Monday, June 23, 2008

Nautilus

Steve grimaced and slouched down in his chair. The graduate student in front of the projector screen was trembling, biting his lip and staring at Steve with a glimmer of desperate hope in his eyes. Steve sighed.

“It seems like an ideal two-photon microscope experiment. Why are you wasting your time with a confocal?”

As they filed out of the conference room, Steve allowed himself a smile. The look of shock on the student’s face had brightened his day; no one expected good advice about cutting edge technology from an eighty-five year old.

But Steve wasn’t quite a fossil yet.

This is in honor of the Nautilus, which is a particularly ancient-looking cephalopod described as a "living fossil". And the Andrew Bird line, "I had not become a cephalopod" from "Opposite Day".

A link to Ayn's story, inspired by the same line, here.

1 comment:

Ayn said...

This story felt nostalgic to me.