Why am I so screwed this year? Grades are disgusting..
I am disgusting.. Urgh
I don't want to move but I want to move out of this place.
Getting plenty of ideas but no idea how to use them.
In essence, life is at best at a standstill, otherwise it's rolling downhill.
Sick.


Let's have some pretty stuff.




Pretty flowers at Regents parking lot


Birds at La Jolla cove


Shadowy models


Thought the colours of the tree was beautiful. Outside Peterson Hall.

The Eucalyptus forest


Spot the fake tree.

Listening to Philip Glass. It's amazing how he can create music with 2 types of rhythms, quavers and triplets. 1 voice plays quavers, other voice triplets. He doesn't even have many different chord progressions. But it sounds good.

So.. finals are finally over. Most intensive finals week I've been through.. All the stuff that I have to know, and i didn't do that thorough a job of cramming, cos things came out on the exam that I didn't pay attention to. Like the molecular structure of cadherins and how they work molecularly, or what is the multi-hit model of cancer, or why did Prussia rise in the 18th century.. couldn't thnk of anything except that Prussia encouraged people to plant potatoes..

Oh well, they're over. 3h exams are too long. I don't have the stamina to stay through them. How on earth did I manage to go through A levels where exams are 3h of continuous thinking and writing with no break? At least now I can afford to use the 3h leisurely, think questions over carefully, for the bio finals at least, no time to think for hum. Not very confident of any of my grades, depending largely on the rest of the class to do badly.. Only confirmed A I got is that music class that I took for P/NP. Grr..

For that music class, we were supposed to come up with a program that do something cool related to computer music. And there were some really good projects. The one that I found to be the most impressive was this algorithmic composer that had 4 voices (SATB) in beautiful strings sounds. The user pick the key and type of scale (major, minor, pentatonic, blues..), and then the voices will randomly pick pitches from the scale (which is probably weighted, meaning some notes of the scale is more likely to be played), randomly pick length of note and randomly pick articulation of the note. The wonderful thing about this composer is that it counts in phrases, I don't know how he did it, but this composer only responds to key changes, tempo changes after a complete phrase, and the voices somehow all know where in the phrase they are, and when you press stop, they only stop after a complete phrase. The result is something that is very tonal, very "follow-the-rules-of-music-theory" type of tune. Sounds beautiful.

Other interesting ideas, but prob not so successful results include this girl who somehow converted the firing of 5 rat neurons into binary and made it into sound, so a sound comes out every time a neuron fired. The plan was to map location of the neurons into the speakers, so it would be like the listener is standing in the middle of the neurons and the neurons firing around him. Didn't turn out to be that impressive, just hear a bunch of ticks. Could be interesting though if the different firings get different pitches or something like that..

Another guy made this thing that record surrounding sounds from 3 microphones and then fade them in and out and add effects and so on, basically mixing a 3min piece from a 20s recording. Again, very interesting idea, but didn't sound so good.

I think I like pd. It's not very advance, some functions that need a lot of programming is probably present as a button in some other program, but there's a lot of things that I can do with it. Considering turning into a keyboardist with a laptop. In the meantime, I'll try, note try, to improve my melody generator and get a composition out of it.

Some pictures taken in school

Forgot if I posted this picture. Found some golden mushroom sprouting out after the rain. They are really gold in colour.


Giant Cat in the Hat to celebrate the don't know how old birthday of the cat in the hat created by Dr Seuss outside the library named after him


Flowers blooming. It's spring!


A bunny I saw hanging out next to the tree I was taking pictures of in the med school, so took picture of it too

Went for bass ensemble concert. 1st time me going for one cos it's always on the sunday before finals week and I always needed to study. Today, sian of studying, so went for that. Mark Dresser's fantastic. He looks like he's in a trance when plays. And it's quite a sight seeing a group of strange-looking guys bent over their basses making strange sounds. Trust me, most of them don't look all that normal, long hair, strange sideburns, moustaches.. Mark was the most normal looking one, and my Indian friend and the fantastic chinese girl.

Long long concert. Some interesting pieces. First piece is called Invocate, written by Mark. The group of bassists stand in a circle and Mark starts playing, then the guy next to him imitates his style, then the next guy join in and so on.. The exact notes you play and when you like to cresc and dim and attack is all up to you, just follow the style. It's like one of those follow the leader games where the first person do something, then the next person follows while the first person changes his action, then the 3rd person follows the 2nd person and so on. Fun. Just that Mark makes some highly technical moves that are rather hard to copy. He ended on some note that is so high that it's off the fingerboard, but everyone managed to copy that. They're good.

