Misc Updatates

misc
Small projects, thoughts after a week of sabbatical
Published

April 19, 2026

I’ll start this post with various small updates of things I’ve been up to, then switch to reflection on why I’m taking an extended sabbatical, and how it’s going so far.

Small Things

Here’s a few recent experiments and such:

I made an interactive site to explore tulip varieties (code, video demo). The UMAP clusters of the CLIP embeddings map nicely to color and locale, made it very easy to get a general vibe for the genus - I’ll definitely be copying this for other taxa!

Some organisms under UV light

My wife and I camped out by the Oregon coast and I took some photos of things under my UV flashlight. More pics on my iNaturalist once I take em off my SD card.

Initial spot far right, nic. smudge and solvent front middle-left

I extracted nicotine from tobacco and learned how to stain TLC plates with KMnO4, accidental science art :)

I tried an energy drink, crystalized some on a slide, used TLC to confirm that it does indeed have a ton of caffeine, and logged my vitals over the day.

Rainbow e. coli

I noticed that some bacteria have a lovely rainbow effect in the right lighting

Tried taking some caffeine out of coffee with activated charcoal, to some success! Image shows four references (1000, 500, 250 and 100 mg/L caffiene) and then some artificially strong coffee (left spot, rightmost plate) vs some that went through the charcoal decaf process (far right), with significantly less caffeine!

Others:

  • Made a bad but fun theremin
  • Filmed some fun glowy fluid dynamics
  • Isolated a nice orange yeast https://ln.johnowhitaker.com/entry/27
  • Grew out third and final (?) attempt at green e. coli, https://ln.johnowhitaker.com/entry/32, cloning strain, ran out of amp so transformation into gave BL21 questionable results, satellite colonies, no strong color yet
  • Working on an explanation re: the green bacteria (WIP renders of the main proteins doing their thing) - video coming soon
  • Agrobacterium transformation attempts on tomatoes, duckweed ongoing (another successful ish duckweed one worked for a couple of fronds, another attempt waiting for results)
  • Tending to various plants, since it’s the start of spring here! Growing out some purple tomatoes, some berries, etc.

Sabbatical!!!!

Now the somewhat larger life update: I’m taking at least 6 months completely off work @ answer.ai. It feels like a particularly pivotal time in AI, and I want to reflect on what I should be working on going forward. Plus, I’d had an extended bout of sickness and was feeling a little burnt out and unproductive, so this will hopefully blow off the cobwebs.

TODO: actual reflections and things go here :)