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This past week for two nights in a row I dreamt about my 1st gf. The details are fuzzy, but it is awful to wake up and to start the day in a lousy mood.

A quick check on this blog told me why. I am amazed by the ability of my subconscious mind to remember dates anniversaries.

Two years later, I still stand by the title of this entry.

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Olandario, who has since deleted his blog, wrote this in 2006.

A neverending story

Now and then, I may meet an interesting new girl, and being single and desperate, I take the opportunity to get to know her better. It’s tiring; trying to know someone new always is. And as we grow older, so do the people we meet (unless you are a cradle snatcher), and there’s more to find out. And then there is the usual background research to be done.

Primary school. Secondary school. Junior college. University. Major. Favourite colour. Favourite book. Favourite animal. Favourite number. Favourite song. Favourite movie. Favourite flower. Unfulfilled dream. Biggest regret.

You labour at it, so that you may reap the rewards later in case things work out. But one after another, they fall by the roadside, and even though you stay as friends, when her birthday comes around again, you can no longer recall what her favourite cartoon character is, or what she likes to eat at a restaurant.

I no longer ask, because I no longer care to find out. No more hedging of bets, just to clog up my brain with more useless tidbits of information I won’t be able to recall when the occasion arises. But for you; I can never forget.

Jin Shan Primary School. River Valley High School. Raffles Junior College. University of Melbourne. Medicine. Red. To Kill a Mockingbird (one of them). Dog. Five. Right Here Waiting. Serendipity. Lilies (or at least it used to be). To be a singer. Not getting together with me.

It’s almost ten years since we set eyes upon each other in that classroom, almost nine years since we traded rubber bands with straws between our lips, eight years since you looked through the fourth-storey window and watch me kick a ball, and I saw you stand and sing on stage in that most memorable of Talentimes, and we got ‘married’ in civics and moral education class, seven years since I heard you cry your heart out on the phone, and we stepped through the gates of the same college, five years since you laughed at my clean-shaven head, four years since I bade you farewell at Changi, and you first got attached, almost three years since I did, one year since I broke up, and four months since you did.

A decade of memories.

There have been many times in those years when I have wondered about us, and where we will be in another decade’s time. Whether the meandering journeys we have taken since those heady secondary school days were meant to test us, and whether fate will bring us together again some day. Or as you once put it, whether we will return to square one after everything that we have been through together. If, we will ever end up together.

I already know the answer.

Happy Birthday.

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And my greetings to another girl on the west coast.

Talk about school pride...

A labmate wore this T-shirt with the following printed in front to the office.



The engineers in my group: "What the heck is mjT???"

The 9 common types of PIs

J.W.Yewdell, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 9, 413-416 (May 2008)

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Writing a research statement/proposal is taking far longer (and more difficult) than I had anticipated. How would you know/guesstimate how much you can accomplish in the next 3 - 5 years? It's like writing fiction.

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NTU is on an aggressive hiring spree for my discipline. The department concerned wants to expand by another 20% over the next 5 years.

Diet Coke and Mentos: Soda-Candy Explosions

Tonya Coffey and her students reported "an experimental study of the Diet Coke and Mentos reaction (made famous in a 2006 Mythbusters episode), and consider(ed) many aspects of the reaction, including the ingredients in the candy and soda, the roughness of the candy, the temperature of the soda, and the duration of the reaction." (Am. J. Phys., 2008, 76(6), 551 - 557)

Basically,

1. The Mythbusters correctly identified potassium benzoate and aspartame as key ingredients in the Diet Coke–Mentos reaction. (Static water) Contact angle measurements were used to show that these ingredients reduce the work required for bubble formation, allowing carbon dioxide to rapidly escape from the soda. The small amount of caffeine in Diet Coke is unlikely to contribute significantly to the reaction.

2. The Mythbusters also correctly identified the roughness of the samples as one of the main causes of the reaction. The importance of sample roughness was shown by comparing SEM and AFM images of the samples to the explosive power of the reaction. Increased surface roughness implies a higher surface area to volume ratio, meaning that more growth sites should be present on per unit volume.

3. Samples which encounter less viscous drag and hence fall more quickly through the soda will cause a more explosive reaction. Also, for the same amount of mass lost, the eruption will be more dramatic when the reaction takes place over a shorter time.

4. Finally, hotter beverages result in a more explosive reaction. (A direct illustration of Henry's law and Le Chatelier's Principle)

The kinds of things researchers do...like popping candy into sodas and watching them fizzle and frazzle.

Monty Hall Problem

This was shown in the movie 21. I got the answer wrong, and had a vigorous debate with a friend who was watching the show with me. It turned out she had taken a Math class on this in her undergrad. Bugger. She kept repeating - "conditional probability!".

