Survived Christmas

...survived the family, which caught up with me for my Graduation and Birthday and for Sinterklaas and Christmas. All of them having completely the wrong idea about what I'm doing as somehow they can't think beyond fixed, narrowly defined static jobs, such as analysing blood samples, if I'm to name the most scientific example. No hints or queries as to whether there's some girl I'm after, maybe the need to keep my private life private to my family is declining somewhat. Or maybe they think I'm gay and are too afraid of that to ask. I've stopped answering most questions that ask anything other than what I do in 'school' or what the colour of my curtains is, after growing tired of the relentless commentaries and strings of 'advice' that never seemed to really be presented as 'advice'. Family can be nice, in a way, as long as they let you be.
Though, with TV volumes drowning out my discman music (at a reasonable volume level), my retreat was soon a fact. In the kitchen there's a second TV, on which I watched CSI, which was accompanied by the music from 'Traumschiff' (German 'Love Boat' series) coming through the walls. Ah, nice romantic music when they find the bodies...
No real content, sorry, just abusing the blog to dump off some ironies. Nah, can't do that... Here's something: New Year has been postponed. By a whole second. Yes, it's time for another leap second!

Just a 'quick' thought

When talking about measures to prevent crises, there are a lot aspects to look at. Yesterday there was a lecture on models of how an influenza pandemic would progress and how there could be a chance to stop one, if a number of conditions are satisfied (want more info? let me know). What struck me is that a number of measures that can help cost a lot of money, whilst an equal number of measures that don't help, don't cost that much and may also, seperate from monetary issues, be more emotionally appealing. With modern politics, money is always a tricky one. Aparently (I don't have a reliable source) the Dutch government isn't stockpiling vaccines as there is a fair chance that it would be the wrong one (these viruses mutate, recombine, etc., possibly rendering vaccines useless). It should be noted, however, that even a poorly matched vaccine can already lead to a great enough benefit, if more people get the vaccine. The latter is more likely, as a matched vaccine will take almost to long to develop, and definitely to long to produce and immunise enough people. Anyway, my point is:
With modern politics the goal increasingly seems to be to take measures that have a direct and visible (and hence usually short term, worry about the future later) effect. In the case of averting crisis, there is no visible effect - that's the whole point, take action to avoid nasty effects of something. So crisis avertion is an expensive item with no visible effect. Not so popular with some governments I would imagine. They want visible effect, and they can get it this way - crisis happens, and is a visible effect.

Oh, and how does Bush want to tackle the problem? By using the military of course! Noboby is entirely sure what he has in mind (hints that sound nearly convincing on CNN), but let's hope we don't have to find out. (Congress squashed the request anyhow).

Mad Science (ah, well, part III then)

I seem to remember (no access to the previous post from where I am now) that I mentioned something about physics in the original post, but I can't really be sure. Anyway, whilst figuring out some biology stuff, I just had to stuble upon particle physics at some point, inevitable, as the subjects are so very closely related... Anyway, I guess the only field where the following naming is used, should be physics. The following content has been taken from the wikipedia article on flavour (particle physics), for convenuence's sake:

Flavour (or flavor) is a quantum number of elementary particles related to their weak interactions. In the electroweak theory this symmetry is gauged, and flavour changing processes exist. In quantum chromodynamics, on the other hand, flavour is a global symmetry.
The term "flavour" was first coined for use in the quark model of hadrons in 1968. A name for the set of quantum numbers related to isospin, hypercharge and strangeness is said to have been found on the way to lunch by Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritzsch when they passed a Baskin-Robbins advertising 31 flavours.

And of course, where the interesting names come in:

Quarks have the following flavour quantum numbers —

• Isospin which has value Iz=1/2 for the up quark and value Iz=-1/2 for the down quark.
• Strangeness (S): a quantum number introduced by Murray Gell-Mann. The strange antiquark is defined to have strangeness +1. This is a down-type quark.
• Charm (C) number which is +1 for the charm quark. This is an up-type quark.
• Bottom (also called beauty) quantum number, B': which is +1 for the down-type bottom antiquark.
• Top (sometimes called truth) quantum number, T: +1 for the up-type top quark.

