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:

i must have been possessed by devil to think that pandora doesn't work by proxy... yes, if you route your connection through a US proxy you do get the good stuff :)

How did zebras get their stripes?

anyways, it's genetic.

"Bard's hypothesis that all the stripes originally are the same width and are generated at different times in the three species also explains the numbers of stripes in each species. The common zebra has 26 stripes per side, and the 3-week Equus embryo is generally 11 mm long. This gives a spacing of about 0.42 mm per stripe. If the 43 stripes of the mountain zebra were generated in the 17 mm embryo of the 3.75 week zebra, the spacing is also 0.40 mm per stripe. At week 5, the embryo is 32 mm long, and the 80 stripes would yield the spacing of 0.40 mm per stripe. Therefore, the striping patterns of the common zebra, mountain zebra, and imperial zebra can be explained if the stripes are generated 0.4 mm apart in the 3-, 4-, and 5-week embryos, respectively."

read MORE.

and, when i was looking for patterning in zebras, i found this:


killing a victim by imprisoning him for homosexuality and causing him great psychological distress seems to be a thing that the british court was very good at doing: Looks like they killed turing pretty much the same way they did it to wilde.

the law: Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885

shopdropping

saw this on new york times, very interesting way of sending political msgs.

Lust Caution [色·戒]

it's been a while since the movie Lust Caution has been in theatre everywhere, and everybody has been talking about it quite a bit. the focus of the discussion was always around the cut piece of sex scene, or the confusing love story between the girl wang jiazhi and her colleague, or that between her and Mr. Yee. I feel that this is not being just to the story or the movie. i haven't seen the movie, and i'm not sure if i ever will. but i think lee ang being the purist he is, tends to stick to the more beautiful and tragic side of the original creation, so probably won't deviate from the author's intention too much. i feel that the intention of the short story, written by my favorite popular writer zhang ailing, was not so much as to describe a love story, even less so to talk about lust. zhang ailing's works usually explore people's, especially women's emotions, introspections, ambiguous and subtle interactions and a lot of times love between men and women. but they were all bitter, lonely, tragic, and the "love stories" told were very often unpredictable, undescribable or unsure. very few occasions would we find her telling a story about a love that she or the heroine/hero was certain to exist. so zhang ailing's stories, while thought to be always about love, may as well be taken as always about the absence of love.

i feel that Lust Caution is such a story. the lack of compassion and personal relations between the revolutionary youths planning on the assassination was just as plain as that between the wives of the rich officers/businessmen. the lack of genuinity amongst the rich is not surprising, or maybe is even expected. but many in the audience were shocked by the same dynamics in the group on the "good side". the rightfully idealistic young men who sent Jiazhi on the dangerous mission couldn't care less about what she was about to go through. we have seen this and we have taken this for granted for as long as we remember. the poem goes:"生命诚可贵,爱情价更高.若为自由故,两者皆可抛," (indeed life is very precious, but love weighs so much more. however, if it was for the sake of freedom, both life and love could be abandoned. ) in the struggle against invaders it was no doubt that love had no place. and it was not like the students all had to suppress love, as we can see, love simply didn't occur in some - their little minds were too busy with lofty ideals and grand plots to realize them. and they would do what it wook and they were cold hearted. in contrast, wang jiazhi was a young woman who had hoped for love, but ended up getting confused and lonely and damaged in the bigger plot in which love was not set aside for her. the pain that was inflicted upon her would not be obvious unless looked at especially from her point of view, i.e. from the point of view of the female story writer zhang ailing. because, no, history books don't tell you all these personal struggles.

it was in the general lack of love that mr. yee's small little expression of emotion feels huge. and it was the fact that yee's small gesture feels huge that emphasizes the general atmosphere that lacked love. the diamond ring was an excellent use of symbolism. in modern day society, very few girls will be even assured of the opposite party's love by the gesture of giving a diamond ring, not to mention risking their lives to save the them. a diamond ring, albeit expensive, is a materialistic expression of emotions. but because it is seemingly such an un-special gift, we see how low Jiazhi's threshold for care and concern is. and it is therefore meaningless to discuss how much yee loves her. or how much she loves yee. because, there is no love story to talk about, at least not in the conventional sense. the ring was merely a thread of warmth that both of them desperately cling onto, in that indifferent time and place. it's difficult to call that love. and sex between them, well they were only human. in Lust Caution, instead of looking relentlessly for a love story, i'd rather see it as it is and savor the tragic beauty.

zhang ailing lived in a particular time, and she is of a particular personality. these are the reason for the particular charm in her stories, and therefore they should be treated quite differently.

read the original story in chinese here

publich research, who has a say?

ok, this is so funny i want to put it here. it's from the same page talked about in the last post:


Public control could be a nightmare for researchers

Dan Graur

Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204-5001, USA

Nature 450, 1156 (20 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/4501156b; Published online 19 December 2007

Sir

Last night I had a nightmare. In my dream, all the recommendations made by Pierre-Benoit Joly and Arie Rip in their Essay 'A timely harvest' (Nature 450, 174; doi:10.1038/450174a 2007) became a reality here in the United States. The public were consulted and actively engaged in practical scientific matters.

I dreamed that the dos and don'ts of science and research were dictated democratically by the American public, of whom 73% believe in miracles, 68% in angels, 61% in the devil and 70% in the survival of the soul after death (see http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=618). In my dream, this majority dictated through vigorous 'public engagement' that science should deal with virgin birth, the thermodynamics of hell, the aerodynamics of angel wings, and the physiology and haematology of resurrection.

Suddenly, I found myself in my old lab. There my students were not dealing with the prevalence of gene duplication in bacterial evolution, but were engaged in a heated argument on the virtues of old-Earth versus new-Earth creationism. I woke up in a cold sweat, thinking of what Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's wife reputedly said when confronted with Darwin's theory: "Let us hope it is not true. But if it is, let us hope it does not become widely known."

