Viraj's Weblog

I got ahold of videos of the show Anatomy for Beginners. I believe it plays in the UK. Basically it is a full live human dissection in front of an audience, with very closeup cameras. You'll need a pretty strong stomach to watch this. What I found really interesting is when they took a frozen brain and put it in a slicing maching to show the internal structures. They could not use the real brain because the consistency is like jelly.

I was really impressed with the production quality of the whole thing. The person doing the dissection is highly skilled and did it blazingly fast. It is really amazing, and if you can get ahold of a copy I highly recommend it.

Here is a picture of the ocean on fire:

Yes, on fire! Imagine swimming in that. It's the result of methane gas being pumped from the bottom of the ocean.

I saw an interesting BBC show about Global Dimming. It started out with an interesting observation. After the 9/11 attack, virtually all planes were grounded for 3 days. During that time, temperature rose around the US by about 1 degree Celsius. Doesn't sound like much but to climate scientists, it's alot.

It had to do with airplane contrails not existing. The idea of global dimming is that pollution (in terms of particles) basically causes reflection of sunlight back out of the atmosphere. It reduces the temperature. It has other implications such as affecting rain/monsoon bands, and they say it was the cause of major drought in Ethiopia (and eventually the many deaths and save-an-Ethiopian commercials). If this were to affect monsoon bands in Asia, we are talking billions of people being affected.

What I find even more interesting is that global dimming offsets global warming. Countries that reduce pollution increase the affects of global warming. Scientists are saying that if we eliminate global dimming without reducing global warming as well, in 20 years temperature would rise 10 degrees Celsius. That basically means goodbye Florida and many other lowland areas due to glaciers melting and oceans rising.

So is the answer to just pump more pullutants to offset global warming? The problem with that is the pullutants are not very good for humans to breathe . Rain bands would also be affected, and the consequences of that are huge.

Murderball is best described as full-contact rugby for quadriplegics in Mad Max-style wheelchairs. I thought this movie would be lame until I read the reviews and saw the awards it won. I honestly expected a tearjerker, but was pleasantly surprised.

This is a documentary that is simply amazing. It is a very touching and inspirational film which portrays the quadriplegics in a light you normally do not see them in. These guys are badass, and can probably kick most normal people's asses. In the opening scene, you see a very tough quadriplegic putting on his own shorts, and from the beginning you realize what obstacles these people go through every day that we take for granted. It brings you into their world without compromise, and the direction is just top notch for a documentary.

I guarantee you will think twice about offering help to a quadriplegic after seeing this. You may think you are helping them when in actuality you are patronizing them. People respond differently. Think if you were in a wheelchair. Would you want everyone feeling sorry for you?

The film is rated R, and it's not for children. Some of these guys are not 'nice', but the competition is all in good spirit. The Canada vs US suspense was real. I really liked how they intercut the lives of the players with the game. There is a rather amazing scene where a doctor explains and demonstrates how to have quadriplegic sex. It's both sad and funny, because you realize that we all have basic human needs, quadriplegic or not.

One thing I really liked about this movie is using low budget techniques to do very cool stuff. When the quadriplegics are introduced, the camera zooms in on the back of their neck, which shows the scar of spine surgery. The film then blends to 3D pencil animations of the skeleton and the pins flying to be inserted in the spine. All done in a very slick and cool way. There are alot of other things in the movie that shows this director has some skill.

I saw this absolutely ridiculous contraption in Discover magazine and after reading "Exercise in exactly 4 minutes per day" I had to do a double take to see if the ad was a joke. I still don't know for sure.

What I do know is this contraption looks like some sort of torture device, and runs for the low price of $14,615. You would think they'd make a nice number like $14,600 or $14,599 but no its $14,615. Get yours now while supplies last.

What is very sad is people will actually buy this .

Here's a site that lists the best and worst cars for our atmosphere. Why not save the earth on your next car purchase? Or you could buy a Hummer.

I'm happy because I got a 96% on my 2nd Biological Principles exam. I was 3rd in my class of about 100. What's cool is the teacher pointed out all of us honor roll students in class. I like that because it gives a competitive edge to it and makes me want to be #1 next time. More teachers should be doing this.

