It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a...fruit fly?

Gender Gap

2005-08-18T23:26:00.000-04:00

The woman in the picture is Maria Callas, the greatest soprano of all time. She is La Divina in my heart. I have already bought at least 10 CDs of her operas and recitals, and downloaded even more.

Soon after I changed my MSN messenger display picture to this, I got several messages from my friends.

From girls: "Wow, what a big diamond!"

From guys: "Wow, who is this pretty girl?"

What did you see?

Pan Gu

2005-08-11T22:31:00.000-04:00

In the paper we were discussing today, there was a gene called Pan Gu.

The boss asked:"Is that a Chinese thing?"

We told him:"Yes. It is a Chinese god. In Chinese myth, he basically created this world. You see the world before him was like an egg. No heaven, no earth, no nothing. Then he was born. He cut the egg in half with an axe. The upper part was light and it floated up to form the heaven. The lower part was heavy, so it dropped down to become the earth."

He thought about this for a second and said:"I wonder if he's going to incoorperate this into the textbooks, along with the Intellectual Design."

Of course, he had been reading TIME.

The Metamorphosis

2005-08-05T21:13:00.000-04:00

"Lei, come out here real quick!!"

Simon's head appeared through the half-opened lab door.

"There's a bat in the hallway!!!"

My utterly bored brain needed no more invitation.

Holy Macaroni! There was indeed a bat in the hallway! And a huge one! It flew back and forth across the hallway as if looking for an exit. Sometimes it would investigate the vents on the ceiling for a while until it came to the conclusion that they ain't no exits. The only legitimate exits were the two doors at each end of the hallway. But they were tightly shut. That's why it couldn't get out. But how the hell did it get in?

Linda heard our excited cries, opened the door to see what was going on, saw the bat, let out a little cry, shut the door immediately, and looked on through the door window.

Even my boss came out to see what the fuss was.

"How did it get in?" he said, "I don't want to be bitten by this thing."

Then he showed us why he was the boss and we weren't. He carefully walked to one end of the hallway, avoiding the flying bat on his way, and opened the exit door, which led to the stairway.

"Come on," he shouted to the bat,"This is your way out. Get out!"

But the bat seemed to enjoy the attention it had obtained from us. It slowed down its speed, as if to say:"No rush, man! Let me play a little." Then it flew straight toward the open door. But just when it almost got out, it suddenly made a U turn and dashed directly toward us. Thus the hallway was filled with our cries:

Simon:"Lei! Look out! It's coming at you!"

Me:"No, it's coming at you! Duck!"

Boss:"Don't let it bite you! It looks crazy! Might have rabies!"

Linda:"Gosh! It's still there??"

Seeing that we couldn't come up with any imaginative offense or defense to get it out, it quickly lost its interest to terrorize us. It studied our posters on the wall a little bit but found our research on fruit flies wasn't particularly useful to increase its preying skills or decrease fruit flies' escaping skills. Then it circled around a vent on the ceiling for a few more times before it decided to fly out of the door and disappear into the stairway.

Back in the lab, we were still excited by this special treat. When we were trying to figure out how it got into the hallway, Peng entered. He was surprised to see us all gathering together.

"What's the matter? Is this a lab meeting?"

The boss said:"Where were you? You missed the bat!"

I pointed out my theory:"He might be that bat."

The boss snapped:"Ah-ha! That explains everything! You disappeared when the bat showed up and you showed up when the bat disappeared! Have you been bitten by a bat recently? Do you feel alright? Have you turned into a vampire? Do you have a black cape hiding under your bench?"

Peng, not expecting this, was speechless for about 4 seconds. Then his face changed to show that his feelings were hurt.

"What are you talking about? Of course I am not a vampire!" he said,

"I am Batman!"

Lost And (Hopefully) Found

2005-08-04T18:18:00.000-04:00

I saw this on the whiteboard in the public computer cluster today:

Lost USB Stick(Datascan)
Please, please, please RETURN it!
I have irreplaceable pictures from going abroad only on that drive!!
****@gmail.com
REWARD!!!

Now, whoever got this USB Stick, if he/she hadn't done so yet, after seeing this notice, would definitely take a look at the above mentioned pictures. Even I was intrigued.

The take-home lesson: everybody is a potential voyeur.

My Japanese Name?

2005-07-31T23:32:00.000-04:00

Not that I want one...

If I type in my name in Chinese characters, It says:

My japanese name is 石丸 Ishimaru (round stone) 一真 Kazuma (one reality).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

If I use English letters, it changes to:

My japanese name is 長谷川 Hasegawa (long valley river) 大輝 Taiki (large radiance).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

The second one sounds better.

A Good Start

2005-07-25T17:25:00.000-04:00

A seminar speaker today said:

"A good way to start a successful career in science is to make an outrageous claim that will take decades to disprove."

Then he quote one such claim made in 1967, which, according to the speaker, was very famous. But I had never heard of it, and didn't understand its meaning at all.

However, since it was supposed to be "outrageous", and hopefully had been disproved, I think I was fine.

Logogle

2005-07-25T16:43:00.000-04:00

Logogle

Faux Pas

2005-06-24T00:36:00.000-04:00

Ling, a Chinese student in my lab, asked me:

"What's pussy?"

I looked at her and said:

"Errr...little cat."

"No. It doesn't make sense. Some other meaning?"

"Why not look it up yourself?"

"I looked," she held up her tiny pocket English-Chinese dictionary,"it says 'little cat',too. But it doesn't make much sense."

"It also means this," I took out my pocket pc, found its "proper" meaning in the digital dictionary, and showed it to her.

She read it, blushed and said,

"I knew it means something bad."

"Don't worry," I comforted her, "it happens to many people."

So I told her the stories of Mei, another Chinese girl who did rotation in my lab a few years ago. Once she asked my boss a question when he walked out of his office for a cup of coffee:

"What's dick?"

"Errr...it's the nick name for Richard."

"No. The place I read it, it probably means some thing."

"Oh, boy, what were you reading? Err...let's just say it's some organ men have but women don't."

With that, my boss turned around and went back to his office, without coffee.

She realized what she had just asked, blushed and said:

"My God, I did it again! Oh!"

Then Mei told me another story of her:

She did her first rotation in Hall's lab when she first came here from China. She wanted to give him a good impression so she often worked late till 11 pm. Another graduate student in the lab, Tom, was also a hard-working guy so they often worked together in the night and developed good friendship.

One night, around nine o'clock, all of a sudden, she asked Tom,

"Tom, do you happen to have a rubber?"

He stared at her, wide-eyed, for a full minute before he said:

"What???"

She thought he didn't understand her because of her Chinese accent, so she repeated:

"Do you have a RUBBER?"

He was still staring so she add:

"You know, I was writing this stuff and I found some mistakes so I want to correct them..." and she pointed to the piece of paper she was writing on.

He immediately relaxed and said:

"Sure. Here you are. By the way, it's called ERASER."

"You sure scared poor old Tom!"I laughed out loud.

