Sex And The Monkey

Sexually frustrated chimp starts smoking in China.

Hero

Hero tops US box office this week!

What a pleasant surprise that it coes so well!

My favorate actress, Maggie Cheung, is in it, too. How beautiful she is!






I hope I can see the director Zhang Yimou's second WuXia movie, The House Of Flying Daggers, here in the US soon.

The Gold Medal

Liu Xiang won the gold medal of men's 110m hurdles!

Plus he tied the world record!

Just look how fast he ran! A red lightning!

China's first men's track and field Olympics medal ever! He wrote a new chapter in Chinese Olympics history!

I got so excited that I couldn't sit down or stand still. I walked around the lab aimlessly. I made phone calls to tell people we won.

This made me even more excited. I rushed into my boss's office and (almost) shouted to him:"We won the 110m! Men's! Hurdles! Gold!"

He looked up from a paper he was reading and, a little shocked by my wild behavior, asked:"We won? The United States?"

I said:"No, We! WE!...No, I!... no..."

At that moment there must be a big "Data overflow!" error message flashing in my language lobe.

I paused a little bit to compose myself.

"...China!"I finally found the correct word.

My boss said:"That was something I didn't expect China could win."

"I know," I said, "isn't that amazing?"

"Yes. It is! Wow! Now the next thing for you to win is the 100m!"

"Yeah, right."

Later that day, Huina Xing won women's 10,000m gold medal.

What a memorable day!

Mine, My Precious, My Own

Today my boss said:"Lei, you should get a name for your mutant."

That's right. I had made the mutation for several months now and it hadn't got a name yet. I kept calling it "my mutant". It was like calling a two month-old baby just "my baby".

Not that I didn't want to name it, but that it was my first "baby" and, like all parents, I wanted to give it a good name.

Fruitfly people are known for their freedom of naming genes/mutants whatever they like, which is an advantage over yeast people and worm people, who have relatively stricter naming systems. Some fruitfly gene names are really cool, imaginative, and funny. Quite a comic relief if you encounter one in a generally boring scientific paper.

I wanted my baby to have that kind of names.

Apparently, my boss already had an idea. He suggested:"Why not call it lz? You know, your initials."

I hesitated. It didn't sound like an ideal name. First of all, it was a little bit vain. Plus it was uncool.

But after a while, when this "initials" idea sank deeper into my brain and hit my vanity nerve, I began to like this name.

Why not? I made this mutant, after all the doubts, obstacles and mistakes. It was mine, my precious, my own. I personally felt in my heart that I deserved it. And this time, there was no controversy involved.

Of course, I am not that vain, So if I have other options, I would be glad to give it up.

But for now, meet lz.

Purchase Or Pirate?

Quite a few Chinese people, including me, were disappointed and even angered when Microsoft announced that it was going to lower the price of Windows XP in some east Asian countries, including Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but not in China.

People in these countries, including China, are used to pirated Windows because the "real" Windows is just way too expensive. Lowering its price might help kick the habit. People don't steal when they don't have to.

If there is any country that needs this low price policy, it is China. I didn't understand why China should be excluded from this list.

Now I do.

It turns out that Microsoft is not lowering the price of Windows XP, but offering these countries another version of it, named "Windows XP Starter Edition". In SE:

• You can only run 3 programs at a time. That means if you have Norton Anti-virus and a ZoneAlarm personal firewall running in the background to protect your PC, you can only run one more program?Ridiculous.
• It doesn't support high-speed CPUs, nor RAM more than 256M. Imagine the unbearable slowness of being.
  
• 800x600 maximum resolution.
  
• No Microsoft networking. Want to share your DSL connection? No way.
  

In one word: rubbish.

A perfect example of a good idea ruined by greed.

Microsoft wants to tell us:"Sounds inadequate? Buy our Windows XP Professional to get a full experience!"

But I hear:"Feeling robbed? Buy a pirated Windows XP Professional to get full revenge!"

Barnes & Noble

Today in Barnes & Noble, I saw a book called:" The Complete Idiot's Guide To Understanding Einstein".

Interesting title. So now the distance between an idiot and a genius is just a 400-page book.

Quite a ground-breaking discovery, although it was not the reason why I was in the bookstore. Several months ago I found out that Harmony Books was going to release a 25th Anniversary Edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this month, with a lot of extra pictures, drawings and other interesting stuff. Naturally I was curious about what these would be, being a big fan of Douglas Adams and all.

