A little rant about dental hygiene

I just had my teeth cleaned. It was the same as every other time except this time I didn't brush my teeth beforehand. Well I brushed my teeth beforehand (as in before breakfast), but not right before I was leaving. I decided to do this after I realized the pointlessness of the whole thing. In what other service industry do we try to do the service on ourselves before we go get the service? Do we cook a little something up before we head off to the restaurant? Do we trim the grass before paying someone to mow the lawn? Do we vacuum our carpet before we get professionals to clean it?

We are going to get the teeth cleaned because the dental hygienists are better at it than we are (or at least have better tools...painful, painful tools). You are not going to wipe away the many months of coffee, tea, tobacco, soy sauce stains with one brushing session right before you leave. Some might say that it is a courtesy to the people who will have to look at your mouth/smell your breath for 30 minutes, but that is their job. If they really mind the sight of dirty, rotting teeth and bad breath why did they decide to do this for a living? And don't even get me started on the whole flossing thing. I get it, we are supposed to do it. We all have floss containers at home from every time we've gotten our teeth cleaned before. Can't you tell if I have been flossing by looking at my gums and how they bleed at the sight of that sharp claw like instrument? There's no point in asking if I've been flossing regularly and then telling me that I should after I've made up my excuse as to why I don't. If there's anything I've learned from pharmacy, it's that guilt trips never work.

Chick-fil-A ads are disturbing

I don't know if any of you have seen the recent ad campaign by the American fried chicken chain: Chick-fil-A. Here is an example video:



Now at first glance, this is a clever commercial with anthropomorthized animals. However, if you think about what you're seeing here, I think it's quite disturbing. Cows are asking us to eat chicken in order to save their own lives. Are we supposed to feel better exclusively killing and eating chickens for our meat? How are the cows better than the chickens and why do they deserve to be saved? It probably doesn't matter anyway. Most people in the US will probably still eat beef and chicken, sometimes on the same plate (and don't forget pork.... mmmmm, bacon).

Cliches exist for a reason

Now that most of my friends are a few years away from graduation, people are thinking about what they will do and who they will be in the future. From what I've seen, we probably couldn't even imagine what we'll be doing when we're older. People change careers or get more advanced degrees all the time. Do you feel unprepared for your future job? Maybe it's because you are. Certainly I haven't learned everything about pharmacy in my 3 years of study so far. Cliche #1: You are always learning. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10 000 hour rule in his book Outliers. Basically, you have to do something for 10 000 hours to do it really masterfully or to become an expert. The 10 000 hr rule is an indicator of 2 things: Cliche #2. practice, practice and more practice and Cliche #3: time flies when you love what you're doing. There's something worthwhile in every job. Find what it is and maybe, just maybe, you'll want to spend 10 000 hours doing it. At the very least, spend the 10 000 hrs outside of your job on a hobby or something (I'm aware you've probably accumulated the 10 000 hrs on video games already).

I'm back!

It's been 2 years (of hard pharmaceutical studies) since my last post. What has happened in this time period?

A quick Google search provided the results:

2010:

January: Earthquake in Haiti, subsequent outpouring of support

February: Olympics in Vancouver (while I was in Hawaii). Nothing like the feeling of tropical sand between your toes to get you exited for the big luge final.

March: Something sunk a South Korean navy cruiser. Everyone blames the North Koreans. Who knows. If there is a God, I can imagine him yelling "You sunk my battleship!" to Jesus.

April: Deep Water Horizon explodes, releasing crude oil into the oceans.

May: Greece gets bailed out. Everyone has forgotten about the earthquake in Haiti.

June: FIFA world cup.

July: Wikileaks publishes 90 000 documents on the war in Afghanistan.

August: OK. I give up, I just realized I still have 17 months I have to do.

Anyway, expect me to update this thing a little more frequently now. I'm still trying to get to $100 from Google Adsense for chordoma research.

An evolutionary flaw

I understand that people find large eyes cute because cuteness is about the only thing keeping us from abandoning stinky loud babies. However, why does this large eye induced cuteness reaction occur even with other mammals. I remember when I was younger, I saw my cat sitting on the carpet in dim light. Its pupils were dilated and this made the eyes look really big. Of course, I thought the cat looked cute so I went to pet it. Bad decision and I still have the faint scar to prove it. It appears that our evolutionary drive to protect cute things extends to other mammals as well, especially their young. Of course, approaching wild animals especially young animals is a bad idea since their parents also find them cute and will do anything possible to protect this cuteness. I wonder how many stupid people (who feed baby bears or climb over zoo fences) will have too die before humans evolve to a point where they are unengaged by babies of other mammal species? Unfortunately for us, natural selection takes a long time to work.

Twilight = emotional porn

Just a note: the term emotional porn as it relates to the Twilight phenomenon is not of my invention but I think it is a good descriptor of the series. Also, I do not hate Twilight or the people who like Twilight. I have in fact even watched the first movie (although this was mostly due to our free movie channel trial subscription for the month).

You might think that porn is a mighty strong word for this especially since there is no explicit nudity (except for the shirtless guys but that seems to be acceptable in our society, especially if they have a six pack); however, if you consider the definition of porn then it might make a little more sense. In a general sense, porn is the use of media to depict explicit imagery for the purposes of arousal. Oftentimes, an pornographic film involves ridiculous scenarios in which an average male (seeing as how most porn is targeted to the make audience) is seduced by one or several attractive females and proceed to have a ridiculously long period of "love making" with a little bit of plot sprinkled in to make things interesting. If you consider that this arousal does not specifically have be sexual, then Twilight and especially New Moon fit into this definition. Lets see, the plot for New Moon is as follows: An average girl (instead of a guy) is in a ridiculous scenario (where there are vampires and werewolves) and is seduced by two attractive (apparently) men/vampire/werewolf and then proceed to have a ridiculously long period of "who will she choose" with a little bit of plot sprinked in to make things interesting. This comparison is not intended to make Twilight seem dirty or give it a negative connotation but it will be interesting to see how girls who watch these movies multiple times are perceived by the general public. There will probably be some girls who become addicted to watching "emotional porn" just like some men become addicted to sexually explicit pornography. In which case, I wonder if the boysfriends of these girls will become jeolous and confront them about their addiction?

Why grown ups act like kids sometimes

There have recently been some startling incidents involving adults acting immature. Let me list a few notable ones:
1. Serena Williams lost a semifinal match at the US open because she threatened to "shove this f**king ball down the (linesperson's) throat" after she was called for a foot fault on her serve.

2. A congressman yelled liar during the president's speech to the congress regarding healthcare which was televised across the US.

3. Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the MMVAs and embarassed her by claiming that Beyonce's video was the best of all time.

Now these three cases all involved relatively famous people but immature behaviour in adults happens all the time. Have you ever seen what happens inside parliament especially in Asia? Do your parents ever drive through a yellow light? A red light? How do you think they would do in a road test that we have to take now based on their regular driving patterns.

It seems our society's notion of "grown up" refers more to the physical than to the personality and values. Afterall, humans like to make quick judgments about people and how difficult would it be if you had to judge someone's behaviour before determining if they were "grown up". Sure, parents will say "do as I say and not as I do" or "your generation will be better". Well, how many generations have we gone through now? I don't see much improving going on. Maybe I'm a cynic but the only plausible resolution (in my lifetime) to this problem would be to lower your expectations for "grown up" behaviour. Afterall, we are only human.