Last post from old apartment

I'm moving to a new apartment this weekend, and whilst most of my room stuff has been shifted over to its new home last night, today is the main moving day. My bedding and computer will be moved over, along with all the living room crap (and i do mean a lot of crap) and the kitchen stuff. Luckily for us, Tzen and co. have offered their help today, so the manly men can do their thang, while we girly girls can just fan their egos and wipe their sweat.... LIKE REAL! Do you actually believe that we'd do that? Sheesh... We already moved like half the stuff over, but now we need some help with the heavier items like boxes full of sauces, CRT monitors, televisions etc. We've borrowed a dolly (no idea how to spell it, but it's the L-shaped trolley thing with 2 wheels that delivery men use to wheel stacks of boxes around), so that should make our job much easier. Oh, did I mention that we're just moving across a lawn about 30m away? :P So we're still in the same 'kampung' (and I don't just mean that in the sense of 'community', more like in the sense of grassy/tree&squirrel-filled, ppl going around on bicycles, low-rise buildings kind of 'kampung'... 'kampung in california'... really, you need to see it).

Hopefully we'll be done by lunch time then we can treat everyone to lunch and pick up some stuff from Ikea or Walmart for the new apt. Okies, will post pictures of the new VS old place soon!

Ciao :)

Online deals... I like

Just spent about 1 1/2h at the nearby Blockbuster store with Nana (I didn't know we spent so much time there!), choosing 4 movies to rent and 1 to buy. You see, being the cheapo person that I am, I wouldn't be in a Blockbuster store renting dvds unless there's a good deal (or if I'm extremely, extremely bored). And a good deal I got. The significant other had signed me up for a 2-mth free trial of Blockbuster online rentals, which is a deal in itself since Blockbuster usually only does 2-wk free trial thingys. But, since he had previously gotten a Netflicks 2-wk free trial and cancelled it, Blockbuster is giving "unsatisfied" customers of the competitor an extra 6 weeks of free rentals, just to show how good they are and win you over. Almost there :) Plus plus plus, to totally buy over cheapos like me, they gave me some e-coupons. 4 free dvd rentals, 1 free dvd (under $25), and 2 coupons to buy 2 previously-rented out movies for $15 (ok, the last one sucks, since at the store we saw those same movies being sold for $12 for 2 :P).

I had actually made a list of movies I wanted to buy/watch, but ignored those in the end (they're on my movie queue instead) and browsed through the racks of dvds. Pretty wide range, but the online store is way better of course. Picked up some movies, but realized that they are only for sale, not rental... oops, so moving on to the rentals section, we picked out 4 dvds, but slightly different from the initial selections :P hehe, fickle women... We got Good Bye Lenin! (Nana hasn't seen it), Happenstance (starring audrey tatou of Amelie fame), Bad Education (with the very drool-worthy Gael Garcia Bernal of Y Tu Mama Tambien), and Season 1 of Chapelle's show (recommended by a friend). But the highlight of the trip was getting The Incredibles 2-disc DVD set worth $21.99 for FREE!!! Hurray for cheapos! :D I was trying to figure out what to get, and decided to settle on something I'd watch again and again (obviously right? how else do you think my practical aka cheapo brain would think?). PLUS, Nana hasn't watched it, significant other likes it, AND it'll be great to watch it with lil' cousin Tiffany when I get back to S'pore :)) Muahaha.... a great harvest for the pragmatic ol' me, if you say. I was also thinking about getting Finding Nemo, since it's so darn cute ("Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming swimming swimming..." You just gotta love Dory :)). But it was out of stock, so it was settled for me.

MINE, ALL MINE! YES!!!!!

Stepped out of Blockbuster a happy girl... 5 dvds in hand and not a single cent paid. *BOHAHAHA* (from the Bleach anime, if you watch it) I've been through almost 1 dvd every day since significant other left for home, and have a whole lot of movies on my queue... I will be the movie queen!!! MUAHAHA... Sadly, I only have about 1 1/2 wks to watch movies coz I'm flying home on Aug 10 (YES!), so the remaining time left on the 2-mth trial will be Nana's and Hannie's movies :)

Ok fellas, gotta do some work now... and it's already 1.15am! Bad girl, bad bad girl...