She cried out innocently:"How would I know rubber means condom in the States? We learned the word rubber in the middle school English textbook! Don't you remember? -'What is this?' -'This is a ruler.' -'What is that?' -'That is a rubber!'How can they change this to such a bad meaning?!"

The takehome lesson: stop reading textbooks and start watching porn.

Mean Boss

2005-06-22T15:31:00.000-04:00

We were out of fly food today.

If science is the spirit of a fly lab, then food is its flesh. Would there be spirit without flesh?

We needed food! Today!

We, the graduate students plus the boss, used to take turns to make food for the lab. And let's face it, it wasn't the most pleasent job in the life science world. But ever since my boss hired an undergraduate student to take charge of this business, our lives became much easier.

So I went to him:

"Will, we are out of food. Do you have time to make some today?"

"Oh, man,"he immediately complained,"it's 90 degrees outside, and you want me to stir the boiling food in that no air conditioning kitchen?"

That was true. It was so hot today that I had to go directly to the 4 degree cold room to cool down when I walked in from outside this morning.

Then I realized: "OMG, I must have sounded like a mean boss to him!"

But I was not a boss, and I was certainly not mean!

I ended up making food with him.

Oh, man, how we sweated!

The take-home lesson: Science could be mean.

Language Barrier

2005-06-19T17:41:00.000-04:00

Oh, it's always there:
http://interwhores.com/downloads/iraq.wmv

I'm not talking!

2005-06-13T15:23:00.000-04:00

Every other week at 11:45 am we have a "germline" meeting, where people from three "germline labs" gether together and listen to one person to present his or her work.

The order of the talks are usually scheduled this way: the three bosses go first, then the senior students, and the junior students go last. So my boss's talk was scheduled in early March, and mine was today. But my boss wanted to switch talks with me because: "you have more data than I do. Do you mind if I let you go first?"

Of course I didn't mind.

So today it was my boss's turn to present. At 11:45, when it was supposed to begin, only people from our lab were in the room.

Five minutes later, the mouse lab people came. But the worm lab people were still missing. So Bill, a mouse guy, took out his cell phone and called Shing, a worm guy:

"Hello, Shing, it's Bill."

"..."

"I'm doing pretty good."

(Everybody laughed.)

"..."

"Yeah. So are you guys coming to the meeting?"

"..."

"Oh, no," Bill looked at me and smiled strangely,"It's not Lei. It's his boss talking today."

(Everybody except me laughed. I managed to laugh about 4 seconds later.)

When they came they said:"Oh we completely lost track of time. We thought it began at noon."

Yeah, right.

Got To Go Got To Go Got To Go Right Now!!

2005-05-31T20:25:00.000-04:00

Bathrooms are widely considered the second greatest inventions of all time. The greatest inventions of all time is, of course, toilet paper. The apparent popularity of bathrooms therefore makes it surprising, sometimes traumatic, to learn the fact that the nearest bathroom is always too far away when you most need it.

For example, in the Biology building, old and ugly, not all floors are equipped with bathrooms. Even those lucky floors have only one of the necessary two: either men's room or women's room. This arbitrary arrangement are welcomed by certain residents of the building but hated by others, who have to travel to other floors to answer nature's call. Imagine when you have diarrhea.

My lab is on the 3rd floor. Right across the hallway is a bathroom-a men's room.

Boy, aren't I lucky.

Which was precisely what I was thinking when I walked out of the bathroom today. A girl, who was an undergraduate student working in the lab next door to us, was hurrying by the bathroom door. Seeing me coming out of it, she turned around and asked:

"Is there anyone in there?"

"Eh...no,"I answered, quite puzzled by the question,"but..."

She pushed the door open and rushed in:

"I don't care. I have to go! No time to take the stairs! Hahahahahahaha..."

Her nervous laughter echoed behind the closing door, while I remained dumbfounded. Finally, realizing that I could do nothing about it, I decided to pace to and fro outside the bathroom to prevent any possible "accidents" to happen, until I heard the sound of flushing.

The take-home lesson: wish for a new building.

Perfect Weather!

2005-05-29T22:54:00.000-04:00

After several weeks of miserable, rainy weather, we finally had a warm, sunny Sunday.

Blue sky, cool breeze. Perfect.

I sat in the lab, feeling happy. The experiment that had failed me several times seemed be working, too.

The boss came in. As a part of the usual greetings, I said:

"Perfect weather out there."

He looked at the tree shadows outside the lab window and nodded,

"Yes. Just perfect."

Then he looked at me and said:

"Then why are we here?"

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

2005-04-16T18:32:00.000-04:00

This post is a severe distortion of the sad reality that I speak 0% of any American English and 100% of bad English.

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

35% Yankee

10% Dixie

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

The Fifth

2005-04-06T23:00:00.000-04:00

I am the 5th in the 2005 NCAA Men's basketball pool!

My department's pool, of course.

What a surprise!

I was dragged into doing this pool the last minute by Simon. I said:"But I don't know much about these teams! Who's better than whom? I have no idea!" Simon said:"Who does? Come on! It's fun! And it's only 5 bucks! I'm sure you can spare 5 bucks!"

So I filled in the brackets randomly and turned it in with the $5 bill. Simon was right. It was fun. However, the early upsets totally screwed up my brackets and I thought I had no chance of being anywhere near top ten. But the fact that I wisely picked UNC to be the champion counted a lot of points and made me the 5th.

I am sure a lot of hardcore basketball fans in my department will look at the top ten list in disbelief and say:"Lei? What does he know about basketball??"

Anyway, I wonder how much money I can get out of this.

Clint The Scientist

2005-03-01T23:46:00.000-05:00

He's been standing against the wall for all he can remember. Year after year, he watches new students come, old students go. His famous white labcoat is torn on the shoulder. But he still looks the same as the first day he was placed here, except the mask and mustache a naughty student called Feng drew on him.

He is a devoted scientist. Look at the coat! The mouse! The gloves! But people always mistake him for that Oscar winner.

"Someday," he thinks to himself,"people will come up to the actor and say:'aren't you that fly lab paperboard guy?'"

A Car With Many Opinions

2005-02-27T22:02:00.000-05:00

A Car With Many Opinions

The Trailer Of "The Guide"

2005-02-17T14:51:00.002-05:00

Amazon has the world premiere trailer of The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

Cool! My favorate book!

Can't wait to see it!

Update: now you can watch the trailer here.

The Lab Pet...Dead.

2005-02-12T19:59:00.000-05:00

Our lab pet, the Lucky Cricket, was dead.

It was a terrible death. Its middle and rear legs were broken from its body, and one of its antennae was broken, too. I felt sorry for it.

But Feng said:"The snow will kill it anyway, if I didn't catch it. It probably outlived its peer a lot longer in this warm room."

Sounded reasonable.

Our boss printed out a "R.I.P" gravestone on a piece of paper and taped it on the bottle.

Simon, an undergrad, came in and saw this. He shook his head at us accusingly:"Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I told you to set it free months ago. Now see what you've done to it."