Anyway, back to figuring out my microwave. I get the gist of how it should be used, sometimes the book uses the same language as I sometimes do, in other cases it beats me at screwing up my Dutch:

Doen niet toelaten dat het energie koord contact maken met enig warmte of scherp oppervlakte, zoals het warmte luchtgat gebied bovenaan achter van het oond.

Mad Science (Revisited)

A while back I posted a list of 'interesting' protein and gene names. I missed one that is getting a few scientists into trouble: POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic gene, also known as Pokemon gene. Seeing as it has role in cancer, a number of blogs etc. came up with the headline 'Pokemon causes cancer'. In other words: Nintendo is suing. (Just google it, the report shows up on a number of places, from Nature (source) to gaming sites).
The second bit of interesting applications of science, links back to the Mona Lisa. Is it smiling? Is it happy? Well, aparently it's 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, or so a computer used for emotion recognition 'thinks'. Reported in New Scientist, and the a spin off by the BBC. And don't go blaming those damn foreigners for that one, it's been done at the University of Amsterdam.

That could have been worse

Quick trip to the lab, you're heading back, nice quite streets, no traffic chaos. Perfect moment to hit a pedestrian at speed. Somehow, I'm wondering how the guy managed not to see me. First he walks through a red light, then he somehow fails to see me and two other cyclists (all of us had lights on) and steps onto the bikelane right in front of me. Okay, so I managed to stop, with combination of brakes and hitting the guy full on, and lo and behold, the guy just walks on. Is the town being invaded by Zombies? Oh well, at least that slight rattle that I've been hearing when I bike seems to be gone...

A General Sense of Direction

...or maybe not. I'm still debating whether I should be worried about that exam that's coming up. For some reason my brain keeps on planning around it. Planning: Before: workdiscussion, final lab work for the week. After: (immediately) host borrel, (immediately) department Christmas dinner. Friday: Lab cleaning. Saturday and Sunday: getting health insurance - as my current insurance ends January 1st, my current insurance company will close it's doors and the company they're transfering their members to isn't going to make me an offer. That makes me one of the 'lucky' few in this country who now has two weeks to figure out what all this mess is about. Everybody gets an offer from their current insurer... yeah right.
There's a blog that I read sometimes lately. It's very calming and is entitled 'Dagboek van een gek' (guess what, it's in Dutch). Basically that's all it is, or, as he describes in the about section: "Dit zijn de belevenissen van Hans, geboren in 1942. Eerst even voorstellen ik ben Hans en woon al jaren in een psychiatrische woonvorm. Verder ben ik invalide en beweeg ik mij voort in een rolstoel."
By the way: Always wanted your own fake office, but too lazy to photshop the sign on an existing office? This site does it for you: Atomsmasher's Office Sign Generator. [Advert] This came with an advert for T-Shirt Hell: also nice to look around for evil t-shirts. Current tagline: "All orders placed this week will arive after December 25th. But a late present from us, still beats a crappy present on time". [/Advert] Sorry, don't know what came over me there. Atomsmasher also has generators for other signs and error messages ('windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Please reboot now.'), scroll down on the office generator page for the links.
And for more joy: what used to be the best image archive for 19th century (and also a little late - mainly symbolist and pre-Raphaelite artists) until it closed, is slowly re-opening it's doors. I should add the site, ArtMagick to the links section soon...

And direction in general (magnetic) North is wherever it chooses to be today, or so it seems: BBC news.