If Jolie and Rip's proposal for public engagement is workable, let's hope no one ever finds this out.


(and it's wrong of me to put the whole of this article in my blog. but most of people do not have nature subscription :( and i hope dr. graur and npg forgive me. )

it's a very relevant issue. yesterday, i was having a discussion with two of my friends about the singapore's biomedical policies, and the mission of Singapore's research funding agencies. we didn't reach any conclusions about how just it was for anybody other than scientists to dictate the directions of publicly funded research. whose opinions matter in research, as yf pointed out, depends on the mission of the particular institutions, and it not only concerns the direction of the research done per se, but also consequentially determines the executive leadership in the research institutions, and directly affects the way an institution is organized and run. if the mission of a funding agency is to do science, clearly the scientists, who know the science the best, should be the ones determining where the research should go, and should play central role in the leadership of the institutions. whereas in the dreadful situation described by the article, if you subscribe to the logic that because America is a democratic society, science should represent the knowledge the people want to acquire, then it is arguable that science is justly used to study the aerodynamics of angels' wings. and it wouldn't be inappropriate for the leadership of NIH to be fundamentalist christians. in the case of Singapore, because of the pragmatic nature of the society, the mission for the research institutions are stated as promoting economic growth. hence, the direction of the research will be determined by the economic planning section of the government, and the leadership will be a group of management-trained executives.

how beneficial is any one arrangement is debatable though. as long as the scientists insist that they know the science best and the people paying for the research or governing the state claim that they know how to best spend the money, the discussion will not conclude. most people will tend to take a middle ground i imagine, to say (like yc did say) that there should be space for both parties to have a say in the research. However, I still stand by the opinion that the open-endedness nature of scientific discoveries requires that scientists be allowed maximal autonomy. stale and still true is that no one knows what will come out of any studies. and it's not like none of the scientists cares about the survival of the species, or the country's economy, for that matter. some scientists are interested in basic research, some in applied research. therefore, it's a fair mixture of people and interests. I don't see an urgent need for smearing public opinion in their faces, let alone dictating the research. However, a quality control system that puts scientists' progress under public scrutiny is quite just, although it'll involve the high complexity of panel organization and selection.

Come all ye scientists, busy and exhausted. O come ye, O come ye, out of the lab

nature just published a short study on how hard pple work around christmas... lol..
Read more here if you have access to nature.com. such a pain in the ass... shouldn't they make these short articles free?

** on a hind sight, because the rest of the plate looks interesting too, i decided to do this:

well i have 12 min while waiting to go home, so i thought i'd blog.

so many things happened recently that i think i've stopped being bored by my life. suddenly it's a mixture of delight, sadness, surprises, puzzles, discomfort at once, like a melodrama.

the day we went to hear our juniors carol at esplanade, the old farts got so nostalgic that we couldn't help but burst into songs in the city link mall, attracting much attention from strangers. and when we sang les fleurs, mohan mentioned that he liked calme des nuits better and joce said that we screwed it up. it's like a title from my deepest dreams :p... i honestly couldn't remember any line from that song, even after he sang a couple verses from both bass and sop parts. and when i came back, i searched in itunes store for that song, and found the cd that i listened to again and again in the whole of j2 and j3, that faure's requiem by monteverdi choir, with a load of other french choral work. calme des nuits, les fleurs, des pas dans l'allee, dieu! qu'il a fait bon regarder!, trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis... and it felt as if they had disappeared. complete erasure (thanks man, i learnt this word.) i wonder what happened between now and then. of all the times i missed jc times, this time was the most surprising. how is it possible that i totally forgot about half a dozen songs that used to be my favourites! i even translated the lyrics of trois beaux oiseaux into chinese... it's such a mystery....sigh

anyway,
Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder
la gracieuse bonne et belle;
pour les grans biens que sont en elle
chascun est prest de la loüer.
Qui se pourrait d'elle lasser?
Toujours sa beauté renouvelle.
Par de ça, ne de là, la mer
nescay dame ne damoiselle
qui soit en tous bien parfais telle.
C'est une songe que d'y penser:
Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder.

Just one of those things

because of the puppies' request for me to play choral songs in a certain hotel room in vienna, i dug out our syf finals recordings from eons ago. i haven't listened to these in years literally, and this following song in particular brought me to a smile (yeah, like this :) )

It was just
one of those things
It was just
one of those crazy flings
one of those bells
that now and then rings
just one of those things
it was just one of those nights
just one of those fabulous flights
a trip to the moon
on gossamer wings
just one of those things

if we thought a bit
of the end of it
when we started painting the town
we'd have been aware
that our love affair
was too hot to cool down

so goodbye and amen
here's hoping we meet now and then
it was great fun
but it was just one of those things


our performance wasn't great haha, rhythm was all over the place and some notes were obviously out. but it was so delightful and there was so much life in it. so much so that i can't help singing along whenever i played it again. (and each time i have a mental movie clip of toh trying to demo to us the sound and look of particular words. "jaaaahst" "rinnnnnggg" "baell" "ok!" "tres bien!") and the tone was totally different from the previous songs, probably just cos we were finishing up the competition performance with that song. hahaha.. but yeah, it was great fun, but it was just one of those things... ironically now that i'm reading the lyrics again, i realise that when we were singing it i didn't even think about the meaning of the words at all. and now it strikes me how interesting and true the words are. lol... and i probably don't have the energy and time to sing it anymore.

anyways, so the choral part of me hasn't actually died. and it's nice to know that :)

I haven't blogged about my trip.. :P


I am sitting in a room at Hotel Savoy, Vienna now. Through the window, I can see windows of perhaps other hotel rooms, or some random apartment rooms. They are very ugly. I wish I had the view of Mozart's apartment. I walked by this particular window when I was on the tour there, through which I could see a curved alley, with white apartment buildings that had pretty window sils on both sides. that itself looked like a sketch of some sort.

