But I fear she's not really paying attention

Dear Undergrad,

Yes you can borrow my stuff. In fact, I told you you that you may, without asking me each time but, as I've also told you multiple times now, please put back the stuff where you found it. This is not a difficult concept. Stop stashing my scissors and reagents and what-have-you in your drawers and yours boxes (where no one can find them when they're in the middle of their experiments and need them) when you're done. They're not yours, they are mine and mine to share with the lab. It's been over two years' worth of reminders and I know you're leaving lab this June but for the love of God or science or whatever you believe in, please show some common courtesy until then.

Your very irate labmate,

Me.

Blue nerds

Quick post to share this link. (It's...flash comic about industrial pollution in China at this point, I guess. I think the author explains it better in the notes.) It works as a stand-alone.

...that nursery rhyme from the beginning...I must've learned it before the age of four (because it pre-dates boarding school) and my parents know it because of me, and I just realized that I knew the first two lines of the second stanza...for some reason I've forgotten that until I saw the comic.

Last time my mother went to Beijing and stayed for more than two weeks she got asthma because of the air quality. Thankfully there is a movement toward environmental awareness and pollution, which got a large boost because of the Olympics (needs, must) and so there's some improvement these days. (Though if you're in Beijing you still can't really see the stars due to light pollution.)

There's definitely seratonin around now

So: the science fair was awesome.

That being said, there were some issues of communication between the volunteer transport and the police (they had to cord off part of the streets for the fair but they were supposed to let the volunteer shuttles through) so that the shuttle drop off/ pick up point for us kept getting changed while we were waiting for our transport. So there was a lot of walking and crankiness.

But, an hour later, I finally managed to get home and rewarded myself by making French toast stuffed with cream cheese and strawberries and honey (idea from the super fancy mango-mascarpone-toast that I had last time Lucy and I went out for breakfast) to go with heavily honeyed tea so now I'm adrift in a sea of carb-induced bliss.

Have to go and deal with chores in a hour, but in the meanwhile: exercise + loads of starch & sugar = at peace with the world.

Key points of fair this year as noticed by me: elephant-brain-hat, live owl, live reptiles & tarantulas & squirrel, DNA extraction from strawberry, analysis of your snot, make-your-own skateboard (by lottery) booth, basket-ball-sized maze-navigating robots, something mysteriously small but definitely aerodynamic. Oh and balloon animals. Er. Molecules.

Why does our lab have cheesecloth?

It's like a sneeze that doesn't come

After spending all of yesterday (as well as part of the evening) obsessing over my cloning experiment, my subconscious provided me with a dream that involves baking. Very specifically about putting shredded coconut in frosting. The baking part I understand because, all jokes aside, baking is  really a lot like setting up an experiment in a molecular biology lab. Even the frosting I can understand. But why, I wondered during breakfast this morning, why coconuts? Not knowing bothered me.

Possible explanations, I concluded while brushing my teeth, are the following:
Zebrafish >> tropical >> coconuts
Fruit fly >>coconut oil (via information retained from classmate's talk) >> coconuts

What makes somewhat less sense is the connection with mice, because:
Mouse>> ??? >>coconuts

(For the record, the mice I work with are black in color.)

The mind is a truly mysterious place.

I am losing feeling in my fingers

I have learned a new word today: empfindsamkeit.

In addition to reading, I should not be allowed to draw things while cooking. I will burn food. Badly.

Anderson predates the 8th, but does Disney?

About half way to falling asleep last night, I find my thought turning to the Disney sequel to the Little Mermaid, more specifically, to the fate of the villain. (Villainess? Villainette?) I was horrified to realize that what effectively happened to her is that she is trapped, alive and with full-awareness, in suspended animation (no pun intended), for presumably all of eternity somewhere in an abyss of the ocean.

I reflected that, if I were trapped in my head but with full awareness of my surroundings, I hope someone would have the mercy to kill me. It is cruel and unusual punishment. It is a fate, I think, worse than death. I would go mad from it, in the clinical sense, and given how the villain (villaine? villaina?) wasn't exactly the most mentally stable to begin with, this strikes me as an Extremely Poor Solution. Forever, in a chunk of ice, can easily be translated to "bidding her time". And as various stories done by other authors can tell you, there's nothing quite so terrifying as someone who's mind is broken, who's vengeful, and who's willing -- and can afford to -- bid his / her time.

Triton is immortal, but forever is a long time. A lot of things can be done in forever. Glaciers have crept across continents and melted in less time than forever. How long would a block of ice (even magical ice) last, in the face of forever?

Unless this is a hedged bet on another sequel, in which I applaud the writers for a job well done.

Admittedly I can pretend that the Lord of the Seas tracked down that block of ice some time later on, preferably before she went mad, thawed her out and gave her a fair trial. Certain to my knowledge no canon exists to contradict me. And then she will probably serve time in an underwater prison, but maybe they'll have craft classes (complete with the underwater equivalent of safety scissors) and she can learn underwater basket weaving.

And then I fell asleep.

I need an econ refresher

Dear all,

Would someone please explain to me how it is that the .mobi (ebook) version of a book costs around 13$ while the used paper copy costs 0.01$? Is this a case of supply-demand? Because then...how is the supply limited? It's digital. Making a copy of a digital book doesn't take that much resources or energy, even compared to the making of mass-market paperbacks (which still requires paper making and binding and such). Most authors these days have their final transcript in digital format, anyway, and it's not that hard to convert .doc to ebook formats. I've done that before too. There are even free online software for these sort of things.

