silly norwegians, your attacks do not harm me. i'm the president bi*ch

i find it ironic that this year's peace prize has caused so much... hate. i'll reiterate as many times as i can - i'm not someone with enough authority to speak on this matter, so i'll let you form your own opinion. it's hard to go out there with an unbiased vantage, and it's harder to find articles that are unbiased, themselves. i finally found a neutral opinion on this issue at the nobel prize home page (which, like all the other peace prizes, and some literature prizes, lists nothing).

in any case, love obama / hate obama. he's still a better laureate than nominating kanye, don't you agree?

it's a dangerous world out there. here, have some hopenhagen.

religiously devoted to you

my girl works with me. same company, same building, same department, same floor. we practically wake up together, go to work together, come back together; to which there's pros and cons, and which i emphasise the con of not having any 'personal time'.

actually, when i say 'my girl works with me', i mean i work for her. gives a new meaning to the phrase 'she's the boss'. sigh. again pros and cons. we wake up, and i make her coffee. we go to work, and i ... do the work. she just tells me what to do. we have lunch break, and she tells me my datelines are up. my performance is down. revenues are up/down but i still can't expect a pay-raise. or a promotion. we go home, and i take out the trash. it's a 'smack yo' bi*ch up' world, except she's doing the smacking. which would be pretty awesome if that carried itself into the bedroom, but... cold fish.

saturday, i'm at my cubicle.

spreadsheets. domestic pressure. pie charts. mortgage bills. client complaints. wrathful significant others. overdue deadlines. deranged parents. missed opportunities. dwindling finances. the list goes on, and so do the minutes. this is probably some kind of divine retribution for leaving everything 'til the last possible minute. one extension after another: the story of my life.

phone rings.

who could that be? office line, nonetheless, instead of my cellphone. clearly someone knows i'm working (in the loosest sense of the word) at this infernal hour.

it's the boss / woman / crusher of souls.

'hey, just wanted you to know, i have church tomorrow...'

yes, i know this.

'... so i'd like the wayne papers in by the end of the evening, please.'

but, it's not due 'til monday.

'and, oh, this isn't really a request'.

yes, i can practically taste the sarcasm in your tone. it's like cheese. the blue-vein variety.

'more of an order. love you, toodles. also, dinner with my parents on christmas eve.'

at which point, i snap.

i am calm. poised. slightly aloof. 'that's it, we're through,'

'pardon me?'

'this is why we can't be together. we're just too incompatible. you're a catholic, and i'm a devout procrastant.'



oh yeah, we're still on nobel-prize-themed week. as per the story, i have been blessed (simultaneously cursed) with an extension till wednesday. rejoice! so here's some half-assed nobel-prizey stuff: it's named after alfred nobel. click on the link to find out more. if you already knew this, click on it anyway, because i'm out. friday night. party on, rar!

i feel, therefore i am; she percieves, therefore...

i see a cat, you see a cat, he sees a cat,
as i wait for a grandiose fly, on the underground.
she sees herself and all whom she has ever met,
when she looks into a mirror, and in herself existence is found.

to feel, and think; to chose, to live, to hold,
in depravity, northern and frigid cold,
if god does not feel, then how can he ever be alive?
she has a brother whose name i cannot think of.
is neither crime, nor itself a punishment thereof,
and maybe to barely survive, is criterion to philosophise?

she sits upon the suit that walks aright (yes, it stands).
although hollow, a man without a head or hands.
how can you learn the meaning of a word, without the employ of dictionary?
upon a world she lives, before she is death and tax,
while chipping away at the icy sea, with an axe.
maybe by being ambiguous, condescending, interpreting with little wary.

'what would be a better way, to rend upon the populace,'
she thinks, 'to be the self i truly am', with pace.
'and maybe while i am, born again' - atheistic, agnostic, whichever you prefer;
hurries down a path of stimuli,
who would follow? verily not i,
and so i lost all sight of her, to someone else i now defer.

to someone whom she followed, not just for a while,
a being of malice - sinister, vile,
ah, i see this has taken upon itself a life of its own!
that's good and well, in its own cacophony.
for guidance is only an evil necessity,
as i contemplate whether to walk or run, she had already sprout white wings and flown.

it is hard to claim that i have lived, but she showed me that you need only exclude bad faith. 'but what of the people and their persistent, accusing stare?'
(because unlike her, i was not condemned to be free) to which she smiled and replied 'one does not simply arrest voltaire'.

