Ants, proteins, yarn

I did indeed get out last night to see the Performance Lectures curated at Harbourfront by Sally McKay. Amos Latteier talked about "Ant and Human Societies", and Susan Bustos talked about knitting proteins. Amos's talk touched on a lot of stuff related to my research interests & even to my current paper (selfish genes, evolution of cognition, self-organizing systems), and occasionally seemed to gesture towards conclusions I wouldn't agree with, but it was well-done and full of interesting information: his enthusiasm for ants is contagious. Susan's use of knitting as both metaphor for protein synthesis and process for constructing actual 3-D tactile models of protein molecules was enlightening to me, especially the bit where she explained that the knitting pattern is like the mRNA and the knitter is the ribosome. Oh, Susan's the ribosome! OK I get it! I think what Susan and Amos are doing is tremendously interesting, in fact I've actually kicked around the notion of curating art-meets-science lectures myself before, though I've never actually done anything about it. Maybe once I finally dig my way out from under this mountain of overdue papers.

Another great thing about the evening: I finally got to meet Maria and Eva!



I "know" both of them via their blogs and the comments section on Blamblog (note Eva's hand gestures: a long-standing Blamblog tradition), but had never met them face to face. During the Q&A Maria stood up & gave Susan a technical suggestion for improving the structural integrity of her yarn-based proteins, and I thought, "Hey, it's Naked KnitGirl!" Then after the Q&A Eva came over to me, and we had a funny "...Squiddity?" "...Easternblot?" moment. Nice meeting you both!