(i wonder what mozart would've written if he had lived to old age.)

(hmm, i need to go for breakfast. i think i should blog about the trip later)

the company i have on this trip is fabulous. even though things changed quite a bit, getting together to sing is still a joy. and it's a wonder how the people clicked despite the age gaps. (there's a reason why these people chose to stick with toh...) this is perhaps the happiest part of the trip.

anyways. breakfast time!

i'm like so retarded cos i'm so excited about my new discovery. here:

a rennaisance trill is a quantised event, like particle behaviour. a romantic trill is a continous event, like wave behaviour.

hah. i'm so lame..

update: a purposeful life

I'm trying to gather thoughts for my statement. it's kind of in a reverse order. i should prob write the actual thing the other way...


What do I want to do?

1. The science part: Learn about neural substrates of basic behaviors in simple organisms

a. basic reward/punishment driven behaviors. i think these behaviors are evolutionarily fundamental, being the minimal and crucial requirement for survival machines(dawkins). and simple enough to understand in our life time. they are probably hugely conserved, so the comparison between species could reveal quite a bit of insights into the principles of protein functions, cellular behaviors and network organization and properties. before comparison comes the need to understand.

i. to understand how a machine survives by responding differently towards the two types of external signals such as:

Me sees manuka Honey and tells myself: This is good stuff. Go for it,

or

Me sees an unripen orange and tells myself: This is bad bad for you. Avoid it.

ii. So what Charles does is interesting in this aspect. Sensory system. The first relay in the whole “I want to eat THIS” activity. So goes for Richard Axel. And the pheromone people. the chemistry is fascinating. think rhodopsin. and the coding is cool. think olfactory system. implications of the sensory system other than for the pure sake of understanding it: prosthetics. eletronic retina. new cochlea. blah blah.

iii. But motor is also fun, just difficult to do I think. Cos it comes out of the black box, which is the brain. you can't quite see the input.. so i dont' think you can control the variables as well as in sensory system. but the coding is way cool(think how flies fly and how fish swim and how easily we walk around, while our technologies are barely good enough to make a robot who stands on two legs), although the chemistry at the end of motoneurons isn't. implications: again, prosthetics. new legs. new arm. new vocal chord.

iv. Central… em… I don’t know. both input and output seem difficult to control for. but this steps on what people most fascinatedly relate to neuroscience: things like emotions and consciousness. i don't think we are ready to do it yet. (of course according to the churchlands, maybe these things don't even exist.) but more basic than emotions, integration of information, such as sensory-motor integration at the CNS level is an very important and interesting thing, but still a bit too difficult for a phd project. implications: things that meddle with your perceptions and intentions. matrix at last...muahahahah.

vi. both the biochemistry and the computation involved in the functionality of the brain are intriguing. so i want to do both. which means, in terms of methodology i'm open to both molecular biology/biochemical studies AND electrophysiology. of course, both would be combined to new imaging techniques...

v. I'm not too thrilled about the metabolism and upkeep of the nervous system. such as neural stem cells, cancer and its immune system. they aren't what's so special about the brain and its pods, but some housekeeping phenomena that happen all over the body. so i don't quite care about alzheimer's for example. when you get old, nature tells you to die by giving your dominant mutations that kill your cells. and your proteins don't fold properly. and your cells degenerate. and you go senile. and that's that.

b. Of course I am fascinated by the complexity of my own mental life, but it is way to difficult to study thoroughly. so take back a step, studying simpler organisms are good enough. chances are the principles involved in making me walk towards and eat a red apple when i'm hungry is conserved with those that make a fly fly towards and suck on a red apple. (it could of course be convergent evolution and mechanisms might not be totally the same, but the principles are worth chasing after)Plus I don’t want to spend 2 years making a mouse. (:( i'm sorry AH.) therefore I only want to look at basic organisms:

i. Flies good. and we live in the same environment.

ii. Fishies good. and they have notochords. but the genetics sucks.

iii. But not as basic as chemotaxis in bacteria, cos I think those are sad. Even nanorods have chemotaxis

iv. even worms seem too simple. at least flies look like aircrafts, not just some tubes that lie around and have sex only

2. The engineering part: Developing new molecular tools to push the boundary of questions I can ask

a. Pretty things! (seeing is believing. - teacher)

i. Chemical biology. What Roger Tsien does is tremendously inspiring. I want to do what he does but I probably won't be able to do the chemistry (the prospect of learning some chemistry during my phd is rather dim..)

ii. New mol bio strategies. Lichtman’s brainbow mouse is quite cool. The molecular biology is rather complex, but the idea is simple. And original. I think this bit I can do. Without having to do chemistry part time.

iii. Which leads the discussion into huge data sets and computers

b. Infomatics…

i. We need more pple in imagics. Data processing should be automated. So that I can use it. I don’t have to learn programming to make use of the brilliance of computer pple but picking up a language doesn’t hurt (and I have been saying this for ages.) and being in a lab that has computer pple sure is good. (ok I see this point is lost)

3. The career path part: I want to eventually teach (everybody will be making this point)

a. I want to inspire just like how my various teachers and mentors inspired me.

b. I want to stay in academia cos I like ivory tower. It keeps the noise away.

c. I think I will like young pple. they are fun and random.

What have I done?

