John A. Lindquist | |
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Scholastic Background
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I'm Still Here.And my real home – where cool and scientific heads have always prevailed and mirthly pleasures abound – is way off 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 indulging in such treats as Kellie's patented sour cream pomegranate meringue pie and checking out the actual sources of the Mississippi River, upstream from Lake Itasca. 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.
Take a look at a list of items we have been teaching in Bacteriology (now Microbiology) 102 over the 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. The students have an 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 years. What an insult to think otherwise. 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. Happening as of 2007 – what with the recent and drastic funding cuts inflicted upon this and many other worthy courses – is the replacement of some of the in-lab exercises with web-based equivalents where it has been found appropriate to do so. 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. And then it can be shown that the usually ill-taught concept of oxygen relationships will not apply universally. Before I can finally "retire" – and then start finishing up 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. More about my work-related activities and general attitude (which really hasn't been too bad) about the subject matter and teaching – for which I expect to be held fully accountable – is found here. As an example of how I am working to reduce everything to one side of a half-sheet of paper, my most recent attempt to ultra-generalize catabolism (as a starting point) for the Microbiology 102 course is shown here; likewise a little more specificity is shown on separate pages for chemotrophs and phototrophs. As regulation has always been a concept that makes the brain hurt, I think I finally have a reasonable understanding of the lac operon summarized here. 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 would not be a bad idea, as the browsers of the near future just might not lower themselves to recognize HTML 3.2 any more! Here are a couple ancient items from the archives, rendered with the old state-of-the-art, speech-capable and still-available browser 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. Remember the old browser wars of a decade ago? A 1997 website on the subject has been recently resurrected and can be enjoyed here. As for splammo, one can consult the Urban Dictionary site for the precise definition of this most useful word.
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. He also sharpened the saws for a major logging operation on Outer Island in the 1920s 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. (But aren't bears generally known to be pushy?) 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. The Hayward area is well-known for its bear population. Case in point: Go here and click on the video. 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 on jlindquist.com in 2001. Latest updating of content herein was on July 27, 2010 at 5:30 PM CDT. You must let me know if any quote or image on these web pages is improperly credited. All photos on this site are by myself unless they are credited otherwise or are obviously ancient archive photos such as this one (ha ha). |
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Be it never so numble, there's no place like Nome.