Two neat kitchen science experiments:

How to Extract DNA from Anything Living: with normal kitchen stuff, a blender, and some meat tenderizer, you can extract a clump of DNA.

Finding the Speed of Light with Marshmallows: all you need is a microwave, a casserole dish, and some marshmallows. And a ruler.

I really hope when I have kids they will be geeky like me, because these would be so much fun!

# : 5:14 PM : :

I think everyone should get a blog. It's fun. You can talk about whatever you want, navel-gaze to your heart's content, everything ME-ME-ME! And you have an audience! So it's better than a journal.

In particular, everyone who loves to constantly talk my ear off should get a blog. I don't know why I attract these people, maybe because I am too polite (ha!) to ignore them or tell them to go away. But really, ten minutes of someone pontificating about their poorly-thought-out political opinions or irrelevant school projects with my only input being "uh-huh" or "heh" is TOO MUCH.

No one cares. Get a blog. Then I can NOT read it.

# : 9:46 AM : :

Just a few random things I've learned recently:

• my library plays Sousa marches 5 minutes before closing time
• neither BW-3 nor Quaker Steak exists around here
• some people are shocked - shocked! - that Pizza Hut employees touch the food with their hands (the manager's reply: it's going into our five hundred degree oven)
• my salon doesn't do manicures on Saturdays
• when guys shave their heads they have to shave every morning

# : 12:46 PM : :

Tim has been blogging about Gmail, which inspired me to do so as well. I got a Gmail account a few weeks ago but I'm having a hard time testing it because no one emails me! The email address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com so I don't want to use it to replace my normal semi-anonymous webmail account; I need to be able to communicate with new internet friends without allowing them to look me up in the phone book. But the people with whom I'd normally email are too concerned about the so-called "privacy issues" to be comfortable using it.

I really think the privacy concerns are overblown, especially about the email being scanned to produce content-sensitive ads. It's also scanned to check for spam - most email providers do that, and no one complains. The other concerns, like the possibility of someone reading your email or giving it to the feds if you happen to get investigated, occur with any webmail service.

That's fine with me, because I understand that email isn't private. I don't think most people understand how email works - it isn't magically transferred from your computer to the recipient's; it's passed through the internet, temporarily residing on various servers along the way. Perhaps I'm overly paranoid, but I generally assume that anything I write in email would be available to anyone sufficiently motivated to track it down. If I need to email something sensitive, there are nice products out there for that purpose.

So if you're convinced, send me some email - I want to test Gmail like all the other cool kids!

# : 11:08 AM : :

Life has been good lately. Eric came to visit over the weekend, and we basically lounged around, socialized a bit, and ate. Good way to spend a weekend.

Monday morning I took him to the airport, got stuck in traffic on the way back, and tried to sneak into work around 10. Unfortunately, two higher-ups were milling around the entryway, and they saw me. If that wasn't bad enough, they asked me why I wasn't ready for the meeting! I didn't know there was a meeting! It turned out that while I was off on Friday, they'd picked me to give a presentation to a way-higher-up person, and we had to do a dry run. So they gave me a little while to, you know, figure out what the presentation was about, and then we did our dry run and I didn't get in trouble.

So the important meeting was on for Tuesday morning, and Monday afternoon I realized I had to wear a suit. Then I realized I didn't have any shoes to wear with a suit! (I'm not sure why I didn't buy any when I bought the suit, or what I was thinking when I wore my standard black wear-with-chinos loafers with it to interviews.) So after volunteering, I made an emergency Payless stop and bought some pumps, which I still think of as grown-up shoes. They were having a buy-one-get-one-half-off sale so I got some new sandals too, yay!

The presentation went really well. I made eye contact, worked in all the items we wanted to highlight, and worked the crowd so they ooh-ed and ahh-ed at all the proper times. It was so much fun!

Then I had to walk back in the new shoes - ouch. I ended up having to get my gym sneakers out of my car because I just couldn't walk in the pumps anymore. I think next time I will wear the sneakers and just change in the restroom right before the meeting.

We're pretty busy at work this week, which I'm enjoying because it's not boring. I may change my mind if I get yelled at for not meeting my (ridiculous) deadlines though!

And today in chem lab is checkout and the final lab exam! No more chem labs! OK, so I still have to write two lab reports this afternoon (I came into work early so as to have time between when I finish work and leave for lab), but last night I figured out why last week's lab went so horribly wrong - they measured the quantities wrong, so the wrong reagent was in excess, and it was reacting with the product. (I think.)

