http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0QaNm7FqxcMXLA&notag=1
My pictures to Joshua Tree National Park and Disneyland

As part of the psyc class, I had to participate in psyc expts. And on one of them I discovered that I really don't like to be treated as a thing. And that is probably one of the most fundamental causes of me getting irritated or angry.

What have I learnt this quarter? A little bit about bacteria, a little bit about politics and environment and population issues, a little bit about how people interact, a little bit about new music, a little bit about how to move, a little bit about how drugs work. Scratching the surface of everything. Every class was so survey-ish, yet they're enough to drive us crazy. So much to know, so little drive.

Last quarter. What to do? Lie back and relax? Charge to the end? Dance? Surf? Play? Work? Socialise?

I cannot be a bureaucrat. Lately suddenly have to do a lot of PR work, have to write these nice-sounding emails. It's too hard. I cannot imagine myself doing the dress nice nice, sit down with people and talk non-stop. Or the kind of dress nice nice, follow boss around. Had lunch with big boss, not bad, he gave out hope.

I've got to

1. stop being a control freak
2. start taking responsibility
3. listen to others
4. be nice
5. think

yes girl, do these please.. right the lefts

Went PB Bar & Grill yesterday. Barhopping might be fun. =)

Isra-el, Inshah Allah, and Shit Happens: The implications of belief systems

http://scientificgospel.com/cgi-bin/redBlogReader.pl?action=readArticle&article=IsraelInshahAllahandShitHappensTheimplicationsofbeliefsystems&section=blog

Check out the article. I'll summarise. It says that the Judeo-Christian culture promotes challenging the authority and struggling because Isra-el literally means "he has struggled with God". Islam culture promotes submission because Muslim means "he who submits to the will of God". Buddhist culture promotes passivism, a "shit happens" mentality, just accept the shit and live with it. So the author's argument was that the Judeo-Christian culture of the Western world promotes the scientific method, questioning and doubting everything that you see, leading to the fluorishing of scientific and technological development in the Western world. And the future is the techno advance of the Western world.

I think this is an interesting viewpoint, explaining tech advance using religious cultures. Let's just assume that his portrayal of the different religious thoughts is right. That Christian = struggle, Islam= submission, Buddism= acceptance. That alone cannot determine how good one's scientific skills are. Science is not religion, you don't necessarily apply religious thinkings to doing science, you don't go oh um, this paper must tell the truth since it's been published, even though its reasoning sounds kind of fishy. You'll apply a different set of logics in science.

Also, technological advancements depend not just on how willing the society is in accepting them, on how well the society can produce such advancements, but also on the state of the society. A larger proportion of the Islamic and Asian world is in poverty than Europe or the US. How to support this non-profitable business of science if you have to worry about the millions of starving people in the country?

What about the other Christian countries that are not in Europe/ US? We don't hear much about research from Central/ South America even though many of the countries there are very Catholic. What about Japan or India or China or for that matter, Singapore, who are up and rising in science and research? They are not predominantly Christian.

Lastly, it also depends on how much power the country has in the world, politically, economically. They determine how much scientific power a country has. A strong country has the resources to fund science, has more people doing science, has more money to hire good people, has journals that reach more people and will consequently have higher impact factors.

I don't think religion is a good explanation for the apparent discrepancies in science and technology in different parts of the world. "Shit happens" is a catchy phrase though.

On another note, Jessica sent me this link. You can go look up California State employee's pays. Go see how much ur UC profs earn. =)
http://www.sacbee.com/1098/story/738462.html

I've been getting a lot of cryptic questions. So here's the official response from me. Ask me directly, if not I don't know how to answer. Danwei's questions were the best man, they were so cryptic that i really don't know what he's asking.

So I tried shutting up this weekend and doing more listening. And people think i'm sad and AS.

