ALL OTHERS WILL BE CRUSHERD

Most intense exam schedule ever. I had to do my first ever true all-nighter. I think I've always had some sleep the night before an exam, even if only for a few hours. Compounding the problem was that they were all cumulative exams covering content from September. The "plus" side was that I ended rather early, allowing me the luxury of having more time to mourn the senseless deterioration of my brain.

Exam Schedule
PCL365 - 12/04 - 9:30am-12:30pm - GB304 - Toxicology Lab
PSL302 - 12/09 - 9am-12pm - BN2N - Physiology
PCL302 - 12/10 - 9am-12pm - EM119 - Pharmacodynamics
CLA204 - 12/10 - 7-9pm - East Hall, UC - Classical Myth
LMP363 - 12/11 - 9am-12pm - RW229 - Pathobiology
BCH370 - 01/13 - ? - ? - Biochemistry Lab

The three day chunk officially doesn't count as a conflict. As well, all of the tests (except for physiology) were short answer format, not MC. Unfortunately, unlike the spring term exams, there is no studying week beforehand. However starting next year a modified schedule is being implemented which allows for a few days of studying before the fall exams, but taking some away from the week before the spring exams to compensate. There's also this strange November break added in which I guess would help for the midterm crunch. A lot of these new breaks also count the weekend, so 5-day breaks are really more of 3-day breaks. I guess the weekend breaks apply more for university staff than students.

I would say although this was the most stressful semester by far, with six courses and some type of evaluation every week since the end of September, the content of the courses learned seemed more satisfactory. It's probably because we're starting to learn more about new content that we haven't been taught in detail about before. The courses are beginning to overlap somewhat too.

I took classical myth as an elective, and I would say that the learning experience is much less enjoyable and impressionable as it was in high school. The whole course was to essentially memorize everything in this textbook and then spill out names, terms and essays in a short amount of time. Perhaps I'm just not as used to this style of learning. I was surprised because this course is apparently in high demand, and for this past semester the waitlist in September after classes started had about 100 people. A lot of the myths that I was more intimate with from high school were glossed by in a very bare-bones manner. Of course the text was very informative and contained all the necessary details about the myths, but didn't seem to give much importance or emotion to the stories. But I guess you can't really demand much more in a university setting.

Anyway all of that is done now. There is another week or so to do non-school stuff before preparing for January midterm and labs.

"Non-school stuff" includes:
iSketch
osu!
Sporcle
FAILBlog

Also to remind you about all the shovelling you had to do:

Approximately the amount of snow that fell so far this weekend, according to my backyard table.

Sockets in the socket pool

One of the above is real and the other is in fact a candy dispenser. I thought it was pretty good for simply being an imitation toy, down to having the removable battery cover. In fact, you press the B button down in order to shoot the candy out from the front of the remote.

Last week I had my three wisdom teeth removed (I apparently don't have a fourth wisdom tooth) and it seems I had a lucky recovery because I didn't experience the massive swelling and pain that a lot of people get. It meant that I didn't need to take any of those painkillers prescribed. Aside from the disgusting taste left by the stitches in the wound the experience wasn't bad at all.

The recent propane blast was a bit unsettling to me due to its magnitude and having been awake at the time to feel and hear it. It's good that very few got injured in the incident. It served as a wake-up call to the fact that there was a volatile storage facility surrounded by residential areas. This wouldn't have happened in SimCity, where if you build residential and commercial areas too close to industrial areas, even if you were only trying to give them power and water, the citizens will only give the illusion of moving in but then quickly disappear in droves leaving blackened, rotting plots of land behind that will never recover again no matter what you do even if you tried moving the factories away man I was bad at SimCity.

When I visited the Toronto Zoo this summer the butterflies were actually out in the Indo-Malaya Pavillion so it was interesting to see them flying around everywhere so closely you.

