Top five meme
Jul. 29th, 2005 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirSherman Fairchild, on the Feast of Ste. Martha
Tagged by Tin: Ask me my top five of anything. Go ahead, ask your worst! I shall not flinch! I think! (I'm in a very exclamatory mood today.)
In other news, I've finally finished updating my book log. Of course it helped that I didn't really read much other than more of The Magic Mountain in the past three weeks. But I went to the Coop yesterday and started scribbling down interesting titles in my "little black book" (hah!). The chairs there are so nice and inviting; I sat down and began reading Norwegian Wood for an hour. (No, I haven't read any Murakami before. He's not half as strange as I expected him to be, but boy, could there be a more perfect time for reading this book?)
No one in the lab today because post-doc is out and the interns and lab tech are off doing something with the caterpillar experiment. I am stuck designing primers and making up CTAB buffer. Nonetheless, life is good, although I really ought to stop wasting time if I want to get these primers finished by today.
Yours &c.
Post-script: Oops, I forgot to include HBP in my update. Oh well...
Post-post-script: I also forgot to tag people for the meme! >_> Um, let's see, who hasn't done this already...![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladydaera, serendip, ayatsujik, klio911, ldmoonflower. (schwimmerin, you've already done this, right? If not, you're tagged too. Just because.)
Tagged by Tin: Ask me my top five of anything. Go ahead, ask your worst! I shall not flinch! I think! (I'm in a very exclamatory mood today.)
In other news, I've finally finished updating my book log. Of course it helped that I didn't really read much other than more of The Magic Mountain in the past three weeks. But I went to the Coop yesterday and started scribbling down interesting titles in my "little black book" (hah!). The chairs there are so nice and inviting; I sat down and began reading Norwegian Wood for an hour. (No, I haven't read any Murakami before. He's not half as strange as I expected him to be, but boy, could there be a more perfect time for reading this book?)
No one in the lab today because post-doc is out and the interns and lab tech are off doing something with the caterpillar experiment. I am stuck designing primers and making up CTAB buffer. Nonetheless, life is good, although I really ought to stop wasting time if I want to get these primers finished by today.
Yours &c.
Post-script: Oops, I forgot to include HBP in my update. Oh well...
Post-post-script: I also forgot to tag people for the meme! >_> Um, let's see, who hasn't done this already...
ladydaera, serendip, ayatsujik, klio911, ldmoonflower. (schwimmerin, you've already done this, right? If not, you're tagged too. Just because.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 06:02 pm (UTC)1. Steal books from a library.
2. Draw graffiti art in a subway station. (I'm always tempted but never could bring myself to do it.)
3. Forge counterfeit money. (I know it sounds weird, but I'm fascinated by the idea of making convincing fakes.)
4. ...Forge ten different passports. (Or maybe I just secretly want to be Jason Bourne.)
5. Hack into a server and play stupid pranks.
Oh, I edited the post. You're tagged! XD
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 06:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 12:27 am (UTC)Top five kendo waza
1. debana-kote -- striking the opponent's wrist just as s/he is beginning to attack (the only point I've ever scored in shiai)
2. men-nuki-kote -- opponent tries to strike the head but misses as you step back and take advantage of his/her confusion to strike his/her wrist (the second kata has a similar sequence)
3. debana-dou -- striking the side of the opponent's torso just as s/he is beginning to attack (I am really bad at this particular waza, but it looks spectacular when done correctly; dou is the flashiest kendo attack, I think)
4. kote-men -- striking the opponent's wrist then head in quick succession; the real strike is to the head, the wrist just being an initial disabling (I'm slightly better at kote-men than I am with dou but I'm not particularly good at it either)
5. joudan-men -- an aggressive, all-offensive move that involves striking the opponent's head from a stance where the shinai is held high above your head and with the orientation of your feet switched so that the left foot is forward (apparently I seem to have an affinity for it, which I can't attest to, but I really enjoy it when I get it right)
Not nearly so interesting, but:
Top five reasons why I like kendo
1. Every small, scrawny Asian girl secretly desires to be the kind of person that other people look at in fear. At least sometimes. Or maybe that's just me.
