March 2005

Life’s Gonna Suck When You Grow Up

March 12, 2005

How strikingly appropriate that the title of Dennis Leary’s song describes my St. Patrick’s weekend thus far. Office tribulations aside, D and I found out last night that his mother’s problem is not a mere cellular aberrance in a portion of her lung, but a full-blown cancer of the lymph nodes. The tears that have [...]

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I Hope It’s Not A Toomaah

March 11, 2005

D’s mother is having a possible cancer excised from her left lung today. Oh wait, she should be in ICU recovery by now. Please hope and pray with me that this wonderful woman enjoys a speedy recovery. She means the world to my love and makes my life a more pleasant voyage, too. There’s no [...]

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A New Frontier

March 9, 2005

NPR interviews Dijanna Figueroa, one of few African-American marine biologists, as she uncovers the secrets of the deep in a new IMAX documentary. A new NSF study shows that only 1% of earth scientists are black. This is a rather disturbing statistic based on the positive experience I have had with young black students and [...]

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Belated International Women’s Day Greetings

March 9, 2005

It completely slipped my mind that yesterday (Tuesday) was International Women’s Day. Bad feminist – no massage! Perhaps it is my disdain for mere days, weeks or months that celebrate such essences of living as women, the earth, nationalities, etc. that caused me to forget. Regardless, it enrages me to know that the only two [...]

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The Eternal Quest for Sleek

March 9, 2005

Our age is the only one after streamlined razor-sharpness, right? Think again. In what may be “the oldest use of industrial diamonds yet,” Peter Lu, a graduate student at Harvard discovered through microscopy that the Chinese used the hardest naturally-occurring substance to polish their ceremonial sapphire axes to a sparkling sheen. Yet another scientific vignette [...]

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The Right Christian

March 9, 2005

vs. The Christian Right Last night, I fell asleep wondering why a lot of Americans are obsessed with being the righteous, while living with what surmounts to depraved indifference towards the right to live of other people, cultures and ecosystems. Why do they have to be bad in order for us to be good? Moreover, [...]

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The Great Night Of Siva

March 8, 2005

Do you know what time it is, boys and girls? That’s right, it’s “the 14th night of the new moon during the dark half of the month of Phalguni,” which means tonight is Maha Sivaratri. An eerie childhood memory of this holy day still gives me chills. *all motion ceases, lights dim, someone turns on [...]

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Your Pick

March 8, 2005

What should we talk about today? For once, I’ll let you make the choice. Would you like to discuss the question of Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years? As Jay agrees, it’s long but rewarding. [The Cliff's notes version: Diamond basically correlates societal/political/technical advancement and Eurasian world [...]

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Go, My Peeps!

March 7, 2005

Padma Gopalan, assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering at my graduate alma mater, University of Wisconsin has received a coveted NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award. The awards are granted on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education. Gopalan will receive a $445,000, five-year grant for research, education and [...]

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After The Rain

March 7, 2005

Why do I look for solace on my computer when beauty is there for the taking if I simply turn my head to the right and look out the window? New Orleans at 5:25PM looks simply gorgeous in all of its rain-washed splendor. The middle of my window coincides with the far-off horizon nicely demarcating [...]

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