no, no, I'm not a real doctor, I just give advice while pretending to be one online

If wishes were bitches, we’d all get stitches

heishi614 — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:35:52 +0000

Its time to dig deep, and REALLY become a shut-in. Over the summer I’m hoping to write 1 or 2 research papers based on my thesis (which is done), and a book chapter. Yes, it is time for me to write part of the great american novel (non-fiction).

I bought myself 2 articles of clothing from an H&M as a graduation present to myself. Some linen pants, and a polo. I’ve come to realize H&M is basically IKEA for clothes, in that its trendy and Swedish, with good focus on design but also self-service, and cheap. From my multi-year study, people go through 3 phases of mainstream fashion.

1. Old Navy esque stores
2. Hollister, Aeropostale, Abercrombie
3. Trendier shit like H&M, AA, or wearing banana republic ironically

Luckily I’ve managed to skip over #2, which is the exclusive domain of those jerk undergrads. oooh how i hate them more and more every year.

Here is a song that rocks:

“Reach up in tha sky for tha hozone laya” – Ludacris

heishi614 — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:43:30 +0000

Reach for the hozone laya, because even if you miss you’re already halfway to a pimp slap.

All my thesis stuff is ready to go, I’m burning through writing. I’m aiming for 80 total pages.

Thus far, I’ve maintained my 5 page a day average for the previous 4 days, so I’m at
Thesis 20 pages

Look how old this music video is.

heishi614 — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:07:57 +0000

I have started writing my thesis. I am projecting for about 80 pages hardcover bound. This will give it sufficient weight to act as a weapon and still be concealable under a light jacket.

Also I realize that maybe at page 3 is when people will start losing attention so I’m going to throw in some graphic depictions of violence and sex every 2 pages to give it that attention grabbing power.

Important choices I will need to make:
font: Arial or Calibri? Times New Roman is for chumps
spacing: 1.5 or 2? THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOU CAN FATHOM

Pages complete: 1/80

Here is a song that rules:

I’m thinking about getting metal legs. It’s a risky operation, but it’ll be worth it.

heishi614 — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:34:07 +0000

I went to an interesting talk by Dr. Anthony Atala over spring break. Double A, as he’s known in the scientific community, is pretty much the foremost and most successful tissue engineer ever. He holds such records as first lab-grown organ implanted into a human, and basically popularizing scaffolding to grow quasi-stem cells on.

Some interesting tidbits:
-Science can grow entire bladders, kidneys, heart valves, arteries, and a plethora of organ cells outside of the body now
-amniotic fluid basically should be saved in order to store these valuable cells for a baby’s future.
-We need to get about 100,000 different lines of cells, then we can cover 99% of the population with cells that won’t get rejected when implanted

Due to the shortage of organ supply from donors, and the high probability of organ rejection, we need to invest in these banks of cells as a hedge that we’ll discover the silver bullet that will enable us to grow fully usable matched tissue for people.

What’s crazy is that we’re now able to grow simple organs outside of the body. At the same time, there’s the other arm of science making entirely synthetic replacements like artificial hearts, replacement joints, and mechanical limbs, and at some point we’ll have both organic and tech theories functioning and practical.

Basically I think eventually we’ll have super-strong low-orbit capable robot exoskeletons holding a organic core supplied with an endless genetically-enhanced disease-impervious supply of super organs. Yea, ladies will dig that.

Fitting with this theme, and since Iron Man 2 is coming out….

chickens

heishi614 — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:54:11 +0000

Today I did a lab in Protein Engineering wherein I had to sacrifice a 10 day incubated chicken embryo in order to get the fibroblast cells to culture.

Later on as I came back from Lunch (Chicken Burrito!) I got stopped by a canvasser and donated some money to the ASPCA.

I hope it sort of evens out.

“This shirt is “dry-clean only”…which means it’s dirty.” – Mitch Hedberg

heishi614 — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:38:14 +0000

A new quarter, and just one class needed to fulfill the degree requirements. A protein engineering course. Now, you may be asking yo’self, what is an ME grad doing taking a Bioengineering protein engineering course with basically no background knowledge or experience? My response is that you need to mind your own business. With just one course hopefully I can get all my experiments I need to do done this semester. I hit a major milestone when my cells weren’t floating off like bitches.