In secondary school, i studied the sciences. but it was not until university that i started to really appreciate the intricate beauty of biology. the most fundamental things i learnt from bio classes was the central dogma. gene functions and regulations. protein structures and functions. cell components and their behaviour. and then, because i was also particularly intrigued by the nervous system, i took neuro classes. In those classes i learnt what's inside the brain and some equations trying to model what happens in the brain. and then, genetic tools people use. ways people study genes, proteins, cells, systems and the whole animal. also learnt how to do recording (and that was very fun) of the action potentials.

then of course, while transmitting knowledge to the students, the professors can't really avoid imparting their philosophical stands on the kids too. after all i think my undergraduate education strengthened my physicalist materialist world view. main lessons i got from school:

1. Matters are made of atoms.
2. DNA is life.
3. Our mental life is brain chemistry and nothing more.

chemistry and physics kind of made my life more interesting. but not the most useful in my current endeavour. maybe one day i will be able to use principles from other fields to solve problems in biology. the lessons at least made it possible to understand sparingly what my friends from other subjects are talking about. in fact discussing stuff with peers from other fields with completely different perspectives and experiences prove to the most inspiring and enriching activity for me nowadays.

(sociology/philosphy/history/arts helped me understand day to day life and human species as a whole and made me a lot more open minded. hugely enjoyable things... but except churchland's class, they aren't particularly useful to work..the music minor helped me understand that it was after all very right of me not to choose music as a career haha. so i don't think the admission pple are gonna care about this.)

and then there was the lab experiences... i did a bunch of failed or near-failed experiments. and through all those, i learnt generally how to keep flies and fish alive. i learnt some rudimentary genetics in flies and fish.i kind of made a trangenic fly, and am now learning how to make transgenic fish. i did some molecular cloning and am still doing it. i have put DNA constructs into flies, cells, an fish. i have tried procedures such as immunostaining, in situ, real time pcr, transient expression experiments in fish, with varying degrees of success. and i took some pictures on confocal microscopes. that's hell of a microcope.. haha..

in the labs, in one of them in particular, i got quite 'wowed' by the scientists i met. these people hang around the lab most of the time, like it was a second home or something... i had the pleasure of witnessing how they plan clever experiments and do them with great enthusiam and great caution and tremendous ambition. and how they got excited by a huge range of things from principles of multiphoton excitation, to why tannin tastes astringent (of course, strictly astringency should be defined as a tactile sensation as opposed a taste), to why there are maps of representations in the brain, to watching live cam streaming a water hole somewhere in africa all day. it was a bloody cool community. a lot of work, a lot of fun.

seminars that i went to in undergraduate years were quite a highlight of my life then. apart from the cheese and punch, a great proportion of the talks are actually very exciting. some tell funny stories (esp the behaviour ones), some talk about new and never heard of techniques being developed. some raise controversial objections to existing theories. such as greenspan's micro evolution talk...most speakers try to pack way too much stuff into the short short 1 hour talk, so sometimes my brain was struggling to catch on most of the time. (on a side point, i always thought it was my problem, cos i didn't know enough.. but my PI now also complained about how american scientists like to pack overflowing amount of materials into talks and pple can't follow.) and then the debate between the challenging audience and the speaker was very exciting to watch.. it was almost like a sport lol...

through my various attachments (seriously, bless the labs and my incredible mentors who took me and endured my stupidity and clumsiness and inefficiency) i learnt more about biology, cool techniques, problem solving approaches and the working of the scientific enterprise.

My life stories

i could write about my travelling and studying. i guess. but the specific things i did don't matter. what's the most important thing about all these diverse experiences and exposure is that they make me open minded. and being open minded, i came to believe, is an quality indispensible to creative thinking and a rich life. as the chinese proverb says, read 10000 books, and travel 10000 miles. for the betterment of me as a person.

(ha. and i learnt how to use blockquote typing this entry)

Chicks That Look Like Dudes That Look Like Chicks

dude.. this is very interesting.. kind of like victor/victoria, the girl pretending to be a drag queen...


AND, even wikipeida is moving to san francisco... it is the place to be, man...

Paul Krugman looking back from 2096

this is an assignment NYT had in 1996 for economists to predict future development of world economy pretending that they were looking back in the year 2096. krugman gave some very interesting insights, some of which quite surprising, such as "the celebrity economy".

Read the article.

this is a picture done by my very talented friend Hydie in 2006. i forgot to blog about this after she gave me the permission to do it on facebook. there's such concise poetry in this little picture that i get the goose pimples whenever i look at it..

we don't think in sentences...

In Nature, not long ago.

"And getting us around is the basic evolutionary rationale of nervous systems. Unlike plants that must take what comes, animals are movers. More sophisticated behaviour emerged with improved capacities to plan, predict and draw on past experience, which improved chances of surviving and reproducing.

This observation motivated neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás, in his 2002 book I of the Vortex, to propose that, at bottom, thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement. He meant that thinking is the generation in the brain of images of a future action, and its consequences. And generating these images depends on flexibility in categorizing the current problem as an instance of one kind of event rather than another, which, in turn, depends on memory for past experience. Fundamentally, thinking is neural activity in the service of behaviour (for example, should I flee or fight? Is this attacker weak or strong?). This almost certainly shapes thinking that seems detached from motor preparation (such as, where did Earth come from?).

... If thinking is rooted in internalized movement, it may be more akin to a skill than to a syllogism. Language may not be the "stuff of thought" after all."


- Patricia Churchland Poetry in motion(1 November 2007)


And:
according to this study, the future of irregular verbs in english will be regular.

interesting links

a freakonomic look at the recent james watson issue: here

and harry potter fans out there, me not included, dumbledore is gay

and a potentially interesting thing: nature's postdocs' and students' group

Just got this in the email box

there's a downloadable repeal at http://repeal377a.com/ that you can sign and will be delivered to the parliment.

