You can’t kill tutorials, they just come back!
Heh, Mass Dance going on downstairs and here I am blogging and doing side researching. Well, I have work to do, and I have two left feet, so best to stay on my study table. And I hath sinned. I went to McD again! AGAIN!
Sigh, Week 2 and we’re aiming for Tutorial 3 for Mechanics and Waves, Chemistry dioxin presentation, second round of C tutorial and Project 1 of Advanced Calculus involving Hermite polynomials. Oh, add a reading list for Writing and Critical Thinking too. Nope, I can’t get the Danger and Security one, so I took Questioning Evolution and Progress, the next ‘nicest’ one on the list. And yeah, dropped the Nanoscale Science and Technology module since I’m not superman. If you’re asking what the heck is a Hermite polynomial, I’m asking the same question too. However, every good researcher must cover all the bases and I discovered some tidbit for that particular project by accident, like many discoveries. Why Hermite polynomials of all things? Prof. might as well just chuck eigenfunctions or some other ‘chim’ stuff at us from the start! If any of my ESP coursemates found my blog, then they’ll be rewarded with one tidbit I’m about to share. 
See, I’m curious about my lecturer’s backgrounds from the start. I’m not saying that I’m a stalker, but it helps to know what kind of background they have so we’ll be able to better understand their PoV and style. The effort paid off right from the start. See, our Prof is not only the HoD of Maths and a First Class Honors Mathematics graduate from UM in its golden days (cue for the oooo part here). His list of publications included something to do with Hermite polynomials! And I suspect it’s his PhD thesis too. Short story, I found some papers to quote for my Project (and I’ll either impress or freak him) and I learnt that you’d better not be smartypants and fabricate something. This would be what I call a good example of ‘useless information’ becoming a ‘gold mine’ instantly.
Ok, I’ll add another one. Our Organic Chem lecturer freaked us by posting almost a full dozen files of presentations, notes and exercises before semester even started. It wasn’t until we first met her that I realised the reason behind it. She looked like she just gotten her PhD quite recently (heard elsewhere that she’s trying secure her professorship or sth, so looks like the teaching staff is under pressure too) and she was previously a lecturer at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Oh, I must stress that the ‘The’ part is in the name itself, and the joke is that THKUST actually stood for The Hong Kong University of Stress and Tension. Thank goodness we’re only in the National University of Stress eh?
University Scholars Seminar came around once again (it’s weekly). It’s not compulsory for me, but it’s essentially the highlight of the week on my schedule. Call me stupid to waste my time attending it, but this is where you get to hear the ‘behind-the-scenes stuff’ and get to ask the ‘meatier questions’, so it’s a valuable event to attend. IMHO, you get background information too but as I’ve managed to keep up with the news and scientific media till lately, it’s all repeat or basic information (it’s partly due to the fact that USP students come from all over NUS). No, I’m not boasting that I’m smart, it’s just that I invested my time in better things rather than things like anime or going out with friends and talk senseless things or plain mugging. As such, this is my main worry being in S’pore, turning into an apathetic, mindless drone. I’ll explain why in a bit.
Today’s talk is about Stem Cell: A New Frontier, conducted by a Dr Ariff Bongso at the Med Fac of NUS. He’s part of ES Cell International’s (ESI) based in Biopolis which is chaired by Dr. Alan Coleman (he helped clone Dolly, whose lecture I also managed to attend in S’pore in 2004) and the pioneer team that first isolated stem cells. To be honest, the fun part is only when he explained why he didn’t get much fame back in 1994 when they isolated stem cells for the first time, and the Q&A session. Oh btw, seems that the fallout from Dr. Hwang’s fiasco was minimal. Researh funding and public support bounced back very quickly. So you biological scientists need not worry about that. Q&A was slightly boring because they were nitpicking and not focusing on the big picture, but at least there were a few good questions that cut straight to the big questions in ST research. The thing is, it would have been more fun to discuss this if they had some background knowledge, which is readily available on the Internet! However, mugging took care of that, so not much in-depth discussions.
I do notice people shunning information as if it’s an infectious disease or something, which is both an irritating and distressing phenomenon. Why do I say that? For example, people come up to me and say, ‘Huei Ming, your blog’s highly technical and bla bla bla’. If you can’t understand the explanation, say so! Don’t try and act as if I’m explaining calculus with hieroglyphs! Or else, don’t say something stupid to me with the implicit meaning that ‘Talking serious stuff is uncool’. That’s just being childish. Plus, if it’s too intellectual, then don’t bother studying medicine, science or engineering. The journals they read is going to give you a stroke for sure. In fact, I think this might be a contributory factor to the decay in the US scientific and economic prowess as they had too much emphasis on luxury. I know that it’s difficult to start off, but once you pick up a dictionary to figure out the parts you don’t understand, or just read an article a day, it’s better than being a brainless layperson on the street. However, I understand that my posts are very very long, which I had warned in advance didn’t I?
That said, I’d better try to resume reading on a ‘normal’ scale on the Internet again. Been slacking off lately, partly because I’m lazy.
