[Enter Subtitle Here] to be cool that is like other people


So it's been a long day. Tuesdays are always the worst days, I get into the lab at 8 and catchup on items I need to do for the labs during the week, then teach Aquatic Botany lab for 3 hours, finally sitting through Medicinal Botany for 3 hours. Which ends up me getting back to my apartment around 9.

Long freakin day.

Medicinal Botany is an excellent class but doing a 3 hour lecture is hard. Even with enough breaks it still ends up seeming long. Today we talked about poisons. Useless nugget of information: It is possible to poison someone with enough apple seeds. Apple seeds are a cyanogenic glycoside. Meaning that when bitten into a reaction occurs in which Hydrogen Cynonide, or cynanide gas. To affect a person you need about 4mg/kg. So you would need about 0.4g to kill 100 kg person. Which is about 50 seeds. Unfortunately the seeds need to be broken, or massicated(chewed). So if you take a nail file and scratch the seed coat a little it would work. So it's possible to kill someone with an apple seed. So listen to those old wives tales, they do have some truth in them. Well minus the whole growing in your stomach thing.

Of course the funny thing today was, most of these toxins have to be ingested orally. Now my question is this, are there people stupid enough out to to put everything in their mouth?? I already know the answer to that, but damn, at least it cleans the gene pool.

More tidbits of information, Ricin, extracted from the castor bean seed, which you can also get castor oil which was/is used as a laxative. Ricin is consider the #3 poison by the FBI, behind plutonium and botulism. Ricin is a protein extracted from the castor bean, which is very easy to extract, as apparent by the people who extract. (i.e. a Minnesota Paramilitary group) The interesting thing that is does is bind to ribosomes. Now ribosomes are used in transcription of RNA into proteins for use in the cell. Now why is that important?? Because transcription is basically how a cell lives (there are other functions but no need to explain that right now). So what ricin does is bind to the ribosomes preventing transcription, preventing the cell for continuing it's exsitence. It can be a quick death if given in a high dose, or it can be painful. One example is a the KGB. The KGB used it to assassinate a journalist speaking out against the Kremlin. They took a normal umbrealla, hollowed it out and put 250 ug (that should be a mu, for micrograms) and walked by stabbing that unfortuntate man. It took him 4 days to die for bleeding and hemoragging. Noticed I said micrograms. 250 micrograms eqaute to about 4000 uses in 1 gram of substance. How much is one gram?? Not a hell of alot, it's about the size of a small pinch. Of course ricin maybe injested or it can be absorbed dermally, but it takes a long time and is not as effective. The Minnesota Paramilitary I mentioned earlier had about 250 grams of it, which is a quarter of a kilo, a kilo weighs about 3 pounds.

Just think about that.

Man this whole grad school stuff is wearing me ragged. Mostly I've been working in the lab, doing stuff for lab classes all day, and then I have a 3 hour lecture. This lecture is one my first 3 hours I've ever had, and I've taken alot of courses, somewhere around 150 so far. And these 3 hours lectures are rough, granted it's an interesting subject but when you've been working in the lab all day and then teaching a lab right before class, I'm a bit tired when I get to lecture. So far my classes are pretty interesting, in case anyone cares here's my current class load:

BOT5990 Medicinal Botany Theodore Fox T 05:30-08:25 PM
BOT6905 Algal Phage I Peggy Winter
MCB5735 Marine Microbiology Wade Jeffrey M W 02:30 - 03:45 PM

Only 9 credit hours, but the Algal Phage is a directed study, so it's easy. I'm mostly doing research for my thesis work, and it's helping me define what I want my thesis work to be. Medicinal Botany is interesting, the only down fall is I have to write a 15 page paper and give a presentation on it. Same thing with my Marine Micro class. The one downfall of being a grad student I guess.

Apparently I am the pimp of algae.

It seems that the only way I can get a woman's phone number is to either be their teacher, or offer to go collect algae. I mean the first day I said something I've got two phone numbers saying to call them whenever I go collect algae. Of course I can't take advantage of that it's completely unethical. I know me saying it's unethical, wtf right?

So I'm completely moved into my new apartment. It's actually larger than I thought it would be. So everything is looking very sparse right now. I need to get myself a couch that way I can lounge if I want to and watch a movie on my computer. I bought a new computer chair and it's comfy and all but nothing beats lounging on a couch.

Being a grad student is different. The professors actually treat, I guess you can say, more respect. I'm currently teaching 3 lab sections. It's a great thrill when you look at the schedule and it says your name as the professor. Of course it's interesting that they are intrusting their education to me, and somewhat scary. But so far the classes look pretty good. Medicinal Botany is interesting, my first 3 hours lecture ever and it's fucking harsh. Even though the professor I know very well, he comes and asks me what I think of the class, another cool perk of being the only Botany Grad Student.

I think that's it for now. Time to go veg out for awhile and chill, teaching on Fridays just sucks.

I hate trendy stuff, well at least this is better than livejournal. Will post more once I stop being a lazy bastard, and get some free time for school and what not.