People tend to generate counterfactual thinking when something bad happens, if only i had done that, I would have accomplished this, this and that. The more easily imagined the event, the more emotional response (regret) is generated (Kahneman and Miller, 1986). The closer you are to getting to the counterfactual thought, the more upset you'll be. It's been shown that Olympic silver medalists are more likely than bronze medalists to voice the opinion that they could have done just a bit better. Also, the more control you have in the event, the more regret you'll have. When attempting to undo the outcome of a game, people are more likely to undo aspects of the game where they had control.

I calculated my projected gpa and ouch, it misses my target by 0.01. Ouch. If only....

Facebook is disgusting. It publishes ur life for the whole world around u to see..

So it's a long weekend. And I haven't studied much at all. Went to my bacteria prof's "farm" on Sat. That's the 3rd prof's house that I've been. Each has its own unique characteristic. This one is wow natural. He keeps chickens and walks around in the garden barefoot. And he gives each visitor a big warm hug, regardless of if he knows u. Er.

Then watched Cirque du Soleil in Del Mar. I think I should stop talking. I talk way too much with these people, I need to listen more. Anyway, I want to go Vegas to watch other Cirque shows. Their acrobatics are pretty amazing and they have nice music and costumes. I want to be strapped to helium balloons and fly too. Or be an angel who only needs to pose and look pretty and hand performers their hula hoops. Angels probably get to fly too.

Supposed to be studying today, but we went to brunch in Hillcrest which took 3h cos the line was an hour long. And we saw 好姨 from 真情 at the restaurant. How qiao is that? So we went to her after giggling forever and took picture with her. She really got a huge mole on the forehead. But she looked glam. and she's nice. =) Then had an utterly Singaporean afternoon where we went to a bubble tea shop, sat down and talked for the whole afternoon, then went some shop to shop shop forever, then went for dinner and sat down to talk again. Loved it all. Haven't had these Singapore talk/ future talk/ past talk/ funny talk for so long. Last time was probably when sy and fm and xy were still around.. I should talk less and listen more. Then came home and played scrabble where tanya won with a 68pt word. Gosh.
Laughed so much today.. hahahahaha..

I do need to study. I wish life is simple.

V-day

It feels like a Friday today. Half my pharm class didn't show up. The lab was pretty empty. Did my blot, got some results and left early. Went to Black's Beach for class, cos there's a concert there today, Alison Knowles was there performing "Shoreline", the main part of it is that she sews a whole bunch of old clothes into a long line along the shore. And there are other parts involving us. Some people were doing the "draw a straight line and follow it", some were doing "vocalists sing together at conductor's cue, but sing anything", people were singing italian, spanish, english.. everything. I should have joined and sang "when stamford raffles held the torch..." haha. Then this guy did the "walking intently" into the ocean in a suit. He got a lot of applause. THe things we do for art. And I was the score holder for my prof's cello playing where he destroys his bows by bowing every single part of the cello, from the tail (that stick thing) all the way up to the head (above tuning pegs), so it's the wood parts, plastic parts, strings... everything. Screechy. Might post my official response to the sounds of fluxes later.

Then went out, on a thursday. No wonder it felt like a friday. Too bad it was pouring, but in any case I bought a score. Yay. Overpriced definitely, but whatever, I'm happy today. And then went to this super nice place on Harbor Island. The view was fantastic. San Diego's pretty spectacular at night. Had a lobster. I should seriously consider eating food that's easy to manipulate next time.. wasn't easy digging through the lobster. Then went walk walk at Seaport Village. The kite shop uncle was so adorable. Love his flying gadgets. I want some to play with. Had a great day.. Feel like tmr's not a school day.

Happy V-Day.

Winter quarter happenings

Sending lao da off. Farewell dinner at Kemo Sabe. The presentation is wow.



That's a whole fish. And it really sticks up like that.

POW truck at Big bear. Skiiers and snowboarders cramp themselves onto the open-air truck. No seats. Hold on to the railings, we're going to camp.

Steamboat CNY dinner with still thoughts. That's my table. We're a super lucky table.. all got good stuff in lucky draw =). Mine was the lousiest, it's 1 slice of meat.

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.