- jean-paul sartre was a champion of the existentialist, and it would be impudence for me to attempt to summarise his impact on the world in a sentence or two. he was awarded the nobel prize in literature in 1964, which he declined, making him the first person to voluntarily refuse the prestigious award.

i am bender. please insert girder,

still keeping in theme with nobel prizes, but extending to what the future holds. i know. i'm not really doing this chronologically. but hey, like i said, after friday, you can expect better quality.

moving on. say 'hi' to craig venter. he's a pretty crazy guy. admittedly experimented with drugs during his youth. and went on to become famous for the human genome project. and yeap, nobel laureate.

here he is, talking about synthetic life, and what awaits us beyond the genetic frontier, which could, in one majestic swoop, solve many of the huge problems that plague modern humanity: carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. dwindling fossil fuel supplies. global hunger and famine. clean, renewable energy... as venter says,

we are limited only by our imagination

oh yeah, dienococcus radiodurans is mentioned in his lecture. told you it's awesome.

we'll be back after a word from our sponsors...

i apologise profusely, for, even though i had said in my previous post that i would 'summarise' this year's nobel-prize winning concepts, i am severely burdened with some work that i cannot procrastinate more than i already have. as such, i will continue with said entry (hopefully) after the submission date of my lab reports, this friday.

however, in keeping with the theme of the nobel prize, all throughout this week, here's something i came across while doing literature reviewing for my labwork, the nobel lecture by kary mullis. it's far more approachable than any of the journal articles one would normally find in this kind of line, but holds enough authority that if my friend quoted in a conversation, he'd be getting the chicks. but, seriously, it is a beautifully written speech, which combines the scientific aspects with his life story, and sharply delineates between the two, should you prefer one over the other. do have a read, if you can spare 15mins, while logging on facebook during lunch break, or on your blackberry while waiting for the bus.

i know it's not really something people will follow through with, but in keeping up with my personal goal of posting once a day, as well as the idea that if i can entice at least one person to read the first couple of paragraphs, i have done more than i set out to do, i post this; with hopes that some of us (including myself) appreciate just how far science and technology has come in so many years, and more of us take nothing for granted -etc.

a nobel dream

i had promised to write on this year's nobel prizes, and i am very enthusiastic on doing so, as it's a subject of personal interest (as are most of my posts, but this one has an exceptionally high ranking amongst them). however, in a discussion with some peers, i was to find that this is not a sentiment shared by the general populace :( and so i have refrained myself from doing an in-depth review of this year's prize in medicine & physiology. but, how could i! it's about telomerases! telo-wait-for-it-mer-fricken-aces (yeah, i made that harder to understand than i probably should, but humor me nps.)

anyway, in the same conversation(s) i find that people are more inclined and interested to hear a brief explanation about the subjects. as my friend appropriately said:

'well, i'm not into this research stuff and all, so i don't really think talking about this would grasp my attention for more than 2 minutes. if you were to tell me a summary, that's relevant...'

really, how?

'... because i would be able to impress chicks in a conversation. chicks dig smart guys.'

ah.
so yeah, this stems to the following, a summary of last year's (since i didn't have the opportunity to blog about it last year) and this year's nobel prizes in physiology & medicine, and chemistry (i would like to include physics, as well, but really, i don't know much about the subjects, myself).

2008
physiology & medicine
the winners are harald zur hausen, françoise barré-sinoussi and luc montagnier, for their discoveries of 'the correlation between cervical cancer and human papilloma virus (hpv)' and 'human immunodeficiency virus (hiv)'. ok, so this is actually a pretty cool subject, because you guys probably know about hiv. check. and for the girls, you probably know about cervical cancer and hpv and pap smears and all that jazz. check. if you guys don't know, go ask your girlfriends. wow, this brief explanation thing is pretty easy!

note: the article on AIDS is (in my opinion) slightly outdated and controversial. it is wikipedia, after all. but the other articles seem legit.

