Nerd Pride

nerd n (plural nerds)

1. (slang, derogatory) A person who, although having good technical or scientific skills, is introspective and generally introverted

(Source: Wikitionary)

When I was in high school, "nerd", although not an extremely positive term, was something I secretly wished people will use to describe me, because that will mean that I am mugging as hard as my peers. On retrospect, it is interesting that many years later, I will marry a "nerd" and pursue graduate education in an institute that celebrates "Nerd Pride" (yes they sell merchandises - keychains, shirts and the like - in the MIT bookshop that spells N-E-R-D-P-R-I-D-E). One particularly popular product among students which I found really interested was a T-shirt that simply has this on its front:

So this nerdy couple (my husband insists that I have to be a nerd in order to marry one), like all inquisitive scientists and conscientious students, prints articles and notes at a vorocious rate. This week, with the graduate student lounges in both MIT and HMS being unavailable, we decided to explore the printing labs in MIT computer labs (the free printing attracts poor students like us).

Even for someone like me who has experience programming with Java and Matlab, printing at MIT still proved somewhat intimidating for me. For starters, the whole network operates in Unix (non-Graphic User Interface!) and we have to remotely access Unix just to get the combo to unlock the doors to the computer lab.

Here's what we need to do to command the program to read the thumbdrive:

Athena% attach-usb

attach-usb: Command not found.

Athena% add consult

athena% attach-usb

Alert: attach-usb needs to run as root. Either "su" to root

before running attach-usb, or type the root password now:

Password:

Success: the usb drive is attached to /mnt/usb

WARNING: run "detach-usb" before you remove your usb drive.

Removal without running detach-usb might not save all your data.

Athena% nautilus / mnt/usb&

[1] 4059

athena%[1] Done nautilus /mnt/usb

athena%

athena% []

Phew!

Plug in USB, enter commands to detect USB, enter password to access USB, open files, enter command to print, close files, enter command to remove USB. What a lot of trouble! Granted this makes the network an extremely secure and stable system, I suppose only seasoned MIT nerds can operate the computers effortlessly without constantly checking back with the MIT computing cheatsheet. Oh did I mention dc and I spent something like ten minutes figuring out how to remote access Unix and login to start with?

*~*~*~*

It's perfectly normal if you do not understand what is on the MIT T-shirt, I paused for 5 min myself.

(Einstein's mass-energy equivalence)

(Ohm's law relating voltage, current, resistance)

(Ideal gas law in thermodynamics)

Good Eats

So is the title of a show on Food Channel, which CY and I crazed over in our undergraduate years, because it is so scientific in all the cooking. Explaining steps in chemistry, measuring temperature with infra-red thermometer, you name it all.

One month ago, we chanced upon this book called "Molecular Gastronomy". Sounds yummy, yet nerdy huh. It turned out that it was exactly the book we would like. It discusses many cooking processes in scientific terms, summarizes important experiments and data to support hypotheses (e.g. when preparing broth, should you boil the water with the meat or add the meat only after the water start boiling?) and even has references to literature. Wow!

There are many molecular gastronomical phenomena happening around us everyday as we are preparing food. One of which has been on our mind for long is why do bones make good broth? Here're the candidates in bone which can potentially be the trick: collagen (type I), mesenchymal or hematopoietic stem cells, precursors to all the white and red blood cells or simply the adipose (fat) tissue in the bone. Personally, I would go with the precursor cells. Here's why: Collagen Type I is a huge protein which can potentially give rise to all the yummy amino acids to give a MSG-like flavor but it's questionable if thermal degradation breaks it down so efficiently. It may be so if we have heat-tolerant collagenase akin to heat-tolerant DNA polymerase for PCR. Fat is always good but well, it adds richness but in terms of giving tastiness, hmmm nah. Stem cells are cool and funky (and elixir-ish) but considering that they are relatively undifferentiated, they probably do not have so much proteins hanging around in their cytoplasm anyway. Does DNA taste good.... probably not. So we are left with precursor cells, cells which are happily differentiating, chunking out tons and tons of proteins for gene regulation, surface markers and enzymatic activities. Did I mention that they form quite a big proportion of the cells in the bone marrow space?

The third and last installment of the Presidential Debate was finally over. Each time there's a deabte, all major news network run lots of analysis including who looks more presidential. To me, Obama looks more presidential, not because he looks calm and composed but because he engages questions and answers them as though he has known you for long.

By the way, everyone knows who Joe the Plumber is after the debate. It turns out that he is not really a plumber but what is more interesting to me is an associated piece of news that comes with it. Average annualized pay of a plumber in USA = $47 000. Isn't something impressive to many graduates in Singapore even before we talk about currency exchange? It's time for plumbin-opolis.

cydc's First Honeymoon (implying more to come)

Today being the first anniversary of our engagement, it seems apt to (finally) put up some photos of our honeymoon which I have been sitting on for a while now.

