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tanarillIt is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year! This year is 5772. The fact that I went to the New Year's services at the Hillel house directly after TAing probably says something about this coming year c.c Also, since we are now in the Ten Days of Repentance, let me know if you feel I have wronged you in the past year, so as I can make amends. And go eat some apples and honey, to guarantee a sweet new year.
So, Things I have Learned:
1. I teach too quickly. I get through an hour's worth of section notes in ~20 minutes. I don't know if I'm just nervous so I speed up, or I'm a good teacher. It worried me I'm covering things to quickly for my students to get a good understanding . . .
2. Proteins in which some kind of post-translational modification occurs are the norm, rather than the exception. Or in other words, after your ribosome has spat out a polypeptide, and that has folded correctly, it is still not a working protein until a different protein comes in and pokes at it for a bit. This is probably why insulin is not dirt-cheap even though we can make the polypeptide sequence with a machine. It has to be produced in a living cell, which contains all the other necessary proteins that make it work, for it to be post-transitionally modified into working.
3. My proffesor used the word 'promiscuous' to describe hydrogen bonding. I am so not the only one to think of it in terms of bitches and hos.
4. Everything in Australia is trying to kill you. Well, okay, I didn't learn this, but it was reiterated.
5. The bike paths on campus need signs. I got lost trying to find the seminar today twice. The presenter spent maybe twenty minutes talking about the paper we'd discussed, and then the other forty minutes talking about some really cool imaging stuff he's doing. The imaging issue is thus: at the sizes we're imaging, brownian motion can actually move what we were attempting to see while we try to look at it. We can, and for many years have, solved this problem by freezing the sample and then looking at it. The issue is that we're getting good enough to look at live cells on this scale, but freezing tends to kill the cells. Not useful. The solution, as I understand it, uses a low-power laser (seriously low power, I'm talking milliwatt powers here) to detect the brownian motion and adjust the sample stage with electronic actuators in real time. They scale they are moving the stage is about one third of one tenth of one nanometer. This is enough to make it possible to take pictures of things we couldn't before, because the 'shutter speed' on the 'camera' was necessarily much too fast. Pretty cool. And thus science moves forward . . .
6. Honey! Made by bees! Bees!
7. I missed my first 'how to TA class' D: because I got the time wrong. So very my bad. But my teacher doesn't seem too upset, so I will move forward. Still. Not an auspicious start to being a grad student :<
8. Living in Goleta is way too expensive.
9. The color Blue.
That is all.
So, Things I have Learned:
1. I teach too quickly. I get through an hour's worth of section notes in ~20 minutes. I don't know if I'm just nervous so I speed up, or I'm a good teacher. It worried me I'm covering things to quickly for my students to get a good understanding . . .
2. Proteins in which some kind of post-translational modification occurs are the norm, rather than the exception. Or in other words, after your ribosome has spat out a polypeptide, and that has folded correctly, it is still not a working protein until a different protein comes in and pokes at it for a bit. This is probably why insulin is not dirt-cheap even though we can make the polypeptide sequence with a machine. It has to be produced in a living cell, which contains all the other necessary proteins that make it work, for it to be post-transitionally modified into working.
3. My proffesor used the word 'promiscuous' to describe hydrogen bonding. I am so not the only one to think of it in terms of bitches and hos.
4. Everything in Australia is trying to kill you. Well, okay, I didn't learn this, but it was reiterated.
5. The bike paths on campus need signs. I got lost trying to find the seminar today twice. The presenter spent maybe twenty minutes talking about the paper we'd discussed, and then the other forty minutes talking about some really cool imaging stuff he's doing. The imaging issue is thus: at the sizes we're imaging, brownian motion can actually move what we were attempting to see while we try to look at it. We can, and for many years have, solved this problem by freezing the sample and then looking at it. The issue is that we're getting good enough to look at live cells on this scale, but freezing tends to kill the cells. Not useful. The solution, as I understand it, uses a low-power laser (seriously low power, I'm talking milliwatt powers here) to detect the brownian motion and adjust the sample stage with electronic actuators in real time. They scale they are moving the stage is about one third of one tenth of one nanometer. This is enough to make it possible to take pictures of things we couldn't before, because the 'shutter speed' on the 'camera' was necessarily much too fast. Pretty cool. And thus science moves forward . . .
6. Honey! Made by bees! Bees!
7. I missed my first 'how to TA class' D: because I got the time wrong. So very my bad. But my teacher doesn't seem too upset, so I will move forward. Still. Not an auspicious start to being a grad student :<
8. Living in Goleta is way too expensive.
9. The color Blue.
That is all.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-29 09:24 am (UTC)D: Sorry you missed you're first TA class/You're working through notes too fast, I'm sure you'll work it out!
That is totally a thing I did not know. No wonder biological molecules are so hard to make. I'm sort of grumpy we're so far away Dr. McCoy quick-synthesizing a vaccine to SpaceFlu.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-30 03:31 am (UTC)Oh, hey, I had an apple as part of my breakfast! (I thought the craving weird at the time.)
1. I don't know how big the class you are teaching is and how easily you could check, but try to see if they start getting blank or worried faces. Those are tell-tale signs for "I don't understand this but I don't want to interrupt the teacher for another explanation."
It doesn't help that sometimes the students answer "no" when the teacher asks if they have any questions or any trouble with the class. I remember when my classmates would say that it was all cool but when the teacher turned around or the class ended they frantically asked their classmates for explanations. I don't know if it was out of embarrassment or because they didn't understand the teachers' explaining methods. Or both.
2. ...So they extract insulin out of people?
3. Whatever analogy works is a good analogy. :D
4. Cracked.com has taught me that lesson well. Theirs is a noble labor.
5. I thought your campus had lots of signs?
That is actually pretty cool. "We know where you are. All the time. YOU CANNOT RUN. Yes, that's right! Keep trembling! It won't help you anymore!"
6. Honey! :D
7. You'll probably learn more on the go, anyway.
8. Oh. :(
9. :D
no subject
Date: 2011-09-30 04:14 am (UTC)2. XD I think they used to extract it from animals that were bred and then killed so the insulin could be harvested. I know that now it's harvested from genetically modified bacteria which have a copy of the human insulin gene. And now you know!
5. Nope. The buildings usually have a big sign on them saying what building it is, and there are a few campus maps around, but mostly not. I'm learning.
Big Brother is Watching!