As noon approached on a recent Sunday, a line of people began to form outside the multi-purpose room in the M.I.T. Sidney Pacific Graduate Residence. These people were mostly from Singapore, queuing patiently, as Singaporeans are known to do, for good food. The rich aromas of cooking curry mixed with various aromatic spices began to waft from the doors. The chatter grew louder, more animated, until it abruptly fell to an absolute silence as a student came out of the multi-purpose room and calmly began to instruct people what to do once they went in. Then, the line started moving. The kopitiam was open for business.
Author: xiaozhi
Welcome to Do The Molecule Dance, and 2013.
This is not the first entry here, but it is the first entry in 2013, and since this blog just sorta got a new look, Welcome to Do The Molecule Dance! Also, I guess it is kind of an afterthought, because I didn’t write a ‘First Entry’ when this blog started in October 2012.
So here goes.
Take A Mushroom Walk Through Lincoln Woods
Boston University News Service – It was an hour of trekking in the Lincoln woods with George Davis, a retired chemist and president emeritus of the Boston Mycological Club, before I finally spotted our prey: mushrooms.
First real publication!
I am required to file a new 500-word story every Wednesday at 2 pm for one of my classes. Which means that usually, that new story gets written between noon and 2 pm, during my two-hour break which is also supposed to be my lunch break. So I was really, really pleasantly surprised when my professor liked the mushroom story enough to have me do some edits and get it up on the Boston University News Service website!
Kopitiam in Boston
This is not my first time living abroad, but I don’t think I will ever be able to get over Singaporean food (yes, not even with bacon and eggs and grits). So I was really excited to go to an event organized by the MIT Singapore Students Society, Kopitiam, for homemade Singaporean food!
One of those reflections on life
We had a guest speaker for our class on Friday, a stay-at-home mom with a child diagnosed with autism. She told us about her experiences – bringing her son up, his problems with digestion, her struggles with their doctors, and the camp that her son went to this past summer. She briefly mentioned that before she had her children, she was working at MIT.
Her stories resonated with me for several reasons.
Mushroom walk in Lincoln
Getting out of bed at 7 am on a Sunday morning isn’t usually my thing, but for what I went to, it was totally worth it. I went to a mushroom walk in Lincoln, hosted by Trish Adams of the Boston Mycological Club. Pictures!
Drug synthesis – an example
Drugs are exceedingly complicated molecules. The process of getting to know what a drug should look like is, in the words of Edward Holson, Director of Medicinal Chemistry at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, “like a chess game.”
Nature’s mirrors
Once, I heard that the more symmetrical a face between the left and right sides, the more attractive it is. This occurred to me again when I was doing my eyebrows last night and accidentally trimmed a little too much off my left eyebrow. But while our reflections in the mirror act exactly as we do, the same certainly does not hold true for molecules.
Ashtanga yoga moon day
Today was a ‘moon day’ for ashtanga yoga practitioners. It reminds me of the time when I was in India practicing at 5am six days a week, unless, of course, there’s a moon day.