My little brother finally found an apartment, he'll be moving out within a month. And since I'm currently homeless, dad asked if I'd like to move into his room when he moves out. If I do I'd be staying there until I graduate in about a year and a half or at least until I know if I'm staying in Uppsala (right now I feel like I might not). There doesn't seem to be much of a point in getting a place of my own at the moment. Of course, I could also move back in with my brother when the renovation is finished, but I've found over the years that an office isn't an ideal place to live. There are a couple of drawbacks in moving back home too. One is of course that moving back to my parents' house seems like a step back, but I think I can live with that since I know it's not for very long. The other thing is that my little brother's band will keep practicing and recording in the garage which would be right outside my room. They're loud. I've still time to ponder and it's not like it'll change my life dramatically one way or another. As I think I've mentioned before; as long as I have a couple of shelves for my books and a desk for my computer I have a home.

I'm starting to feel it. I either have my computer in here on the floor (where I can connect to the internet) or on the tiny bedside table in the guest room, neither of those places is suitable for working with the tablet and without it I just can't do anything interesting at with this thing. RedEye is probably as bored as I.

Listening to: John Lee Hooker - Mr. Lucky

Went to a bunch of lectures today to try to decide what classes I want to take this period (from now to christmas). I need to take at least three to get enough credits, this didn't use to be a problem, but the courses have gotten to a level where it can be kind of tough to find time to study for more than two of them at the same time. This is why I decided not to take Classical Electrodynamics (classical in the sense that there are only a little bit of quantum effects covered, but that doesn't leave out heaps of relativistic junk), the professor said today in the first lecture that roughly half of us would probably fail the final exam and if we didn't feel up to working night and day and/or selling our souls we might as well leave right away. I stayed until the end of the lecture, but I don't think I'll be back. A shame since it seems like an excellent course, but if I can't spend the necessary time on it I'll just feel useless (though I'd pass the exam anyway of course).
Right now I'm feeling tired and miserable, not enough sleep and having to bike home in the rain can do that.




Which File Extension are You?

North Americans use half of the medicines sold in the world toaday, so naturally every major manufacturer wants a piece of that big (200 billion dollar) cake. To make it even more tempting consumers in the US gladly (I assume since four out of five prescriptions are requested by the patient) munch 70 % of the new drugs, where the most money is to be made. However, this cake is guarded by the FDA in all its glory.
Sometimes it might seem that it's easier for an American company to get a new drug passed, but that might be natural, if Americans are going to buy it the money might as well go back into american companies (though as a patient I'd probably want to put my money on the best medicine I could get and not just the most patriotic).
Thus it's not with the same amazement that seems to have struck many experts that I read about how AstraZeneca's new blod clot solver (or however I should translate it, I'm not into (or on) medicine myself) Exanta, got turned down by the FDA. Of course the reasons stated weren't plain "we want to protect our own market, so bugger off foreigner" (even if that's what they'd wanted to say they would probably have had to make it a bit longer, you just don't give a short reply to an application of over a million(!) pages), but the reasons they gave have been said to be in large part "incomprehensible" by people who should know what they're talking about (as, I again want to stress, I do not. I've read neither the application nor the reasons for it being rejected).
I'm glad I don't need this kind of medication, and if I did I'm glad I'm not in the US. There is a competitor in late stages of development by Bristol-Myers Squibb (with all the mergers going on I'm surprised there are any large companies with a short names left), but many studies are still needed before it has any chance of reaching the market. Until then the only alternative is Waran, with side-effects that cause a couple of hundred deaths each year in Sweden alone (so probably at least a couple of thousand in the US) while Exanta has (at least as far as has been possible to show in the testing) very few and no very serious side-effects.
I'm not saying this is a case of blatant protectionism, if it was obvious governments would be throwing pies and old vegetables at each other already, but it does seem a little strange.
So why did I write so long about this?... it just kind of caught my eye as stupid when I read the morning paper today.

This is funny in a somewhat disturbing way. I can just imagine a middle aged Japanese man entering a noisy and brightly lit pachinko hall only to find his favorite Hitler machine already taken, with good grace he settles for a Moses instead.

My quantum mechanics exam yesterday didn't go too well. Or maybe I just put too high demands on myself, but after sitting coped up with my books for almost a week straight before the exam I was expecting it to go better. At least I'm glad that the stuff I didn't know wasn't anything I'd be likely to have learned even if I'd put more time into it.