I repeated Feng's theory for our defence:"It's gonna die outside anyway. It can't survive the snow."

"No,"he said,"it can dig a hole and hide in it. You guys killed it."

Really? Terrible! If it was true, it must have hated us and cursed us in its final days. Its ghost would probably haunt us in the lab, messing with our experiments, or scaring our precious fruit flies to death.

To prove our innocence, and to have peace of mind, I did a little research on this subject. This website said:

They become adults in July and August, mate, and usually die in September, although some may live until the first frost.

So we didn't kill it. We actually made it live longer, much longer, than normal crickets, although it didn't have any grandchildren to tell his longevity secrets to.

I guess it could rest in peace now. So could my mind.

A Star Is Born

2005-02-07T23:46:00.000-05:00

This morning my boss asked me:"Lei, are you gonna be around this afternoon?"

"Yes. What?"

"Dr. D is going to videotape the lab. They are making a film for undergraduate bio students or something. So I want people looking busy in the lab. You can save your work till then if you don't have much to do today."

"Haha, sure. I will be VERY busy then."

2pm, when I was dissecting flies, I heard some people walking into my boss's office. Since my eyes were looking into the dissecting scope, I didn't look up to see who they were, but I guess they must be Dr. D and his "film crew".

Then I heard my boss showing them around the lab while explaining what our lab was doing (genetics), what were in those bottles (flies), and why we used them(convenience, short life cycle, cute...)

"Ah, here you are."My boss's voice was next to me. I looked up and saw two undergraduate students standing beside me, holding a SONY HC20 camcorder.

"This is Lei. He is looking busy. Maybe you guys can film him dissecting some flies."My boss suggested. The two camera men said"Ok", attached the camcorder to a tripod and pointed it at me. So I went back to work while secretly straightening my back so that I wouldn't look humped in the camera.

After a while, one of the guys said:"OK." I relaxed my shoulders, turned to them and asked:"What's this for?" They said:"Dr. D wants to film the lab that are doing research and make a little video and put it on the department's website so that the new undergraduate students can know what lab is doing what and help them to decide which lab to go to if they are interested in science."

"Oh. I see. That's nice."

"Yeah. It's good for the students. Besides, as Dr. D would say,'You are gonna be a star.'"

There And Back Again

2005-02-05T10:06:00.000-05:00

"We can't give you the visa today. We have to review your application to decide whether or not to give you the visa." The visa officer said with a stern face.

He was in his late 30's or early 40's, not quite an age for the middle-age crisis yet, but looked already experiencing it. His weary eyes and impatient voice were drenched with his disgust for this job. And apparently, he had a very bad day that day. He tortured the guy before me, also a returning student just like me, for about 10 minutes and finally sent him off with a We-have-to-check-your-background-so-fuck-off verdict.

The authoritative "we" word fanfared the whole American people's eagerness to interrogate this poor innocent-looking spectacled Chinese student, or maybe just the officer's personal eagerness to ruin some people's life. How many evil things had been done under this "we" word?

Knowing that a "background check" meaning at least a 6 to 8 weeks' delay and my spring semester would begin in two weeks, I anxiously asked the officer:"Am I being checked?"

"No. We have to review your application to decide whether to check you or not. We will contact you." With this, he threw out my passport and other documents.

I told my brain that it should probably make a little beautiful, moving, I-come-in-peace speech to convince the officer that I was perfectly harmless to the US government, its people and world freedom, but it failed to produce any meaningful sounds to convey my purpose. Instead, it directed myself to say"Thank you", gether my stuff he threw out and leave the room. Later I blame this on the over-crowded, over-heated visa office waiting room. I had been waiting in this hot room for over 3 hours just to get interviewed and no brain would function properly under this situation.

The cold air outside cooled my brain down and it started working once again. Now I fully realized my situation. My scheduled flight back to the states was only 5 days away, which meant that: a) I could get my visa within 5 days and happily come back to the States with no harm done; b) I could get my visa after 5 days and have to change my flight and come back to the States with a little delay and about $200 of the flight changing fee, hopefully; c) I could be background-checked and have to linger in Shanghai for 1 to 2 months and finally come back to the lab finding all my flies had died one week before; and d) I could be rejected the visa-application so that I couldn't come back to the States to finish my study and consequently become a janitor in Shanghai and die a non-PhD.

Of course, I hope scenario a would happen and I only had to wait for 5 days.

So I waited. Four agonizing days passed and no word from the embassy. Each day killed a fifth of my hope. Each day made it clearer that I wanted to come back to the lab to finish my experiments. I missed my flies. Really. Please don't die.

In the afternoon of the fifth day, with my flight at 7:30pm, I couldn't sit around and wait for the call any longer. I decided to go there in person and ask them "What the hell is going on?" So I rushed out of my friend's apartment where I stayed and hopped on a taxi. On a quiet street near Westgate Mall Plaza (Mei Long Zhen Plaza), where the visa office was located, my cellphone rang suddenly. It was from THE VISA OFFICE.

"Come to the visa office tomorrow morning at 10:00 am and have another visa interview. Bring all the forms and your passport."

"But can I do it today? My flight is this evening."

"No way."

The next day, after another 3 hours' waiting in the suffocatingly hot waiting room, I was interviewed by a different guy who was apparently asian and always smiling. After ten seconds of Q&A session, he said:"OK. I don't think there's any problem with your application. Please wait in front of Window 7 while we print your visa."

I didn't feel any excitement, just a little relief and a stronger desire to get out of here and go back.

Of course, I had to cancel my flight. And because it was bought on Hotwire.com, my ticket could not "be cancelled, refunded, changed, exchanged or transferred", as the United Airlines representative insisted, after I called, argued, and begged for 10 minutes. I had to buy a new ticket, which costed me $600.

"Time is money". Whoever first said this, he/she must have experienced the same situation as I did.

Anyway, I was just glad that I was back.

I went to my lab the next day. In the hallway, I met another graduate student. We chatted a little bit about my trip back to China. Family?-Great. Food?-Super. Fun?-Sure!

Then he said:"I bet you don't want to come back, do you?"

I wanted to tell him the whole visa episode, but didn't know where to start. So I just smiled, and nodded.

Going Home

2004-12-12T20:31:00.000-05:00

In a few hours, I will be on my plane, flying home!

Home, sweet home. I can do anything I want. Eat, sleep...oh yes, that's pretty much what my "anything" is.

Won't be able to post from there, though. I heard blogger.com was blocked there.

So see you next year!

You Are Going Home?

2004-12-06T23:07:00.000-05:00

Our department is interviewing new faculty candidates, again. I guess it means we are expanding.

As the tradition goes, everytime a candidate comes, the department will appoint 4 graduate students to have lunch with him/her.

I was picked for today's lunch.

During the eating and talking, the candidate asked us, among other things, what we were going to do this winter.

When it was my turn, I said:"I am going home."

He sounded surprised:"What?? You are going home???"

"Yeah."

