Arlen Ward dot com

Every once in a while, an e-mail comes through that reminds me that I work in a strange place.

_________________________________________________________________________________
From: LAB MANAGER
Sent: Yesterday
To: EVERYONE THAT WORKS WITH TISSUE

Subject: Missing Liver

If anyone is missing a liver, it’s in the RF Ablation lab with Tony’s name on it.

As my google homepage was kind enough to point out, the lego brick turns 50 today.

The 50 year anniversary is for the little plastic brick, not the company. The company itself was founded 76 years ago as a wooden toy company.

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (“play well”).

LEGO has re-released one of their original sets, the Town Plan, in honor of the occasion.

One thing that has really amazed me about LEGO bricks (besides the whole best-toy-ever angle) is the level of control they have on the tolerances for each brick. They are made from ABS plastic, which has a shrinkage of around five thousandths of a millimeter for every millimeter of dimension of the part. According to LEGO, thier tolerance is one thousanth of a millimeter. Too small and the parts won’t come apart, too big and they won’t stick together. To get that across billions of bricks, and across 50 years of technology changes for tooling, and across all the hurdles of mold design and lifespan, that is pretty impressive.

Just in time to make the rest of us feel better about the cold temperatures around here, the National Science Foundation opened the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Just to make the single digit temperatures here feel like nothing, take a look at the webcam of the site, and note the current weather.

One of the benefits of a scientific career, assuming you are wildly sucessful, is the chance to name something after yourself. These eponyms are a staple of science, math, and engineering. Newton’s Laws of Motion, Occam’s Razor, the Lame’ Constants. The normal steps are:

1. Spend years working in an obscure area of science
2. Find some aspect that lends itself to a formula or something
3. Name it after yourself

Over at The Science Creative Quarterly, Samuel Arbesman suggests that you can reverse the process. Name something after yourself, then figure out what it means. He also provides a handy list of things you can use to create your eponym:

Law
Dictum
Razor
Principle
Rule
Scale
Effect
Score
Number
Test
Criterion
Paradox
Symbol
Shift
Index
Formula
Measure
Postulate
[any Greek letter]
Distance
Curve
Constant
Phenomenon

Samuel also puts his recommendation into action, and uses the article as an opportunity to introduce the Arbesman Limit, or the limit to the number of things that can be named after one person. He estimates the number to be around twenty or so, but aparently hasn’t run across all the things named after Carl Friedrich Gauss.

So I started the process. I give you the Ward Criterion, or maybe Ward’s Number. Ward’s Law sounds like something my grandfather would have come up with. In fact, I think he had one at one point. Something about how everything tastes good with enough whipped cream. Anyway, now I need a definition for the Ward Criterion (or Ward’s Number).

• The numerical limit to the times you can have pizza for dinner before your spouse disowns you?
• The number of pictures you have to take of a scene before there is a decent one?
• The criteria necessary for get an employer to pay for your education?
• Suggestions? Add them to the comments!

A tribute song to Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplfication for DNA samples.

I know it is an ad from Bio-Rad, but this is damn funny.

My favorite line:
“PCR- When you need to find out who you daddy is…”