Ciao!

Prehistoric phallus?

Ancient phallus unearthed in cave

By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter

A sculpted and polished phallus found in a German cave is among the earliest representations of male sexuality ever uncovered, researchers say.

The 20cm-long, 3cm-wide stone object, which is dated to be about 28,000 years old, was buried in the famous Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jura.

The prehistoric "tool" was reassembled from 14 fragments of siltstone.

Its life size suggests it may well have been used as a sex aid by its Ice Age makers, scientists report.

"In addition to being a symbolic representation of male genitalia, it was also at times used for knapping flints," explained Professor Nicholas Conard, from the department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, at Tübingen University.

"There are some areas where it has some very typical scars from that," he told the BBC News website.

Researchers believe the object's distinctive form and etched rings around one end mean there can be little doubt as to its symbolic nature.

"It's highly polished; it's clearly recognisable," said Professor Conard.

The Tübingen team working Hohle Fels already had 13 fractured parts of the phallus in storage, but it was only with the discovery of a 14th fragment last year that the team was able finally to put the "jigsaw" together.

The different stone sections were all recovered from a well-dated ash layer in the cave complex associated with the activities of modern humans (not their pre-historic "cousins", the Neanderthals).

The dig site is one of the most remarkable in central Europe. Hohle Fels stands more than 500m above sea level in the Ach River Valley and has produced thousands of Upper Palaeolithic items.

Some have been truly exquisite in their sophistication and detail, such as a 30,000-year-old avian figurine crafted from mammoth ivory. It is believed to be one of the earliest representations of a bird in the archaeological record.

There are other stone objects known to science that are obviously phallic symbols and are slightly older - from France and Morocco, of particular note. But to have any representation of male genitalia from this time period is highly unusual.

"Female representations with highly accentuated sexual attributes are very well documented at many sites, but male representations are very, very rare," explained Professor Conard.

Current evidence indicates that the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany was one of the central regions of cultural innovation after the arrival of modern humans in Europe some 40,000 years ago.

The Hohle Fels phallus will go on show at Blaubeuren prehistoric museum in an exhibition called Ice Art - Clearly Male.

To me, it looks more like a proper prehistoric tool that was vandalized by some prehistoric kid. But of course the archaelogists came up with this explanation to make their find more interesting and controversial. Which will then bring attention and therefore funding to their research... hmm, reminds me of ome of the papers that get into Science and Nature :P

Drivingdrivingdriving

Phew, drove a whole lot today... Stanford to SF, across golden gate bridge (it was foggy, what a waste), back southwards to Stanford (back to my place), near hoover tower on campus, back to my place (to pick up something), to university ave for lunch, back to my place (AGAIN! to pick up something else), to Zach's place to pass Lena some stuff (to be used for cooking dinner), to Foster City to meet up with T & D (Fifi's frens), back to Zach's place for chicken rice dinner with immuno frens, then back north to SF to send Fifi back, and finally back south to Stanford. Pretty tiring day of driving, but fun too :) Learnt a whole new bunch of routes north of stanford, hor-lan-ded a little but recovered quickly, muahaha, thanks to my superior map-reading skills, muahaha. And got to spend the whole day with Fifi who i haven't seen in a year and realized that we've known each other for 9 yrs! wow... time does fly eh?

Also, in just one day my driving experience points shot up by a super duper lot... power up! Even pumped gas for the very first time! All by myself! Win already :) I didn't spray petrol all over myself while some guy stood in the corner and lit a match and exploded the whole place, thus depriving all stanford drivers from getting gas from the shell station. Very good. Very proud of myself. haha :)

Got back home in one piece, didn't get anyone to honk me or flash me with their lights and also had a fun/exciting/anxious roller coaster ride up and down some of SF's slopes... really really siao some of them. Like you can't see the slope down until you actually go past the horizontal part. And how do you suppose people rode horse carriages up and down these things in the past?? I guess they just walked. They must all be darn fit. And no, I do not recommend anyone to drive a manual transmission car in SF... never ever (mine's auto, thank god). Unless you are one of the characters from Initial D and are an expert with manual cars. Sadly, drift-to cannot be applied here. Maybe on some of the sadistically narrow and windy slip roads to and from the highways found near stanford. You expect me to see that tiny sign AND turn onto it while changing lane and slowing down all within 2 seconds??? No wonder californian drivers are known to be bad...

