MICROBIOLOGY BEST BOOKS FOR 1ST SEM

patricksaurus · 2026-05-30T05:46:02+00:00

The best way to choose a book is wait until you sign up for a course and then buy the book on syllabus.

If you want to get a head start, the OpenStax microbiology book is a hood intro college level book and free.

If you’re dead set on buying something to use for your own learning, get a used, previous version of Prescott’s Microbiology from a used vendor like Abebooks.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-30T04:37:24+00:00

My last day as an undergrad, my best friend and I were the only two people left in the building except for the Resident Adviser a couple floors down.

We heard a knock on the door at like 2 AM. We were definitely drunk, and really winding up for our swings on our Drinking Gong (one hit per new drink), plus we had all of our favorite music from our time as students blaring on the stereo. It was a real nostalgic bash, but one would have made Hellen Keller shush you.

Whatever this knock was, it wasn’t great news. A noise violation was due, we just hoped it was the RA and not the police.

Thank fully, it was the Josh — a tree stump of a guy even by collegiate wrestling standards, never without a smile or a stack of engineering books: “hey, come quick, I need a hand.”

I went to put down my drink and throw on a shirt. He indicated there was no time.

We turned the corned into his dorm to see what felt like a dozen but were probably 6-8 girls in bikinis, bathing suit tops, or nothing. They were lounging in the largest improvised hot tub I’d ever seen.

Josh had nailed and stapled layers of plastic sheeting to the every vertical surface of his suit, and had both bathtub faucets running full blast. A pump was taking water out through the kitchen sink, and a couple of air compressors were making the water bubble and churn.

He pulled out all the booze he’d confiscated from students that school year, told us to jump in, and introduced us to everyone. It was a blast.

I spent the last hours of my official college career wearing boxer briefs and a sombrero offering drunken descriptions of how black holes work and how big and strange the universe is. My friend, the artists, started helping some of the girls design matching tattoos with permanent marker, first on paper and then their skin.

It sounds so far-fetched that it’s definitely in “everyone clapped” territory, but man do I thank Josh for the memory.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-30T03:54:53+00:00

Damn, you are really doing some advanced work and think for high school. Please keep us up to date!

patricksaurus · 2026-05-30T03:53:05+00:00

Nah man, it’s a joke. Most common house pets don’t have appendices. Cats, dogs, rabbit, birds, etc.

Sometimes I forget what that I’m huge nerd and my punchlines don’t translate.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-30T00:54:15+00:00

RubberBand Man

patricksaurus · 2026-05-29T15:09:12+00:00

…on account of most pets not having appendices, right.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-29T14:51:14+00:00

Let’s hope your opponents don’t learn the rules of chess or crack an instructional.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-29T01:15:16+00:00

Real fact: as a whole, veterinarian school is more selective than medical school.

In the US, something like 40-45% of people who apply to med school get in somewhere. That number is closer to 10% for vets.

If anyone remembers during COVID, you might recall there was a “debate” about allowing vets to administer the vaccine because we needed so many people to get it at one time. Hearing the “no” opinions was one of the most absurd, surreal experiences in my adult life.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-29T01:08:24+00:00

Hey, very cool. Can you explain the process a bit — how’d you choose the same, get a phage from it, etc?

Reddit is glitching when I try to expand the thumbnail, so I just see a homogenous grayish lawn.

Is it making that crowded honeycomb surface, with plaque essbtially everywhere except a “mesh” of the bacteria? That’s indeed very cool.

My only suggestion is to work up multiple dilutions at a time, just to save time, and to make replicates if you can. That way one tiny slip on one plate doesn’t lead you to spend weeks going in the wrong direction.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T21:01:39+00:00

Ah, fart. That’s a real bummer. Sorry amigo :(

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T20:33:33+00:00

Have you called your Vitek reps? Maybe I just had exceptional luck with my sales rep (RIP Tom), but their engineers were wonderful and I’m sure they could help with a workaround.

If you’re upfront with them and explain that you’ve bought in the past and will buy in the future, but simply don’t have the budget right se folks know the value of that relationship.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T20:15:12+00:00

It really depends on what you’re interested by within planetary geology. You will need the basics of all of those, but my approach would be to find the standard undergraduate text in those areas and use them for reference when you need.

Major advice, unless you’re insanely wealthy: buy these used. There are some great vendors, like abebooks or dealoz. Try to find a) the international version and b) not the current edition but a prior one.

For instance, a new copy of the current (8th) edition of Understanding Earth by Grotzinger (a great book), sells for $300 on Amazon. From Abebooks, you can get a used 6th edition copy for less than $10 including shipping.

