The past week or so has been draining me but finally my Biochemistry 502 class is over. I feel like although at times it felt like crawling through a mile of shit, but coming out on the other side i managed to smell like roses.
Alright, that may be an overstatement but I got less than 5 hours of sleep every day for over a week, and had to make a lot of sacrifices and miss out on a lot of fun, but as a result I feel that completing the course changed me. As opposed to getting one course under my belt (biochem 501) and the satisfaction that came with it, I now also feel a more reinforced sense or foundation of science within me. I feel like I now have some kind of background within my field. In the class I learned a great deal of background on DNA and RNA and how they are made, regulated, and all the complexes, transcription factors and structures that go along with them. A bunch of this knowledge is just an expansion of whatever I learned at Gettysburg, but then there is so much more. Its being able to apply the knowledge and think about it in a much more analytical way and the experiment based approaches to learning about them.
Now if I can only get into a graduate school and really focus what I want to actually 'do' I will be feeling pretty good. Speaking of feeling pretty good, I am really enjoying the season and spending time with my family recently. Everyone seems to be getting along a lot more, and doing things together. Although I missed out on some plays we all were going to see this past week, I think that there is a much stronger togetherness with us and that is really good. My sister is also learning how to drive and is interacting a lot more with my parents and myself which is awesome.
Oh yeah and at work, we had a Secret Santa gift exchange and I got a French press and some hazelnut coffee. It is really freaking awesome, and even though i originally wanted to get the press for loose tea, I'm getting into drinking this coffee and I've used it twice this week since I've gotten it. The press itself also looks like its made of magic. The only way i can describe that is by saying do you remember the film Santa Clause, the one with Tim Allen who becomes Santa? Well the time where that elf kid serves him hot chocolate out of that crazy thing, well the magical aura of that is embodied in my french press, and its awesome.
I suppose i have a good amount of things to be thankful for right about now, the funks yo brotha, check it out now, the funks yo brotha...
Sorry, this post is a bit random, and I'm really tired. I also wanted to say that Zombie games are really cool and I want to get one. Maybe I will go and buy one for my computer or look into one for the old xbox I have. My dad recently showed me a Zombie simulator website. It sounds cooler than it actually was, but it was entertaining none the less. Essentially it was a google map of a town, full of moving circles and triangles designating people and zombies I believe. There was a death toll meter on the top as well as zombie count. I noticed that the zombie count was slowly rising but it also dropped at times, showing that people were at least taking a few out while their numbers dwindled. The biggest problems were that you couldn't zoom or control anything. Cool idea, but it could use some work.
Hey, what do you think about Zombies and sleep? Do you think that zombies can sleep or are their brains under a constant low level of stimulation allowing them to conduct their basic instincts and movements. Everything alive clearly sleeps in some form or another, even fruit flys are considered 'asleep' when their movement is minimal for greater than something like 30 minutes or something like that. Fun Fact: to measure sleep cycles of Fruit flies in a vial you attach a laser to record every time a fly crosses its path, and by setting this in the middle of a vial on its side, researchers determine sleep as flies that do not cross from one side of the vial to the other for greater than X minutes... like 30 or something. Sorry for the deviation, but what I was getting at is that flies have levels of lower activity where their neural clusters are in lower activity, probably similarly as when birds undergo rem patterns and shut off part of their brains even during flight.
Moving back to zombies, they are generally moving all the time right? but sometimes they might move slower or just vacantly stare into space. I wonder if the undead actually would have some kind of lower brain activity considered sleep where they recharge, or would they not need to considering they are reanimated tissue that seems to be self sustaining?
Alright well I guess that is it for now. I hope you all have a Happy Holiday and hopefully I will be able to see most of you at some point.
Epistemic Bubbles
7 years ago
