Racemates and Robots

Some quick points:

• Stereochemistry is about pairs of molecules that are almost identical, but the molecules cannot be interposed on each other and the mirror image of one is identical to the other. This is essentially analogous to one's left and right hands. Stereochemistry is immensely important in biological systems, see: Thalidomide debacle.
  

• 1849 Louis Pasteur painstakingly isolated a racemic mixture using a tweezers

Recent work done by a Dutch crystallization group discovered something rather shocking. If a crystal racemic mixture was left in a liquid with glass beads to mix for long enough [days to weeks] only one form of the molecule would be left as a crystal, i.e. the left handed ones were converted to the right handed ones or vice-versa (Noorduin, Crystal Growth & Design 2008, Vol 8, No 5, pp 1675).
It may sound like I have stolen a moment of your life telling you this stuff but it is significant: Firstly our man Pastuer needn't have picked out crystals by hand he could have left it alone and it would have sorted itself out.
Secondly in nature almost only one enantiomer of many naturally produced molecules exist. Using normal synthesis chemistry both enantiomers form. Since all it takes is time for a mixture to become enantiopure, it takes time. So start off at year dot with a primordial soup. [Times passes]. We get a enantiopure set of molecules, ripe for life... At least that is where the idea goes.

Another thing I saw at the conference was a paper on the process control of a crystallization using a neural network. When I heard this I immediately thought this. But of course, Skynet it isn't...

Conferences and Calamaties

Got to the airport 100 minutes before the scheduled departure time. A forlorn looking Barbara greets me with "Mairtin, you are going to kill me...".
It turned out she had forgotten her passport.
The wayward article was in the engineering building. We took a shockingly slow taxi trip to UCD.
Barbara's mother does not use a mobile phone. She had to collect Barbara's office key from her [Barbara's] boyfriend, Daniel. Daniel was supposed to be in work- he wasn't.
She rushed in to a nearby Starbucks roaring: "someone please help me! My daughter is going to Holland this morning and has forgotten her passport. I need to use a phone!" Someone was kind enough to provide one and the twain met successfully, and all was well.
Got the passport [and a camera] and made it back to the airport in 20 minutes from UCD, there was a shakey moment when Barbara's mother drove down the wrong way on a road, I calmly told her this was the case and once more all was well.
5 hours later...
We got to the conference centre to register. Last week I was asked if I had sorted out the accommodation for the ISIC conference, I glibly retorted that it was included in the registration fees. The closer we got to that desk, the more I doubted that this was so. Nonetheless I hoped that the receptionist would finish her piece with "...and here are your accommodation details". [Hands us keys to suites].Despite staring at her expectantly after she had given us our bags and coupons, she did not say the magic words.
"Bugger..."
[Time passed]
We were in the StayOkay Hostel by the river, and all was well.

Had a waffle and whipped ice-cream in town. Maastricht is a pretty buildinged, old and institutionally sedate town- very reminiscent of Bruges, of In Bruges fame.

Computer building and Clichés (Continued)

Due to some hiccups regarding conference registration, I was in college much later than expected. It followed that I started building the PC later, of course in my typically blind optimism I expected I could put it together and still make training. 80 minutes later, having put in the motherboard, 600W PSU, CPU and RAM chips, there was no chance I was going to make it..

Have to stop writing- fire alarm in the engineering block...

Fire alarm stopped... Either it was a drill , false alarm or the fire finally got to the alarm system circuitry.

Where was I....

Another hour of head scratching, manual rereading all the pieces I had for my PC were in it...
The next step was to hook up the monitor to its appropriate port. Some more head scratching and manual rereading and visual inspection showed I was lacking such a port. Next stop is procuring a video card- I am such a n00b :(

Regarding clichés
Sci-Fi

Were I in a space ship meeting or facing of against people in another space ship I would orientate my ship to 7 Degrees off of their verticle, I bet it would really irritate them!

The flavour of the week group of helpless people/under dog rebels etc that encountered our heroes in the tv series would not be led by a a strong yet attractive women who cannot but help fall for our main hero. Maybe it would be some kind of eunich to avoid the lead heroine falling for him, or any kind of kindred spirit for the supporting characters who may be the momentary spotlight of the episode.

When X gets a message about Y from their past being dead- Y better be dead.

Salsa and Friday

Salsa was lots of fun last night. Learned the cross body lead last night. It gave me some difficulty initially but it all worked out in the end. It occurred to me that the one in a million chance of having excess men in a Salsa class last week was something to do with the Fates hedging there bets regarding the LHC's start-up earlier this week, just in case the tall odds against something happening were beaten. Last night there were more women than men- All is right with the world once more...

