许臭美姗

大脑的厌食症
灵魂的肥胖
精神的便秘

世界是思维的食物
从早吃到晚
当然消化不良

城市轰隆轰隆
那是无数坨聪明绝顶的脑袋
一起打饱嗝的声音
遁世的冲动

清静的小镇
音乐和诗
哲学与酒
是一坨良方

专治
间歇性精神消化不良

NIH-3T3

anyone in Singapore has NIH 3T3 cells? gimme an aliquot?

Creationist Journal Launched

The new, free and peer-reviewed Answers Research Journal is fresh online. According to the website's about section, this journal is "a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework."

an example of the articles published there will be: Microbes and the Days of Creation

Mom's Snowman

looks like it is snowing quite a bit..

dude this name has only the vowel "a" in it:
Rajan Sankaranarayanan

and i think i'm going to marry someone with the surname sankaranaarayanan and name my son dasaavathaarangal. then he'll have 16 "a"'s in his name, beats uncle rajan, who has 9. muahahhahahaahahahahahahah(or i can just name my kid that).

and i think this is a great picture

from my dear friend hoiyee

stick to your plans, make a commitment

StickK.com shows you how you can make a plan and get it going. be it weight losing, or gaining, or exercising regularly.

it originated from a simple idea some grad students had. you draw up a plan, and swear to pay your roommate a sum of money if you don't meet your goal. this is surprisingly useful, as you can tell from the result of this weight loss contract.


on the website though, charity gets the money instead of your roommate.

maybe i should start doing it with my roommates. :)

Jeff Dunham again

i run my life on a powerbook g4, my work on xp(good for me cos to run any sort of molecular bio apps on a mac is a pain in the ass, not to mention vector nti totally got frustrated with developing for new mac os's), and my phone is the most carried around piece of device. I'm really trying to consolidate my information life, but it has yet to be made easier.

for example, i would like to have one centralised calendar, and then have all my devices be able to access it. the only way i can do it now is to enter the events on ical, or on google cal , or on my nokia 6300, and then get gcal to sync my laptop and my phone, or send sms reminders of events. (30boxes is very nice, but doesn't sync phones, sadly. otherwise its usability definitely beats google, with quick add and everything. ) or i could sync my phone to my mac with isync, and then let ical syn with gcal and let gcal update my phone. eventually i want a loop, in which any bit of information i enter on any device within the loop can get synced onto other devices. should be a trivial matter.

anyone has any advice?



i typed the word "sync" so many time that i was reminded of the beer ad.

english guy on the ship: we are sinking we are sinking!
german dude on the coast(slowly): what are you sinking (thinking) about?

I could have watched all night, i could have watched all night and still have begged for more!!

All the wonderful women!



Julia Andrews is so beautiful! I'm so inspired to sing!




and so is Callas!

the fake crying whiny little girl "o mio babbino caro"


i was surprised to hear my teacher describe lauretta as a little girl whining to her father. i still haven't watched gianni, but it hadn't occurred to me before that people actually portray rather trivial/daily feelings in operas. i thought they only sang of life and death situations. but here, this little girl is almost throwing a tantrum about her boyfriend to the daddy. that's quite cute don't you think.

norma



rosina



carmen




tosca



why was the tosca i watched (SLO) so boring!??


i really couldn't find anything to put here for veronique gens, but she's great :)



and dawn upshaw the wonderwoman!





"she has not a shred of self-satisfaction. which is why she can play these roles. and why she makes you cry, and it's not about having pity on me, you cry because of a kind of infinite sadness in the universe..."

you wouldn't think dawn upshaw would have a problem being intimate with people and sharing would you... afterall she's so successful at performing so many things! but then again, she does look like the introvert kind. i don't know. anyways, below is a masterclass video. she's a good teacher, i still remember how she described a piece to my teacher to be shattering. "you're not supposed to be able to do this piece more than once a day, cos it's such a shattering experience!"




bartoli



(the callas version is ... hmm.. so different

right?)


i love this song. but from the recording i could never have guessed her expression :p. that beautiful skinny little whistle tone somehow doesn't go with the tormented facial expression. well.. hha.

kristin chenoweth

she's a natural!




on a side note, it of course helps to have huge expressive eyes lol... all these pretty white girls! darn.

my first blogpost

my first blogpost, written on Aug. 3rd, 2004 on livejournal, was quite funny. it actually talked about science too. it's quite an interesting thing for myself to read now. lol.

here i'm starting a new journal, my first online one. used to be very excited everytime i started a new diary when i was younger, but as i grew older i don't even keep a diary anymore. busy with life. that sounds really pathetic.

working in the lab isn't exactly very fun. esp when you don't even know where the project is going, and keep screwing up things. life is reduced to the monotonous sound of a PCR machine running. tissue culture is a little more fun, at least with more things to do. but i only do clean-ups. clean the pump with water, then chlorox, then water again, washing the flask that you suck all your waste (poor)cells/medium into, dash in vircon, swirl, attach it back to the pump, test pump. wipe down the hood with 70% ethanol, UV for a while, switch off.