Some of my work friends just came in and asked me if I want to learn to sail! We're going to take sailing classes in a few weeks - I'm really excited.

# : 10:14 AM : :

I love Neal Stephenson. Today there's an interview in Salon with him talking about his new book, which I'm looking forward to reading.

The part I especially liked:

So I always make it clear that I consider myself a science fiction writer. Even the "Baroque Cycle" fits under the broader vision of what science fiction is about. [Interviewer: And what's that?] Fiction that's not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that's set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn't find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, "That's interesting. I never thought of that before." If it's got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction.

I had never looked at it that way, but I think that I would fit his definition of a "science fiction person". I also like fun or comforting books (like Harry Potter) and ones with settings that draw me in (Christopher Rice's books come to mind), but I think books are really good when they get me to think of something interesting I'd never noticed before. Stephenson's books, of course, do that very well. I think this might explain why I hated so many of the short stories we read in my German lit classes - they were about unsympathetic characters with fairly boring lives, so they may have had literary value but they weren't engaging and didn't make me think.

# : 2:17 PM : :

My feeling of bliss from the weekend evaporated about lunchtime yesterday, when they "fixed" the air conditioning at work and made it 5 degrees colder than the usual minimum temperature. I had to go to my car and get the blanket out of my emergency kit. So now I'm sitting here wrapped in a green fleece throw. It looks really professional, let me tell you.

Being forced to stay where it's cold really ticks me off, especially since it's so nice outside! Since I've worked here, there have been three occasions when I really fantasized about saying "screw this job, I hate you all, I'm leaving." One was due to work-related issues, and two were when they refused to keep the place at a livable temperature. Maybe I'll get a cold* and get to stay home.

*Unfortunately, my boss knows that colds are not caused by being cold. Maybe arthritis?

# : 3:52 PM : :

Wow, being done is SO NICE. The weather very conveniently turned gorgeous just as I was free to enjoy it. And I've had a great day.

Last night I went out with a friend for Indian food. Unfortunately their outdoor seating was full, but the food tasted good inside too. Then we bought some wine and rented School of Rock which I absolutely loved. It was a cute feel-good movie, plus we started laughing at the first scene and never really stopped. Possibly the most fun movie I've seen since Pirates of the Caribbean.

This morning, I got to sit on my balcony to have my morning tea and newspaper! I've been looking forward to that ever since I moved here (I bought the porch furniture too late to get to use it last fall). I think I'm going to try to make it a regular morning thing. Then Kristin and I went out to a tasty lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, and in the afternoon I spent two hours lounging in the park next door and reading magazines.

I love life today.

# : 5:20 PM : :

Yesterday I took the afternoon off work to relax before the MCAT. Unfortunately, I had a migraine, so I couldn't do my practice biological sciences test that I'd planned on. Instead, I took some Chlor-Trimeton (usually the wonder drug) and tried to nap before going out. Despite being tired, I had that forced kind of sleep that doesn't really rejuvenate or cure migraines. So when I woke up I took some actual migraine medicine before going to see The Prince and Me with Amy. You can laugh, it was a silly movie, but we liked it a lot.

After the movie, my head was killing me so I took some Tylenol Sinus. Then I went to the mall because I had apparently thrown away my extra passport picture, and I needed one for my MCAT ID. It cost $15 which I thought was excessive. I was thinking about trying on some shoes, since I love shoes, but I was feeling awfully frumpy and it's not really fun to shop like that.

Then I went to the grocery store to buy dinner and stuff to take for my lunch during the MCAT. While I was there, my headache magically cleared up. It is the most amazing feeling of relief to have a headache suddenly leave. It's even nicer than the happy, fresh, optimistic feeling of waking up the morning after a headache and having it be all gone. (Waking up and having it not be gone feels like a cruel joke.)

Speaking of cruel jokes, what I didn't think about when taking that last medicine was that although it makes me sleepy, 7 hours later I will be wide awake. Yeah, that was right about 12:30am. I tossed and turned for three hours. I think I slept about half the time, but it was all kind of fake sleep. I was so nervous, and kept thinking I was going to do poorly on the test from being sleepy, which made me more nervous, which further prevented me from sleeping. It was terrible.

But today I didn't have too much trouble waking up, and I ate my eggs for breakfast and headed off to the MCAT. Stupid George Mason only opens one entrance to the parking garage on Saturdays (apparently), and that wasn't the one I went to. So, thinking it wasn't open yet, I parked in a metered spot and went in to ask where I was supposed to have parked. "Oh, the other side is open! You'll get a ticket if you stay there, better go move your car!" So I had to go back outside and drive halfway around campus to get in the stupid parking garage. But I wasn't the latest one, so it was OK.

