Thursday, December 27, 2007
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
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
"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
Monday, December 24, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
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
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
Thursday, December 20, 2007
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.
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:
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:
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
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 :)
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 :)
Saturday, December 08, 2007
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 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!
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
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
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:
2. The engineering part: Developing new molecular tools to push the boundary of questions I can ask
3. The career path part: I want to eventually teach (everybody will be making this point)
What have I done?
My life stories
(ha. and i learnt how to use blockquote typing this entry)
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)
Monday, November 12, 2007
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...
AND, even wikipeida is moving to san francisco... it is the place to be, man...
Monday, November 05, 2007
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.
Read the article.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
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.
"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.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
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
and harry potter fans out there, me not included, dumbledore is gay
and a potentially interesting thing: nature's postdocs' and students' group
Thursday, October 11, 2007
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.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Look at What I Found!!!!
the International Music Score Library Projectit's not really international. but yah..
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
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