"And your advisor agreed to let you go home? Who's your advisor?"

"Err...Dr. B."

"For how long?"

"Err...a little less than a month."

"Will your advisor still want you when you come back?"

I studied his eyes behind those frameless glasses, hoping to see any indication that he was just joking.

I saw none. He was serious.

The disdain in his eyes annoyed me.

Since when had going home become a sin?

"For my defence,"I tried to prove I wasn't a slacker,"I haven't been home for like 5 years."

"OK."

Well, somewhere, some day, some graduate student's PhD life will be very long and very hard.

Just not here, not in this department, I hope.

OMG! Is That Meat In Your Food?

2004-12-05T11:22:00.000-05:00

Red meat link to arthritis risk

Red meat risk for endometriosis

Red meat 'cancer threat'

Less meat 'means a longer life'

Update Freak

2004-12-04T23:49:00.000-05:00

I am an update freak.

I like software with the "Check for Update" option. I like clicking "Update Now!" buttons. I like seeing dialogue boxes with inviting "Update Availalbe! Download?" messages. I like watching rapidly growing progress meters. I like these so much that I check many many times a day.

In fact, anytime I unnecessarily open a new tab but don't really have anywhere to go, I will subconsciously click that dot-circle icon at the upper-right corner of Firefox to go to its homepage and click "extensions" to see if there's any new ones. Or, at other mind-blank moments, I will open Norton Antivirus or Lavasoft Ad-ware or Spybot or Spywareblaster to check for new updates.

It's like using CPU idle time to search for ETs or attack SPAM servers.

It worries me that I spend so much time on just checking for updates. To open and close these programs alone takes a lot of time and energy. So I think there should be a program to automatically check, download and install updates of all the updatable software installed on my harddrive, with just one convenient click.

One thing I hate about updates is that sometimes I can't download them. Like today, I found out there was a security update for Mac OS X. I wanted to install it on our lab Mac but I couldn't, because I didn't have the privilege to change any system files. I hate this powerless feeling.

Life is hard for an update freak.

Gadget

2004-12-03T21:05:00.000-05:00

Friday. "Paper Day".

Feng was today's discussion leader. The paper was good, but the copies of the paper were bad. All the figures were fuzzy, and some were just black blocks with different shades of grey dots. It was like a Jackson Pollock's black-and-white art collection.

It wasn't Feng's fault. When you copy a color picture on a black-and-white xerox machine, the colors are lost, along with the details. We usually work around this problem by print out one color copy on my boss's Epson Ink-jet printer. But it was broken last week, so we were stuck with these bad black-and-white figures.

How were we supposed to critically discuss a paper without the figures now?

But Feng was a guy full of ideas. He took out a shiny gadget from his pocket and put it in the center of the table.

"I have downloaded the figures to this thing. So let's look at figure 1..."

It was an ASUS MYPAL A620 PocketPC.

The figures on its screen were of course colorful and sharp. Everyone was riveted. Even the boss murmured something as he was fiddling with it:"What is this thing? A PocketPC...Emm. I should get one of these..."

I was fascinated by how technology had changed our "presentation landscape". Just a few years ago everyone was satisfied with overhead transparencies in presentations. Laptop+PowerPoint was considered a way too "hip" for many professors. But these days everybody had migrated to the PowerPoint land, and the transparencies are used only as backups, "just in case".

Today the PocketPC took the center stage.

Talk about Evolution!

My Correct Name

2004-12-01T15:59:00.000-05:00

Today I wrote an email on our university's email system to my committee members to schedule a committee meeting. Before I sent it out, I spelling-checked it. The system said my last name, "Zhong", was an error, and claimed it should be "Thong".

Ugh.

Out of curiosity, I consulted other spelling check systems for my "correct" name.

Microsoft Word and Hotmail seemed well educated. They immediately recognized that "Zhong" might be a last name, but didn't think it was a correct one, and suggested to change it to more common Chinese last names such as "Zhan" or "Hong" or "Zhen" or "Hung" or even "Song".

Gmail and Yahoo, on the other hand, knew a lot about Chinese history. They both believed "Zhong" was actually a misspelling of "Zedong", the name of our revered leader Chairman Mao. I was flattered, you guys, really.

All of them agreed "Thong" could be a correct name for me.

In the future, when machines control the world, and people's names are given by software evolved from these spelling check systems, my reincarnated self will be named "Lei Thong", and my real last name, Zhong, will be wiped out from the system, and lost for ever.

Stress Can Kill You! Or At Least Your Telomeres

2004-11-30T20:59:00.000-05:00

It's official: Stress damages your DNA, or, more scientifically and less sensationally, your DNA's ends-telomeres.

So, people, don't worry, be happy, longer telomeres make you more healthy.

Priceless!

2004-11-29T22:01:00.000-05:00

Our shaker was broken.

I turned it on yesterday and left it on overnight to grew my bacteria in it. After a night's growing the bacteria that multiplied should make the clear yellow culture media look clouded.

But when I took it out this morning, the media was still clear, indicating no growth. The reason, as I quickly found out, was that the shaker wasn't heated to 37 degrees celsius, the optimum temperature for my bacteria. Instead, it was only 27 degrees.

I tried to turn up the temperature, first a little, then a lot. Nothing. The heating module must be burned dead or something.

I told Mary, the lab technician, about it. She said:"Oh, it's broken again. Let me call that fix guy." She made the call, he wasn't there, so she left a message.

When the boss came in later, Mary said:"Our shaker is broken again. The temperature won't go up."

The boss said:"Really?" and turned to the shaker room. We followed.

The temperature was still around 27 degrees. He looked at the shaker for 30 seconds and pointed at a button:"This 'heat' button is off. That's why it's not heating." He pressed the button. The temperature began climbing, then stabilized at 37 degrees in less than a minute.

Geez! Why didn't I check it more carefully? How stupid!

I said to Mary:"You better call the guy not to come."

Boss said:"Yeah. I don't want to pay him $20 just to press a button."

Me:"Oh you have to pay him to fix it?"

Boss:"Yeah. To press a button, $20."

Me (laughing):"It's like that Mastercard commercial:'To press a button, $20. To know what's wrong, priceless.'"

Boss (laughing too):"Yeah."

What I didn't say was:"To know how stupid I am, priceless."

Data Deluged

2004-11-24T21:13:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of the journal Science, under Random Samples/People/Misfortunes, tells a story about how an overflowed river brought "misfortunes" to a population geneticist by flooding his lab and drowning one third of his fruit flies.

How devastating.

This reminds me of one of my dreams.

In this dream, my biology building somehow got bombed.

(Dear reader, if you happen to be a CIA/FBI/Homeland Security Officer, please note that it was only a dream, and that I had nothing to do with the bombing, and that I will never bomb anything, ever, except perhaps in video games. Thank you.)

I was outside the building and witnessed it all. As a very very noble and very very very brave person hero, I dashed into that partially collapsed burning hell and very skillfully rescued a couple of fainted colleagues. I put them gently down on the safe ground and dashed back in. But suddently a huge ball of fire dropped from above and hit me in the back and sent me into a temporary coma. When I woke up in a fancy hospital, the first words I said to the surrounding people, including the grateful people I saved, a bunch of camera-ready reporters, and my boss, who happened to visit me at that time (good timing, boss), was:

"I guess I have to do the flies all over again, right?"

Oh, how vain I am, even in dreams.

Moral Values

2004-11-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

Friday is our lab's "paper day". Each week, one of us picks a research paper and leads the group to discuss it.

Today is my turn. In the paper I picked there is a gene named Shibire. It is a Temperature Sensitive leathal mutant, which means that under normal temperature it lives pretty happily, but under high temperature, say, 29 degrees Celsius, it dies. We usually call this kind of mutants "TS" mutants. For this particular mutant, Shibire, it suffers so many defects in every part of its messed-up body that death seems to be the best thing that has ever happened to it.

Weird enough. But its name is even weirder. Shibire? It's not in the dictionary.

Me:"What is 'Shibire'? What kind of word is this?"

Boss:"Well, it was first discovered by a Japanese guy. So it's a Japanese word. I have no idea what it means in Japanese, but he named it Shibire, and its abbreviation would be Shi, and because it is a temperature sensitive mutant, he could write it as..."

He spelled it out:

" S-h-i-T-S."

We wrote down the letters and all laughed out loud.

What a smart wacky guy!

"By the way," my boss added,"its abbreviation has been changed to Sh1, for, you know..."

He paused to find a word for this.

I held up my fist high above my head and cried out:

"For Moral Values!"

"Yes. Exactly."

The Quiz

2004-11-11T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Genetics Lab has two sections: Wendnesday and Thurday. Feng is Wendnesday's TA. I am the Thurday's.

Yesterday, after his section, Feng told me:"They had a quiz today."

Professor H's quiz, for many, is a scary thing. On the first day he took over the lab, before anything else, he said:"Let's do a quiz first. If you have read the handouts I gave you last week, you'll have no problem." Apparently, few students read it, for most of them scored 0, which deeply angered him, and triggered his constant yelling in the lab.

So today I hurried to the lab early to warn my students. But Professor H was already distributing test tubes around the lab when I got there. The early students sat around, chatting, not aware what was waiting for them.

I waited. Finally, he went out of the lab to grab his coffee cup from his office next door. I told the students:" You know there's a quiz today, don't you?"

They were agitated immediately and started reading handouts and notes. Some of them looked up at me with gratitude. That was the look I wanted to see. I felt I was a hero, a savior.

A few minutes later, he came back, closed the door, and started the lab. Everybody looked at him with a we-all-knew-your-dirty-trick-so-bring-it-on smile, and waited him to produce a stack of paper from his big white envelope he brought in with him.

He looked around the lab and opened the envelope. From it he took out a piece of paper, the "attendance sheet", and made a note of who were late for the lab. Then he inserted it back into the envelope, put it aside, and said:"Today what we are going to do is very simple..."

What? No quiz?

Students looked at me in puzzlement. I looked back at them in greater puzzlement.

The lab ended with a lot of usual yelling but no quiz.

Sorry, guys, false alarm.

Later I talked to his former TA about today's incident. She smiled, nodded, and said:"He never gave two succesive quizzes. He always gives a quiz to one class but not the other. And several weeks later, he gives a different quiz to the other class."

Ah. That was why. I was fooled.

The take-home lesson: espionage is a risky career.

Good Fear

2004-11-04T23:05:00.000-05:00

The Genetics Lab is split into two parts. My boss teaches the first half. Dr. H the second.

My boss is ultra nice. Professor H is the opposite.

After he took over the lab, you often hear him yelling:

"This class is ridiculous! Do you have the foggist idea of what you are doing?"

Sometimes even I feel a little embarrassed.

Today, I came in the lab a little bit earlier than usual. As I was wiping the rain drops off my glasses with a Kimwipe, the girl, who thought I was an idiot, rushed to me and said:

"OK. I just wanna make sure what we are doing today before Dr. H comes in. I am so scared of asking him any question."

I looked at other students. They all looked at me, solemnly but eagerly nodding their heads.

I suddently became popular!

Who says fear is a bad thing?

Creativity Credits

2004-11-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

You can tell the personalities of the students just by looking through their exams. When they don't know the answer to a question, they can be regretful, resentful or playful.

For example, in the second exam of my boss's Genetics lecture, the answer to one question should be "ligase", which is a kind of enzyme (suffix "-ase" = "enzyme") that "ligate" two DNA pieces together.

One student knew what this question was asking for, but didn't remember the name of the enzyme. So he wrote down: Nano duct tapase.

My boss gave him extra credits for his creativity.

Get Ready!

2004-11-02T23:01:00.000-05:00

Today, after discussing my work progress, my boss says:"You can graduate next year."

That's good news.

Then he asks:"What do you want to do after this?"

"Postdoc, I guess."

"What areas are you interested in?"

My mind goes blank.

I don't know. I've never thought of it.

I once thought that knowledge increases automatically with age. After 4 or 5 years, I thought when I first got here, I would think as a genetics veteran. I was wrong. I still think as an undergraduate.

I am like a new student driver who is just starting to feel comfortable driving on a quiet local road but this road suddently merges onto a crowded L.A. highway.

So many cars. So fast. So many lanes, leading to unknown places.

His hands are shaking. His eyes are overwhelmed. He sees the signs but doesn't know which way to follow, because he doesn't know where he wants to go. Maybe he just wants to go back to his relaxing local road. But stuck in this traffic, he has to drive on.

"Let me get off!"he cries.

But traffic listens to no man.

Do You Vote?

2004-11-02T15:41:00.000-05:00

My boss is eager to see Bush got kicked out of his office. That's why the first thing he did this morning was to vote.

Later this afternoon, a student came by to ask about her already late lab report. Her extended deadline was today.

"If I hand it in tonight, like nine, would you consider it today or tomorrow?"she asked my boss.

He considered it for 5 seconds and asked:"do you vote?"

"Yes."

"Today."

Moon Eclipse

2004-10-27T23:09:00.000-04:00

I took the photo. Not very sharp though.

You Are Just Too Lazy!

2004-10-26T23:02:00.000-04:00

The Genetics Lab's big lab report dues in two days. Naturally, the hallway outside of my boss's office is suddently filled with desperate students seeking his last-minute counsel.

Some can't stand the long waiting so they turn their attention to me.

"Lei, maybe you can help us?" Vic, one of the students, asks.

I should. I am the TA of this class.

But I can't. I can solve all the technical problems during their experiments. But their data is too complicated. As a new TA of this lab, I don't know all the details and tricks of the experiments. In fact, I tried to help one group with their data analysis before. But either I was too stupid or their data were full of error, I couldn't figure out how to solve their problem.

So I go,"Sorry, Vic, I really want to help. But I don't want to misguide you. You'd better ask the professor."

He goes:"Sure you can. It's a good question. I believe you can."

