tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

they wear camo…” - Paul Arden.

I think that the guys over at sexyloops.com really are onto something. Together they are uniting the underground of fly-fishing and breaking down the old-school, with new-school technical. This reminds me of the similar evolution of skateboarding. In the early 90s, method grabs and handplants turned into kickflips and tailslides, then guys started doing 360 flips to blunt slides along tables bridging gaps between buildings, and now they’re jumping out of helicopters into halfpipes! In the same way, fly-fishing is evolving; from the staid old ways of The Complete Angler fishing with waistcoats, bamboo rods and lines made from animal guts, to the evolution of graphite rods bearing weight forward synthetic lines, and anglers with polypropolene thermals and chestpacks. But, sexyloops and the underground anglers associated with it are going beyond even this. They’re into highly technical casting moves, heavily weighted nymphs fished upstream, eating chilli and stealth (lots of).

I’ll be evolving this week too; next monday and tuesday I begin tutoring for the semester. Tutoring genetics to be exact. It’s a long time since I’ve done this stuff, so I’m going to need to seriously get some new school going or I’ll be in the shit. What follows are the aims of the tutorial, as spelled out in the lab manual… *eek*

- Define DNA, RNA, purine, pyrimidine, and principles of base pairing, replication, transcription, translation, codon, anticodon, and peptide bonds.
- Identify the components of deoxyribonucleotides and ribonucleotides.
- Distinguish between DNA and RNA according to their structures and function.
- Describe DNA replication, transcription, and translation.
- Give the base sequence when presented with the complementary strand.
- Identify a codon and anticodon on RNA molecules and describe the location and function of each.
- Give the base sequence of an anticodon when presented with a codon and vice verse

Karin (a molecular biology PhD) was at our place for dinner last night and noticed the manual sitting on the kitchen bench. “What’s this doing here?”, she asked in a stunned sort of way, with her mouth half agape. “Um, I’m tutoring it next week”. “Okay…” she says. I could hear her thinking, “What the hell is he tutoring it for, he’s got no idea”. And she’s right. Luckily I have Roderigo’s copy of Molecular Biology, the textbook, for support. I think I may have to put in a few hours of light reading over the next few days to get up to speed with the wonderful world of pyrimidine. I did do this at uni, but ‘doing’ it at uni, and teaching it are two different things.

What’s more, Kirsten (the lecturer for the course) tells me it’s “kindergarten stuff”. Which means all I’m going to be saying to the students is, “It’s not a tumor”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.