Bitching about teachers and grades - on the wrong side today

I walked in to my lab with a bunch of loud students walking behind me. I could not have cared the least bit and that's what I did. But as it turns out, they had come to collect the graded homework that I put outside my lab for the students to pick it up. They start looking for their assignments and here are some of the comments

- "STAPLE in bold letters, dude he cut points for no staples, he is f%^&ing gay man" (for those of you interested I did not cut points for staples and I am not gay and for those who were more concerned about the second part of the clarification - hey, how you doin' ;).

-" two 16's in a row, dude this guy is tough, the son of a b&*%$h"

-"you better not say that, I put a 75"

These are the only ones that I distinctly remember among all the "what the f$%^k this" and "f$%^*&g shit" and "look at this dude" and all other bitching.

I don't know if they didn't know I was inside or they just didn't care but it was very amusing to hear the same things I used to say about all the ba$%^^&d profs back in IIT when ever I got my grades back.

Puskas on sale

I read this article on soccernet about how Ferenc Puskas, the great Hungarian footballer, (in fact one of the greatest to have ever played the game) has to sell the mementos he earned over his career to pay for his medical expenses. The website reads "Ferenc Puskas is to sell more than 100 personal mementos of his illustrious soccer career at a British auction next month". He is an Alzheimer patient. I am appalled at the handling of this whole thing by the Hungarian government who have not done anything to help him out, despite of the fact that Puskas is by far the most celebrated sports person from the country. The FIFA is putting some bureaucratic crap about the whole issue. The FIFA president Blatter said: "We have already taken the decision to make a donation to Ferenc and Elizabeth Puskas. The only matter that is yet to be finalized is the amount". When are they going to finalize the amount? After he has sold all his medals? Some of the items mentioned include the Golden Boot awarded to him for his world record goals tally, his 1954 World Cup runners-up medal and a shirt signed by Pele. Anyone who plays any sport would know how much all of them meant to him, its a different thing all together that because of his condition he probably does not appreciate or even recognize them as his.

I believe there was a charity game organized by the Football Association of Hungary between Puskas XI and Real Madrid (a club he played for while he was still at his best) at Budapest to raise money for him. Here are some of the figures from that match -

The money raised and given to Puskas' family - 7000 pounds
The money Real Madrid charged to make an appearance for that game - 892,000 pounds.

I can't believe Real Madrid actually charged for appearing in a charity game for one of their former players. It disgusts me, I hate them more than ever now. The most (it would still be shameful and disgusting considering the amount of money they have) they could ask for was a travel expense. They made money out of it - disgusting!!!

I hope someone steps forward to aid him and his family. I don't know what all the rich clubs are doing? I am not willing to believe the only way a once reverred football star can save himself is by selling his mementos, where is the humanity people? I tried looking for some links where donations could be made, I couldn't find one. If someone else finds one, please let me know.

Mac power

I am working on my lab's Mac iBook today since my advisor is running my experiment on the PC that I normally use. This thing is one of the sleekest babies I have seen around. I just love the look and feel of it, if I were all comfortable with the OS I would have bought one myself. I have no idea why Macs are so popular among the faculty members and not so popular among students who prefer a PC or some geeks might want linux. Would anyone care to tell me?

In other news

I had to teach my first class as a TA last week. The prof. was away to some conference and he told me to take the class and of course told me what was I supposed to teach. I was to solve a couple of numericals and teach them some basic fundamentals chemical thermodynamics. The numericals were pretty straight forward, defining a system boundary and determining flow rates.

The night before I was a bit nervous, understandably, coz for one my oratory skills are not something I am very proud of (at times they have been appalling) and two the class strength is about 112. I am sure even a reasonably good orator would be bit nervous if he had to talk to a large audience like this. Luckily for me, it was an early morning class and more than half the students would decide to skip the class so once that part was out of the way and given the fact that subject matter was fairly simple I was gaining confidence. I walked into the class early with a customary coffee cup and The Daily Targum (Rutger's newspaper) with the comic's page open. The liquid kid classics was really funny, I remember (for the uneducated, liquid kid classics is one of the comic strip popular in Rutgers and it's dark humor at its very best). I took the seat by the front desk, for the first time on the other side of it and waited for my students to walk in. I think it was the chair, the feeling of responsibility as a teacher (though very irrelevant in this case), the student who walked up to me and asked a doubt before the class, the maintenance guy who arranged for the visual aid equipments for me (though I did not need one, I used the chalk board), the whole feeling of being on the other side of the front desk that made it all seem so easy now. I wasn't worried or nervous a bit. I just went about the lecture as if it were the most natural thing for me to do. I tried a few things like getting the students involved, make them laugh, at times it worked, other times it didn't. Over all I felt nice about it.

I want to teach in a school sometime and now I am more certain I will do it.

There is a neuron in my brain that fires just for you.

No, this is NOT some geek's way of getting all mushy with his babe. This is actually what happens in human brain. Last week at my lab meeting I came across a very interesting article published in nature (courtesy, my advisor who happen to discuss it ). Here is a news article that talks about it. The title of the article reads "Jennifer Anniston strikes a nerve", she can strike a lot more things though, I have to say :).

The article is about how a few scientist at UCLA, MIT and a couple of other places got together conducted this research on some of the epileptic patients. The reason for choosing epileptic patients being none other than the fact that these patients already had electrodes planted in their brain as part of their treatment and they could use these electrodes for their single neuron recording. Ok I realize this is getting too technical, so I will cut the long story short.

They found that high up (in the hippocampus, for those interested) in the brain's hierarchical structure there are neurons that fire (that is to say that they recognize) every time they are shown pictures of famous personalities or places. In fact, the very same neurons fire even when you are just shown the name of the person/place and not the picture. Essentially, these neurons recognize the concept of a person/place. I am not educated enough to know all the implications of this, but I was totally amused at the way the concept of a person is laid out in your brain, the way memory is laid out and coded. I know for sure there are different areas for language and face processing or recognition which contain millions of neurons, but as you go higher up in the hierarchy, the information is integrated and all it takes is one firing neuron to conceptualize a personality. Intriguing, ain't it?