It's not like they didn't travel backwards before anyway

(totally unrelated: This morning I took the bus - because I was too lazy to put my new fender on last night and it's slushy on the roads - and there was this guy on a bicycle going the same way as the bus. The problem is, crusing speed for a cyclist is apparently the same as the average speed of a bus which loads passengers at every stop. So the bus would stop, the cyclist would overtake it, then when the bus started again it would swing into the next lane to overtake the cyclist. It seemed to me that the driver was swerving out far more than necessary, but I don't know how to drive a bus.

After about three or four repetitions of this, the bus driver was completely exasperated and shouted and threw the finger at the cyclist. The cyclist, watching the road as he should have, didn't notice at all. He did swing onto the sidewalk a bit later though.

Funniest road rage I've seen in a while...driver flipping off a cyclist. Seriously, we get no love. If we go on the road the drivers try to kill us, if we go on the kakilima the pedestrians act like we're trying to kill them.)

---

And now for something completely different: they're going to make a new Star Trek movie with Kirk and Spock as young men, i.e. a prequel to TOS. And Adrien Brody is going to play Spock.

*all the nerdy girls swoon*

Some fler on Gizmodo called nzruss made a great comment about casting speculations:

I'd seen a suggestion of Keanu Reeves playing Spock role, but it was later determined (by group consensus) that he didn't have the range of emotion required to be a convincing Spock.

Explanation for non-scifi-fans - Spock is [half] Vulcan; Vulcans are supposed to be emotionless.

Blur Toad #9

Did I not upload this one before?

Nanoboobs!

[22:15] Steve: and i might get yelled at by my prof
[22:15] Steve: oh well
[22:15] Steve: he knows how i work.
[22:15] me: yelled at for what?
[22:16] Steve: doing little work
[22:16] Steve: last year i procrastinated till the last possible minute for a paper for his class
[22:16] Steve: then i stayed up till 3am and made a very very good paper i'm proud of
[22:17] *** Steve is trying to send you "Dual_Photon_Microscopy.doc".
[22:17] * Steve wants hwa to see
[some time later]
[22:30] me: i just looked up one of the papers you cited in the 2 photon microscopy paper
[22:30] me: figures...guys...
[22:31] me: all this cutting edge nanotech and what do they make? boobies [PDF, see p. 3].
[22:31] Steve: what?
[22:31] Steve: rofl
[22:31] Steve: hahaha
[22:31] Steve: yes, i remember that one

InterVarsity last night

Steve and I went to the IV grad Christian Fellowship meeting last night (they're fortnightly). At the end of the meeting we split up into groups by fields of study to pray.

I noticed something really funny: completely contrary to the layman's belief that science and reason have[are] abolished[ing] religion, the engineering and math group had the most people in it, followed by physical sciences, biology, social sciences (a.k.a. "people who think P<0.3 is good"), and last of all, arts and humanities.

Tim, who's the advisor of Lawrence University's CF, commented that he thinks the arts are the most hostile to Christianity. Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works wrote that the reason modern art holds little interest for the lay public is that it's really an esoteric status competition among artists and aficionados that really has little to do with what the human brain tends to find beautiful.

So there we have our explanation, ladies and gentlemen: professional artists are a bunch of wankers. >D

International time

The BBC World Service had an American Muslim comedian on the other day:

"When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, there was one reporter who said 'This bombing has Middle Eastern characteristics'. What's a Middle Eastern characteristic? Bellydance music in the background? The bombing was supposed to start at 3:30 but it started at 6? That's a Middle Eastern characteristic."

However, I've also heard this variously referred to as "Malaysian time", "Jamaican time", or in the broadest sense (LI meetings) as "international time". So maybe it's just Westerners who're all fussy about punctuality?

I really don't mind meetings starting late. It's when they finish late then we've got problems. I've done some of my best freehand drawings in meetings...

Time and Punishment

Man, I'm so pissed off.

Dear editors,

I would like to hear an explanation from our judiciary as to how one
person can be sentenced to a token five days' imprisonment for
stealing several hundred ringgit, while another languishes for four
months for stealing spare change ("Man jailed for five days and fined
for stealing cheque" and Satay skewers and popsickle[sic] stick used to steal coins from public phone, 22 February). Theft is not simply
theft - one could easily argue that the dispatch rider's crime was
more serious based not only on the amount, but also that he caused
trouble for his employer and took money that he, as a paid employee,
did not need. I don't see how you can call those sentences justice.

