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| i wish i could post some of my kaplan feedback. i love the contradictions - more speed needed/goes way too fast, very patient/abrupt, a nice guy/he could be rude, etc. the 3% are also enjoyable - 3% say i'm not at all engaging, not too knowledgeable, did not care about his or her progress, and just an all-around poor teacher. guess you can't be everything to everyone. eh. i'm happy to be up to 91% good or better.
in other news, my match preferences have been put in. gonna hazard the chance of the die. until jan 15th,
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above: all intently focus on wii sports as i school them.
to those on the fence about buying a wii: i recommend reserve. zelda has reminded me why i don't like most action adventure games, and i'd rather play it with a gamecube controller than the 'mote/'chuk combo. outside of zelda, what else is there for the system? a slew of half baked games. there aren't any quality titles in the pipes for immediate release either (mario party 8 in late march, then another drought). the virtual console thus far is a turd. they're gonna milking us for all we're worth by releasing mostly crap games at an incredibly slow rate.
just wait until the second or third quarter. things worth buying will be out there, and your pretty little wii won't have been collecting dust for months.
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| I've been writing this in my head for the last few days, but whenever I
sat down and loaded xanga I lost interest. Guess I'll give it a shot
now:
Med school. I'm in. Yippee. No, seriously, it's a great relief. I
started frequenting a forum early in the semester called
studentdoctor.com (in my special, hitting refresh every thirty seconds
for ten minutes obsessive-compulsive way) where pre-meds of all
stripes converge to discuss insightful topics pertaining to the
admissions process (e.g. would you eat a poop hot dog to get into the
school of your choice?). The collective gnashing of teeth, countless
horror stories, and mindblowing applicant profiles had me quivering
with anxiety for a while. Received pre-match offers from UT-Houston,
UTMB, UT-SA, TCOM, and A&M... turned down all but Houston and
Galveston at Thanksgiving and am strongly leaning towards the former.
Not hearing from Southwestern was a little depressing... I could not
care less for the education or most of the people there, but the insane
research opportunities, crazy bling available, and admittedly rank make
it still seem a viable choice in my mind. That combined with the
no-show from Baylor has made it a (well-deserved) humbling experience.
At least I'll be able to pwn at UTH. 
The Wii. I think I've caught the bug. Just an hour ago I told D.Ho the following:
Machiavelli85: the wise thing to do would be to wait six months and see
how the wii's selection and graphics develop and if the fabled 360
price drops ever materializes
and already I'm considering an early morning showing on Saturday for a
Wii before my 8 o'clock neurophys exam. I still feel like the Wii is a
pretty huge rip, a pisspoor system with a killer peripheral, but damn
Wii Sports is fun. It'd also give me an opportunity to finally give my
sister her share of our Gamecube.
Blair had a frickin' awesome graduation party last night. God bless
you, man. When I first sat down in front of Monday Night Football with
a bunch of people I didn't know I thought "shit, all the Shiner in the
world won't get me through this." More beer than I've ever drank before
later the eternal CHS quartet of Ryan, Alex, David, and myself
assembled completely wasted and extra loud on the front lawn of some
poor street. I hope we all wind up back in Texas and keep it real
together for many years to come. Special thanks to Shiner, Michael, and
Ryan's port.
My sister got scared shitless by Peteranswers.com. Haha. The premise is that you input the answer to a question secretly and then
pose it to a friend. Thereafter Peter spits out your answer, scaring
the bejeesus out of your friend with its startling accuracy. Before I
figured it out Liz proposed that A&M's tech support people had
installed a camera in her computer and were watching her. I hope she
doesn't get too p.o.'ed at her friends.
Tanglewood North sucks. Automatic twenty-five dollar fine on your first
late day, five dollars/day thereafter. They get almost everyone on
this, because surprise surprise, we're irresponsible college students.
Tell your friends.
more later. | | |
| well, i'm definitely going to med school next year. three acceptances (TCOM, UTMB, and UT-Houston) in less than a day. more later.
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| It's not a very good time for it, either. Made an mdapplicants.com profile today... aiya. Also started thinking about an online project, a layman's guide to cancer chemotherapeutics. You can find a lot of info online about how they work, but the jump between statistics and side effects to primary lit. is unfortunately huge and unavoidable. There's gotta be a lot of people that would find satisfaction in learning the basic mechanism(s) of their family member's or their drugs. Anyone wanna help me with a layout? Haven't touched html since around '96. =/
Shooting for a light schedule next semester. Want to spend a lot of time reading. Bioethics, medical lifestyle, healthcare issues, and research. Getting Science every week is a blast; being in the AAAS rocks. Here's a couple highlights from this week -
From a review of Lee Silver's Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life (423):
"Silver polls a group of scientists and bioethicists about what they would do should an infertile couple want to avail themselves of an assisted reproductive technology that had a 28% risk of birth defects. Most, in time, agreed that the parents should have that choice. Yet many people would call an 8% chance of birth defects after a hypothetical gene transfer protocol just too risky. Further reminding us that no technique is safe, Silver points out that natural fertilization - which entails a 50% risk of embryonic demise, 20% risk of fetal loss, and 4% risk of birth defects - establishes a very low bar on 'safety' for reproductive technologies like cloning and germline gene alteration."
Invisibility cloak (albeit for microwaves of a certain length)? Sweet (403).
Everyone's favorite behavior modifying parasite Toxoplasma gondii may be subtly controlling the world in another way - by favoring the birth of male children. The maternal immune system sometimes encourages miscarrage of male embryos, so the effect may be mediated by suppression (395).
Hyperpolarized xenon coupled with targeted biosensors may allow MRI to be used for molecular imaging (e.g. resolving the location of arteriole plaques, 446).
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