Very tempting. Very seductive. I almost give in. But I tell myself to stick to my gun.

"No. Sorry."

And I feel really sorry for not being able to help.

He says:"Oh. Lei. I believe you can do it. You're just too lazy!"

The take-home lessons: a)students, when cornered, are quite aggressive, and b)I am a lousy, lousy, lousy, lousy TA.

Total Lunar Eclipse

2004-10-26T13:53:00.000-04:00

There is going to be a total lunar eclipse tomorrow night.

I hope the weather will cooperate. Don't be cloudy, please. Or at least let us see the moon, please.

It always fascinates me that ancient people could figure out that lunar eclipses are caused by the earth's shadow, and that it proves the earth is round. They must be supersmart.

Lab Art

2004-10-23T18:24:00.000-04:00

Two modern art pieces, by our lab artist Feng.

Packaging Peanuts and Pipet Tips #1: Lamb

Packaging Peanuts and Pipet Tips #2: Bird

Gold Medal

2004-10-21T13:24:00.000-04:00

So he's going to keep it, anyway.

Winner takes it all.

Unfair.

But how could you expect fairness in an unfair world?

So naive. Too simple.

Less Is More?

2004-10-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

Nature says human gene number is less than 25,000, about the same as green pufferfish.

We used to think we had 100,000 genes. Or at least much more than those of animals.

What a shame.

So it's not quantity, it's quality.

After all, we are much smarter than pufferfish.

Or are we?

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy readers should know what I mean.

Well, at least it matches the minimalism philosophy. Like the new iMac.

Who says science can't be chic?

After Dark

2004-10-19T01:37:00.000-04:00

A view of my desk after the lights are off.

A mini constellation in my room.

Who cares if it is raining outside or not?

Which File Extension Are You?

2004-10-16T23:53:00.000-04:00

I am:

Which File Extension are You?

Doh!

Oh, well. I guess it's true though.

At least Molly thinks so.

The behavior of taking this test at midnight itself is also a sign.

Cat's Nose

2004-10-16T01:01:00.000-04:00

So I went to my boss's house to take care of their pets tonight. Molly was sad, as usual. Or maybe she was just bored without my boss around. When he was around, she barked a lot, as if talking to him. But now she was completely silent.

Did my boss tell her that I am from China so she thought my English was not good enough to understand her?

This made me think of a girl from the Genetics Lab of which I am a TA. She never asks me any questions. One day I overheard her conversation with her lab partener:"I don't think he understands us."

Oh, well. Who cares.

While I was patting Molly to try to cheer her up, the cat "Noodle" ran down the stairs, jumped on the coach and sat beside me.

This was new. The last several times when I was pet-sitting, she didn't even look at me.

She began rubbing her cheeks against my hand. Her fur felt so soft. And her nose, ah, her nose was so cold.

Was it because it was raining outside?

I guess the poem "Fog" can be changed to:

The rain comes
on little cat's nose.

Bigger Chests, Bigger Chances

2004-10-14T10:15:00.000-04:00

BBC reports that men in Shanghai are seeking male beauty by chest implants.

In its Chinese version of the same news, the title ends with an exclamation mark. (一些上海男人为了拥有健美胸肌，竟然开始填硅胶隆胸！)

I mean why exclamation mark? Isn't it a world where men and women are equal? Some women want bigger chests and so do some men. They want them and they want them NOW! What's wrong with that?

I want bigger chest, too. I prefer "physical exercise" rather than implants, though. So relax, and don't expect me to come back from China with bigger chest!

Eclipse

2004-10-13T20:11:00.000-04:00

There will be a partial solar eclipse tomorrow. But I can't see it because I am not north enough.

Square Bacteria

2004-10-12T14:08:00.000-04:00

Square bacteria grown in lab for the first time.

Absent-minded

2004-10-11T19:10:00.000-04:00

1:00 pm. I sat in the injection room, getting ready for another afternoon's injection.

Feng walked in. He asked:"You forgot?"

Me:"What?"

Feng:"The Germline Group Meeting!"

Oh. My. God.

Every Monday, we have a group meeting at 12:00. I never missed one. But I completely forgot this one.

Worse yet, today the presenter is-my boss!

Oh. My. God.

This was not my first time.

Last Friday I was setting up the injection and my boss looked at me in puzzlement.

"What are you doing?"

I felt confused too:"Injection?"

"But our lab meeting's in 5 minutes!"

Oh. My. God.

Just 3 days later I did it again.

What had happened to me?

I felt so stupid. I blushed. I sat there motionless. But then I found I was actually shaking all over.

I tried to find an excuse. But then I couldn't find one except that I was so stupid.

I tried to blame someone else. But then I could blame no one but myself.

I could imagine people's laugh, or smirk, or sneer. I wanted to destroy these people's soul.

But then I found that the one I really wanted to destroy was myself.

I asked Feng:"What did he say?"

"He said:'Welcome aboard! The Absent-minded Professor!'"

Oh. My. God.

House Of Flying Daggers

2004-10-07T16:17:00.000-04:00

Salon.com seems to like Zhang Yimou's new Wuxia movie "House of Flying Daggers" a lot. In its review, it calls the movie "an epic of the heart".

But Chinese audience called it "heartless and silly".

This makes this movie more intreguing.

Will I like it?

Can't wait to see it.

The teaser looks pretty cool, at least.

Man's Best Friend

2004-10-07T01:21:00.000-04:00

Today my boss asked me jokingly:"So you are still going home?"

I said:"Of course."

He said:"Then I guess I have to find someone else to take care of my Molly and the cats when we go to Kentucky this Christmas."

Oh. That was good news.

Not that I don't like Molly. I do like her. But everytime my boss's family went away for vacation, she always thought she was abandoned by them. You should just look at her sad eyes. They broke my heart.

So I was glad I didn't have to face those eyes again.

Going home during Christmas=No pet sitting. I made a quick mental note.

But my boss continued:"This reminds me: are you going to be around next weekend? We are going to Boston next Friday to visit my son. Parents' weekend, you know. Maybe you can take care of Molly and the cats if you are free?"

Oh. Great.

Kiss Of Death

2004-10-06T11:30:00.000-04:00

Three scientists won the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering how cells destroy unwanted proteins.

I am excited because this is what I am working on.

Well, sort of.

Homeward Bound

2004-10-05T21:03:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in the railway station
got a ticket for my destination
mm, mm, mmm ...
...

Today my boss agreed to let me go back to China this Christmas break.

Thus officially began my long, painful, costly and risky journey back home.

I have come to the US for four and a half years and never been back. Not that I don't want to, but because the US government has tightened its visa policy for international students in the "sensitive" majors. Biology is one of them. We are very likely subjected to "background checking", which takes God-knows-how-long. A girl in my department went home last Christmas and didn't come back until this May. In the mean time, we have to stay in our home country and let our experimental material rot.

I remember when I was in college I felt very excited towards the end of each semester just by thinking of the warmth of home.

But now it feels so stressful.

