (BSE) and Creutzfeld-Jacobs Disease (CJD) in humans.  Now they are suspected in Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), something that has recently shown up in Wisconsin deer.  It is not believed that CWD can infect humans, but there are three hunters who died in Wisconsin from brain disease, two from CJD specifically.  The three hunted together and CJD is rare enough that it is scary that infected two guys who knew each other and practiced similar eating habits. Prions are believed to be infectious agents that are neither virus nor bacteria.  They are molecules that reproduce by transforming molecules they come in contact with.  It is theorized that it would be much easier for Prions to leap between species because they don't have to infect cells or defeat the immune system of the animal they are infecting, they just have to get into the blood. The State of Wisconsin is destroying the deer herd in a three county area where CWD was discovered and testing thousands of deer all over the state.  Minnesota DNR is testing for this as well.  The Wisconsin DNR has maps and information about CWD up on their site.  If you think I am being alarmist, check the national news site for CWD for a real horror show.  3:12:04 PM    comment []

Insight into how the DNR manages fisheries.  Wednesday morning I saw the hows and whys of  fish growth calculation demonstrated and for anyone interested in fisheries biology, I wrote up a detailed description here.  The process revolves around counting growth rings on fish parts such as the Walleye scale at right.  The hardware and software used to do this is being replaced soon and it falls upon me to write the new software so it works with all the new devices. 1:22:52 AM    comment []