Let me be Frank...

East Coast Adventures

2010-09-27T05:40:00.001-07:00

The past few weeks have flown by and it’s almost time to leave. We’ve had a lot of fun though. Last week we took a long weekend and flew to Durban, on the east coast, and rented a car there. We drove north into the Hluhluwi-Imfolozi national park where we saw tons of animals. It’s sort of a self-guided safari. You drive into the park and you’re not allowed to leave your car except for at a few designated areas. They don’t want you getting eaten by a rhino. Everyone here talks about the “big five”: lions, leopards, rhinos, buffalo, and elephants. We saw the last three, plus zebras, giraffes, warthogs, antelope, monkeys, and hippos. Apparently it’s pretty rare to see cats on an open safari like that. We also saw whales over lunch during my first week here. They were super close to the coast. There is no shortage of places to see wild animals in South Africa. We had originally planned on traveling to Botswana, which would have been a ton of driving. Apparently the Chobe National Park in northern Botswana is one of the best places for wildlife in all of Africa. But my advice, if you’re ever in South Africa, is to explore South Africa first, and then see if you have time left to venture further north. They say South Africa is “many countries within one country”, and I’m inclined to agree. There’s lots to see here.

After the park, we drove up to St. Lucia and spent the night there. Apparently the main road through this town used to be a hippo trail, and at night you can still occasionally find hippos wandering the streets. We didn’t see any in the streets, but we did take a little drive along the waterfront and found a few choming on the grass. Hippos, by the way, are considered very dangerous because they’re so irritable. And they’re surprisingly fast, despite their pudgy, never-got-picked-for-the-baseball-team appearance. So we didn’t get out of the car to play.

St. Lucia reminded me of Beaufort, NC. Sort of a fishing/budget vacation town I guess. Nice beaches. Bars with fish and flags and fishing nets hanging from the ceilings. We stayed at a pretty sweet hostel. The only catch was we arrived during a drought, and they had shut off the water. Not a big deal though. We were only there for one night.

We then drove up to Sodwana Bay, which is at the northern end of a big wetlands reserve along the coast. It’s beautiful there, and apparently one of the best places in the world for SCUBA diving. In fact, SCUBA is the main reason most people go there. So we went diving the next morning along one of the reefs off the coast. The surf there is crazy. There are foot straps on the boat so you don’t fall overboard while going over a wave. The reef was only about 15 meters down, and the fish down there were really amazing. The Indian Ocean is warm and so there are lots of colorful fish and beautiful fluorescent soft corals. Even at that depth, we still felt the surf tugging us around. We also saw a Mana Ray. I definitely need to dive more. Since I got certified 8 years ago, I’ve only been on maybe 6 or 7 trips.

After that, we hopped back in the car and our plan was to drive to Lesotho, which is a small, mountainous country completely surrounded by South Africa. But as we were driving we also realized that we were just a few miles away from the Swaziland border. Not ones to pass up an opportunity to earn another passport stamp, we hopped across the border. Swaziland is the most HIV-burdened country in the world, with over 50% of people in their twenties HIV-positive. The life expectancy: 32. It’s heartbreaking really. There’s certainly an awareness of safe sex, HIV testing, and abstinence, and you see the red ribbon everywhere you look. There were free condoms at the border crossing, but apparently there’s a pretty big stigma against using them. Polygamy (both in its official and unofficial forms) is apparently very common, and that has contributed to the problem. King Mswati III has 14 (official) wives currently. Apparently he invoked a ban on sex with women under 18 in an attempt to curtail the spread of HIV, only to then marry a 17-year-old the following year. With respect to HIV, I think here, as in many parts of Africa, there’s a prevailing sense of helplessness and inevitable doom. We really didn’t see much of Swaziland. We just drove through from one border crossing to the other. When we left, the border agent said “you have not even spent one night in Swaziland!” He was disappointed. Judging from the brochure we got at the border, there seems to be a lot of really cool stuff to do here. Wish we had more time.

So we drove south toward Lesotho (pronounced “lee-soo-too”). We stayed in a town about an hour north of the border called “Bethlehem”. We called ahead for hotels because we’d heard horror stories of desperate travelers sleeping in mangers here. But it turns out, nobody visits Bethlehem. We were 2 of 3 people staying at the Park Hotel that night. After being served breakfast by a lovely waitress who seemed to be starved of both customers and conversation, we said goodbye to Bethlehem and drove to Lesotho.

