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

Secretariat

Santa recently decided to go Boxing Day shopping, and got himself a spiffy new GPS device.

Rudolph is now on welfare.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! / HAPPY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!!!

Immunoprecipitation

In lieu of the impending snowstorm today I went into the Wii Weather Channel and saw a weather icon I hadn't seen before. It turns out that Rankin Inlet is experiencing diamond dust. Wow, that sounds pretty intense. Are there sharp crystallic fragments of ice blowing around outside? What did they do to upset Shiva?

As it turns out, diamond dust is kind of like fog, but instead of being a cloud of water droplets, it is composed of a cloud of ice crystals.

Diamond dust is similar to fog in that it is a cloud based at the surface; it differs from fog in two main ways. Generally fog refers to a cloud composed of liquid water (the term ice fog usually refers to a fog that formed as liquid water and then froze, and frequently seems to occur in polluted valleys such as Fairbanks, Alaska, while diamond dust forms directly as ice). Also, fog is a dense enough cloud to significantly reduce visibility, while diamond dust is usually very thin and may not have any effect on visibility (there are far fewer crystals in a volume of air than there are droplets in the same volume with fog). However, diamond dust can often reduce the visibility, in some cases to under a mile (1600 m).

Source

The sunlight reflecting off all of the tiny ice crystals into your eye causing glittering flashes of light results in the term "diamond dust".

On a related note, it turns out that Rankin Inlet was competing with Iqaluit to become the official capital of the territory of Nunavut, but we all know how that turned out : (

Preproinsulin

Dec 4:
ANT253 Language and Society
- Midterm, Essay

Dec 10:
BCH210 Introductory Biochemistry
- Exam

CLA206 Ancient Astronomy
- Exam

Dec 12:
BIO250 Cell and Molecular Biology
- Exam

Dec 14:
CHM220 Physical Chemistry for Life Sciences
- Exam

Finished...really need a break now...and sleep. Started drinking a lot of tea in the past few weeks, but managed to not drink a single cup of coffee or can of energy drink.

Main thing I leave these courses with:
Anthro - Zipf's Law is the answer to everything.
Biochem - Blueberries are high in antioxidants. Eat them. Also, COX.
Astro - You succeed in science by stealing other people's works and theories. Sadly this goes back even to Ancient Greece. Nowadays you can even get a Nobel Prize if you pull it off well enough.
Biology - I still need to do this next semester. Lab nights suck because I get home at 11pm and don't feel like studying afterwards.
Phys Chem - Kill me if I need to take another phys chem course ever.

Time to catch up on animé and reading.

COX

The following was inspired by those poems I saw while taking the TTC.

Fragments

.......Poetry is
............taking English sentences and
.breaking them into
....................fragments

"i left when he started talking...about HI HI HOW ARE YOU"

In light of an astronomy project, I went up to Aurora last night and went stargazing. Retreating to as dark an area which could be found, I looked up and saw what I believe were the most stars I have ever seen. This may be due to the fact that I have never stepped outside at night in Markham during one of those legendary "clear days". Even so, trying to find Polaris was disconcertingly hard, as all the stars around the general direction of "north" were either absent or engulfed in a huge mass of clouds. This leads me to conclude that the skies of ancient Mesopotamia must have been absolutely lucid because I can't comprehend how it was they could spot things like Saturn every day in the sky.

So the effort of braving the 5 degree night to find Polaris wasn't quite rewarded. Howeer, I did manage to get a glimpse of the "stars" which are so very hard to see.

Well that is, unless the star exploded a few million years ago, in which case that star isn't technically there...

Also, it was the "good" daylight savings switch today, the one that gives the illusion of gaining more time. :D

GER PICK-UP

So right now is way past the time when you realize university isn't fun. The first sets of midterms have already passed, and the next set starts soon. I have a biology writing report which demands you stuff information found in a ten-page scientific article into three single-sided double-spaced pages. An astronomy project expects me to be able to fully identify constellations in the sky...we are in Toronto, and it seems the professor hasn't noticed the little quirks about Toronto's sky, which is that there are no stars, only smog.

Earlier this month someone had a seizure during a phys chem lecture, which obviously caused a big clamor. Right after that I went to astronomy, and someone shouted "Call a doctor!" after the guy beside her "fell unconsious" and dropped the bottle he was holding. Personally, it just looked like he fell asleep, not unconscious...

In regards to commuting, I have sadly witnessed a sharp increase of subway beggars, who jump to and fro between subway cars pushing their Tim Hortons cup into your face as they pass while you're sleeping. I guess it is very effective as all the people around you have already been concentrated into a small area for you.

Also recently, the revelations about finding high levels of lead in products is really confusing to me. A few months ago everyone was happy with their toy cars and building blocks, and then suddenly everything has too much lead in it. It's as if quality testing just realized "Holy crap, we forgot to test for lead" and then found out everything had a lot of lead. I wonder if this was like when we found out that saturated fats were bad, and that everything actually had saturated fats.

This month is also Nintendo freebie month. They sent me a spiffy pack of DS Lite styluses a long while ago for my Brain Age 2 purchase. They're also sending out some Wii Remote jackets for people who actually still have problems not treating the remotes like a javelin.



However the change in publishers for Nintendo Power I do not like as much, as they no longer give you the option to choose a free gift when you resubscribe to the magazine, only a barebones website which forces you to get a player's guide you really don't need.

Also, contemplating SSBB:



This is what happens when I wait too long to post.