chemistry
to the laureates, osamu shimomura, martin chalfie and roger tsien for their discovery and further application of the green fluorescent protein, gfp. okay, so this discovery is freaking cool. it all starts when shimomura was studying jellyfish and their ability to go all shiny in the depths of the sea. what's odd was, the protein he isolated gave off a blue shinies, whereas the jellyfish gave off green shinies. kinda like going into a club with the wrong glowsticks.


so he does a bit more research and ends up with two different proteins, one being the blue flavour and another being the green flavour (hence, gfp). gfp would come to be so awesome because, integral to its own structure, it could absorb the blue light, and emit green light. for those familiar with fluorescence, the reason it doesn't emit the colour it absorbs, is because it loses some energy in the process, so the emitted wavelength is always larger than the absorbed (stokes shift). but, enough about that scientific jibber-jabber, i want to see shinies!


so anyway, chalfie hears about this, and goes 'wow, that's dope. this molecule be fluorescent on his own. don't need no brahs to hold him up, just keepin' it real. i'll go ahead and put this shizzle into some other creature and see if this nigz be fo' real.' and so he did.

introducing gfp into the translucent worm (nematode, actually, but roll with it. i've been simplifying stuff so far, anyway), c. elegans, he created a recombinant organism that expressed only gfp as an extra gene. the results were astounding.

people then went on to put gfp in other organisms, like this fruitfly. they even used other fluorophores (more shiny molecules) to emit photons of different wavelengths (different colours). this is where tsien comes in: by tweaking the chemical structure of gfp, he was able to make the different variants of gpf which are so commonly used today. in the c. elegans image below, three different types of neurones are coloured green, red and yellow.


so, what's so great about gfp? i have a dinosaur skeleton model at home that glows in the dark. where's my nobel prize? well, for one thing, gfp is a single, independent, small molecule. and you can 'tag' it on to many other molecules without interfering with most of their functions (refer back to the 'small' part, and how biological chemistry relies on a lot of steric interactions). for those interested in biochemistry, the possibilities were limitless. one super-awesome example would be the fluorescent labeling of dideoxyribonucleotide triphosphates (ddNTP) which can be used in automated sanger-sequencing. but that's a whole new area in itself. what's important is, gfp found its place in biological chemistry and hasn't looked back since. clearly fulfilling the criteria of a nobel prize in that it 'benefits humankind' and is 'widely applicable'.

huh. i ended up writing a pretty hardcore textwall. i guess i'll reserve the 2009 'summaries' for another post.

physical trainwreck

as much of a nerd as i am, i advocate exercise. maybe not the hardcore stuff people use to try to get rock hard abs or tree-trunk biceps etc. (which, incidentally, is pretty common amongst my friends who attempt to get girls' / guys' attention by looking fit. come on guys, we don't live in the 7th century anymore). but having a baseline level of fitness is always good. obesity being one of the leading causes of morbidity in the world, leading to (or at least having a high concordance / correlation with) other diseases such as coronary heart disease, respiratory diseases, degenerative diseases etc etc. everything in moderation i guess.

but anyway, to say this, i must obviously practice what i preach. to an extent, i do exercise a bit. jogging once a week counts for something, eh. but that's nowhere near the suggested amount. so when some friends asked me to join them for a round of 'touch rugby' i was mildly enthusiastic about the idea. after some persuasion (there won't be much contact, it's just touch [rugby]. nobody's going to tackle you etc.) and attempted bribery (more on this another time), we set off. it was pretty comforting that in the car i went in, there were two other guys who were just about as skinny as i was, and probably slightly shorter. in retrospect, though, my kind of skinny is 'all skin and bones, skeleton' whereas their skinny would mean 'lean, mean, fighting machines. no fat, all muscle, baby'.

anyway, imagine my horror when we turned up to the field and everyone else looked like the picture below. that's right, cuh. you just can't imagine this sh*t up.