While cleaning boxes of old schoolwork I found that poem I did from Gr.12, which reminded me of the awesome Doppelganger poem:

Self-Reflection

I woke up from my dream
at last.
The world still seemed an illusion.
Surrounded by tunnels,
the lobby was silent and still.
I was almost unnerved.
The seated black-cloaked man
pointed towards
a symbol above a door.
I went deeper,
but it wasn’t my preference.
A creature pointed to a green door.
I ignored it
and wanted to go another way, so
I shouted,
but a force drove me into the door.
I was uncertain,
walking deeper into the dark.
I was compelled to turn back but kept
moving to a random direction.
I ran
at last of my own will,
and there a great entity
was guarding something.
I realized that I

had found my portal.

I realized that I
was guarding something.
And there, a great entity,
at last of my own will,
I ran,
moving to a random direction.
I was compelled to turn back but kept
walking deeper into the dark.
I was uncertain,
but a force drove me into the door.
I shouted,
and wanted to go another way, so,
I ignored it.
A creature pointed to a green door,
but it wasn’t my preference.
I went deeper.
A symbol above a door
pointed towards
the seated black-cloaked man.
I was almost unnerved.
The lobby was silent and still
surrounded by tunnels.
The world still seemed an illusion.
At last,
I woke up from my dream.

Mochahontas

I tried a masala dosa for the first time (above) and it was humongous and delicious. And also humongous.

For Summerlicious I went to Quince and Pan. Quince had really good food, and Pan had good food with large servings. Favourites were the chill tomato soup from Quince and galaktoboureko from Pan. All in all a great experience.

Starting driving school related stuff next week.

Gastroenteritis

The book Mistakes That Worked outlines the stories behind well-known inventions that were created or named by accident, such as with Coca-Cola and penicillin. It has a section on Silly Putty, which is way more versatile than I thought:

It stretches. It bounces. When whacked with a hammer, it shatters. If it is pressed against newspaper comics, it will pick up the imprint. Silly Putty is truly amazing. It is now over forty years old, and was one of the first "fad" toys in America.

It has been used by athletes to strengthen their hand and forearm muscles. It can level the leg of a wiggly table or clean typewriter keys. It removes lint from clothes and animal hair from furniture.

The astronauts on the Apollo 8 spacecraft played with Silly Putty when they got bored, and they used it to keep tools from floating around after they left the Earth's gravity.

It was used by the Columbus Zoo in Ohio in 1981 to take hand and foot prints of gorillas.
- Mistakes That Worked

On another note, I can't believe I was incorrectly saying it as "just desserts" up to now.

Galaktoboureko

Yummmm...

Ended up going to Wonderland: Behemoth was very high but it somehow felt more secure than it looked. I think it's the highest coaster that I've been on so far.

Speaking of bird nests (from last post), while lining up for The Bat we spotted a bird's nest tucked on the supports directly under the roller coaster track. There was a robin settled in the nest, apparently unaware that a coaster cart is noisily speeding by 15cm above its head. Eventually the robin flew off, revealing that there were actually baby birds in the nest. Hopefully they won't have hearing problems later on.

Also, saw The Incredible Hulk. Yes, it is better than the first one.

Currently trying to make plans for Summerlicious. Winterlicious was great, so hopefully Summerlicious is ok too. It's nice getting a set dinner for $25 when the restaurant lists that a usual dinner for two people is $100-$150.

I found this fun tool called Wordle from Sandwalk (who found it from Expression Patterns). It takes a block of text that you enter and makes a little visual cluster out of the words, with the size of the words changing according to their frequency in the passage. I plugged some stuff I had to write recently:







It's addictive for a while :P

Finally, fun summer weather = hail

Things Happened

Most of which are not very interesting.

Highlights:
- 2nd year was dealt a finishing blow
- FeMan, 404 Forbidden Kingdom
- Darwin: The Evolution Revolution @ ROM
- WiiWare -> Dr. Mario
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- The damage of the game disc of said Brawl
- Finally finished Tigana
- I found out that I liked crosswords, but am still terrible at them
- Started playing iSketch again to find that all the regulars are now using crazy pseudonyms and are all "teehee I won't tell you who I am"

Also, found a nest in the tree in the front yard:



It looks very well made. Reminds me of the duck nest, except back then the duck was still there. That was when I found out that ducks made loud wheezing noises to make you go away.

Future forecast?
- Visit to Wonderland, which is now exponentially less paramount
- Victory of Eagles
- Trauma Center 2 (!!!)

