Lucid reflections of an insane world

My journal is mostly friends only, 'cause I talk about stuff I really only want my friends to see .  If you feel you are one of my friends and are not on my friends list, or you just think I'm cool and would like to see my private thoughts for some stange reason, email sandi-calhoun at mail dot utexas dot edu and maybe I'll friend you, maybe.  ;)

...I believe the other person with my name is someone I was told about in high school while presenting one of my sculptures in the VASE competition. She is also an artist. Small world, eh?

So anyone who has met my dog knows how amazingly fluffy and shed prone he is.  Due to this I have had an incredibly hard time finding a vacuum that can tackle the trashbags-full of white, fluffy fur covering... well...everything.  I have gone through 3 vacuums so far, each dying or losing significant power after only a week or two of a regular fluff diet.  So I splurged a bit and took a chance on a $529 Dyson DC07 Full Gear.  I got it on ebay for only $250 as is, but still a lot of money (in my opinion) to lay out on a houshold carpet cleaning device.

I finally got it today and after a bit of frustration over how to set it up (it didn't come with a manual) all I have to say is...damn, that thing can do a number on dog hair.  Granted I have to empty the canister about once every 6 sqft, but the filters aren't even dirty yet!  It gets ALL the fur in one or two passes and comes with a barrage of nifty attachments to get every minute strand of fluff off my floor, stairs, couches, bed, whatever.  The turbo tool is soo cool!  

Yay!  I can finally keep my place as clean as it was B.P. (Before Pets).  I'm not sure I remember how clean that was though - at least I do know that everything was less fuzzy.  :p

I broke down and opened up ye olde photoshop and got me some new userpics.  Yay!

This one:                                             And my new default everyone can see.
                             

So one of the questions asked in my microbiology class was "Do you think technology will ever allow viruses to be seen with a light microscope?"  

The formula for the resolution of a light microscope is wavelength / (2 * numerical aperture)  where wavelength is assumed to be an average of 500 nm and the highest numerical aperture of most light microscopes is 1.25 which gives you a max resolution of 200 nm or 0.2 microns.  Viruses rarely exceed 0.1 microns.  Since using a higher wavelength of light would destroy just about any biological material and no one is really trying to make a greater numerical aperture for a light microscope, I answered that technology could make it possible if the numerical aperture increased, but it doesn't seem practical or likely.  I got the question right, according to my lab prof.

Well, it looks like I was wrong.  Apparently you can use 2D light from a mirrored microscope slide and some really tiny drops of glycerin to do some really neat stuff.  I hope they get that lithography technology improved soon 'cause biology classes may take a whole new turn when they do. 

Check out this nifty link:  Angel's Nest is Sustainable Homeland Security

Ok, so anyone who knows me knows I'm not really a chocoholic, so me raving about a chocolate bar is pretty unusual. Yesterday I found the most awesome chocolate bar known to man (or woman). It's called Dagoba Xocolatl and it is 74% organic dark chocolate with bits of chilies and cacao mixed in.  The taste?...OMFG...The ultra rich chocolate flavor combined with the slight heat of the chilies....mmmm...capsaicin and theobromine.  I had an afterglow after eating half of it, I swear.  This has become my new favorite treat!  Plus it's organic and has less sugar and saturated fats than most other chocolate to boot!  I found it at Central market, but I've seen the brand at other organic food stores like Whole Foods and Wheatsville as well.  I definitely recommend this to anyone who is a fan of chocolate and spicy foods. 

Tomorrow (Friday April 7th) is the undergrad research poster session at UT. That means that the main foyer of Welch Hall will be full of lots of undergrads showing off their research, including the stuff I've been working on all semester. I highly recommend all you sciencey types come check it out, and all you non-sciencey types might find it pretty cool too (plus you can come support my work, which is very cool).

It's free and runs from 11am to 3pm, you can't miss it if you enter the main level of Welch. Look for the poster talking about wheat initiation factors (my name will be on it with other names). I am not actually going to be doing the presenting since my lab partner has been working on this way longer than I have, but I'll be in and out of there pretty much the whole time.

Not that I am really the bleeding heart type, but This article presents some interesting correlations between advertising and lifestyle/social class.  So now my question is:  Does the advertising really help to maintain socioeconomic and racial segregation or does it merely take advantage of an already present situation that is unlikely to be affected by an alternative marketing strategy?  Exactly how much does marketing affect our lifestyle choices?

Hmm...so am I competent or incompetent? (Kudos to cinderave for the link to life hack)

Here's the actual study (link on the page doesn't work).

Yesterday my internet and phone line were disconnected by Grande Cable...again. This seems to happen every month and it is almost never my fault. To start with, the incompetent people who transferred my account from my previous apartment to this one somehow created two account numbers for me and never told me which one to use. They also never specified which form of bill (online, mailed, or stated over the phone by their automated service) was going to display the correct account and balance, therefore each one would give me a separate and different balance every month ranging from extremely large with massive late fees to absolutely nothing to my usual monthly amount.