Suppose you're on a game show and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. The car and the goats were placed randomly behind the doors before the show. The rules of the game show are as follows: After you have chosen a door, the door remains closed for the time being. The game show host, Monty Hall, who knows what is behind the doors, now has to open one of the two remaining doors, and the door he opens must have a goat behind it. If both remaining doors have goats behind them, he chooses one randomly. After Monty Hall opens a door with a goat, he will ask you to decide whether you want to stay with your first choice or to switch to the last remaining door. Imagine that you chose Door 1 and the host opens Door 3, which has a goat. He then asks you "Do you want to switch to Door Number 2?" Is it to your advantage to change your choice?

F-king word play (on a friday)

From the MSN conversation with A, who prefers to call herself HG:

HG: sigh, and I kinda like this other guy... but since I've graduated, probably won't see him much anymore. Lately been wondering if I should ask him out

tk says:
fuck him lah

HG says:
er

tk says:
yupz

HG says:
not so fast bah hahaha

tk says:
haha

HG says:
I don't even know if he has a gf or not... he never talks about his love life. hahahah. And I'm kinda not the person to ask. Hmm, this is going to be difficult. haha

tk says:
Doesn't matter right. Just go for it. Fuck the other girl, if she exists

HG says: >_< I just want the guy. hahah. I don't think he's attached though. Nobody else has heard of a gf

tk says: Not fuck the other girl literally

HG says: lol. I know.

tk says: But ask her to scram. lol

HG says: hahahhahahahah

tk says: fuck in these cases, have multiple meanings

HG says: Wonderful word. hahah

tk says: Yup. One of the most wonderful words in the English language.

HG says: lol. Versatile too!

tk says: Exactly

I first came across this when I was in BMT more than a decade ago. Self-explanatory.

Hiring Illegals; School branding again

A friend was moving house today. He and his wife had boxes of stuffs and many were heavy, although the honor (of being the heaviest) went to the living room's sofa. We needed additional manpower, so we drove out to this strip mall area where there were many amigos (or 老墨) available for hire. We spoke to two guys and did one of these 'chicken-and-duck-talk' bargaining before agreeing on a price amenable to both sides. All payments were to be in cash.

It was an interesting experience, to say the least. The police knew the place well but no raids (as far as I know) were conducted to round these folks up for deportation. There is a demand for their services. We wouldn't know where to hire help otherwise. This is the kind of jobs that few (if any) Americans are willing to do. Some locals blame them for depressing the wages of American manual laborers. Sounds a lot like the arguments back home in Singapore.

It is a global phenomenon, a product of globalisation.

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At the other extreme end of the economic/educational spectrum, there is this. The poster (sakky) has a PhD from MIT.

Prestige, prestige, prestige.

I am attracted to articulate Sg bitches women

I went to the movies last evening with two ladies from Singapore (and three other friends whose presence I we largely ignored).

While heading home after the show:

tk: Why are we walking so slowly?
girl A: We are strolling.
girl B: We are ambulating.

Sometime later, and still on the way home we ended up talking about this head at one of A*star's institutes:

girl B: She's a micro-manager who wants her PIs to present their research to her (and everyone else) at weekly group meetings. She's infamous as this neurotic/psycho bitch who goes nuclear if you attempt to answer back when she's shouting at you. It doesn't matter whether you are a senior post-doc/junior faculty-level researcher or someone fresh out from college. She will just scream at you regardless of whether there are other people in the room. It's kinda humiliating if your position is a senior one and there are college interns or people fresh out of JCs waiting for their school term to start watching you get run over by her. The whole atmosphere in the room would be very tense and silent except for her shrieks; you could almost certainly hear a pin drop. At one of those sessions, I realized that I had neckache after that. I was so afraid of even relaxing my neck muscles; everyone else froze too.

'Allo Wolfpack! And some random walks...

Greetings from the Tar Heel State!



One of the most pressing issues facing mankind now. Also aptly the background theme of many presentations.

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Nagging questions on my mind:

Is there any difference between chemical physics and physical chemistry?

What do you call someone dabbling simultaneously in research in physics, chemistry and biology?

Physical chemical biologist? Chemical Biophysicist? Biochemical physicist? Biophysical chemist?

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I am leaning towards turning down the offer from Berkeley. I hope it is the right choice even though I have been given some time to think about it. Then there is an offer for me to go to NYU. Hmm...California or New York? Or neither?

Regardless of my choice, the path ahead is exciting. But the social life is extremely lacking / quite non-existent. Just got to know that my granny's friend is trying to matchmake introduce her granddaughter to me. I find it very funny. Is highly educated single guys a rare species? Why do I feel irritated during conference trips when my peers excused themselves to make calls to their spouses?

Building trust and relationships in business in E Asia

I am surprised this was only reported on WSJ recently. I thought it is an open secret.

