tchemgrrl
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Below are the 13 most recent journal entries recorded in the "tchemgrrl" journal:
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12:01 pm
[Link] | There's a community called ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) livelongnmarry that is doing a fandom-themed auction which is raising money for the fight against the California initiative to invalidate the same-sex marriages which have already taken place in that state.
Someone who I read occasionally for interesting anime commentary offered to critique a manuscript for legal plausibility, and I thought, "Hey, I can do that! What a cool idea!" A good opportunity to use my education outside of work, and a chance to do some good with the skills I have.
I'm offering a critique of fiction or a detailed answer to a scientific question from a nanotechnologist's perspective.
There are also a million other cool things there; offers of doing fanfic or fanart based on your particular intrests, jewelry, food, etc, etc.
There's a lot of nerds interested in marriage equality, apparently.
Go check it out, and bid if you see something you like. I'm going to spend a bunch more time over there this evening and seek out some goodies.
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03:26 pm
[Link] |
Knitting it up when I'm going down?
The title of this entry is singing to me to the tune of "Love in an Elevator", and is earworming me every time I scroll past it.
Go away, Aerosmith! Dangit.
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08:49 pm
[Link] |
Actual Catholic Buffalo Radio Station
Station of the Cross.
I laughed and laughed.
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05:46 pm
[Link] |
That's Dr. ChemGrrl to you.
All done! It went really well.
I think the fact that the first thing I wanted to do was get online and update everyone says something about me.
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10:40 am
[Link] |
Stem Cells
This is most of an email I just sent to my mom:
"It's not often that you hear about research before it's even come out in a journal and think to yourself "that work is going to win the Nobel Prize"
This is one of those times.
Basically what it means is that, let's say you have leukemia and need a bone marrow transplant. Rather than trying to find a suitable donor, the doctor could scrape up a bit of your skin, grow that in a lab dish, turn those back into stem cells (which can theoretically turn into anything), and turn THOSE into the cells in your bone marrow that make white blood cells etc. They can do all of those steps now.
Actually using that as a treatment is still probably a little ways off, though. They're turning cells back into stem cells by messing with their genes, and when you do that you need to make sure that you've turned the appropriate genes back to "off" before you stick them in people, or else you end up with cells replicating out of control aka cancer. But it's a huge, huge thing. Honestly, I didn't think that would be something happening *anytime* soon, maybe within my lifetime, but not less than 10 years after being able to isolate stem cells in the first place, and when we still haven't figured out tons of stuff about them.
I can't wait to read the paper when it comes out, and I'm really dorkily proud of being here at the UW during this point in its history."
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One thing I am surprised about is that I hadn't heard any whiff of this--I'm have multiple one-degrees-of-separation with the Thomson group, and although I'm not involved with any specific collaboration I'm surprised I hadn't heard what they were up to. I'm impressed that they kept it under wraps so well. This is so big.
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09:24 pm
[Link] |
RSS
Anyone on here who uses Bloglines or some other syndecation thing, I think I've finally got a very basic, functional RSS-thing for going for Nanopant Dance. If you paste the URL of this link into your thingy, it *should* work. If you have a paid account you can do a syndecation thing on LJ, but I don't, so that's that.
If you try it and have some comments, definitely let me know--I did plug this into Bloglines just to make sure it works, but I'm not a regular user so I'm not sure how what I have compares to a "normal" setup.
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07:04 pm
[Link] | (This is pretty much verbatim from an entry at my regular blog, but I want to share and I know y'all don't go over there so much.)
( Cut for fiber dorkiness )
ETA: I'm trying to remember exactly, I think there were about 30 submissions. 6 or 7 singles, about 15 wheelspun multi-plies, 5 or 6 spindle-spun multi-plies, one kid's, a few novelties.
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03:42 pm
[Link] |
Sweater spinning, lace spinning
Below the cut: some show-and-tell yarns--laceweight merino, laceweight silk, sportweight Shetland. A little lace swatch. Some fiber pictures. A lot of talking.
( Read more... )
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01:01 pm
[Link] | Below the cut: A hat knit from handspun, the first project where I put some thought into the yarn design before spinning. Some talk about the spinning and yarn-design process.
( Read more... )
Tags: spinning
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02:19 pm
[Link] |
A year of craftiness
(again, because Angelfire isn't working I'm posting stuff here, while I'm in a talkative mood.)
A year of knitting:
7 hats
3 scarves/shawls
5 pairs of socks
1 pair of gloves
4 sweaters (total--includes several partial sweaters added up as partials)
1 vest
2 baby blankets
3 headbands
1 brain slug
1 doily
A few oddments, I'm sure--projects short enough that I forgot to take pictures or think of them.
A year of spinning:
About 1350 finished, usable yards, all told.
For some reason I was feeling unproductive this year, but looking at this stuff, I have no idea why. Cripes I did a lot.
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I was going to try to list my favorite, or least favorite, or use other superlatives for some of these projects, but looking through them I'm mostly just pleased with everything. 18 out of 28 knitting projects were ones in which I made major modifications to a pattern, made something up entirely, or otherwise figured out something really interesting. The remainder were well-executed, and I don't love any of them any less.
The spinning got consistently better and more interesting. I'm thinking a lot about yarn design right now, in the same way I think about knitting design--how can I make something which is beautiful, well-made, and subtle, while at the same time clearly not being storebought? Not every project made that standard this year, but the ones that did are so far and away better than those that didn't that it seems like a good goal to have.
I already mentioned my only resolution for the new year, which isn't craft related, but I do want to keep doing interesting things. I don't expect to get much done in the next year because I'll be writing a thesis, graduating, moving, starting a new job, looking at houses, and doing the million annoying little things that accompany each of those Big Life Things. I expect I'll do a lot of spinning, a lot of knitting with my handspun, a small amount of buying new stuff. I hope it will stay interesting.
Tags: spinning
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12:56 pm
[Link] |
Spinning tweedy yarns (long and detailed, but with pictures)
So, in thinking about all the different things I could do with the Shetland wool I recently bought for a sweater, one thing I thought of was that I have an ounce of gray Shetland which could work well with what I have to make a tweed yarn, with little gray blips mixed into the light brown.
My understanding of tweed yarns is that they're usually made by adding neps to fiber in the processing stage All this fiber is already nicely prepped, plus I don't have access to a drum carder, plus I don't really enjoy fiber prep anyhow, so I got to thinking of how I could get the same color-blip effect by playing with what I had.
I came up with several things that could work. All this fiber is top.
( techniques, yarn, and swatching under the cut )
Tags: spinning
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02:47 pm
[Link] | In case you poked over here because I friended you:
Until really recently I've only used this journal for communities, but there have been more and more personal LJs that I regularly look at. I realized it makes sense for me to have all these people I check in on regularly to be on my friends page too.
Friending etiquette seems to be all over the board, so I thought I'd clarify my thoughts:
-The vast majority of my writing goes here. I have several friends-only entries but most of them are rough drafts of entries to knitting.
-I won't feel left out if I'm not friended back. The reason I added you is because your public entries are interesting to me, and I'm putting a friends list together because the bookmark list was getting unwieldy. Since I don't write anything here, it wouldn't be real reciprocal anyways.
-Er, I think that's it. If for some reason you're not comfortable with me having your public entries on my friends list, let me know and I'll take you off.
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11:10 am
[Link] | Hi! I thought I'd made one of these for commenting purposes previously, but apparently not. I live at http://www.johnnysstew.com, if'n you're interested.
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