Sea Urchin Ethics

So I'm playing with purple sea urchins this summer, which I'm pretty excited about although I probably won't go into sea urchin immunity right now. But sea urchins! Like many models of development like Drosophila or C. elegans, there are minimal ethics with regard to what one can do to them, unlike traditional immunology animal models like mice. At any rate, "ethics" are wooly in my opinion because the ultimate reason it seems for why chordates get special consideration is morphological similarity. Doubtlessly many people have had metaphysical discussions about "ethics" and their anthropocentric derivation, so I won't belabour the point. However, one of the ethical considerations when working with sea urchins is that one must promise not to eat them.

Yeah, I laughed too when I heard that, mainly because I was secretly thinking about it. In all likelihood, they'd be just as delicious as those found in culinary establishments because we get our sea urchins fresh from the Pacific (no one raises them because they're dead easy to harvest, with the added plus of removing kelp forest predation). However, the ones we get are pretty small (biggest are about two inches diameter not including the spikes), and when you take in account that only the gonads are edible, they're not much of a meal. Furthermore, the lab I'm working in works a lot with sea urchin larvae, the formation of which apparently depletes sea urchin gonads and results in their shrinking (sea urchins that spawn get to see the inside of a -20 degrees Celsius freezer unfortunately because no one knows how to make them spawn again and it's too easy to harvest fresh ones). And the best reason why I won't be eating sea urchins this summer is because they're actually pretty cute with their tube feet (one thing that I didn't know sea urchins had until recently).

Anyway, I have this neat blog post to thank for getting me interested in sea urchin immunity: http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2007/09/01/42/

ZOMG TTC STRIKE

While it doesn't affect me personally since I live on campus, a lot of students will be left in a lurch come Monday morning, with final exams and such. I've commuted during a TTC strike before, and the only viable way is taking a car by side streets, which isn't a viable option for many students.

:(

Test Run

As exams draw inexorably closer and the open question as to what I will do with my summer pushes me into finding worthless tasks to perform, I thought I might as well figure out how this blogging thing works. Embedding Youtube videos seems like an excellent way to figure out the space and aesthetics of this. So anyway, I've embedded an excellent judo match between Huizinga and Daffreville at the Super World Cup Paris-Bercy. Inexplicably, it has the acronym "TIVP", which has no relation to the English name or the French name (Tournoi de Paris Ile-de-France Paris-Bercy). Furthermore, my normally excellent Google scholarship has yielded no relevant answers to keywords like "TIVP", "judo", "acronyme", and "èspece de bêtise".

Damn frogs.

The stand-up is fairly good, but the amazing bit is Huizinga's turnover (4:29) that was fairly exotic and unexpected. One of the announcers initially speculated that Huizinga was going for ude-garami, or the kimura armlock as it is known to some, but the arm entanglement looked more like Huizinga was going for ashi-gatame (a sort of armlock performed with one's legs) or sankaku-jime (triangle strangle). Instead, Huizinga makes fools of everyone by working some mysterious magic that turns Daffreville over and gets him into a pin (gyaku-kesa-gatame) for the 25 seconds needed for the win. I like this match not only because it was a brilliant piece of groundwork, but also because I so rarely see pins win matches. I would chalk this up to Huizinga's experience, or what I term "old-man sneaky judo". As an interesting aside, Huizinga qualified for Beijing, for what will probably be his last Olympics at age 37.

Anyway, back to stuffing my head with more molecular biology. Sigh.

First Post!

:)