Anyhows, pictures next time... gotta sleep now. Ciao!

Powerpuff girls VS Sadako

Last Sunday, me, nana and hannie went swimming, and when we got out of the changing room, I realized that we were very colour coordinated.... in powerpuff girl colours no less! Not on purpose hor, really... I couldn't resist it and had to take a picture of the 3 of us.


Lulu "buttercup", Hannie "blossom" and Nana "bubbles"!!!

Compare this with the real PPG:

So cute right??? Just like us... haha :P

MUAHAHAHA.... then we had to do this next:

PPG-Sadako chimeras

Looks more like a hairdressing advert tho' (well, me and nana at least).... haha :) We are siao...

A & Y's wedding

<-- The immunologists (E, M, A and me)

Like I mentioned in my first post, I attended my senior's wedding, which was pretty fun :) My senior looked gorgeous in all her 5 dresses (1 white wedding dress and 4 others for the dinner). She's got the looks AND brains, plus she's really nice too... man, is Y a lucky man or what? Only 2 other immuno grad students attended coz everyone was somehow out of town or coming back into town that day, but the 3 of us (+ E's bf) had a good time nonetheless. The emcee-DJ-violinist-singer all-in-one entertainer was a bit too cheesy though.... :P Especially when he sang "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, it's ah-more-ray...." IN CHINESE! Very cringe-worthy... even the people who didn't understand chinese thought so too. Another thing my non-chinese friends found amusing (I did too, actually) was when the wedding photographer asked if he could take pictures of our food before we ate (coz there were 4 main courses to choose from, and he was sitting closest to our table)... "Now, did you want an after shot too?"

Anyhow, the couple danced, sang and even obliged their friends and played silly wedding games (The elusive-cherry-near-my-wife's-breasts game, and the roll-the-raw-egg-through-my-hubby's-trousers game). Such a sweet couple :)

Farewell dinner for HS

About 2 weeks ago, me and Nana cooked dinner for HS, Viv and Tzen as a farewell dinner to HS, who's going back to S'pore after completing his postdoc here. Actually Nana did 90% of the cooking, I just washed and cut the veg :P hehe...

Had great fun eating and enjoying the good wine, the company as well as looking at HS's South America backpacking trip photos. Really fantastic scenery, which understandably is almost impossible to capture accurately in photos. Some of the pics:





Nana obviously loves her tang hoon :) heee.......

Japlish

The email from the Jap postdoc in the lab just cracked me up (I emailed to congratulate him on his new baby boy):

Thank you for your mailing!

We are happy to get new healthy baby boy.

But he cried at midnight, so we can not sleep very well.

I will be back next week. So I can give you as many femurs as you want.

See you then!

Thanks,

Kazu

I know it's not that funny really, but he's just so cute. So far all the Jap postdocs I've worked with are funny/cute in their own way... haha :)

A rose by any other name is still a rose

Another article from Straits Times Interactive:

July 22, 2005
Teachers propose banning 'F' grade

LONDON - THE word 'fail' should be banned from use in British classrooms and replaced with the phrase 'deferred success' to avoid demoralising pupils, a group of teachers has proposed.

Members of the Professional Association of Teachers argue that telling pupils they have failed can put them off learning for life.

A spokesman for the group said it wanted to avoid labelling children. 'We recognise that children do not necessarily achieve success first time,' he said. 'But I recognise that we can't just strike a word from the dictionary.' -- REUTERS

Ok, that's just being too politically correct lah... I don't think it will help even if they put 'deferred success' in bold red ink across a test paper/assignment instead of 'fail'. The pupil will still know that he/she didn't pass, and still feel as bad. "Look Ma, I got 'deferred success'! Never fail leh!"

