abe visits america

honors

after going to the lab to check on my experiments, went to a friend's honor's recital. when i came back, i saw photos of another friend's BA exhibit on facebook. recital.. exhibition.. thesis.. we are all wrapping up our honors, our bits of adult life, a taste of the professions that we are going to spend the rest of our lives in. undergraduate life is so finished and on ahead we move. someone told me that in college i would be half an adult.. it's quite true. we do all the things that adults do, only in the safe boundaries of the college, and with the certainty that only a student can afford to have. we sing, we paint, we do experiments, and we know that no matter what we do, we will have our recitals in the school concert hall, our exhibit in the school gallery and our posters at the undergrad research poster session. and now we move on to become full adults, hurling ourselves into the full struggles of life, to have a real recital, a real exhibit or a real scientific conference. it won't be easy. but here we come.

photoshop not a verb

digg's adobe photoshop not a verb article... wonder why they are so not cool

i've no idea why the name jorge cham never rang a bell that he was asian. and of course the last thing to come to mind when i think about the guy who created the phd comic - a big geek with an extraordinary sense of humor- would be good looks. but seriously, i would say he's really good looking..

UCSD Virginia Tech Vigil

UCSD Virginia Tech Vigil
Originally uploaded by flyingpillow317.

Photos that a friend of mine took at the VT vigil yesterday... they are quite extraordinary.. tragic beauty..

What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

-kundera

精辟。。。

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because
there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without
warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the
first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a
sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline
of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our
life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

kundera, the unbearable lightness of being

genetics of romance?

from today's nyt

"It so happens that an unusually large number of brain-related genes are situated on the X chromosome. The sudden emergence of the X and Y chromosomes in brain function has caught the attention of evolutionary biologists. Since men have only one X chromosome, natural selection can speedily promote any advantageous mutation that arises in one of the X’s genes. So if those picky women should be looking for smartness in prospective male partners, that might explain why so many brain-related genes ended up on the X.

“It’s popular among male academics to say that females preferred smarter guys,” Dr. Arnold said. “Such genes will be quickly selected in males because new beneficial mutations will be quickly apparent.”

Several profound consequences follow from the fact that men have only one copy of the many X-related brain genes and women two. One is that many neurological diseases are more common in men because women are unlikely to suffer mutations in both copies of a gene.

Another is that men, as a group, “will have more variable brain phenotypes,” Dr. Arnold writes, because women’s second copy of every gene dampens the effects of mutations that arise in the other."

i just read on an old friend's blog that she got an offer from microsoft... it seems that it wan't even that long ago when i first heard her talk about that wish.(actually, that was probably 6 years ago or so.) so dreams DO come true... how exciting. and just the right motivation for me, especially for this week..

life feels great :)

ah..good times...

parasite makes rodents like cats

how interesting...

Google Announces New TiSP System