Dev Bio Saviour.

I'm posting this for anyone who may happen to study developmental biology at any point. It will seem daunting, it will seem nigh-on impossible, with genes rushing about all over the place. I hope this post will help you. I hope it'll end up on google, like most of my pages do and will direct you to this book in your time of need. PDN dev bio, Cambridge... here you go...

Instant Notes, Developmental Biology

you may think pfff instant notes, what an undetailed waste of time. Nope. This book will clarify everything - in fact, I'm regretting ever going to lectures. Instead I should have just read this book time and time again. It's really brilliant.

Jenga

"A slipped disc is just God playing Jenga with your spine." Me

Knowedge (sic)

"Knowing that you know what you know is almost as important as knowing what you know." Me

Chutzpah (KHʊt'spə) - what a word. Look it up.

Busybusy

Have somehow not blogged for 2 or 3 days, despite this being exam term. I have been pretty busy the last 2 days with this and that, and trying to cram work into every moment in between doing stuff, eating or drinking tea/coffee. Plus it's been bloody freezing (as mentioned in my previous post) and it's going to be the same all week. How depressing!

Sunday night was Open Mic Night (photos). Alex was pretty nervous all day but calmed down while the guy before us was playing, while I did the complete reverse. Hehe. We played "Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Proof" by I Am Kloot, and "The Fear" by Travis. It went pretty well, and Sam (who was running the CAMS (Clare Alternative Music Society night) apparently enjoyed CYHSY even though he's a great fan of theirs, and the 1st year medic I met at the Medic's dinner who said "Proof" was her favourite song on the I am Kloot album also seemed to enjoy our rendition. Hurrah! It was good fun!

Yesterday was a pretty full day, so much so that I did no work! OOer. I'll have to have a purge today. Mary came round for coffee in the morning and we sat in the kitchen chatting to her from 10am until gone noon. I then rang Rahul (who was still in bed) at almost 1pm to get him up and out to snooker, and we went to WT's for a few hours. We played 5 games, drank 4 pints (in total, not each) and he pipped me to the post 3-2 on the last black. Nnnrgh. For some reason we got a free pitcher of beer when we got the table, so, not to turn down a bargain, we happily obliged. "It's a little early" I said. "It's never too early" she replied... Fair enough!

We then went to our 1st "Improver's" dancing class in the evening, which was pretty hard. We'd missed last weeks lesson, so we had to catch up the Rumba and the "hestitation" in the quick-step, which was really hard to get our heads around. Still, good fun though, and we got take-away icecream on the way home (at 10pm - hooray for La Margherita). Then, we had coffee in the kitchen with Iona, and I discovered Horlicks... a strange malty concoction that should probably be avoided at all costs, but somehow tasted slightly pleasant. Don't think I'll be drinking it again though. I also somehow got on to the topic of "gene knockouts" and tried to explain the "cre-lox" system for knocking out genes in specific tissues... I wasn't wholly successful, but that was mostly due to my poor explanatory skills. I left in where devils fear to tread... should have gone for something more simple like mRNAi or oligonucleotides. Nevermind!

Adieu,

Tom

Am in the computer room printing - the pleasant and healthy whirr of the colony printer stack behind me, and finally, some warmth. Braeside has been freezing over the last few days. The weather has taken a decided turn for the worst, and the heating has been turned off. I've been wearing a stupid number of layers for May! If it's gonna be cold, why won't it rain! We need the water.

I went to the Clare MedSoc Dinner last night, as all medics are essentially honourary vets, we allow them to name their Soc after themselves. Bless'em. It was pretty good fun, I sat next to a first year and a 2nd year medic, and chatted to them about... well... stuff, as you do, and enjoyed the 4 course lavish meal with "free drinks" as supplied by the fellows. Which was really good! I guess there aren't many places you could go and get a 4 course meal with pre-dinner champagne, wine on-tap, and port afterwards for the measly price of £20 really!

Happy Birthday Blog

Five days ago, it was this blog's 2nd birthday! I guess this exciting redesign can be a part of the birthday celebrations.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOMTHEVET.BLOGSPOT.COM

addendum...

It has been brought to my attention by a Mr Greg that my pictured monkey is, infact, agnathic, being neither prognathic or in the possession of any jaw bones. However, the original quote (referring to one "Tomthevet") stands as "A prognathic mitten-man", for reasons unknown (excepting a slight overstudying of primate-skulls).

I hope that has cleared up some confusion.

Tom (A prognathic mitten man)
and "Chimpy" (An agnathic knitted-chimp).

p.s. This is Post No. 250! Wow.

