Unnatural organic

Don't look now, but there goes an organic cabbage wrapped in plastic. As its pesticide- and synthetic-fertilizer-supported brethren were not.

The hypocrisy and oxymoronic-ness of some parties who promote and/or sell organic foods astounds me. Packaging is only one of the aspects where the ridiculous may be found. In the past I've also bought Roundy's organic free-range eggs from Copps that came in a TRIPLE-layered plastic carton, unlike normal eggs that come in recycled cardboard. Are these free-range hens calcium-deficient, that their eggs must be sold in armour?

Another example of packaging madness committed by a store involves Whole Foods itself. I bought fresh salmon burgers from them and observed the counter worker wrap them in something that looked like newspaper, just like in the wet markets back home. Only it turned out to be not newspaper going into a second career, but the same plastic-coated paper normal groceries use, but printed with a fake newspaper design in an incredibly lame attempt to look retro. There goeth the holy and virtuous Whole Foods, wasting energy and ink - not that the cosmetic is going to make shoppers in 21st century Wisconsin feel like they're in 1900s Boston.

A couple of years ago when Wal-Mart announced that it was going to carry organic goods, environmentalists on Treehugger and other websites sneered at this rather than acknowledging it was a step in the right direction. Granted, Wal-Mart is well-known for unethical practices, but at least it's making healthier food available to ordinary consumers, in addition to forcing some of its suppliers to be more environmentally friendly. I've quite happy that the Wisconsin chain where I usually shop, has organic veggies at prices not much more than regular (although I can't say the same for their eggs).

The sort of snobbery displayed by the people mentioned above outrages me. Guess what, wankers: organic farming is NOT going to save the world UNLESS it can be made affordable and accessible to ordinary people with pressing demands on their time and money. Not just a) the wealthy elite for whom environmentalism is a fashion and b) the true hardcore environmentalists who are willing to sacrifice a normal lifestyle to be AGAP (As Green As Possible).

According to my boss, Whole Foods is nicknamed "Whole Check" because that's what it takes to do your shopping there. Screw them and their seven-dollar squashes, I'm getting my organic stuff from Copps.

Superflat Kitty

So last week when I went to Massachusetts to visit my sister in college, I took 1 day to go to Boston to see an old friend. Also to see Boston, since I'd never been there before, and had been told by several people that I'd like it. I did. 24 hours wasn't enough by FAR.

We went to the Museum of Fine Arts and I was very excited to see this: OMGOMGOMGOMG TAKASHI MURAKAMI SUPERFLAT!!!!!
(I had to do the Japanese thing and hold up the "V" sign. This painting is "If the Double Helix Wakes Up..." )

And next to it OMGWTFBBQ CHIHO AOSHIMA I DIE NOW.
(Moral of the story: If your boyfriend says he wants to eat your beloved goldfish, ditch the jerk or lose an eye.)

Long story...back in college I worked in the library part-time during the school year, and full-time during the summer after my freshman year. One of the summer jobs was inventory, going up and down the stacks with a list of call numbers, to make sure that every single book was there. It would have been boring if I wasn't a voracious reader...which on the other hand meant that I was highly inefficient at the task.

I ended up browsing a lot in the art section (the "N"s in the Library of Congress system). Even though I love the visual arts, I'm usually too lazy to seek out artwork to look at, so I got bogged down there. I discovered a Japanese artist called Takashi Murakami who paints really weird surreal, cartoony stuff in bright colours that I can't tear my eyes from, and also some strangely funny/cute but obscene statues.

The statues are just too weird for me but I really like the 2D art. In fact, it's extra 2D because Murakami's labelled his style "Superflat". According to him, Japanese art, including the ukiyo-e prints from the 19th century, tends to have a quality that makes elements at all depths look like they're smushed together. There is perspective but things in the distance are perfectly sharp, they don't fade away.