so half of the time i'm slacking in front of the common computers, like now, and the other half i'm busy mixing reagents for PCR or cleaning up tissue culture room. and after lunch i'm feeling sleepy now. my mentor's assistant hasn't alerted me for anything. she's supposed to extract RNA from 48 eppendorff tubes containing transfected cells that we prepared last friday. huge task ahead. but she hasn't called me. so.

and this is life in a lab? i'm starting to wonder if this is what i really want. maybe life as a researcher is really so much better than that of an attachment student. hopefully.

and everytime i watched my mentor's assistant/my mentor herself suck up liver cancer cells in that pinkish medium from the flasks and praising the cells on their healthy growth, i wonder why humans are doing this. and when at last i raised it up to both of them on separate occasions, i got differet answers.

qn: wow man, why do humans grow cells in medium??

mentor: yeah, what next?
asst: so that we can do experiments on them.

sigh.

that was when i was totally whiny. haha. i guess i don't whine so much any more on a blog, which is a good thing, of course. ;)

GOOGLE CALENDAR

I'M STILL IN THE MOOD TO TYPE CAPS

ANYWAYS, EVERYBODY SHOULD SWITCH TO GOOGLE CALENDAR (AS OPPOSED TO 30 BOXES, NOT THAT ANYONE USES IT BUT...). FOR GOOGLE CALENDAR, YOU CAN UPLOAD AND DOWNLOAD EVENTS FROM AND TO YOUR ICAL, AND GET REMINDS FOR EVENTS SENT TO YOUR MOBILE PHONE FOR FREE!!!(SORRY NOT FOR US KIDS, COS THE RETARDED CARRIERS CHARGE FOR RECEIVING SMSES.)

from right half of the left to right half of the right

Noting that he had served in the Clinton administration, Summers said he identified strongly as a liberal and a Democrat, but that while in Washington he viewed himself as being on “the right half of the left,” in Cambridge, he landed “on the right half of the right.”

the Gross and Simmons' Study (click for a summary) investigates the socio-political orientation of american college professors. the results of course indicate that they are much more liberal than the average american. we all know that. throughout my college years i haven't seen a single conservative professors. those who taught me ranged from mildly discontent with the bush administration to openly mocking him. i also heard about the couple of professors who were activists and really went out of their way to raise awareness in the students. while the students on campus were more evenly split between conservative views and liberal ones, the professors were undoubtedly liberal.

larry summers has a theory on why most of the college campuses are filled with liberals (from the inside higher ed article):

He said that if you are a smart individual, and you like the market, profits, and “striving for profits,” you have “a wide range of choices in life,” of which an academic career is but one. If you are a smart person who doesn’t like the world of markets and profits, “you have a much narrower range of choices,” he said, and academic careers may be quite desirable. In this way of thinking, he said, it’s not surprising to find more liberals than conservatives on college faculties.

which also coincides with what we tend to think: the conservatives do stuff and the liberals only say stuff, from their cozy little corner. the american government tend not to listen to academic gibberish very much anyway.maybe that's why there are still liberals sitting in the colleges. one of my history professors used to lament that while the chinese government worshiped scholars and academics, the US government wouldn't ever listen to them. from that perspective, imperial china was a much better place for scholars. big no no. the chinese scholars are largely brainwashed by the government already, whether 2000 years ago or now. what you get is a handful of silenced liberals and the apathetic rest. looks like as long as there are centralised governments around, liberals will stay in the ivory tower.

anyway, the break down of the stats by field and age is quite interesting. the more practical fields such as health sciences/medicine/engineering tend to be led by the conservatives and the more theoretical fields such as science/humanities more liberal. makes perfect sense. and that the age group between 50 and 64 years old are the most liberal ones across field is not surprising. i think this is because this group of people were the teenages and the 20 somethings in the 60's, when liberalism flooded american and various movements were fluorishing. once your characters are formed then in those ways it'll be hard to change them back i guess. the increasingly stable economy and more conservative political atmosphere in the 80's and the 90's probably fostered the conservatism in the later generations, and resulted in the less liberal younger age groups. the 65+ age group grew up in the 40's and 50's, when the model american family was still a working dad and a stay home mom in a nice suburb house. no surprise on their political inclinations.

gym gym gym

so this is what i did today outside meal and work

1. did 1 hour worth of nonsense in the gym. -~400 kcal.
2. drank a 1.5L bottle of 100-plus, +406 kcal.
3. ate an oishi oheya multigrain snack, + 140 kcal.


which means, my new found good hobby is not enough to compensate my newly relaxed appetite. i might as well not gym and not snack.

and why is it that the oishi mutigrain snack contains 0g dietary fiber?

What beautiful images

The very talented Benjamin Friess

interesting stuff

new sci fi blog io9

the little spiky animals

i think i've told some of you that when homologues of hedgehog the signaling protein was found in vertebrates they named it sonic. and couple variants isolated subsequently were named after famous hedgehogs. in fish there are 5 variants: sonic hedgehog(shh), indian hedgehog(ihh), desert hedgehog(dhh), echidna hedgehog(ehh) and tiggy-winkly hedgehog(twhh).

i was shopping at ikea, and saw a pair of hedgehogs. so i felt quite compelled to buy them. :) and i named them before i gave them to my boss as a gift lol..

they look like this: