We must eat chocolate

From an article in the Times Higher Education supplement (19-26 December 2008) on examples of illogical logic -

'It is imperative that we do not do bad things. Eating chocolate, broadly speaking, is a good thing. Therefore not eating chocolate is a bad thing. We should not not eat chocolate. Conclusion; we must eat chocolate.'

I can think of several people who use that 'logic' already.

Another one I like is 'last year, approximately 6000 deaths were direct consequences of drinking. Nearly 5000 deaths were direct consequences of driving. There were 500 reported cases of death by drink-drinking. Therefore drink-driving is safer than drinking or driving alone.'

Hmm.

P.S. Although I use quotation marks, I'm only quoting from memory, so these may not be the exact words used, but as near enough as I can remember.

P.P.S. Yes I'm aware this is a flagrant misuse of quotation marks.

Bright-field leaf sections

I've been trying to get good clean cross-sections of tobacco and Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, and having a few problems with the tobacco cell walls, which have a tendency to rip and tear apart. Following up the suggestions made by a few colleagues I've found that using a different brand of the embedding media, and also sectioning at a lower temperature, makes a significant difference. The section below is 5 microns thick (that's 5 thousandths of a millimetre).

Ironically, I can't get the microtome lab cold enough - these sections were cut at a room temperature of 19 degrees Celsius. I'm planning on moving the microtome to a room with ambient temperature of 12 degrees and trying there.

The cell architecture of N. benthamiana appears to be much more robust and has stayed intact during sectioning, even at a thickness of only 4 microns.

My next stage is to stain the sections.

scissors that leave no visible rend

When people say that they feel their heart break
what their hearts are really doing is experiencing intense feeling
For how can a broken heart feel?

When there is but an emptiness
where your heart used to be
And a sense of something missing in the tiniest events of your everyday life
as if there someone has exited with help from scissors that leave no visible edge
Then there is your broken heart.

The question is, how does it learn to pick up the pieces of itself and carry on?
Or maybe it never does
but the body learns how to carry on, a shell to protect the precious fragments left behind.

Christmas market

Last night I went for a browse around the German Christmas market set up on Parkers Piece. The smells of stollen and mulled wine were lovely, but the atmosphere was rather flat, probably because it was only 6pm on a Wednesday evening. It made me very homesick for Manchester, where there's been a German market every December that I remember, filled with shoppers and children and people milling around with mugs of hot German-style toddies. My friend always enthuses about the German Xmas market in Manchester, he says it's massive, and the highlight of his trip to Manchester. I don't know if it's that big, to me it always seems cosy, but the atmosphere is always great.

Maybe on a weekend, or later in the evening, the Cambridge market is busier and more holiday-like. I wonder if it's also to do with people tightening their belts this year and spending less. With the strong Euro and unusually weak GB pound, the gifts and crafts at the stalls were on the expensive side. Perhaps luckily for me, as there was a stall that was selling really exquisite music boxes, with tiny beautifully carved wooden figurines. But with the simplest music boxes starting from £13 and the ones that caught my eye being £43, I think my music box collection will stay this size for now.

Quiet Cambridge

MA congregation

This morning, an invitation to take my MA degree next March was part of my mail (in fact, my ONLY piece of mail). I've never really cared about taking my MA - it's not an award of merit, but conferred by right onto BA graduates from Cambridge. So I'm surprised to find that I'm actually quite excited.

Perhaps it's because I'll be leaving Cambridge soon and wish to go through some of the rituals Cambridge offers before I leave for good. It feels almost like a rite of passage, more so right now than taking my PhD degree, which seems more and more elusive as my work drags on. Having checked with several of my friends, it appears that most of the colleges invite their graduands to the same congregation - a good thing, as few of my 'friend-friends' from my year were from my own college.

In fact, few of my close friends have ever been from my own year, with the exception of a few with whom I spent my final year revising and working and thinking about plans for the future. After the initial excitment, I felt that the MA congregation could potentially be a very lonely day, especially since I don't intend to ask my parents to come. Two graduations, assuming they're in the UK for my PhD graduation, seems more than enough to ask. The person I do wish to see would be my brother, but he rarely comes to England now, and he definitely wouldn't be able to in March, halfway through the school-year.

My BA graduation fell on a different day from many of my friends, and so I missed seeing them looking like smartly dressed and coiffured bats the first time round. It'll be fun I think, but I think I'll also feel sad. As I said, it feels like the end of a stage in my life.

Thinking about what's in my wardrobe though, I suspect I'll be wearing exactly the same shirt and black trousers as I did for my BA graduation. Perhaps this time round I'll have my own shoes instead of wearing my mum's.