I have been behind in blogging about the tank, but here are some more photos.

These duncans were an interesting piece from Aquarium Depot. At first I didn't even realize it was a duncan since it had a bunch of small heads and not a single large head like my first one. But after a few days, they opened up, and now the heads expand almost an inch beyond the base and look quite healthy.

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It’s been a while since I updated about my saltwater aquarium since I have been focusing on wrapping up some personal projects as soon as possible. For now, here are a few photos and videos of strange creatures, including a pretty cool albeit not terribly high quality video of a spaghetti worm (Eupolymnia crasscornis) that climbed the glass and possibly tried to attack or at least irritated a nassarius snail, who then fought back and jumped to the ground onto a starfish.

I found this spaghetti worm climbing the glass one night after dark.

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After initially thinking it was a crab due to some possibly erroneous information on a vendor’s website, I realized I found my first sea spider. He measures about a centimeter. Despite my revisionist inclination to nurture what others consider harmful pests, I quarantined him and will probably keep it that way.

I found a pycnogonid, or sea spider, in a batch of small corals and algae. It apparently survived the wash stage, unless it caught a ride inside a tube worm. I'm not sure what I will do with him, as he might prey on corals.

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Last week while mesmerized by my tank’s visible plankton, I spotted something that looked and moved like a jellyfish. It was probably half a millimeter, and quickly disappeared. Today I found another one, or possibly the same one, but larger. I captured it with a pipette and photographed it under a microscope. It measured about 1.0 mm.

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I received a crab Aquarium Depot markets as a “lavender sponge crab,” and the bag contained hundreds of what I initially thought were some sort of pods, but later identified as baby crabs in the initial stage, zoea. I’m not sure they survived my tank, but after a few days the crab is apparently again carrying tons of eggs.

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As explained in the first entry, I bought a microscope mostly so I could look for tardigrades, aka water bears, and hopefully make lovely videos of them. Within hours of getting my scope set up, I managed to find some!

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As an early birthday present to myself, I bought a microscope despite many other priorities. I’ve spent a few days using it over the past two weeks, and while I have mixed feelings, I don’t regret the purchase.

While waiting for the microscope to be delivered, I searched for moss in the park that overlooks my house from above.

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In reading the introduction to the Deep Learning book by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, I came across the concept “distributed representation.” This idea struck me as parallel to the depiction of genetics in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Figure 2 from: Asgari E, Mofrad MRK (2015) ContinuousDistributed Representation of Biological Sequencesfor Deep Proteomics and Genomics. PLoS ONE 10 (11): e0141287.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141287" class="mt-image-none" height="602

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More and more I’ve been thinking about life on this planet. In a strange way, it started with reading “The Untethered Soul” by Michael A. Singer. The book has done wonders to catalyze improving my outlook and thinking, which is a story for another time, but it also made me think about thinking and about what makes us us. In the deepest sense, we are not our bodies, nor are we our thoughts or emotions. Those things all somehow exist in front of us, and we can get involved with them or modulate them or ignore them as we please.

Domingo took this photo one time we went to explore Golden Gate Park. Seeing him up close made me miss my degus!

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A month ago I started reading the book “Biocode: the new age of genomics” Yizhen left with me after heading back to Chicago. I posted some comments about the personal genomics section, but then I got super busy with work. (That will not be happening again with that particular job; more on that in a future post.)

Organizational struggles

Last week I made time to finish the book. First I had to settle on a note taking system, since I knew I would want to remember to some of the people and places and projects mentioned. Lately I’ve been taking notes on paper, especially when listening to audiobooks on planes and places I don’t want to deal with my computer. But clearly I need a digital solution.

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I started reading a book Yizhen left on my shelf after he headed back to Chicago to begin his second year at Biocode: The New Age of Genomics, by Dawn Field and Neil Davies, is kind of an overview of the state of biotechnology. I apologize in advance to anyone reading this; I just wanted to make a quick comment about the emotional distress warnings for a Stanford class, but this turned into another train of thought whose course was less direct than anticipated and whose destination was so vague the conductor isn’t even sure if we are there yet.

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This evening I explained what I believe about evolution, how there are no such things as discrete species (by the same logic, there are no such things as races), but rather those are arbitrary labels for a specific populations of living things who can interbreed at a specific time. When …

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This week involved not much more than working 56 hours (unusual), though it was at least in the company of my dog, Vera, since her new owner was out of town.

Work has been pretty crazy lately, as two of my large clients are undergoing migrations and redesigns. One of those launched this week, which went pretty smoothly, but just took a lot of time I didn’t have. The other has a lot of work left, but I hopefully finished most of my role and provided enough documentation for others on my team to fill in the gaps. Time will tell, there. As for me, I supposedly have off two days next week in exchange for the overtime this week, and I am already planning to take off the entire following week to get caught up on personal stuff.

I almost forgot to get a new Adderall prescription this week. I am prescribed one 25mg capsule daily, but because amphetamines are Schedule II drugs, it is somewhat inconvenient to actually obtain what I am prescribed. For most drugs, I can get 90 day prescriptions automatically filled by the mail order pharmacy my insurance uses, OptumRx. The two drugs I take, however, aren’t so easy. (Truvada as PrEP is a story for another time.)

Amphetamine and methylphenidate

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