Anyway, I was browing the net for pictures of his stuff idly one day when I ran across pictures by one of his proteges, Chiho Aoshima. I love her pictures even more - sweet young girls with bewildered eyes in dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, situations, drawn in organic curves, and strange cities of the same dreamworld where buildings with faces blink at each other nestled among giant trees.

So anyway, I'm really happy I got to see Murakami and Aoshima works "for real" (even though Aoshima's prints are drawn on computer, obviously seeing them on a 15-inch monitor is quite different from a full-sized poster).

One of her prints has been my desktop wallpaper for most of the past year. Which one, I ain't sayin' nuthin'. ;)

The Yeast of Malice and Wickedness

(originally written the day after Christmas)

My grad student Bible study group's doing St. Paul's first letter to the early church in Corinth, usually called 1 Corinthians for brevity's sake. Paul being Jewish uses the metaphor of leavened bread as "contaminated" and flatbread as "holy".

Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.

(reference: 1 Corinthians 5:6-8)

One of the new girls, a first-year student who's doing a rotation in a Saccharomyces lab, starts laughing. "I should label one of my freezer boxes 'The Yeast of Malice and Wickedness'," she says.

---

I'm having my own encounter with the Yeast of Malice and Wickedness today. In the morning I pull a flask that I'd seeded with quail fibroblast cells on Christmas eve, wash the layer of cells growing on the plastic with saline, then add some fresh M199 medium. I take another flask that I infected some days ago with my virus, scrape out the cells with a plastic squeegee, burst them to bits with an ultrasonic probe, and pipette a small portion into the new flask. I've done this five times over the past couple of months. Each new flask is infected with virus grown in the last one - this is called "passaging". What I'm trying to do is to get this virus to adapt to growing in cultured cells instead of the chicken embryos it prefers. Whole eggs are messy, fiddly, and largely unusable for genetic engineering purposes. It's a large DNA virus, so they don't evolve quite as fast as some others like the RNA-based ones, but I'm hopeful.

A few hours later, I come in to look at my cells and go OMGWTFBBQ as I realize that the myriad floating bubbles in my flask aren't just fragments of dead cells from the inoculum. For one, they're too small; for another, strangely opaque; also, joined together in short chains of twos and threes. My first thought is bacteria, but they're too small. I groan inwardly, contemplating the necessity of throwing this one away.

"Diana, can you look at this for me?" I ask, baffled.
"This is yeast," she says. "What medium did you use?" We pull the M199 bottle back out of the fridge. The medium is clear, unclouded by growing cells, but I groan again as I recall that I'd dropped the bottle momentarily that morning, letting the medium slosh up into the neck and cap. The cap of any bottle is always to be presumed contaminated, especially since these medium bottles are plastic which can't be flamed (passed through the flame of a Bunsen burner) like a glass flask.

"Maybe you can wash the cells and put fresh medium with antibiotic-antimycotic," she suggests. I do so feeling vaguely guilty. Cross fingers...

Next day the quail cells look okay, with no sign of the proliferating yeasts. But now I have malice against the stuff.

Transit again

Haha, I love self-service kiosks and the technophobes who stand aside waiting for human service while I breeze through...t

Whole Foods is a stupid elitist hippy store, but at least they have good salads. Hope it was still ok after 6 hours off the shelf.

Should have been in Williamstown yesterday. Pea-soup fog cancelled all flights into Madison. Went home and slept, played with kitty some more. Deja vu same flight numbers today.

Needed this poor lolbear, what a good laugh.

Multidrug-resistant infections in Sultanah Aminah Hospital

This is absolutely appalling. (Scroll down to the second part of the story in the middle of the page.)

