so tomorrow, oct 1, is china's 60th anniversary. well, it's right now, since they are 15 hours ahead of me. anyways, they are making sure everything is going well and as planned. they were the first country to distribute h1n1 vaccines. stuff like that. so much preparation. so much that they are even changing the weather to make sure it is nice!!! that's so cool. in 60 years, china has basically done everything! they have controlled america. they have controlled the world's economy. and now they control the weather. wowow! i wonder what they'll be able to accomplish if they have a 100 year anniversary. will be something amazing. anyways, i kind of want to watch china's anniversary show. i guess i'll find a video online or something. too bad youtube is blocked by the great firewall of china. and it is midterms time.

China Hopes, and Tries, for Rain-Free Festivities

By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: September 30, 2009

BEIJING — As nearly 190,000 dancers, politicians, soldiers and fighter pilots prepared for the highly synchronized extravaganza marking the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on Thursday, perhaps no one was feeling more performance anxiety than Guo Hu, Beijing’s chief weatherman.

While meteorologists in much of the world are simply charged with forecasting rain or shine, Mr. Guo and his colleagues at the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Station were also responsible for making sure the weather is of the crowd-pleasing variety. “If we make a mistake with our work, the impact will be huge,” Mr. Guo, a soft spoken scientist, told a news conference this week. “We are under a lot of pressure.”

Meteorologists said their efforts to prevent foul weather on Oct. 1 involved satellites, 400 scientists, cloud-probing lasers and a squadron of transport planes capable of sprinkling liquid nitrogen into pregnant clouds. “It is the first time in Chinese history that artificial weather modification on such a large scale has been attempted,” Cui Lianqing, an air force meteorologist, told Global Times newspaper last week.

During the Olympics, technicians fired off 1,100 rockets that delivered chemical catalysts into a band of clouds, and, according to the Chinese media, provoked rainfall that might have otherwise soaked the opening ceremonies.

Last winter, as drought parched Beijing and the surrounding countryside, aging antiaircraft batteries on the city’s outskirts shot more than 500 pencil-thin sticks of silver iodide into the heavens. Coincidentally or not, three days of snowfall graced the capital soon after.

Cloud seeding, as its known, is not an exact science. In fact, many scientists in the United States remain dubious over claims that humans can increase precipitation or forestall bad weather. But such cynicism has not dampened China’s enthusiasm for rainmaking.

According to the China Academy of Meteorological Sciences, more than 37,000 people are employed in weather modification nationwide. These programs cost $63 million a year, but the society claims they produce benefits worth $1.7 billion.

Success for National Day would be priceless. On Wednesday, 18 planes were prepared to deliver payloads of dry ice, salt and silver iodide should clouds prove menacing. If daybreak on Thursday brings fog, 48 specialized vehicles will cough out streams of air to chase away any miasma that could obscure the colored streams released by 150 fighter jets.

“The air force pays high attention to the artificial weather manipulation and we believe that the more equipment applied, the larger the area we can manipulate and the better weather we can have,” Mr. Cui, the air force meteorologist, told Xinhua, the official news agency, on Tuesday.

If the latest forecasts are accurate, the air force can relax. During the weather news conference on Tuesday, Wang Jianjie, deputy of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, declared that there would be rain between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. on Thursday but that clouds would yield to patchy sunshine by the time President Hu Jintao addressed the nation from Tiananmen Square. In the first minutes of Thursday, Beijing was shrouded with fog and already being doused by steady drizzle.

Otherwise, Ms. Wang said, the main worry was a potentially strong northerly breeze, although it was not clear whether it could impact the evening’s firework display. Despite its prodigious abilities, the bureau, she allowed, is not yet in a position to stop the wind.

so, 3 japanese bands are coming to san francisco soon.

mono is coming on my birthday, which is after midterms, and i really like them. i want to go, but i have already seen them, and concert is on monday, which means 8 am class the next day. to go?

melt-banana is coming on oct 30, which is a friday. that is nice, but i don't really care for their music. they must have exciting shows, since they are a noise band. yea, the guitarist gets bloody noses because the music is so loud or something.

