Greasy Hands

It's always about oil and money. Can't corporations look past that for a minute to think about their effect on the environment around them? Corporations are made up of people, right? Those people have to live in this world same as we do. Throw off the mob mentality a little.

If you haven't heard of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, well, that's what I'm talking about. It's not even a spill, really, but a leak from the underwater oil well. This is worse, because it means that it's not just however many barrels of oil the Exxon Valdez or some other ship was carrying, but a continuous gushing of oil into the sea until the hole is plugged, which, over 3 weeks later, has still not happened. It is an ongoing spill, and it has been ongoing for 3 whole weeks. However much oil has made it to the surface of the water is barely the tip of the oil iceberg. There will be plenty of problems with things like tar balls on the sea floor, as there were in the San Francisco Bay in 2007.

It's nice that people are all ready to help out and BP is taking responsibility and all, but it would have been much better if we could have prevented this disaster in the first place. Perhaps if those extensive safety regulations that the oil companies fought so hard against had been put into place, this wouldn't have been a problem.

And damn it, water is not supposed to be black:

The effect on wildlife will be devastating.

Just, oh my god.

Pictures from Boston.com's Big Picture series.

Obviously

"Needless to say" is a ridiculous, pointless expression. It is always, unfailingly, inevitably (redundantly, tautologically) followed up by an explanation of what was so needless to say. Seriously, if it's needless to say, don't say it. If you have to explain it, then it's not needless, but necessary.

You don’t have to use idioms that make no sense (“Head over heels”? Isn’t that the normal state of affairs?). Just say what you need to say.

Testing Day Again

Having about 10 black belts in a panel judging you and a bunch of other white and yellow belts in one half of the room is not so bad. Having every single black belt in the room on the panel watching you do trips of rolls and strikes across the room is much much more unnerving. Four tables worth of black belts got to watch me do not-very-good barrier rolls. I was sick all last week, so I didn't get to practice, and while I felt like I knew what I knew pretty well, I didn't get to practice it very much. I don't feel that confident after this test. I guess this is how everyone else usually feels, so I guess that's good for me, if nothing else >.<

Rocking on the Top

After being sick for a few days, today was a relief. No fever, much much less cough, and nice weather! Well, my body probably had little to do with that last, but it did make the day a bit happier.

And yet, I was trying to rest so I won't get hit with another virus while I'm weak during finals. But lying in bed and sitting around for three days is not easy for an active person like me. So today, I decided I should continue taking my self-taught classes in dancing.

I've been trying to learn a little bboying (or bgirling, in my case) from Youtube. The fancy acrobatics are attention grabbing, but I've found myself admiring the toprock. Now that I've been exposed to so many other types of dance, I can see the swing and latin influences in here (Slide step? You mean cucaracha?). Maybe I'll get to the windmills and air flares eventually, but for now, I'm working on my basic kick step, hip twists, and shuffle step:



Once I've got the basic toprock footwork down, I can give it my own flavor. Strawberry, perhaps? Or maybe pomegranate...

My Future

I've been looking at grad schools this week. Which ones have the best neuroscience graduate programs, what do I need for their application, what's the curriculum and rotation schedule like, etc. There's some obvious ones, like UCSD, UCSF, UCLA, UC Berkeley...but I don't really know much about those outside sunny California. Except Columbia.

I really, really want to go to Columbia. What I like is that their program is very interdisciplinary, but still well established. And they have Professor Eric Kandel! He literally wrote the (8 lb.) book!

The Kandel book, as it is called, despite the presence of two other authors on the cover.

Still, there's one other thing that I've been thinking about. I was tipped off about this program last spring, when someone came into my History of India class and spoke about it. Since then, I've heard of it from multiple other sources, and done some research for myself. One of my roommates is also going to be doing it beginning next (school) year. It's called TeachForAmerica.

The program selects the best and brightest undergraduates to teach in schools in underserved areas for two years. And it's highly competitive. This year, it got some 35,000 applicants and accepted about 4,000 to train and send off into the education world. Something like 10% of the Harvard graduating class applies to this program. What are the chances I will get in?

If by some chance I do make the cut, I have to think about how I will deal with grad school. Grad school is definitely my goal - I want to do research. This is something I've been working for since high school, and it's really my dream. But I've had a charmed life. I've been extremely lucky. I want to spread some of that to kids who haven't had what I grew up with, to help make their lives better and open up all of the opportunities waiting for them in the future. This is also something I really want to do.

The ideal situation would be getting into a graduate program that will allow me to defer for two years, get that teaching experience, and then return to studying the brain. TeachForAmerica is a well-known program, and they have arrangements with many schools to allow such deferrals. Neuroscience, however, is a pretty specific field, and I haven't seen any of those on the list on the website. So it falls to me. I need to call up each of the graduate schools that ends up on my semi-final list and see which ones would allow me to take 2 years before I begin. If none of my top schools will allow it, or if I don't get in to TFA? Then I guess I'll go straight to grad school and find another way to get kids interested in learning. Don't worry, I've got a few ideas on what to do in such a situation...

A Reminder to Humans

Be a little humble, guys.

A (Kind of ) New Take On Cancer Treatment

Cancer is a difficult disease to cure. Our current systems of classification for it are based on the symptoms rather than the cause. Yet the actual causes vary so much that it is difficult to generalize treatment anyway.

In essence, cancer is a disease of sociopathic cells. These cells no longer follow the rules of the cellular environment around them - they don't care about their neighbors and they don't listen to the advice that staying low is better for society (i.e., the body) as a whole.

Hey, I write a blog, not a webcomic, okay?

Now, anthropomorphizing aside, human cells are complex little things. The problem with finding a simple cure for cancer is that each instance of cancer may involve a different set of proteins becoming disabled or overactive. Cells have redundancies and backup pathways for most of their processes, but sometimes, even the backups break down. Add to that the existing genetic variation between individuals and you have a mess more complicated than a tesseract. The best we can do is try to prevent it by living healthily.

But now we may have a new weapon in our arsenal: a cancer vaccine. It is still being studied, but I can talk about the possibilities.

It won't prevent cancer in healthy people. That would be amazing, but you would have to correctly predict what type of cancer they were about to get and give them a vaccination specific for the markers those cells would express. And how would you know if it worked? Maybe you just cured something that wasn't even going to happen in the first place.

What it can do is prevent relapses. Once somebody has been diagnosed with cancer and treated with drugs and/or chemo, adding the vaccine helps the immune system do its part in the fight in getting rid of the few remaining cells. It helps to highlight parts of the cancer cells that are not normal so that our white blood cells know that these targets can be attacked. If you can catch the micrometastases before they grow back into full-fledged tumors, you can theoretically nip the problem of relapse in the bud and be fully cancer-free.

There's a lot of possibilities here, and I hope this avenue of research proves fruitful.