This is week was good and boring, I got into a routine.

Lab all day Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not attending lectures anymore, emails are more accessible to me right now. I agree that being in a learning atmosphere such as a university lecture hall is the ideal environment for learning, I’d be surprised if you can find any barriers to being educated at the university.

Other times I will be in the gym, in the “field” at Birkdale Ravine or Thompson park. I will probably over the summer get acquainted with the parks downtown.

I’ll actually be watching quite a bit of movies, and I still have to study and write lab reports. So it’s not like I can just screw off and show to the labs like some science savant.

I really looked at myself in the mirror and said “Let’s get out of the lab, and do more work! Let’s piss away your love life in lieu of a career!”

grumble

What I did this week.

In chemistry we worked with carminic acid, which was extracted from the insect Cochineal insects (Dactylopius coccus) contain the red anthraquinone dye carminic acid, which has been widely used as a natural colorant in foods, cosmetics, and textiles due to its intense color and good stability. Carminic acid has a conjugated aromatic structure whose colour and UV‑Vis absorbance spectrum are strongly pH‑dependent, shifting in both hue and intensity as the phenolic groups are protonated or deprotonated.

This dye was first used by the Mesoamerican and Andean culture, before the Spanish had arrived and kept the source a secret. This insect is a parasitic insect, and often gets confused with Kerria lacca, it’s because both are plant parasites.

Nothing really happened in the ecology and evolution lab, we just identified and group different species of bees. The only interesting thing that happened was that I beheaded a specimen by accident. It was already dead, and I am hoping that the lab that we had borrowed the specimens from have more.

What was interesting is that I saw a movie on body dysmorphia, it was really good. It was called “Saccharine” and it had so many great elements that make movies fun to watch. Also, it does make feel, unsteady, and at the end of the movie I was hungry.

Next week I am going to see “Tuner”, it’ about a savant (think Baby Driver) who uses his unique pitch recognition to unlock vaults. I’ve decided that when I’m older and not so active, I’ll be spending a lot of time watching and reviewing cinema, If science didn’t excite me so much, I’d be in the film industry.

I am hoping that next weeks labs are a little bit better than this week. I am a biologist, through and through, there is something about chemistry that just captivates me though. We’ll see, this final year I have to take Physics.

I better not fall in love with another science. I’ll never leave school.