Zuma Beach, Malibu

This is part of the Southern California asthetic that I love.

The big picture

Yup, it was pretty.

The young seagulls look different here than on the East Coast. I amused myself by watching them run from the waves.

Be Cool

Notice how he has exposed warm, high blood flow areas to the open air in ways he doesn't usually. Poor baby.

Bike Rack

the beautiful country

i love reading movie reviews after i've seen a movie. i'm interested to hear what people think about a movie, what they saw in it, etc., but i hate the way reviews give away parts of the movie and predispose one to a certain perspective of the movie. last night i saw "the beautiful country" a movie made by a fin about a vietnamese-american guy set in rural and urban vietnam, on the ocean, in a malaysian refugee camp, and in the rural and urban USA. a. o. scott of the nytimes said it was melodramatic and the script was underwritten. the onion's review was closer to my angle. reading the reviews made me realize that what i love about the movie is something similar to what i love about joan dideon's "a book of common prayer" and some david hockney paintings: the unremitting sparseness and the understated emotions.

Monrovia Canyon Park

It was great to find a park that was shady and green even in the LA summer heat. It was a nice little walk, about 3/4 mile to the falls. I didn't take a picture at the waterfall because it was mobbed with people, including a very apologetic but ineffective group of women with a rabid french bulldog. Walking uphill in the crappy air was a struggle though, even though I'm able to run farther (inside, on a treadmill) than ever before. It reminds me that I shouldn't exercise outside again until October.

This morning I looked at latimes.com for local news and noticed a review of the new Missy Elliot album. I perused it. It was savage. I looked at the other three reviews in the same section by different reviewers; they were all savage too. That surprises me and suggests the LA Times has more spine than I would have expected. The reviews aren't very helpful, but I don't want to ask too much. Simply being critical is beyond my expectations.

might as well enjoy LA

i'm a sucker for americana like drive-in movies. sunday i went with a crew of people to see bewitched and madagascar. we brought lebanese food prepared by armenians, beer, soda and twinkies. we broke out the lawn chairs and tailgated. click the image for more.

how to grill a portabella mushroom

how to cook everything suggested making a basting sauce of olive oil, onion or shallot and salt and pepper and to grill the mushroom until it was brown, about 5 minutes per side. i used the high setting on a gas grill and started with the cap side on top. i lavishly basted the mushroom when i put it on the grill and when i flipped it. i didn't see the mushroom change color, but after 5 minutes on each side, it started to drip, which made a lot of noise as the fire hisses from the drips. i took it off the heat about a minute after it started hissing, and it was fabulous. it was obviously cooked, but still incredibly moist. yum. that was the first time i'd used the grill in the complex - i think it'll be happening more often.

Wonderful New York.

central park and prospect park were amazingly green and lush. i enjoyed how green brooklyn was; there are so many more trees on the street than in manhattan. i loved the urban landscape too though. i went to the museum of natural history, had lunch with my cousin, went out to dinner every night, once at one of my favorite restaurants. i saw rs run a 10k race faster than she expected, met some of her friends, went to rutgers to see a friend and his lab, went to the crumpler camera bag mothership (no link due to annoying flash interface), bought books and read a lot. i spent a lot of time on the subway and other trains, which i really enjoyed. by the end i was ready for a break, and i got one - we spent saturday afternoon mostly inside after the race. this morning i got up at 2am pacific time, and was in my car in burbank by 10am pacific time. naturally i napped on the plane and more once i got home. the only lousy thing about new york was the hot and humid weather. it was gross, but i had been warned. rs keeps her apartment comfortably cool, and plenty of other places were air conditioned too. it was a great trip.

exam exam exam

the exam went ok. following is my brain dump about the exam. i apologize for the length.

one question (on neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons in the brain) was all i could have asked for. it asked a fair amount about the topic, but was explicit about what it was looking for. there were a couple aspects of the question that i didn't really know, but overall i thought it was ok.

another question was also good. it was an interesting angle on a topic (mRNA trafficking and local protein synthesis) that i'm pretty familiar with. i know a little bit about the angle, and so it came together as i was writing it. of course i would have liked to know more in some areas there too, but i'll live. whether i'll pass or not, i'm agnostic.

there was a list of six questions, and after i picked those two above questions, things got a little harder. i started to answer a question that clearly was written in response to a topic i chose that i'm really interested in: backpropagation, the travel of the signal of the neuron in what one might consider the wrong direction. ultimately though, the question asked more about downstream mechanisms than i knew, and i just couldn't put it together. after writing about half a page, half of which was unrelated to the question, i started re-assessing the other questions.

i decided to answer the question on cytoskeletal regulation, in spite of the fact that i thought it was a poorly conceived question and the other fact that it asked me to compare the regulation of the cytoskeleton in the neuron to that in migrating cells. guess what, i don't know very much about migrating cells. happily i knew a couple of examples of cytoskeletal regulation in migratory cells. unhappily, i didn't know enough to make a complete comparison.

for the last question, since i had decided i wasn't up to answering the backpropagation question and i hadn't studied synaptogenesis (i had eliminated it as a topic in an effort to strategize for the exam), i had to answer the question on alzheimers. the question had a broad component, and i felt good about my knowledge of the mechanisms of the pathology. however, the second part of the question was about potential treatments, and that was harder. i answered it anyway. it was my weakest effort, in part because it was the last question i answered and i wasn't as coherent. i'm annoyed at my relative lack of knowledge about potential treatments (i ended up choosing gene and antibody treatment), because if i was going to spend more time studying for that topic, that's what i would have chosen. i explicitly had the thought: the professor who is most likely to be asked to write that question is always interested in applications of basic science to treatment.