Look at What I Found!!!!

the International Music Score Library Project


it's not really international. but yah..

gay rights - petition to repeal section 377a

cow dung, gay bomb, viagra - Ig Nobel Prize 2007

read about the improbably research this year

artists get sentenced for building an apartment inside a mall parking garage...

read

Dove Self-Esteem - Another campaign?

I didn't realise that this "Dove" was the "Dove" that's standing on the shelf in my bathroom until a couple of videos later. and then somehow half of my exceitement was gone. Is this call for attention to real beauty just another acmpaign to attract real consumer interest or am that cynical i can't stand a cosmetic company truely having any public conscience?













A couple of parodies:

what do you think of accent snobbery? this highly exaggerated meaningless but flowery blabbering ties ups nicely with stephen fry's remark "I shouldn’t be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren’t fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there."

and hugh laurie dated emma thompson...!

the microcentrifuge that i usually use was occupied, so i walked over 2 bays to use another one. and as i was pressing the open button i realised that it looked exactly the same as the one Wei had. the one that was broken. my heart literally missed a beat (:p). i know before i left san diego i said i wasn't sure if i was going to missed anyone or anything there, but sometimes nostalgia creeps in without me even noticing it.

So earlier this week it occurred to me that the word "aggregation" and "gregarious" should've come from the same root "-greg-". since aggregation means to form a clump/group, and to be gregarious means to be sociable, then the root should mean something to do with "coming together" or "socialising". which means it might have been intentional that the lead role gregory house from the show house m.d. be named "gregory", for the purpose of irony.

second that occurred to me this week. the chinese call hospitals 医院，meaning institutions where medics/cures are found. the japanese call hospitals 病院, meaning institutions where patients/diseases are found. the difference between the two cultures in composing phrases perhaps shows something quite fundamental about each culture's attitude towards the normal/abnormal/norms. could it mean that the chinese are more interested in corrections of the sick/deviants while the japanese are more interested in concentrating the sick/deviants. either way sounds less comforting than the english word "hospital".

and it looks like i'm unable to write long posts anymore...and milo with coffee is great.

since i'm still stuck on the topic of monogamy, here's 5 alternative hypotheses that James Wittenberger and Ronald Tilson summarised in the article The Evolution of Monogamy: Hypotheses and Evidence. (JSTOR Link)

1. Monogamy should evolve when male parental care is both nonshareable and indispensable to female reproductive success. A female may be unable to rear offspring without nonshareable male parental assistance, either because she cannot provide them with enough food alone or because continuous attendance of offspring is essential to their survival. Hypothesis 1 applies only if females cannot rear anyoffspring within the species-typical social system without male assistance. Males may still copulate with other females (68), but they maintain a prolonged pair bond with only one mate. Hypothesis 1 implies that monogamy is advantageous for both sexes. It resembles Lack's (1 11) hypothesis for monogamy in altricial birds.

2. Monogamy should evolve in territorial species ifpairing with an unavailable unmated male is always better than pairing with an already mated male. Any benefits females might gain by breeding in a superior habitat, mating with a superior male, or cooperating with other females on a shared territory may be too small to compensate for the costs of polygyny. Since a major cost of polygyny is often lost male parental care, Hypothesis 2 covers cases where parental assistance is important but not indispensable to female success. Hypothesis 1 could be treated as a subset of Hypothesis 2, but the distinction is useful for pointing out cases where monogamy is clearly advantageous for both sexes as opposed to those where it may be advantageous only for females. Hypothesis 2 is derived from the polygyny-threshold model of Verner (227) and Orians (145).

3. Monogamy should evolve in nonterritorial species when the majority of males can reproduce most successfully by defending exclusive access to a single female. Sequestering individual females should be especially advantageous for males when sex ratios are male-biased, because the majority of males would then achieve higher success by claiming sole possession of one female rather than taking their chances in a promiscuous "lottery" system. Females may or may not benefit from being sequestered, but the costs of resisting the male's continual presence must exceed the costs of accepting his presence.

4. Monogamy should evolve even though the polygyny threshold is exceeded if aggression by mated females prevents males from acquiring additional mates. The criterion for distinguishing between Hypotheses 2 and 4 in territorial species is the magnitude of the polygyny threshold. If the polygyny threshold is exceeded, Hypothesis 4 applies. If not, Hypothesis 2 applies. In social animals Hypothesis 4 applies when aggression by a dominant female can prevent breeding by sexually mature subordinate females. The occurrence of female aggression is not sufficient evidence for accepting Hypothesis 4, because females may be aggressive for reasons other than maintenance of a monogamous pair bond.

5. Monogamy should evolve when males are less successful with two mates than with one. The presence of a second female may substantially reduce the success of a male's first mate by increasing competition for resources or increasing her conspicuousness to predators. If the combined success of both females is less than that possible for a single female, the male should enforce monogamy by excluding additional females. This hypothesis was first proposed by Trivers (224).



i don't think that hypotheses 1, 2 and 5 really apply to humans, and no. 4 is really funny. 河东狮吼。。。

lol

had dinner at gluttons' bay with a friend, who left me for a show after dinner. so i was wandering around citylink and later raffles city. maybe i was too tired (from what? the paperwork i did today?), i found wandering and windowshopping very relaxing. being in this city is so easy. i don't have to think too much before getting onto a train, which will take me to shops and eating places in no time. and then i could choose from stall to stall what to eat, and roam from shop to shop aimlessly. the variety that singapore offers is quite unique really.

and i know that i know the city much better than any other. just a week ago, i was in shanghai, trying to get a visa for entry into sg. i felt so stranded. the subway was almost the same, and so were the shopping centers. but i didn't know how to go to places, i didn't know how to speak the tongue(even though our dialects came from the same linguistic branch), and i had to use single journey tickets for train rides. it was horrible. a few days later, the moment i got to the arrival hall of changi airport, i drew cash with my atm card, bought a prepaid sim card, took a cab to my friends' place. the second day i found out that my ez link card was still functioning and i was immediately walking all over this island, resuming my old activities, catching up with old friends. (and after all these years away, it was surprisingly comforting to find that some things never change. such as the fabulous smelling $10.90 rose scent foam bath at marks and spencer.) that was when i totally felt at home. i really appreciate the independence, which i had in san diego but not in suzhou, as well as the convenicence, which i might have had in suzhou, but definitely not in san diego. and when i smsed a friend about being relieved to be in sg, he told me "welcome home". and i was happy to read that.

i think i really do like sg very much. and i'm glad i do.

