And so a third week of break lies ahead of me. Not so much a break as before though, as I now have various assignments to complete. I technically also had various assignments to complete before this, but I sort of put them off when I heard the news.

As such, I need to do three reports that were actually due... today. One of them is on blood pressure and respiratory rate. All we had to do for that experiment was get someone to run up and down a flight of stairs a few times, and then measure his blood pressure. So, the rest of us got to sit in the lab and play with sphygmomanometers.

That lesson was incredibly boring, so you really can't blame us for what we did. Of course we did the usual experiments, like finding the "blood pressure" of a water bottle, and trying on the sphygnomanometer in various configurations to see what difference there would be. Eventually, we decided to do an actual (but thoroughly non-rigorous) experiment. We tried to determine the effect of thinking different things on blood pressure.

So there were five of us. All male. Each of us measured our blood pressure in turn, while thinking about nothing, while doing a moderately challenging maths problem, and while thinking happy thoughts. Happy thoughts specifically being typical testosterone-fuelled stuff.

Now, you would probably expect the blood pressure readings to be highest for that last one. And it was, for the other four guys. For some reason, my blood pressure spiked while doing a differentiation problem, and it lowered significantly when I was thinking about...stuff.

I have a reasonable explanation for the maths problem. It has been so long since I tried doing any math beyond simple arithmetic that I probably panicked when the answers didn't come to me right away.

I don't know, I think I have developed some kind of weird parasympathetic response to sexual imagery. It's probably not a good idea to go into detail about this stuff here, so I'll just say that I hope it was an anomalous reading.


Enough about that. My baroreflex to fun stuff is none of any of your concerns. So on Saturday, I went to the science center with some of the KI circle. Not a lot of us could make it, probably because of the mid-years. We didn't stay very long either. Still, it was great. The only problems with the Da Vinci exhibition were that it wasn't very big, and all the flying machines seemed to have frames of solid wood.

That irked me somewhat, because I would've thought that some time between discovering the codices and recreating the inventions, someone would have decided to use a thinner and lighter frame. I mean, it's not like heavy teak was the only wood available during renaissance Italy. Venice was a center of trade, so one would expect plenty of other building materials to have been known, especially to artists and inventors. If I didn't know that those huge contraptions were supposed to be flying devices, I'd have thought that they were gigantic, ornate chairs.

Everything else was very cool. A bit hard to appreciate at first, because all the gear systems and force distribution devices are quite commonplace in the modern world. It was a bit like reading The Origin; one must first realise that these ideas were thought up long before horses were considered fancy.









-Joe

Bacon. Beef. Cheese. Onion rings. More bacon.

I love burgers. Burgers are the best fastfoods ever. Even so, I slightly regret the food-related choices I made today.

In essence, it really wasn't the smartest thing ever when I had a full meal at Carl's Jr only about an hour after a movie. I had some nachos and an ice-blended coffee during the movie. I won't go into details, but this resulted in me throwing up into a ditch after a very long and nauseating bus ride home.

It wasn't that bad. I probably puked maybe one mouthful or so. I didn't really keep it in my mouth long enough to measure it. I was all pale and sweaty when I got home. Paler than usual, which is pretty pale. I still feel slightly ill, but it's no big deal. I'll be fine.

So, the movie. Transformers 2 had a lot of good points. It had several bad points, but I feel that the good points significantly outweigh the bad points. This is not a sentiment shared by the so-called professional movie critics. In general, the critics were really unhappy about how the movie was really long and there was no real plot depth. I personally don't care about that, because I watched Transformers 2 for two reasons: Giant robots destroying each other, and explosions.

There were plenty of sequences involving giant robots destroying each other. Optimus Prime has these cool new red-hot bladey weapons, which he used to fight off a whole bunch of decepticons. Ravage is a freaking missile that becomes a deadly one-eyed panther. A panther that vomits insectoid particles, which can assemble themselves into a robot. The panther also has a gattling gun and two missile launchers.

Ravage is the single coolest transformer in the entire movie. He doesn't even have lines. He probably can't even be referred to as "he". The only other transformer that is even measurably cool enough to stand next to Ravage is Prime himself. The way they animate Ravage's feline grace makes me want to have a little miniature Ravage pet. I would totally buy a Ravage action figure right now.

He eventually had his spine ripped out of his body and used as a whip by Bumblebee. Badass.

Yes, I'm not even going to say anything about Megan Fox. Robot cats that puke insects are simply so much better.

-Joe

It has started to rain again. It has finally rained. Allow me to emphasise "finally". Finally. Also allow me to emphasise "rain". Rain, with wind and water. Rain, with rainclouds that blot out the sun. There is nothing bad about rain, not in this day and age, and especially not in this country.

If I had Storm's ability, the first thing I'd do is increase the local cloud density. The sun is evil. The sun warms the ground. Heat rises off the ground and warms the air. Warm air makes people sweat. Very rarely is that a good thing. The heat distracts a person from his work. The heat downplays the enjoyment one expects to receive from a game. Heat makes people use water, which we unfortunately have to pay for.

