Saturday, November 18, 2006

Episode VIII: Eating at E's


(And Elsewhere)

















Of course it was only a matter of time until I had to write about food, and as it turns out, that matter of time was three months.

So I signed up for a KU meal-plan, which gives you a discount when you purchase on-campus meals in bulk. I purchased the cheapest meal-plan, which amounts to about three all-you-care-to-eat meals per week plus a bunch of credits accepted at on-campus food courts.

Mrs. E’s is my all-you-care-to-eat location of choice, because (a) it is by far the best one, and (b) it is the most convenient (as demonstrated in Episode II, it takes only five minutes to walk there). Technically the name of the place is Ekdahl Dining Commons, but I suppose the marketing directors decided that name does not sound particularly appetizing. And they are right. Thus it is called Mrs. E’s, which, although no one has actually seen Mrs. E, we figure the name must stand for “Mrs. Enormous”.

The online advertisement for Mrs. E’s boasts a “stunning” view, and in this case I found the ad to have been right on. The whole dining area features windows from floor to ceiling, and since the building is located at the top of a hill, one can see for miles (particularly beautiful when fall foliage is on display). The above photo is a panoramic picture that I constructed, showing about 270 degrees worth of the dining hall. The additional 90 degrees consists of the actual buffet area. While this picture may give you an idea of what eating there is like, I am afraid it does not do the scenery justice. But please do click on it to get a higher-resolution picture.

I notice that I eat quite a bit at Mrs. E’s, and one day I attempted to quantify exactly how much I ate, so I took photos of all the nutritional information displays, and created the montage seen below, with dots representing items that I ate.

As it turned out, that meal was worth 3,999 calories, consisting of 167g protein, 194g fat, and 484.7g carbohydrates. To give you a frame of reference, the FDA decided that a “normal” diet was either 2,000 or 2,500 calories a day. However, if you were to adjust the FDA’s Daily Value scale to my 3,999 calories, that meal would have given me 149% of my DV of fat and 81% of my DV of carbohydrates. Clearly, then, Mrs. E is putting me on a low-carb diet.


A final note: the most that I have ever gained in one sitting at Mrs. E's (on record, anyway) is 6 pounds.

Elswhere

Like I say, I only eat there around three times a week. Other times I eat at various food courts on campus, and some days I eat very little. One place on campus that you can always count on for excellent food is in the Kansas Union food court, where there is a special-order pasta service, in which you tell the chef exactly how to make your pasta, including the veggies, meats, noodles, sauces, cheeses, spices, etc. It is exquisite. However, it is a treat for me, since the Kansas Union is about a fifteen minute walk, and fifteen minutes of walking in the cold cold cold is not pleasant.









And…

Speaking of eating, our million-dollar-salary football coach weighs like 500 pounds, and the first time I saw him walking on campus, I wondered if he was even able clasp his hands together, due to his prodigious belly. Anyway, the point is, here is my favorite KU football shirt, hanging in a store window.

























Finally...

Speaking of football, KU just beat their rivals (Kansas State) in their final home game of the year, and here is a video of their celebration. It is about 1 MB, so if you have a dial-up connection, it may take a while. Please tell me whether or not it works. Thanks.





They proceeded to take the posts out of the stadium and dump them in the lake.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Episode VII: The Lab

I suppose it is just about time that I post about something “important” and “career-related”, so here we go: The biggest part of a biology PhD program is research, and as of a few weeks ago, I am officially enrolled in laboratory rotations. Basically, lab rotations consist of the student working in three different labs, with a period of about two months spent in each lab. At the end of the last rotation, you decide which lab you want to continue in. For your edification, I have provided a brief description of each of the labs that I will be rotating through.









Chris Gamblin runs the lab that I am currently working in. He studies a protein called tau that is thought to be important in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. He has lots of spending money (so I hear) and employs a rather large staff, with a post-doc, two technicians, a graduate student and an undergraduate student. He also listens to completely random music in lab.











Erik Lundquist heads up the lab for my second rotation, in which he studies C. elegans, a little tiny see-through worm. The goal of the lab is to better understand neuron development.











Rebecca Hays’ lab studies flies and looks at the molecular mechanisms that induce apoptosis (“programmed cell death”). This topic relates to human diseases such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease.


In looking at the pictures of my professors, you might be led to believe that all KU biology professors are white and in their thirties to early-forties. Of course, you would be badly mistaken: there are plenty of fifty or sixty-year-old professors at KU.

I figure you might enjoy a photo from everyday life in the lab, so here is a picture from Dr. Gamblin’s lab: it consists of my E. coli bacteria growing right next to leftover Halloween candy (which is free for the taking).










And for something completely different…

There was some kind of drawing put on by the various food courts here on campus, where if you ate at every one of them in a certain amount of time, and got a stamp for each one, you would get a free drink and be entered into some kind of drawing. Needless to say, I had little difficulty eating at all the different places, and I enjoyed my free drink, and what do you know, I also managed to win…

A pink scooter!













It is battery powered, and recharges via a normal wall plug.

I have named the scooter “The Thugmobile” (for obvious reasons), and it has been quite a hit already. Just last night (Friday) Emery Wright and I took took it from one end of campus to the other, and had a total of about eight comments (mostly favorable), including two pretty young women who wanted to ride it, a guy who quoted Napoleon Dynamite (“You ever take it off any sweet jumps?”) and a police officer who thought surely we must have stolen it.