Perth, being desertous and laidback, is not many people's idea of a fun or romantic honeymoon destination. Yet after a whirlwind wedding preparation, cydc are only too ready to go for a relaxing, nature-filled trip before we uproot ourselves to settle in metropolitan Boston. The holiday exceeded expectations, even if we drove 2000km at speeds up to 130km/h to little known, yet interested places in Western Australia. With a total photo collection of 1800 (a staggering 7GB!), it is of coz not easy to shortlist pictures without cluttering the blog. So here are our tour guides for the trip:

and also our little passengers:

Western Australia was definitely a good juxtaposition of city and nature, history and geography. We visited countless national parks and never got tired of taking in the chilling winds from the Indian Ocean, the gorgeous gorges along the coasts, or even the mysterious limestone pillars at Pinnacles Desert. We had the opportunity to picnic by the rocky Muchison River at Kalbarri (yummy fish burgers!) in a world of our own! July was also the beginning of the wildflowers season and there were just vast fields of golden yellow flowers along the highways, which together with the random wind turbine park en route, looks just like Teletubby land :) Pelican feeding, dolphin sightings, emus at a random highway stopover, kangaroos along the highway (dead and live), rabbits scurrying across the road oblivious to traffic - don't we enjoy the freedom of animals in the wild?

Little did we expect Western Australia to also have a rich maritime, gold mining and shipwreak history. The HMAS Sydney Memorial at Geraldton is a dome made in the image of 645 seagulls representing the lives lost when the ship sunk in war. Stories of shipwreak mutinies also made for great collections at the maritime museum.

Not forgetting the great food that we had Down Under..

We had seafood almost every meal - fish, scallops, prawns, calamari, mussels, oysters and lobsters, otherwise there was steak, ribs, and our new food craze: grilled chicken with avocado sandwich! Though food was not exactly cheap (contrary to what I was told), the portion size was definitely huge - cydc definitely added an inch or two around our midriffs at the end of our honeymoon. There are of course, times when we had to resort to KFC or Nong Shim Kim Chi instant noodles, when prices or availability got out of hand haha. Did you know that dc introduces instant noodles as his favourite food? He definitely had no complaints about the cup noodles.

A special mention about the cake in the last row - many thanks to Daniel who very warmly served us champagne and chocolate cake on our flight home! The cake was really yummy!

And of course, you can't be at west coast and not enjoy the beautiful romantic sunsets..

We ended our honeymoon with our Toyota Camry Sportivo smacked full of insects from the wilderness on every surface at the front. It looks quite disgusting (especially when you have to clean the bugs off your windscreen), but I guess it's just a nice report card on how much and how far we have travelled :)

We were unable to take any photos at our last stop at Perth - The Perth Mint, but we did bring home from the mint the best momento of our first honeymoon of many to come.

Happy anniversary, Dear. :)

Tired but still thoughtful

Our crazy two weeks ended with a finale (just two hours ago) that left cydc brutally deflated. The midterm was unexpectedly incomprehensible and both of us concede defeat to the prowess of MIT's renowned (notorious?) Department of Chemical Engineering.

Nevertheless, the roller-coaster two weeks have seen more downs that ups. Starting with the ascending portion: we were finally called for our long awaited autopsy! Halfway through our ChemEng class, the beeper went off and everybody turned back to a very embarrassed cy while dc hunched over to retrieve the beeper. If anyone is getting cold feet at the thought of autopsy, I have to say it is really less scary than we make it to be. It helped that the body was already opened by the time we arrived, and the deceased's face was respectfully covered, so it felt like we were only viewing a demonstration. (btw, that's a photo of dc in scrubs!) While this class is about the causes and mechanisms of diseases, dc and I came to a realization that when a patient reaches the need for medical intervention, things usually go downhill from there. Medicine, while at times being able to solve a problem, often introduces other issues to a patient's already broken body. I'm not good at philosophical stuff, but just feel that we can't do enough in medical care.

On the other hand, my new laptop has arrived! (finally!) It is a series of unfortunate events that resulted in four failed deliveries and one return to sender, almost killing all the excitement in getting the new toy. Events of the last two weeks have forced us to marvel at the idiocracy of US systems. Example 1: UPS will only deliver my package before 10.30am on weekdays because the package is delivered from overseas. Obviously working people will not be able to sign for it, and UPS cannot make the exception, so the only way out is to allow them to send it back to the sender based in US, then redeliver by ground, this time they will make the home delivery before 5.30pm. This caused a two and a half week delay. Example 2: We cannot make a Massachusetts state ID (all-purpose document) because we have foreign driver's licences. The only way to get an 'all-purpose document' is to take the local driving test to get the state driver's licence. "When in Rome, do what the Romans do" - we can only swallow our frustrations.

In any case, there are only great times ahead. Our next round of midterms are in mid-November, and between now and then, we have in mind to go outlet mall shopping, watch the fall foilage, host three friends coming up from Baltimore and prepare for our Thanksgiving trip in end November. My family is coming over to Boston! Excited excited.. If anybody wants anything from the US (e.g. scrapbooking materials *wink*, sorry no SunBeam raisins here!), drop us a note!

Lord of the Rings - Nothing rings a bell

Ever since Frodo of Shire, we have

Space of Disse
Fat cell of Ito
Pore of Kohn
Cord of Billroth
Column of Bertin
Islet of Langerhans
Loop of Henle

Not forgetting,

Hassal's corpuscle
Bowman's capsule
Nissl substance
Wharton's jelly
Peyer's patches
Schwann cell
Meissner's and Auerbach's plexi

That's what we have been doing the whole weekend