Melange

Brace yourself, it's going to be one of those posts.

There are some resolutions to the pile of deadlines yesterday. The first one I think I'll mention is the problem set, which has caused me no end of headaches with its poorly worded problems and mistakes. It ultimately resulted in me attending the TA's office hour (well, part of it, anyway). I'm proud to say that I've managed to get the TA to clarify (i.e. give hints to the class for) one problem, to fix a rather important typing error (he gave us the wrong genotype, i.e. genetic makeup, of the plant) for another problem, and to cancel yet another, half-page long, problem entirely. Between Clare and I we've managed to get him to clarify a fourth problem and push the deadline for the problem set back one day. My accomplishment of the day(and how sad is this?)probably is walking the poor TA through why the genetic recombination frequencies that he gave us won't work, why they still won't work even if he got rid of the four highest numbers (which he suggested), and ended up with him checking with me for the right answers for the fifth problem. I felt bad for the TA, but he should've looked over the problem set before he handed it out in class.
I finished the rest of the problem set while waiting for my class.

To contrast with that I can mention some of my scholarship application woes, which most revolve around the advising service UCD provides where advisers read and comment on your application essays. The first day I went in the person who is charge was at a meeting, and the people at the front desk didn't know what to do, so they had me drop off my essay with my contact information with them. When I failed to hear anything back, I went in the next day only to find out, after more confusion with different people at the front desk, that the person who is in charge was actually going to be gone for a few days, and I was sent to someone else, who couldn't find the paper that I dropped off, and so she suggested that someone else had probably picked it up and asked for me to check again Friday morning. I have found out recently that a pre-graduate adviser has ended up with my essays and that I can get them back next Tuesday at the earliest, which is exactly one day before the deadline.

I am half way through my reading and have been instructed to abandoned degenerative primers. The plan is to go on with the primers that I have, provided that I don't find anything else too interesting this weekend.

Also, I biked into two bees today. The first one smacked straight into my forehead while I was about three minutes away from campus and buzzed quite angrily in my bangs for a few seconds before I could shake it off. The second one happened less than a minute later when another bee bouncing haphazardly off of the side of my head. It's... just one of those days.

But- (and there always is a 'but') I did learn why fats contain more calories than sugars today in terms of biochemistry. It is because fat molecules (well, mostly fatty acids) are far more reduced than sugars, and so have a lot more electrons. Therefore when you metabolize fat the change in Gibbs free energy (thermodynamics, can be calculated with an equation which I don't remember) is much more negative and more energy is released, so you get more calories out of fat. Compared to fat, sugars are partially oxidized already, and so contain less energy.

Which reminds me: midterm's on Monday. Cheers.