Fun with Liquid Nitrogen

So… hi. Looks like I haven’t updated here in a while, right? Right.

The old (read: from 2002 or so) adage is that a blog isn’t worth its salt if it doesn’t last 3 months. I’ve heard that something like 80% of all blogs die within that time frame and I suspect the real number is much higher, or at least over 90% if you take it out to 6 months. Which is how long it’s been since I started this. So I’m calling it quits now, right?

Not quite. You see, this was sort of an experiment for me to see if I could do this whole science blogging thing. Over 100 posts in a four month period told me that yes, I could. I even got some excellent contributions from several talented and bright guest authors and, of course, the regular Friday feature from my wife. And then, about 2 months ago, it just sort of petered out as I had to shift focus to another project, one I started before this, namely my travel blog.

I half-expected I’d be done with detailing out latest major adventure in the second half of May by now, or at least close to done. Unfortunately, I’m not, due to the fact that I’m closing in one one of those Major Life Changes™ and that’s been my primary focus, with the travel blog being secondary, not passing out from heat stroke coming in third, trying to be not-fat coming in around fourth and, well, this is barely cracking the Top 5, now isn’t it? And so I need to set it aside for a while as I try to get my life – of which I appear to have more than I can handle at the moment – into some semblance of order. When I return, I hope it’ll be for good. I took FwLN2 for a test drive, and I think I’m gonna buy it. I’ve really, really enjoyed doing this and it’s honestly a matter of not having enough hours in the day to do it and accomplish my other, ultimately more important goals while not going completely insane from lack of sleep.

I don’t suspect you’ll hang around because “hiatus” is blogese for “quitting and not coming back” and I don’t expect to be treated as the exception to that rule who actually does come back. And, if I have time, I’ll try to bang out a few posts every now and then to keep the beat going, but that’ll be an irregular thing. So keep this in your RSS reader if you have it there (you should) but otherwise, I won’t feel hurt if you stop reading. I’ll be sure to make more noise when I’m ready to start again in earnest, a more dedicated, less sleep-deprived man.

So don’t stay tuned, but, much as Futurama arose from the ashes to broadcast TV seven years after cancellation two weeks ago, always keep FwLN2 in mind sometimes. Never know when I might make a comeback. Well, not for a couple months, at least. But after that, you never know.

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Yes, we’re back! After a month of floating down off the blogosphere to take a much-needed vacation, Fun with Liquid Nitrogen has returned.

And with a 90s pop culture reference. Surprise to no one.

So why were we gone for so long? Well, for the first week I had to scramble like mad to prepare for our journey both at home and by battening down the metaphorical hatches at work. After that I was in Washington DC for ASGCT 2010 for a week and then we spent another week down South on vacation. The past two weeks have been tricky as I’ve been trying to get my bearings and write about our trip for posterity without the aid of my laptop, which appears to have been broken by Alabama. I’m not sure how, but it worked just fine in Florida and, next day, didn’t work in Alabama. So there you go.

It’s fixed now, though! And so I plan on cranking this back up again and commencing with the daily posts right away. Tomorrow I’ll post an “unrelated content” entry and I might even make a bonus one on Sunday if you’re really lucky, since I’ve got an immense backlog of links and neat things to share to sort through. The same is true of blogging topics since our time away was not without some relatively big news in the world of Science, namely, it seems like Craig Venter has been up to some things. Perhaps you heard about it already. I look forward to writing about that.

At any rate, I hope you will continue reading after our bit of time off. I may tinker with the site design some over the coming weeks, as well, so please let me know what, if anything you like that I’ve done and what you hate or, more importantly, doesn’t work on your computer. A web designer I am not but since not being a writer by trade didn’t stop me from doing this I figured it’s worth a shot, too.

Thanks for your patience, folks.

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Yeah, I got nothing for you today. I just got back home a couple of hours ago so I didn’t have time to write a post for today and tomorrow’s will most likely be up late, but after that I hope to be (more or less) caught up. For now, here’s a summary of our trip to the Jersey Shore on Sunday:

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Briefly today:

Our friend Lou Fancy emailed me last week inquiring about the FDA approval process here in the United States, specifically in regard to why it takes so dang long for a new drug to hit the market. It’s an excellent question and one that requires a solid answer. After thinking about it for a while I’ve elected to take the bulk of this week in doing so. Tomorrow I’ll give a history of pharmaceutical intervention in the US and why we have the FDA. Wednesday I’ll discuss how the “drug pipeline” works from discovery to approval. Finally, on Thursday I’ll talk about problems in the system that we can work toward improving to help move along discovery of new therapies at a swifter pace in the future.

