Mark vs. the Toaster - A German Unity Special Edition!

This is our toaster:

It burns a skull and crossbones pattern onto our toast:

Pretty nifty.

This is my former PhD advisor, Mark Roth, celebrating with me after my thesis defense*. He dyed his hair blue to honor my previous hair color experiments.


For the last several months I've been tormented by the following question: Who is more intelligent - Mark? Or our toaster?

Luckily, the nice people at the MacArthur Foundation have resolved this issue by awarding Mark with one of their Genius Awards. For his work examining suspended animation **. If you aren't aware what the hubbub is about, check out more info here:

Mark is a genius

It really is quite a prestigious prize, and should put you heads and shoulders above the majority of toasters in the world.

So I guess that's that.

Oh, and today is Mark's 50th birthday.

Congratulations and happy birthday from Berlin!

It's German Reunification Day today, so I'm off to drink beer and eat fried meat.

* check out the fledgling chops. and the 22 oz. can of Rainer. yum.
** while not directly involved in this work, I do remember the first day that Mark came into lab and started describing how he was going to induce suspended animation in C. elegans. At that point in the game I had grown pretty accustomed to a certain level of lunacy escaping from his mouth - but this seemed different. Lunacy, yes. But more like a core of genius covered in a rather thick veneer of madness. Similar in many respects to a peanut M&M.