Be the change

When you play chess, all your pieces have a clear purpose. Just like in life. You have to make sure you make the right move at the right time.
Fact of the Day:
On a recent afternoon, Orrin Hudson, a former Alabama state trooper, is teaching chess to 14 students in an after-school program. He uses the ancient game to instill a fundamental life lesson: They will win or lose because of choices they make -- in real life and on the chess board. Hudson, 41, figures he has taught chess to 15,000 kids in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Nevada and Washington state. He knows that what he's pushing won't save every child in the room. But he's hoping chess might rescue one -- the way it did him.
Be The Change:
Teach a child in your life how to play chess.

All the world's a lab ..... at first, the graduate student

Today I came across a wonderful letter written by an Uncle to willie a graduate student.He express his view “how should be a researcher”, I liked his modus operandi of dreaming & ignorance to order to come up with discoveries. A bit of imagination and dreaming are beginning of great journey if you have dedication.

Dear Willie
I was so pleased to hear from your mother that you have been accepted as a graduate student by Professor Julius at the University of Calpurnia. Although his group is quite modest - with only fifty people, I believe - you will find an interesting range of topics in molecular and cellular genetics. Of course, you will not be starting research for some time
as you have courses to complete; try to get through these as quickly as you can. The essence of scientific research is to get to discover new things and not to spend too much time learning about what has already been done. You will be told that it is good discipline to learn a subject properly and you will have to read fat books called The Molecular
Biology of Something or Other, but I have found that quite a lot of ignorance is useful in research, because once you think you know everything you won't attempt anything new. Your mentors will teach you how to do experimental research and they will insist that a logical argument is given for every step of the process, from formulating the experiment to interpreting the results. All of this is fine, but don't forget that you can also use your imagination and that a little dreaming is helpful as well.

Many years ago I invented what I call the OSPE experiment. I supposed that there was a mythical scientist working in the Oklahoma School of Poultry Engineering, who lacked all our knowledge and our powers of logical thought, but used his deficiency and ignorance to great effect by performing experiments that nobody else would think sensible and, in so doing, made major discoveries. Therefore, if you want to be a clever scientist you need to be the first to conduct such OSPE experiments, thereby pre-empting our OSPE friend and making sure that he does not receive the acclaim and make fools of the rest of us.
In my time, I have carried out several OSPE experiments, mostly in the dead of night. One of these was to plate out tobacco mosaic virus on Chlorella to see whether it would make plaques. The rationale (if it can be called that) is typically OSPEsque; tobacco mosaic virus grows on plants, plants are green, therefore the virus might grow on a green alga, which is, after all, a kind of plant. It did not. Come to think of it, none of my other OSPE experiments worked either. But the beauty is that if it works, you are famous for having a penetrating insight, and if it doesn't, you know that nobody else can be famous either. As it happens, my Chlorella OSPE experiment served me well some years later when I had to review a grant based on a weak claim that some growth of tobacco mosaic virus had occasionally been detected in Chlorella cultures - the proposer argued with OSPE clarity that the virus needed to grow in chloroplasts.


However, I ramble. Once you have finished your course work you will start on your own project. Alas, you may find it to be a small part of somebody else's research and there may even be several of you working on different aspects of the same problem. Your first experiment is likely to be a mess even if you have followed each step of the protocol
designed by your supervisor. Your gels will not run properly and your autoradiographs will be either totally blank or totally black; but don't worry too much, this has happened to everybody and acquiring experimental skills is part of the craft of research.

With practice, you will gain confidence because you will have learned to discriminate between the regularities of an experiment and the vagaries and contamination of the outside world. One of my students once came to me excitedly carrying a Petri dish covered with bright yellow colonies. When I told him to autoclave it immediately, he was most
upset and said that I was preventing him from making a discovery like Fleming's discovery of penicillin. I could bet him ten billion dollars that this was contamination and without interest simply because this happens all the time, whereas Fleming's experience is very rare, and I urged him to get back to his research and to try to repeat Watson and
Crick's discovery.

You will find that every experiment contains one point that does not accord with the rest. Do not become over impressed by this anomaly. It is usually not a new natural phenomenon. More probably, you either forgot to do something or used a dirty tube, that frequent intruder from the entropic universe. Above all, do not mention it to your supervisor as he might take off into orbit, seeing in it the glimmerings of future fame and making you an unwitting collaborator in this fantasy.

After a while you will find that nobody knows as much about the subject of your research as you do; you will have become the world's expert in it. Your professor will have too much to do to pay attention to such trivia as the work in his laboratory, and he will certainly have no time to keep up with the subject as a whole, only knowing what he hears at meetings or what other people tell him, most of the time over the telephone. You will learn most from the other students, many of whom will become friends for life. Students may be the lowest of the low in a laboratory, but I have to warn you that, sadly, this may be the only time in your career when you can enjoy research as an individual scientist.
Good luck
--uncle Syd

Growing Seeds in Silence

Sometimes you read a story that just takes root in your heart. This story I'm about to share with you has been growing in the heart of many people......

