Shanghai?

Code 46. Judging from the pictures, it happened in Shanghai. I wonder what this movie is about.

What The...

How many people do you see in this picture?

The End Of An Era

Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA double-helix structure, died today.

What was on his mind when Watson and he submitted their paper to Nature?

Did they think:"Gee, this must be it! We are going to change the world! Human cloning will be possible because of us! Champagne!"

Or simply:"Gee, proof-reading is killing me! Let's just submit it as it is and hope the editor will like it!"

Either way, I admire them.

This Old Machine

I spent all my evening trying to clean up my roommate's (ancient) laptop.

I don't know what he did, but his computer was filledwith adware, spyware and other trojans, which made his already slow laptop painfully, painfully slooooooooow. Besides the unbearable slowness, there were hundreds of pop-up windows popping up out of nowhere every several seconds, basically covered up his desktop.

Scary.

So I tried several different removal software to kill them. Spybot found 56, Ad-ware found 968, after over 4 hours of scanning! But it was not over yet. The hugest blow came right after Ad-ware finished searching: the computer frozed! I could do nothing but reboot, and all the scan result was lost. I had to scan it again!

I felt exhausted. I felt defeated, by this old machine.

The take-home lesson: Customer Service is a tough job.

2001: A Space Odyssey

My boss brought me his 2001: A Space Odyssey DVD on saturday, after he found out that I hadn't seen it yet. He said he saw it on big screen when he was in high school and it really blew him away, although there were some symbols he didn't quite understand.

"You have to see it. And tell me about what you think about those symbols."

OK. So it sounded like an assignment.

I watched it. Wow! What a strange movie! Not sure what was going on, I watched it again. Then some really weird parts a third time.

Today I brought it back to the boss and we talked about it for almost an hour. I told him my understandings of the symbols he wasn't quite sure about, and he shed some light on the scenes I didn't understand, or didn't even notice. He told me about what he thought of HAL, the supercomputer on board of the spaceship. "He wanted to take control," he said. Finally, we both agreed that it was one of the best movies, not just sci-fi movies, ever.

The boss got so excited by the discussion that he said:"why don't we watch some of the parts again on my computer?"

Good idea.

After he popped in the disc, the DVD Player program automatically jumped out. But before it played the DVD, it asked:"This is the first time you play a DVD on this machine. Please set your region code. (You can only set it for 5 times.)" But the "Set region code" button was grey. The only button that could be clicked was "Cancel". When the boss clicked "Cancel", another dialogue box jumped out, asking for the "Administrator Password".

Ah, nice. The UNIX-based Mac OS X. If you are not an administrator, you can't change or set anything. Even though my boss bought this PowerMac, he isn't the administrator. Who is? Some guy from the "computer-facility-purchasing office". Every machine purchased with your grant has to be "configured" by him first. He is slow, inefficient, and irresponsible. Now it's apparent that he wants to take control, too. Just like HAL, the supercomputer in 2001, A Space Odyssey. He disabled everything on this Mac. If we want to change anything, we have to beg him. By this way he displays the importance of his job, and enjoys power, however small it is.

How chilling, the human nature. Every smallest authority is used to gain the maximum control. No wonder HAL wanted to control the spaceship. Can you blame him? He was built with Artificial Intelligence, modelled after human nature. An innate control freak.

Of course, the administrator was probably just following the computer security rules of the university. But it is always easier to criticize an individual than a "system".

I guess that is another chilling aspect of human nature.

The Cutest Animal

What is the cutest animal on the planet? Before tonight, I couldn't give an answer. But now I can tell you: panda!

Why? Because it IS!

...OK. Because I watched PBS's wonderful program The Panda Baby tonight. It was about the birth of Hua Mei, the first US born panda. If I didn't see this documentary, I couldn't believe what a newborn panda looked like. She was small, about as long as your palm. And she was red and smooth, no black and white fur at all. More like a new born mice than a panda. And how cute she is! Especially after she grew on her black-and-white fur. At about 5 months old, she looked exactly like a stuffed panda doll. The first time her mother brought her to the outside from their den, she was so curious about the whole new world that you would even hear her thinking:"Wow! What are all these fun things Mommy didn't tell me about!"

Next time I go to San Diego I am sure to visit its zoo and its star: Hua Mei.

Chinese Soldiers

Whenever you see a picture of Chinese soldiers in western media, be it CNN, BBC, or New York Times, they all look the same: stiff, cold and heartless.

I mean, come on! Aren't they human?