dir en grey is coming back last week of november, which is before my finals. i like dir en grey kind of. i haven't listened to them much after their horrible "marrow of the bone" album. but their old songs are still special to me, kind of. and they realized their new stuff is horrible and play old songs now. too bad it's before finals. anyways i've seen them before. but sigh.

so apparently, some scientists pointed their radio telescopes at the center of the galaxy and found some molecules like ethyl formate. which means, the center of the galaxy tastes like raspberries. yay. there's also some toxic chemicals there, but that's not important. raspberries!

today is confucius' birthday. he is 2560 years old now.

blue sky. i am sitting in the university center, occupying and wasting space, like a good american. studying, or at least pretending to. actually i am sitting in a seat at a table with space for six. being an inhibitor by taking up space. it is okay though, the room is probably 1/5 saturated, so there are a lot of spaces for substrates to bind. studying biochem. anyways, today i retired my dell laptop. it's been with me for a good three years, but now i've moved on. school has forced upon me a new lenovo, so i moved all my stuff onto this new laptop. only took five weeks. but i miss my dell. please forgive me, dell. i've been through so much with you. it's time to rest. anyways, am i supposed to discharge the battery before i put it away?

so some conservationist named chris packham said that people should just let the pandas die. and now people are angry. but if it was some other animal that wasn't so cute, i don't think people would really care. pandas are really a flaw of evolution. why would a carnivore suddenly become a bamboo eating animal? they can't even digest it well. so odd. and this makes them lazy and sit around doing nothing all day. but then i guess hardcore evolutionary biologists can say they evolved to be cute because humans have this attraction to cute things, so they will save the pandas. so the pandas don't have to worry about anything and can eat bamboo with their meat digestive system. they will be saved by the humans. that would be ultimate parasitism. too bad pandas don't like to breed in captivity.

when i sleep, sometimes i will randomly wake up and wonder where i am. also wonder what i'm doing. (which is sleeping, obviously) but then i always panic and think i should be somewhere else. it's really annoying. it's a new disease. i need to take medication for this.

maybe it is good to just think short term.

wow taiwan is totally going to get ripped apart. first dalai lama comes. (tibet wants to separate from china.) now they are inviting rebiya kadeer. (uighur leader that basically wants to split from china also.) kadeer says she will come, but it depends on whether government wants to issue her a visa. poor taiwan. either way is doom.

so the school sent us a little monthly "magazine" thing (6 pages) that summarizes a lot of the recent research in pharmaceuticals. (good for me, so i don't have to read entire journal articles!) there's a lot of research about mrsa (methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus), some about pneumonia, hiv, and others. one of the hiv articles was interesting. it was from the new england journal of medicine 2008, july. (which is so long ago, i wish they summarized more recent articles.. maybe not much is going on in pharmaceuticals? ha. yea right.) anyways. its about hiv transmission in breast milk.

it says "HIV-1 transmission to infants through breast milk is problematic in many countries. HIV positive mothers are advised not to breast feed, but this is unavoidable in areas where breast milk is critical for survival. Current studies have shown that administering retroviral prophylaxis to infants is promising for reducing transmission."

so what this basically says is, some places can't afford to not breast feed (critical for survival), so they are spreading hiv to their kids. so to fix this problem, just give the babies some retrovirals! drugs! of course! because if mothers can't afford to buy milk, they can obviously use the alternative method of buying drugs for their kids. administered once daily, for weeks and weeks!

maybe milk should be sent to those countries instead... 100% elimination of hiv transmission from breastmilk. nobel prize, please. thanks.

nothing to say. just criticize. annoying.

i made bitter melon soup today. it tasted... bitter, but i guess that is still a success. i guess it is very easy, but i still feel it is an accomplishment. maybe. hopefully i can eventually make beef noodle soup. that is my goal. maybe that is easy. it doesn't seem to be. at least to make it taste delicious. or maybe it is just me. i suck at cooking.

so uh, rammstein returns after a four year hiatus from music. they took all this time off and return with a wonderful song called "pussy". the chorus goes something like... "you have a pussy, i have a dick, so what's the problem? let's do it quick." and the video which premiered today is basically hardcore porn (of them), and occassionally them playing instruments. mostly other instruments. they can't even post the video on youtube. it's actually hosted on a porn site. and these are 40+ year old men, most of whom are married. so weird. and such a bad song. glad to know, rammstein spent these last 4 years working hard. no pun intended.

