"I always thought that would be sort of exciting." I didn't really, I was trying to be responsive, but I was conscious as soon as I'd closed my mouth of the schoolgirl gushiness of the remark.

"Exciting." He snickered briefly. "I used to think that. It looks exciting when you're an eager brilliant undergraduate. They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I'm doing to fid out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place..."

Magaret Atwood The Edible Woman

proxy string bookmark

A* people who use firefox, and are sick of typing .ejproxy.a-star.edu.sg into your address bar, or worse, going through brenner library everytime you come across a paper online, which you have found through pubmed or whatever science literature search engine, here's a solution. Drag this link A* Proxy to the bookmark bar of your firefox browser. and name it as you like. whenever you're at a paper with limited access, click the book mark. and then you log in if you haven't yet, or just wait for the paper to load if you've logged in once already.


I of course know zero java script codes. it's modified from MIT's reload via MIT libs.

(And btw, you can install firefox on your computer. just save and open the whole installation package on your desktop.)

Dafen Painters

Here's a post my friend shared on google reader. Pretty interesting story about these replica painters in Dafen, Shenzhen, China. I used know a replica painter myself. When i was taking night classes at the academy, he used to hang around the classrooms painting replicas. he was probably a friend of the teachers, who never charged him for anything. I remember him having an extra little finger, and that he was painting this portrait of a southern woman sitting beside a stream. i remember him telling us about being paid 50 yuan a painting. not a big sum considering the amount of time he spent doing them. looking back now, i think he was probably a student trying to make some extra bucks to pay for the tuition.

google in bio

back to the days i just started my infatuation with google, i was convinced nonetheless that they were going to stick a foot into human genetics and prayed for the day to come so that i might remotely have a chance to work for them.

that day's nearer now though. google is finally expressing interest in supporting genetics companies, for example, 23andMe, a company that sergey's wife anne co-opened. hah. I KNEW IT. it won't be long before they go into neurons. we'll just wait and see.

and to all the communism-basher mocking the central political bureau with lousy jokes, shut your big mouth. i don't see you coming up with any workable socio-political theories or managing a whole bloody country...

Wanna Download An Entire Website?

I asked a friend for good C++ primers, so she directed me to the website of one of the classes she took and TA'ed at UBC. In addition to the fact that i know nothing about c++, i.e. i need everything on the website unselectively, I have another problem. I don't have internet at home. The website has about a million pages and files. So I needed a quick way to grab the entire site onto my thumb drive, and bring it home with me, as opposed to clicking my fingers off saving the files one by one.

so i googled "download entire website" and found numerous applications that do that. however, my office computer is well guarded against users who want to install stuff. so i had to add "firefox" to the string of search queries. turned out that firefox does have an extension that does the job. so now the little application is mirroring the whole website while i type away here....yet another triumph of firefox over the centralized control of my office computer admins!

oh it's done.

i love google. i love firefox.

on tibet riots in the eyes of the western media

i wrote this for a mailing list but i thought i might as well put it here for the record. i'm too lazy to translate it as of now. maybe later

the original discussions stemmed from this post

1. 英美曾分别试图在西藏插一脚，所以他们于西藏问题的立场并不中立。而他们的报道偏激有欠真实，也并不奇怪。别的西方国家的立场被这两个国家影响得很厉害，所以也有点跟腔的意思。虽然说美国以自己媒体独立为傲，但是美国的媒体毕竟是美国人开的，国家的立场还是会不知不觉地渗透进去的。立场一偏，证据就有可能有偏颇。完全准确的媒体好像也是没有的， 总免不了一点编造，或者三人成虎的成分。好的媒体不好的媒体，只是编造多少而已。再说，英美媒体连切身的家事都报道不清(譬如大选)，不要说跟他关系不大的西藏问题。我觉得这次他们拼命报道这个事情，主要是乘着奥运搅和搅和，并不见得想负多少责任。看来，以后我对英美于中国的报道更要批判地看。

这次资讯混乱，和国内把外国媒体都赶出西藏也有关系。我们确实要改改习惯，一出事情就关门总不是个办法。

令我愤怒的是这些外国人利用我们国内的不和来达到自己的目的。台湾大选，西藏动乱也被国民党和民进党纷纷搬到台上来讲。唯恐天下不乱。我新近学了个说法，这个叫做消费别人的悲剧。真讨厌。