Stem Cells, Cafes and Facebook

Today... Alex's dissertation was collected - her supervisor hasn't really filled in much so she's a little confused as to what exactly is wanted, but hopefully she'll see him soon and get a better idea. I was quite impressed with it personally. I'm trying to bash my way through a lecture on stem cells which is less than riveting and filled with beautiful pointless sentences like "VEGF maintains Flk-1 and PECAM1+ sheets from day 1.5". Wow. I can honestly say I'm impressed. I'm going to run downstairs now and tell everyone in the kitchen what a wonderful insight into the world of developmental biology I'm having. This was supposed to be interesting. nrrrgh.

In other news, it's been freezing today! Alex and me went to Cafe Rouge for dinner and we nearly froze on the way down there. The food was amazing though. I had beef bourgignon (mmmmm) and Alex had chicken in white wine sauce. I then had creme broule (whatever else!) and Alex had a chocolate crepe (so French, so tasty!) and then coffees and things. Was really cool.

Am also playing snooker with rahul on Monday... no doubt I'll thrash him again like last time. I'm enjoying his facebook status at the moment "Rahul is facing four weeks of unadulterated lie-ins." Mine is "Tom is unable to understand why no-one likes Marillion".

Other highlights include "Lizzi is terrified. Google "lizzi edwards" with the speech marks and the first ELEVEN results are actually her... shit." Mmm... someone's bragging a tad! "Vicky is lacking in judgement after compressing her head" - I assume after the tiny child's crown she wore to the bop, and "Greg is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it".

I really don't want to so this stem cell rubbish. Can you tell??

Tom

currently listening, Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No. 1.

Banners!

As you can probably seen, my blog has just risen about 900 points in the beauty and general eye-pleasing imageyness scale™ . Allow me to demonstrate:

0 (black screen)
10 (Cambridge bioanth website)
100 (My old blog)
1000 (My new blog)

I found out how to randomise banner images (see this link) and made some pretty pictures involving PG-tips monkey. Yes, not only am I advertising an admittedly quite poor tea company, I'm also showing off my monkey - who is damned cool. And also, the random "prognathic mitten-man" makes ever so slightly more sense when there's a knitted (like mittens) monkey (usually prognathic, though this one less so) on the front page in numerous situations vaguely relevant to my life. Expect many more as the exams get nearer and as I venture further afield with the monkey. There are 4 so far... press F5 or click here to refresh the page and see them all.

Hope you enjoy!

Tom

Weebl and Bob

What day is it now? Thursday google desktop tells me - how convenient! Ah, weebl and bob... CSI edition...

Weebl: "Lo boberto consuarlez"
Bob: "Lo Justice shades"
Weebl: "It look like this baker has been shot"
Bob: "twelve times in the face"
Weebl: "a real *puts on shades*... baker's dozen"
The Who: "Yeeeaaaah (+ guitars)" key intro.
Bob: "but a baker's dozen is thirteen!"
Weebl: "unlucky... for some"
The Who: "Yeeeaaaah (+ guitars)"
Bob: "where that music coming from!?"

Just so good. Watch it

Sunshine!!

The sunshine is beautiful. I sat outside with Iona, Tom and Louisa for about 4 hours on Monday, revising as best we could in the glorious sunshine. Even in April, sitting directly in the sun is tough - we found ourselves shuffling around with the tree's shadow. Alex and Vicky auditioned for 5 1/2 hours over two days, and had a lot of auditionees - we'll have to wait for the results to see who gets selected! They're due a week of sleep pretty soon!

In other news, we went to formal last night, in celebration of Ella's birthday much past, but missed. The food was awful, but we all had good fun. Ella was properly chuffed with her presents (A space hopper, a murder mystery, a purse, some earrings, some chocolates and 2 DVDs - we split off into boys and girls for her shopping, guess who got what...). I've put some photos on flickr.

c u r r e n t l y

Currently reading: The Dawkins Delusion: a critique of The God Delusion - should be pretty interesting.
Currently working on: Limb Bud Development
Currently listeninging to: Interior Lulu by Marillion - an epic track from their 2000ish album Marillion.com. Not an easy one to get into if you've never heard Marillion before, but beautiful none-the-less

Photos

I've joined flickr as an attempt to make my photos more easily available online, as blogger is often a little unsure of which photos it'll keep, and not everyone has access to facebook. My URL is http://www.flickr.com/photos/recognisetheview/ with the username recognisetheview if you just want to search for me from the main page. All the pic resize to 800 pixels, so if you want a BIG original copy, then just email me!