Babara Walter said her favorite journey was:"to my home."

Would she feel the same if she had to suffer what we have been through?

Homeward bound,
I wish I was Homeward bound

I wish I was homeward bound, too, without the fear, you know.

New Gmail Features

2004-10-04T17:33:00.000-04:00

It's been reported that some Gmail accounts have seen some new features.

Contacts list: Moved to the main screen. New list of frequently used contacts
Drafts: You know have the ability to save a draft
Atom: You can now receive your new mail notifications in your RSS reader

Mine hasn't changed yet, though.

The Atom feed feature is the most exciting thing. Can't wait to test it out.

Who's Cookin'?

2004-10-03T11:15:00.000-04:00

Sunday. I came to the lab as usual to take care of my flies. To my horror, there was no fly food left.

We used to have an undergraduate student making food for us. But she graduated in May and my boss didn't hire another one. So for the last four months, my boss and I had been the food makers. He usually kept an eye on the food supply. When it was low, he would say:"Lei, we are almost out of food. When do you have time to make food with me?" But this time, he didn't say anything, as if he didn't notice. Weird.

I looked into my boss' office. The lights were off. Usually he came in on weekends, but he wasn't here at this time. I was the only one in the lab.

So it left me with two choices: either wait till tomorrow to make food with my boss, or make it today by myself.

It was probably OK to make food tomorrow. The flies wouldn't complain if I left them in old food bottles and vials for two more days.

But it would be better if they had new food sooner.

Finally I decided: as a 5th year graduate student, I should take the responsibility of the lab chore.

In the kitchen I started weighing out the indregients. Making fly food is the same as making your own dinner. You put right amount of suger, corn meal, agar, yeast and water into a big kettle and let it boil for 10 minutes while constantly mixing it. Then you dispense the super dense corn meal soup into 90 bottles and 180 vials. Let the food solidify overnight, and put stoppers on the bottles and vials the next day.

It isn't a tough job. But it can get pretty hot, laborous and smelly at times. That's why nobody really enjoys making food. We make food when we have to.

When I almost finished, my boss came into the kitchen. He looked pretty surprised.

"Ah, you are making food!"

"Yeah."

I waited for him to praise me.

He hesitated a little. Then he said:

"I forgot to tell you that I did hire an undergraduate to make food tomorrow."

Oh. Great.

Firefox Security Update

2004-10-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

Mozilla released a security update for firefox today. They say it is an important update.

I just updated my Windows and my Office for the JPEG threat thing yesterday, which was not a very pleasant experience. Now Firefox is jumping onto the "security update" wagon too.

Expect more security update from more software.

It's like releasing security updates is the new hip thing of the net.

There should be a website which collects all the software updates, just like the websites which collect deals. And of course, it should be RSS enabled. This would save us a lot of trouble to look for updates.

The Cartoon Door 5

2004-09-30T22:01:00.000-04:00

The Cartoon Door 5

The Cartoon Door 4

2004-09-28T18:15:00.000-04:00

The Cartoon Door 4

From Lab, With Fly

2004-09-24T19:10:00.000-04:00

I was having lunch in the conference room, which doubled as a dining room at lunch time. Suddenly Q, who was a secretary of the department and sitting next to me, waved her hands in front of and above her for about 5 seconds. When she finished waving, she turned to me and said accusingly:

"A fruit fly! Lei! It must be you! You brought it down here!"

"But," I protested,"I thought I killed all of them before I stepped out of the lab."

She laughed:"Blame your lab, then."

Yeah. It's like my lab is responsible for every fruit fly in the building.

This reminded me of a story told by a faculty candidate over a welcome lunch.

The lab he worked in as a post-doc had a fruit fly lab neighbor. From time to time, they would find fruit flies lingering around their lunch boxes or coffee cups, which affected their appetite to a certain level. They could have run over to their neighbor and yelled at them. But their high education prevented them from doing so. So they just set up a fly trap and caught quite a few of them. Then they put them into a test tube, put the test tube into an envelope, sticked on the address-labels printed out by a computer and put the envelope into their neighbor's mailbox. When their neighbor received the envelope, they thought it came from some governmental "Biohazard Control Office". In the envelope they found the test tube and a note saying:

"We believe they belong to you."

Body Fat Meter

2004-09-17T22:33:00.000-04:00

Today at Sam's, Xing bought a lot of stuff, mostly "healthy food". He is on a no-fat, low-sugar diet, you know, being weight-challenged and all. He also bought an electronic body-fat meter. $28. Very fancy.

At the exit, the woman who checked the receipt and the cart stopped us. While she was checking, she got very curious of the body-fat meter.

"What is that?...Oh, a body-fat meter!"

Since I was holding the cart, she thought I bought the meter. She looked at me for a second and seemed very confused:

"I know you don't need a body-fat meter just by looking at you."

OK. Am I that skinny?

I think I really need to put on some weight. In a way, I am weight-challenged, too, just as Xing. He has a hard time losing weight. I have a hard time gaining weight.

Tolstoy was right:"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If Anna Karenina were a "self-improvement book" published in the 21st century, he might have changed this famous first sentence to:"All fit people are alike; each unfit person is unfit in his/her own way."

2004-09-16T18:56:00.000-04:00

The Cartoon Door 3

Black Bellied Dew Lover

2004-09-15T22:19:00.001-04:00

The boss let me grade the first quiz of the Genetics Lab, of which I am the TA.

The last question was:"What is the scientific name of fruit fly strain you are using in your experiments?"

"They have to be exact right to get this credit," he told me when he gave me the answer sheet of the quiz,"EVERY LETTER."

Everytime he teaches this lab, he asks the same question. To know exactly how to spell the scientific name of fruit fly is a big deal to him. "Now look at this name,"he would say to the class on their first day, while pointing to the name written in big, bold, black letters on the PowerPoint slide,"and really memorize it. I will be offended if you don't know how to spell it."

That's their cue that this name will be on the quiz.

But still, few of them got it right. "Drosophilla melanogaster", "Drosophillia melanogaster", "Drosophila melanoganster", "Drosophila melangaster"...

All wrong. It is:"Drosophila melanogaster". "Drosophila" means "dew lover". Beautiful name. And "melanogaster" means"black bellied".

One of the students wrote:"Drosophila....I have dyslexia and I can't spell. :)"

Sorry, appreciate your sense of humor, but still 0 credit on this one.

Firefox 1.0

2004-09-14T18:19:00.000-04:00

Firefox finally reaches its 1.0 milestone (although still a preview release)! Bravo!

I still remember the excitement when the Netscape 4.0 Navigator first came out. It looked so cool! The only offer from IE at that time was IE3.0. And it was...eww! I just loved Netscape.

That was why I hesitated to switch to IE4.0 when it seemed everybody was using it. I resisted the IE tide until IE5.0 came out when I sadly found that the Web was no longer Netscape-friendly. I had to switch.

