//beconfused

Well, tomorrow I am not going to church. I’m going to a symposium. In case you’re wondering what that is, it’s just a place for the brainy people. Brainy people go there and listen to other brainy people speak. As for me, I’m just there to pretend to be brainy people. Perhaps collect the goodie bag if there is one.

I was hoping to listen to Dr. Masa Tsuchiya speaking about the ‘New Approaches to Complex Biological Systems’ since it’s related to what I am doing. [Actually, the reason why it is related is because Dr. Tsuchiya is in the research team I am attached to.] He’s a Japanese by the way, his English isn’t all fantastic, but he speaks very intelligent stuff. Half of which I don’t understand unfortunately due to myself being too stupid.

It’s held at Theatrette 4 at level 4 of Matrix Building in Biopolis Street [details]. You guys can go check these brainy people out. There isn’t going to be a hell lot of people I believe.

I think I been to that theatrette and it isn’t very big. The last time I been there, I was listening to nanotechnology stuff. Not that I know much about them, Zhiyang convinced to go check it out. I didn’t regret it in the end. It’s also a symposium. I like the energy, I just don’t understand what the people who produced the energy are talking about. Oh, I like the pastry too.

So yesterday’s yesterday’s [bioinformatics//one] morning, I left my home late. It’s the Monday blues. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be late. Blame it on Daniel and Jason, they’re always later. Yeah, it’s their fault. I must have thought I was early because I always seen them later than me. Must be. Must be.

I was thinking of depositing my cheque into the bank when I saw the bus nearing. I ran across the road not-very-legally and boarded the bus. And I saw my lecturer.

And so I asked him if it’s possible for me to divert to the IT field from bioinformatics. Yes, my clever idea is to divert. I need to specialize in something. I know that I am weak in biotechnology. My interest is in informatics. It would be nice if it’s related to software development. I think I would be interested in multimedia computing, web developing, software engineering, programming stuff and information services.

It’s not going to be easy. If I do that, I do not get a year worth of reduction too. Please, sorry, let me grumble a little. You know there is this Career 2005 book by SPH all around Singapore? It’s a crap book for my course’s people. The content is less than useful. It’s just trying to coin you for SG$6.80 because they think they haven’t earn enough money by selling newspapers. (SPH stands for Singapore Press Holdings.)

And the worse would be – I need to be the top 5% and have a merit in order to switch I think. Let me tell you something, my course has 13 people, top 5% is – let me doing some math – 1 puny human being. And I can tell you for sure that I ain’t number 1 (neither number 2, nor 3..). Okay, let’s talk about merit. I am sure I will not get it. Yong Liang tells me I need 10 distinctions, I count again and again and is so sad to conclude that I am not eligible.

So how to get to university?

I’ll blog more when I am free, I’m sleepy now.

One morning, I woke up seeing a news article hailing how great biotechnology is. It’s a great field and blah-blah. Indeed, it’s very interesting. Watson’s double helix DNA, nematodes, and 3 days before the animal cell culture test you studying really hard and get a ‘D’ ['D' for donkey brain, not 'distinction' you donkey brain] in return. That’s what Biotechnology is about.

So merrily, I passed my first year. Happily, I passed my second. Not as gladly, I cleared half of my third year with 2 modules having a ‘D’ grade each. Damn. I went to ITP and met lots of people.

Dr. Kumar says, “Frankly speaking, a diploma isn’t enough to be in the bioinformatics field. Do you consider university?”

Zhiyang says, “Your diploma’s not going to bring you anywhere man. You need a masters at least.”

Miss Gowri say, “Bioinformatics is a very diversified study. The engineers, mathematics, physicist, chemist, biologist can all come and work together for research purposes. It’s better to study into a more specific field, such as engineering, and then work on bioinformatics instead of studying it for a diploma.”

Masa says, “You should go to university. Don’t stop with a diploma.”

It’s so sad. Because they seemed right. At least they have pretty much gotten me convinced. What do I want to do? A lab technician? Not really. It would be nice to be a researcher. But it’s so sad to know that to be in this researching field, a mere diploma cannot do anything except to play around with Do loops in Mathematica while watching William perform genetic programming and genetic algorithm. [Watching William's Matlab program is the most discouraging moment of my day, I wish I could do that.]

So what can I do? I’ll blog about it tomorrow.

Things has been going well. I went to work the first couple of days thinking that I’d so be screwed. I don’t understand this, I don’t understand that.

Today, I reviewed my week and realized that perhaps I’m dong better than some of my classmates who are forced into programming in PERL, C++ and probably some others. My interest is in programming but I didn’t get any programming task.

I have to admit that I was quite disappointed for a moment that I didn’t get something that I like to do. I received the research reports of Theobald et al. (1997) and Visser et al. (2004) about in vivo metabolic analysis of blah blah. I was just discouraged. Just when I thought I can forget all the metabolic pathways a semester ago.

It’s haunting me back. My supervisor has been patient with me. He explained the introduction in much detail so that I could comprehend the objectives of Visser et al.’s (2004) experiments. I do understand much better during the previous Thursday’s discussion.

In Singapore Polytechnic, there are discussion rooms too. We sat in there, took out our 1-inch thick book and glance. After which, we lazed and laugh and basically do anything other than discussing about our work.

In my workplace, the same discussion room was there. Much cooler, in terms of style and temperature, it just feels different. I feel a discussion going on. Adrian was presenting what he knows. I’m trying to catch everything that can be beneficial to my understanding. And Masa has been very encouraging throughout the discussion.

It went so well that I left the room knowing that I won’t be dreading to go to internship. I may just be excited.

Recently, I been to Professor Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS exhibition in Singapore Expo. If you aren’t familiar with his name, Professor Gunther von Hagens [von means he's a German?] is the person who invented (and also coined the term) – plastination. It’s a method of preserving human bodies to its near-perfect form. And definitely, not very kiddie-friendly.

So the BODY WORLDS team brought many well.. bodies here, some of which are truly impressive. Most of these bodies have their skin removes, showing their muscles, skeletons and organs.

There are signs to constantly remind visitors to respect these exhibitions as they are all dead bodies after all. Let me tell you something -Singaporeans do NOT respect these bodies.

There are many teenagers there, should be aged 13-21. Some of these people went around pointing at the bodies’ penises, then laughing out loud when they first saw one with it. As they walk to more exhibits, they soon figure, “oh.. So all these full bodies have private parts”. [Why of course!]

It doesn’t just end here, people went to compare the sizes of the penises. His penis is larger than his. His testes is larger than his. The joy of criticism never ends.

It’s also interesting to know that there are only around 2 female bodies. There is a section containing fetus too, some are deformed.

So how do I feel? I have to admit this, I find it quite plain. It’s not boring, but it is plain. Perhaps it’s the interior decorations, the colors etc. Slowly, I walked around the entire exhibition. The last section is the comments corner, which so happens to be the highlight in my opinion. There’re so many strange negative comments.

Here’s some that I saw:

• This is so gross! [your body's gross]
• I want to eat French fries [what the hell is this person think?!]
• Show some sex positions [no comments]
• Good but too expensive [typical Singaporean]
• Too much men, show more women [that's quite true actually]
• <Strange, never-seen-before languages>

I spend more time looking at other’s comments than writing mine.

After 2 hours, we left the place. It’s indeed educational, but I am hoping to see more exhibits showing bodies that are different (e.g. deform) due to genetic disorders or illnesses. I keep seeing black lungs. Yes, smoking kills, smoking cause black lungs, but I’m sure there’re more interesting things to display other than black lungs.

Finally, I shall conclude, this is also what I wrote at the comments corner – Despite the many criticisms people made in the comments corner, I believe the bodies are artistically portrayed.