This is weird.. what am i doing?

Craig Venter's talks

Went to listen to Craig Venter today. I can't help but be impressed by what he's accomplished and what he's doing. He's a very ambitious person and a very confident one. He claims that his sequencing of Mycoplasma genitalium is completely accurate. That is a very bold claim. Anyway he wants to start synthesising thousands of genomes every day. Note that's synthesizing, making, creating chemically from scratch... and not just sequencing.

He's either a very smart man or he has some very smart people working for him.. It could be both. Cos every thing that he does is lucrative hot topics. Human genome in 9 months. Personal human diploid genome. Transformation of one bacteria species to other by whole genome transplant. Making a synthetic genome. Doubling the number of bacteria genomes sequenced to date in a single Sorcerer trip. Designing organisms to produce fuels. Makes me want to be a scientist again. Even though my expt techniques absolutely suck.

I should go back to studying my sympatholytics and mimetics... like clonidine and propranolol and prazosin and physostigmine and carbacol and.....

Went for a seminar today about circadian rhythms in bacteria. They wanted to mutate every single gene in the bacteria to see the effects on the rhythm. Every single gene. That's 2700. You know how much cloning that is? And I can't even do a single cloning right. And the speaker flashed a whole long list of undergrads who helped them clone, it was a pretty long list. Bacteria people are fun. They draw all kinds of things with bacteria on plates. So this group drew a sun in one plate and a moon in another and fixed a promoter that is under circadian control to a fluorescent protein. And the sun lit up for 12h and the moon lit up for 12h. How cool!

Singapore Complaints Choir

http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2008/01/complaints-choi.html for lyrics and the story.

It's quite funny even though it doesn't always rhyme and there's this part where they imitated the anthem.

"All the bus stops have tilted benches" yeah, what's up with that?
"We don't recycle any plastic bags, But we purify our pee"
Pretty weird huh...

And is it just me or do I some people in the choir look familiar?

I'm taking weird classes, as in classes that are very different from the prev classes that I've taken. First, dance class, we actually dance. Then psyc class, the professor does experiments to try to trick our minds every class. Music, the musician tells us weird stuff about composers. You think I'm weird? Go listen to these people, people like Satie who only eats white-coloured food and has 7 sets of the same suit to wear every day. Go listen to their music, like Schoenberg's Colours where a chord is passed subtlely from one instrument to the next. Surprisingly, I'm having fun in the class. And microbial genetics class, the professor thinks he's more prokaryotic than eukaryotic. That's fine, so I have a microbe for a professor. And he's super environmentally active and political. Probably the most environmental activist I've met so far.. which is why I have all these links on the environment and why I've been going for seminars on environment..

Went snowboarding last weekend. Wow that was fun... and tiring... and lots of falling. And I have to say I'm surprised at how fast Jason recovered from his "illness". Snowboarding looks so easy. The kids do it perfectly and we big kids just go fall every few steps. haha.

Links

Some links to share..

Story of Stuff
interesting animation on the amount of pollution we create just by having stuff. Love how they said that America is run by consumerism.. Yup that's what make economists happy, more people spending money, more people getting money, everybody feels rich. Everyone except the environment.. Use less stuff!!



And this...
Global over-population is the real issue

I've always thought the world wars were a way to control population and I thought I was way too heartless. But population is a big problem and every country just want to increase its own population so it could take over the world. Countries need to stop being selfish and control population now, it's not just countries with huge populations like China and India, but other countries as well. Yes aging population in a country causes economic and social problems, but if the human population is going to stress the earth any more than we are doing already, there will be bigger problems to worry about. I totally agree that the president of this country is wrong to not supporting abortion.

Crazy music

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/reserves/lp000/text/pierrot.html
The music sounds absolutely insane... Especially part 2. Click on the ear+ music to listen. Crazy 20th century music.. Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire

http://www.oppi.uku.fi/opk/video/ujbb/mp3.htm
Blues band on Pharmacology

Singapore at night

Got pretty pictures must show off..




This is an example of over exposure, look like the sun came out already.



