die bohne der nacht

Danger-nixie strikes again

2007-01-26T00:46:13Z

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.

My collage

2006-08-18T21:37:22Z

Snoof goaded me into making a collage for myself. Evidently I look like trashy rich blondes. Which one's scarier, Farrah Fawcett or Alec Baldwin?

cupcake #1

2006-08-13T03:43:31Z

Ugh.

cupcake #1
Originally uploaded by nixietube.

Silver cupcake earrings

2006-08-13T03:26:57Z

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.

&

opera opera

2006-06-13T23:00:26Z

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.

cat science

2006-03-10T17:17:10Z

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.

Richard the Womanizer

2006-01-27T02:52:09Z

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.

What I "rilly rilly want"

2006-01-02T03:12:07Z

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.

My "hubby" Gorbachev

2005-11-30T22:40:45Z

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.

Hood me, please!

2005-08-22T02:04:13Z

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.

penguin attack!

2005-08-02T22:54:14Z

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

Heart's Desire

2004-07-17T00:49:07Z

I really really want a pair of red diapers, just like what they wore in Zardoz.

"When the durians are down, the sarongs are up."

2004-05-14T22:28:02Z

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)

If I was any more absent-minded, I would explode

2004-05-10T21:49:25Z

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.

My Head, So Big

2004-03-15T03:24:57Z

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.

Operation How-Now-Brown-Cow Closed

2004-02-19T06:15:22Z

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.

Worms and fish in my brain

2004-02-16T23:45:23Z

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!

my big round head loves meat

2004-01-13T21:53:42Z

Our brains are energy hogs. They consume around 20% of our total oxygen consumption, and around 70% of our glucose consumption. The average weight of a human brain is 1400g, and this weight can vary between 1100g and 1700g. Brain size is roughly correlated with body size, so men have on average slightly larger brains than women. There is no correlation between raw brain size and what we consider to be intelligence. It is still unknown whether there's a correlation between intelligence and the brain/body mass ratio.

If one takes the view that humans are slightly smarter than other animals, there could be a correlation between intelligence and the brain/body mass ratio. On a log-log scale of brain weight and body weight, humans have on average a large brain for their body size compared to other animals. Brain size may vary depending on diet, since leaf-eaters tend to have smaller brains. Neuron packing density decreases as the brain size increases for unknown reasons, so humans do not necessarily have more neurons than smaller animals. As brains become larger, they also become more spherical, in order to reduce interneuronal distances and to increase the packing volume. Most whales have extremely spherical brains.

most Americans are Christian because of napalm

2004-01-09T02:48:38Z

Every time you get a work break during Christian holidays, it's because of napalm. Arabia was filled with unorganized barbarian tribes until the Prophet Mohammed catalyzed them into a united people. In 633, Muslims began rapidly conquering surrounding territories, taking control of most of the Byzantine eastern regions. In their quest to conquer more westerly territories, they laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 672. It was a sea-based siege that lasted for five years, and the strong Muslim fleet was severely decimated by the use of a Byzantine secret weapon. The secret weapon was "Greek fire", a napalm-like substance that burned on water. The weakening of the fleet and the continued existence of the (Christian) Byzantine Empire effectively prevented further successful conquering of the bulk of what is now known today as Western Europe.

Constantinople eventually fell to the Muslims hundreds of years later, and nothing in history ever has such a simple cause-and-effect relationship.

Fire! Fire!

2004-01-02T23:01:11Z

I had a fantastic holiday, except when I almost blew up my laptop power supply. How do I manage to do these kinds of things?!? The power supply got so hot that it stopped working and smelled faintly of melted/burnt plastic. Hours later, I stood several feet away as a friend plugged it in, and the power supply resumed working.

Part of my trip was spent at the National Academy of Science in Golden Gate Park, SF. Since the entire exhibit was moving to a new downtown location, admission was free for the weekend. One of the irreplaceable exhibits was the fish roundabout, a donut-shaped tank with glass that contained huge fish. Below the tank, there were several paintings, one of which included trawlers. In one of the schools of fish, I was told that there was a tiny word bubble that said "HELP!". The fish were around 1mm long and the word bubble was even smaller, and I searched for the word bubble for five minutes with no success.