The test itself went fairly well. The Physical Sciences section was heavy on the physics (w00t!) and electrochemistry (glad I studied that last week). And I feel like I wrote good essays for the writing sample. Verbal Reasoning felt like normal, but the Biological Sciences section happened to have a few topics I wasn't as familiar with. I was also pretty wiped out by then. But I think I still did respectably well on that part.

So now I'm kicking back before going out to dinner. And tomorrow I have NOTHING I have to do! This rocks!

# : 6:04 PM : :

I can't believe it's April 15 already - the last few months have flown by. My crazy semester is almost over, though. The MCAT is on Saturday (!!) and I have two more weeks of classes and a final.

Last week I was really nervous about the MCAT, but this week I've been much calmer, I guess because at this point there's nothing more I can do to prepare other than relax. And I went back and looked through my practice scores, and they were all good and close to each other. The part I'm most dreading is having to wait months for my scores! I was spoiled on the GRE, getting my scores right after the test.

The other thing that has made me feel more confident this week is that I've felt things clicking into place. I feel like I am finally starting to understand organic chemistry - I don't know if it's just that I've finally managed to memorize by osmosis most of the things I should probably have memorized with flashcards last summer, or if I'm actually gaining an understanding of the way things work. Probably both, but either way, my grades have been on an upward path, and I'm liking the subject more. Too bad this had to wait for two weeks before the end of the semester, but hopefully it'll help on the final!

Studying for the MCAT has also made me really grateful that I was an engineering major in college. Not only did I learn a lot of physics, but the problem-solving skills are invaluable. For example: when you have only a vague understanding of the problem and can't remember the equation, just set it up so the units cancel to give the units of the desired answer. This has never failed me on the practice tests, and there's a crazy number of dimensional analysis problems. (Well, at least problems that can be solved with dimensional analysis. There's another engineering technique - if you have a problem you don't know how to solve, change it into a problem you've seen before.)

It would be nice if there were some computer problems in place of the chemistry ones, though.

# : 1:52 PM : :

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

So, now you know: even though this blog is no doubt full of errors, I do know better!

# : 3:51 PM : :

Nothing very thrilling, really.

I was off on Friday so I had big plans to be all productive this weekend. I did pretty well, actually; I studied a lot of chemistry and took a practice MCAT (on which I scored about the same as the first two, which kind of gets me wondering why I've bothered studying).

Things that haven't gotten done (yet) include finishing my taxes, cleaning my apartment, and cooking Easter dinner (obviously that won't happen at this point). Overall, not bad.

On Friday I felt particularly accomplished at the gym. My goal is to work out thrice weekly, with 20-30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and however long it takes to lift weights. I tend to actually make it there once or twice and do 15-20 minutes on the elliptical, though I am good about finishing my lifting. So Friday I finally found the assisted chin-up/tricep dip machine. I love that machine because it's like a ride; you kneel on the little thing and go up and down. (OK, I'm weird.) After doing one set of pull-ups with about half my body weight assisted, I wondered if it would be possible to do an unassisted one. I couldn't quite figure out the machine, so ended up trying it with 10 pounds or so of assistance, but I could do it! I was so proud of myself, because I don't think I've ever in my life been able to do that before. When we had Presidential Physical Fitness tests in grade school, I had to to the flexed arm-hang instead. I still haven't been able to do a proper sit-up, though, and I think I could probably run a mile now but that doesn't sound like much fun to test.

Today was Easter, and I wasn't at home with my family! It made me very homesick, because Easter was my absolute favorite thing growing up. We went to all the church services, and my dad and uncle and cousins played in the brass band, and I got to play the cymbals and timpani in the Alleluia hymns, and the choir sang all these great songs. It was really a joyful noise sort of thing.

At the church I go to here, I play in the handbell choir, which is fun. We played in both services today and did well. But the voice choir is little, and there aren't any other instruments, so it doesn't have quite the same celebratory decibel level. "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today" just doesn't sound the same without trumpet fanfares and cymbal clashes, you know?

It was a very good service, though, and my favorite co-worker came to hear me play. Then we went out to Italian for lunch (no ham! another break with tradition) and saw The Ladykillers afterwards. Rather different from the typical family-fest with egg hunts and Trivial Pursuit, but it was fun, and I've been continuing the relaxation by doing nothing useful for the rest of the day. I do see that I have my Ohio tax forms, though, so perhaps I should get working on that.

