"We squander health
In search of wealth;
We scheme and toil, and save,
Then squander wealth
In search of health;
And all we get's the grave;

We live and boast of what we own;
We die . . . and only get a stone."


"Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die."

it would be weird if equations in math, chemistry, physics were all negligibly time dependent, so all our equations are simplifications for this time frame. like, say PV=nRT (which is a very simplified already) has some other variable time in it, but it is negligible in our time, making it true during the years 104934 BC and 3049358 AD. and after that it drops off and changes to another equation. but we would never know, because it's not in our time frame!

so i was reading about pixel aspect ratio, because i was confused why dvds would show up as 854x480 pixels, but display the information as 720x480 pixels when i looked at the codec information. turns out tv pixels aren't square. computer pixels are square. so everything is screwed up. tv pixels are fat at a ratio of 1:1.186 (on NTSC tvs, PAL tvs are different, cry cry). so yea. that's ridiculous! a pixel is supposed to be the smallest unit of display. why would they make it such a weird size!? or why did they make computer pixels square if the tv pixels were already fat rectangles!? ughghhghg. well, at least the new HDTVs are using square pixels now. so it will match up. i guess.

another annoying thing is framerates, 24p, 25p, 30i. ugh. pulldown and all that stuff. PAL makes me sad, but i guess NTSC makes the rest of the world sad. kind of like fahrenheit, but even NTSC is more widespread than fahrenheit.

anyways, i propose a 32 or 64 or 128 frames per second. that would be good. a power of two would be divisible in half all the way down, so easy to edit. can easily slow down sequences without so much fast motion. maybe.

i had like 8 cups of green tea. my head is running like crazy. can't concentrate. but tea tastes so good.

in classes, they always demonstrate dna mutation by random error of dna polymerase by playing telephone. first person hears something and they tell next person. and next person. and by the end, the message is completely different. but this is wrong! because each person is a new polymerase with different abilities to remember and recite what is heard, so too many variables are being changed. it should be a person repeating the thing and wiping his memory at the same time and adding something to his memory at the same time. or something like that.

Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finnish schoolboy who murdered eight people at his high school in November 2007, wrote on his blog that "stupid, weak-minded people are reproducing ... faster than the intelligent, strong-minded" ones. Auvinen thought through the philosophical implications of Darwin's work and came to the conclusion that human life is like every other type of animal life: it has no extraordinary value. The Columbine killers made similar arguments. One of the shooters, Eric Harris, wore a "Natural Selection" shirt on the day of the massacre.

anyways it is almost 150 years since the publication of "origin of species".

one thing i don't like is the distinction between natural selection and artificial selection. because humans are natural too, so our actions should be natural. we are selecting for certain traits just like other animals are selecting for certain traits. when growing fruits, we select the largest, best tasting fruits. when bees pollinate flowers, they select the ones that appeal to them most (based on UV reflection, colors, accessibility). so in the same way, we are selecting for another species development. why are human actions of selection suddenly boosted (or downgraded) to another level? based on this idea, we are a product of nature. yet we do not do natural things?

so what is artificial?

today in biochem, we were talking about polymerase chain reaction (pcr), a method to copy a piece of dna at an exponential rate. so i started to write out powers of 2. and there's like crazy patterns. at least in the first 30 powers.

2^0 is the first power of two to be in ones (10^0).
2^4 is the first power of two to be in tens (10^1).
2^7 is the first power of two to be in hundreds (10^2).
2^10 is the first power of two to be in thousands (10^3).
2^14 -> 10^4
2^17 -> 10^5
2^20 -> 10^6

and it keeps going on. the powers of two always change in the order of 4,3,3. the differences between that number pattern is a pattern of 1,0,-1. the differences between that number pattern is a pattern of 1,-1. and the differences between those are 2. 2. 2. 2. 2. 2.

that's weird, i think.

anyways if 2 is to a power of a multiple of 10, the number moves up by thousands.