Submitted a publishable abstract for a summer conference in Naples, Florida so I am excited for that trip, since A. maybe I can book via united and I’ll get some sweet mileage out of it, and B. the website for Naples makes it look inviting since it’s beachside, so maybe I’ll get to see a hurricane while drinking a hurricane.

Speaking of dry-clean only, I’m looking into getting a suit for this conference, so I’ll be dressed better than what I usually have on which is khaki’s and a polo. That shit’s undergrad level.

My favorite hip-hop song of all time:

“Si vis pacem, parati para bellum” – wikipedia

heishi614 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:05:55 +0000

Our team made this for a class final. It works with cells in a cool way.

Han Solo in Empire Strikes back is a metaphor for Stem Cells

heishi614 — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:57:06 +0000

Today 11 new stem cell lines were approved for use since the ban on new lines was lifted. As a recap, the ‘newest’ stem cells until now were still from 2001.

A big problem that was happening with the old cell lines were people were simply getting worse and worse quality cells to use as time went on, so this is a big step in spurring ALL research done with stem or un-differentiated cells.

A quick rundown on the cell preservation process:

1. grow cells out in some sort of nutrient media. This needs to be done quickly and with as little ‘doubling’ as possible, since there are always mutations with each iteration, and each iteration of doubling exponentially builds more and more of these mutated cells. You need to basically balance creating as many cells as you can, with time spent in a dish in an incubator being exposed to non-body like conditions and causing weird cell changes.

2.Freeze them down with a whole bunch of preservatives and stabilizers that would kill the cell normally

3. Hope you can keep ice-crystals from ripping the cells apart while they sit in cryo-preservation for 8+ years.

You see, this is just like the problems facing Darth Vader when he was trying to freeze Luke Skywalker, that’s why he tested it out on Han Solo first.

Imagine you were Leia Organa, beautiful princess of destroyed planet Alderaan, and there was no lifeform display on the side of the carbonite slab. The only way to check on Han’s status is to chip off part of him and thaw it. As you start chipping off parts of him, you have to locally thaw that area and parts of Han get damaged (hopefully not the roguish charm). Then, Boba Fett (The 2001 Stem Cell Ban) steals your carbonite frozen love-interest and stashes him in Slave I (National Stem Cell Databank). Meanwhile, Chewbacca (The National Institute of Health) is trying to rescue Han Solo with the help of Lando Calrissian (National Science Foundation) who initially didn’t put up enough of a fight because he’s a dirty double-crossing scoundrel. R2D2 (Congressional Vote on the 2001 bill) is still trying to locate a data port to open that damn blast door and help you all escape and chase after Han but gets shocked by a power inlet instead because C-3PO (George Bush) doesn’t know his sockets.

ITS ALL SO SIMPLE.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/02/new.stem.cells/index.html

I’ll make this company profitable so fast, the only headline will be ‘Donaghy saves GE comma marries your mom’

heishi614 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:28:10 +0000

40 hours and countless revisions, after tons of deletions and tons of rewriting I finally submitted my NSF grant. Special thanks to everyone that looked at my essays and helped me rewrite stuff. Couldn’t of done it without the teamwork, much like YOUR MOTHER.

The grant application is supposed to be reviewed in January, with results being returned to applicants with comments during mid-February, so there will be some time before I know anything. Also since basically this is ‘free money’ there is only like a 10% acceptance rate, so even if I get a honorable mention that’s pretty prestigious already. All in all, a good experience, much like YOUR MOTHER.

Also Jay-Z’s Izzo is awesome, and I finally figured out this was the song that was being sampled by all those mashup artists I like, sort of like how I sampled YOUR MOTHER.

P.S. Yo momma’s so fat she gets group insurance

yea.

“”You miss 100% of the shots you never take” – Wayne Gretzky” – Michael Scott

heishi614 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:23:03 +0000

I started writing my personal statement 2 weekends ago, and have probably deleted like 10 paragraphs and rewritten the 5 that are on there right now several times over. Its surprisingly hard to write about myself without interjecting humorous exaggerations or epic similes. I was recently reading what Toyota’s present CEO said about his company “grasping for salvation” to save it from abandoning the consumer, and it really struck a chord with me, in that I was both Toyota and the consumer. The person in charge of my educational goals, and the person in charge of my happiness. I had this bitchin metaphor all laid out and then I realized the review committee is going to read this and think I wrote it right after watching “300″. But I guess thats literally the price to pay.