Gen Me in China: A Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy

from the new article on Time:

The rise of China's Me generation has implications for the foreign policies of other nations. Sinologists in the West have long predicted that economic growth would eventually bring democracy to China. As James Mann points out in his new book, The China Fantasy, the idea that China will evolve into a democracy as its middle class grows continues to underlie the U.S.'s China policy, providing the central rationale for maintaining close ties with what is, after all, an unapologetically authoritarian regime. But China's Me generation could shatter such long-held assumptions. As the chief beneficiaries of China's economic success, young professionals have more and more tied up in preserving the status quo. The last thing they want is a populist politician winning over the country's hundreds of millions of have-nots on a rural-reform, stick-it-to-the-cities agenda.

read more on china's Me gen

today AH sent me an article on how to choose good phd advisors from sciencemag. i think we know more or less the things it's talking about, but it is nicely organized and systematic. makes a good read.

To Choose an Adviser, Be an "Armchair Anthropologist"

impressions: guilin

i'm just back from the tour to guilin with my mom... a few take home points:

1. tour groups are terrible terrible things. they rush the tourists through places of interests like cattle.

2. traveling with mom is a bad bad idea. somehow the trip can get too depressing at times.

3. guilin is an extremely pretty place, but something needs to be done to this place to improve its economy. there's only this much it can earn by conning tourists, and the money is not going to its people.

4. zhang yimou is a fucking genius. we need more people like him to transform concepts and ideas, and create values.

more to come.

chinese tv stations are just getting worse and worse. i couldn't seem to find anything worth watching all day long. so today i was flipping channels forever as usual, until i stop at this weird taiwanese tv series called the eighth pawn shop.

it is about an imaginary pawn shop to which customers could pawn any possession including tangible things such as a leg and intangible things such as talent, soul, love. for an example, in the show, a mother pawned her love for the child for the success in fashion. the grown up child, agonizing over the lack of maternal care, in turn pawned her talent in fashion design for her mother's love. then, the guilty mother pawned her eyes to take back the child's talent. things like that. you get the point.

it is a very strange concept. almost shocking at first. can we really rank the things in our lives and decide which we could lose indefinitely in order to gain the other? can we really say, i don't want the love, i just want my career, and here, you can have my love, please give me a high flying career? how could we make any of these choices when we don't really know what is to come, and from which we are to gain more? it's tempting to think, if i were to go to such a pawn shop, what would i pawn for what? and i shudder as if it was such a terrible thing.

but a little more thought reveals that it is nothing new. we are defining priorities all the time. we are disgarding some things over others every time we make a choice. ordinary choices such as spending the night at the laboratory or a nightclub and whether or not to take our eyes off the computer monitor to pay more attention to our naggy moms. the pawn shop owner just lets his customers do it a more calculative, explicit and irreversible way. we in reality, might not even weigh things as carefully. we just go ahead and decide. on what basis are we making these decisions?

what would you pawn, and for what, my friend, if the 8th pawn shop really existed?

blogger seems to have been blocked again. in china. i am so tired of this censoring thing..

on a brighter note, as i blast my stack of cds from the sound system at home, life has never been so good..

back to square one

home, parents, reality check. i have probably mentioned this a thousand times but here it is again: moving always feels unreal. areoplanes make time space change happen too quickly, i can't adjust to it. one moment i was in a carpeted apartment in la jolla, the other i'm at home, taking care not to scratch the newly polished wooden floor(mainly so that mom doesn't scream at me). i was abruptly disconnected from the previous life, but am nowhere near being connected to the next. i feel like i'm still living in the void, just like when i was in the dark aeroplane cabin traveling in between countries but not really in any, my mind phasing in and out of state of wakefulness and sleep but dreaming of nothing.

but things need to be ended and things need to begin. for a start, i should probably stop drinking. alcohol merely leaves me with dulled and mistaken sensory system, uncoordinated motor sysem and utterly chaotic central nervous system. on the other hand, like marco said, i should probably start looking at groups now. and i need to get reading for the project with ingham started. and gre is around the corner. seems like a lot of things to do.

packing always leads to surprises. found a message zhu wrote me on a purple piece of paper when we left singapore in 04. the flip side has ai yazawa's manga drawings. zhu put a quote in the message:

all existing things are born without a reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies out of chance.
-jean-paul sartre

and zhu said, we are prlonging ourselves out of weakness right now aren't we. i probably didn't give much thought to the quote at the time i received it. i was as ambitious as any student preparing to start a scientific career at a university. my life was full of purpose then, and i had nothing but confidence in me. 3 years later, i'm sure that confidence has withered a little. while i still don't think we are prolonging ourselves out of weakness, a sense of losing control of my own life did sort of creep in. maybe that's what happens when you grow old, when more and more things start to set and fewer and fewer possibilities are left for you to contemplate. maybe when i am at the age when sartre wrote the quote, i would think exactly the same things.

bb's favourite search engine

a couple of things i have been thinking about these days because i loaded my shuffle with all the music tagged "contemporary" from my library:

1. kieslowski should make movies out of kudera's books, and get arvo part to write the soundtrack.