Yours sincerely,

Those magistrates are pigs. Someone passed money under the table for the first guy. But the beggar? The pocket change he prised out of the phone isn't getting him anywhere.

My twisted mind

I participated in a study on diffusion tensor imaging of the adult brain today. It was the first time I've ever been for an MRI...lying still for an hour and a half in a noisy tunnel is quite the Jedi experience. The machine makes different noises as it does different kinds of scans. There was one sound that reminded me of the guitar riff at the beginning of a Smashing Pumpkins song.

My first younger sister also had an MRI recently because she signed up for a sleep deprivation study (college students are great subjects, because for the most part we're young and healthy and willing to do almost anything for cash). "They made us stay up all night then you have to do cognitive tests in the MRI. I fell asleep in the MRI and the voice kept saying "Please respond...please respond..."

Here's a picture of my twisted little mind:

Bioplast woes

A few days ago I ordered a Bioplast labret stud from eBay (don't ask why). It seems to be one of the increasingly popular polymers for body piercing, like Teflon (really polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE, as it's not brand-name) and silicone. Strangely, it seem to be popular for making long barbells for pregnant women's navels, as the kids who hopped on the bellybutton piercing wagon in the 90s are now growing up and having babies. But it's bloody next to impossible to find any useful information on what it actually IS.

Googling results in several definitions:

• What the android Data's skin is made of in Star Trek.
• A trademarked biodegradable form of polyethylene or polypropylene.
• A substrate heater for aquariums.
• A tiny mass of bioplasm, in itself a living unit and having formative power, as a living white blood corpuscle; bioblast. - Webster's Dictionary. (ok, by analogy with "chloroplast" I guess...)

A PubMed search revealed two materials called "bioplast" which seem to be quite different. The most common meaning is a biodegradable, fibrin-containing plastic, which would be very bad for piercings for obvious reasons. The other is "a polyvinylacetate polyethylene" which can be used to make mouthguards and orthodontic braces (!) which seems to be more like the kind of stuff you'd make body jewellery out of. But on the website of a manufacturer of Bioplast jewellery, it says "polysulfone" but when you Google polysulfone it turns out to be a quite rigid material, like polycarbonate (that's what the popular Nalgene bottles are made of, for you non-scientists).

Actually, one of the PubMed abstracts from a Hungarian paper had pretty funny Euroglish:

During the operation we have noticed a wallment size mass of scar between the uterus and the bladder expanding to the height of the orifice of the uterus. The scarily fixed bladder has been separated from the cervix and the scarry wall of the fistula has been cut out. We have brained the cervix towards the vagina and then we've sutured the cervix and the bladder with Dexon 'O' treat, as well.

Yeah, vesico-uterine fistulas are pretty scary, I totally agree...

So can someone please tell me, WHAT exactly am I about to poke into my ear piercing???

(Maybe I should stop doing peculiar things to my body. I dyed the lower half of my hair a weird shade of purplish red today and it looks like I'm wearing a fluffy scarf because it's too unnatural to have grown out of my head.)

More lazy people food

Roast duck:

1. Preheat oven to 425°F.
2. Cut duck up into pieces. Put in metal pan.
3. Sprinkle duck with salt and pepper.
4. And put lots of honey.
5. Roast in oven for about an hour (if it's not cut up, you'll have to roast it longer and keep checking the temperature, which is why butchering first is the lazy option). Don't be too lazy/impatient and turn the broiler heating element on too like I did, because then you end up burning the nice crunchy skin.

Yogurt:

1. Microwave milk until boiling.
2. Let cool to about 40°C or 115°F (yes, I know they're not the same, but it's a rough range, and I'm too lazy to convert properly). If you're too lazy to buy a cooking thermometer, agak the temperature at which you can rest your hand on the container without pain, but it still feels hot.
3. Throw in a container of yogurt and stir. Make sure you picked yogurt which has live bacteria.
4. Cover the container and keep it somewhere warm overnight, like a gas oven with a pilot light or electric oven with a very low setting or on top of a radiator. Worst come to worst, wrap it in a towel.
5. Add jam, stir, eat. (I could have said "add sugar to taste and fruit as desired", but jam has both...and need I reemphasize that this is lazy people food?)