It's Christmas




Orchard


This is my best fireworks pic. Too bad my lens cover didn't open completely. =(

Back in San Diego. Back to Singapore over the holidays, I don't feel that I've done much but was pretty busy every day. Meeting friends, running lots of errands and being a tourist. Found some amazing places, Clarke Quay is very pretty at night or maybe pretty's not the word, it's classy.
Chek Jawa is a nice place to see one-armed crabs, I didn't remember their names.. Ok, I think it's fiddler crab. And it's cool that we saw a horseshoe crab too, really ancient creature. Old enough to 摆在那里给大家.
The new park connectors that connect east coast park to the other parks in the east are nice routes to cycle on.. Might do that some day when I feel like biking. And I found out how flat Singapore is.. no wonder I have so much trouble biking in SD.
Underwater World. There are so many more exhibits. All the different crabs, some huge ones (the Japanese spider crab can have a leg span of over 3m), some hairy ones, some ancient-looking ones. It was really cool, wish I spent more time in there. And apparently there was some fish reflexology thingy where the fish bites off the dead skin from your feet. Jessica was very interested in it. I was disgusted.
Check it out

Was reading my autograph book.. Nv did have an autograph book in JC. Should have asked for one cos it's really fun reading them. Found this super funny poem. Here it is..
I'm a fish
You're a duck
I swim to you
To wish you luck.
=)
Ah... I have some funny friends

Getting inertia again.. suddenly don't feel like leaving san diego and go home. 3 weeks might not be that short after all

Al was introducing Gateway cloning the other day.. and i felt that we're quite suaku for not knowing about this earlier. Basically you clone using homologous recombination instead of ligation. No more worrying about low efficiency ligations, just PCR and recombine.

P was presenting about the complex. Looking at where she's going, she's really going to get a Cell paper. Now she thinks that my protein is a substrate for hers.. why didn't you tell me any of these before? Whatever.. Now you can go KO ur own gene and work it out.. maybe after the phosphatase gets KO-ed. I believe that my new gene does something too.
1 thing I have to admit about this woman. She's capable. She wants to be a PI and is definitely working towards it. I can imagine her being a PI and she would be quite good at it, though she might be a micromanager. Already, she's presenting her work as if it's the most impt thing in the world..

I can't make up my mind. Every time I hear a new thing, or someone speaks enthusiastically about something, I get interested. The other day I heard about an interesting mechanism how G proteins get turned on and affect their effectors. Suddenly biochem sounds appealing again, imagining how things work at the molecular level was very fun. But I'm pretty sure I don't want to be a biochemist. I guess the only good thing is that I'm allowing the many options to stay open..


More bio talk. Had the symposium for Embryology lab. It's absolutely a party, with all kinds of exotic snacks from Trader Joe's, lots of Cuties and champaigne! Champaigne in class, can you believe it? Anyway many people did very amazing experiments and got very fantastic results. RA and ethanol produced some pretty screwed up tadpoles. But the most impressive results are the transplants and ablations. This group chopped off the tail of a young tadpole and transplanted into the belly of another. The host grew to have 2 tails and the donor lived without a tail. Another group did something even more amazing. They chopped a young tadpole into 2 (anterior and posterior), rotated the 2nd part of the embryo 180 degrees and allowed the tadpole to heal. Guess what? The tadpole managed to heal and the 2 body parts stuck to each other and formed a complete tadpole! And what's more fantastic was that the spinal cord moved from the top of the embryo in the front to the bottom of the embryo at the back cos the tail region was rotated 180 degrees. The heart was displaced to the side and the anus was on top of the tadpole instead of the bottom. I thought that was the most amazing result of the day. Very creative experiment.


Of course our results were way too cool too. We produced 2 headed tadpoles by transplanting the organizer of an early frog gastrula to the ventral region of another gastrula. And our 100% survival rate was way too impressive. I don't know how we got such successful results but we did. The other organizer transplant groups had pretty sad results. Maybe it's really because my side of the lab is warmer.


Controls. The one on top is a normal tadpole. The round ball is the donor of an Organizer (organizer sends out signals to pattern the embryo). The one at the bottom is a negative control where we stuffed a piece of non-organizer tissue into the spot where we normally put the organizer.

2 headed tadpoles!! And a 2-tailed one. We were escatatic when we saw these.
Yay! Felicia and I with our prof.

Bomb!

December 7, 2007
SAN DIEGO: The FBI is asking for the public's help in identifying who planted a fake bomb that led to the evacuation of University of California San Diego medical school buildings at the La Jolla campus Wednesday.

Authorities made public yesterday a letter left by the Animal Liberation Front, an animal rights group that claimed responsibility for planting the fake bomb. Authorities also released a recording of a bomb threat phoned to the university.

“We are asking the public to look at the font, word usage and misspelled words that could help identify the author,” Special Agent Darrell Foxworth said. “Listen to the words used, the pace of speech and background noise to identify . . . who made the phone call.”

The first call, received Tuesday night, threatened the university's animal research program.
On Wednesday morning, a letter was delivered to UCSD, along with two telephone calls that claimed the group would detonate explosive devices at campus research buildings.

