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Scholastic Background (a lifetime in school):
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I'm Still Here at the UW!And my real home – where cool and scientific heads have always prevailed and mirthly pleasures abound – is still up in the hinterlands of Northwest Wisconsin: A genuine old-growth forest and partly navigable wetland, filled with a variety of forest and swamp creatures, some photos of which are below. Spare time at home is filled with treats and adventures such as indulging in Kellie's special formulation of pomegranate meringue pie and hitting the road to obscure geographical spots written about by the old, forgotten explorers. One such area comprises the actual sources of the Mississippi River that flow and seep into Lake Itasca and continue on to the Gulf of Mexico. Why just do the slippery, skull-cracking walk across Itasca's outlet when you can take a leisurely stroll up the middle of one or more of its inlets such as seen here. Lake Superior is good for all seasons as might be hinted at here, and there are a few weeks in most years that we can truck on over the ice road to Madeline Island as seen in this movie taken with my pocket-size dashcam. Sand Island once supported the northernmost community in Wisconsin and lately has become my favorite island of them all. Some photos are here and here. At weekend's end (sounds sad, doesn't it), I make like Odysseus in reverse – leaving fair Ithaca to return to Troy to slog through another week's tour of duty. [insert winky face here] As for what I've been piloting over the past decade, my trusty 2001 Dodge Stratus Coupe continues its commensurate journey past the moon and a few asteroids, having achieved 365,000 miles on January 29. Those yearly 32,600 miles surely pile up. By now the car should finally be broken in! I bought the first of my five cars in 1970 and regretfully traded it off after only seven years. I would bet that the "Dodge" (in name only, as it was actually made by Mitsubishi in Illinois on a Galant frame and wheelbase) has enough ganas and miles left in it to get me down the Pan-American Highway to Chile. An extended stay there has become a very frequent and appealing thought, but I'd probably get homesick after the first 100 miles and turn around. Chile certainly has had its triumphs and tragedies over the years, and the confrontation seen here reflects recent troubles rocking the country. Once in awhile, I find it necessary to just go figure (literally). Recalling how fascinated I was in grade school with the fact that 2 + 2 = 2 × 2 and how that sort of thing just didn't appear to happen with other numbers, I recently came up with this formula which generates similar occurrences. Who knows? Maybe it explains some natural law. Most likely, many others have come up with it over the centuries and it has already been named after someone. (So-and-so's Folly, perhaps?)
And now – on to the subject matter which is often a great source of conversation wherever I am. (Holy Wisconsin Idea, Batman.) Take a look at a list of items we have been teaching in Microbiology (formerly Bacteriology) 102 at UW-Madison for many years. There is a framework behind all this which one may not find in a lab manual. The overall theme of this course has been what bacterial cells do and how they fit into the scheme of things. What they look like is relatively insignificant, although one might think they really should be twice their size in order to account for all their doings. In Microbiology 102, the students have the opportunity to learn a lot of basic microbiology in reasonably organized fashion from Day One, and this has always been so, no matter how short the amenities may have been in our various teaching laboratories over the decades. Happening as of 2007 – what with the ongoing funding cuts inflicted upon this and many other worthy courses – was the replacement of some of the in-lab exercises with web-based equivalents where it was found appropriate to do so. If you would like to see how well you can do on one of our old Bact. 102 finals, click here or download a pdf file of it here. Check your answers here. Ph.D. prelims could include a lot of this stuff. Yes, they could. In our laboratory courses, we tend to be biased toward the "easy to grow" microorganisms which is probably a necessity if much is to be taught about general microbiology and laboratory procedures. What we can learn from these organisms can also apply significantly to the vast majority of bacteria which are hard or impossible to grow in the laboratory (including those involved in the essential geophysical processes) and to higher forms of life such as Homo sapiens. Along the way it can be shown that the usually ill-taught concept of oxygen relationships will not apply universally. Before I eventually hit the slide to the great outdoors and continue the various projects I have only begun to list here, I would like to get an experiment or demonstration of lithotrophy into our general microbiology course. During the time I taught the Farm Microbiology Short Course – which was truly a bright spot in the spring semesters – I had to come up with new ways to quickly teach some of the major bacteriological concepts in the short time that was available. For catabolism in particular, it became necessary to emphasize the basic patterns and leave intermediate details for when there might be some spare time for that. Going along with that idea in Microbiology 102, I have been working over the past decade to simplify the various concepts, and a few examples follow:
More about my work-related activities and general attitude (which really hasn't been too bad) is found here, and I expect to be held fully accountable for both by those who are really in charge – i.e., those who are paying for this. Public funding is already being happily flushed down the toilet, paying for the teaching of such crap as: "An autotroph is something that makes its own food." There is no oversight. Nothing can "make its own food" for cryin' out loud. Each living thing processes its nutrients according to its own kind, whether it's organic or inorganic. So, why am I not retiring now? Au contraire, O Contrarian. I am obviously not done yet. Counting the summer sessions, I am just starting my 130th semester on this job. New things keep popping up all the time. A recent excitement is isolating a green alga from the source of the Mississippi River (upstream from Lake Itasca) that can grow heterotrophically in the dark and be cultured like typical bacteria; click here for more.