Back when I did logarithms and 'e' in the past I really didn't see much practical use for them. Now that I've been out in the world, compound interest calculation is fun .

Let's say I invest $40k in a CD with compounding interest of 2%. What will I have in 5 years?

The formula is:

A = Pe^rt

^rt above means e raised to the 'rt' power

A = amount you will have
P = principal
r = interest rate
t = time in years
e = well, just e

So I end up with 40000e^(.02*5) which is $44206, or an increase of about $70 a month. Fun stuff.

Read a very interesting paper about using ultrasound for bacterial disinfection. From the paper:

Ultrasound is able to inactivate bacteria and deagglomerate bacterial clusters or flocs through a number of physical, mechanical and chemical effects arising from acoustic cavitation. On collapse, cavitation bubbles produce enough energy to mechanically weaken or disrupt bacteria or biological cells via a number of processes.

Makes me think what application this can have for humans. I wonder if such 'sound' could have affects on cell division and cancer.

Imagine a decontamination chamber in the future that a person goes in and is cleansed of bacteria from his body by sound waves.

My Infiniti FX35 was due for a 30k mile service. It costed $700!! You would think that an expensive car would have cheap maintenance, but that's not the case. I can't wait until my lease is over to get rid of this gas hog.

They gave me a loaner G35. I like that car alot. It has the same engine as my truck. Getting a loaner is fun because I can treat the car like shit. I had some fun flooring the gas and slamming the breaks.

Had a chance to checkout Hustle & Flow tonight and I thought it was a great movie. I have a soft spot for stories about people trying to get a record deal, and this movie captured the essence of making hiphop music. I used to have a little gig going producing such music. Ah, those were the days. I didn't really like the music in this movie as it's mostly what used to be called 'west side'. I don't know what it's called these days as I don't listen to much rap.

The main actor Terrence Dashon Howard was very good. I remember him as the pimp in Dead Presidents, and man that was one evil pimp. I honestly thought he was going to be a great actor after seeing that. Here he plays a 'good' pimp. All of the characters were very convincing, and the movie is just raw and gritty.

The ending was completely unexpected. Both sad and hopeful at the same time. Definitely check it out.

Melatonin is an over-the-counter drug that supposedly helps with jetlag. It's a substance that your body naturally produces. It supposedly lets you control your sleep better. My brother had some so I tried one.

First I learned you probably should not take it before sleeping. Unfortunately I did, and it took about 10 hours for me to feel anything. It made me kinda dull throughout the day, and created an oversensitivity to light. It did provide a relaxing effect and I could fall asleep during the day, whereas I normally have alot of trouble doing that. So for me at least, it seems a good pill for jetlag.

What is kinda strange is melatonin has a different effect than the chemical in cold medicines that make you sleepy. With melatonin, it's light-reacting. When there is light, you do not feel drowsy. It's only when it is dark that you get sleepy.

Update: Actually there are other factors affecting how quickly it works. I took this on an empty stomach and exercised right after, and I felt effects within 2 hours. Most dosage instructions recommend taking it right before sleeping, but if on a full stomach it will take some time to get into your bloodstream.

Tonight I checked out Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects. This movie pretty much takes pieces of From Dusk Till Dawn, Natural Born Killers, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and tries to make a new movie out of that. It had some interesting scenes, but it was nowhere near as stylish or intelligent as those other movies.

Sure there is some shocking dialogue and scenes, but I found it hard to place the characters in their roles. They came across as actors trying to be shocking. In Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn there were believable characters and great acting. You actually empathized with the sick individuals. Here you don't really care what happens, other than wanting the cute female sadist to live.

The direction is pretty bad, and just comes across as mimicry of better directors. It's a fun movie though, and if you want to see some blood and gore you will get it. There is alot of Freebird-type music playing as people die, which to me seems played out. There is one hilarious scene about sex with chickens that is probably worth the price of admission. Don't worry, it's only dialogue.

I've gotten 97, 86, and 85 on my algebra exams. Everyone is venting in this class, and looking at the scores, you can see not many people are doing well. I am student 629956. I feel like a prison inmate. The teacher doesn't even give back the exams so you have no idea what you missed.