2^10 = 1024
2^20 = somewhere in 1000000
2^30 = somewhere in 1000000000

and then it keeps going. i guess that makes sense because its just multiplying 1024 by itself. and being 2.4% too large. so i guess eventually it will get large enough to fall out of that rule. but my new discovery will be set only the small range of numbers! so yay.

time to study relevant material.

set my sights on open skies.
but couldn't fly.
what am i?

heisenberg uncertainty principle. the more you know one thing, the less you know about another. must do some linear algebra to figure out how to get the maximum. but some things are more necessary. i guess that can be factored in to the equation. is that even the right way to think of heisenberg uncertainty principle? i don't even know. all we learned was "we can't know everything." that sucks. i guess economics tell us that too (trade-offs and opportunity cost). and biology (sexual selection vs natural selection). and chemistry (side products from reactions). and politics (politicians).

yay for schrodinger's cat. the cat that is alive and dead at the same time. both are there until witnessed, then it is either or. need to witness more. observe. observer effect. observer will affect what is trying to be witnessed. that sucks too. how can we know for sure then? if the only way to know for sure is to see it, but seeing it makes it change? i guess that is life.

anyways, i don't know anything about physics. i hope i am thinking the correct way.

i had a dream that i got a ringworm infection on my face. i guess that would be tinea faciei. anyways, it was a huge annular lesion. all over my face. even to the hair areas like my chin, so cannot treat with topical antifungals. ketoconazole. gotta use systemic treatment. cannot dispense that myself. gotta get a dermatologist to prescribe. make sure i don't accidentally over-the-counter myself with hydrocortisone. then it will get worse and become tinea incognito. that makes it worse, but then we can know more surely it is a fungal infection. dermatophytes suck. i'm a fungi. fun guy. harhar.

everyone wants a chance to be unfair. that makes things fair.

last night i was sleeping (obviously) and then i suddenly woke up. and i thought "oh no my left leg is going to cramp." and it did. it hurt. my leg hurt today. i hope your leg didn't hurt today. it is not a comfortable feeling. pain is not comfortable. unless you live in backwards land where comfortable is uncomfortable and uncomfortable is comfortable. but that loops forever.

zero is the entity of having no entity. but it is an entity itself. oh no.

the world just is

i feel as i bad as i felt in high school. maybe because i'm listening to a lot of old music. where is happiness?

nothing here, move on.



actually there is something here. just not here.

tsai ming-liang is still the most confusing director ever. slow and "boring". some people say it's not boring. some people say it is. anyways, i watched vive l'amour this weekend. it is about 3 people that share an apartment and they don't really know about each other. one woman is a real estate agent, so she's selling the apartment. she uses it to have her affairs with men. the second guy is the man she's affairing with. and the third guy is some random guy that stole the key and uses the apartment to escape from reality. it was slow. i don't know why mr tsai is so famous. all his movies are so hypersexual. it's too much. there's also almost no dialogue. the first line is like 20 minutes into the movie. the whole script could be written on one page. if he added some music, it would make it drag less. instead it's so life-like. these people have no soundtracks in their lives.

i suddenly want to make a movie again. i have some idea. i hope it lasts longer than a day. need to expand more. now if i only had time and money and people.

today i took a nap. it was supposed to be 30 minutes, but ended up being an hour. oh well. i dreamt that i was watching myself study. it was in third person. like some creepy person watching me. then the shock of confusion woke me up. i dont know if i was confused because i realized i was studying when i was supposed to be sleeping. or maybe it was because someone was watching me, but it was myself. i wonder if the "being watched" me would know that the "watching" me is watching me. do the two forms of me share a common brain and knowledge? or maybe they are different. i dont know. i fell asleep after. and the "studying" wasn't very effective.

i had a dream last night that i opened a soup restaurant thing. it was run like a burrito stand or whatever, but i served soup. it was pretty cool. i opened at a building in my elementary school, so could make money from students. maybe a future business venture. a good break from the confusing dreams. this one made a lot more sense and flowed smoothly, except for the fact that i was selling soup.

nonpolar : polar
organic : aqueous
oil : water
reality : dreams

what's the emulsifier?
or should i use a separatory funnel?
the product is only in the organic layer anyways.
be sure to dry the organic layer with magnesium sulfate.
don't want any aqueous contamination.

banach–tarski paradox says you can take a solid sphere and break it up into finite overlapping pieces and put it together in a different way and make two of the same balls. now if this math could bypass the conservation of mass, then we could make so many spheres! and eat spheres for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! and use spheres as transportation! and live in spheres! and go to class in spheres! life in a sphere!

today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall.