Now mind you, Lesotho is only about 100 miles wide. We though we’d be able to pop in one side and out the other in the matter of an afternoon. Yes, it’s all mountains, but really, how long could it take us? We had a flight out of Durban back to Cape Town in the morning, so we had to make it back there by 5am. We drove in to Fricksburg, on the northwest corner. The western side of Lesotho is deceptively flat. And since the town we drove into, although very poor, had gas stations and all that, we assumed that all the other similarly-sized dots on the map would also have gas stations. So our half tank of gas didn’t concern us. But after we crested the first mountain and watched our gas needle charge towards E, we realized we might be in trouble. We stopped off at the Mafika Lisiu pass for some photos, and nearby there was a national park with a beautiful hiking trail overlooking a gorge. It was perfectly quiet. No cars. No people. Not even any animals (not big ones, anyway). Slight breeze. They had a nice little windowed gazebo hut thing where they served tea and sandwiches. This is also where I bought tons of hats. The guy there told us we’d be able to get gas just a few miles down the mountain, so we were relieved. And it turns out he was right. We got two detergent-bottles-full (about 10L) of gas. I’m not sure if it was actually unleaded, although the woman claimed it was. Apparently, it’s hard to find unleaded gas in these parts. Oh well, it’s a rental.

So, surely we had enough gas to make it through the rest of the country. We headed for Sani Pas, on the eastern side of the country, which butts up against the Drakesburg National Park on the South African side. We’d be in Durban by late afternoon, in time to go lay out on the beach. Great.

But driving in the mountains is slow, and map distances are deceptive. And we didn’t have a topo map, so it was hard to estimate how far we had to go. We had our trusty TomTom, which I’ve got to say, is a fantastic piece of technology. Even the ruralest of rural roads in Lesotho were no stranger to TomTom (or Clare, as we called her, because we had it set on an Irish woman’s voice). But Clare told us it would take 16 hours to make it to the other side of the country. Surely she was mistaken. We were, after all, only talking about 60 miles (as the crow flies). But still, we were beginning to realize that it was taking us a while to get from town to town, so we stepped it up as much as we could. The roads, although good up to this point, were littered with fairly large rocks that had fallen from the mountains, so you had to be careful. And this car was small. I mean, I’m pretty sure Hyundai offers an optional duffel bag carrying case for this thing. I’ve seen bigger tires on lawn mowers.

Then the pavement stopped. Clare happily invited us to press on. And at this point, we were starting to understand why she told us 16 hours. The border crossing at Sani Pas was to close at 6pm, and it was around 4pm at that point. We had roughly estimated that if we continued going through the mountains as we were (averaging 60 km/h), we probably barely make it. But now, all bets were off. The road kept getting worse and worse. We drove a little and asked a man walking along the road whether it would eventually become paved again. He said it would once we reached Thaba Tseka, and it would be paved all the way to Sani Pas or Maseru (the capital), whichever way we wanted to go. “I know this country like I know my hand.” Ok. And then he asked for a ride. So we drove him down the road for a few miles to his home. His name was David. We were hoping David would stay with us all the way to Thaba Tseka, in case anything should happen with the car. But unfortunately he left us and we had another 20 km to go before reaching town. Luckily we made it there without popping a tire or ripping a hole in the oil pan. It took us like 2 hours. We averaged about 20 km/hr. Along the way we went through some very poor neighborhoods. The kids would run out to the road and hold out their hands. Some would ask for money, some for candy. The men all wore thick blankets, which is the custom in Lesotho. Many would also wear cloth masks which would cover everything but their eyes. I guess this was to protect them from the harsh wind. They looked pretty intimidating. We interrupted many a herd of sheep or goats while driving along those roads, much to the dismay of the herdsmen.

We finally made it to Thaba Tseka, and I’ve never been so happy to see asphault. We took a picture of the paved road. At that point, we decided we’d better exit the country through the capital, Maseru, because that border crossing was open 24 hours. We would be driving all night to Durban (since this meant we’d basically be driving all the way back around Lesotho once we got back onto South African roads), but at least we’d make it in time to catch our flight. And then, just as the sun was setting, the pavement stopped again. And this time it was worse. The rocks were huge. We were going so slow it wasn’t even registering on the speedometer. 5-10 km/hr, maybe. Although this road showed up as a major road on our map, it was apparently still under construction. We flagged down a truck coming the opposite way (there were only 4x4 trucks on this road) and he told us that we had about 30 km of unpaved road ahead, and then it was paved all the way to Maseru. So for the next 3 hours or so, we puttered along, with the Hyundai about to rattle apart. Our gas was also hovering around empty again, and there was no chance of finding a gas station out there—definitely not one with unleaded gas. If we ran out of gas, we’d have to flag someone down and try to siphon or something. Plus it was night by then, and we didn’t pass very many vehicles at all. So I was pretty much sure we were spending the night in the car.

