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Thursday, January 25th, 2007
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5:46 pm - Danger-nixie strikes again
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Two weeks ago my labmate asked me to help her evaporate chromium onto her wafers. That's all well and good, but when we were filling up a bottle with liquid nitrogen, the hose of the big tank became frozen to the bottle opening. I wrenched the hose off, releasing tons of pressure. A giant cloud of liquid nitrogen erupted from the bottle, and liquid nitrogen sprayed into both of our faces.
Fortunately, right when I was starting to fill it up, some man came by and berated us to put on safety goggles. Normally I ignore such warnings, but this time I didn't. I had a red line on my forehead for a week where the LN2 had pooled up above the goggles, and my hairline still hasn't quite recovered. My labmate (who was closer) emailed that her face was red the next day. She hasn't come in to lab since.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, August 18th, 2006
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2:37 pm - My collage
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| Saturday, August 12th, 2006
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8:43 pm - cupcake #1
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8:26 pm - Silver cupcake earrings
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Yes, I wasted pure silver to make wretched cupcake earrings with faces. Only one of them has a hook. The instructor of my class kept on dropping my cupcake earrings, and it may be the rough handling that made the hook on the other cupcake fall off.
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| Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
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3:49 pm - opera opera
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Today I gave a speech about opera. Even though it lasted only 8 minutes (and included many sound clips), I managed to completely bore the audience. As the talk progressed, their eyes glazed over more and more. At the end, they had to give me feedback, but I think they were too abashed at their lack of interest to give me a bad review.
Over the weekend I saw two operas, Marriage of Figaro and Madama Butterfly. One was incredibly good, the other was incredibly bad. It's up to you to guess which one is which, but I'll give you a hint. One of these operas featured whiskey, salami, the American anthem, and pseudo-japanese folk songs.
Marriage of Figaro had two excellent singers, the soprano Ruth Ann Swenson as the Countess and the bass-baritone John Relyea as Figaro. The singers in Madama Butterfly were all decent, but nobody stood out as particularly good or bad.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 10th, 2006
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9:15 am - cat science
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Today I am wearing a knitted cat hat. It has two grey ears with pink centers. A pure belligerent ball of plump gave it to me.
I like this hat, because it makes me look like the serious scientist that I am. But when I walked into my Russian class this morning, everyone turned around and started laughing. I don't know why they laughed! They shouldn't laugh at a serious scientist like me. I was offended.
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 26th, 2006
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6:34 pm - Richard the Womanizer
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Last weekend I saw the second-worst Shakespeare production that I've ever seen. This version of Richard III included bonuses like completely video-recorded characters, microsoft windows sounds, characters sending email to communicate, and monotonic poorly-enunciated lines.
The whole play was made even worse by the "special seats" we were assigned to. We were seated in the first row of bleachers that were placed on the stage. I think the seating was supposed to be circular, but it just didn't work very well because the stage area was too big. It was also almost impossible for me to see the screen, so I couldn't see the "video actors" or the contents of the emails. I didn't miss much.
The actor playing Richard III was awful. He was supposed to be playing a cripple, but his acting was so bad that it was obvious that he was not a cripple. Scarily, he was better than many of the other actors.
Richard III was good at one thing, though, and that was trying to flirt with my date and me. In the middle of acting on the stage, he managed to ogle my date's chest more than five times. If he spent as much energy on acting as he did on staring at my date's chest, he would be a far better actor. It's true that my date's chest was definitely worth staring at, but really. There's a time and place for everything.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, January 1st, 2006
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7:06 pm - What I "rilly rilly want"
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I finally heard one too many jokes at my expense about how I still don't know who the Spice Girls are, so I went and figured it out. I'm around 7 years too late, but better late than never, right?
I think Baby Spice and I are twins! I wonder if Britney Spears is as cool... maybe I should get some of her music.
