Best day... ever?

I was hoping to write a proper post about this, but I am somewhat too tired to do so, so I'll resort to posting a schedule of the day.

9:00 AM: Brain Day starts, introductions to talks by...

9:15 AM: Sebastian Seung (MIT) [I am my connectome TED Talk, on Youtube].

10:45 AM: Peter Strick (Pittsburgh): Motor control and basal ganglia / cerebellum topography.

1:30 PM: Jonathan Cohen (Princeton): Adaptive cognitive control.

3:00 PM: Ned Block (NYU, Philosophy) [On Consciousness Youtube clip].

[End of Brain Day]

7:00 PM: Perimeter Institute lecture by Roger Penrose [Discover Magazine article]

10:00 PM: Read web comics. There was a good crop today!

EDIT: Apparently Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics was also at the Perimeter Institure lecture. I'm kinda disappointed I spent too much time listening to the lecture to notice this.

Watermelon Carving

Exciting news everyone! I managed to grab the 'gingerich' username on Flickr (I tried for matt, but 210 people beat me to it... actually probably more than that, but matt211 was still available; also someone has majugi as well... grr).

Also, the reason I signed up for a Flickr account, after all this time, is because I don't want to put the entire series of awesome pictures I took of me carving a brain out of a watermelon on this blog. Here's one, though:

EDIT - Other crazy things I forgot to mention: I froze an egg while walking home from the grocery store today. I had noticed that one of my eggs was cracked, so I decided to fry it before it made a bigger mess but I ended up peeling away half the shell before I could 'pour' the egg into the pan. It is also now snowing (very lightly)!

...and the people I'm living with just filled four wine bottles with homemade apple cider (and I mean homemade in the fullest "pressed from apples grown on a friend's apple tree with an apple press built out of a car press and pieces of wood" sense — and the force required to press the apples was enough to shear the head of one of the screws clean off).

All the Way

I saw this rainbow as I was biking home today. The crummy cellphone panorama I took of it doesn't do it justice at all, because it was really quite vivid. In fact, looking closely at it revealed that it was a double rainbow with the second, very faint, rainbow surrounding the main one (slightly easier to see in the following picture - sadly this one's from the same cellphone camera).


Anyway, say what you will about guys sobbing hysterically over rainbows (or sing it, if you're so inclined), but know that they are much, much cooler looking live than in recordings.

Alternate Reality Campus

I'm not sure what prompted this, but I've had this idea of a "University of Igloo" floating around in my head for a while. I think I originally thought of it as a satire of the University of Waterloo's big rebranding efforts, but I didn't get around to developing it into an actual parody. So here's some guy chilling next to an igloo in the summer.

Post-script: It pains to me admit this, but I originally accidentally capitalized igloo as 'iGloo'.

Posters!

According to some posters I saw on the wall, the end of term concert for the University of Waterloo's acappella groups is July 23rd at 8:00 PM in the Theatre of the Arts. I don't know if I'll have time to go, but it should be fun times!

EDIT: Oh, hey, also: it turns out that July 23rd is also the day of the Engineering Jazz Band Charity Gig! Yayyyyy. The jazz band will be playing sometime around 6 PM (I think, details coming) at Waterloo Town Square. As a member of the band, I will probably be there. See both the jazz band and a cappella concerts and get your fill of music for the whole year in one day!

EDIT 2: Still looking for things to do on July 23rd? You could catch a webinar about using Matlab to process large datasets around 2 PM before heading to the afternoon/evening concerts. I know I'll be watching... or, probably not actually... but someone might find it interesting.

Public lectures and I found my stylus!

Yessssssssssss. That is the sound of me rediscovering my tablet computer's stylus. You don't realize how expensive a piece of plastic can be until you start thinking you'll have to replace one. Fortunately, I don't have to replace one, so here's a celebratory doodle:

Click for larger sketchy drawing!

The iGEM team (next post, I'll stop writing about iGEM in the next post) hosted a public lecture today about synthetic biology. There were a ton of people there which was pretty awesome and various misconceptions about the recent Venter Institute announcement were addressed. I did get the feeling the panel was preaching to the choir a little bit about some issues, but with the number of people there, I'm sure the topic was new to a sizeable group.

In other news, I appear to have pulled a gluteal muscle for no apparent reason. This is not so fun. I would go so far as to recommend against pulling such muscles, in fact!

Recruitment Meeting

This picture is in no way related to the content of this blog post.

UW iGEM had its recruitment meeting today. It was fun times! But I really need work on my presenting abilities; I find I'm really hit-and-miss in my ability to actually convey information while speaking to groups of people. This doesn't come as a surprise, I was always consistantly bad at "verbal communication" as the elementary school report cards would call it, at least by the crazy perfectionist standards of my youth. Nonetheless, I like to avoid being "that guy that gave that talk that nobody understood" whenever possible.

I find it interesting that the fields I'm working in now, both at iGEM and in co-op terms tend to be the interdiscplinary/academic/cutting-edge-no-one-really-knows-what's-going-on fields that are prone to having miserably unintelligible talks. I've sat through a lot of these talks now and they're fairly painful, so painful at times that it's tempting to simply say that the presenter stood no chance and that the topic was simply too complicated to communicate in the available time. Of course, then I go off and watch some TED talks and realize that you can describe pretty much anything worth describing in twenty minutes if you're just that good.

Postscript: I was just about to post this and was looking through what tags to apply, when I realized I have an existing "Painfully Bad Poetry" tag. We were discussing painfully bad iGEM poetry for some reason or other at today's meeting and, well, I have the tag, so...

iGEM (a haiku)
the title counts as a line
oh shoot, out of room

Okay, this next one's the real haiku, not that that previous one wasn't (also, non-iGEM people, iGEM is pronounced "I gem", which is ironic given its silly capitalization which I've probably ranted about before).

lots of little cells
and biology stuff, woot
will sell soul for sleep

Bonsai Trees

My dad's been toying with a little bonsai tree for a while. His bears no resemblance to the above sketch; in fact, it's actually a lot cooler looking because it bends down to be parallel to the ground and lines up with its oval pot. It's not fully styled though, which means that it still basically looks like a potted plant instead of a potted tree. We spent some time today trying to figure out what parts to clip off to make it look more tree-like, but it turns out to be pretty difficult to visualize what effect the clipping will have until after its done.

Edit: As a side note, the sketch accompanying this post is the latest in a long line of proofs for my "drawing foliage is hard" conjecture. I tried to draw this one really quickly because (a) as usual, I want to get to sleep and (b) I'd like to be able to use foliage as a subordinate element in visualization sketches.

Edit 2: Bonsai tree, version 2:

Pseudo-Arts

Reading over my last post, I can't help but notice that it is full of, for lack of a better word, 'Pseudo-Arts'. That is, misguided arts-jargon babble that's probably as representative of real art jargon as pseudo-science is representative of science. I seem to really like pseudo-art, as I fill posts with it whenever possible. Perhaps it's simply a good filler. Perhaps it's something more. At this point, I am inclined to suggest that it is representative of a primal human drive to mimic other societal groups, a concept explored briefly in the literature (Monroe, 451), but that's probably just pseudo-anthropology.

Postscript: the real explanation for the graphic? Skewers + hearts = fun times. It's basic pseudo-math.

Hearty Holiday (Har Har?)

The image, in case you can't tell, is of a symbolic toast involving two martini glasses, one of which is topped with an olive and the other with a heart. What this symbolizes is beyond me, but connaisseurs of post-modern impressionistic martinis might note the striking similarity in colour and tone of the heart and olive pit. The pit, one could argue, is the heart of the olive and thus the skewer passing through the heart is made poignant by the fact that, in the olive, the pit is not subject to such violations as the skewer would tend to pass through the outer flesh of the olive instead. Removed from its olive, the martinis seem to say, the heart is no better than the olive itself. Incidentally, yes, I am single. Jubilations!

In other news, this Monday is a holiday (Family day) for those of you in Ontario who are not employed by the federal government. University students may even be so greedy as to have an additional week-long holiday in the form of reading week. Of course, this is not really a holiday as you should all be studying. In solidarity with everyone who is actually studying this week, I will admit that I also do not have a holiday Monday. Jubilations!

Crazy Unicode Characters

1. ‽ : the interrobang, usually written '?!', has been combined into a single character.
2. ☃ : the unicode snowman, as seen on unicodesnowmanforyou.com.
3. ☠ : skull and crossbones.
4. ☭ : hammer and sickle.
5. ✌ : victory hand.
6. ㎔ : the symbol for terahertz (and you were writing THz, like a sucker)
7. ㎯ : the character for radians per squared second.
8. ☂ : umbrella.
9. ☄ : shooting star, supposedly.
10. ☏ : telephone.

░░░░░░░░░░░░
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Unicode face.

EDIT: There's a crazy new emoticon floating around Facebook that uses some truly perplexing characters:

⎝⏠⏝⏠⎠

Quizzes, More Quizzes, and the Glowing Sidewalks

I had a bunch of rather stressful quizzes (aka midterms, except that they aren't necessarily in the middle of the term) in the past couple few days. On the plus side, I also had a couple midterms returned that I did reasonably well on. It was particularly interesting to finally see how marking works in non-engineering faculties (disclaimer: note that one midterm can't fairly be used to extrapolate to all courses taught by all non-engineering faculties, but I'm going to do so anyway). For one thing, the marks were quite high: an average of 78%? A top mark of 100%? Only one failure? Preposterous! But aside from that, it was weird to see comments like "good, but too short" instead of "good: 10 marks" or "wrong: zero out of ten". Oh subjective marking, how I've missed you.

Disclaimer 2: engineering does actually have subjective marking. It's currently mostly relegated to a certain online professional development course; still, even mathematical courses usually have some degree of subjectivity. Incidentally, that certain online professional development course has recently been the subject of an independent review (PDF) which is an informative read for anyone interested in such matters.

On a completely unrelated topic: there's a tutorial on Instructables about building a pressure sensitive glowing sidewalk as seen in Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" music video (obligatory link to the official YouTube copy of the aforementioned video). Fun times.

Knight to C3

One of the guy's in my house is quite good at chess. He doesn't actually have spiked hair or a mohawk, or look in any way similar to either of the characters above, but he's pretty intimidating nonetheless. Case in point: he's supposedly played, and beaten, a grandmaster in speed chess online.

In two-on-one anti-chess (where the goal is to have all your pieces taken), we did manage to beat him though. I've yet to play a real chess game against him, but after soundly beating him at foosball today, a retaliatory chess match can't be too far away. I guess it's time to start training by turning up the difficulty level on my computer's chess program. On second thought, it's actually time to do a circuit's lab and lots of homework... but after that: chess showdown.

(Also: iGEM competition next weekend. It will be awesome. More details to come.)

EDIT: I won! It may not have been a particularly representative match, as he was goaded into attempting a ten move checkmate (which backfired) by the spectators of the game, but I'll take it. The next game will undoubtedly by harder.

Scaring the First-Years

Run. Now. Get out while you can. Drop out of engineering and go into an arts program. Calculus is difficult. The economy sucks; you'll get a co-op job counting packaging peanuts. Friends, sleep, or work: pick work. The cafeteria food is made of recycled plastic polymers. The Canadian geese will kill you and defecate on... well, you get the picture.

If you're just starting university, all you need to know is that you can't trust anything older students tell you. Except about the geese; that part's more or less true.

Personal Satellites

You can apparently now buy kits to build satellites. And I know what you're thinking: that's just a metal container you can throw stuff in. And that's where you're wrong, because it stops being a metal container as soon as you launch it into low earth orbit (this is included in the $8000 price).

I have to say, I've never been more tempted to buy an eight thousand dollar can. I'm not completely sure what I'd do with one, but any project would have to have some communication component to be useful (otherwise you'd never hear from your super expensive can once you tossed it into space). I sort of like the idea of trying some sort of zero gravity biological experiment, but again there's the problem of recording and sending results, plus you'd kill whatever you sent up so I'd feel bad about sending up a pet fish. Weight restrictions would also probably rule out most other animals, but you could probably do something bacterial...

Anyway, enough of my random fantasies, go check it out.

Keeping Your Sanity (Blanket)

This has been a pretty crazy week for me, which I could rant on for a while about but I've used my 'rant' tag a lot lately so instead I'll just say that I saw EngPlay today.

EngPlay is a once-a-term tradition here and, as the infinitely subtle name sneakily reveals, it is a play put on by engineering students and for engineering students. There is a lot of innuendo, some clever lines, a lot more innuendo, some decent acting, and a bunch of swearing.

It's one of the three events that I look forward to each term, along with the SyDE coffeehouse, and the end of term engineering jazz band gig. Of course, there are other high profile events, including the SCavenger hUNT, Bus Push (ceremonial hauling of a bus for charity), TalEng (talent show), the Water Boys (a cappella group) end-of-term concert, the Accent (jazz a cappella group) end-of-term concert, and so on, and so on...

Yes. Stay sane, kids. Stay sane.

Disc Golf

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon here in Waterloo, and I've just finished playing a round of disc golf with my sister and her boyfriend. We went to the Chicopee ski hill which, like a lot of other ski places, is used in the summer for mountain biking, hiking, and recreational throwing of plastic flying discs into baskets.

We played the 'easy' course (the hard one usually involves starting all the holes a few meters back), but still spent a significant amount of time searching through the forest for the discs we threw off-course. Especially the yellow ones. Attention disc makers: greenish-yellow disc + long grass = invisible. Still, it was a pretty good time and disc golf is definitely something that's worth trying.

For the record, I lost. I think my score was something like 110 or so, a little over double the record for the course.

Canada Day!

Oh Canada!
Our home and native land,
True patriot love, in every DNA strand...

Okay, so I still have iGEM stuff on my mind, because we're continuing to code away on Recombinatron (see previous post), but it is Canada Day and that calls for celebration. The engineering jazz band is not in fact playing today, but the Water Boys (a cappella group) will be performing twice today at Columbia Lake for anyone in Waterloo (no, I don't sing with them currently -- I'm just a fan). Also, there will be fireworks and other fun. Yaayyy Canada!

RECOMBINATRON!

I spent the whole day programming for Waterloo's iGEM team. iGEM, for anyone who doesn't know, is the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition hosted by MIT, the goal of which is to figure out ways to design useful things out of biological components.

There's a subtle but important difference between iGEM's philosophy and conventional biotechnology, and it lies in the issue of design. People have been able to do things like getting bacteria to produce human insulin for a while now, by taking the human gene for insulin production and inserting it into the bacteria. What we haven't been able to do is to really understand the genes that we're dealing with.

Biological parts have been impenetrable black boxes: if something comes out of that box that we can use, that's great, but more often than not we would like to get into that box and tinker. What's more, these parts don't tend to play well with each other, and all sorts of chaos ensues when you start mixing together genes.

iGEM's approach is to create new biological parts. Parts that are not massively complex genes, but simple, reliable, reusable components that have intended purposes and known effects with other components. The goal, really, is to allow for true genetic engineering instead of genetic experimentation.

This isn't to say that all genetic parts created for iGEM are simple or reusable and it certainly doesn't mean that all that many of them are reliable, but we're working on it. The project I was coding today, for example, is intended to allow the team to predict the results of certain biological reactions, the end goal of which is to develop a repeatable method of inserting genes into chromosomal DNA.

At least, I think that's what it's for. Biology hurts my brain.

Unfinished Jungle

(click image for huge size)

I've wanted to do a drawing of a jungle for a while, just because I find all the foliage pretty awesome. It turns out foliage is really annoying because it's simultaneously insanely complex and repetitive.

The drawing ended up being more of a tech demo of different brushes, but I still think the concept is cool. Also, if you click the image for the larger version and then squint at the lower corners, you can make out some neat detail.