2. If it were not for kendo I would do nothing on weekends other than procrastinate on homework and surf the Internet. Plus, the club has been responsible for my entire social life at Harvard so far.
3. If it were not for kendo I'd be totally unfit, and walking up three flights of stairs would leave me gasping for breath.
4. After you've been hit nearly everywhere with what is essentially a wooden stick by people who are mostly taller or at least scarier than you, nothing seems frightening anymore.
5. There's a moment where you're tired beyond belief, completely out of breath, with every single muscle aching; your body is limp and you believe that you can't lift that shinai one more time because it isn't humanly possible. But you straighten your back, look your opponent in the eye, and make one more strike. This is why it's worth it, every second.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 07:31 pm (UTC)Okay, top five lines you've read in a book/fanfic that you wish you'd written yourself.
And also because I cheat at memes -- the top five Korean characters that you like to handwrite. (... it is Korean, correct? And I mean actual word-characters themselves, as opposed to book-characters.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 12:58 am (UTC)Top five lines I wish I wrote
from "Five Shades of White" by
1. "What hour or two lives inside you?"
2. "Now he's like a spider web of silence over my face."
3. "He doesn't know love but he loves her lashes when she closes her eyes, the pleats of flesh when she cups her hand."
4. "And it went like water, like water, into my throat and soul."
5. "At four in the morning the great bronze bell of the monastery, leaping alive with deep bronze baying, and the crouched monks and novices supplicating in grayness before dawn amid the incense, to the great golden compassion, the Mercy squatted quiet on the Lotus of the World."
Written Korean is alphabetic and beautifully simple. We use traditional Chinese characters for ideographic writing. I assume you don't want me to list my top five favorite Korean letters though, right? (If you do, they happen to be ㅎ, ㅡ, ㄹ, ㅣ and ㄷ.) I only know about 200 characters though.
Top five hanja (漢字) that I like to handwrite
1. 國 -- I don't know why but I really enjoy fitting everything neatly before "closing the box" with the last horizontal stroke
2. 夏 -- Because it's the first character of my given name
3. 聞 -- I really like the geometry for some reason
4. 書 -- Maybe I'm projecting and it's not exactly the prettiest of characters but I still enjoy writing it
5. 弓 -- That last flourish of a stroke is quite possibly my most favorite stroke ever
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 08:14 pm (UTC)and norwegian wood's my favorite murakami, but it's not very murakami-esque at all: no strangeness! very weird that it's not...weird - i think the quintessential murakami would be either hard-boiled wonderland or wind-up bird chronicle :).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 01:39 am (UTC)Top five characters I'd want to be
1. Joseph Knecht (The Glass Bead Game) -- Knecht's entire life as narrated in the book defines a large part of my personal philosophy
2. Anne Shirley -- I think I spent my whole life prior to college trying to be Anne Shirley and often failing
3. Heero Yuy (Gundam Wing) -- I think I wrote about it before, but Heero has integrity (and also singleminded focus, haha)
4. Anna Liebert (Monster) -- Top of the class, hard-working, strong...and yet still likeable; self-contained without being shy
5. Peter Wimsey -- All right, so this may be simply because I've been reading Wimsey mysteries for the past year or so. But I really would want to be Wimsey in every possible whimsical (don't kill me!) way.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-29 09:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 01:46 am (UTC)Top five quotes uttered by my blocking group
1. "If physics is water, then I'm a big fat hydrocarbon." --
2. "The more you put into a quesadilla, the worse it tastes." -- my roommate
3. Prof. Lue: It's a symphony of cell adhesion protein interactions!
4. "Kendo is my abusive boyfriend." -- me
5. "Would you be my ribosome?" --
There are more priceless quotes, I'm sure, but these are the ones engrained in my memory. Heh, most of these are bad science jokes. O_O;;
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-31 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 12:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-30 02:04 am (UTC)Top five things I've done that I'm most proud of
1. Survived kendo practices.
2. Skipped down Broadway with friends singing "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" at the top of our lungs.