Red science

Scientific American: Open Access to Science Under Attack

PubMed Central, published by the NIH—a federal institution—has come under especially intense fire. Their efforts have been dubbed "socialized science," by Rudy Baum, editor in chief of the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Chemical and Engineering News. "Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science," he wrote in a 2004 editorial. "I find it incredible that a Republican administration would institute a policy that will have the long-term effect of shifting responsibility for communicating scientific research and maintaining the archive of science, technology and medical (STM) literature from the private sector to the federal government."

So if you support open-access scientific journals like PLoS or databases like PubMed Central that means you're a Commie? What la. >(

More and more scientists now are part of the generation that grew up with Kazaa and BitTorrent...it's hardly a stretch to guess that open access will gain support over time rather than dying out.

Sci-fi heroines

Late night, at random: Even though I like both science fiction and fantasy fiction very much, I realised a few days ago that my favourite female characters are all in SF and not fantasy. The problem with fantasy heroines is that many of the writers are from new-agey backgrounds and tend to flavour their writing with strong feminist overtones. Mother goddesses give you power. Bonus points if you like girls. Extra bonus points if you like girls AND boys. It's only ok to like men if they're not macho and have long hair. It's just blatant and annoying. (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, et al.) And I don't know what's wrong with fantasy writers of this stripe, but they just CAN'T do good dialogue.

The problem with these writers is that they're from countries where women already have gained suffrage, at least nominal equality in education and the workplace, etc., quite some time ago, so they have a lack of imagination as to what it's like to live in a really old-fashioned culture. You can't run around making strident declarations of emancipation and jumping on horseback waving a sword straightaway the way these bra-burning heroines do. People wouldn't even persecute you - they'd just laugh at you like crazy.

Sci-fi heroines, on the other hand, are strong women making their way in a world which, no matter how developed or how far in the future, is to some degree still more influenced by men. They live in worlds where the ultimate arbiter of fate is how tough and ingenious you are (and obviously you have to be on the side of Good as well, this being fiction), which to my mind is much more realistic. I love Ellen Ripley. Love Kathryn Janeway. Love Cordelia Naismith, Samantha Carter, Mara Jade, Leia Organa, Molly Millions, Lilith Iyapo, Anyanwu, et cetera, et cetera. Starting to get into "Firefly" and Zoey is cool too.

On the other hand I find most of Anne McCaffrey's characters annoying, possibly because she's from the same aging-hippy background.

(Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 are written by multiple people, many of whom are women, Lilith and Anyanwu are from Octavia Butler, Cordelia Naismith is from Lois McMaster Bujold, so don't tell me it's cos I only like female characters written by men. =P)

The only strongly feminist fantasy writer that doesn't annoy me is Robin McKinley, not sure why. (I like Ursula Le Guin's "The Tombs of Atuan" because the main character was trapped in a female-only environment which was portrayed as being ultra - hee.) Too late at night to do analysis. Figure out later. [Incidentally, FlowerMoonFish told me why almost all McKinley's novels involve romance between the younger female lead and a much older male character - her husband is Peter Dickinson and he's pretty old compared to her.]

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

- "Firefly" theme

Free software plug

Free Download Manager is trying to get people to promote them. So I'll just say this - it's free, it doesn't take up a lot of space/memory, and I like it.

While I'm at it, I also have to say that I also like Windows Media Player. Yes, Microsoft is evil and all, but WMP 11 is pretty decent software. I find WinAmp annoyingly hard to work with.

Other free things I use:

• ClustalW: for aligning nucleic and protein sequences. Only useful if you're a biologist.
• Azureus: BitTorrent client. I'm only starting with this, so I don't really know how to use it well, but it seems to have a nice interface. The original BitTorrent client by the guy who invented it was a real pain in the neck.
• Paint.NET: very cool image editing program, tons of features. It's got everything I normally use in Paint Shop Pro 9. Only problem I've run into so far is that it doesn't support pressure sensitivity for tablets.
• Trillian: multi-network instant messaging client. Back in the day when my sisters and I first started instant messaging (late 90s; yeah, we were slow) ICQ was the most popular service in Malaysia. Now it's MSN. Most Americans use AIM, and I have the few oddball friends who are only on Yahoo. So, yeah, essential.

Freeze branding II

I used the end of a bottle-brush as a strike and then decided it looked too much like a flower petal to do just one. I'm rather curious as to whether anything will be visible once the erythema goes away, since freeze branding is supposed to make white marks but the inside of my arm is pale to start with.