Which brings to mind the variety of grading systems I have encountered throughout my years in school (which is 18 consecutive years, including kindergarten, and still counting... I'm mad, I know I'm mad):

• Kindergarten: Stickers of stars and cute animals/fruits/cartoon characters (This has to be my favourite grading system coz no one fails! And everyone gets a sticker even if you'd drawn the same house-and-tree-and-sun-and-family setup a zillion times).
• Primary school: Stickers are for babies, so now we have A*, A, B, C, D, E and F; and aggregate score (out of 300) for the PSLE (now remind me, was that for English, Maths, Science? How about 2nd language?).
• Secondary school: Now that you're older, you can handle the more complicated A1, A2, B3, B4, C5, C6, D7, E8 and F9; and if you're planning to go to junior college, you need to have a good (i.e. low) L1R5 score (1 language and 5 other subjects, including 1 maths, 1 science and 1 humanities); and if you are an overachiever, you can even get your score lowered by doing well in Extra Curricular Activities (aka Co-Curricular Activities now :P) or applying to an affiliated JC.
• Junior college (solly, never go poly, so cannot comment on that): Haha, now that we're more mature, we can go back to the simple A, B, C, D, E... oh wait, not that simple... O, F grading system. Wah, and if you are super overachiever, you can even get D (distinction), M (merit) or U (unsatisfactory) for 'S' (special?) papers. And heck, to make things more interesting, we'll just keep the A1, A2, B3 etc grading for languages and 'AO' level stuff.
• University: Grades (A+, A, A-, B+...) may have a number associated with it which adds up to a score, and depending on where you do your undergrad it could be anything from CAP (cumulative average point) which has a maximum of 5 (in S'pore), to GPA (grade point average) which has a maximum of 4 or 4.3 depending on the university (in USA), and I'm afraid the British don't like to do it the American way... so it's still A, B, C etc (I like). And then there's of course weird American grades like Pass+, Pass, Pass- or Check+, Check, Check-.
  
• Grad school: Still has a grading system like in undergrad, but really, who cares that much about your grades as long as you achieve the minimum grade to stay in grad school... haha :) And grades aren't all that important anymore (finally!), your research is.

So the conclusion is, even though a lot of us have strived and struggled to get as many A*, A1, A+, CAP of 5, GPA of 4, 1st class honours and whatnot, in the end, in the very end, they are all just a stepping stone to the big real world of work. You'll still have to prove yourself to your bosses. And with every further step taken, your past achievements will mean less and less to everyone, but perhaps yourself. No use waving around your PSLE cert coz it'll only be good as toilet paper (in my friend's words). Let's hope it's not laminated (hmm, slip and slide... :P). Yes, grades are perhaps a good measure of a person's aptitude and attitude towards a task (i.e. scoring good grades). But no, good grades are not a sure measure of future success. So people with bad grades, chin up; people with good grades, don't get too cocky (yet). But who am I to advise? I'm still in school.... heh :)

Goodnite y'all!

Oh, Samuel L Jackson...

Just finished watching Coach Carter on DVD, courtesy of 2-mths free trial of Blockbuster (thank you darling). I really liked it, even though it had the same formulaic plot of coach-comes-and-trains-a-bunch-of-pai-kia-students-and-transforms -them-into-a-winning-team-and-now-they-are-all-champions-in-their -own-right-yadda-yadda ala Remember the Titans and Dangerous Minds. Even watched the extra features like deleted scenes, music video ("Hope" by Tricksta feat. Faith Evans), interview with the real Coach Carter and his team from 1999, and the behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm a real sucker for these kind of things... I always read the cast credits :P

But I guess what did it for me was the great casting of the oh-so-cool Samuel L Jackson as Coach Carter (but then again, he's good in any movie :D), and the pretty good ensemble cast who made up the basketball team. Man, those guys had to train as hard as the real team in order to shoot all those bball action. And boy, did they have some good action. And I don't even particularly like bball myself (still prefer it over american football tho')... ok i'm rambling...

