Mind games

Being the nerd that I am, I was watching scientific american frontiers on PBS and they talked about this group at harvard that has done some psych studies about sub-/un-/conscious biases against a number of different groups of people (e.g. gay, black, middle eastern etc) using a sort of word association computer task. They have a website where you can test yourself.

So of course I putt over to that website and take some tests. I was actually kind of nervous about it, figuring all sorts of deep dark subconscious biases might come crawling out, but so far so good. Apparently I:

• moderately prefer gay people over straight
• am slightly more inclined to associate women with careers and men with families.
  
• show no preference to either African- or European-Americans.

I'm a bit proud of myself, but then I'm kind of surprised that I show any preference for either gay or straight people.

These tests are addictive, I'm probably going to go take another one right now...

Excitement!

another long absence, but I finally came across an interesting enough day to write about.

First off, miracle of miracles (or perhaps a mix up in a clinical lab somewhere), I apparently have perfectly normal cholesterol/HDL/LDL levels! Hey now, how'd that happen? Here I was resigned to the fact that my genes -- and maybe some of my terrible eating habits and laziness -- would result in cholesterol-rich blood vessels for hte rest of my life.
I guess the vulnerability is still there though, maybe I can't eat fried twinkies all the time after all. Poop. In less surprising news I'm also free of diabetes, HIV and chlamydia.

Secondly, some pipes went kaboom at work. More or less. The pipes burst and flooded the research building. Apparently the heat stopped, temps dropped and, seeing as it was about 5 degrees out and the failsafe to keep the pipes from freezing failed, resulted in the simultaneous bursting of pipes on all floors of hte building. Whoops! Our lab got away got away relatively unscathed, but some labs didn't get so lucky and one of the rooms in the animal colony had part of the ceiling collapse. So that was kind of an interesting day at work with the cleanup and such. I guess i shouldn't derive so much excitement from an incident that could've potentially ruined our lab.

Also this past weekend i had my first sleepover in something like five or six years with some other RAs from the lab. It involved all the things good sleepovers should, namely: pizza, brownies, peeps, several pints of ice cream and brunch at IHOP the next morning. Overall, pretty awesome.