In the New Releases section, I found the book. The cover looked the same as the original hard-cover edition, except for a silver round sticker at the bottom-left corner of the front cover.I ignored the sticker and flipped through the book. To my disappointment, there was no extra features in it. In fact, it looked exactly like the original edition. Then I looked at the sticker on the cover. It read:"BACK IN ORBIT. 25th Anniversary Facsimile Edition. NOW ONLY $13.95".

Facsimile Edition. Why bother?

Back home, I did a more careful study online. It turned out that the book I wanted to see is called:"The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition".

It is going to be released in October, 2004.

OK. Let's wait till then. Better not let me down twice.

Nice Dress!

This afternoon, on my way to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, I met L, another biology PhD student.

Me: Hi, L!
L: Hi, Lei!
Me: How's going?
L: Pretty good. You?
Me: Good, good. Have you seen any movies lately?
L: That is a nice dress for the weather.

For a second of two I solemnly thought that this long, hot summer had finally destroyed my listening comprehension unit of my small brain. But my logic circuit quickly jumped into action and directed my eyes to a girl passing by.

That girl was in a low-cut, knee-length pink dress. And L was staring at her, turning his head slightly as the girl walked away.

When he finished staring, L said:"No. Last movie I saw was Spiderman 2. I liked it. Have you seen it yet?"

I had no choice but to continue this conversation as if nothing weird had happened.

But I thought it was pretty weird.

The Beginning Of internet

A while ago I wrote something about internet, and the next day my friend Bo pointed out that the "i" in "internet" is always capitalized. So it should be "Internet". I thanked him and made the correction.

But today Wired Magazine announced that from now on it would stop capitalizing "internet", "web" and "net".

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.

I think I will go with Wired. Why? The simple answer is because I am a subscriber. The real answer, though, is because it saves my face.

That said, I still appreciate Bo for pointing out my mistakes. And I will appreciate anyone for taking all the trouble to do so, too.

I Assumed...

To do a ligation experiment, you mix the enzyme and the DNA in an Eppendorf tube, put it in a PCR machine and leave it at 16 degrees overnight. A PCR machine is basically a metal block whose temperature you can control, from 0 degree to over 100 degrees. You can also control how long it holds a certain temperature, from several seconds to several days. You can save your settings to a program and assign a number to it. For example, the number for the ligation is 6. Next time you want to use the same program you can just browse to the number and hit the "RUN!" button.

Today, Feng felt ready for a ligation. He put his tubes into the PCR machine and turned it on. Without looking at the LCD display, which showed the program number and its settings, he hit the "RUN!" button. Instead of leisurely holding at 16 degrees, the machine made some labored noises, turned off its green light then turned on a red one, and heated its metal block to 95 degrees within a few seconds. Feng noticed the machine's fiery manner and checked the LCD. Of course, the machine was not on program 6, but on some other program whose first step was 95 degrees for 5 minutes. He panicked a little and shut it down 3 seconds later.

When he turned around to make sure no one saw it, Feng met the boss's smiling face. Apparently, he saw the whole thing.

"Errr..."Feng tried to explain,"I just assumed it was on the right program!"

"You assumed,"the boss grabbed a pen and wrote the word ASSUME down on a piece of paper, "look, when you ASSUME something, you make an ASS out of U and ME!"

That's a good one.

What's His Name?

I was at lunch with a bunch of chatting girls. Their topics switched rapidly from abnormally cool weather to, naturelly, gossips.

Nancy: "So Hong in my lab said..."
Farhana: "Hong? Isn't his name Kong?"
Veronika: "Oh, yeah. I am always confused. It seems all the Chinese call him Kong, but he lets us call him Hong."

They paused their discussion, and all turned their heads to me.

I decided to grasp this rare opportunity to give them a Chinese lesson. So I cleared my throat and lectured:

"Kong speaks Cantonese, OK? And in Cantonese, his name is Hong. But we speak Mandarin. And in Mandarin, his name is Kong."

Veronika, still confused, asked:"But what should we call him then?"

Me:"Hong Kong."

