This class is inspirational. I've come up with a new sport: Swan wrestling - but here's the catch, you have to wait until the swan has just taken off (usually after running for about 100m) and picked up enough momentum with their 30kg body weight (heaviest flying bird out there). It's usually fatal, but it'll look rather funny though.
Nov 27, 2006
Oxygenic
My weekend was consumed brutally by grad school applications and writing abstracts on the neurobiology of honey-bees, salmon, birds, and a veritable bestiary of nervous systems. Thanks to an absolute slaughterfest of an anime called Berserk, my thoughts on human life oscillated dangerously during this time.
Anyway, can't slow down, this is the last ditch for this semester and then back home for some Wintertime sugar highs. Looking forward to that. The future man! Speaking of which the spider in our bathroom at the beginning of the year is now about 6. They occasionally try to web me, but hey, I'm a vertebrate, and no chelicerate under 1 foot in diameter is going to elicit any violence. non-violence, yeah.
Made myself some honey enriched tea after finding a website claiming honey and cinnamon mixtures can cure pretty much anything. Funny how a random psycho's page on the internet can actually motivate me to do something I've been reading for years. Might as well, the short-days up here make the 8am seem like 5 so one can get all twilight-metaphysical with the tea. It's the force, man. The force.
Right now I'm sitting in a biodiversity class filled with first years. I wonder if they know I'll be TAing them during their biochemistry and cell biology lab course...take that! ha! I'm a freaking nice TA though, so they say when I point a loaded pipette at them, hehehehe - yeah, frigate birds! cleptoparasites, freaks.
Nov 26, 2006
Nov 25, 2006
Nov 21, 2006
How Not to Die on German Roads
German roads are unique. It seems like an opportunity for serious
injury or death or a run-in with the law itself around every
corner. A German reader sets you straight.
Nov 19, 2006
Nov 17, 2006
Nov 16, 2006
Live
Live messenger, live writer, live spaces...we're getting wired more than Serial Experiments Lain. Forget not to hone the spirit in moments of solitude between restarts....
Nov 14, 2006
Nov 10, 2006
The Farce of Carbon Trade
Check out BBC's viewpoint: 'Obscenity' of carbon trading for background.
The entire notion is sickening - dumping pollutants on third world "acceptors" (be it computer hardware loaded with toxic flame retardants and the like or straight waste) is largely a ploy to fool consumers and voters into thinking the problem is being dealt with at home. If you don't see the effects there probably aren't any, huh?
This sort of "economic delocalization" is an underhanded way with relocating 19th century social structures (such as a deeply impoverished working class) and practices (colonialism and generally treating the Earth as if its resources are limitless) out of the sight of the 'modern' world. They're still there, and most of them are living off them like parasites.
Nov 8, 2006
The McNasty
The McNasty, a culinary composition from the the bounty of the college cafeteria, designed to hurt...
Ingredients
- Bread roll
- Dubious 'cheese with herbs'
- Quartered tomato
- Chili sauce (the serious stuff)
- Cream cheese
Method
Cut off one end of the bread roll and hollow it out. Cram in one slice of the dubious cheese. Add 2-3 dashes of chili sauce. Add a tomato quarter. Add another 2 dashes of chili sauce. Cram in another slice of cheese. 2 dashes of chili sauce. Add ~1tbsp of cream cheese. Chili sauce. Tomato. Another slice of cheese. Chili sauce. Tomato. Chili sauce. Cheese. Tomato. Cheese. Chili sauce. And you're done!
Microwave at 600W for about one minute...
Principle
Pain and re-evaluation of life. The microwave process should allow the terminal cheese slice to ooze out something awful and make the tomato scalding hot - a most worthy surprise and an obstacle to the over-convenienced life-style the method represents. The chili sauce serves to clear the awareness and sensitize the systemic realization of the bigger picture (if you think I'm rambling just try it...). The cream cheese is a real expansion of potentiality in the middle, just as one's reflexes are beginning to settle. Other factors are subjective.