# : 7:35 PM : :

This spoof lab report (via Pharyngula) is hilarious. There have been so many times I've wanted to do a writeup like that.

Which is a good lead-in to my long-threatened diatribe on why lab classes usually stink.

It's accepted wisdom that learning by doing is the best way to learn. Of course this makes sense; learning by listening clearly fails most of the time. And it's true a lot of the time - for example, my dad told me to loosen screws by turning them counterclockwise, and I listened, but I didn't really remember until the time I tried turning clockwise, with the help of a wrench. The screw stripped, and major embarrassment ensued. And I never forgot again. (Of course, "righty tighty lefty loosey" also had a lot to do with that - now I poise my screwdriver, think "mustn't strip the screw - how does that rhyme go?" and THEN turn.)

In theory, of course lab classes should be key to learning science. So... how come most of my lab classes have been crap, and I don't remember learning anything from the majority of the labs? How come the experiments that worked were usually the ones I knew the outcomes of? How come I came out of lab with an image of science as a boring slog punctuated by moments of intense frustration, rather than the boring slog punctuated by moments of discovery that I know (from reading Sagan, if nothing else) must exist?

I couldn't figure this out for a long time, and thought maybe I just wasn't that good at science. However, while I don't claim to be a Newton (though at least I'm not an alchemist), I'm evidently fairly intelligent, so if I'm not learning from labs (and I don't see many other people learning from them either) maybe there's something wrong with the lab courses.

A few months ago, I realized that freshman physics lab has very little in common with real science. (Possibly I'm the only person who was shocked by this.) If you popped back several hundred years, picked up Newton, and stuck him in, say, a quantum mechanics lab, he'd have very little idea what he was looking at. Then, if you gave him a typical lab manual and a difficult-to-understand TA and told him to conduct experiment #4, he'd probably be just as confused as the average freshman.

Newton, having never seen a particle accelerator [1] or even heard of subatomic particles, wouldn't know what he was supposed to be doing. He'd have no clue what the normal workings of the accelerator would be, what pushing Button X would do, how to use the plotting software (OK, he wouldn't have seen a computer either), what theories he was supposed to be testing, or what the possible outcomes of the experiment might be. He'd be stuck following the step-by-step instructions of the lab manual, which, if you've ever read a lab manual, tend to be more like step-by-jump. Then when he got confused he could ask the TA (if said TA were anywhere to be found), and probably wouldn't be able to understand the response. Maybe the TA would take pity and show him how to do the experiment - maybe, if he was really lucky, he'd even get results. Of course, he'd be screwed when it was time to write the lab report, since (again) he'd have no clue what he was talking about. (He'd probably also get marked off for writing in Latin.)

I don't doubt that, given Newton's prodigious intelligence, he'd be able to pick up quantum mechanics pretty easily. And, if he were stuck in a lab with suitable tools, he'd probably come up with the theory independently (he seems to have been good at that). But what he'd want to do, I think, is talk to other scientists, learn about the theories we've come up with in the past couple hundred years, gain an understanding of quantum mechanics, and then head back to the lab to test the many hypotheses I'm sure he'd come up with. (Oh, and he'd probably ask for a demonstration of the equipment too.)

This illustrates what I think is the problem with lower-level science labs. You're dumped in there with equipment you don't understand, trying to follow instructions you don't understand, in order to explore theories you don't understand. Obviously, you can't understand everything - otherwise there would be no experiments - but science is generally not done by random flailing. The "hypothesis" portion of the scientific method implies some level of familiarity with the material - and in order to do an experiment, you must have some idea of what might happen. Chemists don't just pour random chemicals together; they pour together chemicals they know, in order to find out what happens, or chemicals they don't know, in order to find out what they are. (And they certainly don't do it with equipment they don't understand - ooh, explosions!)

My current organic chemistry lab is run fairly well. We actually learn about the theories before we do our experiments - we don't know everything; the lab manual says something like "the mechanism of this reaction is unknown" at several points. But we do have an idea of which chemicals we're using and why - we know what the theory predicts will happen. And now that I have some understanding of chemistry, and know how to use the lab equipment, it would be possible for me to form my own hypotheses and perform my own experiments.

There were a few good labs in my biology classes last spring, too. The action potential ones were particularly good - first we learned about action potentials, then we practiced with models, then we made predictions and tested them on frogs. At that point, we knew what was going on, so when it didn't go as planned we were able to think of reasons why, rather than just blindly continuing to plow through the steps in the lab manual. And I think back to those labs when I'm trying to recall details of threshold voltages and such. Sorry to say, I can't recall much at all from my physics labs. Except when we took the magnets to the computer monitors to make pretty colors - that was fun.

