Way to (Mis)-Point the Finger

So it is reasonably well heard that the tryptophan in the turkey sends the thanksgiving eater into a bit of a napping mood. Ha! it appears that it doesn't =). Ya the tryptophan can make you sleepy, but this author conjectures that it isn't the source of the whole sleepiness.
Oh ya, don't forget to get the chemical free turkey or chicken or whatever, then you won't have to worry about this whole tryptophan thing ahahahhahaha!!!!

Just in Case you Thought about Sleeping

last night i made two pumpkin pies and a maple nut pie. the maple nut pie was the last to bake and so i put it on time bake and went to bed since it was a little after 10pm. later that night the smoke alarm goes off in our bedroom with three very load and very annoying beeps. my first thought was that the time bake didn't work and i had burnt the pie to a crisp. i checked the kitchen and everything was fine. but we keep our house pretty cold at night 50 something if i remember correctly so i scurried back to bed and thought maybe the detector just hit a weird patch of air or something. then, i think it was an hour later, i had just gotten back to sleep (i was worried about finding my gps) and the alarm went off again. this time i knew everything in the kitchen was fine so i didn't move. it didn't smell like a fire or anything. so i started to go back to sleep and not two minutes later it went off again with its three beeps. i told keith, "i don't know what that is but it is very annoying." so he got up and unscrewed it from its base and took its battery out. then he claimed that my statement was a good ploy... ahhha... i didn't have to get out of bed. but in truth i can't reach the smoke detector.
i wonder what its real problem is... don't say battery going dead because it only does one beep at a time when that is happening =).

good thing i'm not social

so there is a crappy newsletter that gets delivered to one of my e-mails (via a forward from another e-mail). sometimes it has interesting information but most of the time it just reminds me why i am not "active" in the gsa (that's graduate student association to those who are uneducated).
this week the news included the announcement that there is a two day event about water .
This just makes me want to go to the meeting and be outside the door...with a sign and a clipboard with a petition. something along the lines of "ban dihydrogen monoxide, it kills" and see how many takers i get. it has a website afterall, so it must be true, right?

same page, how about at least same book

situation
• chem. dept. is hiring a new organic professor (or whatever it is called when they first enter the realm of academia)
• candidates go to lunch with three grad students on second of two days here
• school pays for lunch

complications
• there are several (rumor eight) people interviewing
• the same grad students should go to lunch with all candidates to give feedback
• i was not told of previous complication until i agreed to go on the first lunch last week
• group meeting is on tuesday during lunch
• my advisor gets a schedule of today's candidate but apparently neither knows item two or actually connects my name being on the schedule with me actually going

result
• people show up to group meeting today expecting me to give my final presentation this semester
• my advisor gets mad at me because i didn't tell her i was going to lunch
• i wonder if she'll actually read and understand the crappy research report i write for this semester since she can't read and understand a simple schedule
• i wonder why i bother with anything at all related to social things

my dream

last night/early this morning i had a dream i actually remember, sort of.
it is a weird one! i was sitting at a large table with my mom, keith, neal and a couple of other people and we were waiting for neal's jennifer to join us. this table was in a bar, dark and somewhat weird lighting. and we were all drinking, and it was normal. keith and neal were drinking a beer, keith out of the bottle and neal had a glass. my mom had something that you only drank in small quantities, but out of a regular sized glass. i had some peach frozen looking thing. it seemed to be a regular get together.
analyze that freud. =)

Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize

Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize These are prizes for people who do real research but it is not remotely worthy of a Nobel Prize. My two favorites this year are the awards for Chemistry and Biology.

Chemistry went to Coca-Cola of Great Britain. They used "advanced" technology to make tap water into the "super pure" Dasani which they had to pull from the market shelves because in fact they made it contain a cancer causing chemical.

Biology went to several people from Canada and Europe who shoed that herrings (no neccessarily red ones, but i think it includes those) communicate by farting. Yup, its real research.

Apparently they get real Nobel Prize winners to hand out the prizes so I think tonight I'll try to watch the ceremony, could be funny.

I almost started a FIRE

okay so my weird take on life (currently) is that if you feel guilty about something you need to confess. or if you do something that is wrong you should confess (even if it isn't the typically sin thing). I get this from the old testament where people offered sacrifices for sinning unknowingly (see for instance Leviticus 4)
if i did something that resulted in an error (even if unintentionally) and i don't acknowledge that then i am lying to myself and others. and bearing false witness (saying everything went fine) is against the commandments, even if i did the whole thing unintentionally. so here's my public confession.
yesterday i was curing my plastic which involves letting it sit under a UV lamp for an hour or two. this lamp is set up in another lab for reasons that are long but not neccesary to know. when i first started doing this i would sit down there with the stuff for the hour since i didn't know if things were going to go wrong and the lamp gets pretty hot. recently i have been not staying down there because nothing had been going wrong. yesterday the lamp fell out of its clamp and squarely on top of my stuff so it formed this little dome of heat over my sample on the table. when i got down there, it smelled bad, the dish i had my sample in had melted and the table was really hot. i kinda smelled like burnt particle board for a few hours. so from now on, even though it seems stupid, i'll sit down with my stuff for hours.

It's Snowing

i love watching the snow so much that i have to announce every time it snows here, sorry (well not really sorry, if i was really sorry i wouldn't do it).
they are nice big flakes. i don't see any collection yet, but i bet i'll have to drive slowly on my way home after lab tonight

nanowrimo

well i'll probably have few posts this month on this blog because i am doing nanowrimo again. hurrah for horrible but voluminous writing. =). you can read my "composition" at watered down words.
i was sitting down to do 15 minutes of writing as part of my "lunch" break (we actually had group meeting during lunch today so i am taking my free time later), when i decided to see if there was a difference between word and word perfect in word count. (yes there is: for yesterday's chapter wp: 1807 word: 1802). but more importantly i found the coolest thing in word perfect. there is a thing that will analyze your writing for sentence lengths and such and also compare it to other writings. there is hemingway short story, the gettysburg address, and the 1040EZ instructions to compare to or you can load in your own document to compare. so cool. i am more complex than hemingway (probably less readable) and about on par with the gettysburg address (i am probably way less interesting). check it out:



anyways, happy reading and i shall have happy writing =).