Going to go home early and build my PC. Have to think of a name for it. I'm reticent to name it a girl's name; at least two of my friends have called their sets of computers girls names (Kevin and Steve). If I had 3 internal hard disks in RAID array I would call it the 6 harmonies, they could be the external harmonies, the CPU could be Yi¹, the motherboard Qi and the RAM Li².

Back to training tonight, it has been a couple of weeks since I did my 2000 punches in low stances, but on the upside I can do 5 minutes in low horse now :)

¹To the best of my knowledge Yi means intention or will to act- Unfortunately the internet is not forthcoming with direct links about it [at a cursory search]
²The chinese for strength apparently [I did not do a proper search for this one of laziness]<sup>3

3</sup>My next skill to learn is linking within a document- I'd prefer it much more to basic numerical references

-Mairtin at his nerdiest were it not for the salsa of course...
[EDIT: I have decided to go with calling my computer "Dhá Meabhair"; the Irish for "Two Minds"]

The Middlethon and the Conference

For Dinner:

Made Chicken noodle soup

1. Boiled water
2. Put shredded chicken carcass into soup to boil
3. Added some garlic, broccoli pieces, shredded carrots, salt and two chilli peppers
   
4. Left to boil for about 2 hours
5. Took out the chicken carcass and pulled the meat from the bones

Next day

1. Brought the broth to boil
2. Added the noodles, spring onions, monge touts and nice chunky carrots

Chicken and sweet pepper halves

1. Half lots of red peppers, put them into the grill
2. Boiled shredded chicken in chop suey with some ginger and spring onions
3. Mix chicken and sauce with some crunchy vegetables
4. Pour into the pepper halves and leave in oven at gas mark 5 for 30 minutes

[The mistake at this point was adding so many noodles, it turned into porridge :( ]

The dinner took about two hours to prepare and eat. So we only got to watch 4 episodes of the Middleman. Ali and Eva brought dessert (cookies and fruit salad) [and Kevin brought some too...].

Got 2 hours sleep and went to the airport for my flight to east midlands.
Conference was interesting- my PhD needs a lot of work. There was a guy that gave a presentation about crystals in food. He explained how stupid it was to "Ban trans fats" from products because trans fats allow crystallizations in butter, our jelly bellies, ice cream, etc. On top of that he had the actions and the appearance of Bill Nighy in Love Actually.
I chatted to a guy at dinner that uses light tweezers. The future is now :)

Got back to college- my RAM finally arrived. They have monster aluminium radiators sticking out of the chips.

Looking forward to building it. Going with 64Bit XP and Ubuntu.

Salsa and Middlethon

Went to Salsa last night in the Garda Club, for the first time in over a year- opted for beginner's class to avoid any embarrassment.

It was oodles of fun. The class reminded me a lot of kung fu class, phrases like "blocking" were used and there were many apparently complicated hand motions going around. My dancing was generally well received :)

I was somewhat horrified when there turned out to be more men than women at the class- it is the first time it has probably ever happened in the history of Salsa classes- it could be a portent of a coming apocalypse...

Preparing for my Middlethon tomorrow. Going to cook dinner for the "peeps" coming over. Looking up a recipe for noodle soup at the moment, it is kinda like I am Po from Kung Fu Panda.... Only in reverse and I am not a useless anthropomorphised cuddly evolutionary dead end (it is more I have a problem with Pandas as opposed to Pandas portrayed by Jack Black)

The Chinese Wedding

My brother got married in China at the beginning of August. Here's an account of the trip

Dramatis Personae

Mairtin: Me
Eimhin: The artist (His animated short has been selected for a film festival in LA), 195cm tall. at least 20cm greater than what is usually seen in China.
Diorraing: The kid. Does not really like chinese food...
Cillian: The Groom. A mathematician.
Jin Xi: The Bride. Generally our interpreter.
David: The Best Man. Astrophysicist. 199cm, 100Kg, can dead lift double body weight; a monster.
Jin Xi's Mother: Encourages Diorraing to eat, giving us a battery of medicines at the slightest indication of a cold, rumour has it prices drop by 20% when she walks into a shop.
Jin Xi's Grandmother: The family matriarch. The Hardy Old Lady. Master haggler.
Jin Xi's Grandfather: Happy man. Missing a middle finger. Delights in telling us stories when we won't understand (always). Looks like he he should be a movie star/celebrity, reminds me of Beat Takeshi.


T-minus 12 days
Went to zoo with younguns.
Molly was particularly taken with the apes and monkeys.

The flight leaving before us at our gate was full of annoying teenagers returning from a language course, I slept on the ground for a while..
In Amsterdam, Eimhin caused his usual delays going through security for our connecting flight to Chengdu, too many pockets and too many things in his bag don't you know...

T-minus 11 days
Arrived in Cheng Du without further incident.
Got a lift from a friend of Jin Xi's family from Cheng Du to Pengzhou not as hair raising as the car trips in Quanzhou in 2005.
Went for a walk around the town, were stared at and had people roar "Hello" at us- as it happens few tourists come by this part of China, well except to see the Panda Reserve... I'll get to that later.