I was talking to one student who was getting good grades and attempted a quadratic formula derivation on the exam. He got no credit, just like me. But he said he put down everything correct, and checked this with his TA. Teacher's Assistants run the math 'lab' class. When he brought this up with the main teacher he said that he included more information than necessary and therefore got no points. When the student tried to debate this, the teacher's response was "I'm a mathematician."

Give me a break... it's fucking algebra.

There's a very interesting interview in the latest Discover magazine about sleep. Luckily they put it online.

There are some interesting points made in the interview. One being that you are more likely to remember something you've learned if you sleep right afterwards. But what's ironic is you are also more likely to remember something if you learn it just after waking. Throughout the day your synapses get 'heavier' and it is harder to retain information. Hmm, so when should I learn something new again?

The article describes an experiment that basically shows that when you learn something, there is more brain activity during sleep. Babies sleep so much more because of all they are learning. Some of those eureka moments come after sleep, and the idea is that during sleep, your brain increases the signal to noise ratio on the concepts you've learned. You are able to concentrate completely on the 'problem' without any distractions.

I pretty much hate self-help crap. But a friend sent this to me and it was interesting. Read on for your daily dose of self-help therapy.

Read more!

Yes I've went over to the dark side. You may notice that I now have google ads on the right side of my blog.

The majority of ads that seem to be popping up are related to blogging. Those advertisers must be searching for blogging keywords in the HTML, probably even b2evolution specific stuff, because I don't paste all over my site the more of the word 'blog' relative to other words.

However if you look on Prashant's blog, the ads are at least a bit more relevant. You can buy spiritual books and what not .

I thought it was pretty cool it let me customize the color of the ads to match my blog skin. It gave me a chance to use OS X's Digital Colormeter application to get the right hex color values.

Our Biology teacher described fainting in an interesting way. Basically it has to do with your brain needing more oxygen/blood. Your body wants to put your head in the same plane as your heart horizontally, so there is less resistance to pump blood there. What's the best way? Get you on the floor, immediately. Hence, the faint.

I don't know how factual this is, and I don't see it described this way anywhere else. I just find it amazing that no matter how much control you think you have of yourself, if the body thinks something is wrong, it will do whatever it can to fix the problem no matter what you may 'think'. It will just shut your consciousness off, as if it says "screw you, I'm taking over now."

Ok well, not exactly. But interesting story nonetheless.

I'm watching this great documentary by Carl Sagan called "Who Speaks for Earth?". I transcribed this quote which, in respect to recent events, is something people should think about.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of this small planet Earth. But up there in the cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent, fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. There are not yet obvious signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably headlong into self-destruction. I dream about it. And sometimes they're bad dreams.

Tonight I was thinking about the many different multivitamins out there and wondered if there was some site that objectively rated them. Searching on google for 'best multivitamin' returns alot of results that are either devoid of brand names or are links to sites that sell their own multivitamins with their own biased reviews. It's sort of like searching for 'best cialis' when you really want the best cialis . You end up with crappy search results.

It seems any objective reviewer is afraid to list any brand names. It gives the impression that the drug makers have alot of influence on such sites, similar to magazines and advertising. Maybe they think they will be sued if they said Centrum sucks.

I did come across this PDF which seems to be a pretty good review of the major brands.

I'm taking a class called Biological Principles which is basically college Biology II. The teacher is very good and makes the class interesting even in the boring areas. His lecture is composed of Powerpoint presentations with lots of nice graphics and animations. He gives it out on CD, and the .ppt files are like 40-50megs. Ouch.

He goes into funny anecdotes during his lecture which keeps it upbeat. Like today he mentioned some friends of his who let their dog 'french kiss' their baby. A student was arguing a dog's mouth is cleaner than a human's, but he pretty much said dogs lick their ass, and I don't want them french kissing me hehe. Then he said something like "then again, some humans lick their ass also" and the class laughed alot. Hehe, what? It's cool though, more teachers should be like that.

Anyway, I got an 89% (B+) on my first exam. That kinda sucks, because I really need to get an A in this class. I need to study harder. The students who get an A on an exam are put up as his first slide during a presentation and he points them out in class. Someone else told me this is not 'legal' to do, but I think it's actually encouraging. He makes a point that the majority of students who get A's sit in the front of the class, and tells everyone to do so. Another student I was talking to said he is going to get an A and sit at the back of the class just to prove him wrong, hehe.