everything started fine, though. they did a bit of touch rugby, where, when you tap someone running the ball, they'd be considered out and would have to start a new run. that was cool. i even got the ball a few times and ran around a bit. god knows i had the motivation to run pretty fast seeing as i had a couple of buff-ass guys coming at me at about 67.39 kmh. i was having fun at this point. it wasn't that much ice-cream and candy when people started slapping me on the ass, but i'd place the 'fun' factor higher than jogging alone. and incidentally, probably lower than the fun one of these guys was having, tapping people's asses even when they didn't have the ball. i mean, i'm not homophobic or anything. but, really. someone has to draw a line somewhere. here, have a picture so that your life will be forever scarred. what has been seen cannot be unseen. although, i imagine the girls might be slightly turned on.


anyway. there's gayer things that could have happened. like someone dick-grabbing during the heat of things. or lesbo-chicks making out in the background. or someone pulling down another persons pants to reveal what would later come to be known as 'his cleavage'. not that i'm saying any of this happened in actuality, but you know. just saying. *shudder*

but yeah, then they said 'okay guys, warm-up's over. time to get down to business'. i was like, 'okay, cool, so now i have to run faster or dodge stuff. maybe slap someone's ass a bit harder' (giggity. get your mind out of the gutter, you dirty, dirty boy). but, you guessed it, that's not what they meant. what happened next, i can only describe with an analogy:

on a dark, but starry night, an elk is prancing through a forest. elegant, poised, venerable; the beast is majestic in every sense of the word. as our elk is rushing against the wind, steeplechasing logs and avoiding low-hanging branches of ash and beech, a small, slightly rotund object crosses his path. what is this? a rabbit, mayhap? or a cone of pine, whose dropping now marks the end of a winter? and our protagonist now, picking up this object unknown, sees in his peripheral vise, a glimmer of light. a will o' the wisp to which he cannot attribute a colour as yet (for elks have no colour vision. certainly not at this time of night, in a din darkened as soot would unto velvet). but rapidly, the light comes forward. momentum behind it, an approaching curve, relative to our unmoving elk. the seconds seem unerringly infinite, and our elk stares into the headlights of this being, fixated, unwary. BAM. MOTHAFU*KA GOT ROLLED BY A TRUCK, YO.

puer aeteruns

which is to mean 'eternal child'.

i was talking to a friend today, a1:

a1: yeah, i've lost contact with him ever since he got married.
etc: that's pretty common, i guess. it's around this age when jobs, significant others, etc. come into play.
a1: but i still keep in touch with you, you've not changed a bit.
etc: that's probably because i haven't grown up, since. all the things i've listed above don't pertain to me.
a1: so you're slow.
etc: that's a bit derogatory. i prefer to call it IMMORTALITY. or childish, immature. whichever you prefer.
a1: slow.
etc:... i think i'll call it 'peter pan syndrome'. that way, i could potentially get it classified as a recognised disease. psychological or some shit like that.
a1:sounds like an idea. you'll be the first patient, huh. i don't think i fit the criteria though. i have a job T_T.
etc: yeah, you have a bf, too. so you can't suffer from the syndrome. see, we've already established some of the clinical features to diagnose this.

and it's at this point i wikipedia 'peter pan syndrome'...

etc: fffffffuuuuuuuuuucccccccc******* you wikipedia.
a1:?
etc: there's already an entry in wikipedia.
a1: hahahahahahahahahah (ad nauseum)
etc: and fu*k you michael jackson.
a1: he only named his theme park 'neverland' to get the kids in.

the dialogue goes on. but we still have hope! a1 is a doctor and 'peter pan syndrome' is not classified in the ICD10 or DSM (so it's not an 'official' disease. yet). i could still get this coined after me. my one shot at fame (albeit probably no fortune).

here's to adults who never really grow up /cheers.

p/s: interestingly, there's also a 'wendy dilemma' book, which i'm currently trying to find. no idea what it's about, but i think i can guess.
p/p/s: peter pan = flying = undead alternative. awesome

coup de pylori

i had a serendipitous encounter today - as i drudged off to a microbiology lecture, which i had hoped was canceled, i found that, in not having it canceled, instead i was to receive a lecture by barry marshall! now, i know i've been going on about him for quite some time, and contrary to what you may believe, no, i'm not in love with the guy.

anyway, homophobia set aside, i was rather interested with what he had to say. him being a nobel laureate and all, i have to profess, i entered the lecture hall with the pre-set bias that he was going to be some dull, monotonous elitist, who would end up talking about his research etc.