Exam Schedule
CLA201 - 04/22 - 9-11am - SEEL
BIO250 - 04/24 - 2-5pm - VAN
CHM247 - 04/28 - 9am-12pm - VAS
HMB265 - 05/02 - 9am-12pm - VAN
PCL201 - 05/07 - 9am-12pm - VAS

4/5 exams in the same place, therefore I did not get lost.

Glasses Case

I am still playing Animal Crossing: Wild World fairly consistently nowadays, but somehow today I felt compelled to revisit my Gamecube file for Animal Crossing.


It was rather nostalgic. Apparently I hadn't played the Gamecube version for 28 months, also evidenced by the fact that I'm standing in a field of weeds. I was pleasantly reminded of the roundabout chores that the animals gave you such as retrieving the glasses cases or organizers they've lent to others, for whatever reason. I also confusedly ended up asking Blathers to explain to me what the museum was until I realised that you had to mail fossils to the museum rather than have Blathers personally appraise them (a change I'm glad happened in AC:WW). Meeting the old villagers was nice too.

Also, sometimes Animal Crossing is not quite rated E.


Haha, Chuck is awesome.

Now back to human bio. Reading Week was so short-lived. :(

Better-Veiled Xenophobia

VGL last night was pretty amazing and was different enough from the first time to still enjoy. Note to people who want to get picked for going on stage in a few years when VGL comes back to Toronto, make a sign (that's important) and wave it around madly during the selection. They seem to like the signs, or are too lazy to pick other less obvious contestants.

Now for some excerpts from Our Dumb World:

The United States: The Land of Opportunism
The United States was founded in 1776 on the principles of life, liberty, and the reckless pursuit of happiness at any cost - even life and liberty.

Massachusetts: Covered in ivy
Home to hundreds of prestigious colleges and universities, Massachusetts is where the nation's best and brightest can't afford to go.

New Mexico: Unexplained
Though a retired police captain claimed to have seen New Mexico one night in 1947, researchers and government officials maintain to this day that the state was merely a weather balloon.

Alaska: Needlessly unspoiled
Alaska is the country's last frontier of untouched disposable consumer goods, with vast forests of potential napkin products stretching as far as the eye can see, and mountains of two-liter E-Z Chug bottles waiting to be processed.

Canada: For the United States, see pages 9-22
Living in the shadow of its southern neighbor, the nation of Canada will never be as great as the U.S. so long as it continues to burden citizens with universal health care, refuses to drill for oil in federally protected wildlife reserves, and neglects its duty to blindly support unilateral invasions of Middle Eastern states.

Honduras: A lush and diverse crime scene
With over 900 distinct types of rapists, 600 varieties of cold-blooded murderers, and all 18 members of the feared Hernandez-Garcia family, Honduras boasts a startling array of criminal life sure to take any visitor's breath, wallet, and often both kidneys away.

Jamaica: True Rasta no develop country
Jamaica is home to dank nugs, kind buds, ganja, and a crumbling infrastructure, which the country will get around to fixing right after this joint.

Brazil: People at their most beautiful, humanity at its ugliest
Boasting some of the sexiest people ever to be stabbed repeatedly at night, Brazil is home to perhaps the most attractive victims of carjacking, robbery, and violent assault in the world.

IL NOSTRO MONDO STVPIDO

Somehow this week has managed to be the culmination of almost everything that I initially feared could go wrong with taking public transit during winter. Compared to this, the fiasco on Friday could be a mere passable event.

Highlights of the week include:
● Almost being late for a midterm
● Being late for a lab session
● Being trapped on a VIVA bus for over three hours
● Almost missing Chinese New Year's Eve dinner
● The most hours ever spent studying on a public transit vehicle in a single week
● Writing a midterm for the worse course I have ever taken

Initially, I thought that the storm this week would be way more mild than last week, with less snowfall but a chance of freezing rain. As a lesson learned I immediately registered the Winter Storm Hotline into my cellphone. Sadly, the storm ended up being very wet and voluminous...