i don't know when i hear about whether i passed the exam.

i feel like i should write down things i learned about taking exams like that, but i also feel brain dead. none of the questions could be argued to be outside of the topics i wrote down, but some of them were definitely more in depth than i went, or deep in a different area than i studied deeply. i'm glad i was right about some things i studied.

if i was going to do it again, i would make a little fact sheet for myself on each topic with the main points. the table i made up of studies of neurogenesis were really helpful. generally, making a list of the main points of the experiments in the papers i read was really helpful. i found that sometimes i tried to get so much detail out of a paper that i wasn't solid enough on the basics. basics basics basics!

nervous and exhausted

i'm taking my exam today. i guess i should just start it. eek.

yesterday my roommate looked in the kitchen and said, "tell me you chased garlic-stuff olives with pepto-bismol."

yeah, i'm core like that.

i love pens

highlighters can suck if you're marking a paperback book, because you're reading fast enough that you close the one page on the other and it smears, or because the pages are so thin that you see the highlighting through them. on the other hand, highlighters rock for journal articles (printed out on printer paper, which is how most people seem to read them). it takes forever to read a single page, giving the highlighter a good chance to dry before the page is turned, and the paper is thick enough to minimize the bleed-through.

have i mentioned that i went on a pen splurge before my crazy exam studying period? my favorites: the pen-style liquid accent highlighter (above) and my perennial favorite, the uni-ball gel impact RT. both of them practically bleed ink onto the page, which i love. you can see think ink sloshing around in the liquid accent highlighter, and it's only as thick as a pen so it's easier to hold. the mark that it makes is very saturated, almost as good as the big fat big fat highlighters, according to my comparison in the store. they aren't bright enough to use the yellow and be easily able to pick out the section you highlighted - i like the pink. it's got a chisel end that's pretty hard, which is nice for control. it's small enough that the most you can highlight at one time is one line. however, i did like using the thin end of a fat highlighter to mark a line - there was a nice minimalism to it. since i can't have it all, i'll have this for now!

a PhD in procrastination

apparently it was important for me to figure out the probability that the exam that i'm going to take will exclude the same topics that i've eliminated from my study plan. the odds aren't as good as they were before. it's unlikely that i'll have to answer questions on topics i've eliminated, but i won't have as many options when it comes to picking which of the exam questions i want to answer (i now pick 4 of 6; i was expecting 4 of 8). i'm trying not to feel bitter that i wasn't told how things would be in advance.

when doctors are chumps

do you think drug companies can track how often a particular doctor prescribes a given drug? they can. if you had asked me that question, i would have leaned toward the cynical and said yes, but i wouldn't know how they did it. according to this article, insurance companies sell the information about what drugs are prescribed, keyed to a number assigned each doctor by the drug enforcement administration (DEA). the federal government and the AMA sell a list of doctors which includes their DEA number. the drug companies buy this information, cross reference it, and whammo, they've got the goods.

the next part of the article is stuff i knew, about the gross tactics drug companies use (and doctors fall for) to convince physicians to prescribe more of the company's drugs. what is compelling is that the data collected by the drug companies proves that doctors are swayed by this advertising, and the denial that doctors maintain. it's like 80% of people thinking they're in the top 20% of drivers. from the article:

In one survey, 61 percent of the residents at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center reported that they themselves are unmoved by drug company gifts. But when asked if they thought their colleagues were swayed, 84 percent said yes.

i have sympathy for doctors. they're busy, and it takes time to keep up with the peer-reviewed literature. often, they want samples for their patients who struggle to afford medications. my old allergist was a great guy, and i was impressed with how he handled the drug reps. still, i think it's the fundamental arrogance of the medical profession that leads to doctors to believe they are not affected by the lobbying of the drug reps.

by the way, i renounce my previous paean to cold medicine. after 4 days of steady sudafed, i'm sick of the stuff. it makes me nervous and irritable. i'm still sick.

What's that hair for?

Isn't the lovely feathery hair in the bottom of his feet adorable?

Since I've been sick, I've been letting Mac lead our walks. He tends to want to stop and smell everything, and I'm happy to walk at a slower pace than usual. I've been a few places on campus that I haven't been before. Usually we just follow his nose, but every once in a while he looks at me to figure out where we are going. When he gets it in his head that I'm deciding, he can't be swayed. We'll stand there until I make a move in one direction or another.

the joy of (cold) drugs

my feelings about cold medicine have ranged from agnostic to antagonistic, but right now, i'm a big fan. i've got some cruddy sore throat, temperature regulation and headache-dizziness sickness. i've decided that if i can stuff myself full of medicine to at least prevent myself from getting a chest cold and making my sore throat worse, i will. here's my regimen. every 4 hours i take 2 advil or tylenol, two sudafed and use a zicam nasal swab. before bed i take two benedryl. the benedryl doesn't work as well as the sudafed, but i don't think i could sleep very well on sudafed. and of course i'm taking my everyday allergy meds: clarinex, advair, nasonex. i'd really like to find a decongestant to take at night, but it sounds like all decongestants are stimulatory.

the problem this is creating with my studying is not making me panic, although i don't know why not.

Beckman Institute

The focus is a little off here, but I still like the picture. I feel like a bit of a sucker when I photograph something that is designed to be appealing.

Recently I've spent most of my time studying for my upcoming advancement to candidacy exams, beating myself up for not studying more, and procrastinating. I went to San Francisco for kj's graduation. I was happy to get to be there, very happy to see kj, and acutely heartsick for San Francisco.

I hate LA