well, i had the latter part right, but besides that, he was really very engaging. i'm not really going to talk about his lecture's contents, as you can probably just google him up (here's somewhere to start, if you're really that lazy). rather, i'd just like to comment on something i found interesting during the course of his lecture.

he's admitted that his slides were re-cycled stuff from previous years, with one or two new ones added to the end of the presentation, and the way he presented the slides was what caught my eye - basically, the general idea that he conveyed (added with, maybe, a bit of bias on my behalf) is that:
a) in the past lectures he would have 'bitched' about how people didn't accept his findings, and how he, in the end, shoved it in their faces when he was right.
b) however, now he's grown up a bit and isn't too angsty about it all, and would instead, like to talk about more relevant stuff
c) before, he would talk about his research (if i won the nobel prize, so would i!) but now he's talking about other people's stuff that builds on to, what may be the future of infectious diseases.

i can't go into details of why i feel this way, because i would have to describe some of his slides and the things he said, and that would take ages to type out. just take my word for it. all in all, though, i found the lecture very interesting. he's a pretty good speaker (to which, i eat my pre-conceptions and tip my hat), and the contents was really interesting. albeit being about helicobacter exclusively.

anyway, being in his presence was... something. can't really describe it, and i'm not really going to try to. you might be better off feeling it for yourself.

yummy!

it's not customary of me to double-post, but i've just finished my poster assignment for science communication module, and i thought it would be nice to get some feedback on what people think about it. i'm going to spare everyone the theory and literature behind poster design (there's more sh*t which is actually logic than there should be, related to something any 8-year old can now do), but feel free to comment on theoretical aspects of it, if you are so inclined.



as a side note, this was supposed to be a group project, but, as with most group projects i do, i ended up doing everything. sigh. i'm not kidding, either - i really had to do every single thing. and my groupmates are making me burn this into a cd (in which format it has to be submitted) as well as print it out (probably using my own money). AND present the poster at the end of it all. really, i want to bitch so much more about this, but i'll just go with the japanese approach and suck it up and ganbatte.

this is why i preferred (and still do) to do all assignments on my own. but that's a rant reserved for another day. for the time being, keep the little flying bugs at bay! yummy, indeed.

biologists' worst enemy is mathematics

the title is a direct quote from my bioinformatics lecturer (i can't remember if i gave him a pseudonym, so let's call him DM, because he is a D&D enthusiast, and i can really picture him mastering a good game. apologies to the non-D&D fans who cannot relate). anyway. i think this applies to almost all non-mathematicians - from my friend base, i have yet to meet a non-mathmo who is a math enthusiast. so we'll work with this as an axiom (even though, by reading on, you'll see i, myself contradict this, so flawed logic ftl).

anywho. in a lecture, we are posed a question, as following. i post the entire question, for completeness, in the off-chance that someone amongst the readers is an avid mathmo, but if you are in the majority, feel free to skip the block-quoted portion, as its contents is irrelevant to the development of this post:

given a set of protein sequences, which are aligned:
N-FLS
N-F-S
NKYLS
N-YLS

we can construct a hidden markov model:


the question ensues: what is the probability of observing NKGYS?

ok so, the point of this all is, DM has glossed over the mathsy part for so many years and students have been able to answer the question.

but from a mathmos point of view, the question is far more complex than the 'expected answer' and from this i argue that,

the probability of observing any sequence in a HMM is the cumulative probability of each and every one of the possible ways of obtaining the sequence. whereas what DM wants is the single probability of the best possible path (also known as the viterbi path's probability).

hence, where the other students answered in one or two lines (and got full marks, mind you), i foolishly computed every single probability, and since the number of possible outcomes for a HMM increases exponentially, i pretty much calculated something to the n^5th degree. and even for the non-mathmos, that's a freaking huge number. i spent like the whole day doing one question (sheepishly, never questioning if i had done something wrong, because as we all know, when someone has the pre-conception that they're right, on go the blinkers!).

anyway, once he revealed his answer to us all in today's class, i was slightly pissed, but more than anything, i found this hillarious. sweet charlie chaplin jesus laughs at me, not with me.