Wonder if I'll see any of these actors in future movies. I have a thing for picking out not-so-well-known actors from an ensemble cast, remembering their names and noting them in future bigger films. Like Giovanni Ribisi (the medic in Saving Private Ryan, which on a sidenote, I could not get in to see on the first try coz it was rated NC16 and I was a couple of months short of my bday :P) who later appeared in Lost in Translation among many other movies, Barry Pepper (the cool-until-cannot-be-any-cooler sniper in Saving Private Ryan) who I last spotted in We Were Soldiers (another war flick, but this time as a reporter). And these actors are usually the ones with unusual looks or names.... but I like.... like Johnny Depp.... *melt melt melt* And I liked Leonardo DiCaprio when he was acting in pre-Titanic movies, like This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape (sec 3 classmates might remember me writing a movie review on these films for the weekly journal thingy). Then he got too big with too many girls going gaga over him, so I dropped him from my list :P

Ok, shan't bore you with which actors I like to drool over... more next time... muahaha... *slurp*

Ciao!

R.I.P., dear Lewis rat

(Disclaimer: Graphic description of rat innards below. Proceed if you are above 18, like watching horror movies, or if you like to eat pig/chicken organs, or..... aiyah, do what you want, I told you got gross stuff already :P)

Kazu, the Jap postdoc in the lab, has just had a new baby boy (found out today that the baby's name is Atshiro.. unusual huh?), so he's taken the week off. Congratulations to him, but that also means I'm not going to get my rat femurs from him this week (since he usually spares me some rat parts when he's done using them in his liver transplant surgeries). So I asked Christine and she told me that Jennifer (the summer intern student) will be sacrificing a Lewis rat today to get the spleen. "Great!" I think to myself, "All I have to do is get the femurs out. It'll probably be like a mouse, but bigger. Shouldn't be a problem."

Come 11.30am, Jennifer arrives, and we proceed to the next room (where the animal surgeries are done). I ask J how she goes about sacrificing the rat and getting the spleen out, since I've never worked with rats before (only mice), and not in this lab (so I don't know where the equipment are). She tells me the method, which I shan't elaborate on, and I wasn't quite comfortable with the way it was done, but carried on nonetheless. Also since J's allergic to rat dander (i.e. flying fur and such), she said I had to shave the rat's belly (Christine usually does it for her). Oh well, we have to share the animal anyway, so I did it. So anyway, I shaved the fur, placed the rat on the surgery board and apparently it had stopped breathing from being overexposed to the isofluorane (knocking-out gas). Felt a bit more relieved because I wasn't prepared to dissect the poor rat if it was still alive and breathing... too cruel. J proceeds to cut the spleen out which, unfortunately, involves opening the abdominal cavity, which results in the contents of the abdominal cavity spilling out. Although the rat has stopped breathing, the heart was probably still beating its last beats and the nervous system was still functioning a little. So as she was removing the spleen, the intestines and whatnot were still twitching and pulsing away. J jumped a little when the rat leg twitched due to reflexes (I didn't see it happen though).

By the time it was my turn, it seemed that the rat was properly dead, and the innards weren't twitching anymore. J left the room and I was left with the task of cutting out the femurs (if you didn't take bio, the femur is the thighbone). Sprayed some alcohol on the fur to wet it so that the fur wouldn't fly everywhere as I was cutting, but accidentally sprayed some on the exposed organs, which started to twitch again (eeps, stupid reflexes). With my not-so-fantastic dissection skills, I severed the vein/artery(?) along the femur and had to mop up the blood with gauze. Now I have a bloody, furry mess, great. As I was in the middle of my grand struggle to cut through muscle and tendon with the blunt scissors and not-so-friendly tweezers, Olivia (the other PI in my joint lab) comes in with 2 visitors (medical doctors or postdocs, not sure) to show them some of the equipment we have. I double my efforts to cut the femur out, but the scissors just refused to cut, and I was praying they wouldn't come behind me to see the mess I had made of the rat. One guy momentarily walks behind me to check out the microscope in front of my rat and made some sort of exclamation like "oh my" or something like that and then retreated. I looked up at Olivia and she kinda got that it wasn't quite the best time to have a tour of the room, so they left... *phew* Struggled a while more and finally got both femurs out. The rest of the stuff that happened after that aren't very exciting.....