The Spice Girls look Russian. I like them.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
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2:42 pm - My "hubby" Gorbachev
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I've been learning Russian in order to get in touch with my Uzbek roots. We had to choose a Russian name, and I chose "Raya". That was all well and good, except that it's the name of Gorbachev's wife.
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, August 21st, 2005
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6:53 pm - Hood me, please!
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Yesterday I went to the Rembrandt exhibit at the Getty in LA for the second time. I became obsessed with the hooded bird in Saint Bavo, even though that painting is not my favorite. Now I know the difference between a peregrine and a tiercel, and the difference between a haggard and a passage. This is not very useful information for someone like me, but now I know it and it's too late.
They evidently hood birds to get them to calm down. Next time that I get too excited from too much Rembrandt, I will try hooding myself too, just to see if it works.
The Getty also had lots of flora, including sycamores and oaks. I like this website for learning how to identify trees:
Identify that Tree!
I'm in LA for another 1.5 weeks, doing practically nothing. I was supposed to learn how to do a complicated laboratory technique, but on the day that I arrived in LA my boss finally bothered to tell me that I wouldn't be doing that at all. Instead, he wants me to program and analyze data, which I can do practically anywhere. There's lots of museums in LA, though, so I will try to visit them all. Maybe I'll also go to the beach.
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(10 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005
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3:44 pm - penguin attack!
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I think I'd like to install LINUX, and it seems that Red Hat went commercial. Anyone have any suggestions of a good flavor to install? I'm considering Red Hat 9.0 (pre-commercial), Fedora, or debian.
I'd like one that lets me compile linux source straight from the tarball (no porting!). The next primary features that I'd like are stability and security. Last comes an easy, non-windoze-destroying install and the ability to read/write NTFS file systems (am I asking for too much here?).
I plan to do some wireless things with my new LINUX box. Anyone ever play with one of those range extender antennae? Do they work well? Here's the one I'm eyeballing:
Hawking HAT15SC
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, January 30th, 2005
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4:40 pm - Macblah
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NOTE: Date of viewing is only approximate.
This is by far the worst Macbeth that I have ever seen. It was set in the South during the Civil War (1861-1865). Lady Macbeth, played by Lee Fitzpatrick, was absolutely awful with a matching awful fake Southern accent. The play included a gratuitous lynching of a black man.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, October 30th, 2004
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6:49 pm - Class Wars
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Rigoletto by Verdi (Italy, 1936) is mostly about a man from the lower classes who is the equivalent of the jester to the upper classes. Being in a different class, he naturally distrusts them and he tells them nothing about himself. They suspect him of having a mistress, but it's really his daughter. A philandering duke seduces the daughter, so Rigoletto hires a hitman. The Duke happens to "visit" the hitman's sister (quite a coincidence), and the sister falls for the Duke too. She pleads with her brother to save the Duke ("o me! how i love him!"), and Rigoletto's daughter manages to throw herself at various knives to save the Duke's life.
Rigoletto is destroyed. He of course discovers that he paid to have his daughter killed. Very depressing. SO did a good job with it, but it wasn't absurd enough for my taste. The audience was also uncooty.
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, July 16th, 2004
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5:47 pm - Heart's Desire
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| Friday, May 14th, 2004
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3:16 pm - "When the durians are down, the sarongs are up."
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This one's from Evil Brain...
froots
Just in case the link goes away, here's the list of fruits that I must try:
• mabolo, or velvet persimmon
• durian (an aphrodisiac fruit that smells like a toilet)
• mangosteen
• Baccaurea sapida, Burmese grape, mafai wan in Thai, or yaow in Vietnamese
• keppel fruit
• Sapadilla, salak, or Indonesian "snake fruit" ("tart and astringent" flesh? yum?)