A segment of the Berlin Wall was erected in the garden of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) in Taipei yesterday to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, but the foundation declined to draw parallels with Taiwan.

hahahaha. what does that even mean? there's a wall between taiwan and china. do they want to set up a wall to separate the democratic and the communist? or do they want to tear down the wall? would that spread democracy or communism? because from what it seems, i don't think taiwan's government is spreading democracy to china. if the wall falls, the only thing that is spreading is the chinese communist party. lol, so silly.

so they say telomeres are a G-rich region. (important, because G-C hydrogen bonding is stronger than A-T). the repetitive sequence of telomeres in humans is TTAGGG, which looks very G-rich, but is it really higher than usual? G pairs with C, T pairs with A. so actually only half of it is the stronger G-C, which is the normal probability. there's half chance it could be A-T and half chance it could be G-C in any normal part of DNA. in TTAGGG, half is A-T, and half is G-C. that fits the probability. unless "rich" is relative to the rest of the cell's dna and the rest of the cell's dna isn't G-C as much as A-T. i guess that is the case. it would be bad to have the two strands of DNA always stuck together.

yesterday, i watched wings of desire. it's a german movie. it's pretty good. it's about some angels that just watch people, listen to their thoughts, and observe for eternity. eventually one angel gets tired of being unable to interact with others and make a difference, so he becomes human. it's filmed very beautifully, everything that the angels see is in black and white and the thoughts of the humans are sometimes interesting. the best part i liked was the last half hour, when everything became colorful because of the angel (now human)'s new experiences with interaction. i think it is a very nice story, and shows that one shouldn't always just observe, which is what i do too much of (but also, watching a movie is a form of observing, hmm). the only problem i have with the movie is that the observing parts was really long (the first 1.5 hours). a lot of it was german cultural stuff and scenes of the berlin wall, which i can't relate to. but i guess that is one of the important things of this movie.

today, we learned that methylating dna allows bacteria knows which dna strand to repair when it is damaged. then someone asked why dna is methylated. so how should this be answered? is dna methylated so bacteria knows which dna to repair when it is damaged? not really. which is the cause? which is the effect? is it the need to know which strand of dna is wrong that caused methylation? or is methylation the cause of dna strand identification? hm. one of the most important ideas in evolution is that it is not forward thinking. (which is why some animals will evolve themselves into extinction, such as moose that grow sexy huge antlers until they can't even move through the forest and die.) so asking why in this case is really useless. there wasn't really a reason to methylate dna. they could have ethylated or propylated too. it just is. and it happened to be that way. can always ask why, but at one point they there will be no more causes. reached the final cause and effect. i think a scenario like this is close to the end of whys. after the physics of it.

anyways, it's funny that the non-forward thinking evolution would grant humanity the ability for forward thinking.

actually, i take that back. let's just spend and waste money and make bubbles. deal with economic crisis later. let's eat fats and sugars and get hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes, and death. deal with health issues later.

actually, that might be forward thinking. except we just don't care.

i think it's funny that there are researchers working on finding ways to activate telomerase, so that people can (theoretically) be young forever. yet, at the same time, other researchers are working on finding ways to inactivate telomerase, to make cancer cells age and die (like normal cells). i wonder how that will turn out.

anyways, it would be weird to have the telomerase activation for eternal youth. would it be a one time use drug? can't really imagine it to be, because telomerase usually turns off in normal body. so it would be a chronic use drug? take three times a day for the rest of your life. is aging really a disease? just fuels the world's addiction to drugs.

and, telomerase activation will keep cells young forever, which is one step closer to cancer. another mutation to make the cell uncontrollably grow and you get cancer! instead of the (at least) two mutation steps: uncontrolled growth, and immortality. so we'll just become giant blobs of immortal cells faster and it will be cool.

i think telomerase is a pretty interesting research area. it's just that once they discover a way to make cells live forever, big pharmaceuticals will abuse it. people will live young forever. then people will get cancer. and then pharmaceuticals will sell anti-cancers. and it could loop forever. until we run out of resources. i guess that is the plan.

God (or evolution, whichever you prefer) plays the game of life in combinations. changing groups of variables, but still maintaining order. humanity can only play with a single variable at a time, and that just causes disorder and a mess.

in essence, we are just oily bags of water and electrolytes. and somehow the concentration shifts create life. it is weird.

void life (long problems, long solutions)
{
if (age < death)
life (problems+1, solutions-1);
else
return 0;
}

// please debug.