All this will be a bit more dense than usual so it might not have as many lulz as you’re used to seeing from me. To make up for that I give you this:

Perhaps 3 people will actually get that. But they’ll think it’s really funny. I hope. Back to SERIOUS BUSINESS tomorrow.

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A quick note here before I finally sit down to fill out my tax forms (whee…).

One of the more nebulous focuses of FwLN2 – specifically the Sunday feature – is the fusion of art and science. Two great tastes that taste great together. The mixing of science and religion is a gambit and science and politics should only have a one-way relationship: that is, science can inform politics but not the other way around. Art and science, by all means, should be best-o-friends, though. Artistic expression of science is a great way to illustrate just how awesome it is.

There’s a good word: “illustrate.” Illustration and I have a bit of a history. My grandmother painted. My mother was an art teacher for a long time. My sister is a studio artist by training. Meanwhile, the best I accomplished in terms of artistic endeavor was a couple abortive attempts at webcomics in the early 2000s and a series of editorial cartoons for my college newspaper. None were particularly good in terms of artistic skill, to say the least; it was mostly by the fact that I could write and compose a decent joke that I got by. Clearly, something on the Y-chromosome robs members of my family of being able to draw purdy pikshars. Which is why I respect the ability of people who can do just that, especially if they can do it in an engaging manner. And I really appreciate it when they can do it to describe just how awesome science can be.

So I present you with a challenge: draw more pictures. I’m looking for guest authors who are interested in using illustration as a means of conveying information. I want this to be part of the specific focus of conveying the importance of the fusion of art and science in this Sunday feature. As you well know, on Fridays my wife highlights paintings she’s made of representative fauna over the course of geologic time and, really, I look forward to each one every week (and not just because it gives me a day off). So if you want to draw or paint things you like that involves any aspect of science, I want to see it and I’ll put it up here if it’s acceptable.

So get to it! Feel free to comment here or email me at jon@funwithln2.com if you’re interested. I hope to be able to turn this into a regular thing in the coming weeks and months and you, dear reader, can help me accomplish that.

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I hate to pull a Fred Gallagher on y’all (did anyone even get that? I haven’t read it since, like, 2005), but:

After 70 consecutive posts I need a day off. See? I didn’t even have the time/motivation to remove the pencil lines*. We’ll be back with our regularly-scheduled posts tomorrow.

* That and, since it’s been nigh on 6 years since I’ve drawn cartoons, I don’t have a gum eraser anymore. Which also explains why the drawing sucks.

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I’m not including this post in the regular Sunday Specials! series because I don’t think it constitutes any useful, self-contained information, but I’ve got a few more general updates to make so I thought I’d get them all out now.

• I’ve integrated the RSS feed into Feedburner with the plan of getting more delicious stats with which to make more silly graphs in the future. This seems to have caused a small hiccup in the RSS feed the day I did it but I haven’t noticed any further issues. If you’re an RSS subscriber and you have noticed problems, though, please let me know and I’ll see if I can address them.

• I also created a Facebook group for FwLN2 today in case you’re into that sort of thing. You should totally join it.

• Finally, my wife told me today that the main index.php page appears to be slow in loading lately. I’ve been having some minor issues with my host (Dreamhost, and yes, I know some folks are very opinionated about them one way or another) and if this persists I might contact them to see what the deal is. Ultimately, though, I don’t see this stand-alone blog as the final form of FwLN2 and I hope that by the end of calendar 2010 it will be re-located to a more interactive and community-like environment such as Science Blogs. So I don’t think this will be a permanent issue, but, still, if you’re experiencing off-putting delays in load time, let me know so I have some more data on which to draw if I do need to request a server relocation.

And that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, folks.

EDIT (1002281247): I figured out what the problem was in the load time. For some reason the Reddit button I had that was perfectly good for 2 months suddenly decided to crap out. I removed it pending figuring out what the deal with that is.

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