1103 Finale with more useless information

Semester One 2010 is officially finished this morning after the long-overdue MEDSCI201 lab test 2. Dept. of Anatomy w/ Radiology cunningly arranged the test well into the exam period so the pharmacy exam next door may be continually distracted by a 400-strong class coming, waiting and leaving in tandem. The volatile situation is not improved at all by their supervisor, a middle-aged cow lady who'd emerge every five minutes and tries to drown our chatter with her supercharged rat-like screaming, causing much mayhem.

The test went okay for us, much easier than the previous one. Only surprise is to know that colonic veins drain into the same hepatic portal, unintuitive but true.

What comes next are three exams, which will be promptly forgotten until the night before, wish me good luck, I will need several shipments of it.

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Thanks for putting up with the boring stuff of my life, let us talk about things that might interest you. Shcokingly, I have been oblivious of the Polandball meme for such a long time. Basically it is the caveman's Hetalia, and according to this post on MP, "strips national stereotypes down to their cores". Pure ingenuity and, well, outright awesome, with many in-jokes that only /int/ards and /b/tards will understand. Having rudimentary knowledge of history and current affairs helps, too.

 All Hail Lord Polandball

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An excellent chronological summary of the Blue Diamond Affair, very interesting to read. The most absurd part of the saga is why would the Thai police give back obvious fake gems, I am sure the excuse of "your property was never recovered" would have been taken much better by the Saudis.

Actually, it all makes sense if you take into account what has been going on in the southern departments all year around. (Warning: Blood and Gore) Ethno-religious hatred sometimes do transcend economic divisions, much to the charging of left-wing historiography. 

Speaking of blue diamonds, the most famous one is probably the Hope diamond, said to bring various misfortunes to owners since Louis XVI, well not really. 

Blame incandescent lighting, the diamond surely is blue.

I took the photo in my last visit to the states. The stone was in its Pt setting with 16 diamond surround and 45 diamond chain;currently it is on a temporary display alone while the rest of the set reamins in maintenance.

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P.S. In case you have noticed some style difference in this post, it is probably because I have changed over to the new post editor, much easier to use than the old one.

Fast Food Freestyle

It has been a chilly day, ideal in a bum weekend when sustenance = takeaway food. Can't decide on beef or chicken? Well why not both: Have a life, have one of the world-infamous McGangbang^®.

I went out for mine today, the only right way to do it is to order a double cheese burger and a McChicken sandwich, evenly split the double cheese, place the entire McChicken in the middle and reassemble.

This is how McGangbang^® works, please refrain from asking more obscene questions.

Below this paragraph is my lunch before it became a part of me. I apologise for the rather unappetizingly soggy look since I let the ingredients stand for too long by taking a detour to fill the car. To make up for the lost freshness I added a generous scoop of chicken pâté (not visible, but it sits right above the chicken pattie; it helps to stablise the tower too as an edible adhesive) and some freshly ground pepper. Yum

Notice the undersized cheeseburger

Washed down with an ice-cold bottle of lemon lime & bitters, the total energy intake is approximately 4100kJ or 990cal, not including the added pâté and mints. I feel better fortified now.

A more elaborate account of the meme can be found here. Shame I had to pay over $8 for it while it costs less than half of that in the US.

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On a side note, food is really cheap in the states. Grocery from a supermarket in Greenwich Village on average cost a bit less compared to my local Foodtown, mind you it was one of the more expensive places to live. The gap is much bigger in the west coast, and for most of time I was there I did not even bother eating out: There are so many wonderful and affordable options in the supermarkets, you can treat yourself to a really good meal in your motel room.

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Miranda is a huge fan of McNuggets^®, a habit I could not approve of. Smooth muscle is already overrepresented in ground meat, yet all nuggets contain up to 20% of chicken skin to improve texture, without the fat nuggets will crumble once fried.

Above all, I prefer the more boutique fast food chains such as Wendy's, Arby's and in the worst case: Burger King. Sure, they all have the same problems, but McBurgers are the worst. If you ever need a saturated fat fix, try drippings on toast, at least your throat does not burn as badly after consumption.

In case it was Maccas or stavation, I'd get a salad. One particularly memorable encounter with big brother Mac was in some remote town in New Hampshire where I had a chicken salad and piping hot vege soup. The latter was poured out of a plastic bag into a paper cup. Not withstanding the peculiarity, it actually tasted pretty good, or I could have been nearly frozen to oblivion that anything warm is welcomed by my system.

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P.S. Google's best kept secret:

Search with the prefix "cache:" followed by the URL will take you directly to the latest snapshot of the page in concern, very useful for some sites where the content can be a bit volatile.

Daily Dose of Poetry for Your Mind

Spontaneous update, apologies in advance for the lack of original content

Anna thy charms
Robert Burns

Anna, thy charms my bosom fire,
And waste my soul with care;
But ah! how bootless to admire,
When fated to despair!

Yet in thy presence, lovely Fair ,
To hope may be forgiven;
For sure 'twere impious to despair
So much in sight of heaven.

