The Civilizations Enquirer

It's the last night at home. Tomorrow I'm heading to Boston to present some stuff I've been doing with PathGen at the DREAM/RECOMB conference. I'm pretty excited to go, mostly because I hope to make some connections with people who know stuff about the Broad Institute. It would be very cool to get in there for graduate school.

So today was busy, as I prepared for my extended absence this weekend. I worked all day on PathGen and finally got it to incorporate microarray expression levels. You can even upload an expression file, and have it color them according to that. I was pretty excited. This is a 4-step map from SHH to DYRK1A with some expression information I found on the server that Steven was working with almost a year ago.

And my civ class was crazy. I'm taking this history of civilization class, and our teacher is a little.. well, he a religion teacher, so he isn't the most founded-in-the-facts person in the world. After several weeks of inner anger experienced immediately after class, I realized that I was getting upset because the claims he made were not logically based. And then after a while, I came to the conclusion that my civ class is like reading the tabloids. There is a certain society that enjoys base pleasures such as knowing who married whom, and who had an alien baby with three heads. And that is just fine. But there is also another society that does not read tabloids because the picture evidence is touched up, the sources are not trustworthy, and frankly, they don't care. I think I fall into the second class of people, and enjoy deciding for myself whether a claim is true based on the facts presented. And in my civ class, there are no facts... just large inferences. For example, the teacher claimed that 'No ancient Greek person ever believed for an instant that the world was flat.' Unfortunately, the description of the creation of the earth involves a flat earth with corners. And today in class, things became more like a tabloid as we discussed Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The professor stated that he hoped that we didn't find the material titillating. I agreed. It was repulsive. Of course, I wouldn't really know. I just read the spark notes version, and saved myself the obscene details.

Anyway, that's life.

Hi again

So I went to a focus group for students who were interested in summer internships, and if a blog by the office of internships would be helpful for students. One of the questions they asked us was whether we kept a blog. Sheepishly, I replied that I had, but I was slacking on updating it.

And then I picked up a job as an accompanist for a choir class thing, and the leader/teacher has some cool warmups. And because it is the unspoken duty of the accompanist to provide creative voice warmups for ward choir, I thought this would be a cool place to keep track of them.

So here goes nothing.

Today we warmed up with a practice that was meant to stretch the top and bottom voice range. Going down in sets of five notes .. 54321, we sang "ee" while keeping the sound forward in the mouth instead of letting it go to the back through where it usually goes when people try to sing deep. Then we did 135 up also keeping the sound forward in the mouth. While singing high, it is important to keep the air flowing. One way to practice this is to sing a 'fricative w' .. halfway between an "oo" and a "w" if that makes sense.. the lips are tight together. During the warmup, hold the hand in front of the lips, and make sure air is coming out as you do the warmup. Make sure it comes out at a constant rate throughout the exercise.