Enjoy!

I've just finished going through Module 3, and am not far off making lecture notes for the other 3 modules. Getting there...

Last Friday was the "What you wanted to be when you were younger" bop, which was really really good fun - probably one of the best bops for a while. Vicky, Iona, Erika and me went shopping (yes, I was a girl for the afternoon) for costumes, and I picked up a hard-hat from an army surplus store for £7. I need more use out of it, so no-doubt next year whenever I do any sort of DIY I'll be putting on my hard-hat. "You need a plug rewiring? Of course, I'll just go and get my hard-hat".

One never can be too careful.

But yargh, bop was good fun and photos (with my exciting new camera!) are available on flickr.

Cambridge

I have returned, and spent much of my time back in Cambridgeland putting finishing touches to my dissertation. It's now all handed in and completed, so it's in the lap of the Gods now. It was nice to see it all bound up and posh-looking, all 23 pages of it. Iona, Vicky and Erika all handed theirs in today, so we're all going out to Dojos to celebrate, hopefully followed by a bar trip.

In other news, I broke my cafetiere! The glass bit now has a tasty hole right in the bottom. No full on (non instant) coffee for me until I can get a new one and I can see me needing it in the coming weeks. The only question now is where to find one!?

__________________
Update: I now have a cafetiere - £7 (-70p student discount = £6.30) from Whittards. I got it from the scary lady. It took all my guts to ask her to go and get them.

I wanna feel alive, gas up the 4-wheel drive.

Good evening all. I haven't posted ALL holiday - which is a bit lame really. First thing's first - there's a new Marillion album, so I'd better get a review out the way.

Marillion - Somewhere Else.
After the first few listens I was, how shall I put it... shocked... and somewhat apalled. H's voice has a real habit of sounding terrible when he's singing something you're not used to. His melodies seem random, and his voice seems droll. But after a few listens it sounds incredible! You realise why he's singing why he is, and how it sits with the rest of the song. Because they have a tendency to make such epic songs, you need to know what's coming to enjoy the rest of the song. That's why I love them so much - every minute of (almost) every song is building up to something big, small, poignant, whatever. Just magical music.
My hilights from the new album are the opening track (The Other Half), Most Toys (which has a radioheadesque guitar line running all the way through it), The Last Century for Man, which builds up beautifully similarly to King (if you know Marillion!) and has the best few seconds on the whole album ("I wanna feel alive, GAS UP THE 4-WHEEL DRIVE). Oh, and A Voice from the Past (which I hated at first), is perfect. Perfect guitar solo, perfect vocals. Glorious.

This album is probably the biggest grower since Marbles!

I've also recently bought the new Maximo Park album, and the new Bloc Party album, and both are pretty good. Somehow none of the songs hold me like Marillion though! I'm going to see them in Cambridge in June! Hurrah!

Finished Gormenghast

It was a really good series.

Well, the 1st 2 books anyway.

It's dark, it's beautifully written, and even in the page-after-page where the castle just undergoes it's painful and unceasing monotony, it's worth reading, and still holds you. And of course, when something does begin happening there's no way you can put it down. The last book is strange, and such a huge leap away from the first two, that I found it a little strange. Titus leaves the castle, and finds a magical land with cars, and flying space-ships. All a little weird and unexpected for my tastes. However, if you get the chance, read them. It's well worth it.

Pub Golf.. FORE!

Met Matt et al. in Surbiton for a number of people's birthday's (Matt and Matt infact!). We played Pub golf all the way to Kingston. Lalalalala. I got hole 1 (Guinness) in 2, that's 2- par. Oh yeah - hardcore me! Then I didn't play the next round, but lied to Dan (who was scoring), or the next round (but lied again)...

Then we all gave up cos everyone was FAR to drunk to carry on (though no hangover for Tom! I know my limit now. Woooo!) and spent an hour or so in The Mill (which had NO drinks. I had to get Gabriel his 4th choice. FOURTH! jeez!) and then went on to McCluskies, and danced to shite music till the night was done. Was pretty good fun all told!

Pic stolen from Natalie. Sorry, and Ta!

Alex's visit

Alex visited - we went into London to see Vicky, and had the classic Wagamama lunch, with the less classic Haagen Daas dessert - the service in that place is terrifyingly personal. Just give me my food and leave! We also ate LOADS of Pret (darling Pret) a mange, bought numerous textiles commodities in Kingston (for Alex is once-again making her own ball-dress!), had chinese takeaway, watched programs about GIANT SQUID. mmm... invertebratey, and generally enjoyed having a couple of days together and without work.