It felt so bad. It was like I was cheating on Netscape with IE. Although I always kept a latest version of Netscape in my computer, I seldom used it. It was like sleeping with IE with a picture of Netscape on the nightstand.

But everything is back to what it should be now! Firefox, the new Netscape, is my default browser. My affection to it increases day by day. I rarely touch IE now. Even MyIE2, once I liked, can't drag me back.

Hope Microsoft won't destroy it.

The Cartoon Door 2

2004-09-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

One item from our "Cartoon Door", made from a TIME magazine cover by Rich, the undergraduate student.

Deep question, isn't it? Also note the slogan of our lab:"Flies, Maggots and Liberty".

Bad News

2004-09-10T15:16:00.000-04:00

NewScientist says keeping a diary makes people more susceptible to "headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness."

Uh oh.

Is this why they call it "blog" instead of "diary" now?

The Cartoon Door

2004-09-09T19:46:00.000-04:00

It seems every lab has at least one door that is covered by cartoons or pictures cut out from newspapers, magazines, or stuff printed out from the internet. I call it The Cartoon Door.

It is also The Personality Door. It reveals the lab owner's personality more than he/she probably wants. For example:

Is he/she funny?
Where is he/she from?
What is his/her research area?
Does he/she use fruit fly, mice or worm as his/her model animal for research?
Is he/she married?
Kids?
Does he/she have a dog or a cat?
What newspaper does he/she read?
Magazines?
What is his/her hobby?

or even:
Is he going to vote for Bush or Kerry?

Here is our Cartoon Door:

The Lucky Cricket

2004-09-08T18:10:00.000-04:00

The Lucky Cricket is singing again.

Last Saturday, when I walked into the lab, I found a 200ml flask on my bench, and there was a cricket in it.

Feng came up from his bench and explained:"I caught it on my way to the lab. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Yes, it was a very beautiful cricket. All black, shiny, and mysterious. A little evil-looking, too. Like Darth Vader.

"But," Feng continued,"it's very stupid. It just sat there for me to catch it. No intentions to jump away at all."

Yeah. I don't blame it. Who would have thought a 27-year old Biology Master student, who is a father of a one-year old son, would suddently jump into the meadow to catch a cricket in a beautiful Saturday morning?

I put it into a milk bottle with corn meal food at the bottom, the kind of bottles we usually keep our fruit fly strains in. Thus, it officially became our lab pet.

Feng showed it to everybody and everybody said:"Oh, a lucky cricket! Very nice!"

It seems happy in its new home. From time to time, it sings its happy songs. Not what you would expect to hear in a genetics lab. That's why people passing by would come in and ask:"What's that sound?"

Today the boss said:"It's so nice! It's like we are camping!"

Yeah. And last night when I was lying in my bed at home, I heard the singing of crickets from the meadow outside my apartment. For a moment I thought it was morning and I was in the lab, working.

The singing of the crickets somehow warped the time-space in my mind.

Maybe that was how Einstein discovered relativity.

The Devil Within

2004-09-07T20:33:00.000-04:00

Last night I had the weirdest dream.

It began with a strange visitor in my house. When he walked from the dark doorway into the bright living room, I found he was actually a white rabbit with a brown hat on his head. He walked out of my living room and quickly disappeared into some other rooms. As he was walking, some kind of liquid dripped from his ears, like spores flew out of white fungi branches. When the liquid drops touched the floor, they became alive and I somehow realized they were liquid monsters and going to kill me. So I quickly plugged in an electric iron and before they attacked me, I pressed the hot iron onto their bodies. They sizzled, or screamed. White steam came out of their rapidly shrinking bodies. One by one they were killed this way.

But then the monster rabbit showed up from nowhere. I grappled with him. I pressed the electric iron on his body. He also vaporized and turned into steam. The only thing left of him was his T-shirt, now very flattened. Exhausted, I collapsed onto the floor. But to my horror, the rabbit materilized out of the thin air and in a second he was standing in front of me again!

He stared at me with his red eyes and said:

"You can't kill me. I am the devil within your heart."

I woke up at this very moment.

It was 4:25 am.

Unable to decipher the meaning of the dream, I decided to go to the bathroom.

On my way back, I checked my email. I just couldn't help it.

There was one new message. I replied it.

Oh, how I am sickly addicted to the internet!

Maybe that is the devil within my heart, the internet!

Lost And Found

2004-09-03T21:44:00.000-04:00

Xia walked in this morning, looking pretty upset.

"I can't find my keys! I looked everywhere yesterday afternoon and couldn't find them!"

I was not surprised at all.

She has about ten keys and several grocery store saving cards on a big key chain, which makes it impossible to fit in her fashionably tight jeans pocket. So she always carries them around in her hands and leaves them wherever she does her experiments (we have different places for different experiments). More often than not, she forgets to take them with her when she finishes her job.

It was not her first time she couldn't find her keys. But it was the first time she couldn't find her keys for so long.

So the whole lab was recruited for searching. Even the boss. We looked everywhere. The main room, the "west wing" (what my boss calls our other room, which is west to the main room), the kitchen, the autoclave room, the secretaries' office, the ladies' room (she went in herself), on the benches, under the benches, even in the garbage cans.

Not a trace.

She lost hope and sat down in front of her desk:"We can't find it. Maybe if we stop looking it will show up itself. Let me do some experiment first."

With that, she opened a red binder in which she kept her experiment records. And right there, lying between two sheets of yellow filler paper, was her chain of keys.

In her binder! Who would have thought!

Sex And The Monkey

2004-08-30T11:49:00.000-04:00

Sexually frustrated chimp starts smoking in China.

Hero

2004-08-29T19:58:00.000-04:00

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

2004-08-27T23:09:00.000-04:00

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

2004-08-26T20:14:00.000-04:00

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?

2004-08-25T09:12:00.000-04:00

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

2004-08-22T15:59:00.000-04:00

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!

2004-08-18T21:09:00.000-04:00

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

2004-08-16T17:52:00.000-04:00

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...

2004-08-13T14:59:00.000-04:00

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?

2004-08-10T23:27:00.000-04:00

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

2004-08-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

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)

2004-08-05T21:44:00.000-04:00

picture1

picture2

How To Survive In Nature

2004-08-05T21:32:00.000-04:00

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

A Quick Post

2004-08-05T21:23:00.000-04:00

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

Bushism

Mystery...Solved

2004-08-04T22:48:00.000-04:00

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?

2004-08-03T16:01:00.000-04:00

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

It's Four In The Morning...

2004-08-03T04:32:00.000-04:00

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

2004-08-01T23:33:00.000-04:00

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!

Shanghai?

2004-07-31T12:48:00.000-04:00

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

What The...

2004-07-31T00:14:00.000-04:00

How many people do you see in this picture?

The End Of An Era

2004-07-29T19:04:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-28T23:37:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-26T23:34:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-25T21:29:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-23T21:50:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-22T20:19:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-21T20:19:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-19T19:31:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-18T00:24:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-15T23:52:00.000-04:00

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"

2004-07-14T20:33:00.000-04:00

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'!"