2. 国内的互联网实在是令人心寒。不知道大家有没有同感。一是中文互联网上传的东西准确性极有问题，大家喜欢转贴，传说，不太喜欢（像褚辞杨波同学一般）考据。二是帖子里普遍感情因素比较重，不太客观。 有点事情就惊叹号泛滥，骂人的话四处乱流（举不胜举，），而且说来说去几句民族主义的话。这种发泄风格也已经蔓延到了facebook上。西藏，新疆，台海这些问题都历史老长了，各方都犯过错，积怨多，各种因素复杂，以致现时的对错其实并不明显。因此解决办法也不是一句两句统一的口号或一行两行惊叹号说得清的。我觉得要理性，从长计议。越骂人越显得我们没理。

3. 西藏这个问题，或是疆独，或是台海，只要我们维持现状，纠纷总是会有的。再这样，每次一出事就追究谁对谁错，吵得不可开交，没什么建设性。我们真正需要的是从大局考虑有建设性的分析。 以后怎么办？政治上压制可行吗?经济策略有效吗?如果政治上的压制受国外人权主义舆论牵制，而经济上支援也不见效，那怎么办？能不能从文化上统一？

满人与藏蒙和平相处的政策是值得借鉴的。我在课上学的，清政府的基本政策是，承认喇嘛佛教，于是西藏以为自己在精神上指引清政府，而清政府认为自己在政治上统治西藏。这样一来双方各居其所，并不起冲突。 现在我们当然不可能回过去信佛教，可是我确实觉得文化上的理解与和解是关键。其中，与达赖谈话是关键。达赖说，"I am a simple Buddhist monk -- no more, no less"这是扯淡，扯给以前不明真相的西方人听的。在西藏宗教领袖从来也就是本地的政治领导。现在大家当然不会这么天真了。我们要和达赖谈。我们也要想怎么处理藏佛教的问题。我们的政府不信教，但在藏民心中，宗教还是占有相当高的地位。这一点短期内是不会改变的。所以也许我们需要折衷的办法。北京在解决西藏的问题上动了很多脑子，现在看来要动更多的脑子才行。

4. 不管统一与否，我觉得民生最重要。衡量西藏政策成功与否应该有一个客观的标准。首要标准应当是当地藏民和汉人的物质生活和精神生活质量。大家生活稳定，自然这个区域就稳定了。这其实比打还是不打，或者统还是不统的问题都重要。我的想法比较天真，当然中共和达赖都不会完全这么想。但北京花了这么多心思与达赖谈判，又实行了这么多年的软政策，而不是像美国人杀绝印第安人一样打进去，说明还是有戏的。所以我觉得西藏问题难解决，却并不无望。

我买了前一期的亚洲周刊，里面很多分析都很中肯。 所以我扫描了一些文章，大家有兴趣的话可以看看。亚洲周刊西藏动乱报道

the economist也作了一个特别报道，有些照片。The Economist's Report on The Tibet Riot
According to The Economist, their correspondent "by chance" "arrived just before the eruption of anti-Chinese rioting by Tibetan monks and others. He was the only western journalist in tibet as the violence continued for several days, leaving many dead"

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early


Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports


In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?


Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters


In The Know: How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly?

TalkingCock presents

Facebook v.s. MySpace

"The "conclusion" of my article should not have been a big deal, but I had to put it out there because so many folks weren't acknowledging it and the press kept perpetuating the view that MySpace was dead because Facebook was taking over. We used to have this utopian view that the Internet would solve all of our societal divisions. On the Internet, no one would know you're a dog, right? The reality is that all of society's issues are simply perpetuated online. And that's frustrating. I liked the utopian dream better, even if it's not real. But if we accept the reality - that the Internet mirrors and magnifies offline values and views - we must start to think of what the implications of this are. Society is in a dangerous position when people who are different do not interact. This is how intolerance breeds and we definitely have enough of that in this country."

by danah boyd
From the response to the critique of the essay on class division between facebook and myspace users

Falling Goats

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:

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: