Category: geek stuff

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Sega Dreamcast: TNG

The Slashdot crowd will have already seen this, but it’s kinda freaky to look down this list, even for the non-geeks.

This website at 1UP.com describes 23 similarities between the launch of the Xbox360 and the Sega Dreamcast (remember that?!)…it continues on to describe 10 reasons why the 360 won’t fail as the Dreamcast did…but still…it’s kinda funny to look at…

…as you read this, just keep in mind that PS3 will still win out overall…but I’m pulling for my underdog Nintendo to the (bitter?) end… 😉

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Oh, cholesterol…

So, Dr. Stephenson was talking to us in class today about something he read in the Journal of Clinical Cardiology recently, saying that they believe we should all strive for the lowest total-body cholesterol count possible. Basically, we shouldn’t try to have a count of “below 200” or “around 150″…we should just go and go until it’s as low as it can go.

Anyway, he then mentioned some studies that show up years ago on the same subject… These studies said that people who had low cholesterol were less likely to die of cardiovascular diseases. However, keep in mind, this data only reflected death by cardiovascular problems, not by other factors.

Essentially, it came out that, yes, people with cholesterol counts around 130 or a little higher did well…but people lower than that started to die off. Why’d they die off? Suicides and murders. Apparently, people who had extremely low cholesterol counts died because cholesterol is a relatively key component of cell membranes, especially those in your brain…so people would start getting either really depressed and would kill themselves, or they would get psychotic enough that someone would kill them…

Take home message: eat a lot of fatty stuff and die happy, rather than depressed or crazy.

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Random thought…

So, sitting in class today learning about the biochemical machinery that leads to transcription via RNA Polymerase…I wondered the following: What if the world were populated by robots instead of humans? Now, these are robots with robot humanoids, robotic animals, robotic plants, etc… I mean, we know practically nothing about how or why things work in our bodies…but when we think of machines, we designed them, so we know how they work and why. So if these machines did not have knowledge of their creator, or if they simply arose on their own somehow, would they find it just as difficult to figure out how and why they work? …even though, inherently (since we designed them), they “work” on a less sophisticated level than our organic bodies? Would these robots have the same questions about their origin as we do? Would they have to learn about how they function, or would they care?

…I gotta get out of here…

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…busy-ness, etc…

Yeah, school is keeping me busy, but not too busy… We got our exams back yesterday (I got a B+…not too terrible for the first exam…), so now we’ve moved on to DNA replication/repair in class…it’s been about 4 years since taking Genetics at Truman, so it isn’t quite as clear in my head as biochem was in the last unit, but it’s coming back to me…slowly… Anyway, it’s causing me to do more reading than I’d prefer…thankfully, I can do most, if not all, of it while I’m doing work at the lab in the afternoons.

That leaves me a lot of time for TV. I’m realizing how old I am since I’ve got shows to watch every weeknight…which really sucks, since I’m supposed to be studying, etc. This is mostly Brooke’s fault, of course…if she wasn’t watching these shows, then I wouldn’t have gotten “in” to them over summer… So yeah, I’ve got 3 “CSI” shows to watch during the week, “Law & Order: SVU,” “Threshold,” “Numb3rs,” etc…and the World Series of Poker is on Tuesday nights as well… I can easily sit in front of the TV for 3.5 hours almost every night of the week…which is terrible, but almost unavoidable… My VCR gets quite a workout every night, it seems…

Anyway, Brooke’s ‘rents are visiting on Friday and taking us to a Card’s game, which is cool…the 3rd-to-last regular-season game at Busch Stadium (which means absolutely nothing, truthfully…). Otherwise, I’m hopefully getting some poker played on Saturday…been a few weeks since I did that… Playing with the praise band at Webster Hills tonight, and then again on Sunday morning…looking forward to that, of course…

So, basically, life goes on. Nothing too fascinating to report…except that Brooke is this close to starting substitute teaching, which will bring in some much-needed income to a relatively poor couple…and by “poor” I don’t mean “bad”…I mean “financially lacking”… 😛

P.S. …there’s a calendar link up top…since I now have my calendar online…if you wanna know which weekends we’re in Columbia/Hannibal/etc., that’s the place to check…w00t…

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How chemists do it…

Per my grand-little’s away message (Sarah Hobbs…in AXE @ Truman…):

How chemists do it…

Chemists do it reactively.

Chemists do it in test tubes.

Chemists do it in equilibrium.

Chemists do it in the fume hood.

Chemsits do it in an excited state.

Chemists do in periodically on the table.

Chemists do in organically and inorganically.

Electrochemists do it with greater potential.

Polymer chemists do it in chains.

Pharmaceutical chemists do it with drugs.

Analytical chemists to it with precision and accuracy.

…so true on so many levels…

…stoopid grad skool and studying for tests…grrrrrrrrrrrr…

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Nintendo Revolution

Wanna see the controller? Here it is:

Nintendo Revolution Controller

Nintendo Revolution

And here’s an article about it….