Han Han's Tarantella was a beautiful beautiful piece. I really liked it. It's fast, difficult, very energetic and has a very nice tune. A true tarantella. I think she has a very nice sound, and her high notes are in tune. I really don't think bass should go play such high notes actually. Anything above the G above the staff on a treble clef is way too high for a bass I think, people go way out of tune.. And that G is already an octave higher than what I can do comfortably.. I must go look for all the harmonics on the string, saw some harmonics that I nv knew existed today.

I'll never be as pro as any of them and guess what? I have no wish to be there.. I'll be an educated listener instead..

1 thing about modern music. It has evolved into, well, sequencing. A bassline which repeats, many lines of variations above it, adding up to a whole which sounds coherent. The mood moves and changes with time, so maybe progressively louder/ more notes and then dies down and so on.. But that's what it's been reduced to.. What happened to melodies? Non-repeating stuff? We need less sequencers and more melody generators..

Question of the Year - Nature Genetics

Thought they'll do something with more immediate effects.. well, scientists are scientists and they work for science more than for people

Woke up really early today cos of a strange dream. I wonder how many people made that big an impact in my life. Strange dream, something that will never happen. Do I wish that it might come true some day? I don't know. but it's strange enough to wake me up early and I decided not to go back to sleep and wonder in the dream any more.

So woke up abt 2h before my alarm's supposed to ring, decided to do some pd. Ended up chatting with many many band people. Haha, me waking up early + DST= before midnight in Singapore. Great time chatting. Everyone asked the same question. When am I going back? I really have no idea. Ended with a buddies chat (haha, remember the failed buddy attempt at bonding in band?), and a discussion of that buddy breakfast which never did materialise. We should buddy bridge.

Weather was beautiful today. Bet it's about 29C again. Hope it stays warm.

Concerts. Chamber orchestra. The concert that I ended up playing in even though I had no wish of joining. As usual, almost broke down but somehow managed to pull through. If this was SYF, we'll get COP. If only people watch the conductor more.
Chamber ensemble. Why do flutists always look so good? sy has a beautiful voice. They chose a beautiful song. A great showoff piece. Very nice indeed.

Gosh I'm writing in the romantics style. In fragments. Symbolism. But I'm much more pro-enlightenment than romanticism. Prefer the systematic Kant to the flowery Schiller.

Let's get even more romantic, talk about dreams. In a studio, individual, with ms lee, 1st day of return, she was nice, amiable, was rusty, clumsy. This'll nv happen, unless my personality change so much that I can be gregarious to everyone. But i'm not a very good member of humanity, i'm asocial. That psc psychologist was sure that sth traumatic happened to me when I was a kid.. cos I refuse to tell her abt anything when I was a kid cos i simply don't remember. the education process seems to have progressed from a "you're going to fail" to a "don't give up". Coleridge is certain that the kid knows more about infinity than the adult. Was that form of education better?

What am I looking forward to? Starting in the new lab. Cabaret. More short term thing, sign lang tmr..
So boring.

Studies have shown that people ignore the top and right most part of the internet browser cos that's where all the ads are found. So if you're designing any kind of webpage, make sure you don't put anything important there.

I need to learn to say no. No. No. No. There's a pd help file with the patch name, "just say", and when you play it, it's a recording of a guy saying "no", looping, with all sorts of effects the user can do. I need the effect "sound pleasant and doesn't make me feel guilty".

Life is boring. I'm not usually in this position with this view, and I don't know why I'm here. At the beginning of the year I was telling someone how the boringness of life is how you look at it, and today that person was telling me the same thing when I said life is boring. Something about this quarter is driving me crazy and I don't even know what. I'm not too keen to find out anyway. Just let it be.. I have an urge to scream, and that's terribly rare.
When I'm abnormal like this, I shall retreat to my usual mood-calming activities.. if I can get to doing them..
If the weather's good tmr, I'll go watch sunset, before daylight saving starts and it'll never get dark.
I need something to look forward to. Where's the hope? Where's the optimism? Why don't I believe in Leibniz's ridiculous philosophy?

I thought with so many times on stage, stage fright will not be a prob for me. Apparently not. Let's hope that I know my language well enough to not say gibberish on Sat.

Ridiculous Japanese. Can't you take responsibility for what you've done? Do you seriously think that all Asian women can't stand your charm and throw themselves at you?
Japanese Prime Minister angers victims of wartime sex slavery

Scientists in love

Life is hard.
If you want to marry a scientist, read this article.

And the most important point I think this woman made is

"Publish. Then publish again. The more brilliant the candidates, the easier
it is to place them." (and for them to get anything they want)

Yup. And to attract scientists, keep a physics blog.. or using my cell bio prof's method, tell your target that you need a partner to act out phosphorylation..