Another day

And we're off to a flying start. Articles to read, protein names to dread (erm... X-box associated protein? I choose to believe that that has nothing to do with certain electronic devices), powerpoints to study, etc. etc.
Well, with the added 'fun' of having two girls of about my own age at the door asking how much thought I gave the future and more importantly, god's role in it. Scary stuff: I don't handle people with very strong beliefs that well. Especially not the ones that come to spread the faith in a fairly multicultural neighbourhood. I wonder if they'll run into that psychic...
Though, maybe divine inspiration did come, as I figured out why I can't send any mail from outlook: my ISP is blocking access to port 25, which is used for SMTP transactions. Solution: figuring out that one of my outbound servers accepts connections at a different port, and route all accounts through that server. Yay quick response e-mailing again. That took a my while of not thinking about the problem to figure it out.
No I just wait for all the bio knowledge that I need to appear in my head, along with a repaired sense of languages and a stable memory for people and things, for I'm mixing up all the names that I should know again.

Back to that chemistry again.

Bio Exam!

Yes, one week to go and already trying (not succeding) to remember stuff. Though I have to say that Depeche Mode, the remixes 81-04 is working brilliantly (or was, it did increase my attention span). The other conclusion: learning this stuff is bad for your health (or maybe that was because I was already a little under the weather). Also, your language skills don't improve too much. Then again, some of the tact (lack thereof) and skill in writing English letters (ditto) displayed by an (associate) professor at the department is very inspiring. In the sense that it shows you that you can still get far if you don't fully grasp your grammar, keyboard and social skills. In other words: I could lock myself up in the lab for 16 hours a day and devote my life to science and still have the impression that I'm damn important and that I'm the only one who has any sense at all. Though I would need to shrink my own little private world quite a bit more to achieve the latter - shouldn't be too difficult if you don't see real sunshine or non lab-people for a couple of years. Nope, I think I'll skip - My own little universe is already sufficient - it's small enough to overcome agoraphobia and I don't want to take things further.

As there's no point to this post at all, I'll just paste the last list I got over MSN. Antilian proverbs. Have fun, take care, remember that there's a whole world out there.

P.S: Firefox really blocks that pop-up...

Climate Change

There's nothing so depressing as a climate conference. A few of the very good reasons why are outlined in a blog by Amanda Haag over at Nature.com. Also, in another article, another look at the US is taken. Of course, it would be surprising if something positive would be said - but that isn't likely to happen. Instead, when talking about methyl bromide (insecticide, but also one of the large major ozone-damaging chemicals out there, the last to be phased out) the following pops up:

• North America uses more of the substance than any other part of the world
• Exemptions for the US of the cut-backs imposed are more than the exemptions of all other countries combined for 2005
• "But representatives of the farming industry counter that the huge value of the crops, and the efficiency of methyl bromide as a pesticide, means that its continued use is reasonable." Okay, the fact that if we don't act now, we won't have a climate to grow strawberries (main use of the chemical) in in a few decades, doesn't seem important. We'll cross that bridge... when we all live underground wondering what wrong?!
• Under the exemptions, which would lead to less reduction of the usage, the US has requested to use more methyl bromide than it actually used in 2003. What part of reduction don't they get?
• Europe requested to use 4400 tonnes in 2005. Reports indicate that the actual figure will be 3000 tonnes. The US request for 2007 is 6500 tonnes. Funny that, as even in 2000, Europe had 730 million inhabitants, and the US 282 million. More is less, I guess.
  

Quick sources: Nature.com article and GeoHive.

In short, as the Nature blog mentions:

"At one point, the chairman even said, "Saudi Arabia is on the phone, so let me go to the UK."
So much for saving the world."

100th post

So that's 100 posts in about 11 months. Could be worse I guess.

I'll spare you the rants, I'll try and link to a few things, I'm brining up the wishlist that I promised a while back, even though it'll be January by the time I get round to celebrating my birthday.
Anyway: there's yet another breakout clone available in flash - to waste your precious time in exam week. So is this game, once you get the hang of it: N-Game.
Once again - back to the female drivers aspect. Just ignoring the fact that there is a perhaps greater amount of male stupidity videos out there. This one is how not to exit the garage. With apologies for the adverts on the page. I'm using IE now to search for media, as I'm running a firefox beta and not all plugs are functional. Turns out that one of the pages that I monitor for content is now more of a porn gallery than anything else. Well - at least it proves that Firefox with Adblock works miracles...