If you have doubt, take a look at this picture.

Lost In Translation

X was doing a plasmid prep today, which involved a step where liquid flew through a column and DNA got stuck on it.

So she was sitting on a stool in front of the setup, mindlessly staring at the liquid dripping away.

The boss walked out of his office for some coffee. Amused by X's Zen-like stunt, he commented:"A watched pot never boils."

Then he turned to me:"Have you ever heard of this saying? 'A watched pot never boils'?"

( See, he is our boss AND our English teacher.)

I said:"No, but it's easy to get the meaning."

He said:"Yeah. I'm sure you have some similar sayings in Chinese, right?"

Out of diginity, I answered immediately:"Sure we have."

But when I really thought about it, I couldn't find its Chinese equivalent. There might be a saying goes something like:"If you lift the lid of a pot for too many times, the dumplings in it will never be fully cooked." Sounds so lame. If this saying really exists, which I am not sure, the exact wording must be much cleaner and smarter.

The take-home lesson: don't ever try to be a translator.

Free iPod

I wish I were a freshman of Duke University. I could get a FREE iPod, PLUS I would be young again.

The 5-minute Koan

I looked up from my lab notebook to check time, and gasped.
It was already 4:55 pm and my bus was going to leave in 5 minutes! And I still had:

• one gel to pour for later tonight when I was back from dinner;
• one gel to take picture, which was still running, and had about 20 minutes on its timer;
• one transformation to be finished.

I told myself:"Ok, DON'T PANIC! Optimize your steps! Don't make any mistakes!"

-5 min left.
Took out IPTG, Ampicillin and X-Gal tubes out of the freezer and holding them in my palms to melt .
Ran to the shaker room, took out the transformation tube between my right index finger and middle finger, shut the shaker down with my left thumb while making sure other tubes in my hands didn't fall out. Shut the shaker room door with my left foot. Ran back to lab.

-4 min left.
Put IPTG, Ampicillin and X-Gal, half melted, in the ice bucket. Put the transformation tube on the rack. Add 10 ul IPTG. Add 15 ul Amp. Add 50 ul X-Gal. Ran to the 65C water bath. Took out the top agar. Took a 10 ml pipet on my way back.

-3 min left.
Add 3 ml top agar to the tube. Votex. Took out the LB plate in the 37C incubator. Pour.

-2.5 min left.
Ran to the gel room. Still had 15 min on the gel power timer. "Calm down. Don't panic. Make gel first." Made the gel. Checked the timer: still 14 min to go. "Good enough. Stop the timer." Stopped the timer. Took out the gel. "Be careful! Don't drop it! Don't make mistake!" Checked the gel under UV. "Great! Good bands! Just as expected!" Took the picture.

-1 min left.
Threw the used gel away. Took the gel tray to the sink to wash. "Great! The bus is always late a minute or two! Seems you have made i-" As I was putting the washed gel tray away, my elbow knocked down a flask on the edge of the sink. It fell into the sink, and broke.
"Damn it! "
Stared at the broken flask for about 2 seconds.
"Oh, what the hell. Nobody saw it!" Picked up the pieces and threw them into the "broken glass disposal" can. Cleaned the sink.

Ran back to lab. The top agar still hadn't solidified yet. Asked X:"Hi, could you please put this plate in the incubator in about 10 min?" She nodded.

Looked at the clock on the wall. Already 5:06 pm.

The bus should have gone by now. But maybe it was late. So I ran to the bus stop to try my luck. My usual fellow-passengers were still standing there idly under the afternoon sun, which meant the bus hadn't gone yet! Phew!

The bus came about 3 minutes later, which meant that I had no need to hurry at all. If I had known this, I probably wouldn't have broken the flask.

But if I hadn't broken the flask, maybe the bus wouldn't have been late.

Oh, the inextricable cause-and-effect relationship!

Birthday

Today is my birthday, so I did what Chinese would do on birthdays: feasting my friends, in a Chinese restaurant.

Food was excellent. After the food was the routine we always do: reading each other's fortune cookie. Mine was a little interesting:

"You have had a good start. Work harder."

Yeah, right. Like I haven't been working hard. Worked a whole day today, a Saturday, my birthday!

Earlier today, while I was busily checking my flies, one of my friends called and screamed:"Can't you take one day off? It's your birthday!"

I said:"If I can't do something useful on my birthday, when can I?"

I like the "you have had a good start" part, though. I think I have had a good start on two things:

1. I have made a mutant of the gene I am studying. And it has the expected phenotype. Yeah!
2. I have started this blog, and I am addicted to it. Yeah!

