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.