We finally did get back on paved road, but with each mountain pass we could watch the needle go lower and lower. One of these passes was aptly named the “God Help Me Pass”. We stopped at a village along the way and asked about gas and a few guys started leading us down this dark, rocky decline. We were already a little wary because it seemed like the last place you would find gasoline, and the road was so rough we were bound to get the car stuck. Then one of them said “hurry, hurry”. And that struck us both as strange. Why should we be in a hurry? So we made an executive decision to get the hell out of there and drove off.

We pulled in at the next place where we saw lights (most of the villages we passed by didn’t have electricity so it was pretty difficult to see anything). As it so happens, the place we pulled into was sort of a gated community. Nice brick buildings. Security gate. Paved parking lot. And…lo and behold…two private gas pumps. It was about 7pm, but we found one building with the door open and the light on, so we went inside. There we met the guy who was apparently in charge of the place, working late. His English name was Simon. He invited us in and we sat down, and after a flurry of phone calls, he told us we would be able to purchase gas (the gas wasn’t for sale; it was only for company vehicles). He got in touch with the man who could pump it for us. Apparently he was just down the road playing squash. So we drove into the community. After some confusion at the security gate, we met our savior, Cox (English name again), who was super friendly and has apparently been to Fremont before. He filled up our tank and didn’t charge us any more than a normal gas station would, though we paid him quite a bit extra for his trouble.

At that point, it was smooth sailing through the border at Maseru and on to Durban…wide open highways and 24 hour gas stations. We drove all night, switching every couple of hours. We arrived at the airport at dawn—or so we thought. When we got to the airport, we were met with a closed gate and a security guard. Although the sign said “Durban International Airport”, apparently the real airport was 50 km north. It turns out that the Durban airport was very recently relocated a few months ago (probably in anticipation for the World Cup), and we were at the old location. Apparently Clare missed the memo. So we drove like hell and made it to the new airport (King Shaka International!) with literally about 20 minutes to spare before check-in closed for our flight. Amazing.

Now we’re back in Cape Town, trying to finish up our work here. Some things are working. Most things aren’t. But we’re learning, and I think we’ll have some nice results in the near future. Rick keeps talking about primers and amplicons and loops. I don’t really understand much of it. But I’m building a cool gadget. Quantitative nucleic acid analysis in the palm of your hand. With a touchscreen.

South Africa

2010-09-05T01:34:00.001-07:00

Clearly, I'm lousy at keeping a blog. My last post was a year and a half ago. Since then, I taught orphans in Peru how to solder (an important skill in the jungle), had a great Christmas with friends in the mountains of NC, took my qualifying exam, was a teaching assistant for an awesome class, went to China, and wrote a grant proposal--all things that would have each deserved several blog posts, if only I hadn't been so busy doing them.

So, I'm going to make more of an effort to blog (we'll see how long that lasts).

I'm in South Africa now, working for a month at the Center of Excellence for Biomedical Tuberculosis Research, led by Professor Paul van Helen at Stellenbosch University. Rick is developing a point-of-care device for diagnosing TB and determining the particular strain a person is infected with, which is very important for prescribing the appropriate antibiotics. The test is unique in that it looks for mutations in the genome of the TB pathogen using a new, rapid technique for DNA amplification. I'm going to help him by building a battery-powered, handheld gadget that can "read" his chip in the field. My initial research interest when I came to grad school was in point-of-care diagnostics, so I'm glad to finally be working on a project in that area, even if it is a bit of a departure from my main project. South Africa, unfortunately has one of the highest TB burdens in the world, and so there is a great deal of clinical and research experience with the disease. This, combined with SA's relative wealth compared to other TB-burdened countries, makes it one of the best places for research.

I've been here for a week and I've had a lot of fun. Rick has been here for a month already, so he's been showing me around and getting me acquainted with everyone here. We've made a lot of friends in the lab and in the building where we live. Rick found this great apartment in downtown Cape Town with an amazing view of Table Mountain. There's a roofdeck with a small gym, swimming pool, sauna, and barbecue pits (they call it "braai" here). Someone comes once a week to clean the apartment. There's a great coffee shop downstairs called "Mugged", as in, if you live in Cape Town, you'll probably get mugged once in a while. I've been going up every morning and working out. There's a punching bag in the gym and it's made me want to pick up martial arts again.

Last weekend, we had a Braai on our roofdeck and invited people over from the lab. Rick and I loaded up on meat and wine at the grocery store. I insisted that we would never go through so much wine in one night (we bought 12 bottles and had a few more back at the apartment), but turns out we almost did. I guess Rick has made a lot of friends. While we were on the roof we met another group up there and we all went out together. It was a good evening, although the ending wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Apparently the Bronx club in Cape Town is….renowned. My ass has never seen so much grabbing.

Rick and I went down to the Cape of Good Hope and it is BEAUTIFUL. We hung out with penguins and watched whales as we ate fresh fish. Rick also treated me to a Thai massage when I first got here (I mean, he didn’t give the massage. He bought me a massage. The masseuse, by the way, was gorgeous). I think he’ll propose any day now.

After lots of planning and map reading and flight checking and consternation, we’ve decided to go nowhere this weekend. We were going to take this epic trip to Botswana, which is apparently the best place in Southern Africa to see animals. We’re ordering a bunch of things for the project which will take some time to get here, so we were thinking now would be a good time to take a long trip. But Botswana would involve a 16 hour drive (one-way). So in the end, we abandoned the idea, but we might do it this weekend instead.

There are several groups here who are interested in working with us. Rick’s device can be applied to any kind of diagnostic in which you want to rapidly genotype a person or the pathogen they’re infected with. So in addition to the people who are studying TB and it’s various drug resistance mutations, we’re also going to be working with an HIV group and another group who looks at genetic indicators of cardiomyopathy. It’s very cool to find collaborators like this who are enthusiastic about device development and bring the clinical and molecular biology expertise to the table.

Today we’re going to a rugby game. I *think* we are, anyway. We put our name down on a list, but we don’t actually know where the game is or who to contact. So hopefully they call us.

My cellphone number here is +27 (74) 623-2644. So from the US, dial 011-27-74-623-2644. I jailbroke and unlocked my iPhone so I could install a local SIM card. It was super easy. You can just visit JailbreakMe over wifi from your phone. And once it’s jailbroken, you can unlock it by downloading ultrasn0w with Cydia. There was recently a court ruling that declared that jailbreaking should be allowed by Apple, so doing so doesn’t prohibit you from getting updates anymore. I think when I get back to the US I’m going to switch cell phone carriers. AT&T is so crappy and overpriced.

I’ll post pictures soon. My camera’s not working, so Rick is taking pictures for the both of us.

Subway

2009-11-29T14:30:00.001-08:00

I have been eating at Subway restaurants for over twelve years, and it's been one of the most consistent features of my foodscape. I remember when Subway first came to my hometown of Washington, North Carolina with its strange maps on the wall and elongated hotdog-like sandwiches full of things other than meat. In Washington, where your only other dining options included places like McDonald's, KFC, Bill's Hotdogs, and Hank's All-you-can-eat Barbecued Ribs and Deep-friend Fatback, Subway was this strange Connecticut Yankee creation dropped down into our stripmall as if it fell off a truck on the way to a retirement home in Miami.

It was many years before I realized that the maps on the wall were of the New York City subway system and finally understood the name.

I do not remember the first time I went to Subway. My mom never went there (even though it WAS right in front of the Walmart), so I don't ever remember going there with her. The first time may have actually been when I was on a date. Yes, a date. I seem to remember eating at Subway with my first girlfriend before watching a movie at the theatre across the street. On a subsequent date, we went to K-Mart. I bought a Bon Jovi album. No, I'm not kidding. I wouldn't joke about Bon Jovi. Anyway, perhaps it was the excitement of sweaty hand holding and awkward movie theatre back row shenanigans that earned Subway my unrelenting loyalty for so long. Or maybe it was just those chewy chocolate chip cookies.

The thing I like about fast food restaurants is that it's OK to be alone, and since (1) I was frequently alone and hungry, (2) I really dislike most fast food restaurants (gotta maintain my Charles Atlas figure), and (3) I'm not very good with the whole "buy things at the grocery store so you can eat them" concept, I've always wound up, one way or another, at Subway.

I'm a creature of habit, and all these years I've eaten the same sandwich. The only thing that will change is its length: 6 inches if I'm not too hungry, 12 inches if I'm pretty hungry or if I'm in one of my "gotta eat more so I can bulk up and impress the ladies" phases. Chicken breast on honey oat bread, lettuce, green peppers, onions, cucumbers, salt/pepper (they put them in the same shaker...so clever!), mayo, and an brief spike in blood pressure accompanied with a polite but firm "No, no...I said green PEPPERS" as the server’s hand starts to reach for the pickles (blech). Two chocolate chip cookies. Small Pepsi.

Washington
I remember the old Subway in Washington, where I would go sometimes by myself after I had a car, or I would go with friends to discuss the news of the day after exploring the wonders of Walmart. They added a drivethrough window and it was here that I first perfected the art of eating a sub while driving. I think this restaurant was eventually shut down due to health code violations. Shame. Eventually though, they put a Subway IN the Walmart. Brilliant.

Hillsborough St.
Then there was the Subway on Hillsborough St. in Raleigh across from campus. I used to go there during my freshman year because it was close to my dorm (Sullivan Hall). I remember this one in particular because it was a tiny restaurant sandwiched (no pun intended) between two other stores which had successive addresses (2808 and 2809). Luckily, the post office is no stranger to fractions though, and so they addressed the Subway as 2808 ½. I got a kick out of that. I remember coming here between classes one time and reading a book that a friend had loaned me called “The Emporer’s New Mind”. Louis was always reading books that were over my head. But I remember there was a chapter on fractals, the Mandelbrot set, in particular. I was so intrigued by the simplicity of the formula for generating the Mandelbrot set that I pulled out my laptop and, over a sub and an ice cold Pepsi, wrote a Matlab program implementing it and I actually got it to generate Mandelbrot figures. I felt smart.

ECPI
As a freshman I was working on a startup company and doing a lot of software development with Microsoft's .NET platform. For the hell of it, I decided to take the Microsoft certification exams because I thought this would increase my job marketability later on. In a way, this did actually pay off for me, as I think it was one of the main reasons that I got an internship at ABB, and a lot of good things ended up coming out of that internship. Anyway, I’m now a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, woo! I also earned an A+ Certification for PC repair. I would take these exams at night at ECPI Technical College in North Raleigh, and I'd always cram for them several hours before in the Subway across the street. They were multiple choice and really pretty simple, so just a few hours with one of those exam prep books from Barnes and Noble would do the trick. While nibbling on my cookies I'd flip through pages on Web Services and SQL Server management. Sounds awfully innane now, but I really enjoyed it at the time. It was always a nice quiet evening and at the end of it, I had a sense of accomplishment. I only failed one exam – the one on SQL Server Database Architecture. Actually, I knew quite a bit about this topic, so I was really disappointed when I failed. I never re-took the exam. Anywa, microsoft would send me these little certificates and lapel pins. I think this was more of a money making gimmick for Microsoft. I don’t know that employers really pay much attention to these certifications.

Western Blvd.
There was another Subway near campus, on Western Blvd, which I would frequent later after I’d moved off-campus. I remember there was a guy from Syria who worked nights there, and he worked on campus during the day and took classes. He was nice. Actually, the store was primarily staffed by middle easterners. You had to go in if you wanted to get your order right though. They were hopeless with the drivethrough speaker. For my last two years of college, my dining choices often came down to: Subway vs Bojangles. Typically, my health-conciousness would win and I'd go for subway.

Checkpoint Charlie
I spent three months in Cork, Ireland, which did not have a Subway restaurant. It was a dark time in my life. But I do remember going to the one in Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie. I don’t really eat a lot of American fast food while I’m traveling, honest. But when I saw the restaurant I started craving those cookies. And they had ice! I really enjoyed that lunch.

Kinston
During my last year at NC State, I was a TA for a class which we broadcasted to a few community colleges, including one in Kinston. As part of this class, I would actually drive to Kinston and teach lab exercises to a small group of students there. I really enjoyed this, and the pay wasn’t bad. It was a 2 hour drive, and I’d get reimbursed for mileage and paid for the time I was on the road. I listened to a few audiobooks on the road that semester: 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kinston was small and rural like my hometown, though it’s primarily a military town. After teaching each week, I’d go to the Subway there. The guy that ran the place was always enthusiastic and well-spoken. He must have gone to business school at UNC (at least he had a UNC sticker on his car). Once, I remember him selling me on three cookies instead of my usual two because it was only, he argued, "20 cents more". He said that in business school they taught him that was called a "value added proposition". I’m not really sure what that means. But nevertheless, I sprung for the extra cookie.

New York City
It wasn’t until I visited a subway in New York that I finally noticed that the maps on the wall were of New York City. Candice and I took a trip through New England and we ate at the subway next to our hotel a couple of times. I remember thinking how remarkable it was that the sandwiches were the same price as what I was used to yet clearly the operating costs of the restaurant must have been much higher. How do they do that? Probably has something to do with “value added propositions”.

Utah
The sketchiest Subway I’ve ever visited was in southern Utah, on my way to California. Will and I were in the middle of nowhere. Like, imagine one of those panoramic photos of Mars. Now imagine, in the middle of that photo, there’s a Subway restaurant. The staff was strange--white as the driven snow (figuratively and literally). Actually, speaking of Mars, they looked a bit like extras in the movie Total Recall-- unhappy and oxygen-deprived. The person manning the cash register couldn’t have been over 13 years old. There was this map on the wall with pushpins all over the place indicating all the places where customers had come from. I found it hard to believe that anyone from Togo or central Greenland had visited this particular Subway location.