Wednesday morning provided a little scare as one of the ever fragile subway stations decided it would lose all power, grinding the whole line to a halt. However this is not all that unusual, and luckily that was the only interruption that morning. I normally arrive over an hour before the start time of the miderm, and I managed to arrive before the midterm started.

Later that day, there was an optional review session for the pharmacology course from 5-6. Initially I wasn't going to attend due to the professor being notorious for creating more confusion and havoc in her "clarifications", but in the end I stayed...for a reason best left unbiased by hindsight.

Because of this, upon reaching Finch station at 6:59pm, there ensued a great one hour wait in the snowstorm, by now at its peak. At least I had practice from last week. But the reason for the delay was that there was apparently some major series of accidents north along Yonge, causing a blockade immediately along the VIVA route. No buses arrived until an hour later, during which time amassed a sizable amount of snow on the platform, people in the station, and water in my shoes. Although during this time I was able to see flashes of lightning in the sky, which is apparently really rare during snowstorms.

Since the whole Finch/Yonge intersection was literally frozen in place, the bus driver headed up normally along Yonge, but reached an impasse at Clark station, where we too remained immobile for an hour. In addition to freaking about about having a lab the next day and a midterm on Friday, there was a man onboard who seemed to be suffering from a mental disorder which caused him to scream shrilly every now and then, effectively scaring the hell out of everyone on board.

There eventually formulated a plan to divert the bus through some residential streets and connecting to Bayview via John St., before turning back towards Richmond Hill Center. Awesome, let's inch along the road faster, please. Unfortunately, the plan, although with very good intentions I'm sure, involved driving into one-lane roads and over a very steep hill. This effectively amounted to being trapped in the bus for a further two hours.

During this time the atmosphere on the bus instead grew rather relaxed as we all accepted our fates in the blue-coloured tomb. Everyone grew accustomed to the random wailing of the aforementioned fellow. However, another dilemma was still present, which was that today was Chinese New Year's Eve. The tradition says that on Chinese New Year's Eve, you must dine together with your family in order to ensure good luck for the new year, a rule that my family adamantly abided by. It's either that or be cursed for the rest of the year or something. As it was currently about two hours from the end of the day, you can see why the frequency of stressful phone calls I received from home was increasing.

My father was previously stuck on the roads too but eventually reached Richmond Hill Center and we drove home. After spending about 5 minutes charging back and forth up the driveway which by now was covered in a foot of snow, our family had Chinese New Year's Eve dinner at 11:15pm.

The following day involved arriving late for the lab, rushing in short-breathed followed by a few other stragglers, but understandably we were still allowed to write the quiz normally administered at the beginning of the session and granted a zero if you were late.

Friday was a whole different dimension of stress. This involved the pharmacology midterm. However, this was no ordinary midterm. It was also no ordinary course. PCL201, up until last year, was effectively a bird course (well, as bird-course-y as life sci courses can go at UofT). This year, there was a new professor. And she decided to do things her way. This includes:

● Being excessively rude towards her students. She seems to view every reasonable request as a threat to her position or status, belitting us for wanting things that every other professor willingly provides.
● This includes lecture slides which she provides in a format which requires a magnifying glass to read without permanent damage to the eyes. When students made the request to change the format, or at least provide the Powerpoint so that the students could do it themselves, she outright refused.
● The lecture slides consist of cut and paste from what seems like Google Search images.
● She makes many, many mistakes during her lecture. She mixes up very important terms such as "hydrophobic" and "hydrophilic" which can totally change one's understanding of a concept, as well as mixing up drug names (Digoxin? Dioxin? Didroxin?).

Obviously the last straw came when marks were directly involved, as is always the case in UofT, it seems. The class average on the simple 10 question MC quizzes were dramatically low. They were the kind of quizzes that are simply supposed to "make you review" and allow you to get 10/10 on for almost every one. Most of the more adamant students appealed to the student council for pharmtox and they actually held a student meeting for the issue. Now that the midterm has passed, no doubt there will be an even greater source of enmity towards the professor.

As of yesterday, over 50 people had dropped the course. Which makes one sarcastically wonder what retake % this course will receive at the end of this semester.