I think that lab courses ought to start out simply, with demonstrations of the equipment. Then, when it's time to demonstrate concepts, make sure that technical considerations don't get in the way of the actual experiment. (I'm recalling a Monte Carlo simulation from P1 - it had something to do with evaluating the experimental results, but we couldn't make the simulation work, so the experiment kind of fell by the wayside.) Provide help and explanations - real scientists can ask colleagues for help; why make the students struggle blindly?

In general, labs should be an opportunity to explore and solidify - don't think they'll help students understand concepts if they're clueless. Experiments will help thoughts click, and often provide a hook on which to hang concepts, but if the students don't know what they're doing as they conduct the lab, all you'll get will be disgruntled future English majors.

[1] or whatever they have in quantum mechanics labs - or do they even have quantum mechanics labs as such? I don't know but it doesn't really matter.

# : 5:17 PM : :

Now that my O Chem test is over, I'm able to imagine this whole stressful spring being done, and look forward to relaxing afterwards. Some of my plans for the next few months:

• April 17: MCAT
• April 23-25: long weekend, Eric visits, I relax
• May 6: O Chem final - the end of my overscheduled spring
• May 7-9: long weekend, I go to Cleveland and celebrate
• sometime in May or June: beach trip
• June 17-29: San Francisco with the family

In addition to all the trips I have planned, my normal days are going to feel like vacation - I'll be able to stay up later since I can get up at 8 instead of 5:30, I can go to the movies instead of studying, I can do things in the evening during the week... it will be wonderful.

By the way, I was dreading the results of that test - I was sure I failed. Turns out I beat the average by 30 points. Not bad.

# : 1:44 PM : :

With the help of Netflix, I've embarked on a mission of watching all the movies I should have seen already. When I was a kid, our movie watching was pretty much restricted to cartoons, musicals, and Westerns (well, we didn't watch those much, but my mom did constantly). So I missed the movies my generation grew up with (E.T., Goonies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and the classics (Casablanca, The Godfather).

Basically I've been adding all the old movies that I've heard of to my queue and watching them with almost a completely opened mind. We did do a film unit in high school English, and I took a few German film classes in college, so I'm not totally uneducated, but I find that watching older movies is almost like watching foreign films, in that I'm not quite sure about the conventions - I don't know when I'm supposed to suspend disbelief and when I'm supposed to notice the characters acting strange.

But I really enjoy watching older comedies, because I mostly watch movies for relaxation, and they're funny and fluffy without being completely stupid and full of off-color jokes. (Of course, there's a time and a place for everything; I did like Eurotrip with is basically defined by being stupid and off-color.)

I'm looking forward to eventually being educated about film. I'm always intrigued by the idea of mini film festivals consisting of a handful of movies tied together by some common thread, and I think it would be fun to be able to come up with those. (Thanks to my German film classes, I do know something about vampire movies, so I have a whole little set of those on my queue waiting for October.)

# : 9:29 AM : :

I'm finally getting to relax after a very stressful week. I had an O Chem test this morning, which required a lot of studying. It turned out to be really hard, too, so I don't know how well I did. I've also been stressing about the MCAT, and work has been busy, so I ended up with a whole bunch of random stress symptoms.

Which is actually kind of interesting - I got the normal ones like headache, stomachache, and random body aches, plus a touch of insomnia, plus feeling sleepy all the time (which wasn't very conducive to studying, and thus continued the vicious cycle). Also, I've been constantly starving all week. It's weird - I keep thinking that I can't be hungry, it's only 10 AM, or I just ate three hours ago, or whatever, but the grumpiness and stomach growling soon convince me otherwise.

But the strangest stress symptom, which I've had before so it wasn't a surprise like the hunger, is that I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye that aren't there. I'll think that a speck on the wall is a bug, or think I see movement where there isn't any. Last night I thought I saw a car that wasn't there! Before you come and take away my car keys, though, these are just split-second flashes, not even long enough to instinctively react (maybe my subconscious knows there's nothing there?) so I won't be swerving away from any imaginary vehicles. And it's mostly bugs that I think I see, anyway.

I'm fascinated by this - I keep wondering what's going on in my brain to cause it. I guess stress would make you more vigilant for danger, but then I'd think I'd be reacting to these phantoms. Maybe my neurons are overtired and have started misfiring. (That's scary.) And why is it always bugs?

# : 4:50 PM : :