Laughter Through Tears

Kandel 4th edition:

"The [smooth pursuit] system requires a moving stimulus in order to calculate the proper eye velocity. Thus, a verbal command or an imagined stimulus cannot produce smooth pursuit."

File under: "Ways in which smooth pursuit eye motion differs from orgasm."

"Drugs, fatigue, alcohol, and even distraction degrade the quality of these movements."

File under: "Ways in which smooth pursuit eye motion and orgasm are pretty similar, actually."

This is how I memorize things that don't interest me.

Correlation does not imply causation question in my statistics exercise this week. Temptation to copy/paste webcomic into exercise: narrowly averted.

Yes, I also still have class. I don't spend all day reading Homestuck in class.

First exam Thursday. Which reminds me, better check the second date since the prognosis is not awesome. /o\ How do I SPSS?

I'm working on statistics. We're studying two variable analysis, which involves making tables of numbers and then checking to see if they form sets. Series of numbers are the sort of thing I find oddly relaxing, although today it was a setback because I found it easier to fill the table out right than to explain (or understand) why that's the right way. Interactions are also easier to understand geometrically (the two lines are parallel) than arithmetically. Then I start thinking about how I process numbers and I get distracted.

Once, a while ago, I posted (on my old journal) about gender and color coding, and how I thought green was more masculine-coded than blue. Just not it occurred to me that maybe it's because it's farther from pink. This is a weird idea, I guess, and it doesn't explain everything. But, when we were little girls at school we went through an obligatory pink-liking phase and then an obligatory "I am too mature to like pink and purple" phase. During that second one, it was fashionable to like blue, which is the next over from purple. Green is the next over from blue, without veering into the orange-yellow spectrum which was the favorite-color territory of eccentrics.

My brain is a very strange place to live, sometimes.

I have not yet watched the finale of Lost Girl. I was all pumped to watch it yesterday and then I somehow forgot, IDK. Tonight I have to deal with some laundry issues so maybe I'll watch it Wednesday. Maybe if I put it off long enough, this whole finale business will turn out to have been a big misunderstanding, and there'll be a new episode next week.

RNA polymerase is an enzyme that's responsible for transcribing DNA into RNA. It facilitates producing proteins according to the DNA template. Like many complex enzymes it's made of several subunits. The sigma (σ) subunit is responsible for initiating transcription. The rho (ρ) factor is responsible for terminating transcription.

I believe I've mentioned my chronic inability to tell the difference between the two? Just when I reliably learned to tell mu from eta, too.

I really wish the last holdout lecturers at the university would stop thinking of uploading their presentations to the course website as something optional. Look, everyone else does it. It's not generous, it's not a favor to the students, making it a requirement is a formality. Providing your students with study aids doesn't have to be such an ordeal, especially since the presentations almost always include diagrams with text that's too small to read when projected on the white screen. Even with unimpaired vision, which I (and many others) don't have.

I keep wanting to post about something interesting, but this week has been eating me alive and I don't even know why. I'm only posting now because class is mostly covering neurology basics that I learned last year.

ETA: I had to restrain myself from saving today's notes under "braaains!" It was tempting. Clashing nerdities are clashing.

Geeky moment of the day: my classroom computer is numbered 616.

"(a) During conjugation, the pilus pulls two bacteria together. (b) Next, a bridge (essentially a pore) forms between the two cells. A single-stranded copy of plasmid DNA is produced in the donor cell and then passes into the recipient bacterium, where the single strand, serving as a template, is converted to the double-stranded helix."

How E-coli bacteria transmit DNA from one cell to another. I wonder if they enjoy it.

(From Introduction to Genetic Analysis 9th edition, Griffiths et al.)

I have been convinced to stick through with Genetics A. It's an 8 AM start twice a week, including today. This better be interesting, otherwise I will be sad. :(

ETA: OMG you guys! You remember that thing about 99.8% of the genome being identical between individuals? It's not true anymore. I LOVE SCIENCE.

It's a hippocampus! Pretty sure it's the wrong kind, though.

Apparently, "what is this I don't even" is not an appropriate question to ask in class. Who knew?