Transformers

This morning, I met up with a few people from the lab to watch the movie Transformers. Today was opening day, so we decided to see the earliest show at 10am, to dodge the crowds.
The movies in NZ cost differently, depending on how new they are. Since this movie just came out, it was going to be more expensive. However, Vicky bought "movie money" (basically a bunch of tickets in bulk, maybe ten or so?) and got a discount.

I didn't really know anything about the story, other than there are fighting robots that "transform" into something else.

I don't think I would buy the movie on DVD, but overall it had a lot of funny parts, and pretty cool computer graphics. It was a little bit long, though (2 hours, 24 minutes).

I did make it back in time for the meeting with my mentors.

The meeting went pretty well; I feel we should have had it a few weeks ago, though.

Later that day, Dee helped me set up BLAST on my computer.

BLAST is a tool that allows scientists to compare protein or DNA sequences against a library of sequences of another genome for similarities. This can be useful, for example, when you have a sequence of DNA of unknown function. By "blasting" this sequence against the genomes of other species, you might discover sequences in these genomes that are already known and are very similar to your query sequence. Oftentimes, similar sequences perform similar functions, and then you are one step closer to identifying the uses of your initial query sequence.