Happy birthday, Charles Darwin!

Thanks, Abi, for the reminder.

Folks, check out http://www.routesgame.com/home/ for genetic games and more.
Plus http://www.darwin200.org/ and other sites to see what’s going on.

2008.11.10. Welcome to a new semester!

Hello, everyone! Welcome to a new semester!

For those taking my Ch 253 class, please check out the class website at http://ch253.wordpress.com.

The Sci 10-DD site and the ASMPH YL5 pages are on this site– just click on the tabs above.

I’m looking forward to the new semester, and I hope you are too!

– Nina

2008.09.12. We’re Number 1!

No, not the basketball team, because that race is not yet over. The chemists are number one!

Joseph Unsay topped the Chemists Licensure Examination for 2008. We also got the highest passing rate for any school in the country. Congratulations to our new licensed chemists!!!

Full story and full list of successful examinees at http://www.philstar.com/archives.php?aid=20080911200&type=2.

208.09.10. Latest news on the Origin of Life

Wired Science is right on time with some new developments on the Origin of Life– they have a crew of reporters watching closely the latest from a major meeting on the origin of life.

The latest on simple protocells assembled in the lab of Jack Szostak, a bottom-up experimental approach: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/biologists-on-t.html.

And more on a complexity-and-computation approach, which tackles chemical evolution, or pre-evolution, by Martin Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/before-evolutio.html.

Cool!

2008.09.10: Large Hadron Collider Up and Running [Protons]

Whoops, I nearly wrote down Proteins instead of Protons up there. Habit, I suppose. Here’s a video clip from New Scientist about the Large Hadron Collider at http://www.newscientist.com/video.ns?bctid=1785292087&DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_head_Inside%20the%20LHC. See www.newscientist.com for more. Wired also runs a more quirky coverage of the LHC.

BTW for a more fun video, check out Large Hadron Rap by Kate McAlpine at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM and lyrics at https://www.msu.edu/~mcalpin9/lhc_rap/largehadron.html.

It’s origin of the universe time in Sci 10, and the timing is perfect.

Nina

Goodbye, Prof. Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

Just saw last night the news that Randy Pausch passed away from pancreatic cancer last Friday, July 25, 2008, at this home Virginia, leaving behind his wife and children.

Goodbye, Randy– your “Last Lecture” touched the lives of so many. Your courage and zest for life inspire us, even those who just watched you on YouTube and read your book, or maybe saw you on Oprah’s show.

Some links:

• LA Times/Chicago Tribune news: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/reviews/critics/la-me-pausch26-2008jul26,0,5191339.story?page=1
• His “Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, 2007 (~75 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&feature=related
• His ~10 minute version for the Oprah show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIyt8oSLVs
• His website: http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/
• His book’s website: http://www.thelastlecture.com/

Moving house

2008.06.11.

Welcome to this new home for my virtual professional life. My old site has been a cobweb site since 2005 or so. I hope this move will make it easier to update on the fly from anywhere.

Let’s see, this WordPress site is my 4th virtual home, since my page was born back on 25 June 1995 at Princeton. Back then, the web was mostly non-commercial, a typical page looked like today’s blogs, and one had to code pages in html. Fortunately, there was lots of time back then to do just that while waiting for bacteria to grow, DNA to amplify, gels to run and stain, and column samples to elute. After moving back home, my page went back to Manila too– reborn on PacificNet on 14 August 1998, moved to the Ateneo Chemistry Department server in 1999, and mirrored on aegis.ateneo.net in 2002-2004. Somewhere along the way, I started doing webpages using Frontpage and similar software instead of writing in html in a text file. And now, this page is housed at WordPress, where all I need to do is type my text and click. Lots of things have happened in the past 13 years!

Welcome to my new professional world! By the way, some of my pages had migrated to WordPress in the last year (my biochem classes, for example), while I’ve been experimenting with multiply for my outside-the-classroom ruminations. Oh, and if you want to see my old site, it’s at http://www.chem.admu.edu.ph/~nina/index.html.

Nina

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

I was going to delete this post, but the title holds memories. I don’t know if programming classes still start this way, but when then newly minted teacher Ms. Didith Tan (now Dr. Rodrigo) first taught us programming, the first thing we did was display “Hello World” onscreen. So I guess I’ll keep this default WordPress opening post after all.