Berkeley
During my first couple of years in Berkeley, I’d frequent the Subway on San Pablo Ave in Albany. I liked this one much more than the Subway on Telegraph in Berkeley, which just smelled like pot and incense (not that I’m opposed to either, but when I’m eating a sandwich I just want to smell..the sandwich), or the one downtown, which is always cramped and hot. I would sort of wander around sometimes, driving without a destination. Sometimes I did this on Sunday afternoons while my laundry was going at the laundromat. Invariably, I’d end up at the Subway in Albany, talking to mom on the phone. I think this was when she got the idea to put Subway gift cards in my stocking for Christmas.

UCSF
I came to hate these gift cards. Half the time, I would give them the card and they wouldn’t actually apply the money on the card to my meal. Instead, they’d give me “points” or some bullshit. So as you accumulate points, you get free sandwiches and what-not. But whatever, I just wanted to get rid of the card. It got really frustrating because this kept happening, and I could not get rid of my card. Finally, I was at the Subway at UCSF Parnassus and I told the cashier explicitly: please use the money on the card. And when I got the receipt, I saw that he still charged me the full price for the sandwich. So I took note of the difference, and when I came back the next week (Rick and I were going to the UCSF Subway each week when we went to our anatomy class), I just gave him the card and only enough extra cash to cover the difference. I just told him to figure it out. That’s how I finally got rid of that damn card.

The gift card scam wasn’t the only thing that started irritating me about Subway. The thing that really got to me was when they started automatically toasting my sub when I didn’t ask for it. Before Quizno’s “mmm-mmm-mmm toasty” bullshit came along, Subway didn’t even have toasters. Then they started offering the option to toast your sub. I guess most people prefer toasted subs. But I don’t like it. Anyway, now they don’t even ask. They just assume that’s what you want. And half the time they don’t even listen when you say “not toasted”. I think as a consequence of everyone toasting their subs, the bread quality has suffered. It’s not as soft as it used to be. It just tastes stale and flavorless. It’s funny because when I was dating Candice, this was always her complaint with Subway and I just thought she was crazy. But now I’m starting to agree.

I don’t go to Subway very often anymore. I’m not ending our relationship; we’ve been through too much. But it just doesn’t draw me in like it used to. Maybe it’s the decline in quality. Maybe it’s because I live in a place with so many other better options for decently healthy food. Or maybe it’s because I’m not eating alone nearly as frequently as I used to. Or maybe, after all these years, I’m finally just tired of it.

Berkeley is Cheap

2009-11-27T21:04:00.000-08:00

So the latest round of protests on the Berkeley campus is over the recent 30% hike in tuition, bringing in-state tuition to around $10k. That definitely sucks for those paying the bills, but people really need to view this in a broader context. The cost of attending a four-year college needs to be weighed against a handful of other factors including: availability of need-based aid, average debt upon graduation, quality of education (student/faculty ratios and all that jazz), average time to graduation. The folks at Kiplinger put together a ranking every year that does some of this:

Kiplinger's Best Value Colleges

Woah! How about that? The various University of California schools rank right at the top of this list of the most economical schools in the nation. How can that be? Berkeley is, after all, the most expensive university on this list! But the university covers 88% of students' financial need (meaning, it provides that much in grants, not loans). Furthermore, 1/3 of this tuition hike is going towards financial aid, so those who are really in need will be taken care of.

Also, keep in mind that this only lists the top 100. So any university on this list is a deal. A couple universities not on this list are the University of Michigan, which charges in-state students about $13k, and Penn State, which weighs in at $14.5k.

Now, I went to a cheap school (NC State). It's often cited as one of the best value colleges in the country (Princeton Review ranked it 2nd!). Tuition there is currently around $5500/year. But it actually falls slightly behind Berkeley on this list in the only two metrics that (in my opinion) truly matter: percent of financial need met (81% versus 88%) and average student debt upon graduation ($14,930 versus $14,453). Furthermore, I doubt anyone would argue that NC State is a better school that Berkeley. Hell, according to the Chinese, Berkeley's the best public school in the world (and 3rd overall). Wouldn't you expect it to cost a little more than average?

So yes, Berkeley will cost you a lot if you have a lot to pay. The philosophy of a public university is that it should be financially accessible to everyone in the state while keeping the quality of education as high as possible. The only way to do this is to make people pay in proportion to their income. Private schools do it too. Sure, "tuition" might be the same for everyone, but poor folks get some or all of that money diverted back to them.

