(no subject)

Work mostly gone away, yay!

Of course, the inevitable effect of stress going away is that all the stress effects catch you up. Consequently tired and headachey. Definitely a tension headache...feels tensiony. *gets paracetamol* That should work. Gimme half an hour. EDIT: kicking in already! Yay!

Day not bad. Plants supervision ended with us being set a research paper to read. One, single research paper. I will normally skimread at least 2-3 for an essay, making notes, so this is bliss!

Played with Herpes simplex virus and measles virus in Pathology. I am really hoping I haven't accidentally given myself Herpes simplex as that would be VERY annoying and generally bad. Should be OK, I think. They probably use a puny lab strain anyway, as everyone knows how incompetent second years are (I may or may not have ruined one experiment by not reading the lab sheet properly).

Discovered the dubious joys of Poisson equations. Well, they are OK. Could be worse. Just that they have Numbers^TM in them, you know?

Went to random public lecture about cochleas and stuff. Subject matter interesting, but lecturer not great public speaker and hesistated a lot (almost considered counting his ums and ers - there were many) and I was tired so kept going woozy. Probably didn't follow as well as I would have liked, which is a pity.

Riding lesson I wanted to sign up for has been cancelled. D'oh! Well, there's always next week...

Singing in the rain...

It is extraordinarily wet at the moment. I could almost believe I was back in my beloved Mancunia!

This morning wasn't too bad - I set off about half an hour after leaving the shower, hair still wet, and managed a net decrease in wetness of hair between leaving flat and arriving at lecture. Spent lectures industriously writing more AIHL - lots of war and stuff going on, the twins don't want to dwell on it too much so I'm planning on handling it more with the emotions involved than with a chronicling of the events.

But the afternoon...WHOAH. Rain, rain, rain, wetness.

My good deed for the day was letting a bunch of student actors sit in the hallway while they were waiting for their director to arrive, as they were a bunch of drowned rats. You see, our front door is basically 10 feet from the entrance to the Octagon, a cute theatre-effort on the Chad's site. And there is a play running all week there that it raising money for Breast Cancer Research - go them!

I REALLY need to get laundry done tonight...

Oh, lovely!

Some bored scientist decided to give some lines of retrotransposons (these are bits of DNA that jump around in genomes) silly names:

"In particular, the Arabidopsis thaliana and Drosophila melanogaster genome sequencing projects have recently disclosed a large number of new Ty3/Gypsy sequences. So far, elements of three different Ty3/Gypsy lineages had been described for A. thaliana. Here, we describe six new lineages, which we have called Tit-for-tat1, Tit-for-tat2, Gimli, Gloin, Legolas, and Little Athila. We confirm that plant Ty3/Gypsy elements form two main monophyletic groups."

And they even cited him in the list of references at the end:
"Thompson, J. D., D. G. Higgins, and T. J. Gibson. 1994. CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, positions-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Res. 22:4673–4680.[Abstract]

Tolkien, J. R. R. 1954. The lord of the rings. George Allen and Unwin, London.

Wright, D. A., and D. F. Voytas. 1998. Potential retroviruses in plants: Tat1 is related to a group of Arabidopsis thaliana Ty3/Gypsy retrotransposons that encode envelope-like proteins. Genetics 149:703–715."

Yes, I also found papers talking about a protein called Frodo.

Oh, bored scientists are incredibly cute!

WTF Snow

Eni takes out her laundry. This involves a short venture into the Outside.

Eni sees wetness and rain.

Eni suddenly hears lots of wet stuff drop from the 3rd floor on to the lawns.

Eni looks out over the lawns and wonders why they are all pale in the darkness.

Eni considers this.

Eni suddenly recognises SNOW. For 'twas slush that fell from the roof to the lawn.

Eni: WTF?

Ladies and gentlemen, snow comes to Cambridge. Apparently.