Surprisingly they still let me on WORT every now and then to do my thing. On December 6, 1975, my very first show began with a little dance number written by King Henry VIII which then led to a convoluted cycle of mostly-classical music that took eleven years to wrap up. (One had to catch each weekly episode from the beginning.) Over the decades it has been my pleasure to fill in for (and do specials with) Rockin' John on occasional Saturday nights. Presently they are beaming into outer space to where our galactic neighbors may someday beam us back a request or two – or maybe they'll just boogie on down. I continue to hammer away at stupid myths which have Roy Orbison as only a loneliness-oriented ballad singer and Bread as just a soft-rock group. ROFL, indeed. (Or "Fap!" as Major Hoople would say.) Rarely do commercial stations play the exciting and educational stuff and get it right.
Adding more content to the web continues to be enjoyable. I am still doing HTML the old-fashioned way, building on what I taught myself back in 1997 when I discovered it was fun, easy and intuitive. (Go to your browser's source viewer and check it out.) A marketed HTML editor finds no place in my desert island emergency kit. Anyone can do it; just keep the code clean and modular. My favorite HTML-checking web browser suggests that I move up to XHTML and stylesheets which may not be a bad idea, as the browsers of the near future just might not lower themselves to recognize HTML 3.2 any more! Do you remember the old browser wars of the 1990s? A 1997 website on the subject has been resurrected and can be enjoyed here. I was sorry to see Mosaic leave the scene, as I was actually writing web pages with that browser in mind. Here are a couple ancient items from the archives, rendered with the old state-of-the-art, speech-capable and still-downloadable NCSA Mosaic 3.0beta4 for the Mac: The HTML Page and The Web's First Splammo Page. The latter – viewed not so well with Netscape Mosaic 0.93beta – is shown here. Splammo you say? One can consult the Urban Dictionary site for the precise definition of this most useful word. Last year, noting that the Kindle™ could not handle multiple windows and had several other web-related issues, I experimented with making some of my pages as Kindle-compatible as possible such as my modified Howard Creek page with all of its maps and photos. But now the browser on the new color model is really up to standard and appears to handle multiple windows and pdf files with ease.
Where does the hardly-earned money go? Partly to fund badly-needed playtime and escapes into the real world such as what might be seen here. On the right are photos (taken with real film!) that show (1) a sunset taken from the top of Bell Mound near Black River Falls on Sept. 13, 2001 when dark clouds in general were no longer just on the horizon, (2) a view of Jackson Hole, Wyoming suitable for calendars and postcards that was taken in August, 1961 and (3) a similar view of the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina taken in May, 1975. The Apostle Islands area still ranks high on my list of cool places. Wisconsin has every bit as much photogenic scenery as any other state. Click on the photo below which shows some Lindquist generations (circa 1915) immediately preceding mine. Among the three kids in the front row, spot the future school principal and architect, the future farmer, and the future aerospace engineer. In 1920, my grandfather Clarn (on the far right) built a barn on his farm near Hayward; click here for a recent photo. Later in the '20s, he sharpened the saws for the Schroeder logging operation on Outer Island which is shown here.
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Up in my neck of the woods, various interesting animals have been observed including Domino the black squirrel who could chew through wood and plastic and destroy all kinds of "squirrel-proof" bird feeders, Little Ollie the good-natured teddy-bear type who was unjustly accused of taking down our feeders, and a big mama bear with triplets who got caught in the act performing a precision pulling operation to take the feeders down. Here she comes to examine the source of the flash, only to take a most unflattering self portrait. For photographing these shy creatures at night, I use a wide-angle camera with an automatic motion detector. Genuine forest animals – wise to the ways of the great outdoors! Bright, motivated, self-aware, professional, prosperous and innovative. A true joy to observe. For the truth about black bears, go to bear.org. Garbage cans have always been a natural attractant for animals. Here is Little Ollie down on one elbow scanning the bottom for the serial number, and here is one of our rather large raccoons. Delighting all who saw her strolling through her domain was Maureen II (caught here with the bear camera), the albino deer who popped out of the woodwork in 2002, replacing the first Maureen who appeared as big as a horse and was first seen in our woods in February 1999 prancing through the snow. A couple photogalleries of Maureen II are here and here (she loved walnuts), and one of the first Maureen is here. If presented with an apple and a similar-sized scoop of mashed potatoes, Maureen II would take the mashed potatoes every time and just sniff at the apple. We lost her in a car accident in early November 2004, and whatever happened to her predecessor is a mystery. And we always have a woods full of the "regular" kind of deer. The ravens can put on a good show, sometimes spending a lot of time passing things real and imaginary from one to another. Here is a male tanager soon to acquire his scarlet plumage for mating season. And here are some very young birds at the communal bath trying to figure out their new world. In the summer, we often see insects bouncing across the back yard like tiny blue balls of cotton – traveling in a small pack, flying skillfully against the wind and landing preferentially on raspberry and black cherry leaves. Not finding a photo of such a thing anywhere, we determined that they shall be called blue fuzzy cherry gnats, although two authorities at UW-Madison have tentatively identified them from the photos as wooly alder aphids. My Mom loved sitting by the picture window and watching the animals emerge from the woods. Here is her photo of twin bear cubs resting in the back yard. |
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Life is far more important than what you do for a living. | |||||
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This homepage was originally placed on the web Jan. 28, 1997 and found sanctuary in 2001 on jlindquist.com. Latest updating of content herein was on Feb. 1, 2012 at 6:15 PM, CST. Bacteriological Email: lindquis @ bact.wisc.edu |
The weather back home:
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Be it never so numble, there's no place like Nome.