"If you can't finish the project in 4h, you should spend the first hour planning on how to make full use of the next 3h" ~some professor in IR/PS

I agree, fluorescent proteins are so pretty. Went to this seminar on development of sea urchin embryo, wow, the pictures are so fantastic, no wonder their pictures are on covers of magazines so often.

My mol bio professor was pregnant, disappeared 1/4 through the quarter and probably won't come back this quarter. My mentor is pregnant and she has disappeared.. wonder how long it'll take before she comes back. Maybe it'll be better to work with Darren instead..

Shopping for labs. Got a rather good offer I think, but I'm pretty lousy at judging, seeing how I passed up a HHMI guy last time to be the solutions/ autoclave girl. Should I keep shopping? Talking about labs, I realise how little PIs have to judge someone.. What do they know about me? Nothing. Grades are rather irrelevant, past lab experience, I don't have much. All that he is attracted to is my plan to grad in 3 yrs. That shows I have a drive? whatever, I'm not complaining, as long as they take me. Even though this is not exactly moral acc to Kant.

Talking about Kant. He says that human beings can only be treated as ends and not means. If I follow that and do my duty to fellow rational beings, I ought to reject Minh. Wait, duties are categorical imperatives, which means the if shouldn't be in my sentence at all. So, if I buy Kant's theory at all, I should just say No. Especially since from sy's analysis, he doesn't fit any of the criteria and there's no way I'm doing this for anything else but fun, I should stop hanging people in midair and say no.

Was at I-cafe today. This Dutch girl sat down at my table and said to this NZ girl, I'm going to get married. She visited her Indian boyfriend some time back and he proposed unofficially. So now they have to go through some official proposal ceremony thing and she's all scared. Then some other Dutch girl sat down and started talking about this African guy she's seeing. Apparently that's the 2nd African guy that she has dated. Wow this is really I-cafe.

Career
New Year. People have been wishing me 恭喜发财 which I always think is rather inappropriate because there's no way I can 发财 any time soon. Secondly shouldn't 恭喜发财 be something you say to people AFTER they 发财? Since you're congratulating them on their wealth gain..

Need to find a good lab where I can do something significant. Need to package myself into something delectable for now and for 2 years later. Getting into a grad school isn't anywhere near easy and I'm not doing enough to make the process easier.

Recent debate over direction of biomed research. Pretty amusing to see 2 people who refuse to give in to each other argue publicly.

New Year
went to Ranch yesterday and saw jessica, and she gave me a 红包. haha. So nice of her. Dinner party. Thought i sent invitations to everyone that i should, but turned out I still missed people. And next time I'll make more edible food, food that's confirmed to be edible. Bridge is fun. i'm going to miss my bridge buddies when they graduate.

Oh wow they won! yay! 1st in San Diego County!

Ok.. back from a long absence. Blogging less nowadays, been busy..

Science Olympiad regionals today. Seriously, I'm a lousy teacher. A booming voice really helps if you're a elementary/ middle school teacher.. The place felt like Singapore orientation today. Stations everywhere, kids move to different stations to do their tests, get briefed at the station, then try to win their test against the other schools. Just that they've been preparing this for 4 months. It was quite a coordinating mess, since the whole thing is run by parents in a school that is not familiar to anyone. So you see 2 kinds of parents, one kind that are just hanging around everywhere gossiping and the other kind who are running around crazily to coordinate everything, like what the orientation leaders do.

I was watching the "storm the castle" event. The participants had to build a catapult (before hand) to fire balls at a box and you win if you hit the box in 3 tries. Quite hard. Not many people can do it, but there were some fantastic catapults though, shooting very very far. Reminds me of the ice-cream stick catapult that we made in RJ. None of these catapults fell apart after shooting. They're good. =)

It's just crazy that everything is organised by parents. How good a school is is determined by the power of parents. If the parents are lousy, too bad, your school won't even have a Science Olympiad team.