Author: jasmine_lee

• Analogies

  I was revising biology as it was something I neglected during the term. I was concentrating on physics and chemistry because I historically struggled with these more.

  

   

  There was an analogy I thought of that made me remember the process of how proteins are synthesised and transported outside the cell. I find that I revise more effectively if I attach the concepts to a process I already understand.

   

  I woke up and wrote this in my notes:

   

  mRNA passes through the nuclear pores into ribosomes, where it’s being translated into protein through synthesis (an Amazon warehouse where there are instructions to pack an item is put in a package that’s not waterproof), because ribosomes doesn’t have a membranes.

  There are free ribosomes inside the cell (many lost packages)

  Some ribosomes attach to the rough ER, where the proteins are folded and processed (the package goes to an Evri warehouse where it is processed and sent to the Evri distribution department). The Golgi apparatus repackages the proteins into vesicles (the department changes the package and puts the item in a waterproof bag, and then tags it by putting a label of where to send it to), the Golgi apparatus manages where to distribute the proteins to outside the cell. The vesicles, which are membrane bound, then move to the phospholipid bilayer (cell membrane) and is expelled through a process called exocytosis.

  

  I drove to Sainsburys last night, on what felt like a luxury excursion, to buy a few extra tins, 2 bottles of water, with groceries ahead of the boycott on the 28th and who knows what, and a few packs of flashcards. Running out of revision cards is a good sign. For stockpiling, I think having some extra supplies is a good idea even though some say it’s scaremongering, because it’s useful for banal situations where I might be too ill to buy food, it’s useful to have some extra supplies at home. But there is something I can’t get my head around, wouldn’t the money we spend to buy extra tins account for the lack of sales on the 28th? This is why there’s conspiracy theories around the stockpiling and the boycott.

   

  I’m trying not to go out, because I don’t want to get ill before my blood donation in the next few days. So I’m just stuck at home revising. Plus going out means spending money, so I’d rather not go out.

  

  2026.10.27

• Reflection

  I’m not having the best time psychologically, because I had my physics mini mock yesterday, and I don’t think I did a good enough job. The experiment of making ethyl ethanoate and testing its boiling point was intense too. I would have equated the start of this week to the US variant of ‘mid-terms week’ due to its intensity. It’s technically half-term/reading week now, because I don’t have anymore classes until November.

  

  

  

   

  I find it fun, but I would have enjoyed it more if it wasn’t hinged on grades. I went to counselling this morning to talk about my black and white thinking around exams. I seem to think if I mess up on one question, I fail the whole thing, the whole of level 3 applied science even. There’s a lot of anxiety felt in the exam context when I physically have the paper in front of me; the stress makes me muddle formulae and calculations up. I still think it’s performance anxiety.

   

  Touch and go, trial and error

  Realistically, if I revise the unit conversions, some formulae I may have missed, and practice my exam techniques through past papers and look at some model answers, it’ll fix my issues. I just need to know what the question is asking for and then target my answers in the exam. I don’t think the problem is within not knowing enough of the content.

  2026.10.21

• Feral feeling

  I feel a bit feral, because of all the calculations and formulae I have to do for each unit. It’s a lot to unpack in a short space of time, that I worry I’ll get it mixed up with each other. I’m looking forward to half term, but treat it as reading week, because I’ll be using that time to practice exam papers and revise topics that are difficult. I’d like to call it reading week like at uni, as I feel like I’m progressing backwards by calling it half term.

  

  I was practicing on physics for the test this week. It’s a struggle with the application questions, because I missed a week due to a cold. I concentrated too much on calculations instead of the applications of waves, so I’ll rectify that over reading week/half term.

   

  I don’t feel like I had a productive weekend, because I was napping a lot because of the cold weather. Plus I put the heating on yesterday, and my throat felt irritated due to the burning dust smell from the radiators. Didn’t sleep well either, as I wasn’t used to the heating being on.