It is the story of Jude, a young deaf man with green thumbs and a big heart who recently opened a plant store in a community called The Silent Seed. It was first noticed by a person during her walk and a few days later a beautiful story was published in local news paper. It was titled "Growing Seeds in Silence; Deaf man opens Magnolia store dedicated to unusual plants."

Through my Daily Good mail,I came across this story so I sat down to read his story... and I too got profoundly moved by this young man's journey and how much he has to offer. It was also clear that Jude had touched Kristen Grieco, the staff writer at the Gloucester Daily Times who wrote up that lovely story further below. It's not often that the local media opens the heart of its readers so wide.

So, I invite you to read Jude's story below, and let it grow on you too. If you ever goes to Magnolia in Gloucester, Massachusetts, consider visiting The Silent Seed at 15 Lexington Avenue . You might leave with some unusual plants in your hands and magic seeds in your heart.

*****

By Kristen Grieco , Staff writer
Gloucester Daily Times

"Growing Seeds in Silence; Deaf man opens Magnolia store dedicated to unusual plants."

A visitor to The Silent Seed can open the door with a loud squeak and slam it behind them. A few feet away, hunched over his indoor flower bed, owner Jude Platteborze will never look up.

A light tap on his back, however, stirs Platteborze into action. He straightens up with a wide smile and extends his hand, nodding, leading the visitor into the store. He makes them feel welcome without uttering one word. He has to.

Platteborze, 31, is deaf and rarely speaks. Stashed nearby, among the plants of the indoor botanical garden is a notebook that Platteborze uses to communicate with customers. He's just as happy, though, if the customers prefer not to talk, choosing instead to relax inside his store and explore the plants he's cultivated over years of self-taught botany.

Platteborze, who communicated through sign language with his mother interpreting in spoken English for this interview, said that he plans to put his customers at ease when they walk through the door, despite the fact he can't speak with them conventionally. He has spent his life around hearing people and attended public school in Wayland.

When asked whether he'll need assistance running the store so that he can communicate with his hearing clients, Platteborze's response is telling: "I'm not sure what you mean."

Platteborze, 31, a Newburyport resident, searched as far as Nova Scotia for a place to bring his plants. A few months ago, he settled on a storefront on Lexington Avenue in Magnolia. The Silent Seed opened Saturday.

Over the past two and a half months, Platteborze has set up shop, planting an indoor botanical garden, lining the shelves with potted plants and painting the walls a soft lilac. The store was named after a poem hismother, Nancy Haverington, wrote about him when he was a baby and she realized he was deaf.

"Now this is my baby," Platteborze said of his store.

He nurtures almost all of the plants from seedling to their adult stage, and a large part of his business is selling the seeds he cultivates. Platteborze has traveled across eastern North America, from Nova Scotia down to Florida, collecting different plants and seeds. From those, he cultivates seeds for the next generation of plants.

To give customers an idea of what their seed purchase will look like, Platteborze built an oversized flower box that takes up a large chunk of the store. The variety of plants are there for visitors to examine and learn about, and to provide the kind of environment that will make people want to stay awhile.

"I want to offer a feeling of peace, and a place where they can just sit and be and think and share their passion for connecting to nature," Platteborze said. "And they can take part of that with them to their house."

Until now, Platteborze has sold his plants and seedlings almost exclusively online, taking the products he grew in his backyard and shipping them to customers. Several moves that have required him to uproot or restart his nursery have made him especially happy to find a place to call his own.

Platteborze jokes that he is at his store "22/7," and driving the other two hours of the day. The shop is open from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., or by appointment, but he often stays until 2 a.m. at the store and the nursery next door. It takes him eight hours to water each of his plants individually. The rest of the time he spends making cuttings to cultivate new generations of plants, writing plant tags or working on the computer, making sales and networking.

Platteborze's mother attributes his love of plants to his deafness. Deaf infants often have trouble with balance, and it took Platteborze three times the normal amount of time to learn to sit up or crawl. As a result, Haverington said, he spent quite a long time belly-side down in the grass, nose-to-nose with plants and bugs.

All Platteborze's knowledge is self-taught, gleaned from books he's read and the hands-on experience of cultivating his own nursery, and as a result, he loves to teach others. He was the first deaf child to attend the Children's School of Science, a summer school in Wood's Hole, and he subsequently became an assistant teacher there.

He plans to open a kids corner, where children can plant seeds and watch them grow - one of his favorite parts of botany.

"I love how they are each unique and how they've evolved in so many different ways that are fascinating," said Platteborze after showing a visitor a plant that snaps its leaves shut when touched to ward off insects. "I love watching things grow and nurturing them."