Friday Photo Shootout

Friday already? I've been so busy this week I never even posted last weekend's trip to Neussargues. I'll try to get to that this evening, before I leave on yet another weekend of adventure (to Paris, yeah like we haven't seen that before. But if the weather cooperates I hope to do a special series of something quite cool, so do stop by on Tuesday or Wednesday for that).

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Well, between the weather and work and being sick part of the week, it's been difficult to find much in my town that is my favorite color: RED. The flowers aren't out yet, aside from a few snowdrops and daffodils, and they aren't red.

One red thing in my town is this rug I bought in Marrakech a couple of years ago. (Here decorated with my cat Sienne.) It's very thick and soft, and I really like that it's not one solid red, but changes shades randomly as the rugmaker changed dye-lots of yarn.

Sienne is playing with her favorite thing: The Shoelaces.

Not impressed with the offer of shoelaces, Bandersnatch just wanted us to finish our little photoshoot and go away.

For other Shootouts, visit here!

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Thursday Zebra

what happens when you look really really close at your zebra

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Stellabus

This week's Poetry Bus assignment is to riff off the lines:

She was wearing Stella McCartney

I was drinking Stella Artois

Alrightthen.

Stella

Oof.

A long, exhausting week

a long, exhausting day

rather than go straight home to dinnermaking and the evening news

a glass of beer and a vague unthinking pause at the corner bar seems just the thing.

(maybe Prince Charming will be lifting a golden brew of his own)

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These french small town bars

they're alright now they've banned smoking and you can breathe

they're good for an aperitif, a kir, a cloudy Ricard, a glass of mysterious porto

but they suck for beer.

All lagers, thin as piss

not an ale or a stout in sight.

no body, no bite, it's summertime beer, this.

a fermented species of iced tea, or soda,

not anything to hold you when the cutting wind is full of ice.

but it'll do, has to.

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The people here are working-class

they're meeting the guys before trundling home to their wives and kids and bills.

one or two have been here all day,

nothing better to do than keep the barkeep company.

And then she comes in.

not exactly with a saunter, but a particular walk

like she's mistaking Clermont-Ferrand for Paris, le quartier le plus chic.

What on earth is she wearing

All the guys turn and look,

like they've never seen such a creature before.

She looks back at their crumpled jackets and worn out shoes,

at their working hands and rough haircuts,

like she's never seen such creatures before either.

Then she pulls out her phone

a tiny, bejewelled marvel,

and calls a taxi, to whisk her away from this strange planet she has landed on by accident.

Somebody must have made a mistake.

We turn back to our evening beers, and the racing results, and the lottery ticket dispenser,

not much wondering what we're doing here ourselves.

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Friday Photo Shoot Out: Wrought Iron

This week's FSO theme is Wrought Iron, chosen by Jarie-Lyn. I was meaning to get out and take some nice photos of the iron balconies and gates that decorate so many of the older buildings around town, but the bitter cold (a relative term, but for me it was just too cold) meant I just stayed in.
From the archives, we have a nice door on an apartment building in Clermont, currently decorated with Flat Hannah.

From my junkyard series there's this pile of springs
and a pile of bolts.

And lastly there are a couple of gates from a park in Paris, where my brother and I were tracking down a legendary Master lock left there decades ago. Story here! We're pretty sure this is the right one,

though there are plenty of abandoned locks on gates and fences all over the country. When they repaint, they go around the lock instead of removing it.
That's all for this time. For other Shootouts, click here!

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Dancing faster than the music

So we did two new sequencing experiments, and loaded them together on our new high-throughput machine. Part A needs software A, and part B needs software B, but running software A will analyse both A and B (it's just that the A-B mix is not what you want and you ignore it), and vice versa. Both software versions will tell you how much data there is, though, for either type of data.

So software A told us the whole thing was a disaster. Don't bother to look at the details; there's just not enough data there to conclude anything. Naturally we were very unhappy about that, and were preparing to call up the supplier and complain - again - or at least get a reason why -again -, though they usually have no idea why.

In turning things every which way before calling, we decided to run software B to see if the B data was really as bad as all that. And it wasn't. But lo and behold, the A data looked pretty good too. Since the two experiments are really quite similar, it seemed reasonable to us that software B would be perfectly capable of analyzing data A, in spite of the supplier swearing up and down it couldn't.

And really, both sets of data are perfectly fine.

It's just the software A decided that it didn't like something or other about it, and tossed 80 % of our perfectly good sequence in the trash. I really wish we could get it to stop doing that. New technology is great. But it can take a while for data processing tools to catch up, and they haven't yet.