I would call about this and would inevitably get put on hold, get told someone would call me back or told that it was fixed. I would make my usual payment. Then about 10 days later my services would be terminated, I'd call about it, get put on hold, get told someone would call me back, wait another day or two, then get a call that my services were going to be reinstated only after being lectured to by yet another person about how this is all my fault and I should keep better track of where my payments are going. Excuse me?! Isn't that the responsibility of the person processing the payment? How can I know where my payment is going when the system requesting payment doesn't even know which account to bill me under or what amount I really owe!? By now I think this company owes me at least 2 weeks of free cable for their screw-ups.

I finally got fed up with it yesterday and just told them to cancel my services immediately and that they would not be getting a cent from me from this point on. I called Time Warner to request service from them only to find out that I CAN'T get their service because the freaking apartment complex I live in has locked all it's tenants into a monopoly where only Grande can provide them with cable services. By the way, Time Warner is offering exactly what I had with Grande (phone, broadband internet, and extended cable) for only $5 more than Grande except Time Warner is offering DIGITAL cable at that price. I was so ready to scream.

To add fuel to the fire, my roommate, who does not have a cell phone so requires a land line, tried to get Grande to deal with him to set up new services in his name and not only did they say that he needed to fax them copy of his lease to prove that he lived there (they never once asked me for such a thing), but they actually told him MY balance. I'm no lawyer, but isn't that illegal by privacy laws? Oh, and our apartment complex never gave us a copy of our lease. Anybody know a good consumer advocate group?

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Note: This means texasfanboy will not be available online for a while and I will only be online when at UT. (which is 6 days a week, but I don't always have time to get online)

...was an awesome movie! I highly recommend seeing at at the Alamo. I wasn't too sure about it, and kinda thought it was going to be just another matrix style action flick, but it totally blew away my expectations. The script was actually good, Natalie Portman proved she has far more diverse acting skills than George Lucas could ever take advantage of, and Hugo Weaving (Mr. Smith, Elrond) as V. There were also a number of talented and not as currently popular British actors, like John Hurt as the power hungry religious dictator. All in all, it was the best movie I have seen in the theater in a while, and I'm pretty sure what the most popular costume on 6th street this Halloween will be. :p I now need to pick up the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and see how true the movie is to its inspiration. Anyone read it?

My roommate and I are looking for additional roommates, one or more depending on what kind/price of place works best.  We will be moving at the end of this July to somewhere within the city of Austin and generally west of downtown (anywhere from 183/360 area to William Cannon/MoPac and probably not very much east of Lamar).  Price range at the moment is no more than $300 per person plus utilities.  We’d like a duplex with a fenced yard as opposed to an apartment, but we’ll take what we can get.

So I wonder if all men secretly want their wives to be this way but aren't bold (or psychotic) enough to actually try to make them do it.

Sicko Marriage Contract

You know, if my fiancee honestly tried to make me sign this, I would have gone to the police way before the attempted kidnapping.

Although I regularly chide my boyfriend for believing any hair-brained conspiracy theory he and his father hear on the Coast to Coast radio show, sometimes he does succeed in getting me to get up off my ass and actually research things. 

Forgive me you're already subscribed to this goup, but I thought this was pretty interesting.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought. Named the "deliberation-without-attention" hypothesis, it was confirmed in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.

Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I finally gave in and set up my LJ. I actually set this one up nearly two years ago when I realized that I was about to take my life in a direction that would not give me very much time for friends anymore. Well, you can see how well those intentions turned out. (Actually I *did* start posting regularly to a blog, but it's one I created to keep my now geographically wide spread family in touch - but that's a different story for another day.) So... I should probably start with where I am now. Actually, I am physically located in FAC on campus at this exact moment, trying desperately to do my organic II homework, but getting bored with NMR patterns. But that's probably not what you were wanting to know, now was it? If so, hey, read no further. ;) For the past two years I have pretty much been obsessed with getting a graduate degree in some sort of bioscience field. My ultimate goal has arrived at an M.D./Ph.D. in molecular biology, but I am becoming quite fond of biochemistry and far less fond of genetics (thanks to my genetics professor). I am currently attending UT and am about 4 semesters (including this current one) from a B.S in molecular biology. I also work at UT, in the biochem department researching an isozyme of eIF 4F, 4G and 4E in Arabidopsis. If that line of jargon I just spat out actually interests you or you could *gasp* translate it, let me know. We nerdy, scientist types always love a good biotechno-babble conversation. I just choose not to inflict mine on others.

Other than that...I haven't really had a permanent address in the past two years, so I haven't had much of a chance to invite people over. I'm currently rooming with texasfanboy. I still have my big fuzz-ball of a snow dog, but he is not very happy with my current schedule. Plus I now have a psychotic, blue-eyed feline demon appropriately named Azure (Azzi for short). Don't ask who's cat she is. My boyfriend claims she's mine, I claim she's his, my roommate claims he'll kill her if she jumps on his face one more time...you know how it goes. And that's about it in the world of me for now. I should be getting to class.