You can find a really good recitation and some background information of the verse here by BBC.

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Similarly themed song



Literal translation thanks to Wikisauce:

By a head of a thoroughbred horse
who slackens in the final stretch,
and afterward when it returns seems to say:
"Remember, brother, you don't lose when you don't play."

Lost again by a head: the infatuation of a day
for a flirt who promises while she smiles
and tells lies about love
yet my whole heart burns for her.

By a head!
It's madness
but a lying mouth that kisses
still drives away sadness
and soothes the bitterness.

By a head!
If she forgets me
I'll lose everything that matters.
Life is a thousand broken promises--
but why live at all?

How many disappointments were lost by a head?
I swore a thousand times to stop pushing my luck.
It's no pleasant sight to watch a man lose.
Yet I remember the burn from her lips and want another kiss.

I'm done with races. No more foolish chances.
I won't return to see the bitter end.
But then next Sunday I'll think some filly is a sure thing.
I'll gamble; I'll find out. What else can I do?

Wonderfully Biomimetic Animation

Spent two hours today this afternoon watching Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22, with a bottle of Sarz and some chips. It was pretty good, I do intend to write a full synopsis/review once I can be bothered to type 1000s of words again.

Oh and it is full of science too, with one realistic portrayal of breaking the sound barrier, as well as a much redesigned Sahaquiel, which behaves just like an oversized pleomorphic virus.

HERE is proof:


For the virologically uninitiated, the black sphere seen from 0:48 drops like a disco ball because it had a plasma membrane coating which is of a fluid mosaic structure maintained by cholesterol; upon fusion with the host the membrane goes away to reveal some shiny and perfectly geometric capsid proteins forming a protective core; as the capsid disassemble, a neatly stratified and compact genome can be seen; finally the genome unwind itself to a more linear molecule, and judging from the complex outline (and the lack of other components) I am fairly certain it is positive sense ssRNA, so-shaped to trick host ribosomes into thinking it is one of the cell's own mRNA, as well as epigenetically regulating the level of expression of different gene segments.


BTW, here is the old Sahaquiel from the original TV series 15 years ago. Appearance-wise it is closer to an unnatural triplet of neurons with very short dendrites, strange.

Happy Socialist Children's Day, Happy June 1

Welcome to the month of Juno, a.k.a Hera, the younger one. Today is the Children's day in most former socialist countries, which are the following according to Wikipedia(!):

"...In Russia, as well as other former Soviet Union states, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, other former or current communist states, Albania, Angola, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Germany, Laos, Republic of Macedonia, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Tanzania, Yemen, Children's Day is celebrated on June 1."

Well to be exact, unified Bundesrepublik does not have an official Children's day in June, however most people in what is former DDR carries the tradition on. The list also missed out China: curiously both claimants officially celebrate Children's Day today. Just to prove how prevailing the views of Moscow had been.

Yup, once upon a time in Soviet Russia it was five kopeks a pop.

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The latest development of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, well, suffice to say BP failed to seal the leak. Some report suggest it will continue to send oil to the US shores till October.

Oh no.

Extraction of petroleum is nasty business, once you breach the non-porous layer of rock, pressure keeps the well flowing, until it gets so depleted that you actually need to pump water into the well to displace the oil. Offshore drilling is even more risky; lacking reliable method to store the gas, platforms are typically equipped with a torch to burn effluent gas, so much to the waste of resources.

Recall the oil crisis, people forget about things so quickly that it is surreal to read old newsreel describing serious proposals to open up conservation land for firewood, or people might freeze to death. Then it came the oil glut of the 80s, which ultimately bought down the USSR as oil revenue diminished at a few dollars per barrel. More so, the cheap oil compounded with two decades of neoliberal policies shifted the world's infrastructure to an oil-hungry mammoth that we are still stuck with today.

Since the energy issue often gets unnecessarily politicised, blame not the corporations, but the hippies for making it happen. It is hard to believe that humans are still burning compacted corpses of archaic organisms to keep warm and move around. D. I. Mendeleev once said (I cannot find the source, but I am sure it is the right person I am quoting from) burning coal for heat is pretty much criminal, because more valuable chemical products can be obtained from coal than simply turning it to CO2 and possibly some other toxic fumes. The same statement cannot apply any better to petroleum: petroleum feedstock is one of the cornerstones of modern chemistry and engineering, with most synthetic products having origin in crude-oil products. In case oil runs out, there will be substitutes for energy, but nothing can yet replace the oil distillates.

If a developed country like France can produce over 70% of its electricity in nuclear power plants, there is no reason why rest of the world cannot follow suit. Nuclear power has been relegated so badly, that no uranium was mined in the last score or so; existing reactors are fed with a relatively bottomless supply of recycled pre-military uranium. There is some risk with too much physics, I know, however reactor design has advanced a lot since Chernobyl, and I'd rather have a minor rise in the background radiation than having various fowl emissions from the chimneys and car engines.

To make light of a dire situation, I present the Russian method to end this problem once and for all. thermonucleargeoengineering FTW.

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Is this real? Or is it the portal to a different dimension?