Laneway tomorrow, more food, molecular dynamics progress, campus exploration

Laneway!

For those of you who have yet to hear my rant, tomorrow is the long-anticipated St. Jerome's Laneway Festival, Singapore, with some of my favorite musicians playing at Marina Bay Gardens. For those interested in the lineup, the website is here.

The main acts I'm excited for are Cvrches, Daughter, James Blake, Jamie XX, XXYYXX, and probably one of my absolute favorite groups right now, UK-based Mount Kimbie. But there's also many more great acts.

Here's a link to Daughter's new, free EP on bandcamp, and here's a video of James Blake's excellent music video, Retrograde. Finally, I'll actually embed Mount Kimbie's amazing Tiny Desk Concert (live show via NPR) because you should definitely watch it. Skip to ~14:00 for what I'd say is they're most climatic song in this performance. I'd like to point out that the ratty pair of headphones I use is the same as those they use in this show, because I'm that pro.

Food

More food pictures. I've been having a bit of trouble getting up to the daily vegetable consumption I think is acceptable- I'd say 55% of my caloric intake in a day is noodles or rice, maybe 30% meat and egg, 5% super-sweet tea and coffee, and the remaining 10% vegetable. Bit tough to do better out there.

I see the guy in blue a lot, he's the bus boy for the whole area.

View of Canteen 11 from the second story, lots of Chinese New Year decorations

Near the breakfast cafe in Canteen 11, where I usually go in the morning for some hard-boiled eggs, kaya toast, and coffee flavored cocoa (it's supposed to be coffee, or actually as it's legitimately spelled here, kopi. Took me forever to make the connection).

Korean BBQ, relatively lots of veg.

This is what I've been looking for! Yong tau foo stall. You pick a set number of 'pieces' from this selection, they chop 'em up, sauce them, then mix them in with a noodle soup for you. Pretty tasty, got myself lots of mushrooms and bok choy.

One of the tastier meals I've had in a while, this is a bean paste with pork and julienned cucumber on a bed of- what else? noodles.

Finally worked up the courage to try a local dessert. This is chendol, a local favorite I'm told. That's three different kinds of gel, sweet bean paste, and sweet corn on a bed of dense shaved ice and coconut milk. I kinda liked the bean, corn, and the green gel, the other gels were kinda bland and slimy. Overall, I prefer ice-cream waffles.

Halal Indonesian food. Fried fish, curry, rice, token salad. Coffee (excuse me, kopi) is not really any less sweet sans condensed milk. But you get closer to the bare hint of coffee flavor.

 Molecular Dynamics

I've been slowly making progress in the GROMACS tutorial. It's a pretty funny little program- fairly easy to use as I'm getting the hang of it. After every computation, it'll show a little quotation from a nineties band, it's cute. I'm including some screenshots of the models I've produced, eventually I'll figure out a way to post the fully produced videos. For those of you with too much free time, you can download PyMOL and then take a look at my model for yourself.

KALP-15, a small, synthetic model peptide in a dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) membrane solvated in water molecules

Same KALP-15 model zoomed in slightly. You can't see too well, but I think the lysines are a little angry, the model isn't very relaxed

To give you an idea of how small that peptide is, here's a homology model of TRPM8 based on- I think- the Shaker Kv crystal. No membrane or solvent. I helped do this back in the US, but it's probably not worth much now that the Cryo EM structure of TRPV1 is out, we'll need to model with that as a homologue. This protein is probably two or three times bigger than the whole membrane patch in the previous pictures.

Campus Exploration

I've been trying to find a place on campus to get out into the jungle, but everything is blocked either by fences or "WARNING! LIVE FIRE" signs or both. However, I took a few pictures out and about to give you lot a feel for the University. BONUS: a people-breaking-rules picture.

The nearby Pioneer MRT Station (Mass Rapid Transit, the rail)

Yay, NTU

I couldn't decide if this was really a community garden due to the signs telling me that I'd be shot on sight. But I ended up making it up and out alive.

Couldn't tell if this was like a shrine or a shop. No English in sight.

Campus housing on NTU! Apparently, they're for foreign professors. Only actual houses I've seen in Singapore

Pretty, I think

Birds hanging out on a hill by the so-called North Spine, one of two major academic complexes

View from the top floor of the South Spine

Oh look, bathroom ceiling lizard!

What the hell? People apparently smoking on an INDOOR staircase in the Biological Sciences building. I feel like you couldn't really get away with that in the US.

Stay posted for pictures and musings from the Laneway Festival tomorrow!