3. Read Les Misérables unabridged in five days straight (did nothing else but eat and sleep)
4. Rewrote a critical essay on Ellison's Invisible Man and finally understood my thesis statement in the process
5. Conducted one semi-successful microarray hybridization all on my own (now if I can only do it again)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-12 03:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-12 04:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-31 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-31 09:51 pm (UTC)Top five things I want to do here before I graduate
1. Go to a formal! (Why, oh why, are they always scheduled at such inopportune times?)
2. See a Boston Pops performance. (I mean, in a proper concert hall, not the Fourth of July outdoor concert.)
3. Visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History and its famous glass flowers exhibit.
4. Have at least one all-nighter doing nothing but talking with blockmates. (It seems like such a college thing to do, and yet we've never managed it.)
5. Walk through all of Widener stacks.
I suppose I ought to put "get drunk" on that list, but it's not so much something I want to do as feel like I ought to experience for once in my life. Ah well. Alumni weekend...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-01 12:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-01 02:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-02 04:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-02 06:47 pm (UTC)1. Watson and Crick's elucidation of the DNA double helix -- personalities involved aside, no one will deny that DNA is just simply beautiful
2. Cavendish's experiment in support of Newton's law of gravitation -- considering how crude instruments were back then, the level of creativity and meticulousness that this experiment required is mindboggling
3. Kepler's laws of planetary motion -- what I consider to be a staggering example of induction: elegant theory derived from a chaotic-seeming mass of empirical data
4. Nirenburg's decryption of the genetic code -- without which most of modern biology would simply not be possible
5. Rutherford's discovery of atomic structure -- all right, so quantum mechanics might have made it obsolete, but it's still a very good model and I really liked the experiment
I know you said interdisciplinary, but the following are all going to be biology-related, I'm afraid:
Top five current theories
1. RNA-based mechanism of non-Mendelian inheritance -- See Lolle et al. paper on revertance in Arabidopsis. Controversial, but if it is true? All assumptions must be overturned!
2. "RNA world" hypothesis for origin of life -- I'm really fond of RNA, aren't I? Two years ago, I would have told you that I wanted to spend my entire career working in this area of research. Now that I know how much I dislike organic chemistry...maybe not. >_<
3. Superstrings -- Oh hey, something from physics! All right, so I don't know the details of superstring at all, but on a very loose conceptual level, it sounds really neat. The idea of additional dimensions rolled up and tucked away seems kind of...nonparsimonious to me, but I suppose that kind of complexity is what makes science beautiful.
4. Canalization -- An evolutionary biological theory that forms the basis for our lab's central hypothesis. It states that successful phenotypes are resistant to change (i.e. due to mutation), or in more standard jargon, "robust to genetic variation" unless under extreme environmental stress. I suppose one could say, in a really broad context, that it complements Gould's punctuated equilibrium model, which posits long periods of species stability interspersed with periods of rapid speciation (e.g. Cambrian explosion).
5. ...I had something for the fifth one but it slipped my mind. >_>;; But this was fun to write! XD
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-02 07:05 pm (UTC)I, too, am a fan of Rutherford Scattering and Kepler and String Theory (which you aren't alone in doubting, it's something no one's been able to even attempt to prove because there's nothing that can produce the needed energy levels. At a recent String conference there was a vote on whether what I'm working on, the cosmological constant, would be explained by string theory or by conventional physics. Convention won by 90%. At a String Theory convention, with no existing conventional theories. So, you see).
And, ahaha, I'm really biased so I expected most of the cool recent theories to be physics-based, and that's why I gave the option of "historical" -- because I figured there was more of a scope for biology there, stuff like famous diseases and, yes, DNA. Clearly I underestimated modern biology. Clearly you are awesome.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-12 03:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-12 03:58 am (UTC)