so i confronted him at the end of the class, and he found it interesting that the wording of the question was so misleading, and yet caused so much confusion (where it had not to the others). not that i'm being condescending to 'non-mathmos' or anything. but you can probably see where i'm coming from when i could say that 'with great power (or knowledge) comes great responsibility (or overthinking + grief).

well yeah, sorry for returning to posting with a textwall of a ridiculously semantic insignificant issue. i promise to post something a bit more cheerful next time!

p/s: DM is the lecturer who offers chocolates if we can correct his slides or find mistakes. he owes me a bar for some other mistake, and by sam's hell i'm going to claim another one for all the grief that question put me through :p

one of the three great forces

i want to post on the recent nobel prize announcements, especially one of personal interest, the prize for physiology and medicine. however, i've been far too busy (for my own good), and don't really want to botch it up with a hasty and insufficient entry. hence, i'll settle for a little reminder (to myself) of the deadly sin: greed

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed
-mahatma gandhi

it is not something new in my personal life, to feel that we have more than we need, but never enough of what we greed, and this quote succinctly puts into words what i have thought up in convolution and in extraneous length. for the existentialists, an elegant, and somewhat romantic, way to phrase it is also

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
–kierkegaard

upon (some) request, i'll try to post an 'introduction to philosophy' soon. as a disclaimer, i'm just going to go ahead and say, no, i'm not in the knowhow on the subject. but i do have (a somewhat vested) interest in it, and if by posting i can entice one reader to follow through, i will have done a job tenfold of what i intend. i'll see you then!

p/s: the other two are fear and stupidity.

what comes after a period (of, not necessarily, time)

i sometimes think people do things without reason. don't look at me with that raised eyebrow, you know what i mean. see, sometimes it's easy to pick out the dos and don'ts, but when you're in the hot seat, well. the decision-making process isn't so logical anymore. point in case - some friends were playing chess while waiting for a lecture, and all the observers could see the mistakes, but neither player could see theirs (ironically, they could see the opponent's). anymore of these analogies and i'm going to cry (misspelling with a reason).

there should be a limit as to how many mistakes one does in a day, a week, a month. is that something plausible, though?. no, i think not. reason to believe so is that... wait. no, don't really want to rant, gah. motivation is slightly lacking at the moment. i just woke up at 2am and am hungry, still tired, but have a shitton of stuff to do (really, don't we all?). want this, want that. it all sounds the same in the end. all too familiar - what i say, you say, they say. to an extent, we should all forget such petty things and enjoy things, without reason. end

sometimes, pictures only tell one word...

a picture supposedly tells a thousand words. of this i am a firm believer. exceptions may include my doodles during lectures and camwhores on teh intrawebz. i'm a bit tight on time, but doing some research for all my assignments have yielded quite a few interesting pictures. here they are, in no particular sequence, one picture per assignment. i've included a title as appropriate, so that some of you can either go 'ah that picture exemplifies the work very well' (although you've not read the horribaddible that is 'work') or you can go 'wtf how is that even related?!'


bioinformatics: structure and function of DFFB_MOUSE as a multidomain protein


science communication: effectiveness of posters (review)


science communication: science of scuba diving


bioinformatics: sequence alignment (it's D. radiodurans!)


microbiology: evolution of influenza


microbiology: caspase cascades

ah well, i'll stop being lazy and write a proper post when all this is done with. 'til then,

... the word is 'fffffffuuuuuuuuuu...'

different prespectives (now with dinosaurs!)

it has come to my attention that a hybrid being has been created. a being so malicious, so devilish, so malefic; yet so intelligent, so prespicacious, so dexterous. a being which embodies the greatest of my awes, but also the summation of my fears. how could something borne of two opposing polarities have come into existence? who could have created such a monstrosity?

philosoraptor

as opposed to trying to rid the world of such an abberation, surely it is wise to approach said raptor with diplomacy? surely it would be beneficial to all if we were to reach a compromise? a common goal, a live-and-let-live agreement? wrong. wrong. wrong. which part about raptors being malicious did you miss? was it the part where she rips you a new orifice and exposes your jejunum, ileum and caecum to environments they were not made to deal with? maybe it's the part where she coyly tricks one of us into thinking we've got her cornered, before her firend she-devils spring up from the flanks to nibble on your fingers. coyly. or mayhap it's the part where she flat out sprints from across the plains at 50 mph to proceedingly (in one graceful, unhindered movement) skullrape you with 13-inch claws. no no no. personally, i'm running the sh*t away before we reach that stage.