"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.

3min till my file finish uploading.. 3min to blog

Entries haven't been exactly exciting lately. That's the result of spending way too much time in school or else trying to program in pd and also because the philosophies of those people are much more interesting than my own.

What's up with my life. Usually week 1 and 2, I'll be dropping classes like birds drop white stuff onto clean cars, but for some reason this quarter, I'm adding committments like no one's business. My postdoc has this impression that I'm really free, cos I only have 1 class on MWF and of course, I go to lab on MWF.. Man, I'm nowhere near free and it's only week3. Hope things turn out well.

All people have been trying to do is gain control of the universe, control every variable, be able to predict the results. Is that ever possible?

"Since our government prefers intelligent design over evolution, I have to rephrase my question: why did god create this gene?" ~Nobel laureate who came to UCSD for a talk. I forgot his name, he works on this gene that I forgot the name of, but it enhances female sexuality, the press reports it as a future aphrodisiac. I can't remember much of it cos I fell asleep, chairs were very comfy.
OK, I've found out who he is. He's Paul Greengard and the protein he was talking about was DARPP 32.

"The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived"

"We may establish it as a maxim that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion"

"whoever is moved by faith to assent to [a religion] is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person which subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience"

~ Hume, Inquiry I, Section X: Of Miracles

Cool dude.

I guess everybody has been enjoying winter holidays, traveling to new places, going home, just chilling, anything that's different from the normal school life. Holidays are always good. If there's a time to try something different, this is the time. Ed was telling a freshman yesterday to try different jobs and see what he likes, I wonder what I'll be doing if I'm on FMS. Would I travel around at all? I would definitely get a lab assistant job, even if it's tail-cutting or dish-washing. Would I be doing internships? Exchanges? Take up things that are unrelated to my major?

California trip. I've said this many many times, it's really the people that make a trip good or bad, and the Cali company was just fantastic. It's a group of people that I don't have trouble communicating with and for this trip, I didn't even need to use my brain much, to navigate, or plan or anything. Complete relaxation.

San Francisco. Chinatown's just great. Cheap good food, extreme speedy service, (we think the waitors are on crack haha) though i still think that the place where we stayed at, which was just off Chinatown, was quite scary at night. Half-drunken and very high people hanging on the streets. Back to food. Great food. Great dim sum under $10, bubble tea for less than a dollar, dinner for slightly more than $5, exotic ice-cream, simply amazing. Oakland chinatown is equally good, supermarkets selling everything chinese, and lovely bakeries =). Otherwise, SF is just another big city, traffic, people.. I like the convenience of cities, and the bustling life, but sometimes it gets a little too hectic for my liking. It's like what Locke says about the formation of societies, you have to give up your natural rights to do whatever you want for the benefits that society can give you, so in this case, i have to give up my longing for peace and quiet for the convenience of a big city. New Year countdown was ok, people were very high, typical Californians, the clock was not accurate and misled many of us, fireworks were pretty good, there were smiley faces. :)

Yosemite. I love Yosemite. It's so pretty. Especially since we went AFTER heavy snow. Snow was dripping from tree branches, so pretty. If I have a chance, I'll definitely go there again. Keira says I'm a nature freak. I just like to see the nature, I'm not really fit enough to enjoy much hiking. Climbing up the waterfall was fun.

Berkeley. Such a liberal town. It's filled with shops and stalls selling strange things like anti-govt slogans, weirdo cds, and all kinds of junk. We spent forever in this poster shop buying posters. If I lived in Berkeley, I'll definitely be influenced by this extreme left-wing-ism..

San Diego. Experience could be much more enhanced if I could drive and had a car. Sorry peeps. Taking buses is just tiresome here, especially if you live nowhere close to downtown SD. But I think La Jolla cove is still the prettiest place in San Diego.

New Year. Resolutions: I didn't really think about them. Shall make some.

School. I like my development class, this is a field where I have not touched much before, unless you count my 8 weeks of lab meetings in a stem cells lab, think it'll be a fun class. I'm really sick of huge classes, like my molecular bio class with 350 people. Man, I really don't like to go into class 5min before class starts and still can't get a good seat. Computer music is as expected filled with comp geeks who have attempted pd before, I havn't even heard of PD till last quarter. Well hopefully they're lazy bums who don't do homework, then I'll still have a chance at getting an A. But this is expected to be a fun class, though might get quite challenging along the way. Hum, will complain about it later when I have papers to write. Lab, first day I went back, I felt so sian, why is bio research so time-consuming, so many steps, so much time and effort to do one experiment. Grow cells for almost a week to do a 2h experiment, and then spend at least another day working on the stuff that's been extracted from the cells, then analyse results. I can understand why Aristotle and Descartes want science to be sit-there-and-derive-formulas kind, rather than go do experiments. But after I start pipetting again, I felt less sian, wonder why.

