The extent of Human Knowledge!?

So...last night I was studying for this big test I have on Monday

And I'm looking at diagrams used in the lecture slides...and diagrams in the text book...and they seem to be in conflict. They have different names for what appears to me to be the same thing...and the flow charts seem to disagree on how many steps there should be between point A and B, whether A branches off from B or from C....etc.

So I emailed my professor to ask what I should be taking as the "final authority" and is it even important in this case to know that level of detail and the answer he gave me was the exact answer I was hoping for- just focus on this and ignore that because we haven't really worked out how it actually happens yet.

Which brings me to the actual point of this thought train I'm having.

I'm learning stuff that is actually the extent of human knowledge in this field.

In high school bio, they'd be like "yeah...this is glycolysis" and they would draw a circle, and say "but you don't have to know anything except that it breaks down glucose and gives you energy"

We didn't have to know that because it was too complicated for the scope of the class.

Now, the things we don't have to know have nothing to do with being too complicated- in biochem we will have to draw out the whole process of glycolysis and know the craziest amount of detail about it, for sure.

But now, the things we don't have to know are because NOBODY knows them.

And that is really strange!

My whole life I've taken for granted the fact that we just know these things. My older professors will tell me about how when they studied this stuff we didn't know this, this, and this, which seem so basic to understanding biology to me. But really, there's a lot of stuff recently discovered, and there's a lot of stuff yet to be discovered. So it's really weird being in a class and having a professor of cell biology from a medical school tell you "you don't really have to know this, because nobody really knows how it works. People are working on figuring it out." Crazy. But Awesome.

La de dumm

Well.

I'm procrastinating.

Today has officially been labeled a non-productive day, and I guess my brain has a hard time becoming productive in the afternoon/evening if it hasn't been so during the day.

This morning I woke up at 1:00pm, because...I could.

I got up, read this case study about cholera outbreaks during the victorian era and went to class to talk about said case study...where the TA gave us all the answers off her answer sheet, basically. So...I don't know why we have to bother doing it now, since they know that we all know the answers.

but whatever.

Then I came home and was mildly productive and cooked dinner...I had chicken francese (store-bought...mine is several times better!!) and made green beans roasted with garlic and bread crumbs in a little bit of olive oil. YUM.

Then I really didn't feel like doing any work so I washed a large amount of the caked-on goop off the various removable parts of the stove top.

Then I went to the first CMDA (christian medical dental association) meeting, which was about 15 people. It was good...they put this huge emphasis on being short and not making people feel pressured to spend more than 45 minutes there because we're all busy, etc etc.....but I didn't really like that because the whole point of me going there is to sort of relax and hang out with people and have a Bible study...and as soon as they finished today everyone sort of got up and left within 1 minute.

so i hope that as people get to know each other better, or on a day we do an actual Bible study instead of just mostly introductory stuff, that people hang out more.

We had our first exam on Tuesday, and I was stressing out because my cousins were here all weekend and I had to figure out how to do the family time and do the study time...enough study time to do well but not so much that I missed out on family time.

I guess it worked out because I got 1.5 standard deviations above the mean. Wahoo!

I haven't been going to anatomy lectures recently because of the histo test, and they've been stuff that's relatively uninteresting to me...but starting next week they're getting back into things like (My heart literally skipped a beat when I saw this) "Clinical Correlations of Blunt and Penetrating Trauma"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!! I CANNOT WAIT FOR THAT!!

and then they get into anatomy of the limbs and the musculature of the back and all that sort of stuff that I L-O-V-E.

Yesterday we had out first flag football game...I'm on a team called the rectus abdominators ( as in, rectus abdominus + dominators- love it!) and we played against this team of 2nd years that had two sets of people...they actually had a defensive and offensive team. And a girl who could throw ( = you get double points if a girl throws or catches a pass that scores a touchdown, or the extra points). My team had never played together before...so needless to say we lost, but not as bad as we could have.

PLUS it was POURING rain the whole time and everyone was sliding all over the place and soaked and muddy but it was a lot of fun.

Now I am sore and we've got another game tomorrow...probably also in the rain. So that's exciting.

ok. That is all. I am going to read about "Formation of Blood Cells (Hemopoiesis)(Hematopoiesis)"

(personally, I'm partial to "hematopoiesis", I think I just like words with more syllables.)