Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • Down with the Sickness

    Down with the Sickness

    Because any writing vaguely resembling a movie review needs some sort of pseudo-wit based around a pun. I saw Contagion over the weekend. It’s not often I make it to the theater for a movie (last time was Midnight in Paris, before that I think it was Black Swan), so I try to do my due diligence and make…

  • Joyriding

    Rachel’s friend Jenni was driving a Mercedes CLX 430 and offered to let her take it out for a spin. She disappeared “around the block,” only to return about fifteen minutes later. I guess she realized she was getting a little far away from the apartment when she saw the highway signs. I got a…

  • Homemade Pizza

    I finally got tired of waiting for my AC to get fixed and started turning computers back on. About…goodness, about a month ago, we tried our hand at making pizza from scratch. The last time we did was back in Maryland with our friend Jeff Chiu, whom we greatly miss. This time we used Angie’s…

  • Progress

    There’s a hole in our house where the new AC is going to be. Visible progress my friends, I will dare to hope that we will be able to sit in our living room without pouring sweat within the week.

  • There Is Never a Case Where Sharing Equals Stealing

    Most, if not all IP maximalists and a great many misinformed journalists equate the sharing of digital information with the theft of physical objects. This misuse of language has been debunked may times over, but in a recent article, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones remixed the argument in favor. I think he’s still making a…

  • Slow Cooking

    The past several weeks have been some of the hottest of the year, with temperatures frequently going over 100 °F. It’s during these times of extreme use that home climate control systems tend to simply give up, a fate that befell our air conditioning unit one week ago today.  Even the nights are in the…

  • Convict Lake

    It took me way too long to process the collected pictures from our camping trip to Convict Lake, but here are some of the highlights (taken by all of us across several cameras). I’ve kind of surprised myself with how much time I’ve been spending outdoors lately. It’s a good contrast to all the time…

  • Science at 100x

    Science at 100x

    Because you were so consumed with longing to know what I do in lab all day, here’s a picture of some immunofluorescence staining I’ve been working on. Blue is cholesterol (labeled with filipin), which has accumulated in these cells as a result of treatment with a special drug. Red and green are two proteins I’m…