Hate is easy.
Click to viewLove this song. (Hope it posts the youtube video...)
I talked to Lihua (a chinese post-doc in the lab) for about thirty minutes today about making chinese characters. Each character has it's own unique design. However, many individual characters are made up of repeated themes. There is a specific method of making each symbol, as dictated by the stroke number and order. A stroke is akin to a line or a continuous pen swipe. When the stroke pattern is not followed then most symbols just look stupid. For the most part, every symbol begins in the left upper hand corner and works down and to the right, with the exception being boxes. Boxes are usually formed outright and then whatever is drawn inside follows.
China has decided that all students must learn a list of around 3,500 characters before they finish secondary school. That means to be fluent you need to know that many characters, which is a pretty daunting task. The symbols are super pretty. My dad bought me a book on the history and cultural aspect of the chinese language and it was super interesting. It also covered pronunciation and the tones. I am looking forward to working through my Chinese grammar books.
Also, my dad bought me two spanish grammar workbooks. They were highly regarded on Amazon.com. I would consider myself an "intermediate" spanish speaker, as I currently can understand around 70-80% or all I hear or read in Spanish movies or newpapers. I think by next summer I should be "fluent" but nowhere near a "native" speaker. Apparently, it takes a vocabulary of about 10,000 words to be considered a "native" speaker (not considering accent or grammar). I probably know about 2,500 words (I have note-cards, I'd say 2,500 is a real number due to the countability of note-cards...)
Stuff in the lab has not been going smoothly. I finally got my restriction enzyme and carried out my ligation and transformation. I will see tomorrow if I have indeed created a plasmid I wanted. Hopefully I did... I have a "mini"-group meeting with my boss at 10 A.M. tomorrow in-which I show him all of my work over the previous ten days... I don't have much due to the three day wait on the RE's... Sort of sucks, hopefully he won't get pissed off.
Jacob came in for his orientation over the past two days. He got placed in 104 level math and he seemed disappointed in that. I think he will like college but is a little scared of what it will be like. When I think about it, I remember how in the week before it finally hit me my life would change. He might be there now...
Here is a random Gandhi quote. Do with it what you will. Tienen paz, mis amigos. :)
