Chemistry

by Weike Wang

A belief among Chinese mothers is that children pick their own traits in the womb. The smart ones work diligently to pick the better traits. The dumb ones get easily flustered and fall asleep. For their laziness, they are then dealt the worse traits. Or perhaps this is just a belief of my own mother.

If I had one, I would want to have two, and if I had two, I would want to have zero.

find it interesting how often beauty is shown to make the objects around it feel worse.

I am the girl who followed you and I know what happens to those girls. They are never happy and then they carry that unhappiness everywhere.

Something I notice about this new culture: the common first names, yet the emphasis on being an individual.

The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in liquid state and half in gaseous, both of which are probably poisonous.

The only difference between a poison and a cure is dosage. Drink too much water and you will die. Inhale water and you will die as well.

What I like about Gattaca is that it is not what you think when you think of sci-fi. There are very few special effects. There is a man in lab doing work day in and day out. He waits for the centrifuge to be done. He pipettes something into vials. The movie is set in the far future and yet nothing about the science is flashy. The movie is timeless in this way.

That glow you see around a closed door is the property of diffraction. It is light trying to escape the room and move around an obstacle, in this case the door, my parents. I am scared sitting at the edge of my bed.

Newton’s third law is why rockets fly in space. When a rocket shoots out a plume of fuel, the plume pushes back and the rocket goes forth.