(apologies to female readers, but if you've ever watched jurassic park, you might recall that the dinosaurs were designed to be all female. though they ended up not being so. we can argue the semantics another time, more pressing issues are at hand, ergo EFFIN PHILOSOPHISING RAPTORS. god)

but really, as i've just pointed out, there's no running away from a raptor. 50. fricken. miles. per. hour. so we shall try (albeit, probably bearing futility) to discourse with these cerebrally-enhanced velociraptors.

all shall rue the day.

for, even though there are many differences between us. and there may be many things to gain from adjoint. one does not simply walk into mordor. i mean. one does not simply reason with raptors.



the moral of the story is: we may all be different. we may see the same things in different light, we may feel the same things with different thoughts, we may live the same lives with different experiences. so be considerate of your kin (or non-kin, in the case of raptors)

that being said, i still think they're up to something. sneaky raptors. they'll be the end of us, mark my words. may sweet raptor jesus save us all. umm. wait.

avalon landing

i have many a friend who indulge, explore, reticate, and even produce philosophy. i have few a friend who dabble in it. i have no friends who know naught of it. it is easy to hold my friends in such high esteem considering i'm not confining the definition of philosophy to classical, authoritarian schools, but something more general, more ubiquitous. that, and my friend are pretty well-read.

i know many demons who lurk in shadows, preying on those who pray, effecting those with little affect. i find it very disturbing to consider my friends, who are so educated and socially-emancipated (though from what, i shan't discuss here) turning into these demons.

is it morally despicable to consider such corruption a definition of human nature? is it inadequate to assume that all things lead to ruin? is it expected of everyone to have skeletons in their closets, and japanese schoolgirls in their cupboards? again, going back to philosophies, there's no simple answer, i guess.

but something that's caught my eye, and has possibly elucidated more answers than any philosophy textbook i've ever read (not that there's been many of those) is a japanese manga which manages to provoke - it incites issues but remains vague, symbolic, metaphorical - enough such that you're free to interpret it with your own philosophies. be warned should you attempt to read, it is indeed very disturbing, and full of awkwarness. definitely nsfw.

things you only found out when you grew up (things your parents never told you)

i like cooking. i may be horribaddible at it, but i like it. it's relaxing, it's meticulously well-planned, it's self-fulfilling, and best of all, the food is best when made by your own hands. even if others think it's terrible. same thing goes for baking, even though i haven't baked in about 2 1/2 years. i miss those times.

it's common to think you're missing out on something good when you think you could have done it, but never really followed through. personally i think this all the time when i reflect upon all the 'lost chances' i had. all the decisions which could have potentially been better (or at least less worse); like when i was younger i wanted to be a sage of sorts. a pious man, devoted in life to religion and god. but i never really found out where that would lead to.

and then i grew up and wanted to become a scientist. which may still happen, i guess. but it'll never be really the same as what i had imagined as a younger me. by the way, if you google 'draw a scientist' test, or DAST, you might find some interesting ideas on pre-conceptions and development of perceptions.

and then i grew up and wanted to become a mathematician. but that was crushed by the fact that there's no real job for mathmos back home.

and then i grew up and wanted to become a doctor. somewhat. boy, did that get screwed over.

and here i am now. all grown up. with no idea what i really want to do. which is really interesting. because i should have been a chef. i might have sucked. the pay might have been meagre and the benefits non-existent. the hours may have been long and the abuse harsh. but i can honestly say i like cooking.

but then, i'd say 'i miss science'.

ah well, such is the indecision of the human mind.

did you grow up wanting to be an astronaut? maybe a firefigher or policeman? maybe a ninja or a pirate? maybe a teacher or an engineer? did you grow up wanting?

and for all those wants, did you get anywhere close? does it matter that you have(n't)? so many questions to which i can only answer (personally):

boy, am i hungry. i should go cook something for dinner