Think of the possibilities! You can use the thing as a fishing real/baseball bat/hockey stick/etc. in sports games…you can use it “Minority Report”-style in strategy games (pointing to a location on a map, zooming in, moving units, etc.)…and for the first-person shooter folks, you can use the controller as a gun (there’s a trigger on the bottom side), use it as a sword, etc. The possibilities are almost limitless!

w00t! Xbox 360 can suck it…

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A few changes…

Nothing truly important…as usual… First of all, I switched web servers… I was using my old 1.0 GHz Athlon box for my server and my Athlon XP 1900+ for my primary computer…but since getting my laptop, I’ve been using it primarily and my faster box hasn’t really been used…therefore…I switched from the 1.0 GHz Athlon to the faster Athlon XP 1900+ computer…still running Linux, of course… 😛 This may speed things up a little bit, but probably nothing noticeable…

Slightly more obvious a change is the address of this website. http://andyl.homelinux.net/ is (mostly) no more! It’ll still work for awhile…until I decide not to renew it… Regardless, the new address is https://linsenbardt.net/. Yahoo! Domains was running a nifty deal on domain names…so I get it for $2/year…and I paid $10 and now have that address for 5 years…

Anyway, adjust your bookmarks or links from your blogs…https://linsenbardt.net/ is my new address…

Back to studying, I guess…

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…so it begins…

“Why do we need explosive detection methods? Terrorists. Because they all want to increase your entropy?”
– Joel Brockmeyer

So classes have officially started. All I had today was BBS 501: the “BBS” stands for “Basic Biomedical Sciences” and, essentially, this class is Graduate School Biochemistry (officially titled “Beginning Basic Biomedical Sciences I”, I think). Today we began a few lectures on thermodynamics, hence the aforementioned quote regarding entropy…spoken by Joel during my Junior Chemistry Seminar class Junior year at Truman…

If today’s class is any indication of the future, then it shouldn’t be too terribly hard for the first few weeks. We had a review on thermodynamics, and by “review,” I mean back to Freshman year of college. I’m sure it’ll get more difficult, but flipping through the first few weeks of the syllabus, all I can see is stuff I’ve, at the very least, heard of if not studied on multiple occasions in various classes throughout undergrad. I think the primary difficulty will be in the sheer amount of material, however. As in, I’ve got this class weekday mornings at 9:00 am…so when I have my first test in just over 2 weeks, I’ll have had about 11 lectures…which is the equivalent of almost a month of lectures (MWF) at Truman. So yeah, I dunno…it could be easy…could get a lot harder really quickly…

The exams will be completely in essay form and we are assured 3 hours to take the exam and each lecture will be covered by only one question on the test…therefore, we are relatively aware of what’s going to be on the test already…that, and we are being told to a). get the previous tests from upperclassmen and b). that the questions are very similar from year to year.

Graduate school?! So far, it sounds a lot easier than I would have thought in many of my undergrad classes…on the other hand, I’ve only had one day to deal with…but, then again, I only have two real classes to worry about: this one and a class twice a week that deals with reading “classic” papers (i.e. the original Watson and Crick DNA structure paper, etc.).

Only time will tell, I guess…

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So true…

“Well, Bible…Wrath of Kahn…what’s the difference?”
— Kyle Brovloski; South Park

Dude…I’m telling you…Star Trek rocks…so does Stargate…but not as good at Star Trek…

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…fun with turtles…

So yeah, I’m working for Dr. Michael Ariel here at Saint Louis University in the Pharmacology and Physiology department for the next six weeks. This is the first of three lab rotations that I need to carry out for the Ph.D. before I can start my actual research work. Dr. Ariel’s focus is the brain, specifically, the reflex action that causes muscles to move your eyes when you turn your head. As he explains it, when you turn your head, your eyes want to stay focused on a given location, so the muscles cause your eyes to stay on that position while your head moves from side to side. He does this work in turtles, which is somewhat rare in a world where mice and rats tend to dominate research. He uses turtles because, this specific box turtle, can live underwater in the winters of Wisconsin for up to 5 months without having to come up for oxygen (crazy, eh?!). Well, when you remove the brain tissues from the turtle’s body, the tissues will actually stay alive for a few days without being attached to the rest of the body…something that mice/rats/us can’t do…

Currently, I’m helping Dr. Ariel set up his new $70,000 camera device that will record brain stimulation. We will put a voltage-sensitive dye into turtle brain tissue and then shock it with an electric pulse; the neurons are then excited the response travels throughout the neurons along certain pathways. The camera reads the changes in the dye so that we can trace where the signal starts and stops. Neat, eh? 😉

Thus far, the work has been interesting, but it’s difficult getting used to 8 hour workdays again… Now that the camera is mostly set up, I’m sure I’ll be working on other projects by mid- to late-next week… Fascinating times, I tell you…

…and on a side-note, I get to play with my new praise band tonight at Webster Hills UMC…those drums won’t know what hit ’em…