J. Michael Andresen

Over the weekend, Katie and I installed a Closet Organizer from IKEA. The steps: 1. Katie planned the scheme to provide better use of the closet space. 2. Katie and Michael traveled to IKEA to find furniture to fit the plan. 3. Michael and his brother, Jeremiah, returned to IKEA with a truck and a trailer to pick up the furniture. 4. Michael and Jeremiah assembled the behemoth organizer this past Sunday. Many insults were hurled back and forth during installation regarding who had a better claim on the appellation of Master Closet Assembler, a lofty title that implies a deft and gentle touch combined with a dizzying spatial intellect. It does not imply any reading ability, however, as the IKEA assembly directions are designed with the functionally illiterate in mind: Jeremiah summed up the last line: "When you are sad and depressed, call IKEA and they will cheer you up!" Sometimes (as in the first line above) two men are pictured. But IKEA is very liberal, and in one section ...

I was working at my lab bench last night and thought it was interesting how many alcohols I use regularly. The alcohols are all small (4 carbons or less), but each plays its own unique role. The 50% methanol and 5% methanol are used for fixing protein gels. The 1-butanol is used to even out the top of (and remove bubbles from) hand-poured acrylamide gels. It gets added in small amounts directly to the top of the gel. I have taped a small transfer pipet to the side to facilitate this. The isopropanol is used to precipitate DNA. A 40% solution of isopropanol added to a mix of salt and DNA will bring the DNA out of solution (but leave the salt in solution, thus purifying DNA away from the salt). The 70% ethanol is used to wash the precipitated DNA in order to remove the isopropanol. This is done because ethanol evaporates faster than isopropanol, allowing a quicker purification of the DNA. The 70% ethanol is also used to disinfect external surfaces of possible bacterial contamination. The...

One of my father's affectionate nicknames for my siblings and me was "no-necked monsters." I was reading in bed the other night, when Katie walked by me and burst out laughing. Katie got me an appropriately named husband pillow for my comfort while reading in bed (though to this day, I don't understand why it needed to be pink ). When I read in bed, I start sitting up straight, but eventually I slide down. During the sliding process, though, my shirt stays put, turning me once again into a no-necked monster.

I am a bit of a Scrabble nut , so it pleases me to know that the Obamas play Scrabble. This story was broken two years ago, in a list of things you didn't know about Barack Obama: 8. He loves playing Scrabble. Apparently Barack's family is quite intense into the Scrabble, according to Michelle Obama : Robin Roberts: Is there any kind of Obama family vacation traditions or-- Michelle Obama: There can be mean games of Scrabble. He and his sister Maya, oh, they are deadly. In fact, sometimes we all just walk away and let them, you know, compete into the night. Sounds like a holiday vacation at an Andresen residence, with Katie occasionally walking away from the madness! I happened across a recent political cartoon with Scrabble in it: The artist did enough research, at least, to know that the Scrabble board is 15 by 15 and starts in the center square (the E in economy ). But would it be so hard to spend the $10 and get a real Scrabble set? It would then become clear that a sta...

The Miss America pageant was held on Saturday. The winner was Miss Indiana , Katie Stam (above). Her talent was singing, and she did a rendition of Via Dolorosa , a song that was completely foreign to me. Here is a singer called Sandi Patty singing the tune. That means that the answer to Question 2 of the 2009 Prognostication Quiz is A (Vocal). A whopping 20 people predicted this: Stephanie, Jan, Pete C., Tina, Ted, Jeremiah, Kevin, Peter M., Heather, Katie, Liz, Ellen, Matthew, Ben, Sarah, Ana, Jeff B., Missy, Beth, and Ekrem. They all get one point. Six of these 20 also got the correct answer on the first question and are now 2-for-2! Congratulations to overall leaders Stephanie, Tina, Ted, Jeremiah, Peter M., and Heather! It makes sense that most people would pick A (Vocal) the most often, as it had the highest probability of winning out, with 18 contestants choosing that as their talent. That assumes that all of the entrants have about an equal probability of winning, though. S...

I was reading the headlines earlier this week and came across this story : Here are 20 jobs we found that let you work less and earn more. These jobs require less than 40 hours of labor in a work week, but exceed the median annual income level in pay: 1. Aircraft pilots, copilots and flight engineers Hours/week: 23.5 Hours/year: 1,215 Annual earnings: $119,658 2. Biological scientist Hours/week: 38.4 Hours/year: 1,992 Annual earnings: $65,329 This was funny because the top two jobs listed are the ones chosen by my father (1) and myself (2). Something is not quite right about the statistics, though. I think academic biologists work an average of 50 hours a week, and that goes up for those trying to get tenure. I suppose some people treat tenure like a sinecure once they achieve it, but that's rare in my experience. And who knows what those slacker biologists in the biotech industry are up to. As for pilots, they count their hours in a funny way. When my Dad was working for Northwest...

This week I have been making a figure for a paper (due next week) and wanted to get ideas how to sketch the endoplasmic reticulum in a dendrite. I therefore did a Google Images search for "ER dendrite." Because "dendrite" is such a science word, I didn't figure I would get many non-scientific images. I was correct, and a very helpful image appeared on the first line of the first page. That helped in my construction of this draft of my figure. (The ER is contiguous with the upper right-hand corner, sitting in the larger dendrite): I wanted to be complete, though, so I searched through the next several pages, most of which were just pictures of dendrites without any endoplasmic reticulum. Then to my horror, on page five of the search results, I found this mixed in with all the images of neurons: Why, oh, why? It turns out the indicated page is an archived week's worth of posts from October of 2005 on a blog called BoingBoing . One post is titled "Dean on...