About 10:30 a.m., a UCSD employee found a suspicious package in the Leichtag Family Foundation Biomedical Research Building that authorities later determined was a fake device made to look like a bomb.

Medical school buildings were evacuated but reopened that evening.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Joint Terrorism Task Force at (858) 565-1255 or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-TIPS (8477). –J.L.J.
~ San Diego Union Tribune

Friday was a phenomenal day. Firstly it rained. 50.3mm of rain in one day. Where did all the water come from? There were threats of mudslides in those places which were burnt a month back.

Secondly and most importantly. Friday was the day when I confirmed that I've got knockouts. Woohoo! Finally managed to knock a gene out of Dicty. I could almost forget that Susan practically did the whole thing for me.. So the expts and learnings finally start. A was doing Southerns and developed right after me and we couldn't help peeking at his film and gloating over how much cleaner our film looked. It's absolutely terrible of us, terrible ethics..

Then went to look at my transplants. There's a slight chance of a head developing. But there are many other good transplants. I was rather efficient on Thurs.. Now I just have to worry about how to explain all the strange developments.. I think I've got a tadpole with 3 tails. Bizarre.

And then went for a TA party organised by my Metabolic prof. So nice of him. He has a very nice house. It would be such a shame if it was eaten up by the fire. The walls are filled with paintings that he collected all over the world, he has a huge garden of different plants, including a full-grown macademia tree. We had some wonderful fresh macademia nuts. His collection of orchids is amazing, so is his collection of books and pictures on Indian history. I have decided that I need a hobby. If a professor who has to teach and manage a lab and has a family can find time to do gardening every weekend and take care of the orchids and collect all kinds of art pieces, I think I can manage a hobby. Talked to all the TAs and the significant others. These people love being TAs, they teach over and over and over again. Wow, we need these dedicated people to teach. And I realised that even though the department is huge, at the end of the day, I've kind of met each person at some place or other. Took the same class together or they were my TA or something.. Everyone kind of knew each other. Had a good time socializing. Of course it helps that the prof is someone who talks non-stop.

Went to judge for high school speech and debates today. Can't help feeling that I might have screwed some kid up badly by not being a good judge. The preliminary rounds were pretty easy to judge. It was quite obvious who would win.. But I tried judging for the octa-finals, and oh wow, they were good. Hope I made the right decisions. These kids are very good. This girl had an impromptu speech topic of "Cheese". What would you say? Talk about cows and milk and calcium? She talked about smiling during photos and how Americans don't smile enough. And when the timer counted down "3, 2, 1", she said "Cheese!" and smiled. How much more creative and appropriate could you get?

Yihui was saying that we should be glad that our campus is so huge. I never thought that the campus was big until yesterday where I went biking into the eucalyptus forest. OMG there are multiple trails in there, complete with trail markings on trees and dust flying everywhere.. Nature trails on campus. Wow. How many schools have that? Pretty cool. Great view of the canyon and of the campus in the distance at some parts. Anyway I suck, had to stop many times cos couldn't make it up the slope.. But it was fun chionging down the slopes =) and to have a homecooked dinner =)

Thanksgiving. Totally just slacked through the 4 days. Mostly played old grandmother's games online. Had a thanksgiving dinner at my place. Wasn't a total flop but let's face it, I'm not a good entertainer. On those personality quizzes that ask where are you usually found in parties, I always answer at the side talking to a small grp of friends. Food was plenty and good. No turkey but no loss. Pictionary saved the day.. Next gathering, hopefully more people show up, hope the better entertainers show up

Then psychoed Yihui to take us to Las Americas at midnight. The traffic was crazy, everyone is flooding there. Finally got there, finally found a parking spot. Bought my shoes and jeans and tshirt and sweater.. Haha. Not bad for ~$100. Got tired and didn't want to go anywhere with huge queues so I probably missed the best sales, like the 50% off at Puma. Next time, go at 4am. There's much less people.. But that means you'll have to wake up at 3am. Or don't sleep.
The things we do to get a good deal.

I'm getting excited over embryo lab. Planning my expt and hoping to get presentable results. Our plan is very ambitious and hopefully we're technically up to it.
Doing Southerns next week. Hopefully I have a correct clone and finally successfully knocked the gene out. And doing even more wishing, hopefully my clone has some phenotype.

Reading Watson's Double Helix. It's so much speculation and theorizing and not much expts.. It seemed like as long as they have the time to sit down and think, they could get groundbreaking theories in a week. They go for conferences, see other people's data, and get excited and start theorizing. Then they try to scoop and publish before others.. Science.

Pictures

Flash Mob! Bang! You're dead.







