Sunday, June 8, 2008

Spreading the nerdism

Tagged by another geeky grad student Solitaire. This is a fun tag about books. But, unfortunately the 'fun' part goes missing from the life of grad students :(
You can skip to the red paragraph in the end if you are interested in some guessing games.

OK, so here are the rules of the game:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.


I have two text books just next to my computer right now. I picked one and guess what, page 123 has a full page graph and and only two sentences in the caption!!

Hi hi..very tempting opportunity to stop, but I decided to try the second one.

So here are the 6th, 7th and 8th sentences on page 123 from 'Programmed Cell Death in Plants' by John Gray:
"E2F homologs of Arabidopsis build a small gene family with three members (Vandepoele et al., 2002).
Constitutive misexpression of E2Fa resulted in enlarged cotyledons due to prolonged cell proliferation (see also Figure 5.1 De Veylder et al., 2002).
The proliferation rate was dramatically increased when the E2F cofactor, DPa, was coexpressed."
Sounds like a foreign language? You are not alone. Doesn't make much sense to me either :D

Ok let's make this game little interactive for my non-specialist friends.
I'm posting the cover of the book. Can anyone guess what the picture is of? (Hint: It is of course a plant part, and it is taken by a very powerful microscope that can make micro-nano millimeter sized things look life-size).


Not tagging anyone.

7 comments:

Solitaire said...

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKS!!!!!


John Gray? Hahahahaha!!

P said...

he he not the famous one :) This person is pretty cool too. A relatively young prof from our very own Ohio (Toledo Univ). Met him at a conference few years ago and he was so excited to hear that I use his book as my text :D

Pavi!!!! said...

@P: i donno the different parts of a plant n all ! Don't ask me such difficult Qs k!
Gosh...how do u study all that!

g-man said...

lol, yep...spreading the nerdism is quite true. and the picture. erm...wild guess, but is it the xylem?

P said...

@Pavi: What to do..all part of the game. Other things make even less sense to me :)
You definitely know this plant part, if you have seen a plant :) It's the surface of a leaf with a leaf hair on it.

@g-man: Thanks for trying and I'm impressed that you know 'xylem'..but unfortunately you don't the prize for this one :)
Check my reply to Pavi for the correct answer.

EYE said...

I think it is a pistil of a flower. (last studied biology in class 10th, only remember the flowers)

P said...

@eye: hello!
I am very, very impressed that you remembered 'pistil' from class 10th. The pic indeed looks like the tip of some pistils!! Actually it is just a hair on the surface of a leaf :)