Other highlights (in an incomprehensible list): Wicked, Suppenküche mit Glühwein, Drunken Boat, Thai brunch, SF-clothing-or-boutique-store-that-i-cant-remember-name-of-even-though-its-a-chain, sushi, Death Guild (oy! rubbing-nipple-man and falling-over crossdressers!), KALX DJ room and DJ Love Bunny debut, turkey dinner, Rohan, so many accordions i almost exploded!, Dr. Dum Dum, misshapen stars, reading-too-much-and-ignoring-you, red rain boots. At the Drunken Boat, I drank Anjou, a dessert wine that was very tasty.

Would you like some mini-opera with that order?

2003-12-22T01:09:24Z

Over the past few days, I have had a horrendous bout of homesickness. The homesickness makes me permanently grumpy, but I have been giggling madly to compensate.

The bout of homesickness was not brought on by my attendance last night of Handel's Messiah, performed by the Seattle Symphony and the Seattle Symphony Chorale. I've seen the Chorale perform before and they're pretty good. This performance was somewhat lukewarm but still good, and I suspect that the Chorale was bloody tired of singing the same pesky song every single year. Yes, the Messiah is performed every year and is the equivalent of the Nutcracker, in which everyone goes to the performance but has little appreciation for it. The Symphony was even worse than normal. They were out-of-tune and played wrong notes. The guest conductor's conducting was frenetic, which did not positively contribute to the music. The guest singers were good but not fantastic. The overall performance would have been better in a smaller space. Harpsichords don't do well in the huge Benaroya Hall.

The form of the Messiah is an oratorio, which is a miniature opera without costumes and staging. This reduces the cost of performances dramatically, which Handel needed to do at the time, since he was impoverished. There are three acts, and the words were all biblical passages in English. The passages were chosen by a librettist named Charles Jennens, who sent the libretto to Handel and later criticized the music that Handel wrote to accompany it. Messiah was first performed in 1742 in Dublin, where it was better-received than in London. Still, those naughty Londoners started the whole tradition of listening to this piece of music every single bloody year.

When the Hallelujah Chorus started, every single audience member stood up. Is this some thing that they learned to do in church?!? I was most confused. Their odd behavior confounded my nose.

mad-scientist cow gone wrong

2003-12-01T21:45:11Z

Woah-kay, it's confirmed. I really have a knack for blowing things up.

So today I'm working on setting up a computer system. I needed to test an older system, so I plugged in the power supply and was reaching to plug in the other cables when... !!! POW !!! the machine blows up.

The computer wasn't even turned on! Bits of capacitor flew out of the back fan port into my face. The computer emitted a mighty smoke cloud and the entire lab started smelling strongly of burnt plastic.

These kinds of things just aren't supposed to happen. Fuses, what? I want to go home.

attack of the grumpy penguins

2003-11-29T00:18:57Z

Today I saw someone else with a Batz Maru umbrella. How can there be more than one!?!

Can anyone tell that I don't have much to post to livejournal? I've been seeing performances, but they're mostly weird circus performances. I recently saw rubber boy, who stuck his entire body through a tennis racket and did some grotesque contortionist things. I also saw The Spoon Man. He played spoons and delivered his "message": extremely personal information about his family intermixed with extremely liberal anti-government propaganda. There was also a footbagger who juggled six footbags with all four limbs...

Spooky

2003-11-19T05:13:45Z

Today I saw someone wearing a slayer tshirt. When I saw it, I couldn't help but think, "how cute!" It made my day.

Posters and Lunatics

2003-11-10T20:33:58Z

I'd like poster prints of several paintings that I saw in Madrid, and in my quest for these posters, I found this site:

Art Renewal Center

The site has several articles on why Modernist paintings are simply bad art. The articles are interesting to read, even if one is a fan of modern art. Mr. Ross, the creator of the site, is endearingly nutty and extremist, and he has featured all of the artists that he considers to be great. Some of the artists featured on the site include Bouguereau, Waterhouse, Caravaggio, and of course Rembrandt.

Unfortunately, the posters are very expensive, mostly because each poster print is a custom order. They're the only supplier I could find for prints of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Caravaggio. The largest print they offer is 24"x30", which is half of the size of the original painting.

According to one of the articles, Caravaggio was a homicidal maniac. Shocking!