Graduate Students in Real Life...

Okay, so I was forwarded these posts by one of my professors. I'm pretty sure that this might be a good way to spend Saturday night with some of my fellow students out there:

Dancing my way through a Ph.D.
(must have been in a science-related field - if only I had gone to medical school like my mother wanted!)
and
Starring in my own graduate-student action game.


And I thought I had trouble just trying to get a dissertation committee down on paper...

:)-<

A guy, a girl, her ponytail, and some Def poetry, emoticon style. In this TED talk, Rives shares a little tale about love and loss, illustrated by emoticons. Much cooler than whatever you texted your mom this morning.

(For some reason the movie won't embed , so I don't have any pretty picture for you to click and watch. Sorry)

Document this Life

In a post-Panopticon world, many of us are heading out today to vote with questions lingering about our right to wear campaign buttons or drink free coffee.

What about questions surrounding our vote? How do we document our tiny struggle against "the man"? Some people are suggesting the need now to "Video the Vote:"

Video the Vote is a national network of citizen journalists, independent filmmakers, and media professionals working together to document voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

The effort to mediate our lives continues. Is this a necessary endeavour to assure that we remain (or finally become) enfranchised? Does suspicion run amuck unfairly? Or has blind faith prevailed too much already? Sadly, I'm leaning towards the side that feels the need to preserve my experience, both for posterity and the assurance that my experience will, in some way, "count."

I don't know how to deal with these issues. But I wonder how far the documentary urge will continue to stretch. Have you checked your harddrive lately? How many pictures are on it? Do you save your emails? If you really, really needed to, could you find out, in one way or another, what you were doing the week of November 1, 2006?

Eternal Sunshine is Today

It is Monday morning, and I woke up before the sun to get started on this week. That's never a great sign.

Other than that, though, I wanted to share this with you - the advent of Eternal Sunshine. A quote from the article summary, published in the journal Neuron:

"Inducible and Selective Erasure of Memories in the Mouse Brain via Chemical-Genetic Manipulation"

"Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient αCaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. "

You don't have to read the whole thing, but it is pretty interesting if you have a few extra minutes.

Deleting memories like old files on your hardrive...
The title of my first book?
When We Became PostCyborg??

Alchemy, Ennui, Cupcakes

Last week, in my Poe class, I reviewed a book which talked about Poe's hoaxing of the American public. In one of these hoaxes, a man reveals that he has succesfully turned lead into gold. In another project for the class, we need to review a cultural appropriation of Poe. Many of these appropriations render Poe as the dismal, depressed man that he sometimes was.

This link has nothing to do with Poe. Officially, that is. It represents instead Swedish playwright August Strindberg and his chipper friend, Helium. But the convergence of ideas is certainly present. Alchemy? Dark Figure of Ennui? Cupcakes? (Maybe the last one isn't so relevant to Poe, but to me...)
And besides, it is Friday. Enjoy.

Twitter saves the Day

I've been searching around for stories on or in Twitter recently, and I ran across this CNN article: "Student 'Twitters' His Way Out of Egyptian Jail." The story may over-emphasize the role of the "twitter" on getting the kid out of jail, but it also points some interesting applications of the tool. Using Twitter to get out the word, update your status, inspire political change. Not that this is all that different from sending a clandestine written message back in the pre-cellphone dark ages. Yet the (illusion of) the "culture of the immediate" is certainly appealing. Consider the bandwagon of text-messaging emergency alerts to students that many schools jumped on in the past couple of years.
Maybe I should have a GPS Device embedded in my skin for my own protection.

Please Mum, I'd like some more red blood cells on my half!

'Nuff said. Go here to get your fix.