We've been learning about cells in biology (cytology), and I vaguely remember some of this stuff from high school. I find it very interesting now though, and back then didn't really care much about this stuff.

One of the many structures a cell has is lysosomes. These are used within the cell as a sort of digestive system. They also eat and destroy broken parts of the cell itself, in a recycling process called autophagy. The first thing that popped in my mind when I read this is whether this could be a way for cancer cells to eat and destroy themselves. Wouldn't it be cool if cancer cells could be 'programmed' to self destruct.

Then I found out about apoptosis which is literally programmed cell death. Some more searching found that there has been research done on using lysosomes to fight cancer. That's something I'm very interested in.

Interesting article on brushing the tongue.

One thing I learned in Chemistry (yes I learned something) is that blue light in fireworks is the hardest to produce. Oxidized magnesium produces white light. Yellow light is easiest to make using sodium like Na3AlF6. Strontium produces red light, and barium green such as barium nitrate.

But blue light is the hardest to produce. Supposedly it can be made by decomposing copper(I) chloride at low temperature by mixing CuCl with KClO4, copper powder, and hexachloroethane C2CL6. It's only available in recently made, and probably expensive, fireworks.

Last night while watching fireworks I looked around for any blue lights and as expected I did not see any. The closest I saw was violet.

I checked out Romero's Land of the Dead tonight, which is being billed as Romero's Ultimate Zombie Masterpiece. Indeed it is. I love all of the social commentary zombie movies. At first I wasn't sure what to think of this movie, as it progressed kinda slow. But eventually everything built up and it was more than I expected.

This film is mainly about humans and how they treat each other. At the end of the movie you are actually rooting for the zombies. In previous zombie movies, they had no intelligence. In this case, they have evolved. There is sort of an alpha zombie, who has been learning tricks by watching humans and imitating them. There are a few scenes similar to 2001 where the monkey finds out how to use a tool. In this case, it is a machine gun, a sledgehammer, a gas pump, and a machete. That's evolution for you. There is a classic scene of the zombies busting into a beautiful apartment building where all of the upper class people are living, and I couldn't help wanting all those rich folk to be eaten. The movie gives a true impending dread as the zombies slowly figure out how to get past each of the city's obstacles.

There are 3 other scenes that stick out for me as sheer genius in this film. They may sound really stupid, but you have to see it to appreciate it. One is where a military dude is about to throw a grenade and a zombie cuts off his hand with a machete before he's able to release it. His hand falls down, and he falls on top of the grenade, blowing himself up. HAHA. The other is a zombie chewing off one of those sexy belly button rings. I laughed out loud at both of these scenes. The other scene is where the people are trapped between the electric fence they created to keep out the zombies which they can't turn off, and the zombies themselves. Let's just say a feeding frenzy ensues.

There are also other little nuances, like Dennis Hopper picking his nose and saying "Zombies really creep me out." If you liked Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, or any other good zombie flick, you have to check this one out.

Awhile ago I had setup a Ubuntu Linux system for my mom to use. There were some issues with sound not working that I never really looked into. This morning I decided to look more into it.

Basically, the problem was that sound was not working. Looking at an 'lsmod' showed a snd-cmipci module loaded which I found out was the driver for my card (Crystal Media 8738). So I started checking log messages for any device not found messages but didn't find any. Sound applications, like Real Player, would just hang when they started. Doing an strace on them revealed them trying to open /dev/audio, /dev/dsp, or /dev/snd/pcmSomeHexCrap and just locking on that. Then I tried something simple:

echo a > /dev/audio

This should return immediately with some garbage sound sent to the device. But it didn't, and just hung.I thought it might be an IRQ or some sort of hardware conflict. I found on google mention of upgrading to a new ALSA driver (ALSA is what Ubuntu uses). So I downloaded the Alsa source, which then wanted a configured Linux kernel source. Ubuntu does not include this, and I didn't want to be fucking recompiling the kernel for sound.