1950 years ago to the day young Nero, then not yet 17 years old, was made emperor of Rome. Among other more or less wacky things, he had his mother (after several intricate but failed attempts) and two wives murdered, Rome set on fire (I finally understand the pun 'Nero burning ROM')and large numbers of people, among them many christians, put to death on loose grounds during his 14 years in power. In June 68 he comitted suicide to avoid being flogged to death (sanest thing he ever did).
Thus it is that we still in this day and age prefer to choose our leaders among old dull men (Sweden's finance minister even has the inspired name Bo Ringholm), not because we believe them wiser than others (if we did believe that, we've been proven wrong many times over), but because we believe that the seeds of raving madness should have already made themselves known by then.

I'm sitting on the floor of my mom's home office, the desk is too cluttered with papers and books to fit my too large laptop on and I know better than to disturb mom's piles (she's got some kind of paper based random access file system here that defies all reason). I'm sitting here becaues it's the closest point with internet access to the guest room where I'm currently living. I decided to move this morning. When I came out of my room to eat breakfast the fridge had been moved to an unknown location and three men I didn't know were cheerfully tearing down one of the kitchen walls. If you've ever experienced this you know it's not the best way to start the day, especially with less than an hour to go until the start of a five hour final exam.
I managed to get out and buy my exam candy and even stop by here at my parents' for a five minute breakfast and still got to the exam with minutes to spare.
My ideas concerning exam candy may need a little explaining. About a week before a major exam it's time to go into pre-exam mode, lots of studying at any and all hours. During this time I limit my intake of sugar as much as I can force myself (I can stay away from candy, but mom's baking cannot be resisted). With blood sugar levels at a normal or lowered level the brain works sluggishly, but I'll work my way through the problems. Then on the exam I'll eat candy and drink sweetened tea to let my brain go into overdrive and since I've trained with a stupid brain everything gets very easy with a smart one. It's kind of like practicing running at high altitude... or just a reason to eat lots of candy during the exam.
I'm fairly confident that I've put Dynamical Systems and Chaos behind me and now I'm looking forward to Quantum Mechanics next Wednesday.

My brother has come up with more things he wants to do while rebuilding. This time it involves breaking up the entire floor in our home, up 'til now the work has been confined to the bathroom, kitchen and the office portion of the building (with the brief exception of changing all the windows). Well, it's my brother's house and I can't blame him for wanting to fix it up since he plans on staying here for the foreseeable future (if any part of the future ever is). I'm just not sure I can live with this much longer and am seriously contemplating moving into my parents' guest room (which used to be my room) for a few months. It feels very depressing to have to pack up my stuff again now just two months after settling back into my old nest (the suitcases are still standing over by my bed).
On a more happy note I've finally gotten around to downloading and reinstalling JWPce and JFC on the pda, so now I can at least try to hang on to a little bit of Japanese vocabulary.

I'm glad I bought that copy of Physics Handbook yesterday. I mean I'm glad I bought it yesterday as opposed to sometime last week since now I can still return it to the shop and get my money back. My old copy arrived from Japan today together with a number of other books. I also got this sexy japanese mailbag that they all came in. It had also picked up a small nail and a couple of bright yellow plastic bands around the top somewhere along the way. The boxes that I had packed the books in before they went in the bag were all shredded, but surprisingly the only book that was damaged was a pocket of Orson Scott Card's Shadow Puppets which got its cover a bit mangled. A couple of other books had slightly bent corners, but nothing that wouldn't happen on the way to school.
So many people have made sock dolls of various anime characters, maybe I should try making a bag doll out of the mail bag... it'd have to be Moleman from Escaflowne though, he's the only sacklike character I can come up with right now... Not that I'll ever take the time to ever actually do it, so I think I'll just call it the Molesack from now on.

It was developed as a tool to help the lump of meat under it to hunt moose, run from enraged bears and get as many offspring as possible. In my 23 years I've never hunted a moose, never seen an angry bear and never... well whatever. Instead I'm trying to use it to study quantum mechanics! It's like driving nails with a sewing machine, like picking splinters with a chainsaw, like eating noodles with a ...a... a fork? Anyway, you get the picture I'm trying to project here. This thing needs another billion years of evolution.
*scratches belly and looks around for his spear*

Listening to: Blind Guardian - And the Story Ends

The word you're looking for is pink I believe. Maybe i went a little overboard ^_^
I'll blame it on only getting five hours of sleep two nights in a row and on an upset stomach.
I showered at the Ångström Laboratory this morning, this does not mean that I was influenced by my japanese lab mates only that the bathroom here doesn't even have a floor now, much less a shower. The showers at Ångström on the other hand are very nice, hardly anyone ever uses them so they're like new.
Now I shall get an hour of sleep before going to play tennis with Kana.

Listening to: T. Rex - Monolith
Feeling: Bifurcated

It was fun playing tennis again, I'm glad that Kana and I were at about the same level (not very good but we'll both get the ball over the net most of the time). Note the little wizard Howl fan thingy down in the corner. Everybody loves a vain wizard.