...Karaoke in East Asia is serious, and its practitioners are far more earnest in their art than a group of giggling Americans belting out "Sloop John B" might seem.

For the unseasoned American doing business in East Asia, there is occasionally a darker and somewhat confusing side to a night of karaoke. First-time travelers could be in for a shock when they find themselves in a private room in a karaoke club -- common in Thailand, Taiwan, Japan and mainland China -- being asked to choose from a lineup of young women brought in to serve them. A visitor's first thought might be that the women are sex workers. They are young, often dressed in revealing clothes and ready to finger-feed customers fruit or whatever else they may be eating. In some low-end clubs, the women may indeed be sex workers, but foreign business travelers are unlikely to be taken to these places. At most places business guests end up, the women are simply club hostesses whose presence conveys luxury.

In some cases, it is considered rude to turn down invitations and you risk getting ostracized if you do so.

The Science Comedian - Brian Malow

This guy rocks! Three of his classic jokes:

a. Some helium gas drifts into a bar. The bartender says, 'We don't serve noble gases here.' Pause. The helium doesn't react.

b. Says the bartender to a superconductor that walks in: 'We don't serve superconductors here.' The superconductor then leaves the bar, putting up no resistance.

c. Women have passed through my life like exotic particles through a cloud chamber, leaving only vapor trails for me to study for clues to their nature.

There's more in youtube where you can watch his performances.



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Unrelated: Chemical Party by EU. (via lancerlord)

My Intelligences

The Rogers Indicator of Multiple Intelligences created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Logical/Mathematical You like to work with numbers and ask questions. You learn best by classifying information, engaging in abstract thinking and looking for common basic principles. People like you include mathematicians, biologists, medical technicians, geologists, engineers, physicists, researchers and other scientists. Logical/Mathematical 93% Verbal/Linguistic 82% Visual/Spatial 71% Intrapersonal 64% Bodily/Kinesthetic 54% Interpersonal 43% Musical/Rhythmic 21%

This is like so...duh.

On (potential) bondbreaker from China

An email to the graduate student body was sent out last week, giving us the names of the incoming class of 2008 and the previous institutions they attended (similar to this). There is this person from one of the Singapore universities. She is obviously PRC (I don't think Singaporean Chinese have names spelled like hers, but I could be wrong), and a google-search of her name + university showed that she had topped her undergraduate class recently.

I wonder if she is one of those foreign MOE scholars who broke/is breaking bonds to come to the US for graduate study. I intend to find out when she arrives on campus in the fall.

Now you know why there is so much ill-will and resentment by the Singaporean students towards foreign undergrads in NUS/NTU/SMU when it comes to this topic of foreign MOE scholars (leeching off the goodwill and generosity of the Singaporean tax-paying public).

Happy Vesak Day

It has not been a good year for many Buddhists, with the events in Tibet and Burma. And in the world of materials science, the Lotus Effect has been a hot area of research since Barthlott's publication in 1997. The two images below show the connection between surface roughness and self-cleaning ability.







Readers might also be interested to know about the petal effect. Surfaces are interesting, no? :)

On how to win a scientific argument against your co-worker

Two professors, one an organic chemist (A) and the other a physical chemist (B), were debating the merits (or workability) of a certain synthesis pathway. Students from both groups were also present in the meeting room. Temperatures started rising when the former accused B of not being an expert in A's area and was attempting to just bullshit his way through.

B shot back: "Have you published in Science for a similar starting material? I have."

What followed was silence in the room.

Classic. A friend (later) commented: "That's just a very unfriendly way to do science."

Imagine a Nobel laureate losing a scientific argument, then s/he says: "Have you won the Nobel Prize?"

N.B. The above methods will not work if you are not as accomplished as your opponent. Then it might be better to shut up (aka the 'Asian' way of showing reverence).

On technical competency and literacy

I had a good laugh when a fellow grad student in the department sent out the following (in pdf) asking for help in translating Russian. He wanted to know the chemicals listed. There aren't any native Russian speakers in my department, although I know a few in physics. As it turns out, universities (and by extension, colleges) are one of the best places to source for competent technical translators, especially if the said personnel had completed at least a Bachelors degree in their home country.

...Our work is critical to the scientific community, and yet remains largely invisible and poorly understood.

From individual scientists to multinational corporations, clients routinely need materials translated into many languages for information, publication or patent filings. Machine translation can't handle such complex material except for crude "gisting", often with incomprehensible results in our fields. Poor translation is costly. Errors compromise safety, intellectual property, and image as well as bottom line. Incorrect terminology in translation makes research disappear in keyword searches. Therefore choosing the right translator can ultimately save money and grief.

Being bilingual is no guarantee of written fluency or translation skill, and highly technical material requires highly developed subject area knowledge. If you don't know an alkane from an alkene - let alone understand a reaction scheme or patent abstract - chances are you can't translate it.

