proteins and an antibody

proteins and an antibody

Originally uploaded by lekowala.

I was numbering my proteins in this cartoon for the next set of lectures when the I felt the tremors today… except that I thought my colleague in the next cube was shaking my chair. I turned round and saw him quite far away. He didn’t feel the tremor nor did our friend who was talking to him. I guess numbering the proteins helped me detect the movement. I thought “that’s it, I’ve been staring at the screen too long and need to take a break”

Poor Indonesians, its just one thing after the other.

I just happened to be reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson a few days ago and reached the part about earthquakes. The Richter Scale was actually called the Magnitude scale by the people who invented it (Richter and Gutenberg) and the scale is logarithmic which means each increase of 1 in the scale represent a 10-fold increase in energy.

A sense of history

At a CNY dinner at my parents’ place.  My dad was telling stories about the past and my cousin Alvin decided to take notes.  I think it started by how my dad would go clean our grandparents graveyard.  It became a family history thing and threatens to become a Peranakan play since Alvin is involved in theatre…  There were the stories about pre-war Empress Place, Geylang Bahru, Spohia Road.     My dad described the indulgent lifetstyle of my grandfather and some granduncles.  There were the cabaret girls, servants, opium smokin, gambling, civil service, raleigh bicycles, 2nd wives.

Then of course there was the japanese war and how my aunties were kept hidden in another person’s house.  I shot about 2 hours worth of handphone video recording the story telling.  Another uncle and aunt were there to add nuggets of stories of their own.  Running around were the little children and there were 4 generations in that house.  So the atmosphere was quite conducive to try to extend that beyond the 4.  We even took down the photographs of my late grandparents from the wall.  This was the first time we actually knew our grandparent’s names.

Soon a family tree took shape and there was mention of a Hakka blood line and I joked that “sekali” we are all hakka…  the dangers of digging up the past!   There was also questions like why the peranakans enjoyed cantonese opera..  My dad said that the housekeepers were usually cantonese speaking so most peranakans could understand cantonese, my uncle said the women were usually very pretty..  I tend to believe the latter.  Alvin and Lina tried to get most of the names but these were beyond my dad even and he said we needed to go back to the graveyards…  And he only knew how to navigate there using a tree (the forked branched in particular) as a landmark.

As I type this a 77 mb 3gp format video is being sent to my cousin through yousendit.  It would be nice to see all my dead relatives come to live in a peranakan play…

RNAi

This is probably the most enjoyable animation on a biological process that I have seen. Its so entertaining. Click here to go there.

there was you… a tribute to Kai, the memory maker

Here’s Kai. I wrote about him in this post. I bought 2 of his albums and there was a song there that marked a beautiful memory for me. A few days ago he commented on the post . It was a pleasant one, long, thoughtful, like a nice glass of wine or a sit down by the lake.. That prompted me to take out the harddisk from my old toshiba satellite-pro and whacked the 1 Gig disk into my harddisk casing Otterman provided… soon it was whirring and i firewired it into my mac…. Its strange how I never thought of doing that.. i almost threw the old laptop away.. now I have saved so many photos from my postdoc in Kew. Gosh, Thanks Kai. Here’s a picture of yu that was in my old laptop as well.
Then the next day I had a dream… it was my my dear old friend who’s dissappeared/ run away from my life and many others… So he was there just by the aisle of the cinema and holding on to a baby, he smiles at me and its the same smile when we first met in kindergarten, just at the old hawker centre whilst his grandma was buying soya bean. He sits next to me and before he could say anything… the damn alarm rings… I wake up and cycle to work in the quiet and desolate cold morning.

1215 hrs. I am at Novena and after mass, I buy a pot of Narcissus bulbs for his mum and bring along the Rudraksha rosary beads that I bought for him in Tamil Nadu… I go to his house thinking he or his mum will be there but a maid comes out and says that the house owner is a totally different name…

Kai was right, people change, things change…

Quote of the day

On a student’s test paper on Organisation and Control of Prokaryotic and Eucharyotic Genomes

Lao Tze said,”A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

I say , “Cancer development begins with a single cell.”

Now that is quite an insight, he was referring to the Multi-step model of Cancer Development which basically involves the gain in function (through eg. mutations) of proto-oncogenes and the loss of function mutations in tumour suppressor genes that lead to the development of cancer, starting off from a single cell.

The air is sweet again

Over Dec and as the year changed, I finished this book on none other than the great Bapuji, and ignored largely everything else. It was nice, the book and the ignoring. It was a good read and lulled me to calm and some collectiveness as the year 2006 gave way to 2007.

Louis Fischer was a journalist during Gandhi’s time and it was a refreshing and rich account of his life. There was the usual thoughts, writings and everyday going ons of Gandhi as well as the political intrigue that was so part of the scene as India wrestled, through civil disobedience, from the British. I found the book refreshing because the writer seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the man. Well, he was a journalist at the time and also visited Gandhi many times and was a guest at his ashram.

Throughout the book there were nice perspectives into certain facets or actions of Gandhi’s life, clearly intelligent insights by the author who wasn’t afraid to articulate his thoughts and feelings about the man. For one of these perspectives, I used it to kick start the year. Gandhi used to “turn the searchlight inward” throught fast and prayer, especially during times that were hardest for him to comprehend- the senseless riots and killings. There was one account described in the book about a boy being torn into half by adults… I think about that often and cringe.

And so I tried that out. A 9 day fast of liquids (coffee, milo, milk) from the time I wake up to 6pm. I am midway but already gained clarity about something that has been perplexing for me both mentally and emotionally and which needed a clear decision. Intead of thinking about it, I let the fast go on and somehow last night it became clear… and suddenly as I spoke to Jen by the breezy moonlit beach whilst the kids played in the sand, the air became sweet again (is that the fragrance of heaven?) and peace abided…

“yeah!” as a friend said as I told him about the sweet air.

now I have a tiny glimpse of an easy method used by the great man. And so hopefully, I will follow Madre Teresa, and try to do small things with great love.

Seafood Paella

It was time to actualise this recipe that I had read in Rick Stein’s, “Fruits of the Sea”. So I experimented on a few poor souls who apparently said it was pretty ok. Couldn’t find risoto rice so had to settle for risoni (rice-shaped pasta) which actually soaks up the stock nicely and has a nice texture. Especially tasty are the clumps that are slightly burnt…

My “sous chef” did pretty darn well with the manga salsa from a book called “the beach house cookbook” by Barbara Scott-Goodman.

Of course this was in celebration of “Sea”-otter’s voyage on the Indiaman - The Swedish Ship Götheberg.

Arcade boy

Josh always has fun at the arcades. Its costly these days (I have turned my back on the  gourmet coffee shops and settled for a 70 cts condensed milk coffee instead many times).  But somehow the dark side manages to take my money away…  The arcade, $1.50 per game, happily sponsored by the father so that Josh can have a few minutes of adrenaline rush…  I gush with pride with every special power he delivers to the opponent in streetfighter and every corner he negotiates successfully on the VR bike.

Amazing Father and Son team

Guiding at Buloh Anniversary

It was the 13th Anniversary of the Official Opening of Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve so did a bit of guiding on Sunday.

M y co-guide was 14 yr old SEH from Hillgrove Sec.  He’s really interested in fish and can differentiate the different species in Buloh well.  He spotted this school of square tail mullet at one of the boardwalks.  They were pretty big, about 40 cm in length.  It was at the end of 2 and a half hours walk that we saw them and we were just leaning against sides of the boardwalk, watching those fish flash their white sides as the circled the shallow waters.  There must have been a hundred of them.