e pur si muove

The Drudge Report does it again. 26 minutes ago, the Associated Press released a news report stating that stem cell expert Hwang Woo-suk hoped to open a stem cell bank in Korea by year-end.

Hwang sounds like the slave-driving type by the way. The news report states:

[Hwang's] team is notorious for working long hours without weekends or holidays and even sleeping in the lab

Which makes me wonder, how many graduate students does he have, and what do they have to do to remain in the group? A report from Nature News has a chilling statment:

Hwang fell into disfavor with bioethicists amid questions over whether a graduate student in his lab had donated eggs used for his experiments.

If you had them, would you do experiments on your own eggs? *shudders*

I had a weird dream this morning. (I know it was the morning because I know I woke up to turn the aircon off at dawn, i.e. 5 am, then promptly plonked back to sleep and *then* had this dream.) After reading about Google’s Summer of Code on Slashdot, I was thinking something along the lines of Google is the l33t35t company ever. Then I had a few friends from lab over for dinner (I cooked chicken curry, yum yum) and we happened to chance upon the topic of getting all stressed up over homework, and how we would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat over some quantum mechanics problem.

In my dream, I showed up for some kind of selection test from Google for the program (there are only spots for 200, mind you). It was a “do two of the following questions” kind of thing. I remember there were 28 questions, with questions like “What does the following circuit do? Discuss how you would optimize it.” interspersed with “Discuss the impact of world governance on the spread of thee open source movement”. I recall reading through the rest of it but not remembering what they were all about.

I only felt confident of tacking the world governance question (I only remember the circuit problem because it had a big fat circuit diagram occupying 1/3 of a page, and thinking to myself, goddamn I’m not doing THIS one.) but 2:50 into the 4:00 test I was still pacing back and forth the exam hall (unreal right) unable to even think of how to begin to answer it.

After sweating it for a while my real self woke up and said to my dream self, what on earth are you doing? Sweating blood in your dreams for the minuscule chance of earning $4,500 over the summer? Did you really think you can hold your forte with 100,000 other computer science students? My dream self realized the futility of doing this test. At that point I recall tearing the question sheet into shreds and then waking up.

How fitting, a dream test for a dream job at a dream company. So now you know, I’m a übergeek deep down inside. *shamed*