Yes you're dead.


Very amusing to watch. But I must say that the pillow fight was a lot more exciting.

Halloween! Our cute pumpkin with 2 teeth =)

The artists

Pumpkin after a week.. and no it's not burnt by the fires.. just providing a home for microbes..

My orchids

Chick-in-a-cup.. They're so cool.. Watch the chick develop in a cup during the time when it's usually in the shell.

Closer look at the baby chick. About 6 days old. Huge eyes. Wings and legs are developing. In fact, digits are developing. Heart is happily beating away. It's so cute.

After manipulations with hue and saturation and crop, an alien looking creature.

Instead of spending my time playing some online crossword puzzle, I'll blog.

Things to do:

1. Get that gene into the plasmid and into the bacteria.. Why so hard??
2. Find cute crafts to make to give to old people
3. Chase after people to approve of my crafts and chase after other people to get me materials to make those crafts
4. Read the 5 papers needed for me to start my lab report
5. Read more papers to decide what final project to do
6. Pray and hope that my tadpoles are still alive and relatively normal after its head is partially detached from the body
7. Do something fun this weekend
8. Plan something fun for Thanksgiving
9. Stop feeling angry at myself for throwing my distinction in biology away
10. Churn out some rudimentary personal statement
11. Practise
12. Stop feeling impatient with slower-witted people

Grr... #9. How dumb am I to make such a big mistake and not realise it until now.. Grr.. What to do?

Was the MC for senior house. Went pretty well. Actually went very well. The old people were high even though not many of them came. The song was a big hit. I'm pretty sure they felt that it was too short and it was over before they felt shiok. And I love my turtle movement. Pretty surprised that PP agreed to such cute actions. Games were exciting. My pingpong ball game went quite well. As usual all of them tried to cheat and I had to physically block them to prevent them from throwing more balls. They were nice and didn't throw balls at me. Jenga was veto-ed but the other game with the bottle air gun thing was cool. It was so exciting and the pictures came out good too. So even though we started out kind of slow.. didn't know what to say.. quite stoney, depended a lot on Alice for cues.. it was a good show..

I'm quite amused at what the sta people are trying to do. I wonder if PP noticed. Highly amusing. Sneakily taking pictures of people, suggesting people to work with each other.. hmm..

If you haven't heard already, there was a huge fire in Southern California last week. Actually, it's many big wildfires. Burnt many homes, blackened lots of trees, evacuated hundreds of thousands of people. It's quite an experience to live through a disaster, there's a lack of those in singapore, not that I'm complaining. It was a little smokey on Sunday but we thought it was because of fires from LA and didn't think much about it, went to labs, checked my sea urchins, picked my colonies.. Monday morning, my aunt called me and told me UCSD was closed because of fires near San Diego and that she's evacuating. Wow, this thing's serious.

Well, ok, classes cancelled, no midterms. Good. The air stinks. It's much worse than Singapore during the Sumatra fires. much much worse. It's like people burning incense paper everywhere + the indonesian fires. The air smells like smoke, ash particles are everywhere. Our window was opened throughout the night and there was a black layer of soot over everything next to the window. I could see soot particles flying in. It was freaking hot and we couldn't open window. Evacuation orders were being given all day, half a million people were evacuating.. friends were freaking out and packing.. got us a bit worried too. What happens if we were asked to evacuate? I never thought that the fire would ever reach La Jolla, but since Carmel Valley (2 highway exits away) was asked to evacuate, I don't see why the evacuation order wouldn't reach us. Stayed tuned to the news all day. Loved my radio.

And then, Tuesday classes cancelled. Fires were spreading, somehow it crossed the I15. Del Mar had to evacuate, Rancho Bernado was burned.. Air's terrible. It's getting scarier. Then UCSD sent an announcement, classes cancelled all week. Hahaha. After hearing this, many many many people started leaving san diego, going back to LA, flying back to Nor Cal. Guess what I did? I hunted down a ticket to Chicago and flew there. Hahaha. Got holiday, might as well make good use of it right? More about it some other time.

Anyway, a lot of people evacuated to Qualcomm Stadium, which is the main stadium in San Diego, and the aids that were going to that stadium and other evacuation centers were just amazing. Starbucks sent coffee, Costco sent food and water, volunteers donated burgers and sandwiches and offered massages.. Donations were so much that they had to stop accepting. Thanks to all the warm-hearted Californians. People who went to Qualcomm said that it was like a festival there. Kind of like Quidditch world cup, everyone pitching tents, big screen TV, plenty of food and water.. Evacuation in luxury. How many people get coffee and massages while evacuating?