   

   

  The back and forth thoughts about studying further

  Sometimes I have thoughts whether pursuing a PhD is worth it, but I’m sure a lot people who are thinking of a PhD in the 2020s are thinking the same. I wonder whether I’m deceiving myself into the illusion that education really is the yellow brick road. (It actually leads to where the wizard lives so. The wizard symbolising illusion and deception of some sort, maybe pure meritocracy; one that says people succeed upon own effort without help from more privileged sources.)

   

  Deeper down, do I even know what I want in life? I tried working full time and going out partying on weekends, and it didn’t work for me. I can’t imagine living the lifestyle my whole life, so is education the answer? I don’t know.

  2026.10.18

• Falsifiability

  The electrician fixed my immersion heater switch this morning. It started overheating on Saturday and I didn’t want to pay for an out-of-hours electrician, so I didn’t have hot water until today. It happened because the construction company used cheaper switches that had a lower amp rating than the immersion heater. This is why people say newbuilds are bad, because cheap materials are prioritised over safety. Had to use my gym to shower and it was cumbersome, because I had to wear crocs to avoid athlete’s foot. I guess that’s falsifiable as it can be tested.

   

  I wanted to write about an annotation I did last week.

  

  The birds and the bees, but it’s actually the c*ck and bull story

  Karl Popper used falsifiability to separate actual science from pseudo-science, which I feel is a boundary that distinguishes science from humanities. Even though he trained as a medical doctor, Freud’s ideas is unpopular in the science community because his theories involved airing his dirty laundry as evidence to support an idea of Oedipus complex, derived from Greek tragedy of the protagonist who murders his father and marries his mother. Freud proposed the idea that boys are attracted to their mothers and later redirect these feelings to other females. Then he expanded his theory to Electra complex, which is the idea that girls want to marry their fathers, and later redirect these feelings to other men, as having a baby boy relinquishes penis envy, (but apparently females don’t overcome authority of their fathers. I beg to differ because it reflected the attitudes society had on women in late 19th/ early 20th century. Back then, men and women were divided into the public and domestic spheres, and women didn’t have a voice in the public one.) Freud’s theory can’t be shown empirically false, because his theory was based on a boy walking in on his parents having sex. It would be so unethical to repeat this in a a longitudinal study. Even thinking about it seems insane because it’s basically child abuse, and the dependent variable are the effects of child abuse throughout life.

   

  That’s why I annotated Freud as an artist, because he was exploiting his position and authority to explain the psyche from his perspective, and clutching at straws to make it into legitimate science. He used and advocated cocaine use as well, so I felt it was appropriate to draw some red paint just under his nostril on the portrait.

   

  But love him or hate him, Freud did influence western surrealism and research into dreams, along with Carl Jung et al. It’s interesting how Freud’s approach was somewhat misogynistic, but the movement he helped influence: surrealism as a revolt against the bourgeois morality, which was a rebellion against the public sphere as reaction from WWI. Relating it to today, there was a mini-surrealist moment in art as a reaction to Covid-19 and lockdown, because  most places became a domestic space, where people used online video calls to communicate between home to home.

  2026.10.15

• Refining goals

  I found my A level human biology notes from sixth form.

  

  I used to have neat handwriting, but as I progressed through tertiary education, it became very untidy. Here’s a hypothesis, if the speed of writing increases, then the handwriting becomes messier. Maybe the formula for that would be:

   

  Speed of writing = messiness x number of paper

   

  The best bits in the folder were the posters I did for homework.

  

  My aspiration back then was to be a medical illustrator when I grow up.

  I don’t want to now, because my plans changed.

  It’s not going to go anywhere, but I’m starting to like theoretical physics, because working through the formulae and mathematical equations is exciting. I use ChatGPT to generate exercises for me to solve. So I use it to make my brain work instead of replacing it. I don’t agree that ChatGPT is bad! It’s a tool that gets a bad name, because the majority misuse it.