So anyhows, that was my first rat dissection (not counting the one in RJ bio lab where we prodded the poor formaldehyde-d rats' genitals... "wah, this rat's testes are HUGE"). I'm not a big fan of working with lab animals, but I guess it's unavoidable in my research... I just hope it'll be limited to sacrificing* and dissecting them. (*'sacrificing' is the PC word for 'killing' lab animals) I hope those animal rights people don't read this and hunt me down.... :P

<-- Lewis the Lewis rat looks something like this...

Evolution in progress

Read an article on ST online about more elephants in china becoming tuskless (i.e. genetically, and not because they got their tusks sawn off by humans, duh), and thought "wow, another example of evolution in progress!". The reason for thinking that was because I had borrowed a book from the library called "The beak of the finch" by Jonathan Weiner, which gives a detailed insight into the study of Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands. The Pulitzer prize-winning book gave a lot of examples and hard data to show how evolution is an ongoing and rapid process, unlike the usual perception of it taking millions of years. I myself feel that the author did an amazing job putting all the facts together, but at the same time felt bored reading the same idea get repeated a gazillion times in different ways. I think it's only good in small doses at a time. Ah well, I shall persist till I finish the book :P

Anyhows, here's the article from the Straits Times:

July 18, 2005
Elephants 'becoming tuskless'

BEIJING - CHINESE elephants are evolving into an increasingly tuskless breed because poaching is changing the gene pool, a paper reported yesterday.

Five to 10 per cent of male Asian elephants in China now have a gene that prevents the development of tusks, up from the usual 2 to 5 per cent, the China Daily said, quoting Beijing Normal University research.

'A male elephant with larger tusks is more likely to be shot by poachers,' said Associate Professor Zhang Li, whose research team has been studying elephants since 1999 at a reserve in Xishuangbanna, south-west Yunnan province.

'Therefore, the ones without tusks survive, preserving the tuskless gene in the species.'

But Prof Zhang's findings of the spread of the tuskless gene due to poaching must be tested, said several academics. -- AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS

First entry and other firsts

So... this is my first entry in my first blog. Well, first official entry anyway. I've a couple of half-written entries that are in my drafts folder, but those will have to come later. So I guess this marks the beginning of my blog -- no fanfare, no provocative statements, nothing particularly special (well, special to me maybe, not to you :P). Gives you a slight taste of what's to come... haha.

Other firsts that happened recently:

1. Attended a wedding in the US
2. Attended a friend's wedding (same wedding as #1 btw), instead of some relative's wedding
   
3. Went swimming today at the Avery pool in Stanford with nana and hannie; I last swam about 11 mths ago? (I did 4 lengths, they did 16... I blame it on the lack of goggles, cannot swim properly :P)
4. Saw a machine that spins wet swimming costumes so that they won't drip (didn't try it tho', thought it's a bit gross :P)
5. Played "lom chiam pass" for the first time in a looooong time, in front of our new apartment (it was to decide who gets which room after we had checked out the rooms by looking through the windows into the empty one-storey apartment). The new apartment is just across a small grassy area from my current apartment, and my current neighbour was sitting outside his place and must have been wondering what the hell these 3 chinese girls were doing outside this other apartment playing hand games. He retreated into his apt when he saw us cycling back to my place. ("Crazy women. Better hide.") haha :)
6. And my last 'first': Entered a long distance relationship (LDR), starting when W went back to S'pore (before he goes to London)

Ok, quite a lot of 'firsts' I realise (oops, still stuck in my British mode... should be 'realize' now hor :P).

Till next time, folks! Stay tuned... :D