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