So I said forget upgrading, I'll see if it's another problem. Just by chance, I SSH'ed remotely into the box and didn't login on the console. I tried the same echo command above and it worked. Then I tried aplay to play a sound and it worked. At this point sound was working when I didn't login to X. So some sound daemon X is starting is screwing things up. That narrowed it down.

I logged in on X and started looking at the lsof output of daemons that sound like they have something to do with sound . I found esd had /dev/dsp open, and a 'killall esd' later I was able to play sounds just fine. I ended up disabling the 'sound server' via System-Preferences-Sound as explained here, which said goodbye to esd. Real Player was happy now.

A Google search comes up with mention of using '-as 2' to esd which might help. I honestly don't give a shit. This just reinforces to me the pathetic state of sound on Linux.

In my Biology class we are talking about evolution. Originally, Lamarck described how characteristics are given to offspring. He said that characteristics acquired in an animal's life are passed on. This is simply incorrect, and the best example is that of a giraffe. Lamarck would say that a giraffe stretches his neck, and therefore its children will have long necks. That is like saying a human dyes her hair, and her offspring has the same color hair.

Darwin of course says that the process is natural selection. Those that are at a disadvantage to reproduce will die off. The idea is through generations and generations, mutations cause changes in an species, and some of those changes turn out to be advantageous. Those animals would reproduce more, and be more 'fit'.

Our teacher asked us to think of the Lamarck vs Darwin explanation for certain animals. One is the mole, which is blind. What would be the reason why the mole is blind? Lamarck would say that the eyes became less useful, and so became vestiges. That's wrong. The Darwinian explanation is that having eyes became disadvantageous. This could have been due to the eyes causing more problems than they solve since the animal is always underground. Dirt could get in the eyes, infections, etc. There was more likelihood that the blind moles survived and reproduced more than the seeing ones.

Another thing our teacher asked us to think about: tooth size in humans has been decreasing. I can see the Lamarck explanation, that large teeth are less useful than small teeth with the current diet. But this is not a Darwinian explanation. For that, there must be something that causes the big teeth humans to die off. Having small teeth must correlate somehow with being able to reproduce more.

The only explanation I can come up with is maybe large toothed humans had trouble finding mates and reproduced much less than the more attractive small toothed ones. That sounds ridiculous, but what other reason could it be?

There is also another concept called 'gene expression'. I don't know much about this, but I believe it is something like dormant characteristics or abilities that normally aren't available but are 'expressed' by some means. Maybe its being able to have an immunity to a certain type of disease. Basically evolution without the need for natural selection/offspring. That seems kinda crazy, and reminds me of the Lamarck view. I need to find out more about it.

Update: This paper lists some possible explanations for teeth size decreasing in humans. From the paper:

1. Dental reduction is a result of facial reduction. This in effect says that forces of selection don't effect teeth directly and presents a logical dilemma if we insist that teeth are directly affected by forces of natural selection.
2. Smaller teeth are an economic advantage; fewer resources go into making smaller teeth. A similar argument is made for why we can't synthesize vitamin C: in our ancestral past it was readily available. Early primates 'deleted' the ability to manufacture vitamin C as a biological economy measure. This argument has been dismissed by some as silly and inconsequential. Yet, measuring the 'biological cost' of growing teeth would be a creative laboratory project.
3. As early humans acquired culinary skills, teeth ceased to have survival value and they are just dwindling away due to the Probable Mutation Effect. This notion is complex, but is interesting for the light it sheds on some of our basic beliefs in biology.

Last weekend I ended my apartment lease and moved to my brother's house in Boca Raton. This is alot closer to FAU. I lose some privacy and a very nice apartment, but it's not too bad. Most of my time these days is spent in the library anyhow, and I pretty much have zero social life.

My first summer semester is over and I got an A in Chemistry I and a B+ in the lab. I should've got an A in the lab but they have some ridiculous online quiz system that the student is responsible to take before certain deadlines. I didn't meet the deadlines for a few of them simply because I forgot. I just think it's idiotic to make the students responsible for going to take a quiz. It should just be given in class.

Anyway, hopefully I can keep up the steam. There have been issues with how I'm going to fund this whole schooling thing but I think it will work out. I'll probably need to take a loan here and there.