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i am easily distracted. and admittedly it is one of my greatest flaws… however, it is also one attribute through which i derive unexpected knowledge and snippets of fun or interesting things.
i learnt about this interview that Kerry Miller from the Mid Morning programme on the Minnesota Public Radio did, in which Daniel Pink debunks the carrot and stick approach, from a different interview she also did this week that discussed the brain and biotechnology. i haven’t yet read the book but from the discussion, Daniel Pink offers a thesis that resonates with Maslow’s theory of the Hierarchy of Human Needs. Maslow, an eminent social psychologist of his era, proposed that once our basic needs are satisfied, we crave for higher means of finding fulfilment and, to borrow his term, becoming ‘Self-actualized‘ beings.
i’ve had my share of working experience with different supervisors and mentors and can quite confidently say that it doesn’t require a genius to figure out that there are some people you’d rather have as bosses and others you’d avoid at all costs. but that aside, it is also about how you shape and find your own motivations, too. afterall, life is not just about work, although at times it can feel that way. but a positively conducive social environment can certainly help to make sure that the delicate balance of work and life is maintained. needless to say, beyond the bread and butter and a roof over one’s head, we seek more than just mere survival. we want to feel good about ourselves!
and to this end, we have: Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.
some years ago in the department of anatomy in the little sleepy German town of Tübingen, i learnt about the history of tagging brain cells and looking at them under the microscope… it was pretty amazing to think that what one could see can lead to powerful inference about how the network of cells within the whole brain might be communicating. two pioneers, Golgi and Cajal both had differing ideas of how that communication might exist, based on what they saw. Golgi saw cells or neurons in a cloud-like mesh and thought of them as a composite entity while Cajal found each neuron to be a single entity and postulated that communication between them might occur in the space between them; the junction we now call a synapse. their differences were not resolved even when both were jointly awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize recognizing both their achievements.
since then, we have come to appreciate Cajal’s foresighted inference with better viewing tools. and many other scientists have sought to tag cells and other sub-cellular structures to better understand their form and function. this year’s Nobel prize in Chemistry is shared by three of them who used a green glowing fluorescent protein (GFP) found in a deep ocean octopus! it sounded crazy to me when i first learnt about that in class. but when i saw how fluorescent proteins worked when tagging the peripheral nerve cells i have stained in one of my lab rotations, i felt just as Cajal probably did when he first saw the Golgi stained cells. dumbfounded. the microtubulins and actin filaments and dying cells glowed green, red and blue, respectively, under the microscope. i marveled at how minuscule those red-stained filaments looked and how so vital they are in the many wondrous things every cell in each of us does.
here’s a picture of modern day tagging at its artistic best… brain cells of a lab mouse glowing in multicolour protein tagging
(picture courtesy of NYTIMES © AP Photo/Harvard University, Livett- Weissman-Sanes-Lichtman)
i had no idea how these fluttery things with slimey-looking younglings get inside my apartment when there’s a wire gauze over all windows… except perhaps through the slits in the window wherein the air-conditioner (A/C) was installed over summer… darn those wretched creatures! i had to part with my beloved sacks of rice… rice of all sorts; wild, sweet, brown, and my baking stuff… evil little things!
may i also mention that the said window with the A/C also enticed a frequent visitor with a bushy tail particularly when it storms… and more annoyingly this visitor has a penchant for gnawing at the gauze outside the storm window next to the one containing the A/C. it’s partly my fault for having the storm window drawn up occasionally for the fresh breeze, because the protective (?!?) gauze has suffered 3 chewing destructions and consequent replacements… and i believe that the visitor actually came in one evening and decided that it wasn’t going to be finding any food and scampered out again. i’ve never had negative thoughts of grey squirrels until i met them in person… they are pesky.
anyways… back to the pantry! i’ve been swatting and exterminating them moths and emptying my food cupboard… and putting whatever could be salvaged in a box… clearing away these invaders will be my new chore! baaaah… and i will have to live with an empty cupboard for a while… sob.
ARRGH… if we didn’t have choice, we’d be better at decision-making… except you’d think you have lost your free-will.
for the past months i’ve been saving up for what i thought i’d be getting, a mac-book-pro… with all the latest frills maximazing the RAM, HDD, DLDVD, etc. but it seems quite a huge leap to switch between operating systems… don’t get me wrong… i do like the Unix system… i just grew up with Windows and there’re many things you just get used to because of the many different softwares you use in research… to be honest… I HATE COMPUTERS. they are great when they work. else, they are horrible monsters and vexing frustrations.
i have to get a new laptop soon… my current archaic, ancient, temperamental dell might just give up on me any day, it’s motherboard is flaky — that’s the new replaced motherboard mind you (sob… the poor monster has had a couple of serious technical surgeries… thank goodness for extended warranty; don’t leave home without it!). i’ve had it with dell. it’s not as good as it used to be. i don’t recommend it. period.
so it’s between the X60-ultraportable Lenovo and the MacBook pro, with similar specifications.
they are both just as pricey… both with pros and cons…
at the end of the day i just need something portable, reliable, that works, and i can get my thesis done, and use it for future number crunching… brrrrrrrr.
gosh i hate decisions…
BTW, has anyone used BOOTCAMP? apart from the partition at installation of the OS, do you need to include in the partition, hard disk space for mac and windows applications/programmes separately and do the 2 operating systems share the same folders across platforms?! are partitioned macs stable?!