If you don't want to read it here's a quick summary. A woman whose 60-something diabetic father was in Sultanah Aminah Hospital in Johor complained because a consultant told him he urgently needed a wound debridement surgery, but he was subsequently left in the multidrug-resistant isolation ward for five days with only i.v. antibiotics. He has a multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter infection in the ulcer. A reporter from theSun went to visit them and found that:

• The door of the quarantine ward had a sign saying it should be closed, but it was left open
• another sign said that everyone going in must wear gloves, masks, and aprons, but there weren't any masks or aprons
• there was a pile of used gloves next to the glove box (yay cross-contamination!)
• visitors were ignoring the signs since the protective equipment wasn't there
• even worse, the reporter saw A NURSE AND A DOCTOR!!! walk in, attend to patients, and walk out without putting on the PPE or washing their hands (and the doctor's tudung wasn't tucked into her lab coat, which is effectively the same as a non-Muslim doctor having unbound long hair trailing all over).
• Another guy was there who had been in a road accident and acquired a multidrug-resistant infection from a metal implant in his leg. He's been there with a FRACTURED HAND for over a month. His fiancee said that the quarantined patients appear to have been "forgotten".

This hospital is apparently run by monkeys. Even if the patients weren't KNOWN to have an infectious disease, clinicians are still supposed to wash their hands between patients (I don't use the same gloves for different experiments in the lab).

Let me point out again for the sake of my American readers that Malaysia is not, in terms of technology, resources, or wealth, a backward country. I take every opportunity to smack down the ignoramuses who assume that "developing country" = "1990s Rwanda". We make computers, other electronics, drugs, all kinds of fine consumer products. We have so much. But brains? Who knows.

Greasy palms

(This is all from stuff printed in The Star which is virtually an MCA party organ, by the way. I'm quite disgusted at how they fawned over Chua Soi Lek after he resigned after being caught dicking around. "Brave and decisive" my foot! He didn't have a choice!)
I think we've got a bit of a contradiction -

• Regulation of companies growing palm oil sucks,
• Deforestation, and draining of peatlands is making Indonesian biodiesel decidedly NOT carbon-neutral or environmentally friendly,
• The industry causes an annual cloud of smoke and other airborne crap, known as "the haze" to fall on Malaysia,
• And to cap it all, we've got a shortage of cooking oil to the point where it's been smuggled out of the country

- and the gov't STILL wants to increase biodiesel production, with the industry in the state it's in?

Hi ho Silver!

I'm da Clone Ranger!

Also, found out today that our lab is going to get a virus from the UK that I've been waiting for for a really long time. It's going to speak ATGC with a Cockney accent.

2008 New Year's Resolution

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions (e.g. "I will not bite my nails" has been a historical failure since age eight or so) but I've come up with what I think is a viable one this year:

• To match any amount I spend aside from regular groceries, household, and toiletry supplies with donations to NGOs doing food aid, health, education, social justice, or women's issues - both secular and Christian.
• To match ALL spending on my cat with donations to animal welfare (not animal rights) and wildlife conservation organizations.

This way I'll probably spend less money this year on silly stuff and waste less time Internet shopping.

Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to some people but I've found since leaving home and starting to earn my own money at age 18, that the less stuff I buy, the less stuff I want. Materialism is a self-perpetuating lust, and most of the hobbies I really enjoy require very little material.

Other things I'd like to do:

• Write at least 2 short fiction stories and submit at least 1 to Writers of the Future or a science fiction magazine.
• Draw more, and spontaneously.
• Reinstall Creatures 3/Docking Station on my computer and start tinkering with the CAOS (Creatures Agent Object Scripting) language.
• Call parents and sisters and "small" boy more often (sometimes I forget my brother has a phone because he never calls me...)
• Clean my bike more often.
• Cook for my boyfriend and make him take his vitamins regularly.
• Watch more movies.

It's gonna be a personally interesting year...my project is going to get into animal studies...I'll have to write a thesis and hopefully graduate...my parents just got transferred to Penang...two of my London cousins are getting married in the summer so I'll finally have a chance to go to England...a couple of Phases kakis are getting married in Malaysia...another couple is having a baby, which makes them the first friends my age to reproduce...my boyfriend is taking 2/3 of a year off school for an internship...his mum wants to show our respective cats in the summer (TICA lets you show household pets)...

Et cetera. 'Tis life. =)