Angela: "Did you try to kill yourself?

Freeze branding I

I think I've just done something pretty darn silly. I was reading up about freeze branding last night (I really need to get my late-night surfing habit under control). The first time I read about it was in the National Geographic in the context of branding dolphins - obviously putting a third degree burn into an aquatic animal is a poor way of marking it. Apparently it's a pretty straightforward process - cool metal implements in liquid nitrogen or alcohol + dry ice until the coolant stops boiling, press into skin (20s for horses and cows, 8s for dogs). It's also supposedly painless - calves that were branded while nursing just went on sucking on mama cow's teats through the process.

Well, we have a canister of LN₂ in lab, but I certainly don't want to potentially mess up our frozen cultures and viruses...but when we got a shipment of reagents in dry ice just now the temptation was too great. I now have a loop-shaped red mark on my inner left elbow surrounded by a white and red halo. Photo and details later.

Yeah, I'm crazy.

Silly Icons

Those of you who are on my contact lists may have noticed my Patrick Stewart icon:

The image is from the movie The Lion in Winter, which has him playing King Henry II opposite Glenn Close. I like it also because it has Jonathan Rhys Meyers doing a gay kiss. (Given my predilection for skinny guys, you can see why I like the near-skeletal JRM.)

Here's another one featuring Amanda Tapping as Major Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1:

I love Carter because SG-1 is one of the few shows where it's the woman spouting technobabble oblivious to the confusion of the people around her.

Feel free to use my icons if you like, please just don't re-post them anywhere else.

Xenomorph on film

I'm watching one of the "features" DVDs in the Alien Quadrilogy set. The "Creature Design" section, strangely, is the only thing I've seen all day that's cheered me up. (The reason why I'm watching the features is because a certain person is too ill to watch movies with, plus my apartment is freezing, so it's been a pretty miserable and boring day.) The interview with the writers, designers, and actors about the infamous chestburster scene are absolutely hilarious. "Is is coming through yet, 'Arry? Can you see it?"

There's also a slideshow of poster ideas that make me very very glad they went with "In space, no one can hear you scream":

Please listen Mankind, you have so little time.

Once again, something has come from space, and this time it's not a friend.

From an infinite universe, the ultimate threat.

The universe trembles.

There are things so terrifying, they only exist in a nightmare...or outer space

Think the unthinkable.
Speak the unspeakable.
Suffer the unsufferable.
Then perhaps you can begin to imagine the unimaginable horror headed our way.

No one should be allowed to even imagine that thing which is now headed our way.

It is an unspeakable horror.
Unlike anything previously experienced by mankind.
And what seven human beings are suffering now far out in the universe will soon, all too soon, be shared by us all.

Prepare yourself. [okay, that one's not so bad, but completely uninformative and non-scary]

a word of warning [accompanied by a monochrome, mostly black, image of a sprawled human hand in front of two eggs]

Of course, even the pithy tagline they finally settled on has been parodied on the site of Bernie Hou's brilliant Alien loves Predator webcomic.

I guess I do have a fangirl streak. Sigourney Weaver is my favourite actress on the basis of those movies. I know I've seen other things with her and liked them, but I can't remember WHAT.

---

And when I said my apartment was freezing, I meant literally. Just installed window film today, and it's tangibly warmer (this isn't just subjective, I have a digital lab freezer thermometer that was discarded for having a broken sensor wire).

Cranky Friday

I did my first mutagenesis and transformation ever yesterday. Looked at my plates just now...no colonies. *cry* The mutagenesis protocol was from a kit, so we have to order more before I can try again.

(Transformation is the process of introducing foreign DNA into cells. This can occur spontaneously, or you can make cells take up DNA by shocking them with electricity (electroporation) or heat-shock. The plasmid I was supposed to put in yesterday contained, aside from the gene of interest, an ampicillin-resistance gene as a "marker" to separate transformed from non-transformed cells. Then I spread the cells on agar plates containing ampicillin. Since they're all dead, I don't know whether the transformation was unsuccessful or I just killed all of them -_-;; )

---

Also, the weather is shockingly cold today. It's the depth of cold that makes breathing - normal breathing, not even panting or hyperventilation - painful, and makes your fingers hurt within seconds of exposure. I'm truly glad for my Seirus balaclava. When you have it over your mouth and nose, it gather condensation from your breath, so the air you inhale is humidified and warmed. It's basically an artificial extracorporeal heat-exchange membrane.

