Out of all the Hair Brained Applications I think this takes the Cake

Before I go on, I feel I should explain what sparked this rant is my readings in wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence

In the middle of my muddled research during my ever seeming further days of engineering undergrad, I (mostly ammused) would (every once in a while) come across some researcher's paper in Kalamazoo that listed sci-fi type possibilities for their oh so important research. Keep in mind my specialisation was in nanotechnology and not a more established discipline (such as civil, chemical, materials, etc... )

Although I did enjoy the chuckles produced from reading these hair brained schemes to stop global warming, control the mind, store hydrogen, kill cancer cells and trust me the list could go on forever...

I did reach a level of frustration at times. The amount of papers trying to make the bold claim that studying the crystallization of diatomaceous earth at the bottom of our ocean's will lead to great new discoveries / methods in the opto-electronic community is astounding and preposterous. I would usually find these hairbrained claims in the abstract tricking the unsupposing reader to read on. Unfortunately, for some reason, potential applications don't have to be qualified in the abstract and usually left it up to the citation to elaborate. Even more frustrating, the more hair brained the scheme, the more impossible it would become to actually get an explanation. I often found my search would go something like this (depending on how desired the explanation was) -

1. Search for citations.
2. Referred to other citations.
3. Search for new citations.
4. Either didn't find them or (even worse) referred back to original paper (the cyclic citation effect!)
5. Knee deep in the muddled middle of this citation mess, I would decide to take a break and go joke around with my roommates, get some warm milk + cookies, and (eventually) go back to the grinding board.


So you may be asking, why why why am I reading about Aaron's rant 'back in the day when I was a youngster I used to walk three miles wearing snow shoes' ...... because I thought I might try and give you a nice chuckle (if you are still in uni... and in the muddle of it.. or if you are out of uni. and missing the muddle)

Go back to the wikipedia article I refered to :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence

Check out the biotechnology section - non-electric christmas trees! The person who wrote this article must have had way too much fun.