• unusual dark-purple mango, found only near Banjarmaisin, Borneo
• Abiu (Amazon, melon and caramel taste, persimmon texture)
• young leaves and shoots of pak wan, or tropical asparagus
• Peanut butter fruit (texture is like Skippy's)
• Marang (a breadfruit, Phillipines, vanilla ice cream)
• Mamey sapote (tastes of chocolate, pumpkin and almond)
• Sawo (tastes like a honey-flavored peach or pear)
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 10th, 2004
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2:45 pm - If I was any more absent-minded, I would explode
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Today we had a quiz, except that I didn't remember that we were having a quiz, so I didn't study at all. I also didn't bring a pencil or pen. None of the TAs had any writing implements, either. To get a pen for me, they announced it in front of the entire class. "Does anyone have an extra pen or pencil?" The professor gesticulated at me as the one penless person in the entire 200-person class. People turned around to look. It was so humiliating.
Last week, I superglued myself to a superglue bottle. The week before, I froze an orange slice in liquid nitrogen for a 12-year-old kid, but then the orange slice became permanently stuck to the kid's tongue. I plan to hide in my apartment for the rest of the month.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Sunday, March 14th, 2004
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7:15 pm - My Head, So Big
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How does one tell if one's head is big? Here are four hints:
o You go to a women's hat store and not a single hat in the store fits.
o You dye your hair a darker color and friends describe your new hair color as "slimming".
o Your body shape is described as "lollipop".
o Someone with a fetish for large craniums asks to measure your head circumference, then unsuccessfully tries to hide his excitement at the result.
All four of these "hints" have happened to me at some point in my life (OK, I admit that #3 is taken out of context, but that's one out of four). I am beginning to suspect that my head is outright obese.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 18th, 2004
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9:59 pm - Operation How-Now-Brown-Cow Closed
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Endnotes of my plan to be brunette.
Operation how-now-brown-cow turned into operation i-am-a-milk-cow-moo as my skin became whiter from the lack of sun and my hair became blacker through purely artificial means. If only I sprouted a teat and started lactating, my life would have been complete.
My head turns red and does other wretched things when I use dye now. I think this is called an allergy, wot? Being a poor grad, I must become blonde again, at least until I get a real job. There's some wacky "edgy salon" that I've decided to go to. I will ask them to chop my hair off as much as possible so I won't have to look at my horrid blonde hair, and to chop off some of my fat head too! The experience should be terrifying. I hope that they give me a very trendy, very bad haircut.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 16th, 2004
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3:23 pm - Worms and fish in my brain
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The cerebellum is a highly-folded bit of brain lying underneath the occipital lobe towards the back of the head. The word cerebellum means "little brain", and it accounts for around 11% of the entire brain. On top of the cerebellum is a region called the vermis, which means worm. It looks vaguely like a worm and it is exceedingly cute. This is currently my favorite part of the brain.
Nobody quite knows what the cerebellum does. It is known that it has something to do with motor function, since people with cerebellar damage cannot make accurate movements. Movements tend to be larger or smaller than intended, and the motion is jerky since coordination between joints breaks down. The cerebellum also receives input from Ruffini endings, which are sensors that respond to the stretching of the skin. I will post more about Ruffini endings in a separate livejournal entry, since they are quite interesting too. There are some animals with extremely large cerebellums, though, which use cerebellar structures for other purposes. The best example is the mormyrid fish.
These fish are weakly electric, and they generate an electric field around their bodies. They analyze deformations in the electric field to sense objects around them.
Almost the entirety of their brains consist of cerebellum. Here is a picture of the mormyrid fish brain. The regions colored blue are cerebellar. Mormyrid cerebellums are outright obese!
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 14th, 2004
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6:50 pm - Gypsy De-synchronized
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Last night, I saw Gypsy Spirit: Journey of the Roma, produced by the UW World Music and Theatre Series. The performers were Romani people from Budapest, and some of the singers were very good. Unfortunately, the music didn't work well in this venue. We were around 250 people crammed into a darkened auditorium, staring at a bunch of out-of-sync folk singers who were trying to express soul. Just didn't work.
There was also some flamenco-style dancing, which would have been good in a cosy bar with some booze. I think the performers themselves were uncomfortable. Some were obviously nervous, and kept on fidgeting about.
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