T-minus 10 days
We went to the local park for a stroll.
The crickets/cicads were extremely loud, I'd wager pretty close to the threshold limits for exposure to sound in an industrial setting... Fed some coy/goldfish/carp, beasts of fish! Most were at least a foot long, dropping food into their pond led to the bubbling feeding frenzy generally reserved for piranhas in cartoons.
Jin Xi brought Diorraing skating on the outdoor Roller Disco, here we were subject to more staring, surreptitious camera phone snap shots, ultimately leading to posing for pictures like sideshow attractions... demeaning? Of course not! They were particularly awed when we told them that Eimhin's shoe size is Wŭ Shi (50 European).

T-minus 9 days
Got up early, went to see the Pandas (Xiun Mao). Giant ones and Red ones.
Giant Pandas give birth to twins 45% of the time in captivity. They are shockingly cute and useless, I mean really; Black and White, feed solely on Bamboo (only 27 of the 60 species that they could eat), kids are not independent of their mothers for the first 18 months, take another 3-4 years to reach sexual maturity, stacked odds...
The red ones look like foxes and actually move, I even saw a couple of them scrapping... "Skidoosh"
Continuing with a tradition of large-scale eating, Eimhin and I finished off ten courses at a family dinner, the locals were shocked.

T-minus 8 days
Made my first wantons and jaoza today, jaoza should look like fans or some such- of course mine looked like tied sacks. We made 100s of them though!
Stomach took a beating from the previous night, so I did not have much for lunch... I'm getting too old for this shit.
Learned how to play Mahjong, of the two variations they mentioned I'm not sure which one I know.
Bought 2 bottles of orange juice, 2 of grape drink, 1 of peach drink, 1 of pepsi, 2 of water [all 1.5L volumes], plus some snacks for less than 100RMB, less than a tenner... wow-wee

T-minus 7 days
Played Mahjong for a bit. Lost. Went to see a man about a suit. My disproportionately long arms were remarked upon. In the end, got a suit, shirt and tie for less than 60Euro... Hot diggity. Went shopping again, Eimhin bought imported raisins that cost a quarter of the total shopping bill, a shockingly high ratio considering it was such relatively small amount of it. The bitterest irony of it was that the raisins were shipped from Dublin 15. If he had gone domestic then the price would have been at the most a tenth of it.

T-minus 6 days
Got up early. Took train from Cheng Du to Cha ning, strangely the train is less comfortable and takes two hours longer than the 5 hour bus journey... Went for the first of many hosted 15 course meals.

T-minus 5 days
Went shopping in Chaning, well browsing at least. More open gawking and staring to be had by the locals. Another big fancy meal. Went to Karaoke, all the chinese people were shockingly good at it, at least three of them were classically trained in singing. I thought it best not to partake...

T-minus 4 days
David arrived. Had dinner. A snippet of the conversation during dinnger:
Jin Xi's Grandmother: [unintelligible Chinese]
Jin Xi: [Unintelligible reply]
Cillian: Did she just call me "that foreigner" again? Remind her my name is Cillian!

Oh! How we laughed and fell about the place, the offspring of "Meet the Parents" and "Lost in Translation"

T-minus 3 days
Got up early, went up... and up... to the Bamboo Forest. It was amazing... the first day going outdoors that I was not slick with sweat... I mean the sights were great. All along the cliff faces in the bamboo forest there are carvings from the Three Kingdoms era. People stared as much at Eimhin and David as they did the statues in the area... One asked for a photo with them [Eimhin and David, I mean. They weren't asking statues for photos]

T-minus 2 days
We found out that the locals have been calling us "Wei Go Ren" ["Foreigner" or some such]. Thought it fair to start saying "Zhong Gua Ren" in response.
Went to the local gym. Taekwando and Wushu is taught by a guy named Qibo. Cillian introduced me to him. We did a tiny amount of pushing hands, then light sparring. fast little bugger. He kept kicking me in the stomach, I have 20Kg and half a foot in height on him, so he kept bouncing off of me
I obliged Qibo in a gloved bout of fisticuffs. He got me with a delightful hook that made a good contact on my jaw, it clicked for the rest of the day. I kept stepping on his lead foot, by accident, I assure.
Went for another multi-course meal and then some more karaoke. There were no uber talented singers so I brought the thunder, did some renditions of Britney Spears [her golden age stuff of course].

T-minus 1 day
Went back to the gym again. Played around with a Jian this time, tried butterfly kicks, failed. Did sanzhan for Qibo, realises why he was so out of breath during sparring yesterday, while i was hale and hearty. Got to palm one of his round house kicks.

W-Day

Kidnapping and Making Away with a Brother's Prospective Bride

Aside: Context aside, the wedding day is representative of the The Siquan trip, flying blind with last minute instruction or miming.

Got up early, had a shave. Put on a my "Sunday Best", Spirit Level cuff-links are a must.
The wedding started at 0830Hrs. Irish contingent, with compulsory interpreter [xi-xi, the bridesmaid] were talked through the in-and-outs of chinese wedding traditions accrued over the course of centuries.

1. We have to push open the door of the Bride's home a crack.* 
2. Once opened, we throw in red packets of money, to buy admission for Cillian. 
3. He promised to wash the dishes and love her, etc.** 
4.  Jin Xi was won over by the promises and left the home, with red silken veils hiding her face.
5. Cillian piggy-backed her down the the four flights of stairs as far as her palanquin awaiting in the apartment block courtyard.
6. The groom's family and friends stand around the palanquin ensuring that Jin Xi does not pull a runner before we can get the wedding started.
7. Cillian mounts a mighty steed.***
8. We paraded a circuit of the town, a marching band in tow.

The only point of note was that the horse fell under Cillian's weight about halfway through the parade, david and I had been staring at its kinking rear right in fascination for quite a while.

*At a combined weight 350Kg we had to take care not splat the troupe of slight Chinese women against a wall.
**Well we assume so, since he was parroting phrases from Xi Xi
***a horse not that much heavier than he.

Receiving The Guests
Once we arrived at the hotel for the wedding actual, the palanquin was jigged for a while so that the palanquin bearers could get more money*. The impendingly happily married couple went up to their suite. The Irish milled around outside aimlessly, forgotten. Within, Cillian removed the silk veils** with his teeth. They were left to change from traditional Chinese red robes to a Western white ensemble. Only just remembered, Eimhin and I were left at the mercy of the Women Relatives, subjects of the size of our family, marital status, tastes in [Chinese] women and Eimhin's height were discussed.
The couple and their righthand-people stopped the guests at the hotel door, forcing sweets and cigarrettes onto them- seeing as they seemed to miss the 2m tall white guy with a tray.

*Probably a tradition based in mercenaries extorting additional money for the acquisition of a nubile woman
**Representing the Red Sack of Pillaging of yore, I reckon

Two Become One
After about 2 hours of stopping guests the ceremony began. They had a 9 tier wedding cake.* The two walked up the middle of the dinner hall, showered in sprays and streamers, Cillian's carefully styled hair was devastated. A cabaret singer was mistress of ceremonies. David gave a brief speech. The crowd went wild when he opened with "Ni Hao", like a rock concert. Some candles were lit and rings were exchanged. Jin Xi's grandmother [her father's mother] gave a lengthy speech. The richest women in town gave a speech too. JIn Xi's mother gave a speech. The two drank tea at her feet, presumably as an induction into her family. Next there was food. Here the Hardline Mrs Doylian Philosophies took a monstrous turn, Eimhin and I were forced at glass point my pushy Chinese person after pushy Chinese person to drink, one old chap made us have some kind of rice liqueur which burned my throat.

*"9 is forever!", Jin Xi informed us

T-Plus 1
Were woken up early for a trip to the "Siquan Karstic Geopark". Being from the "Gateway to the Burren" I thought I knew Karst regions, this was pretty cool though. There were some limestone structures that looked like pigs and bunnies. The cliff faces have holes in them where coffins were placed, sometimes they were hung on the cliff face. Then, the heavenly cavern. A gigantic cave that you can take a slide down to its lower level. Steps lead you to a very fancy looking stalactite/stalacmite area called the heavenly fairies [or some such]. Some more anthropomorphized rock formations, with a 2mx8m skylight 80m or so overhead. We went into a really really really dark cave, armed with flash-lights; no mole-men or morlocks to be found. The final stage in the heavenly cavern is traversed by a paddle boat across an under ground pond, I saw an eel in it. My local pride was injured by a little known attraction in China being orders of magnitude more entertaining than the tiny Burren equivalent, the Allwee Caves. Had one last dinner and did some shopping. Haggle master #1 stepped in and got us knock down prices, although I was worried that Cillian and her would come to blows over who was going to pay, Doylian to the core.

T-Plus 2
Got a surprisingly comfortable bus back to Cheng Du followed by a cramped van ride back to Peng Zou. On the bus, Jin Xi's Mother's Mother gave me a measuring look an eventually decided I was worth waving good bye to, Ice cold!

T-Plus 3
Got a comfortable trip into Cheng Du airport. Paid 10Euros for a banana split, with 3 standard sized ice-cream scoops, not even particularly tastey. Unimpressed.
On Plane: watched Kung Fu Panda [fantastic!] & Iron Man [Yay for Robert Downey Jr!] & Batman Begins [Ready for the dark knight]
Got back to Ireland. Tired.