2 Rules to succeed in life:
1. Don't tell people everything you know.

there's a chinese story about a king who challenges one of his servants to a horse race. they each have 3 horses. the king's top horse is faster than the servant's fastest horse. the king's second horse is faster than the servant's second horse. and the king's third horse is faster than the servant's third horse. so how does the servant win? sacrifice his slowest horse against the king's fastest horse. then the servant's first horse can beat the king's second horse and the servant's second horse can beat the king's third horse. so smart.

it works. when i was in swim team in high school, i was slow, so i was always the sacrifice, swimming against people that would definitely beat me. so i lost miserably often. but then the others on the team could beat the slow ones on the other team.

but what if the servant's fastest horse can't even beat the king's slowest horse? what happens then?

that's how i feel now.

yesterday, a speaker came and talked about how it really feels nice when patients come back. maybe i am just negative, but i think that means the treatment didn't work. or maybe it is a chronic condition. then there are too many chronic conditions. need more cures.

ugh. a class just about calculations wouldn't need to exist if the medical field hadn't been so sloppy to begin with.

so apparently, someone used my name and signed me up for some class about counseling at community college... i hope that person gets an A.

damn. is there any yakuza movie or drama where one of the members actually gets out of the world and "lives a normal life"? seems like it can never happen. when it gets almost good, they always die. or get dragged back in. it's like once they are in, they are doomed to die horribly. at least they get cool body tattooes.

today i helped a blind student back to her dorm. she got lost in the university center and was walking in a circle. i feel bad for not immediately asking her if she needed help. oh well. she must be a strong person, facing the world that she can't even see.

i think this is pretty cool.

Devil's dung herb could combat swine flu, Taiwan scientists say


A folk remedy from an herb known as "dung of the devil" because of its rank smell could lead scientists to new drugs for swine flu, a Taiwanese study said.

Extracts from the plant's roots, bought from a Chinese herb shop in Taipei, were more potent against the A(H1N1) swine flu virus in lab tests than was the prescription anti-viral medicine teamantadine, a Kausiung Medical University research team wrote in a study scheduled for publication on Sept. 25 in the ACS Journal of Natural Products.

The pungent plant, Ferula assafoetida, is a flu folk remedy of long standing and was used during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the scientists wrote. Its individual compounds hadn't ever been studied systematically, they said. Among other uses, the herb has also been used in folk medicine for cancer, HIV and rheumatism.

The study shows that compounds from the plant "may serve as promising lead components for new drug development against influenza A(H1N1) viral infection," the scientists wrote.

Researchers in the lab treated some virus-infected cells with compounds extracted from the devil dung plant and others with amantadine, a generic drug.

Most of the compounds were better at killing the virus than the existing medicine, the researchers wrote. Current strains of H1N1 are resistant to amantadine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in interim recommendations on Tuesday.

Such lab tests aren't proof that a medicine works, but could be precursors to trials of a new compound in animals and eventually humans.

A(H1N1) influenza has become the world's fastest-moving flu pandemic, with cases in 177 countries since it was identified in April, according to the CDC. Lab tests confirmed A(H1N1) in at least 2,837 deaths and more than 254,206 infections as of Aug. 30, though most infected patients aren't tested, according to the Geneva-based World Health Organization.

today a woman named victoria hale came to talk. she's pretty pro. ucsf, johns hopkins, fda, genentech. she even has a wikipedia article!!! (my goal in life.) anyways, she started some pharmaceutical company, but it's nonprofit. so that's really weird in a field that is driven by greed. surprisingly, it is pretty successful. (or at least she says it is, and many websites too). one of the differences is that she treats diseases that americans don't care about anymore, such as visceral leishmaniasis, malaria, diarrhea, and soon parasitic worms. she treats a lot of the diseases in india, so there isn't any competition with any of the profit-driven corporations.