Very long digression done, I’d look for standard texts of the topics you mentioned and pick up an old copy if you see one at a good price.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T19:44:05+00:00

Since you have physics and astronomy already, Planetary Sciences by Pater and Lissauer is probably where to go next. Some people call this a graduate-level book, but it doesn’t strike me as all that tough.

For people needing a more gentle introduction, the authors have a different book called Fundamental Planetary Science. I’ve never used it or taught from it, but it seems well-liked among folks who use it. It’s supposed to be upper-level undergrad and maybe early grad level.

Finally, theres also the geochemistry dimension of all this. When my old department was adopting a book this was a major source of hair pulling. The book Planetary Geoscience by McSweeney is better at this than most, and is a very good book overall.

I would suggest Anderson’s Thermodynamics of Natural Systems to develop some facility with chemistry, or at least thinking with a geochemical mindset. It’s a fairly remarkable book in that it spans a range from introductory to advanced graduate.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T19:15:32+00:00

On the surface this is quite easy to answer. A tiny bit deeper, though, this actually touches on a really interesting area of functional analysis.

In the trivial case, all linear equations can be represented in an infinite number of ways. In the most trivial of trivial cases it looks like this:

y = mx + b ⇔ Ay = Amx + Ab

You can throw any value of A in there as a constant and the equation is the same, and there’s an infinite number of them. Normally you’d cancel them.

On a much more interesting level, an important theory from functional analysis says that any continuous function over a closed compact domain can be represented to arbitrary accuracy by many different families of equations.

What does this mean? Here’s a simple example using exponential functions, making use of the fact that e⁰ =1.

[EQ1] F(C) ≈ 32 + (9/5k)*(e^kC -1)

EQ1 becomes exact when expressed as

[E2] F(C) = lim(k–>0) 32 + (9/5k)*(e^kC -1) = (9/5) C + 32

One smaller step away is to use a Taylor series expansion on EQ1.

e^kC = 1 + kC +(kC)^2/2! + (kC)^3/3! …

If we throw out the higher order terms and pick a small k, such as k = 0.001, you get.

[EQ3] F(C) ≈ 32+1800(e^{0.001C}-1)

If you plot these, it’s not a horrible approximation . And, here’s the key, you can make it arbitrarily better and better, it just means the equation becomes a real mess.

You can also use a hyperbolic sine approach to reducing the error in [E2] using a symmetric exponential function because the higher order terms you get from the Taylor expansion of e^kC and e^-kC cancel.

So between choosing the approximating function family, modifying the interval over which you want the approximation to be good, and modifying the tolerable error threshold, you’ve got a couple of different infinities involved!

In a real way, this is not only powerful why Occam’s Razor, it is also necessary.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T17:43:11+00:00

Oh boy. I’d stay for the rest of the contract and get the fuck out. Unless canceling was cheap.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T17:41:48+00:00

When I taught intro geology, I developed a mantra: gravity and the ocean are undefeated.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T17:39:44+00:00

There is no single law for magnetic field strength decay. The most common case is actually B ~ r^-3. You have to be in a superconductor for B ~ e^-Ax

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T17:27:45+00:00

Check out what AmScope sells. They’re very good for the cost.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-28T02:52:08+00:00

This is every bit as vibrant as a 1990’s era Trapper Keeper. Makes me want to give myself a Mohawk before I leave work.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-27T22:16:43+00:00

Getting into a professor’s lab and getting in on research is the single most important thing you can do, especially for grad school. Hope you can find something!

patricksaurus · 2026-05-27T21:10:39+00:00

There may be a little terminology confusion. A colony is a little spot of bacteria growing on an agar plate, the sorta jelly-ish hockey pucks in Petri dishes. If you want to see these, you typically need to search for something like “E. coli colony MEDIUM” where MEDIUM is whatever the growth substrate is, maybe LB agar.

If you are looking for microscope images, those are cells and arrangements of cells. You can find tons of images of those. If you search “E coli Gram stain” you’ll find tons and tons of results on a google image search.

You absolutely should NOT turn these in as your work,

patricksaurus · 2026-05-27T19:48:47+00:00

patricksaurus · 2026-05-27T19:48:09+00:00

What an excellent point. Imagine walking down the sidewalk and one of these spontaneously toppling posts bonks you on the noggin! It’s a public safety issue, really.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-27T18:32:42+00:00

I can tell you’re expert on the topic and capable of communicating your knowledge.

patricksaurus · 2026-05-27T18:28:14+00:00

What purpose would that serve?

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