A Viral Story

This break, I am looking at Yale medical labs that look interesting in the hopes of find a lab to do research at this summer. I am especially interested in a particular lab that focuses on how retroviruses, the family of virus that includes HIV, infect cells. While I was starting to read through some of the research papers that this lab has published, despite the papers being no Harry Potters and requiring more google searches (to understand certain terms) than a final exam (which needs google searches for procrastination's sake), they had an undeniable narrative. Badass, secretive retroviruses infilitrate immune cells and take over the cell's machinery. While this of course, is a well known tale, it gets more interesting as the lab begins to provide additional narrative detail. See cells that are attacked by retroviruses aren't as much military bases like Fort Sumter, which if captured simply provide ammunition and weapons for the virsues's machinations. No, immune cells are like naval ships, a la pirates of the carribean. If retroviruses can seize control of immune cells the lab has shown, it can steer and extend membrane connections, similar to rope ladders, to connect to a nearby immune-cell/ship, and 10 times more efficiently infilitrate and take over that cell/ship that it is in contact with. If the Cold War was America vs. Retroviruses, not only would we have been fighting a naval battle as aforementioned, but containment would have been an essentially pragmatic and necessary paradigm. The battle strategy would necessarily have included cutting down the rope bridges between ships a.k.a. inhibiting the formation of membrane connections that facilitate transfer of HIV virus (which the lab has shown can be done). These fairly choppy, incoherent analogies are just from a brief skimming of two papers, but I can't wait to uncover additional narration (hopefully I can even spend all summer unraveling the story if there is an opening in this lab that would allow me to work in it).

I got to be honest, though, maybe this post is at some level inspired by my unceasing desire to be like Barack Obama. To see how Obama might see the world with a narrative-frame-of mind, read this really inetersting article http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/200911/barack-obama-writing-books-writer-robert-draper?printable=true (I found this article on an awesome blog called givemesomethingtoread.com, a blog which I found out about from Sean--thanks Sean!)

Born to Love Running

On my flight back to California, I read a book titled "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen." The hidden tribe the book refers to is the Tarahumara tribe from Northern Mexico (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarahumara). The tribe is renowned for its ability to run loooooooooooooooong distances (up to 160 km or 99.5 miles in a day according to wikipedia). To be honest, I read the book a little out of default. I was looking for a good book to take out from the Yale library to read on the plane ride, and after finding all the books I had recorded on my post-it-note of books-to-read were not available in the library (Yale allowing you to take out 150 books at a time for a month or so is great for academic papers, but it makes things rather competitive and difficult when it comes to taking out popular, more leisurely works), I moved on to books that looked interesting from the New York Times Best Seller list. Born to run was really the only one available in the library. To make the story a little more romantic, I had to go all the way up to the fourth-floor (and the auxiliary wing of the fourth floor) of our largest and most labrythian library, Sterling Memorial Library, in order to find the book--so I myself traveled long distances to find this book. The book was filled with interesting characters and annecdotes--but what I took away most from the book the was the depiction that Tarahumara really love to run. I can't imagine running 100 miles in a day, but I suppose it only makes sense that if you are going to run 100 miles in a day, you are probably going to have to love doing so. I am tempted to apply this lesson to the gym...but I gotta be honest, I just don't love running on treadmills. And I'm not going to love running on treadmills. It's not going to happen. But like the Tarahurama love a central logistic of their life, running, maybe I can come to have a similar exuberant love for the primary logistics of my life--car rides, home-work, chores, blog updating (kidding about the blog updating--not a central chore and I already enjoy it). We'll see, we'll see.

Writing Block

I haven't posted on my blog for quite a while, and to tell you the truth, nothing really jumps out at me to write now. Which is to say, the only thing that jumps out is that I don't really have anything in particular to say. I think that is a product of the vastness of potential thoughts, rather than a lack of opportunities for thought. In economics, my professor briefly mentioned how thought might be one of the few things that is not 'scarce'-- in other words, thought doesn't appear to be something you allocate per se. I mean you allocate your time, and thus to a certain extent, you can allocate time for thinking about different things, but you don't have a discrete quantity of thought, independent of time, that you allocate to different purposes. All the same, I too often forget this. I am intensely impatient when it comes to thoughts and discussions--I love to read and to think and to discuss, but if a novel, radio program, or even preson loses the train of thought I find relevant....well, the 'offending' party might as well have put on a red sox hat. It's hard to exactly define what I find 'relevant' but I think it relates to my rigid if general idea of what is important as well as an ability to affect the subject I am thinking about. Perhaps this impatience and devotion to relevance is truly a concession to the limits of time: I feel like I only have so much time, I need to spend it thinking about important things I can affect. But given the quantity of time I have devoted to watching Entourage, my guess is that it's not really an allocation of time thing. That's not to say that it is not related to time-- I think the combination of the infinite space of thought and the finite space of time react to form a debilitating fear. My impatience with 'irrelevant' thought is a product of the desire to do, conquer, think everything and a related fear of a fail in my pursuit of everything. Since thought is so vast, and I canot think everything, the only way I have come to differentiate between what I should think about and should not think about...wait, I guess this is an allocation which makes thought scarce by association with time. All right, fine, thought is scarce! But it isn't that scarce... So, as I was saying, the only way I have to differentiate between what I should think about and not think about is to use the metric of what is 'relevant.' But while I might not be able to think about everything, thought is not so scarce as to limit to narrow relevance. Especially because even given my prior definition of relevance, it is hard to know what will be relevant in the future. There's not too many things that aren't very scarce, (a lack of scarcity is quite scarce...hehe) so I might as well take advantage of thought. So here's to a lavish indulgence of irrelevant thought in the future.