UPDATE!!!
lucky is she who gets a new lab-sponsored laptop… it’s an ibm-lenovo with all the specs i want… maybe i might get to buy it off the lab if i end up loving it! that means… i get to wait a bit more wrt macs… what can i say… i am ALL SMILES =C)
image © apple.com
the NEW macbook-pro is out!!!
it’s a hedious name… the macbook pro (they really ought to come up with something better… tsk tsk!)
and it costs a bomb… particularly when i’d like to have the max. of the available specifications… so i have to save up another us$1500… before i can get the academic price version… it should be worth it though (i hope)… yeeehaar… the smaller version has a dual-layer dvd writer, finally!!! and up to 200GB for harddisk space capacity… YES!!! now i just have to keep my fingers crossed that MATLAB will be quick enough at developing their softwares for the new IntelMacs… i wonder if i can run wretched SPSS on it too… i wonder if bootcamp will work… hmmmmmm. (how i hate the fact that computers and operating systems don’t speak the same language!)
Summary Quote (NB: Academic Pricing)
Subtotal $3,487.00
Estimated Ship:
2-4 business days
Free Shipping
Specifications
* 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 3GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 1x2GB, 1x1GB
* 200GB Serial ATA Drive @ 4200 rpm
* SuperDrive 6x (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
* Apple USB Modem
* Magsafe Airline Power Adapter
* Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS – U.S. English
* Final Cut Express preinstalled
* AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro/PowerBook (w/or w/o Display) – Auto-enroll
baaaah… what a lot of craziness… i shall have a peek at the apple-store!!! rah… how very exciting…
imperial old fashioned units are impossible… as with the unit of time… and to make things worse… time differences can be a pain for parents when they try to call their children in far-flung continents…
it is also made even more confusing with Winter and Summer time differences… when day-light savings is turned on and off in the northern hemisphere. Winter-time (day-light savings) usually starts at the end of Oct for most countries and every country participating in this change, shifts time one hour backwards.
however, Summer-time begins at different times across the european countries which results in a week of extra 1 hour time differences for some cities when it happens during the last week of March until we arrive at the beginning of April. but when this happens, we return the ‘stolen’ hour back by moving time forwards by an hour…
here is a way i’ve come up this morning to calculated the current time (in 24hr format) at the country/city you are interested in:
it is terrible that BBC has reduced or removed all its short-wave broadcast to/in the usa… for i could not get any reception at all and what it alternatively offers on FM is just too short a service and during odd hours of the day… i suppose it is presumed that everyone will have cable, satelite, and high-speed internet connection today…
this explains why even the antenae extension my papa sent won’t work… sob.
i was mopey yesterday with the remnants of a flu-like bug i was still fighting… and i decided i had to do better than that today… but my heffalumps-neighbours upstairs were game on setting me up in a moody morning with me trying desperately to steal more sleep but obviously loosing the battle… crap. i resorted to blasting my world-receiver (which my brother kindly retrieved from my bedroom at home) and then after a while got bored with the selection of classical pieces on the classical radio channel and started randomly pressing some buttons i’ve made to store the frequencies of some channels that happen not to have too unpleasant things on air…
frequency-modulated (FM) channel 88.5 suddenly aired the voice of a very british accent… and i thought, how weird… i turned up the volume and much to my amusement… it was BBC world on culture and movies… i got to hear a review of Chronicles of Narnia, Everything Is Illuminated and Ang Lee’s new movie Brokeback Mountain, which sounds like a good one to catch… how delightful… and i thought my attempts in trying to find the BBC channels were futile… i really was quite upset not finding any for weeks… now i know at least one channel in the mornings might be dedicated to BBC world news!
yippeee…
i honestly think that…
i don’t know if many of you have already heard of Project Gutenburg but this is a really nifty site for literary works whose copyrights have expired and are therefore free for all to use…
since i have left or sent back many of my books home (except for a few things packed in 3 boxes at the dept. back in edinburgh and some bitsNbobs left with lucy) this spiffy site is a really nice way for me to read up old classics.
and guess what i was pointing my browser to?!
thanks to f who introduced this to me some time ago and then i forgot all about it until desperation set in… memory has a wonderful life of its own.