It is San Diego after all, where the rich live. Or at least the middle class. Families with comfortable lives, owning at least 1 car.. When they're asked to evacuate, most just grabbed their important stuff and sped off in their cars. The house is probably covered under extensive insurance. It'll be a lot of inconvenience if houses really burn down, but we'll all live. After all, the money's not going to burn. Furthermore, even though the air's terrible, even though it's pretty hot in the day, at least people were not wet and cold and hungry and miserable. And the later evacuation orders were sent with plenty of time for people to get ready.. People were ready.

You need friends. you need to be prepared for emergencies. You need to not panic.. San Diegans did a pretty good job at all these.

Thank you all who remembered my birthday. Thank you all who made it special. Thanks to ooi who wished me really early, you're the 2nd one to wish me happy birthday, 1st one was the scholarship officers. Haha. Thanks to jac who stayed up late to be the first to wish me when it's 11 Oct PDT. Thanks to lao pei who remembered. Thanks to Carol who was the first one to call, thanks to her again for suddenly hushing everyone and giving me peanut soup with imaginery candle. Thanks to Sunny who called and pretended to not remember that it's my birthday. Thanks to housemates who gave me the orchid, sorry that 2 buds died.. thanks to stephen for coming over and to all for the tres latte cake. It was very interesting.. very ethnic. Thanks to the whole gang for bringing me to Corvette. That was an experience. Thanks Jason and Clinton for the wine. Thanks Jane for bringing the beach to me and for Islands. =) Thank you Assers and CBs. Thanks Kok Lim for the amazing cheesecakes, lao da's too nice. Did I miss anyone? Thanks to facebook for keeping everyone in touch.

Corvette's Diner was an experience. After waiting forever to get in, we got a table. And then straws came flying over our heads and landed on the table. Ok. So I guess food's going to be thrown at us as well. The waitresses had huge hairdos and loud screechy voices. The place was noisy, and there's a DJ playing 50s music. So every time a waitress sees someone on the phone, she'll announce to the whole world and tell everyone to keep quiet. And of course, everyone will start making as much noise as possible. Our table is very quiet in comparison. So food came, drinks came, weird stuff.. and I ordered a magarita. Just to use my ID. The waitress took my ID, studied it, did some calculations, and started shouting "Ladies and gentleman, there's someone here turning 21!". That was embarrassing.. There was a balloon man who made all sorts of huge structures and another lady who made humongous hairdos for girls using straws. When it was time for dessert, 5 of those waitresses came over and sang me a song that none of us could figure out what exactly they were singing.. even after we've heard it for a gazillion times that night, seems that every table had someone with a birthday.. It's just a place with its own special character.

Can't believe this guy. The things that he says are just appalling.
'In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.
During a lecture tour in 2000, he suggested there might be links between a person's weight and their level of ambition and between skin color and sexual prowess.
"That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to The Associated Press, which cited people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."
And in a British TV documentary that aired in 2003, Watson suggested stupidity was a genetic disease that should be treated.'
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/10/18/nobel.apology/index.html

That's taking unconfirmed scientific data too far.. They might be your hypothesis, but with all the social impacts they could potentially have, you should at least say them in a nice way, or if you can't, don't say it, since it's unconfirmed anyway.

Anyway, Watson just published another autobiography. It's on manners. Reviews are pretty positive. I wonder how much of manners you can learn from this guy. On another note, Craig Venter just published his first autobiography. Yet another controversial biologist. He's a very eloquent guy, so his book might be rather fun to read..

Think I've been taking many things for granted. I've been very lucky since I got to San Diego, having very helpful seniors, very helpful friends. Not everyone has friends who are willing to drive them to places every time he asks, not everyone has friends that they feel comfortable enough to ask for rides to the airport at 8 in the morning.. I don't know what I would have done without people like Desmond in my first year. Since my entry a week ago, many people have asked if i'm ok. Thank you everyone, I'm fine. Thanks for all the suggestions, thanks for all the analysis, thanks for trying to cheer me up. I still think it's very funny that I received a fan. Haha, it would have been very useful in the freakingly hot summer.

Talking to freshmen, and friends on exchange.. I realised that many times I don't have the power to help them. Many things which I experienced don't apply to them.. All I can tell Jac is, cook your own food, but then i also don't know how I could make my own food if, 1. I use a communal kitchen shared by the whole building, 2. there's no Ranch around, 3. there's no car to get groceries.. How do you survive in the middle of nowhere where you get everything you need from Walmart? Suddenly I love California for its huge Asian population, I love my apt, I love my housemates and friends..

Pictures from Canada
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