I think I'll stop drinking Soda

This article describes what happens in your body when you drink a coke. Awesome!

Holiday Travels

Tomorrow I head to the East Coast for over a week, staying at my mom's while my brother and sister are there, too. I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone for more than a few days this time, and seeing all the extended family is a huge added bonus. Christmas has turned from a time when I was a kid, to be excited about what I might be getting, to being (close to) an adult, and being much more excited about what I'll be giving and the people I'll be spending time with. It'll be great, to be sure, but with so many of my relatives infirm in some way or other, I hope it doesn't end up being too much of a hassle for them and those closest to them. There's also a good possibility that it will be the last family gathering of its kind for the same reasons, so it seems important to really enjoy it to the fullest. I especially love our family's Christmas Eve II, where we all sing carols in harmony. And trust me, with as much musical talent as everyone in this family has, it's really something to hear. Yay Christmas! Excited!

It's actually there!

My brain, that is. So for some of you who doubt at times, here's proof!

I took part in a cognitive psychology experiment a few weeks ago, and volunteered to get my noggin scanned for about forty five minutes in a fMRI. It was simple word-association thing, where you had to respond to various random nouns flashed up on a screen with the first verb that came to mind. It's kinda cool. Aside from this image, I've also got three movies - one on each cartesian axis - moving slice by slice through my head. Really cool, if you ask me. Though I do look kind of strange, even without that huge chunk taken out of my head.

December 7th, 1941

Just a reminder that today is Pearl Harbor Day - a time to reflect on the atrocities that men willfully inflict on each other under the exonerating moniker of "War."

What's so immensely sad, beyond the loss of thousands of unique lives, is the thought that somewhere people got together and supposedly justified the horrible pain, suffering, and death they knew they were about to cause. And today, if anything, should be a day to remember, and be outraged that this sort of abhorrent justification is still going strong all over the world.

Research Sucks

Yeah. That's about it. With no publishable new data in nearly a year, two papers still sitting unedited on my advisor's desk since March, various parts of my setup not working, multiple projects to try (again and again) but none of which I think will work (or are even worth the time,) pressure to graduate by May (HAH!) and a complete lack of interest in my research topic (mine or anyone else's,) my research is not a high-point in my life right now, to put it euphemistically. It also occurs to me that even with an eventual PhD, there's a complete dearth of skills or knowledge that I've really acquired over the last four-plus years that make me more marketable in a job hunt. Unless I stay in academia, which I'm loathe to do, this has basically been at best a respite from the real world, and more likely a huge waste of time that I could have spent furthering other, more long-lasting and useful goals. The fun of it all is that there are about five different projects, all basically related, that I have at the moment. None of them seems likely to succeed, and none of them interests me in the least. There's no chance that I'm going to have enough data to graduate by May, even if one project miraculously does work, so where do I find my motivation to stay in lab ten hours a day to ensure that I eventually will get some useful data? I think I need a motivational kick in the ass, or I may as well just leave now.