2. the last 2 minutes of giger's tropus is haunting. the little violin voices layered at the back of the chorus sound like dead white winged creatures weeping. i want to say layered on top, but it really does sound like it occurs somewhere at the back of my mind. and the visual images i can't rid of are surprisingly the vampire maids from van helsin. that wasn't even that good a movie.

3. steve reich's after the war is brilliantly written. go listen for yourself. and his marimba pieces are just adorable.

4. i still think the poem i hide myself within my flower is very nice... (which eric whitacre set to music)


Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.

Part Three: Love

VII

I HIDE myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.

fantacy of a pale sickly child. so lonely, yearning, with almost an erotic touch. and so clever. and reminds me of another one she wrote, from the same series.

XLVII

HEART, we will forget him!
You and I, to-night!
You may forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done, pray tell me, 5
That I my thoughts may dim;
Haste! lest while you’re lagging,
I may remember him!

first born smarter?

sciencemag seems to like this type of things, such as the index finger: ring finger ratio indicating maths ability and stuff that they posted some time back.

from the urban dictionary

Internet
A vast tundra of knowledge, now corrupted and slowly imploding on itself. Those caught on the outskirts enter a void of stupidity and insecurity. Eventually, it will completely cave in on itself, and then explode with such force, we will all be sent to an information oblivion. Random bits of intelligence will float amongst vast oceans of idiocy, and all of man kind will commit suicide in a futile effort to repent for creating such a weapon of mass destruction. God will not accept their sacrifice, and everyone will go to hell, where Satan will get pissed off at the extreme overpopulation of his facilities, and send everyone to someplace copletely unihabitable, like Utah.

digital immigrant
Someone who grew up before the digital age and is fairly new to the internet. Basically anyone over the age of 28.
YouTube is foreign to the digital immigrant.

BCG
Birth Control Glasses. Generally a military term which refers to the large, blocky glasses issued to military personnel who require the use of corrective lenses.

Man, these BCGs make me look like a complete idiot.

programmer's tan
The pasty white tan of a person who works over eighty hours a week and never gets any sun.

Bill's been doing a lot of hours lately -- he's really working on his programmer's tan.

Computer
a machine for downloading porn

"oh no, the computer broke, i ejaculated all over the keyboard"

generation y
children of boomers born from about generation from about 1977 to age old enough to remember 9/11.

gen y began with corporate watered down versions of gen x music (hip-hop and heavy metal,) after the shit load of that swedish music and boy band phase of the early gen y kids. For this many gen y kids have turned to their parents old albums from the 60's and 70's.

pampered by our boomer parents to do good and go far in life sociologists predict a backlash.

gen y has been said to be a clone of gen x, but there are notable differences.

gen y rewrites the rules and works around authority rather than go against it like gen x. This will lead us to get higher in corporations and better paying jobs that gen x was forced to do. Also gen y knows the impact of money.

early failures are that of SUV's fuck those gas guzzlers that kill the air. Hummers and are for ass holes.

blah blah blah we grow up and die
then fertilize the world

we were raised by grand theft auto!

google maps-street view

look at this!

i was hungry after setting up a couple of reactions this morning, so i went to the price center for a cup of cheap cocoa and a piece of marble cake. the cocoa was a little too hot for the season, so i dont think i will get it any more this year. therefore i was sitting in the open, sipping my cocoa on a sunny and breezy la jolla morning for the last time, listening to arvo part's lamentate. i'm sure part didn't intend his music this way, but whenever i am not feeling much or don't know what to feel, the music feels emotionless. the sparse piano sounds just fills the blank spaces between my equally sparse thoughts. but it's quiet, like a whisper. and i like that. so for a moment, everything was perfect, the breeze, the sun, the sweet cocoa, lubimov's fingers on the keys, the ambient noises making its way through the earphones, and those that were coming from my roaming brain. everything coming through different channels, nothing is blocking anything else. and all was harmonious.

blank

nature publishes mentoring guide. kids.. read this to identify good mentors.

一只强博。怎么以前没见过？

Gisele Bundchen

i was flipping through the latest vs catalogue (not sent to me) and i saw this woman:


she is HOT! there's something about her looks, which makes everyone else look like either bithes or country pumpkins. or little girls. goodness. i would rather quit my job if i had to compete with this woman..

(ok. i just googled. she is the highest-paid model alive. oh well... looks like my taste is quite mainstream :) )

boredom III

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Boston   You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don't. Of course, that doesn't mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.
The West
The Midland
North Central
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

boredom II

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 80% Supergirl 72% Green Lantern 70% Superman 70% Catwoman 70% Wonder Woman 67% Iron Man 65% Robin 57% Hulk 55% The Flash 50% Batman 35%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

final week boredom

Your dating personality profile: Funny - You laugh often. People never accuse you of lacking a sense of humor. You don't take yourself too seriously. Liberal - Politics matters to you, and you aren't afraid to share your left-leaning views. You would never be caught voting for a conservative candidate. Wealthy/Ambitious - You know what your goals are and you pursue them vigourously. Achieving success is important to you.

Your date match profile: Funny - You consider a good sense of humor a major necessity in a date. If his jokes make you laugh, he has won your heart. Adventurous - You are looking for someone who is willing to try new things and experience life to its fullest. You need a companion who encourages you to take risks and do exciting things. Conservative - Forget liberals, you need a conservative match. Political discussions interest you, and a conservative will offer the viewpoint you need.