So I guess I will be working harder on these two things in the following year , or, to be more precisely, in the following years.

Happy Birthday to Myself!

The Three Kingdoms

Today X, who has been preparing for her PhD qualifying exams, asked me sheepishly:"What are the three Kingdoms of, you know, biology?"
 
I was puzzled:"Three kingdoms? I thought there are more than three! See, Animalia, Plantae, and..." I found I didn't know the correct terms for other kingdoms, so I go, "the one with bacteria, you know, the prokaryotes, and at least there is one with the fungi..."
 
I swear I once knew this. I had learned this repeatedly in high school, in college and when I was a microbiology TA a couple of years ago. At least three times, and still I couldn't remember.
 
I guess I am not Ken Jennings, after all.
 
Nevertheless, I felt ashamed of my ignorance. So I pulled out a biology text book from the shelf, blowed off the dusk, and learned some solid biology knowledge.
 
"The one with bacteria" is actually 2 kingdoms:"Eubacteria" and "Archaebacteria". "The one with the fungi" is actually called "Fungi". Besides these, there is another kingdom called"Protista", a kind of junk-basket category for organisms that don't fit into the other eukaryotic kingdoms.
 
So why did X ask for 3 kingdoms? There was no answer in the book so I did some research online and found out that what she meant was "domains". There are three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya.
 
Eureka!
 
While X was writing these down, she sighed:"If the boss knows I am studying this kind of stuff..."
 
Yeah. It's pathetic, isn't it? So basic, yet so elusive. The more you learn, the less you know. What's the point of learning then?
 
The take-home lesson: the storage capacity of human brain is so inadequate.
 
Or we are just getting old.

"Dropsy"

I drop things often these days. Sometimes I don't hold a thing firmly so it drops, sometimes I don't put a thing back on the table properly and it drops. I have dropped my book, my pencil, my notebook, my Eppendorf tubes, my fly vials...lots of things. Either the gravity forces in this lab has changed dramatically over the days so that my muscular system hasn't quite adapted to it yet, or my cerebellum has some difficulty communicating with my cerebrum. Maybe the fuse of one of my synapses got busted so that the brain keeps getting a "network failure" signal. It's like my internet connection breakdown a few days ago. To fix that I called the company and they sent a technician down here and fixed it a week later. But I can't just call some company and let them send me a technician to open up my skull and use some fancy eletronic meter to track down the bad neuron and replace it with a new one. It's not that simple. I am not a robot.

Maybe being a robot isn't all that bad, after all. At least troubleshooting is easier.

The good thing about my dropping tendency is, I haven't really broken anything yet. But the bad thing is, my boss has noticed it. Just yesterday alone, I dropped at least three different things at three different times right under his nose. He called me "Inspector Jacques Clouseau" from the "Pink Panther" movies.

So today when he walked out of his office and saw me busily working, he asked, jokingly:"Have you dropped anything today yet, Lei?"

I smiled reassuringly:"Oh, no, not yet. It's improving." Then I went to the freezer to get Buffer H for my enzyme digestion. But the tube was kinda glued to the buffer rack by ice so I pulled it with a little more strength. Maybe a little more strength too much. The rack unexpectedly jumped a little and fell back. A few tubes got loose and flew right out of the freezer. They hit the floor and jumped all over the place, making happy noises along their way.

I heard a giggle from my boss from behind:"What did you drop, Lei?"

I tried to sound innocent as I hurrily picked up the tubes on the floor:"Oh, nothing. I mean, just a few buffer tubes, not a big deal."

My boss giggled again and claimed:"Lei is 'dropsy'!"

Can't Explain It, Just Watch Him

He finally did it! Ken Jennings has won 1 million dollars on "Jeopardy!"

He knows everything, I mean, EVERYTHING. And he is FAST. He can give an answer even before I understand the question. And the most mysterious moments are when he isn't sure about his answer and you watch him hesitating, shaking his head and producing an answer at the last second with an ascending tone, and you say to yourself:"oh, he is going to be wrong." And guess what? He is always right at these moments! It's like magic!

Once there was this category about the wines and other spirits. He almost got them all. The host looked at him curiously and said:"Ken, you are from Salt Lake City. You are a Mormon. Yet you have extensive knowledge about spirits. We better talk about this over the commerical break."

I suspect he has plugged himself into the internet.

If anyone still has any doubt about the maxim:"Knowledge is wealth", well, just watch him.