Translating Chemistry, CENEAR, 2008, 86 (3), 6

On a side note, I just discovered that German was required for graduation up till the 1970s in many of the chemical and physical sciences' departments around the country because so many important discoveries were published in German. Until WWII, Germany was the center of the chemical world. Already, in my research work, several important references were written in the language. Given that English is the almost universal language of science today, consider the communication problem for scientists of whom English is a foreign language. What if their native tongues is the dominant language for science and engineering? How will we feel trying to publish in their language?

As of now, I can't even write a decent Chinese essay, or a blog entry, let alone describe my experimental work using Chinese.

Alpha Chi Sigma

This boingboing post brings back memories. My dad gave me my first chemistry set as a Christmas present when I was in Primary 5. There were 6 chemicals in it, stored in opaque plastic bottles that had child-proof anti-tampering caps, along with two test tubes, a test-tube holder, a pair of tongs for handling the test-tubes and an alcohol lamp. (The alcohol was not provided, and I had no idea how to get it - the addresses of the vendors listed were all in the USA, and this was the pre-internet age). In the end, I resorted to sneaking into the kitchen late at night to use the gas stove to heat up my chemicals, and got an earful from my mum when I was found out.

Of the 6 chemicals, I remember cobalt(II) chloride, copper(II) sulfate, sodium carbonate and potassium ferricyanide. I wonder if that particular set was from the same company as that referred to by Thompson, even though this was already the late 80s. The upper primary Science syllabus given in school was very basic, and much of it devoted to botany. (Remember the Angsana tree?) It was very boring; then these chemicals fascinated me. They listed the chemical formulae, and the 11-year-old I was then couldn't fathom the combination of letters and numbers in one word. K3[Fe(CN)6]. It looked so alien, and algebra was only taught from secondary school (still into the future) onwards. But it got me hooked, and started me on my still-not-so-long association with the Central Science.

Of different subconscious attitudes towards representations of our sexual organs

A friend and I were discussing about the similar attitudes (across cultures) towards humankind representation of our sexual organs.

In particular, I find this paragraph illuminating:

...We project our archetypal terrors onto the widow. It is black; it avoids the light; it is a voracious carnivore. Its red markings suggest blood. Its name, its sleek, rounded form invite a strangely sexual discomfort: the widow becomes an emblem for a man's fear of extending himself into the blood and darkness of a woman, something like the vampire of Inuit legend that takes the form of a fanged vagina.

-Taken from The Red Hourglass. Lives of the Predators by Gordon Price (pp 41 - 42).

In Chinese, the vagina is known as 阴道, or 'dark alley'.

There are other obvious ones - caves; where as children we read many stories of them being the home of malevolent creatures who would have no qualms about eating us alive should we ever be so foolish in trespassing their territory.


"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

And then we built phallic symbols to honor our heroes and gods. Even for my university - the most prominent landmark on campus is a penis-like structure that juts into the sky and a favorite of many official school photographs. A running (sexist) joke was that a female student could get an orgasm simply by impaling herself on it, if she could climb to the top.

Towards the end of our discussion, the friend simply summarized it as "Penis Envy". In coarser terms - the difference between 'getting fucked' and 'fucking others'. The former implies submission, subordination and weakness, while the latter simply means power and control of others. Do you want to be the ruled? Or the ruler?

The Central Science...to me

God made solids, but surfaces were the work of the devil! -Wolfgang Pauli

This quote reflects the immense difficulties faced by experimentalists (ahem...) when characterizing surfaces (Rohl and Gale 2006). And the 2007 Chemistry Nobel went to a surface chemist.

So, think positively. It is a wonderful place to be in---getting paid to play with a diverse range of materials and really, there is no better company than a bunch of nerdy scientists and engineers. It's not blue-sky research, and it's comforting to know that the work will have a positive impact on increasing our quality of life.

Surfaces are the playground of Solid State Physics.
-E. W. Plummer

Or what my mentor likes to quote:

What starts here changes the world.
- (which happens to be a new theme for UT-Austin)

Internet vigilantism over the Tibetan protests

A mainland Chinese student at Duke found herself the target of her compatriots' anger after appearing to be on the side of a pro-Tibet independence protest. If you think the Wee Shumin incident was bad, this is worse. Her name, phone number, Chinese identity number and even her parents' home address and occupations were posted on the web.

Wang Qianyuan comes out at 5:16, and she's clearly standing opposite the vast majority of the Chinese students.

There's one spot in the video that's quite clear

At 7:05, a few classmates surround her, asking why she's calling for Tibetan independence, and not waving the red five-star flag

At 7:27 she retorts by saying that Hong Kong has a flag too.

Some of my cynical classmates claimed this was just her show to get a green card on the basis of political asylum.

The opening scene above reminds me of this movie (at the 8:38). Heh.



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