Dosage
One every 2 weeks. Weekly only if high metabolism is in effect. Risks involve arteriosclerosis and a bad case of enlightenment.
Nov 7, 2006
HRW: The Middle East's distorted laws
...informal measures are adopted such as seeking the mediation of influential clan leaders to encourage marriage between a rapist and his victim, the reports said.
'Laws' like this allow these regions to be infested with human trash. It's in their own interests to clean up.
Enemies of the Internet: 13 countries choking free speech
THE 13 COUNTRIES BLACKLISTED
- Belarus
- Burma
- China
- Cuba
- Egypt
- Iran
- North Korea
- Saudi Arabia
- Syria
- Tunisia
- Turkmenistan
- Uzbekistan
- Vietnam
Fallout of the Sterile Hood
5 hours of selecting bacterial colonies last night with hundreds of sterilized toothpicks was an easy step to otherworldly conversation in the vacuum hood. In the next week I'll be taking the first steps to engineer a suicide plasmid through serial voodoo with some of the most evil enzymes I've met. I have commenced the preparation and assembled the sacrifices, now all that remains is to ensure the right cosmic alignments....
Nov 6, 2006
Scientists use grammar rules to slay killer germs
Nov 5, 2006
Why war? Business is hungry...
"Iraq For Sale" can be described as an anti-war film in the spirit of Errol Morris' "The Fog of War" or Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11". U.S. history and political manipulation are the themes, respectively, of Morris' and Moore's films, but Greenwald's thesis is that the George W. Bush administration's love of privatisation is slowly and irrevocably destroying the democratic ideals of transparency and accountability.
Affordable medicine? Novartis says no...
BRUSSELS, Nov 2 (IPS) - Médecins Sans Frontières and other groups campaigning for access to affordable medicines in developing countries are closely following a case filed by the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis against Indian patent law.
A decision in this case can create an important precedent, with consequences that go far beyond India. "If the Novartis challenge against the Indian patent law is successful, patients worldwide who depend on India for affordable medicines risk becoming victims," Ellen 't Hoen, policy director with the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines told IPS.
50 years of sea fish left
Now this really sucks. Responsibility lies in all our hands thanks to the consumer market - stop buying it and the lack of demand might help ease the situation. As consumers, we have a lot of power - let's be responsible with it.
Nov 4, 2006
Aplysia
A jittery little marine gastropod that's been squirming its way into my heart thanks to the endless hours I've spent researching its cellular mechanisms of memory formation. Interesting, but over-bountiful. Just look at it...looking at ya...
If you ever need to do a report on it, you know who to ask :P
Kiwi vinegar
Ingredients?
- A couple of kiwi fruits, halfed with the skin still on
- Tupperware
- 3 months
- The right eubacteria
Capture the kiwi fruits in the Tupperware. Keep sealed for about 2.5 months. After that, open once to scare room-mate. Wait another 2 weeks. Witness.
(I wouldn't recommend ingesting it unless you put the right microbes in)
Nov 3, 2006
News today
A few stories I found striking, saddening, and an appeal to popular awareness.Lawyers for four of six men who almost died after medical trials went wrong have crictised the US research company for awarding its boss £920,000
The steady rise in atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change shows no signs of abating, a UN agency has announced.
Militias backing Sudan's government have killed at least 63 people in attacks in Darfur in the past week, African peacekeepers say. At least 27 of the victims are thought to be children under the age of 12.
A week after the Stern Review warned of the costs of delaying action on climate change, delegates are gathering in Nairobi for the next round of UN climate negotiations. The new executive secretary of the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC), Yvo de Boer, argues in the Green Room that the talks can bring benefits for the environment and for the world's poorest societies.
Frost
The first frost is here and I’m in a research building listening to a presentation on Nazi propaganda – the presenter is singing along with the Party music – the enthusiasm for Leni Riefenstahl’s work verges on unhealthy.
Nov 2, 2006
UHT my staples
UHT milk, sterile, pure. More and more this is becoming a nasty and malodorous fiction. My plans to make my own probiotic cultures from vast milk reserves are in question....
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