Skip to main content

Bye Bye Engine

This is not a good week. Yesterday as I was on my way to the airport to pick up a new student, my car died. Fortunately I had enough sense to steer towards the curb when the car suddenly started shaking extremely violently. Not entirely sure what the problem was with all that shaking, as no warning signals had lighted up nor was the engine temperature too high. I decided to restart. And could not. Thank God for the invention of the cellphone!

Of course, I think another divine intervention also delayed the flight of the new student, so my replacement picker-upper arrived an hour before the student did, but my car's bust. And living in the outbacks (as compared to NY) without a car I'm as good as useless. Can't go anywhere except my kitchen, and the fridge is unfortunately rather empty-looking. Bummer. Good time to have lots of friends with cars.

Hopefully I'll know what to do about a car in the next few days. Aiya.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This weekend sucks!

So the Yankees are facing an uphill battle against the Angels. Hope they pull out of this one. The game today was pretty intense. Down 5-0 then went up 6-5 only to be beaten 11-7. Ugh! I don't know, they just lacked the stamina to pull things through today. Then again, I don't fault them. NY has a pretty tense weekend with the bomb alert, and I pray that all will be well. After all, in my heart NYC is still my home. This weekend is Fall Break. Unfortunately for me, the weather is bad so I probably can't go hiking, and then my boss told me Thursday that we have work to do over the weekend. Right now I am busy testing the microwave/rf generators for our quantum dot gate pulsing. We need to make sure that we can maintain the pulse form sent down to the sample with minimal distortion, reflection, attenuation and loss. This is made particularly difficult due to the size of our metal gates (which I made), on the order of 100 nm or less in width and less than 20 nm in thickness. S...

Of Mice and Men

Here's an interesting story, mice sing ! Check out the sound clip at the bottom of the page. Apparently during courtship male mice sing. This was discovered when researchers let male mice sniff on female or male mice urine, and though the original intention was to see how the male brain differentiates the pheromones, they noticed a rather complex ultrasound pattern erupted when hetero (whether there are homo mice is a question) male mice smelled female pheromones. This places mice in the same league as some other complex singing beings such as birds and dolphins! This is interesting for many reasons, but one I can think of is since mice are relatively easy to manipulate genetically, and the fact that they utilize complicated vocal patterns to court mates means perhaps mice have some simple language abilities. So we may be able to understand how language and vocal abilities develop and play such a crucial role (obviously as in birds better singers get to procreate!) in animals. We a...

Yes, Taiwan Can!

I saw this image somewhere, and I thought it was nice. I hope we can spread it around! I apologize for not giving full credit, but if it's yours, let me know!