guilt trip

your father and i are taking off for an overnight trip, i tell J1 and J2. whaaatt? they say. you're taking this empty nest thing a little too seriously, aren't you? J2 says. what are you going to do to prove you love me, J1 says. sneaky manipulators both.

grad grades

read this. in brief, a couple of final year communications students spend $26,000 on their college final year project. they had initially hoped to spend $5,000 each.

if you ask me, their supervisor must have kinda lost them somewhere along the way. also, this magnitude of budget deficit surely earns an automatic failing grade. they might well have lost the contract by now.

saturday outing

we discover walmart in singapore.
different name, similar philosophy.
same supplier.

my two (dented) cents

J1 introduces me to two non-pubmed type of papers that are making waves, this and this. the first is the pronunciation on austerity drives by the global gurus and the second is the debunking of the first by an upstart post-grad student.

if you ask me, here's what happened with the first paper. there was bias (okay) and they didn't correct for confounding factors (not so good) and they used fishy composite numbers (horrors) AND it was an observational study from which they drew conclusions about causality (gosh).

moral of the story: you could just get away with it.

second moral of the story: ebm stuff applied to social science papers might just work.

heh heh.

geek heaven

iPad maxi, if you ask me.

feeling mah age

if i am quieter these days it's because i'm more spent these days. on the one hand it's nice to have work to do and things to learn and stuff to contribute and money to earn. on the other it sure gets harder with age.

romance

this redefines the whole concept of macaroons.

toys

'nuff said.

little joys

you spend years worrying about development and school and socialization and survival capabilities and health and then one day, by God's great grace, you find you have a friend.

sudden light

it occurs to me that as much as i want to remain fresh-eyed about life, most of the time i forget to simply lift my eyes up to behold the prettiness of things around me.

interregnum

after the afternoon storm and before the evening downpour.

i get caught in one of those monster showers that inspire you to remove your footwear because one might as well save SOMEthing, and it isn't going to be the body or the apparel or the bag.

physiology 101

retina brain barrier (rbb): a separation of visual signals detected by the eye from the signal processing centers of the brain. permeability varies with attention, circadian rhythm, glycemic status and age, among others, becoming mostly impermeable on weekends workday afternoons and when presented with an unusual amount of visual stimuli.

we need to figure out why the signals that do get processed then get abruptly deleted from the data bank.

BYO

have screen will travel.

zap

i've been back at work for three months.

J1's african trip has come and gone.

i don't remember what snow looks like.

or how driving feels like.

one quarter gone.

just like that.