ramblings~
Yijin + girls! '05
Xiz, Ms Wang + guys! '04
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* 06s78
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* dearly beloved ms wang!
* 03S77
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http://osteele.com/words/aargh
qy lived on 4:56 PM
- 03S78 forever -
Ever wonder why?
I have recently come across a delightful book "Ever wonder why" written by Douglas B.Smith. Its a fun read, perfect if you happen to have a lazy weekend afternoon. Some edited excerpts:
Ever wonder why...
when a lady spurns a gentleman, she is said to give him "the cold shoulder"?
Despite current usage, the phrase does not have a romantic origin. In fact, the shoulder in "cold shoulder" is actually a shoulder of mutton!
In the early nineteenth century, when the phrase was first recorded by Sir Walter Scott, it was customary for a hostess to serve hot meat to visitors who had overstayed their welcome. Since the cold meat given to the unwanted guest was usually a shoulder of mutton, the hostess was said to be "giving him the cold shoulder" -- of mutton, that is.
someone suspected of expressing insincere emotion is said to be shedding crocodile tears?
This expression arises from the fact that crocodiles often appear to shed tears, but not for emotional reasons. (Well actually, we wouldnt know would we?) When a crocodile takes a big bite of something, the food presses against the top of its mouth, causing a watery liquid to ooze from its eyes.
Men's clothes have buttons on the right and women's clothes have buttons on the left?
It is easier for right-handed people to push buttons on the right through holes on the left, and since most people are right-handed, what's the matter with women's clothes?
When buttons first came into being, they were very expensive and worn primarily by the well-to-do. Women that class did not usually dress themselves but were dressed by maids. Since a maid would be facing a woman she is dressing, dressmakers put the buttons on the maid's right and thus, the woman's left where they have remained.
so many coin banks are shaped like pig?
Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense, orange clay called "pygg". When housewives began having coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became known as "pygg banks". In the 19th century, an English potter misunderstood the meaning of the old term "pygg" and took it to mean "pig". So when someone asked him to make a pygg bank, he made one shaped like a pig. (I think its more probably he was just trying to be funny). The idea caught on, and soon everyone wanted a "piggy" bank.
we nod our heads for "yes" and shake it for "no"?
The best explanation for the origin of this comes from Charles Darwin, who related these gestures to a baby's nursing habits. The forward head motion, or nod, is supposedly a breast-seeking pattern while shaking the head from side to side is a breast-rejecting motion. This is supported by the fact that a baby born deaf and blind will still nod for "yes" and shake its head for "no".
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY...
there is a best man at a wedding?
In days of old, when young man often went to neighbouring villages to find their wives-to-be, it was not uncommon for a young man to encounter heavy resistance from the girl's kinfolk or perhaps her other suitors. To help overcome such resistance, a young man would take with him a strong and faithful friend. It was the job of this friend to help fend off attackers during the abduction and stand guard by the couple during the wedding. This wonderful friend, became known as the groom's best man.
ryaniq lived on 2:16 PM
- 03S78 forever -
Diving Pictures
Why so dead again? Post something lehh...
 Clown fishes (Nemo) with their anemone, symbiosis
 Look closely. Little shrimps are nibbling on our instructor's (Hans) tongue All pictures courtesy of Kristy Fu (03S76? can't rmb)
qy lived on 6:47 PM
- 03S78 forever -
Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus
haha..why holidays liao everyone still talk about school?
My input...
Been a kickass week...end-of-posting test, then a long 84km ultramarathon race, then went scuba (the title) diving with a bunch of medicine people..
anyhow..a lot of people say diving is super dangerous etc...so i wanted to find some stats to disprove that...haha..
So from the UK health and Safety Executive
http://www.hse.gov.uk/education/statistics.htm
The average annual risk of death of scuba (1 in 200,000 dives is about the same as surgical anaesthetia (1 in 185,000 operations) and less than half of pregnancy (1 in 8,200 maternities).
From the Ontario Coalition for Better Cycling
The average fatalities per million hours of scuba (1.98) is actually less than 25% of normal motorcycling on the road (8.80) , less than one-eighth the risk of flying on an airplane (15.58) and only a little higher than general staying alive (1.53)!
hahaah
i think everyone should try scuba diving...at least once..:)
qy lived on 5:57 AM
- 03S78 forever -
from a natsci
haha first of all - i doubt i can match ryan's flair for the written word. i tried to persuade yifan to humour us all, but apparently he prefers watching movies than to impress us all.. prove me wrong, bun! =D
when i last posted here, it was slightly more than a week before my exams; when i'm writing this, i already know what my results are haha. in an impressive display of efficiency, my department has posted our results within 3 days of the conclusion of our exams. it could have been faster - although our exams ended on monday, us geneticists were down for a 20 minute viva on either tuesday or wednesday. by thursday, 10.15am, our results were pasted on a board at senate house (which is the tradition here). i just came back from a departmental bbq dinner, and apparently this efficiency is repeated yearly. lecturers typically finish marking their scripts within a day, and since the genetics course offered here is quite fixed ("pure" geneticists take all 5 courses offered by the department), that helped a lot in coordinating the quick publication of results.
unlike the medics, us natscis have reached a juncture in our lives where we decide where our next step would be. mine's no less uncertain - i plan to prolong my student life next year, and although i've already fulfilled the academic criteria of my conditional offer, i have yet to secure the means to fund myself. i'm cautiously optimistic that things will work out though!
i guess the third year is when we start getting a taste of what our professional lives might be - medics start to, tremblingly, offer their first diagnoses to their patients; natscis start to, blur-ly, grope in the dark for results for their project, if they chose to do one. i have to say my final year project is one of the highlights of my course - i loved it to bits. my project made me realise it's still very possible to somehow mesh my interests in bio and programming together - i spent 8 weeks being a lousy part-time programmer, spending lots of time writing code, and even more time debugging it. i had a great supervisor as well, which made everything even more enjoyable!
while medics are constantly under pressure to remember what they've learnt, it's sort of the reverse in the science world - things change so rapidly, we're actively encouraged to forget anything beyond, say, 3 years! models that were envisaged to explain the genetic relationships between genes get refined by biochemical work; ideas that one might consider to be "common-sensical" start to be doubted because of current evidence (eg: synonymous mutations, in which a point mutation did not affect the amino acid being coded. it's a subclass of silent mutations, as silent mutations can mean mutations that substitutes an amino acid of similar properties. anyway, current research have found that in some cases, synonymous mutations can cause "translational pausing", which in severe cases causes the distortion of the protein structure as well!) it's perfectly okay in the scientific world to admit one's ignorance - lecturers often tell us to speak to someone else if the question we asked fell outside of their specific fields! they feel that the other guy's in a better position to know what has happened in their field in the last few months.
anyway, i'm glad that i did my science degree here - over here, the science courses are regarded to be one of the most rigorous ones offered by the uni (that hasn't prevented the medics from joking that if they fail their exams, they'll drop back down into a natsci course!). i get good lectures, get spoon-fed excellent notes by some lecturers, get to do projects with great supervisors, get 1-on-1 supervisions with highly-esteemed professors, and we have more weeks of holidays than weeks of school. what more can i ask for? =P
i'm starting to get incoherent cos i need to go to sleep now. it's 3.40am and the birds are starting to chirp outside my window cos the sun will rise in an hour's time. goodnigh.. erm, morning!
Yi Jin lived on 3:39 AM
- 03S78 forever -
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