Water. The environmentalists lie to the general public. Water is not a non-renewable resource. It's not as if used water is magically ejected into space, never to be seen again except maybe by the Voyager probe. Water stays comfortably on Earth. Our waste water is flushed into the seas, which feed the rainclouds, which in turn fill our reservoirs.

The problem is not that we are running out of water, as many of them would have us believe. The problem is that there is too much demand for water. Unless someone, hint hint, develops weather-control abilities, we're not going to be able speed up the conversion of water. I have a few ideas, but they all involve Maxwell's demon being a real thing.

In that light, maybe it is not so bad that a large proportion of the population believes that we will eventually run out of useable water. People are hard to teach, so perhaps the use of fear to convince people not to treat the matter lightly is perfectly justifiable.

Of course, none of this will be a problem once... certain events have come to pass.



I have to complain about how bad the grammar is in my lecture slides. It stopped being funny after I found out that a lot of it doesn't make any sense, and that I need to understand the topics for the tests. It's not as if the slides are an extensive story about past, present, and future events. Bad grammar, horrible tenses. Nonuniform omission of connector words. Sometimes they even leave out "and"s. Totally changes the meaning.

I find it particularly infuriating that hardly anyone knows how to use the word "whereby". Very often I have find it being used in place of "where". This is just so wrong.

For future reference, learning English is a process whereby grammatical skills and vocabulary are acquired.

Oh but I've got a great joke:

Three neighbouring kingdoms were fighting over piece of land in between them. The first kingdom was extremely wealthy, and they sent twenty knights with three squires each. They spent they day before the battle cavorting around and having jousting matches.

The second kingdom was not quite so rich, so they could only muster up a force of ten knights with two squires each. Still fairly confident, they also spent the day before the battle having mock battles amongst each other.

The third kingdom had recently experienced a famine, and could only send one elderly knight and one inexperienced squire. The knight spent the day praying that he would somehow avoid the battle. The squire set up a pot hanging high on a noose above a fire to cook some food in.

When the dawn of the next day arrived, the knights of the first and second kingdom were too tired from all the activity from the day before. The knight of the third kingdom was nowhere to be seen. Thus, the squires decided to enter the battle themselves. After a long battle of squirey bloodshed, only one walked off the battlefield victorious. It was the squire from the third kingdom. How did he win?


I take that back. This isn't a great joke. In fact, it will probably make you quite sad.


The squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.

-Joe

And so I started my revision. I realise now that disease-related microbiology is not one of my main interests. Which is rather unfortunate, because the vast majority of microbiology is in the medical sector.

Food microbiology is incredibly boring. Foodborne pathogens seem to appear everywhere, in every food we eat. Staphylococcus aureus is also apparently a food pathogen. It should be a law for every last food handler to wear some very clean gloves. I've changed my mind. Food microbiology is not incredibly boring. It's only slightly boring, but it is also very bad for the appetite.

That doesn't really change the fact that trying to memorise a list of pathogens and the diseases they cause is as tedious and un-enjoyable as science could possibly get. This is a job for stiff muggers who don't have anything better to do. There is really nothing complicated here. No complex processes to understand. Makes it an uninteresting task.

Plus, it's difficult to know the actual pronunciation of the names. You can never really trust what you hear in a Singaporean lecture hall. This is sort of a problem, because I'm quite dependent on verbal quizzing.

Head hurts slightly.

The kind of "detail" that the lecture notes go into just seem rather unnecessary. When they started giving me examples of metallic food packaging, I wanted to scream and hurl stuff at the monitor. Why do they feel the need to tell us that aluminium cans exist? Or tin cans. They can't possibly be thinking of asking this stuff in the common test.

Oh and here's something interesting. The original spelling of "aluminum" is as such. It was named by a British chemist in the early 1800s, who was attempting to use electrolysis to extract the metal from its oxide. It was later changed to "aluminium" to make it uniform with the other elements. However, as usual, the Americans had a problem with that. In 1892, a man named Charles Hall started advertising a new electrolytic method of extracting aluminium. Whether it was a genuine mistake, or an attempt at ease of pronunciation(there is one less syllable in "aluminum"), the adverts featured the older spelling.

Hall happened to be one of the more dominant players in the metal industry, so the public had "aluminum" imprinted onto their minds.

And that is why Americans spell it differently from everyone else today.


-Joe

So I just finished watching Gattaca. I had been wanting to see what this movie was like ever since the whole eugenics thing. In fact, it was a review of this very movie that prompted me to choose the topic so many months ago. So even though the point of Gattaca was to show that even a genetically imperfect human being could achieve his goals in an unfair world, what I got from the plot was just the background story.

In the near future, people have begun to select and engineer their offspring to remove any unwanted physical disabilities. Myopia, rather than afflicting nearly half of the population, is now a mark of weakness branded on the invalid population; that is, the people who were not engineered at birth.