A Boring Day

Spent a whole day doing some Mass Spectrometer Training. I can hardly see me using a Mass Spectrometer in my whole PhD career. The only reason of my being there is that the training program requires minimum 5 people to open a class, and Andy and Nancy, the people who really want to use this machine to id their protein samples, couldn't find 5 people. So they asked me to be the "5th person". As always, I said:"OK."

The professor started the class by asking each of us why we wanted to attend this class, which really caught me off guard. Obviously, I couldn't say "I am just a filler". So I made up some bullshit which I think the professor didn't quite understand, except for the fact that I am the retarded one of the group.

Later I learned that the program requirement is not "minimun 5 people", but "maximum 5 people", because the workplace is really small to hold more than 5. So I didn't even need to be there to begin with. I felt more wasted.

Oh, and I owe Andy $5 for lunch because I didn't carry my wallet.

How To Survive In Nature (Answer)

picture1



picture2

How To Survive In Nature

Each picture has an insect in it. Can you make out them?

A Quick Post

I am not being partisan or anything. It is just pure fun. Besides, I am a little lazy today.

Bushism

Mystery...Solved

After several tedious weeks of subcloning from a phage clone, several discouraging months of creating a NotI site by mutagenesis, a couple of boring weeks of inserting a GFP cassettee into the created NotI site, a few tiresome days of subcloning it into an injection plasmid pW8, an intense week of injections, 3 anxious weeks of waiting and praying, 5 hurried minutes of dissecting and preparing slides of different fly tissues, finally, the expression pattern of GFP tagged k5, a protein expressed ubiquitously, is ready to be examined.

(For those who don't read Biology, this means, I had a hard time making this thing. It's finally done. I am going to check the slides under the microscope, and I am expecting to see bright green, green, green color everywhere.)

This is the moment of truth. Relax. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I put on a slide. It is a female ovary. I look into the eye pieces of the fluorescence microscope. I see--darkness, darkness, darkness everywhere.

I am supposed to see green! Where the hell is the green? What's with all this darkness?

I put on another slide. It is some other tissue I dissected out from a female fly. I don't even know its name. Look, and see darkness.

Another slide--darkness. On all slides I see darkness, except the one with male testes on it. On that one I see bright green light along the sperm bundles, which looks exactly like another GFP tagged protein I have made and examined a few weeks before. That protein, k5t, is a testis-specific protein and is supposed to be seen only in testes.

After dissecting and examining some more flies, both of k5 and k5t, I reach a conclusion: they look the same, which, I can't say is impossible, but is very very improbable.

What's happening?

The only logic explanation I can come up with is: I pulled out the wrong tube of DNA to do the injection, so these alleged "k5-GFP" flies are in fact "k5t-GFP" flies.

The result of a subsequent PCR test is consistant with this explanation.

(For those who don't read Biology, this means: I am screwed.)

Oh, what a stupid mistake! What a terrible waste! But what can you do now? Punish the flies? Abuse them? Or raise the "lab-soberness alert" to orange?

I will begin to do some injections tomorrow, this time, with the right DNA.

Why English Is So Hard?

My boss printed this webpage out for me, "to make you feel better," he said.

It's Four In The Morning...

It's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

Thus the song Famous Blue Raincoat begins.

Sometimes I wonder: what does it feel like to write a hopeless letter at four in the morning? Must be pretty desperate.

Tonight, at four o'clock, as I sit in front of the computer, up and half-awake, I feel pretty desperate, too.

Not because I have a heart-breaking tale to tell, no, but because the piercing sound of the fire alarm is ringing, on and on, seemingly to eternity.

Yes. Fire alarm, at four in the morning. That is one of the bonuses of living in this apartment: the fire alarm will go off at any hour of the day. Not once is there a real fire. So we have learned to stay in our rooms and wait helplessly.

Ten minutes later, without a warning, it stops abruptly, just as how it begins. My brain feels empty without it. Immediately, the roaring noises of the passing vehicles on the highway a few miles away rush in to fill this sudden void. I hear them every night. So familiar, so soothing.

I think I am ready to fall asleep again.

The Little Prince

What I learned today: 60 years and 1 day ago, on July 31, 1944, the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared after his aircraft crashed on a reconnaissance mission.

Maybe he went to the planet B612 to look for the little prince. Maybe he went to look for his own rose.

Check out this site: International LITTLE PRINCE Online.

Be sure to check out its 315 different frontcover page!