If you're rich you might complain about this policy. But as a general rule, if you're rich, you really shouldn't complain about things. If you're poor, you've probably got nothing to worry about because your financial aid will go up to cover the tuition increase. Those folks in the middle--the ones who's FAFSA tells them they can afford X but for whatever reason X is just too high (I was in this category)--are the ones who will suffer the most (and generally ARE the ones to suffer the most in any economic crunch). But if you do well, there are scholarships. Apply for them! There are tons of them out there. And as a last resort, there are loans. College loans! What a wonderful concept: pay for college at a later date, when, thanks to your degree, you can actually afford it!

Nobody should ever say "I can't go afford to go to such-and-such college". I believe that if you're a good student you can attend any college in America. Period. But you've got to work for it. That's the American way.

iTunes U

2009-05-15T22:12:00.000-07:00

I find this absolutely amazing: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes_u/

You can watch entire courses from about 100 universities in virtually any discipline...free. MIT has been doing this for a while with OCW, and a few other universities followed suit. But there are so many today, and to see them all together in one place is really astounding. It really raises the question (which has been around since the beginning of the whole distance ed thing): what will happen to conventional brick-and-mortar classroom instruction? What does it mean to go to a top-tier university, when the essential product of that university is freely available? I'd say undergrads these days get a substantial portion of their education from textbooks and the web anyway. The classroom is mostly there to provide a framework and set the bar for evaluation. So now students have the option to watch lectures from the best teachers in the world. And they can repeat/pause/fast-forward...whatever. Even assignments and tests are posted online. So who needs a professor?

The really great thing is you can download these to your iPhone or iPod and watch them on the go, and you can even speed them up and cram entire lectures in 20 minutes. David in my lab has been watching a polymer rheology class from Michigan Tech at 2.5X. He's gone through an entire semester of lectures in a few weeks. This reminds me of when Neo first plugs into the Matrix and they download a bagillion martial arts styles into his brain. Except David emotes.

NCSU is conspicuosly absent. Come on, Tom Miller.

Berkeley Science Review

2009-05-05T23:03:00.001-07:00

So, this semester I joined the editorial staff of the Berkeley Science Review. I'd seen the magazine around campus before and was always impressed with the quality of the articles. Now I understand why it's so polished: A LOT of effort goes into it. The articles each go through around 5 revisions. We meet with the authors one-on-one (typically more than once), all the editors read and discuss each article fairly thoroughly--once at the beginning and once at the end of the process, and each article gets combed over by 3 different editors, who provide feedback to the author at different stages. It's been a pleasure to work with the staff and the authors, and I've learned about research topics at Berkeley that I probably would have never had any exposure to otherwise. Our latest issue is out. You can check out the articles online: http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/

Also, the BSR recently won Best Publication of the Year from the ASUC (student association here at Cal). There are a lot of publications here on campus, so this is really an honor!

Olympics!

2008-08-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

I like the olympics. I usually never pay much attention to sports. But something about seeing people my age train their whole lives and then go off and represent their country in front of the entire world grabs my attention. The Olympic Opening Ceremony was amazing, and made me wish I had gone to Beijing. Check it out.

Also, I'd like to point out that a Cal student, Nathan Adrian, just won a gold medal!

Nathan Adrian

Two other students, Natalie Coughlin and Emily Silver (appropriate name) won silvers! There are a record 46 Cal students and alumni in the olympics this year--20 representing the USA and 17 representing other countries. I guess the remaning 9 are coaches and alternates?

And an NCSU student, Cullen Jones, also took a gold medal in the 4x100 men's swimming relay alongside the illustrious Michael Phelps!

Cullen Jones

Penguin Wetsuit!

2008-04-25T11:40:00.001-07:00

When I do finally buy a wetsuit, it will be an Oceanic. This is great.

http://wral.com/news/strange/story/2789445/

Speaking of...who wants to go diving?

Stuff White People Like...

2008-03-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

#81: Graduate School!

This is pretty hilarious.

Encyclopedia of Life

2008-03-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

The Encyclopedia of Life was brought online last week after several years of development. It looks like the site is still far from complete (if such a thing could ever be considered "complete"). Basically, it aims to be an online encyclopedia of all organisms on earth, with detailed information on physical characteristics, habitat, behavior, and taxonomy, as well as plenty of pictures. In the future, users will be able to contribute information in a Wikipedia-like system, but that's not set up yet. It will be interesting to watch this thing develop.

Scientific Research in the Google Era

2008-02-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

I want to share five web tools I use for research. Kudos to Rick for introducing me to many of these.