Steve has a really awful sore throat and fever though - he's gone to the doctor twice in two days, and despite this had to teach three physics classes yesterday. I feel almost guilty for having such a good immune system...you'd think kissing would transmit anything infectious but so far it hasn't. Plus, I registered to go on the Grad Christian Fellowship's women's retreat to New Glarus tonight. We're going to stay in a nice lodge with a hot tub, which is a nice place to be with the coldest temperatures of the decade rolling into town, but I still feel guilty for leaving.

---

On the bright side, two funny things: For my cell biology course, we had to read a paper about a protein called XBP-1. Did I mention that I hate cell biology's sense of naming conventions or lack thereof? They make acronyms upon acronyms, and they're all unpronounceable, so people will insert random vowels in order to say them. Well, what does XBP-1 stand for?

X box binding protein, that's what. Someone sue Microsoft.

The X box is actually a DNA sequence that's involved in the expression of certain immune-system related (MHC) genes, but now XBP-1 gives me a mental image of a gaming console covered in green slime or something. Or fanboys.

---

The other thing is, my boss gave Keith (our lab's "old guy who knows everything") a Spanish-English calendar for Christmas. Today's sentence:

Hace un tiempo horrible.
The weather is horrible.

I couldn't agree more.

SF writer personality test, and Snape fandom

I have no idea who this is at all. Steve got Octavia Butler *sulk* I love Butler.

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Interesting Snape fansite with essays on why he didn't murder Dumbledore: I Trust Snape

Forecast

I think I'm going to cry...

Special Weather Statement

MARQUETTE-GREEN LAKE-FOND DU LAC- SHEBOYGAN-SAUK-COLUMBIA-DODGE- WASHINGTON-OZAUKEE-IOWA-DANE-JEFFERSON- WAUKESHA-MILWAUKEE- LAFAYETTE-GREEN- ROCK-WALWORTH-RACINE-KENOSHA- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...MONTELLO... BERLIN...FOND DU LAC... SHEBOYGAN... BARABOO...PORTAGE...WISCONSIN DELLS... BEAVER DAM... WEST BEND...PORT WASHINGTON...DODGEVILLE...MADISON... JEFFERSON... LAKE MILLS...WAUKESHA... BROOKFIELD...MILWAUKEE...DARLINGTON... MONROE...JANESVILLE...BELOIT... ELKHORN...LAKE GENEVA...RACINE... KENOSHA 148 PM CST WED JAN 31 2007

...ARCTIC BLAST THIS WEEKEND INTO NEXT WEEK...

A SERIES OF STRONG COLD FRONTS WILL MOVE THROUGH WISCONSIN BEGINNING FRIDAY...ALLOWING SEVERAL SURGES OF BITTERLY COLD AIR TO OVERSPREAD WISCONSIN. THIS ARCTIC AIRMASS IS THEN EXPECTED TO RESIDE OVER SOUTHERN WISCONSIN THROUGH AT LEAST THE MIDDLE OF NEXT WEEK. THESE FRIGID CONDITIONS WILL BE THE COLDEST TEMPERATURES OF THE SEASON...AND PERHAPS THE COLDEST TEMPERATURES IN THE PAST DECADE.

AT THIS TIME...THE COLDEST TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO OCCUR FROM SATURDAY NIGHT THROUGH NEXT WEDNESDAY...WHEN LOW TEMPERATURES MAY FALL FROM 10 TO 20 DEGREES BELOW ZERO...WITH HIGH TEMPERATURES STRUGGLING TO GET OUT OF THE SINGLE DIGITS.

IN ADDITION TO THE COLD TEMPERATURES... DANGEROUS WIND CHILL READINGS OF 25 DEGREES BELOW ZERO OR COLDER WILL ALSO BE POSSIBLE AT TIMES.

BEFORE THIS BITTERLY COLD AIR ARRIVES LATE FRIDAY...ANY PERSONS OR INTERESTS SUSCEPTIBLE TO VERY COLD TEMPERATURES SHOULD BEGIN PREPARING NOW. ENSURE THAT YOUR FURNACE AND AUTOMOBILES ARE IN GOOD WORKING CONDITION...AND CONTINUE TO MONITOR THE LATEST FORECASTS FOR ADDITIONAL DETAILS ON THESE POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS CONDITIONS.

(from Weather.com)