Internet Nightmare

My internet access had been down for almost one week. It was back on only minutes ago. What a nightmare! Were they punishing me for downloading too much?

What a week I had suffered! I felt part of my heart and soul had left me. I felt I had been cut off from the outside world. I felt blind. It's like Neo and Trinity, who are hooked up to break into the Matrix and are just ready to kick some agents' asses when suddenly receive a "network failure" signal! They must feel what I had been feeling: confused, anxious, and scared. "Oh, shit, What am I gonna do?"

Believe me, we are all here to experience a major evolution of human beings as a species. Haven't we been trying our best to be connected to some kind of networks? From the radio network, TV network, to GPS network, telephone network, cell phone network, and now internet network. And the trend is, people want to be able to carry these networks with them. From regular phone to cell phone, from desktop PC to laptop to pocketpc, from dialup to Wi-Fi. The only logic next step is to merge all these networks into one and integrate it into ourselves. Internet will be our external sense organ. We won't need any computer or cell phone to communicate with friends at the other end of the world; we search for any information just by thinking it, and the whole internet will be our external memory, and our knowledge will only be limited by the capacity of the internet. And we will live happily ever after.

But remember to choose an ISP that won't leave you disconnected for one week.

Fruit Fly Fight Club

Ever seen flies fight? Honestly, I haven't. That was why I was quite amazed to find this site:



Fruit Fly Fight Club

The Independence Day

Technically, the Independence Day means nothing to me. I am not an American citizen, and being a biology student, every day is a work day. But in reality, this day is the day when I feel like at home, because on this day, they fire a lot of firecrakers.

To Chinese, firecrakers means Spring Festivel, which is the most important day in Chinese life. On this day, usually in the late January or the early Feburary, people go back to their homes, no matter where they are. So the sound of firecrakers remindes us of our homes, of the warm feeling of relatives gethering tegether around the big table having dinner, watching TV or just chatting.

Mysteriously, Americans fire firecrakers in their Independence Day, July 4th, hot and humid, nothing like the cold and snowing Spring Festivel. But the sound of the firecrakers makes me feel like it is Spring Festivel. It's like the holiday and the season are out of sync. Probably what an American would feel when celebrating Christmas in Australia.

The feeling of home makes me want to go home. But I can't. Because America has tightened their visa-issueing policy, all the students of the "sensitive majors" (which mean all majors) will be "background-checked" to see if you are a terrorist (they assume you are). The checking time varies from 2 months to god knows how long. A Chinese student in my department got stuck in China for about 9 months. I don't want to screw up my experiments so my only choice is staying in the US.

It's so cruel: while they are out there celebrating their freedom of...well, say, bombing a country at will, I am in here mourning my freedom of simply going back home.

An Hour Younger

My friend S moved from Pittsburgh, PA(time zone:-5) to Indianapolis, IN (time zone: -4), which means he permanently gained an extra hour in his life, and therefore, he was one hour younger than he was in Pittsburgh. (BTW, who won't feel younger leaving Pittsburgh?) Pretty cool, eh?

When he arrived at his new home in Indianapolis, he called me.

I asked:"Do you feel any younger?"

"No,"he said,"but I feel very tired."

Perhaps the first man ever to feel tired of being younger.

A New Moon

I am going camping tomorrow! My boss recommended me a nice place and he even lent me his binoculars today. Great! I could use them to look at moon and the stars!

It was full moon tonight. The moon was so big and round and yellow and bright that it looked a little bit strange to me. It was like it was not real. It was like it had been pulled closer to the earth by Jim Carrey in the "Bruce Almighty" movie. This kind of thought gave me creeps.

Anyway, it was perfect time to try my boss's binoculars. I went to the parking lot and pointed them at the moon, for the first time of my life. WOW! The face of the moon suddenly became so clear to me. The dark spots were no longer just "the rabbit in the moon" or more scientific but equally vague "craters on the moon", but real things, with definite shapes and clear borders. I could even see the fine textures of the bright parts. I never saw the moon like this before. A new moon to me. It reminded me of the first day I bought and put on my glasses after being nearsighted for about 5 years or so and suddently I found I couldn't recognize my friends because their faces were so clear that they looked different from what I thought they looked like.

When I was standing on the parking lot, mind-blown by my new-found moon, a car with several young guys and loud music drove slowly in front of me. They looked at me with some curiosity and one of them asked:"You OK, man?"

Of course I was ok! I was just being a regular dork.


The moon map: