I Spy a Sty in My Eye

Sometimes, I forget that I only have two eyes, and no replacements. Thanks to my disregard for proper eyecare, my left eye is now swollen and lazy-looking, and according to Sarah's research, the symptoms indicate the formation of a sty within my eyelid. YAY. It doesn't seem like too big a deal as long as I don't pop it on accident, but I was scanning the list of sty-related problems of a more serious sort:

-The eye is swollen shut.

-Redness appears around the entire eye.

-You have any change or disturbance in you vision.

-Swelling lasts for more than 3 weeks.

-The sty or styes come back or bleed.

-Your eyelashes fall out.

-Pus or thick discharge continues to drain from the eye.

-You have a fever higher than 100.5.

-You have excessive persistent tearing.

-You have significant pain.

and for some reason, of all the serious problems listed, it was the one about the eyelashes falling out that freaked me out. There is something distinctly horrifying about the possibility that one morning, you'll rub your eyes upon waking up and find all your eyelashes stuck to the back of your hand.

But now my curiosity is getting the better of me: I wonder how I would look with no eyelashes? Would it make much of a difference, given that my eyelashes are of inconsequential length in the first place? Hm.

I've always envied those with eyelashes so long that they make air currents when they blink and necessitate the use of curling irons instead of plain old eyelash curlers.

Funniest Facebook Group EVER!

NAME: Dora the Explorer is soo an illegal immigrant...

DESCRIPTION: Ok, so here's the deal... If you need the explanations they're all around you...

1) She speaks spanish... she speaks spanish perfectly... what is she like...5? Her backpack even speaks spanish perfectly!

2) That backpack of hers has EVERYTHING in it! And we're talking everything! Life support, water/food, clothing for any weather, ropes, grappling hooks, shoes.... i mean c'mon!

3) She's carrying a freaking ZOO with her! I mean, she has a monkey, an band of insects, a bajillion other animals! Really! What kind of legal immigrant has that many pets!?

4) She's always on an "adventure" to transport a "package" to some destination and is always being stalked by a person trying to take that package... i mean... really, Swiper is so obviously some sort of border patrol person trying to collect evidence of Dora's entire narcotics trafficking buisness

The evidence is so obvious and around you guys! And they're even poisoning our little children with them... Who wants our toddlers to grow up knowing spanish before english?! Even if it's the USA...

ONE MEMBER'S POST:

"OMG..I had no idea this group existed. My 2 yr old daughter LOVES dora and her only words come from the show. seriously, her first word was back pack. I'm not kidding. She says abre and hola and zapato and baila and she can name all the characters on the show. It's so sad. My boyfriend and I have always joked about how dora has cocaine in her backpack and is smuggling it and she must be having sex with boots. Wow. Thank you for this facebook group!"
-Mother of a Dora Fan

Where's the Blimp?

I was listening to "Strength and Honor" from the Gladiator soundtrack, and suddenly I thought of that scene in Cinderella where the mice are trying to get past Lucifer the mean, fat cat.

Is that weird?

There's a little blurb in the Science Times about how scientists are ready to put the Large Hadron Collider (named Atlas) into action, possibly recreating the the birth of the universe over and over and over again- 30 million times per second to be exact. It's also possible that the monster machine won't produce anything special, in which case the credibility/rep/etc. of the scientists involved will be annihilated, they probably won't receive funding again for such an endeavor anywhere near our lifetime, and the hope of finding evidence for certain theories will be lost for a long time.

So nothing too exciting, in other words.

Shouldn't this stuff be advertized by a blimp flying a banner, at the very least? I guess they can't count the chickens before they hatch.

PS Meets HP

What's your greatest fear? I completely empathize with you, man!

MMA-Worthy Idea?

I want to build a bunch of random objects like chairs, birds and hairdryers out of playdoh, put them on display, and call it "Plato's ideals".

5-Second Rule!

An awesome one-page article on a scientific study of the 5-second rule. I'm pretty blase about eating stuff off the floor. A little dirt don't hurt, and I'm sure I've ingested much dirtier things than a few colonies of bacteria in my lifetime, and see, I managed to reach the age of 23. But of course if it fell on the Septa bus floor for example, or on the floor of the bookstore bathroom, I ain't that stupid- that shit's staying on the floor.

Happiness to Thoreau

“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder…”– Thoreau

Aphorisms

Beauty is only skin-deep; underneath that skin, everyone is fucking crazy.

The real question is, is it true that the more beautiful and perfect you look on the outside, the more fucked you are on the inside, because it takes so much effort to maintain the physical semblance of sanity and perfection? Or is it that "everyone is fucking crazy", but some are so fucked inside that the fuckedness hidden underneath the skin oozes out like puss through the pores, thus making it visible to the naked eye?

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well...."

~Magritte, about his painting, "Son of Man"

If I Were a Dictator

Forget ordering mass genocide and hoarding all the wealth and food. If I were a dictator, I would standardize melons. Honeydew, cantaloupe, golden melon, watermelon, (just) melons- there's just too goddamn many of them! And papayas are melons too! Unbelievable...

When life gives you melons, make melonade.

Melon is Elvish for "friend."

If Physicists Were Weight-Loss Specialists

You know what's a great way to lose weight? Go down an elevator and have someone cut the cable. You weigh...zero pounds, congratulations!

Surgeon General's warning: Weight-loss using the above method is temporary, and excessive weight re-gain is highly probable upon impact when landing.

If Physicists Were Bullies

"Your mama's so dense, light bends around her."

~Ouch. I've definitely heard that one on the playground.

I just love how they have a page on Wikipedia for "yo momma" jokes, which got popular, apparently, in the early '90s.

Words of Wisdom

"If there’s a defect in basic cell biology, it might be shared by other cells. So we can learn a lot about complicated organisms from studying very simple cells like yeast."

~ from an interview with biologist Susan Lindquist

Since things usually evolve from simple to complex, then it does make sense that if something's wrong with a basic function, then the problem occurred early on and continued throughout. Kind of like when you make a calculation error early on in a complicated math problem, but you don't realize it until you reach the solution, so every line thereafter is wrong (carries the error).

Tragedy or Comedy?

1. There's a lot of bad shit going down around the world. But it's always been like that, right? To me, though, the Virginia Tech massacre seems all the more tragic because a lot of them were so young. Dying is awful, but it's worse when it happens to people who haven't had a chance to do everything they want to do. (Tragedy)

2. What's with the Koreans Gone Wild? (Hm, I just thought of an inappropriate spoof* of Girls Gone Wild videos- Comedy). First there's that second year Penn law school student, John Cho, who barged into his downstairs neighbors' apmt door and fired 15 rounds because he thought they were commie spies, or something. Then this Cho Seung-hi guy. Two don't mean a thang, though.

*Word History: We are indebted to a British comedian for the word spoof. Sometime in the 19th century Arthur Roberts (1852-1933) invented a game called Spoof, which involved trickery and nonsense. The first recorded reference to the game in 1884 refers to its revival. It was not long before the word spoof took on the general sense "nonsense, trickery," first recorded in 1889. The verb spoof is first recorded in 1889 as well, in the sense "to deceive." These senses are now less widely used than the noun sense "a light parody or satirical imitation," first recorded in 1958, and the verb sense "to satirize gently," first recorded in 1927.

3. I recently experienced some drama-trauma myself, when my ipod went missing for a full 4 days. (A tale for some later time.) But I got it back yesterday, and when I went home, I scrapped all my evening plans, hooked up my ipod (my baby!) to Sarah's speakers, plopped down on the living room floor and listened to glorious music until well past midnight. For the record, I did, in fact, croon "dear ipod, I've missed you so!" not once, but twice! With feeling! (Near-tragedy)

4. Sanjaya making it into the top 7 in American Idol. (Comedy)

5. Sanjaya singing country. (A Tragedy for the Country music industry, a Comedy for the rest of us)

6. Sanjaya winning American Idol (Tragedy).

7. Ryan Seacrest's look this season just screams "MINI-PAT SAJAK!" They should get him a wheel. (Comedy)

8. A giraffe with a fear of heights. (Tragi-Comedy)

Dialogue

Theme: Insults

Scene 1:

Joey: You know what I like about you? No matter how much I insult you, you are unflappable. You're like the ship that sails serenely through the fog.

Angie: Wow, I've never heard that analogy before- I like it! How does it go again?

Joey: Yeah, you're like a ship, see there's this thick fog, you can't see anything, and you just sail like a ship through the fog, completely unfeathered.

Angie: So...I'm the fog.

Joey: Yeah, see, so there's this ship, it's sailing through a thick fog, it's night and you can't see a thing, but you just sail on through it

Angie: So...I'm the night.

Joey: The knight in shining armor. See now, it's raining, and it's foggy, and there's this ship that's sailing on the water, and the knight's armor gets all wet from the rain.

Angie: So...I'm the rain.

Joey: Yeah, except it's strange because you're carrying an umbrella. But it's one of those umbrellas that, when you open it, it rains on the inside, but you only see those in cartoons.

Scene 2:

(At the bookstore. My co-workers and I are standing around at the info-desk being our usual useful, hardworking selves.)

Karen: ...blah blah blah Angie blah blah blah...

Molly: The problem is, it's really hard to insult her because she just doesn't listen.

Me: ...What?

Science Times

This week's Science Times is a gold mine. I sat at the bookstore yesterday and read it cover-to-cover. They had this huge theme, "Desire", which caught my interest, sure, but the article that was supposed to be a main feature was kind of a let-down in my opinion because a lot of the discussed "discoveries" were common sense, trivial, "duh" discoveries that everyone and her mom already knows. I know that that is part of science too- proving the obvious facts through the scientific method, but I hate it when researchers make a big deal when they discover that "oh my god, people tend to like their own personal space," or "sexual arousal is linked with emotional/inner states, not just physical for a high percentage of women." One result they found particularly interesting was that straight men are only attracted to women, whereas straight women, though they say they prefer men, are nonetheless attracted to other women. Well, yeah, that's because a typical woman's body, compared to a man's, is just damn sexier, more beautiful with its curves, not just an angular box like a man's; a typical woman's body is simply more aesthetically pleasing. We'll see how long it takes for that to become a hypothesis.

The other main feature, on the other hand, was definitely not a let-down. Some interesting points I found were:

-all fetuses are female by default! At least until a certain gene on the Y chromosome, if present, diverts the reproductive tissue from the ovarian-forming pathway (Picture a stick figure chromosome man dressed in a clown costume jumping up and down with his arms raised, shouting "hey, over here! Lookit me, lookit me! Follow me, and grow some balls!) into the pathway that makes the fetus man up.

-baby boys whose dicks are accidentally cut off due to a circumcision job gone south (maybe not south enough), who are raised as girls, are still attracted to girls

-based on a study of twins, they found genetics definitely plays a key role in determining sexual orientation, especially in males- not an amazing revelation in itself, but then one has to wonder how homosexuality, if it is genetic, survived in the genes since homosexual males tend to have 1/5 the number of kids as their straight counterparts.

The article discussed the possibility that either

1) it's a byproduct gene (just like how our penchant for believing in a higher being could simply be an evolutionary byproduct of another trait) that just came along for the ride, attached to some other actually beneficial gene. Picture now, Schwarzenegger going for a motorcycle ride with his son sitting next to him in a side-car. (They crashed, but they survived!) I just learned of this incident from my current annotating task.) , or

2) it's explained by the fraternal birth order effect, which says that males with older brothers have a higher chance of being gay. Something about more testosterone being in the womb for the next birth. Each older brother increases the odds by a whopping 33%! Suddenly, while reading about this theory, I couldn't help but marvel at my straight friend Joe from high school, who had 6 or 7 older brothers (and very old parents, I might add); Joe's a walking talking miracle. A bit of a mama's boy, yes. Oh and just so I don't get shot, by "miracle", I mean a statistical miracle.