Eigenfactor (http://www.eigenfactor.org/map/)
This is a great tool for assessing the impact of a particular journal and searching for the top journals within a discipline. If you're new to a field, this is a nice way to get some perspective on it. It has a cool interactive interface for viewing the different connections between disciplines, too. The eigenfactor score is a metric for assessing how well that journal compares to others in terms of citations per article, and it accounts for the different citation customs/frequency within different disciplines. The eigenfactors of all the journals add up to 100, so if a journal has an eigenfactor close to 0.1 or 1, that's pretty high. The Article Influence of a journal is basically the average number of citations per article in that journal. This is a great way to get a feel for the top journals in a field.

ISI Web of Knowledge (http://apps.isiknowledge.com/)
Most graduate students will be familiar with this tool, but I include it here for completness. This is my favorite journal search engine. There's also Google Scholar, PubMed, and a handful of other ones, but for bells and whistles I think ISI wins it. You can get a listing of citing papers for an article, which is a handy feature if you want to find out what is the most current research on a particular topic. It also gives you some idea of the impact of a particular paper--are those citations just follow-up papers from the same group, or are other people picking up the idea and doing new things with it? This helps you assess the quality of the paper even before you've read the abstract. If you're on a university campus, you should see a link where you can download the paper. If you're off-campus, check to see if there's a proxy server that allows you to access the journal subscription.

Zotero (http://www.zotero.com)
This is a nifty little browser plug-in that recognizes when you are at a journal website and allows you to download a snapshot of the article's bibliographic information as well as the PDF with one click! It stores the papers in a local database on your harddrive and you can search through them by author or keyword. Most journals and several websites (including Wikipedia) have "translators" built into Zotero, so that when you land on one of these pages, it knows where to look to grab the title, authors, source, etc. Once the paper is downloaded, it is even capable of indexing the PDFs so you can search through the text of the articles. You can store any webpage in Zotero, and you can highlight text and take notes in the article right from within your browser. Your annotations are saved, along with a copy of the page. There's also ways to categorize and tag articles so you can keep things organized. According to the website, plans are in the works to create a web version so you can access your research database online and share it with others.

Google Reader (http://reader.google.com)
Pretty much all journals now provide RSS feeds of their tables of contents, and many will even push abstracts and figures out through these feeds. Any RSS reader will work, but I've decided to swallow the Google pill (Gmail, Blogger, Reader, Calendar, iGoogle, etc., etc.). And it's really a great interface. Basically, I have about 12 journals that I subscribe to, and every day or two I log in and skim the titles/abstracts. I "star" the papers that I want to read. From Google Reader, you can just click on the entry and it will take you to the paper. As you scroll through the listing, it automatically marks things as read, so it's very easy to just skim.

Foxit PDF Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/)
This little guy is a godsend. I used to despise Adobe Acrobat. "Oh geez...do I really want to open another PDF? I feel a crash coming on. Maybe I'll just read the HTML version and if it looks ok then I'll download it and print it out." The browser plug-in was slow, buggy, and leaked memory. The annotation tools (which are only available with the overpriced full version, which is even slower, buggier, and more leaky) were a kludge. Foxit wins in all these categories, hands down. It doesn't have a browser plug-in, but I've set Firefox to just open PDF files immediately, so it's no big deal. Foxit opens up instantly, there's very little lag in going from page to page or from zooming in/out, and it has decent annotation tools (I use highlighting quite a bit). And most importantly, it NEVER CRASHES!

del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us)
Weird name, cool tool. It's basically a bookmarking too, and they have a browser plug-in which allows you to synchronize your bookmarks among the computers you use. Each bookmark can be associated with multiple tags, and you can search through these tags very quickly. I use this to bookmark lab websites, and I tag the website based on what kind of work that lab is involved in (nano, microfluidics, mems, circuits, etc.). Neato. Here's my bookmark list.

Brace yourself, folks. Frankie's blogging.

2008-02-26T22:35:00.000-08:00

"But Frankie?! Isn't a personal blog just a procrastination tool for teenagers who want to rant about their ex-boyfriend/girlfriend?"

Well, yes. But not this blog. Don't expect any juicy secrets about my love life (such as it is), or musings about my childhood, or stream-of-consciousness ramblings about my philosophies on life or anything. Nope, this is science, baby.

Well, mostly science. And engineering. And life as a grad student in Berkeley. I'm mainly writing this for my family and friends back home who want to see what I'm up to all these 3,000 miles away. Whether anyone else finds it interesting remains to be seen.

But hey, everyone from RuPaul to Ron Paul blogs. Why not me?