Perhaps it's because the paper-copy is "used"? But...it's digital. I mean how do you even tell apart "used" from "new" copies? But if that were the case, where can I get used digital books? Because seriously, I don't mind used books. Either paper-copy or digitally.

This mini-rant is brought to you by my visit to the library website. I'm one of those people who prefer not to buy a book until I've read it and know that I like it. I read fast. To entertain me for extended length of time requires something either massive or going to the library (whose schedule overlaps with mine by only two hours every week) every week. I have a kindle. I have gone through the entire SD library ebooks collection. There're just over 2000 books. There are five that overlaps with my to-read list (121 books so far). They all have wait-lists ranging from 6 to 36 people. Hunting on the internet has not helped much.

Help.

[edit 11:00]
New thought: I hate to default to thinking the worse of everyone, but I realized that it's possible for it still be a supply-demand situation where, because the supplier knows the demand is high, they can purposefully limit the supply in order to charge higher prices and therefore obtain more profit (and they don't even have to subtract printing and distribution costs for ebooks).

Thoughts? 

Some sounds go straight to the subconscious

I was pretty tired last night due to the length of my day and sadly, it also was one of those rare days when the neighbor had a few and then fell asleep in front of his tv with the volume on full blast, which meant that I could hear the dialogues, not to mention the music and other sounds, perfectly clearly. Even more unfortunately he was watching something with a lot of gunfire.

Eventually I was forced to get up, grab a jacket, and knock on his door until he woke up and then request he turn down the volume. Then I returned to bed and proceeded to have an extremely lengthy semi-science-fiction nightmare where I was sent off to war. I spent nearly the entire length of the dream feeling ill-prepared and terrified and now I feel a bit like my eyeballs are going to fall out of my head.

Please tell me this isn't going to turn into one of those days.

Last night I had a dream during which I was helping Sherlock Holmes troubleshooting the wireless connection on his laptop. Looking back, he was probably more patient than is canonically accurate.

Also, this is probably the record for early arrival to work since I moved to PB. Awful, isn't it? I'm tempted to ask Santa to 48 hours of nothing -- no chores, no obligations -- to just sit around and sleep except, rather like the lyrics from the song "Stress" suggests, I'd probably hate it.

That's the tragedy of being a self-aware workaholic. You are very aware that you really have no one to blame except yourself.

Oh well.

Common sense fail

Sometimes the Thesis Adviser seems so genuinely interested in the details of what I'm working on that I forget common sense and try to explain the details to him. I usually realize the mistake thirty minutes later with either a vague memory or no recollection of what I was working on before the discussion started and uncertain predictions as to when the discussion will actually end so I can go back and figure out what I was supposed to be doing (possibly when the timer went off ten minutes ago).

Today, for instance, I tried to explain to him why I stagger experiments a certain way to be efficient, and why that kind of efficiency works for me. Looking back I suspect I may have had better luck trying to convince him that genes are made of green cheese.*

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*A famous geneticist (possibly Nobel laureate -- I forgot) once made a comment along the lines of "the principles of genetics would still hold true even if genes are made of green cheese". (Yeah IDEK.)

I wonder what will happen in the fall

Dear all,

Today I encountered the most novel explanation for daylight saving I've ever heard: tomorrow an hour will be taken out of our day to be given to the Easter Bunny so it'll have time to go around the world to distribute candy to everyone.

Also, as per the song, "Raisins", I discovered that people do indeed wear orange pants outside of detention centers. Sorbet-y orange. It's...ghastly, actually, when paired with a shirt in an even more vivid shade of orange.

I don't understand fashion. I am better at drawing clothing lately but the nuances of what is tacky and what is fashionable appears to be, still, beyond me.

Lawn darts and baking soda

Confession: sometimes what motivates me to write a post is the title I can use for it.

Especially when the title is a result of my brain when I tell it to summarize the 24 hour highlights in ten words or less.

You sir! Yes, you!

There's unobservant and there's failing to notice three girls in bright yellow flailing at you from a grand distance of 15 feet away.

Why is it so hard to explain stairs to people? Why?

So I've been told that the Comic-Con tickets are already sold out.

The tickets just went on sale for registered members only this morning.

It wasn't this crazy the first year I went. If this trend keeps up soon we'll have to register for it a year or even two years ahead of the time, and it will be as bad as the university-run daycare. (Yeah they don't really have good infrastructure for career professionals who are also mothers. At least not until you've made it to the income bracket where you can afford to hire nannies five days a week.)

Unrelated: I have stubble burn on my arm. It is obviously a better alternative than getting clobbered in the face but a) light-haired people's facial hair, until they grow a beard or something, isn't obvious, so this is ...sneaky ninja stubble b) ow and c) and I thought that sprained toes were hilarious.

I didn't know necks could do that....

The man seated in front of me on the bus reeked of alcohol and was distressingly floppy. Based on what I recall from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he only needs a packet of peanuts to be ready for hyperspace jump. (Though he is a couple towels short of being an actual space-time hitchhiker. Shame, that.)

Tired now. Sleeeeeeeeeeeep.

Right.

So when a scientist is essentially told that she is too idealistic to survive in the academia, what is she not too idealistic for?