-a lot of brain-related genes are on the X chromosome. Why? A possible explanation discussed in the article is:

1) Guys only have one X chromosome, so mutations on it have more of an effect, leading to fast selection.

2) Girls prefer smarter guys. (I guess this has been true since the beginning of man, is the assumption.)

Coupling facts 1 & 2 together, any advantageous brain-related mutation on the X chromosome is going to be snatched up quickly, resulting in a lot of brain-related genes on the X chromosome. I grappled with this for a while. For some reason- maybe because I haven't had bio since high school- I had a hard time understanding the connection, but I think it makes sense now. I was like, "Why do they keep saying 'fast selection'? What does that mean?"

Also, an article about the flight pattern of fruit flies, which sounds mundane at first, but they're like fractals! No matter how close or far you watch their flight pattern, it looks the same (fly straight, make a right angle turn, fly straight, make a right angle turn, rinse and repeat). And why would anyone care? Because next time you're searching for a needle in a haystack with some friends in the stix, you'll remember this article and suggest to your friends that maybe the best, most optimal way to search isn't by combing the fields in straight lines, but in a crazy zig-zag pattern! Take a leaf out of nature's book- a lot of times, it turns out to be a pretty good guide, you know?

Here is an interesting quote from an article I found while searching for the fruit flies one:

"NO longer content with dissecting tissues, analyzing proteins and breeding fruit flies, an increasingly diverse group of scientists has decided that the best way to study life is to make some of their own.

They are creating a field called artificial life, [this is where I stopped reading to check the date of the article- September 29, 1987] mixing the impulses of biology with the tools of computation. By looking beyond the usual materials of life - beyond the familiar biochemistry of earthly animals and plants - they hope to capture its spirit: the animated, the energetic, the replicating, the evolved."

Wow, imagine how crazy that must have sounded way back in the eighties.

And last, an article about the discovery of the oldest depiction of a fish. Guess what kind of fish it is- an Atlantic salmon. That's how accurate and detailed the 25,000-year-old depiction was; they could actually make-out the particular type of fish! Speaking of salmon, it's cool how such a simple thing as wearing the same jewelry as the rest of your tribe could have played a part in ensuring the evolution of you and me- modern modern man.

Last Words

"Don't cry, I need all my courage to die at twenty."

~the last words of Evariste Galois

Poop Talk

You know what's a laxative? When you only have one bathroom, and your roommate is using it. Somehow your stomach knows...

Dictators Aren't Below Good Ol' Name-Calling

Okay, so he didn't call him "butthead" or "nincompoop" which would have been AWESOME, but in the past, Venezuelen President Hugo Chavez has called Bush a "donkey," a "drunkard," a "coward," and best of all, "Mr. Danger." Oh wait, it gets better! Now he calls our dear jefe "El Diablo." Hee hee! Well, he does have the cowboy accent and probably the boots to go with.

Also, last year, Chavez showed a keen interest in having a biographical film made starring Oliver Stone as the Venezuelen president. Apparently, Stone passed up the offer (of a lifetime).

And once, he rebutted criticism from Condoleeza Rice by suggesting she had a crush on him.

What a colorful character. Evil, maybe, but colorfully so.

Joey's Trick

Something Joey showed us at work one day:

eyeye

(double vision!)

The Hazards of Dance

I split my pants dancing to Beastie Boys yesterday.

"Kickin lyrics right to your brain, so when you hear that sound you'll be right as rain!"

Help, I need a needle and thread.