Your Top Ten Traits 1. Funny 2. Liberal 3. Wealthy/Ambitious 4. Big-Hearted 5. Adventurous 6. Intellectual 7. Outgoing 8. Practical 9. Romantic 10. Sensual

Your Top Ten Match Traits 1. Funny 2. Adventurous 3. Conservative 4. Big-Hearted 5. Wealthy/Ambitious 6. Outgoing 7. Practical 8. Sensual 9. Intellectual 10. Romantic

Take the Online Dating Profile Quiz at Dating Diversions

江湖写： 怀想作文 。当年我搜一首诗不幸落到他给他家千金写的博客上，又辗转到他写给自己的博客，结果成了每天必看的消遣专栏，到现在也看了一年多了。一只大强。

i have probably seen ig nobel prize before, or even blogged about it... but today my mentor was telling me about the mini-humans thing and it was damn funny.

江湖的新帖

妈妈打电话过来，我对着电话噼里啪啦乱叫了一通，才发现自己的生活多么混乱。其实只是这个礼拜混乱，因为课题终于要做完了，演出演了，课也都要上完了。专修也出来了，副修也出来了。本科终于要解决了，可以前进了。

我当然知道科研是不容易的，老妈。可是，即便对于失败有充分准备的人也难以逃避失败所带来的失望。不过，有准备与没有准备的区别在于，有准备的人分析造成失败的原因，承认自己的不足后就继续前进了。我是有备而来，所以属于败不馁型，而且经常以后发之才自居。没有什么可担心的。过两天就好了。：）

今天看别人的博客，看见一句话很好玩，说“衣服千万不能试，万一合适怎么办啊？”真是精辟。哈哈。

JOVE-journal of visualized experiments

finally the scientific community decided not to waste their humangous servers and internet2 connection, but to catch up with youtubers. here's an exciting new journal that presents video demonstrations of visualized experiments... i would've been able to do IVF on zebrafish if this was in place 1 1/2 years ago...

poster

the nightmarish poster session is finally over. as usual, i feel no relief after it, but a sense of emptiness, just like how i feel after all the exams i took. but this time, it's particularly depressing.

many months of work looks tiny on a poster. when people come along i say, "eh.. i made that fly.. yeah.. it didn't work" and i shrug like i just spent a fortnight doing it and it was nothing much. or, i point at some data and say "this looks like it could be working, potentially", and when my listener doesn't show much expression on his face i shrug again to show that i wasn't convinced either. or when i say "if it worked, it could be revolutionary!" and i witness that statement drop down dead on the cold hard floor in front of me...

i'm beyond the age when i could still say at the end of the day "but it was fun", or "it was the experience that counts". i'm at a place where i need to see something happen, or i'd start to doubt if i was cut for science at all. i only care about the results. yeah. i'm that pathetic.

Look at Her!

from time magazine:

The State of Divorce: You May Be Surprised
The annual national divorce rate has dropped to 3.6 per 1000 people, the lowest since 1970 and well off its peak of 5.7 in 1981. But marriage is down 30% since 1970, with the number of unnmarried couples living together up 10-fold since 1960.

Creature Comforts

Creature Comforts... came up during the seminar on evolution today... given by Sean Carroll

黄豆豆

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hRRS-rMvR4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cayXgQFlAZs&mode=related&search=

this guy is one the chinese equivalent of american idol... he's not bad eh??

社会不和谐，广告惹的祸？

i youtubed for old TV show intros... here's the old stuff.. :) how i loved it!! and i almost forgot i grew up watching she-ra and he-man! haah..

Dark Matter The Movie

"But the movie isn’t really about science.

As Mr. Chen, the director, said, “It’s about power, in a way.” That would be the nearly feudalistic power that a graduate adviser has over his student, who after 16 or more years sitting in a classroom listening and regurgitating information must now change gears and learn how to produce original research. That grueling process has been the crucible in which new scientists are made ever since Plato mentored Aristotle, and although it rarely leads to murder [adjoining article], it can often lead to disaffection, strife and lifelong feuds. "

Read the NYT article

and i can't help wondering why the university has refused to reveal the letters that Lu Gang wrote before action. maybe he should've sent it to NBC instead...

everyone is blogging about the fun we had.. haha.. i only remember one thing :)

kayaking in the middle of the ocean!!! the best is to just lie there... the sky looks incredibly large and empty when its blue fills every pixel on your retina.. imagine.. nothing but the sky is in sight, nothing but the bobbing of water is in your ear, nothing is in your mind but the tiny hope that it lasts longer... while you're gently rocked by the water up and down. i haven't felt so much at ease for years...if i owned a kayak, i would go out there in the ocean every morning and just lie there for a whole day... :p

(yah but of course good things never last and i had to be pulled back to reality by some idiot who splashed cold seawater on my face.)

i was shopping for mother's day cards yesterday.. and came across this card that says "coporate top, perfect homemaker, best mom!" and got a little scared by the enthusiasm people have over the newly emancipated female sex of the species... how is one supposed to do that?

another observation. as i was discussing this over dessert with a friend, i think witticism is highly related to the power relation in a conversation. i believe that 5 minutes into a conversation, even between strangers, the power relation is established. and from then on only the domineering party can afford to be witty all the time. probably just cos it takes a great deal of confidence to be witty. wonder if there is any, how the neural circuit for humour is like... definitely has a positive input from the "confidence center".

recently me and my friends been talking a lot about relationships and stuff.. there's one thing i've been thinking about, which is the difference between the singaporean kids and american kids in the terminology for being "in a relationship". the singaporean kids say "so and so are attached", whereas the american kids say "so and so are going out", or "so and so are dating". the latter is clearly a verb reflecting the activity of the two people, while the former is a adjective, mainly reflecting the status of the two people. difference in mindset no?

Startle response

at a popping balloon (click image to learn more). from the current issue of journal of neuroscience.

free hugs

this free hug dude so cute...

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all.

CHORUS:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've one but one Earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by life and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above.

(c) Billy Bragg, circa 1990

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