First thing my wife reminded me of when I mentioned the topic. I was a Taz, she was a Marvin the Martian. I wore rave pants and a fishnet shirt on a date.

I almost agreed, then I remembered that the late 90s-00s changed the perception of tattoos, piercings, and clothes. It seems mundane now.

I used to use it for recruiting. "We do all the cool science (not B&E) parts in House. Doctors do all the stuff he hates to do. We solve the puzzle."

I'm glad you're feeling better. You love to teach, and I look up to you for that.

We had Loony Tunes characters in street clothes airbrushed on shirts. Those were everywhere for a while. "No Fear," "Big Johnson," "Big Dawg."

And rave clothes were pretty ridiculous. Wide leg Caffeine pants with neon piping, fishnet shirt, and a pacifier.

Characterizing eugenics as silly and stupid is a part of advancing it. It lowers defenses until you start agreeing with things like "people should be licensed to have kids." Some of the smartest scientists of their times fell for it, and anyone can fall for it. That's why we teach about it.

Great! The best mnemonic is the one that works for you. Making one up can be even better.

Nomenclature mnemonic for remembering ates. Nick the camel ate a clam supper and crepes in Phoenix. The word in the mnemonic helps you to know number of oxygen atoms by looking at the number of consonants in the word. The number of vowels in the mnemonic word tells you the charge for the ion. For example: Nick has N for Nitrogen; 3 consonants for the subscript of oxygen, and 1 vowel for the charge as -1. N O subscript 3 is the formula.

Old mnemonic for the -ates. Helps my students when they're taking chemistry.

The second panel was pretty dense. Then all the units disappeared in the fourth panel.

A Rick and Morty meme. Rick is telling Morty and an alien "That's just eugenics with extra steps."

I haven't used the meme, but I'll say this sometimes while teaching. It's insidious.

In this case, "polarisation" refers to directionality. The transition from cartilage to mineralized bone occurs in a specific direction relative to nearby structures, even though the cell types would allow it to occur in both directions.

That basement membrane stain is crisp. And the mesangium in the EM is classic. May I use your pictures and description (with attribution) in our medical lab science/histology classes?

I've already come up with a protargol alternative using gelatin and expired silver nitrate. I wonder if I could modify this to make a neural stain. 🤔

My histology professor in college was a pathologist named Dr. Samples.

Freida Carson had a degree in home economics from a women's college in Texas. The skills she learned allowed her to revolutionize cancer diagnostics and literally write the book on laboratory techniques in cancer research and diagnosis. Every pathologist and oncologist alive owes something to her.

Fantastic silver basement membrane stain. It takes skill to do that reliably. That's a decent Congo Red too. The EM is crisp. Did they do en bloc staining, or is that all on the grid?

You can argue or shift blame. I've pulled people out the window of a halfway-submerged car. I've seen the bodies of people carried away, and the bodies of divers that died trying to retrieve them. We can afford prevention and response. Not doing so is a choice.

Proper forecasting and alerts save lives here. We have city-wide broadcast equipment for weather alerts. The climate is changing. It's going to get worse. As a country, we need a top of the line national weather service and disaster response. We don't anymore. People will die as a result.

I live in Central Texas, and have for a long time. First, flooding isn't unusual. The ground is clay. Rain doesn't soak in like it does in other places. We build for it. July flooding is unusual. Second, people do die in floods, mostly because they drive through floodwater. This is different. 1/2

It is insane. And it's where I live. If I know my mayor, she won't let this stand. I'm just like him. Germany. Ft. Lewis. My parents are citizens. Just like him. I'm a 15-year Army veteran, drill sergeant, and professor. My mother is Mexican. Deport me. It'll be fun to use all the legal insurance.

Cells in a microscope showing a colon polyp. A circle of light with a bumpy, rounded protrusion visible. The protrusion is a single finger-like polyp which has a very consistent appearance. Most of it is pink, but blue cells stand out. The blue cells are on the surface on occasion and extend downward in a zigzag pattern. Blue cells extend into the tissue forming pits. These pits produce mucin. The regularity of appearance and similarity to normal tissue mean that the image is not cancer.

"Benign" is a beautiful word to anyone that ever had a biopsy. It's a beautiful sight for us too. This stain was done by students learning to do special stains for pathology diagnosis.

I've been in that boat. Building a histology course on the fly. 6 years of teaching functional histology, and I'm still in that boat. I learn something new every time I teach it. If I do a good job, I get a few questions I have to look up. That means they're listening and engaging.

I do in fact have my own biopsy lab. However, I still can't diagnose prostate cancer because that requires 12 yrs of education to read the slides properly. I teach how to turn a biopsy into data. Pathologists read the data. The idea that one person can diagnose this without a whole hospital is 🤪

This kind of dumb can only be accomplished with "AI."

Good call. You caught the fleet of Stryker vehicles I kept hidden in my closet. Deleting my file when I was in the middle of conversation with the poor befuddled supply sergeant doesn't stink with the musk of incompetence either.

CIF is turning in all the equipment issued to you. They make you clean it and they inspect it.

That's like getting a phone call that you have to take a calculus test from 10th grade to keep your diploma. But you have your diploma already. And you took that calculus test.

I just had the most surreal experience. Veterans will understand, and I'll explain for non-veterans.

I just got a call saying my CIF turn-in was never completed 10 years ago, and I need to fix it. We all joked about it, but it actually happened. 1/3

You reminded me of a similar story from my lab.

I showed him the aqueous picric acid and Bouin solution, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

"We found some crystallized picric acid when I first started, and we had to ask the military to send EOD from the nearby base. I had to be sure."

When I took over as director of my lab, I put up disposal instructions over every sink. I asked the chem chair to review it just in case. He had a couple of recommendations, but said it looked good.

6 minutes later, he knocked on my door and asked "Did I see picric acid on the list? Can I see it?"

The point was so obvious, I have a profile picture of myself grilling while wearing cargo shorts, and I know nothing about that show was about Drake.

Public Enemy would have been more subtle.