but what if one day she fixes all the diseases of poverty and brings the world to the same standard. then she must compete with the other companies. who will win? her companies will be sponsored by donations and grants and stuff like that. but major corporations will have shareholders, and other greedy people that want to get a piece of that. if they have profit, will they be able to set lower prices than nonprofits? i should learn more business.

or will that situation never happen? again, the problem of healthcare is killing off your own job. drugs require sick people. drugs heal sick people. will drugs ever be developed to heal them forever? then it's over for the drugs, right? no one sane would really do that to their own job right? that would be too altruistic.

or is it just impossible for diseases to go away? it did happen to smallpox. all gone, eradicated. (well, except for the tiny samples they still keep for research and bioterrorism). would a nonprofit want to do that also? eradicate all sickness? their mission is to make sure everyone has the basic needs.

or will basic needs increase? will poverty just be a higher standard? before, a poor person just died under a tree. now a poor person still has metal and plastic trash to build a shelter. is that a higher form of poverty? can the gap really be decreased?

maybe not. while the altruistic fight for the poor, the selfish bring up the rich. while the poor is fighting tuberculosis and cholera, the rich is fighting erectile dysfunction and short eyelashes (bimatoprost makes your eyelashes longer, apparently). once one step is done, there is a new step. i guess it just depends on which one works faster.

so which one will work faster? does it just depend on which one has more money? will people move towards supporting altruistic acts? or will the profiteers have more support? the rich have a lot of money, but the poor are many, which area under the curve is larger?

is this altruistic action really beneficial? evolutionarily, it seems like a failure. still can't really explain most (if not all) of the altruistic phenomena in the world. or is it really moving in the right direction? if everyone worked together, we could all progress, but there's always the few to take advantage.

or does it not really matter? in the long run, we are all dead.


what a long post. i should stop for a few days. need to study.

plug and chug. life is just one big plug and chug problem. too bad no one knows the equation that we are supposed to plug into.

maybe that's why i always get the wrong answer.

i am filth. trash. garbage. waste. unrecyclable materials. plastic. overflowing the world. polymer too stable. cannot break down. but why is this so unstable?

today is 09/09/09. lucky day. especially for chinese people. because 9 has the same sound as the word that means "a long time." (it also has the same sound as alcohol, but i guess that is disregarded.) so apparently, it's a good day to get married today.

this morning, at 5 AM, the smoke detector started running low on batteries, so it made that annoying loud beeping sound. so i had to climb out of bed, find a chair, find where the smoke detector was, move the chair, climb on the chair, disconnect smoke detector, and pull out the batteries.

later today, i signed up for the testing on how to give injections. my partner and i were 3rd on the list. 2 pairs go at a time, so the first 4 people went in, and we were there. we filled up our syringes, did the oral examination. then it was time to do injections. too bad there was only 1 guy that was certified to certify us, and he had to leave at that time. so we have to do it again later. so scared and close to heart attack, only to have it prolonged for a week.

why can't this week be over?

today is labor day. it is always the first monday of september. but no one knows what it means anymore. so apparently it is because of worker strikes and union protection and stuff like that. it started in canada. now it is in america.

so i sometimes hear that it's more common to get hit by lightning than by being attacked by a shark. but how do they measure those? for the shark, do they get the stats by dividing the number of attacks by the number of people at the beach? or how long the people spend in the beach. that must be really hard to measure. also, the lightning. what is the denominator? how often lightning happens? or how often lightning hits the ground? does it include lightning in the skies? i would like to know.

finally watched millenium mambo, by hou hsiao hsien. i originally planned to watch it three years ago. then life happened and i forgot about it. then suddenly found it again and watched it. anyways, hhh's movies are always so... empty. but that is life, i guess.

in this life, we are supposed to prove ourselves.

so why do i keep disproving myself?

What can America learn from Switzerland and France about healthcare reform?
By Mark Lange Mark Lange Tue Sep 1, 5:00 am ET

San Francisco – Anyone put off by the poster that paints President Obama as a "socialist joker" might take a look at the typical American in the mirror. We already combine the worst features of both socialism and market forces in healthcare, because we can't seem to learn from the best examples in other countries.

It's time we did – because that's where the real choices are. And eventually, we'll have to choose.