One of Katie's favorite stories to tell is how she once had a correspondence with a semi-famous comedian. It was when Katie was just getting back into the dating scene after her divorce that she and a girlfriend (Beth) went to see the comedian Dwight Slade . Dwight was in the middle of a divorce and made a number of raw and emotional jokes about his anger. Egged on by Beth, Katie went up to Dwight after the show and gave him her business card, saying she thought that he "really needed a lawyer"! She followed that up by buying his CDs and then sending him an email, redacted by Katie before she gave it to me (click on the image to enlarge): The joke here is that Lorne is the name of the imaginary stalker who was the apparent author of Dwight's very funny web page back then. (His web page is more straightforward now.) Here are the attachments that Katie included: (Links to the full coloring book in html or pdf .) Much to her delight, Dwight wrote back a very nice respon...

When I was a young tyke, I would write notes to my mother. What made me a little odd for your typical grade-schooler is that I often wrote them in code of one sort or another. Included in this correspondence (and stored for posterity by my mother) was a series of rebus puzzles, which turn out actually to be a combination of rebus and homophone and occasional other literary tricks. I present the first in the rebus series in honor of my mother's birthday, which was yesterday. (My siblings and Katie and I took her out to IHOP for dinner, which my mother chose because she once worked at IHOP as a waitress and wanted to reminisce. We didn't run into any of the people Mom worked with 45 years ago.) Can you figure out my birthday message below? (Click for a larger image.) Favorite part #1: That I drew a picture of a cat with a huge X through it to depict our dead pet Siamese cat, Happy. Favorite part #2: That my map of Asia, while including a disclaimer that it is not to scale, has tw...

I played trombone starting in 5th grade and going through college. At the end of college, I started getting into percussion, as well. I played timpani for a Gilbert and Sullivan show and also played some with the MIT symphony , which gave its concerts in Kresge Auditorium . The pinnacle of my percussion career came when the percussion section got mentioned specifically in a music review in the Boston Globe. The MIT symphony doesn't always get reviewed in the Globe, but we had a semi-famous soloist (also the wife of an MIT faculty member) playing with us, so we had a reviewer for this one show: The piece in question was Aaron Copland's "Billy the Kid Suite." At one point, a gun fight takes place in the music: a duet between the bass drum (me) and timpani (my pal Kip). During rehearsals, we kept trying to outdo the other. The original music calls for normal volume, and that's how we started, with me using the soft felt mallet usually used for the bass drum. I decid...

The press release from Freedom House has come out. Sadly, freedom retreated in 2008. There were 90 "free" countries in last year's report, but that dipped to 89 in this year's report. That means the answer to Question 1 of the 2009 Prognostication Quiz is B. What was the country that declined? It was Senegal , on the west coast of Africa. Senegal's democracy has had two smooth transfers of power in recent history, allowing it to move from "partly free" up to "free" in the 2003 report. President Abdoulaye Wade (pictured above) was reelected in 2007, but came under some criticism last year with a series of scandals (corruption in his cabinet, nepotism on behalf of his son, and needlessly divisive confrontations with the opposition). That, presumably, plunged Senegal from "free" back to "partly free." Twelve people picked B. Here they are, listed in order of predicted score for the remainder of the quiz: 1. Leanne 2. Ted 3....

Entrant Statistics After a dedicated media blitz including much browbeating, I managed to secure a field of 43 entrants for this year's quiz, up from 27 last year. I recruited two aunts, an uncle, and a cousin along with my immediate family. Grant also helped out to to form the second-largest family contingent, recruiting his two parents. Ekrem helped out by convincing his wife to join this year, followed by his co-worker, sister-in-law, and friend of sister-in-law. Welcome to all! Of the 43 entrants: 26 are new and 17 have returned from the 2008 quiz. (The latter group will be competing for grand champion 2008-2009.) 10 are from Katie's sphere of influence, and 33 are from my sphere. (Who will have the best average score?) 21 are from Minnesota, and 22 are from elsewhere in the US. Three people made patterns from their answers: Best scream: AAAAAAAAAAAAAA Tiebreak: A -Ekrem Best choke: CCCCCCCCCCCCCC Tiebreak: C -Greg (In hexadecimal, A=10 and C=12.) Tina wrote a little poem: ...

Before you read the rest of the post, read the title and try to figure out what I'm talking about. Quilts and Jammies? Quinces and Jams? Queens and Jesters? Quetzals and Jackalopes? No, in fact, it was the letter Q and the letter J that were on sale. Once proud recurring sponsors of Sesame Street , these two letters have been reduced to the clearance shelves at Target: What is cruelest of all is that the other letters are not also on sale. J and Q have been singled out for persecution: I guess that Target has an algorithm that puts things on sale when they don't sell quickly enough, but how much sense does it make to apply that algorithm to individual decorative letters? Will this make Quentin or Jane more likely to adorn the walls with their names? Or worse, will it induce Kate or George to recast themselves as Qate and Jeorge in order to avail themselves of the bargain?

The Dow did not miraculously rally to get back over 12,000, meaning that the answer to question 12 is A. Katie was the only one to predict the market's precipitous decline, and yet failed to short any stocks. She gets to claim to be wiser than the rest of the quiz entrants, but she is not any richer because of it. CONGRATULATIONS to Matthew B. for his stunning performance in the 2008 quiz . He wins a deluxe gift bag for his efforts as well as a discounted entry into the (admittedly free) 2009 Prognostication Quiz . (Just 5 more days left to enter! Get those answers in now! We have already matched last year's participation level of 27 entrants. Be the felicitous 28th!) Special kudos go to the top four finishers, who all had a final score of five: Matthew B., Sandy, Pete, and Eric. It came down to the tiebreaker to crown Matthew B. as our victor. Thanks to all the entrants. It has been a lot of fun for me, even though I ended up dead last. (How embarrassing!) Here are the final ...