outer hair cell though i know you'll attenuate eventually...

i remember i posted a video of an outer hair cell dancing to rocking round the clock. since our class was revisiting the subject of outer hair cell and some classmate found something funnier.. i'm compelled to post it here. heh. a little bit far with the nerdiness...outer hair cells are believe to transduce electric signals into mechanic signals (contraction and expansion) and therefore amplifies cochlea's response to sound.




and on top of that i have to add this incredibly lame joke. so joe santos-sacchi who studies outer hair cells at yale tells his medical students that the motility in outer hair cells activates a direct dance reflex that goes from the ear to the motor system. ha ha.

i got out of 46

my response to experiment failures and unfinishable homework was to get out of building 46 and go somewhere else. messiaen and boulez would be played at the symphony, so i decided to go downtown and take advantage of the college card, while unwinding my brain.

as it turned out, the college card hours were over nearly an hour before i got there. so i didn't get the ticket and had to think of somewhere else to go. i wondered along huntington ave until i hit the mfa. at least i wouldn't have to pay for entrance. they had an exhibition of art nouveau jewelery with japanese motif going on. the jewelers actually took the pain to line thin thin thin edges with tiny tiny diamonds. wonderful stuff. my phone camera didn't work too well under that lighting. so you have to take my word for it.




then i went through egyptian and roman sections of the museum and spent the rest of my time in the early 20th century room. it's a very small room, but contains a few nice pieces. they have a good mary cassatt (in the loge), a good renoir (the dance), degas' little ballerina in bronze and some other stuff. for the first time i realised that the ballerina is not only standing chest up, but also her hip is swung slightly to the left. which makes the entire impression a whole lot different. weird i never saw it before. another thing i saw was that three of the native women in the gauguin are making eyes at the viewer, in a rather seductive way. exotic women in a seducing act, this definitely added value to the painting in his time! it is also weird that i haven't noticed that before. anyways, i wonder why i connect so much with these 20th century enruopeans. if only i had a time machine!


one last thing worth mentioning, when i was on my way out, i saw this piece of work (you can read about it in the caption at the end):







isn't it wonderful. all the bottles are contained in a mirror glass chest made of unidirectional mirror. so you can see what's going on inside, but light can't go in. the pattern thus formed on the bottles are quite magnificent!

watch this

it's fucking amazing

c'est la vie

&uarr major infringement of multiple copyrights.


time: 2250 hours
venue: some graduate student lounge

i'm trying kill creeps on desktop tower defense. behind me, a group of people are overdosing on a combination of skittles and a drink yet to be named. its composition is roughly as follows: 7up, regular; jack daniel's; 100x mg of caffeine ("stay awake" tablet, where x is an integer greater than 1). loud music of unknown genre to me. someone else frantically typing something on a laptop computer.

and we are all trying to (pretend to) read a paper for tomorrow and write a critique of it for one of its main authors. the original plan was to read it sober, so that the brain areas for memory encoding process (the hippocampus, also the major subject of the paper) is intact, and then drink the shit and critique the paper. hoping that the caffeine helps the fountains of criticism and creativity. anyways, the hope is gone. the reward circuit yearned for caffeine a little too much for the beverage to wait in the cup.

and the crowd gets bigger.

and i wonder if my entire graduate career will be a multiplication of this night. no wonder people spend so long doing their phds.

update: the drink has just been named. it's the ghetto blaster. however, there's also an augmented ghetto blaster. not sure which is which.

the arrival of g pen 340

came in the mail today. at 27.72, this USB tablet really works surprisingly well. i think with some training, i should have much better control of the cursor than using my trackpad. not just for fine control, but also for gross movements.




i'm convinced that the following thing is completely wrong anatomically.

from the window of 46-2033, October 10, 2008

Ferguson on voting

it's a shame how often only the comedians get it right. and loud and clear...

the circus is in town...

so the ringling brothers circus parked their train on the track next to school...and unloaded a bunch of elephants and horses and ponies. i didn't know about this until i hit the crowd (easily hundreds) on mass ave on my way home from the library.

the crowd:

From elephants

note the abundance of strollers, indicating high hippie index of the parents in the area.



the police force:

From elephants

the elephants!

From elephants

From elephants