Holiday tomorrow. Yay.

California trip photos are up
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2096953323

Grand Canyon photos are also up, but more of my cousin's family than of the canyon
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2097014636

Comments are welcome.

Newton's amazing rules of reasoning

1. We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. (cf Occum's Razor)
2. Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
3. The qualities of bodies are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. (leading him to conceive of some indivisible particle that makes up everything, or maybe there isn't one, but all bodies follow the laws of gravity)
4. In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions collected by general inductions from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined. (objective science, but no hypotheses formed in science? Plain observation and deduction?)

"This most beautiful system of the sun, the planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being"

While I'm waiting for my photos to upload, very slow today, hope they don't timeout on me, I shall research on stuff that have been fluttering in my mind this holidays.

White Chocolate
White chocolate is a type of chocolate based on cocoa butter without the cocoa solids. It also includes milk solids, sugar, lecithin, and flavorings (usually including vanilla). Cocoa butter is the ingredient used in other chocolates so that they remain solid at room temperature yet melt easily in the mouth. Thus, white chocolate has a texture like that of chocolate but does not have the same taste. Unlike chocolate it does not contain caffeine. As white chocolate does not contain cocoa solids or cocoa mass, it does not meet the standards to be called chocolate in many countries. In the United States, since 2004, white chocolate needs to be at least 20% (by weight) cocoa butter, at least 14% total milk solids, and less than 55% sweeteners such as sugar.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/chocolate.htm

Piano roll
A piano roll is a roll of paper with perforations (holes) punched in it. The position and length of the perforation determines the note played on the piano. The piano roll moves over a device known as the 'tracker bar', which first had 58 holes, was expanded to 65 and then was upgraded to 88 holes (generally, one for each piano key). When a perforation passes over the hole, the note sounds.
That's how the piano can play by itself and how the earliest recordings were made. What I don't get is how the holes can transmit information, is there a stream of air that blows through the paper? Light sensor? Electric sensing? Anyone care to enlighten me?

Scientology
The Church says that Scientology is concerned with "the study and handling of the spirit in relationship to itself, others and all of life." Dianetics is more narrowly focused on getting rid of the reactive mind, the "bank" of traumatic memories known as engrams which are said to inhibit one's success and happiness. Basically it's to reach into the good and logical part of the soul and use that to achieve goals in life. They do this by talking to each other and solving each other's problems. We visited this Church of Scientology in SF and listened to this sweet old lady tell us all about scientology. According to her, scientology is an open-minded religion where you choose to believe in anything you believe, scientology just helps you achieve your goals. We concluded that scientology is a huge self-help group. Wiki seems to think otherwise though, talking about mind control and disconnection from people who are in objection to scientology. Reading Wiki, scientology sounds like a computer game where you have to advance through the levels to uncover more secrets of the world. And somewhere in it all, there's an alien manipulating everything. Fun.

End of winter break. End of all trips. I'm actually really glad that they're over. They've been fun but travelling is draining. Using words from this trip, I'm shagged and I need to chill.

Grand Canyon
Spectacular first view. First glance and we go WOW! And then as we drive to more points to look at it, it's just, well, it's just the canyon. Pretty amazing how flat the top of the canyon is and it's so jagged and deep in the canyon. All these done by the Colorado river and the uplifting of the plateaus. "The canyon, created by the Colorado River cutting over millions of years, is about 277 miles (446 km) long, ranges in width from 0.25 to 15 miles (0.4 to 24 kilometers), and attains a depth of more than a mile (1,600 m)." ~ Wikipedia
Just finished snowing when we went, pretty cold. We concluded that it will be a much better way to visit the canyon by a helicopter tour. See more stuff, less boring. Or maybe hiking will make it more interesting too. We couldn't hike at all cos there was snow all over the trails and we didn't have any shoes equipped for snow.

Drove through Sedona after Grand Canyon, thought that place was beautiful. Red rocks, redder than Grand Canyon, very shapely mountains. Apparently when waterfalls are running in spring, the rocks become a natural slide and kids slide down the rocks in the Sliding Rocks State Park. Should be very beautiful.

Medical breakthrough: Why surgeons are more handsome than doctors

Can't believe channel news asia has this kind of ridiculous news. Entertain yourself.