So I had to create another blog account for my graduate school program so that we could post and share our work remotely.  I'm not writing anything in that blog, but I thought since I had to have two blogs, I might as well link them.  The link for that account is:

http://rostama.wordpress.com/

So now I'm going over to the other blog so that I can paste the link for this one into that one.

Too many accounts for everything. This is getting out of control.

Getting back to Blogger-ing

Wow it's been two years since I wrote in this blog. The lab is a demanding place, and there has not been much time to do anything but research, and worry about getting enough data together to publish a decent research article and graduate and to get going on a career.

I managed to get back into this blog because I wanted to follow: http://towardpermasteading.blogspot.com

Now I'm back and maybe I'll write more often, but if anyone out there in internetland is actually reading this, and may potentially care, I must warn you that I can't make any promises.

Here's some more cells!!

Bad Math

I ran into this post:

on this website (http://www.fugly.com/pictures/22788/an-arguement-for-creationism.html) today. I tried to leave a comment but their comment software was broken, so I had to respond in this blog with my comment:

Here is my comment:
This is a serious case of bad math.

The cell divisions are not geometric, they are exponential.

Every cell division doubles the previous number. Let's call each cell division "N". At time zero we had 1 cell. At 30 minutes we had 1 cell division (N), giving us 2 cells. At 60 minutes we had another cell division (N) giving us 4 cells. At 90 minutes we had another cell division (N) giving us 8 cells. At 120 minutes we had another cell division (N) giving us 16 cells.  In 2 hours, we had 4 cell divisions giving us 16 cells. The equation for this is 2^N. We had 4 "N"s. So 2^4 = 16.

So let's re-do this guy's math correctly.

1 day = 1440 minutes

1440 hours divided by 30 minute chunks of time (time it takes for each cell division, or "N") = 48

So each day, 1 cell becomes 2^48 cells = 281 trillion cells.

Multiply that by 365 days per year =
1.03 x 10^17 cells

Multiply that by 3.5 billion years =
2 to the 6 x 10^13 cells.

That is a number so freakishly huge and SOOOOO much larger than 81 trillion that it actually accounts for every cell in every organism that has ever been on this earth, plus all of the cells that died during each organism's lifetime. Every blade of grass, every bactrium, every fish, every fungus, and everything else that has ever been can be accounted for by this number.

One should not try to disprove evolution with math, when one can not do proper math.

2 - Sojourner Spoof

The story of my life is that I've moved around a lot. Can't stay still. Always moving. Finishing one chapter of life and physically moving to another...often involving hundreds or thousands of miles distance between the two. Funny thing is, I'm not seeking out the move. Life forces it upon me and I oblige. I've said it every single time I've moved (and I am certainly not the first to iterate these words): moving sucks. Nevertheless, it is necessary.

In today's world, where information moves at the speed of light, economies rise and fall in minutes, and the demand for individual productivity requires immediate mobility, I am one of the many whose fate is tied to a future destination. It's never just tied to the one in which I currently reside.

That being said, I currently live in South Portland, Maine, and I moved here from Hilo, Hawai'i. Prior to that it was various places in Northern California, Southern California, Nevada, Germany, and Iran.

I came to Maine for graduate school, and I am currently a graduate student. Here's my profile on the school's graduate program website: http://www.gsbs.umaine.edu/people/profile/beau_rostama .  It's extremely time-consuming work. It goes without saying, therefore, that my entries into this blog will be sparse and haphazard. It is for my own personal interest, then, that I write this. So if anyone else reading this has any questions for me, please email me ( brostama [ a t ] gmail [ d o t ] com ) and I will write you back or respond in the blog about it.

So...ummm....here's a picture of some of the cells I had growing in the lab, fluorescently stained. :)

1 - The first entry.

Hi Folks!

So I know there are millions of weblogs out there, and that most people don't care what others have to talk about, simply because EVERYONE is talking at the same time and it's mostly very boring. What keeps the blog-o-sphere going is, most of those doing the talking do not care. Neither do I. So if you're reading this, I thank you for caring about ME enough to read this, because you could easily be reading the writings of someone far, far more interesting.

This blog is not made for any specific reason. I just wanted to have somewhere to write stuff that was not homework, work-related, or having to do with science, although I will inevitably touch on those subjects because they make up a huge part of my life. That being said, this blog won't have a worldly theme. I am the theme. Since I consider myself a multi-faceted person, the stuff poured out on these pages will be variable and not terribly exciting. Probably just day to day stuff, and the occasional thing I get passionate about, like politics, food, philosophical ideas or something else like that.  However, since it is public, I will be using discretion so as not to offend anyone with whom I am associated. This is not a diary, after all.

I tried having blogs before, but I ended up writing some strange things in those that I did not want friends and family to see, so I anonymized them and do not link them to myself anymore. They still exists on the internet, I do still occasionally write in them, and for those who may have originally had the addresses, they can go read those for themselves. I'm trying to keep this blog civil and grounded.

So that's that for this entry. Cheers for now.

Here's a recent picture of me, Bahman "Beau" Rostama