On the (fully) socialized side, US Medicare and Medicaid consume 8 percent of our national income – about the same share as socialist European systems. Except that theirs cover everyone, not just the elderly. And we've only just begun to pay for our own collectivism, since the bulk of our boomers haven't retired yet. When that gray wave crashes on our status quo shores, it'll wipe away trillions in national wealth.

Then we pile on uniquely American layers of private-sector "innovation" in healthcare, forcing us to spend double what other rich countries do:

•Reimbursement rates disproportionately enrich specialists, who are better rewarded for being "partialists" doing procedures and heroic interventions. We scarcely reward outcomes or results – most of our incentives actually preempt prevention.

•Primary care doctors are quitting front-line healthcare to join boutique practices in gated community medicine – because good primary care has become nearly impossible in practice.

•Insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists have written fat profit subsidies and price supports into federal legislation, particularly the Medicare drug benefit, inflating costs unsustainably.

Add the cost of our elderly socialized systems to what employers and families spend for coverage with private insurers – when they can afford it, which tens of millions of our citizens can't – and Americans burn more than $7,000 each year on healthcare. That's more than twice the average for other rich nations.

For all of that money, we get better quality – right? Well, no. Our health system ranks 37th on the list of wealthy nations, on a definitive range of outcomes, according to the World Health Organization.

Enter T.R. Reid's new book, "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care." It makes a critically important contribution to the conversation about reform, by taking a clear-eyed look at what is actually working in other countries.

While the right feeds culture-war flames of indignation about so-called death panels that would euthanize the elderly, and the left berates Mr. Obama for backing down on an opaquely defined and unaffordable "public option," Mr. Reid starts our interview with a bracing statistic that frames the debate in simple moral terms.

He points out that some 18,000 Americans die each year, simply because they don't have access to the basic medical treatment that would save their lives, according to the Institute of Medicine.

Now consider the lucky among us: Even among those with access, another 200,000 perish from preventable medical errors and avoidable hospital infections. Overall, our failure to structure and deliver effective healthcare is 70 times more lethal to our citizens, every year, than the September 11 attacks.

We can do better. "What I saw in all the other developed countries," Reid says, "is that they decided that a rich society has an obligation to see to it that anybody who's sick can see a doctor. All of the rich countries have agreed on this except one. The United States has never made that basic moral commitment."

Reid, a veteran foreign correspondent, spotlights three paths that other countries have taken to walk their talk. A "Bismarck" system of private insurers and providers – financed through payroll deductions, but universal and portable – works for Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. Britain runs a "Beveridge" system (similar to what the US provides military veterans). Taiwan, France, and Canada run national single-payer health plans funded by government through taxes (like Medicare, which we currently provide to 36 million of our own elderly).

What America can't continue to do forever is operate a mishmash of market and government systems that has become the worst of both worlds. Reform will be as simple – and as difficult – as deciding on one approach and executing it.

Notably, once citizens in other nations have agreed that healthcare is a moral imperative and a right, they've found ways to summon an equal measure of individual responsibility for healthcare that sounds … well, pretty conservative.

"In Britain," Reid says, "if some fat guy is sitting at the bar with a pint and a plate of chips, a complete stranger will walk over to him and say, "Hey, mate – go easy on all that. I'm not paying for your heart attack." What true conservative would choose a fat tax over the simple stigma of a snack attack?

Reid wonders aloud whether Britain's peer pressure amounts to a "nanny state." But the effect seems the opposite, and far more effective: a health system where choices are made by individuals held accountable to family and community. Where the irresponsible, rather than being policed by bureaucrats, make a direct impression on fellow citizens, right where it hurts – in their wallets. Sounds more like a "neighbor state."

"I want to see us get this done," Reid says, well after midnight. "If we could find the political will to cover everybody, the other countries can show us the way. They've all done it, for a lot less money than we spend. And they're getting far better health outcomes."

Among all of the issues Americans are struggling with right now, healthcare reform is generating a fearful focus inward.

Let's just take a deep breath, turn our heads, and learn. It won't hurt a bit.

my brilliant idea was shot down. it's okay. i can make it better.

真的找不到, 絕望
告訴我, 真的不是只有這樣
完全, 全部都是這樣
無望