![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
don't know much biology
Dec. 7th, 2009 10:34 am1. Thank you very, very much to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cordelia_v and ruric for the snowflakes! Very cute.
2. Am not dead but gradually sinking under a pile of pre-Christmas requirements. Also, my computer mouse died, so I could not respond to anything computerish without great sweeps of the mouse across a rough surface and even then, not really.
Now using B.'s special Ergonomic Mouse which is a very odd shape, like a games controller. Unfortunately, 'ergonomic' also happens to equal 'right-handed.' Feh.
3. Little E. is off sick. Clearly, it's her week for it following young P's absences last week and the week before. She is tucked up on the sofa watching CBeebies.
4. Spent all day Saturday at a practical for my Genetics course. This essentially involved doing endless homework for 6 hours, using various genetics databases to investigate mutations and answer 45 questions. Aaargh. It's so interesting and yet frustrating, because it's a 2 year course with rotating modules and most of my classmates are in Year 2 and know what RNA is; and I get stuck because we actually haven't covered the structure of DNA and so I don't know the difference* between a nucleotide and an amino acid or indeed about the bases and I CERTAINLY don't know that when you look up the international ready reckoner for T and there is no T then it actually means U. (Or something. I'm sure you lot will correct me).
At that point the lecturer actually patted me on the shoulder and laughed.
Look at Wikipedia: it's really simple. Gah.
On the other hand I have become a veritable fount of useless information: did you know that all Europeans are descended from just a couple of people? Or that every modern human can trace their ancestry back to central Africa? Or that there really are genes which make you fat, and there may even be genes that make you religious. Or! Or that the genome sequence for dogs is based on Craig Venter's poodle.
I was expounding on all this to B. and then he lost faith because I could not adequately explain what a base pair was.
5. Interior design proceeds verrry verrry slowly.
6. Merlin! (I can haz beleefuble character development nao plz? U can not haz, sa de riterz.)
*I don't know what they are. Words. It's all words, mostly of many syllables.
cordelia_v and ruric for the snowflakes! Very cute.2. Am not dead but gradually sinking under a pile of pre-Christmas requirements. Also, my computer mouse died, so I could not respond to anything computerish without great sweeps of the mouse across a rough surface and even then, not really.
Now using B.'s special Ergonomic Mouse which is a very odd shape, like a games controller. Unfortunately, 'ergonomic' also happens to equal 'right-handed.' Feh.
3. Little E. is off sick. Clearly, it's her week for it following young P's absences last week and the week before. She is tucked up on the sofa watching CBeebies.
4. Spent all day Saturday at a practical for my Genetics course. This essentially involved doing endless homework for 6 hours, using various genetics databases to investigate mutations and answer 45 questions. Aaargh. It's so interesting and yet frustrating, because it's a 2 year course with rotating modules and most of my classmates are in Year 2 and know what RNA is; and I get stuck because we actually haven't covered the structure of DNA and so I don't know the difference* between a nucleotide and an amino acid or indeed about the bases and I CERTAINLY don't know that when you look up the international ready reckoner for T and there is no T then it actually means U. (Or something. I'm sure you lot will correct me).
At that point the lecturer actually patted me on the shoulder and laughed.
Look at Wikipedia: it's really simple. Gah.
On the other hand I have become a veritable fount of useless information: did you know that all Europeans are descended from just a couple of people? Or that every modern human can trace their ancestry back to central Africa? Or that there really are genes which make you fat, and there may even be genes that make you religious. Or! Or that the genome sequence for dogs is based on Craig Venter's poodle.
I was expounding on all this to B. and then he lost faith because I could not adequately explain what a base pair was.
5. Interior design proceeds verrry verrry slowly.
6. Merlin! (I can haz beleefuble character development nao plz? U can not haz, sa de riterz.)
*I don't know what they are. Words. It's all words, mostly of many syllables.
