Refraction

So remember the part where I’m a Gmail fangirl? Gmail has made me even happier with their new options for labels! I used to keep the labels menu closed by default since I had so many (I’d make one for each course I took…), but now I can keep only the active ones visible. Since I’m out of school, there are only three. 😀 Makes for a nice clean inbox, anyway, and I’m able to easily see just the messages I want.

I’m so glad I got my Gmail account when I did, so that I’m able to use my real name (sans numbers, etc.) Unfortunately, I seem to get a number of e-mails addressed wrongly to me. Some of these are amusing (booty call), some cause me a bit of concern (receipt for a plasma TV), some are oddly helpful (organic produce newsletter).

I can’t quite say the same for Facebook; I was beaten out to my real name (as a username) by someone else with the same name. Ah well. You win some…

(My lab mate is really good at chemistry puns, actually…)

Anyway. I’d like to think I totally rocked the conference–my presentation even picked up a prize, and I met some really awesome people (how could they not be awesome? They’re chemists!) Despite my misgivings about the small town of K—, it turned out to be irrelevant: We chemists know how to drink. And enjoy board games. Especially drunken board games.

I think xkcd has been awesome this week.

Reasons:

1. Um, hello, Firefly?
2. Do you really need any others?

I don’t know how healthy it is to admit that a friend and I sat down today to try and list all 150 (original) Pokémon.

We got up to 144.

I didn’t care about this before, but now that I’m on the cusp of leaving my undergraduate degree (last hurdle tomorrow) I realize just how AWESOME the open courseware that MIT offers is.

I can finally get a semi-proper foundation in linguistics! And … all that other stuff I always wanted to learn about. Cryptography. Economics. Anthropology. Maybe I’ll finally understand what political science is all about. Psychology. Cognitive sciences. Classical studies?!

Plus stuff that’s more relevant to my degree: Materials science. Chemical engineering.

This place is a goldmine.

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for the last couple of days:

And everyone’s new and everyone glows
with something I had never seen
It’s like the secret
They are telling me that makes my heart go
Oh oh, oh oh, oh oh, oh….

“Sympathetic Vibrations”, The Paper Raincoat

*kind of wants to make a mix based off this one song alone*
*kind of doesn’t want to do that because she needs to prep a presentation*
*will keep humming this all weekend*

Things are a bit different around here because Earth Hour is going on tonight–and yep, I’ll be turning my lights off at 8:30 and doing my organometallic problem set by candlelight. Or something. So… this blog will effectively shut down for an hour, too. Get off your computer. 🙂

I could throw in some cynical stuff here about how it’s really just a token gesture and that my extinguished lights do little, but the point is just to raise awareness on the way to saving the planet. Worked for me last year, anyway.

Over at Language Log there’s a post about being terrified at not being able to read in a foreign country (in this case, Hong Kong SAR). One of the commenters points out:

I had gathered that the “ideogram” thing was a myth — that Chinese script is really a syllabary, and that Cantonese speakers said to read “Chinese” are really bilingual, and reading transcribed Mandarin.

I don’t know how much I agree with the first part (written Chinese as a syllabary? You’re going to have to dredge up a bit more evidence for that one) but the second part is true, true, true.

Now I realize why I only learned to recognize characters in Chinese school, and not to write–I would have had to learn a whole other language.

That said, I admit to having the same fear (apropos de journal articles, for example). It’s terrifying to look at a page of text and realize you can’t read it and have no idea what it says.

I didn’t realize this until today, but I’ve had my blog for seven years. Holy. Mackerel. Throughout that time it’s changed from whiny high school student entries to whiny university student entries to… a second-rate translation blog, mostly. With occasional sidebars on music.

I don’t think I’ll ever close it down–I post here for myself, not for anyone else–but I have to admit its utility is minimal. There are other, better, ways to keep in touch with friends, and I doubt that anyone who still reads this doesn’t have other means of contacting me.

Still, an anniversary’s an anniversary, isn’t it?