I know a great deal more about genetics now than I did a year ago. I therefore now know that Gattaca is a huge stretch of the imagination. In the film, based on blood or urine samples alone, a person's risk of disease, intelligence, life expectancy, and even likelihood to become mentally unstable, can be determined. What technology could possibly predict these things from just the biochemical properties of a drop of blood, I cannot imagine. I suppose this is my version of being unable to suspend belief. When physicists watch a space opera, their conscious minds scream and yell during every space battle. Here, my own mind writhes uncomfortably at these seemingly magical properties of DNA.

It is much different here, a serious, dramatic story, than from a lighter piece of fiction such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When I think of the DNA analysis in Gattaca, I also think of the Total Perspective Vortex, a machine that simulates the entire universe based on the properties of a piece of fairy cake.

Up until actually reading that book, I had no idea that the term "fairy cake" existed. Turns out that a fairy cake is a cupcake.

Cupcakes are to muffins like donuts are to bagels. Bagels are like donuts, but they're lopsided. They taste different. They don't often have a layer of sugar, or white chocolate, or mint cream on them. The bagel is really just a piece of bread that happened to take the form of a torus. There is no reason for the bagel to do so, as the torus conformation of the donut is simply to ensure the lowest amount of calories in its central region. Bagels, seeing as that they are composed mainly of bread, are not rich in calories. Thus, the hole in the middle is not only completely and utterly unnecessary, but also represents the gaping void that the bread overlords(these are real people) store our money in.

In the confectionariosphere, bagels probably share a common ancestor with donuts. However, they would have branched off quite early in their phylogenetic history, an observation supported by how different their biochemical properties are. More likely is the hypothesis that states that bagels evolved their torus shape as a means to keep their kind in existence by mimicking the donut, a far superior organism. I mean, food. This is akin to the way the harmless king snake has a similar coloration to the more magnificent and potent coral snake.

On a side note, I sometimes have dreams where I play Russian Roulette with snakes instead of bullets. It never really works very well. Snake guns just can't happen.

According to On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Flavoured Food Items in the Struggle to be Produced and Sold for Profit, which I will write eventually, all confectioneries share a common ancestor. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that the common ancestor is some sort of starch-water conglomerate. However, it is important to note the possibility that certain items may have arisen independently. For instance, the English scone is rather difficult to classify. It has a rather unique property of being unnaturally dense for a bread-type food product. The only other similarly dense food is the muffin, but the muffin clearly falls under the Desserya kingdom, while the scone is sort of a cross between a large wallnut and a stick of butter.

Another interesting grouping to take note of are the cakes. Cakes are traditionally defined by their spongey, sweetened bread-like masses held together by a matrix of coagulated egg protein. Over the centuries, cakes have evolved to become extremely diverse. Many modern-day cakes possess outer coverings of crystallised cane sugar, or fusions of churned milk fat and artifical sweetening agents. Commonly mistaken for cakes are gelatinous cheesecakes. The gelatinous cheesecake is in fact, not a cake, but rather an agar that rests upon a base of delicious cookie crumbs.

Yum.

I actually like the base a lot more than the "cake". I also sense that I should stop writing this now.

-Joe

It has been so long since my last post that I have almost forgotten that I actually write in this thing. I visited earlier and thought, why the hell hasn't the guy updated yet? Stupid question.

A lot of stuff happened over the past few weeks. Some of the things were very enjoyable. Others not so much. In the end, the only reason I am posting now is that the World of Warcraft server is down and I can't get a new belt for my druid.

It really annoys me when things don't go according to plan. Which is funny (and rather hypocritical), actually, because more often than not my plans never fully unravel, but I am perfectly content with them. No, it's really more of when I have a very limited amount of time, and much of the plan depends on someone else. It's when the tension is palpable, when I know that every second counts. This is especially important when I have some stupid other thing to do that I have to work my plan around.

I'm really just complaining right now because I waited all week for some playtime. I had my weekend planned out, with time allocated for this particularly dastardly report. Identification of food pathogens. Thanks to cross-contamination and some other unknown errors, my range of hypothetical pathogens is so huge that I could probably determine their most recent common ancestor.

Also interestingly, our food samples appear to have been contaminated with various strains of salmonella, and some pneumonia-causing bacteria. Food from our canteen.

Also I'm having this problem with deciding what tense to use for another report, which is really not a report, but rather a reproduction of procedure. Has, had been, will be, is. Why couldn't I have had my consciousness manifest in a universe where all my lecturers have good grammar? Life might be too easy, maybe.

I don't think anyone is reading this. If you're reading this, send me an email saying "Ten animals I slam in a net". You'll get a prize.


And then, it was my birthday. Oh, that was a good day. It had been a long time since I felt that happy. My classmates surprised me with a couple of presents. The last time I got presents like that was when I was eight. Or seven. Maybe six. I can't even remember the last time.


Nope, server's still down.


I'll be settling for something else then. Maybe I'll get a movie, eat some chips. It will be tricky getting my family to not pester me about one thing or another. A job like this calls for finesse. Finesse being a lock, earphones, and loud music.

I am in severe need of intellectual stimulation.

-Joe