Luckily on a much lighter note, tomorrow is the day of the VGL concert in Toronto! Hooray. As well, I just bought Our Dumb World today which is written by The Onion, and it is basically the best book in the world on the world.

On a more grave note, there is an organic chem midterm next week. Owch.

Winter Storm Warning

Scenario: Must get down to campus for 11:00am Scientific Terminology class

7:00am
- Wake up

7:45am
- CP24 announces that there are no delays for subway routes

8:00am
- Get a ride to Scarborough Town Center

8:30am
- Radio reports that UofT Mississauga campus is closed

9:00am
- Arrive at Scarborough Town Center
- RT is delayed; wait in packed RT platform

9:30am
- Arrive at Kennedy station

10:15am
- Arrive at Spadina station

10:30am
- Arrive on campus
- Get internet access
- Discover that UofT St. George campus is closing at 11am

10:45am
- Finished sobbing
- Depart for home

11:25am
- Arrive at Finch station
- Wait 25 mins for VIVA Blue

12:15pm
- Arrive at Richmond Hill Center
- Wait 20 mins for VIVA Purple

1:00pm
- Arrive at Enterprise
- Walk down to Unionville station
- Wait 10 mins for Kennedy bus

1:30pm
- Arrive home

1:45pm
- Type whiny post
- Cry about lost time and tokens

Aaroniero Arruruerie

I just realised how sad it is that the names of places in Toronto that I actually recognize are being replaced with forgettable generic sounding names for the purpose of advertising. Paramount became Scotiabank Theater, the Hummingbird Center is now the Sony Center, and even Skydome became Rogers Center. We might as well start calling it the iTower now so that it will be hard to differentiate between whether it is a tall free-standing communications structure or a tall free-standing music CD rack.

Coulomb Explosion

Admittedly the content from both biology courses so far seem to interest me the most out of all my courses. I can better understand the experiments outlined in scientific articles and such. We just finished off a term in which talked about experimental methods such as using reporter genes, and surprisingly the ones we learned about are actually used in real life! This is especially exciting since we're used to being taught "dumbed down" or "incorrect" versions of the facts in school. (This probably still happening to a certain degree regardless.) We mentioned Craig Venter as well, which I guess goes under the category of "hot topics in recent news".

From Discover:

Biologists Perform Genome Transplant

In June, biologists at the J. Craig Venter institute announced that they had successfully transplanted the genome of one species of bacteria into another bacterial species. "This was the ultimate in identity theft," says Venter, a biologist well known for his private-sector contribution to the sequencing of the human genome. "The chromosome [genome] took over the cell completely, and any characteristics of the original species were lost."

The transplant team took several steps to be sure the transfer was complete. First, they added two genes to the donor species' chromosome: one that made the cells resistant to the antibiotic tetracycline and one that made them turn blue. By dosing all the post-transplant bacteria with tetracycline and looking for blue colonies, the scientists could identify which cells had the donor DNA. Next, they tested all the blue, tetracycline-resistant bacteria for any traces of the recipient species' genome. When they found none, they knew the bacteria must contain only the donor species' genome. Finally, they found that all the proteins manufactured by the new bacteria were characteristic of the donor species.

This is a critical advance in Venter's quest - which he has been pursuing for a decade - to create a fully synthetic life-form. Now, he says, it could be just a matter of months before a living cell stocked with a synthetic genome becomes a reality.

- Jocelyn Rice

The Discover magazine website also has weekly podcasts of Vital Signs articles. Vital Signs is usually my favourite part of the magazine. The articles are all written by doctors who relate one of the previous patient cases they worked on, which often involve unusual or uncommon disorders and diseases. They then outline their thought process on confirming the condition and how to treat it. For example, the most recent Vital Signs article published in the Jan. 2008 issue talks about narcolepsy and cataplexy.

Blanc de blancs

Happy New Year's! I wish everyone the best of luck in 2008.

First thing eaten in 2008: Piece of Hershey's milk chocolate
First thing drunk in 2008: Martellini's sparkling apple-cranberry juice
First thing played with in 2008: Pokémon Diamond (Hatched Phione at 12:03am :D )
First thing resumed in 2008 after celebrations: Hatching Phione