  

  

  I have placement for the course I’m on at the moment, so I’m going to ask around university lab departments if I can do a placement there to gather information about using art as a research method in scientific research. I think my lifelong goal is to lessen the gap between humanities and science subjects. That seems to interest me more than medical illustration. I can also ask at STEAMhouse for placement. I could have done this outside of a course, but I feel more confident in asking when I feel I have institutional support.

  2026.10.14

• Distilled substances

  

  I re-added the work I’ve done for MA Fine Art onto the website, which helped me see how it fits in with my other work. The work angers me, possibly because of the association with the pandemic, and how our cohort got shortchanged. We still had to pay full tuition fee, even though we had limited access to the workshops, and a lot of the times, we had online lectures. We didn’t even get a physical show at the end of the course.

   

  I’m working on a topic called fractional distillation on applied science at the moment, and I can see this process with my art education. This might apply to others, but I’m not sure. Undergraduate, postgraduate and doctorate have different boiling points, and fractional distillation separates the degrees in which the substances (knowledge) condenses. Abstract information has a higher boiling point than tangible information, and grit is the temperature. This process is a time consuming and expensive one, but has a great yield.

   

  I’m seeing this pattern in my art education, where in BA Fine Art, my focus was on the aesthetics of art and science. My focus became more abstract to look at the mirror stage as a device for self-awareness. So going up a stage, it’s plausible that instead of looking at the aesthetics of the disciplines, I’d apply it to create original knowledge. [This made more sense in my head than in writing.]

   

  Looking at what I’ve done for MA Fine Art, I quickly read information on the Greek mythology of Narcissus, and I think it applies in infatuation. In the mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, but it’s about infatuation rather than a literal ‘he fell in love with himself’. When a person is infatuated, they project their own desired qualities to fill in the gap of what they don’t know about that person. In doing so, they fall for their own reflection (a méconnaissance, mistaking the ideal image for the total self). Social media distorts it further. I added a photo I took of an example of diffraction grating, because the light was dispersed into different frequencies, but it’s curious how it’s only the red, yellow and green out of ROYGBIV. Maybe it’s saying something poetic about méconnaissance.

  

  I made an artwork the other day.

  

  This is Kafka’s metamorphosis, a prokaryotic cell, and the society we know today, blended together.

  2026.10.11

• British Art Show 10: a chorus of strangers part 1

  Si grip

  I felt a bit wanderlust this weekend, because I was self isolating all week. I think I had a cold, although Covid couldn’t have been ruled out. I ordered a Flowflex covid test kit, and an expired one was delivered to me. I used two anyway, because it was the only one I had. Both tests came back negative, but the components could have degraded, giving false negatives.

   

  I feel better today apart from sensitive airways. I’ve had mild asthma as a child, but grew out of it. I just have temporary problems after being ill; maybe it’s the post-nasal drip causing it. I don’t want to come across as a hypochondriac to my GP, because I’ve been recently to talk about eczema and my neurodivergence. But maybe I should book an appointment to check, because I just searched about it, and sometimes it comes back in adulthood.

   

  I took the train to Coventry, but will be driving there next time, because I didn’t realise how disgusting it was on the train during cold season. It was a cacophony of coughs and sneezes, a chorus of strangers on a train indeed. A person sneezed a few times opposite me without a face mask – I felt like I was assaulted, so I up and left; and went to the other side of the carriageway to stand for the rest of the journey. I’m trying my best not to be a misanthrope, but inconsiderate people are making this task difficult.

   

  British Art Show 10

  I only went to Herbert Art Gallery and Museum to see part of the British Art Show 10. It’s on until January, so there’s a fair amount of time to not rush. Studying Applied Science has created space for me to appreciate art more. When I was in the thick of being an artist, I didn’t appreciate artworks as much, because I was too aware of the field.

  

  This is Osman Yousefzada’s work. I didn’t know the subject of these busts, because I saw the busts and made a psychological shortcut that it was historical, so I didn’t know these figures. I only realised when I was talking to a member of staff that these busts were images of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and they ARE playing chess. His work presented here was shown previously in his show called, ‘When will we be good enough?’ and asks if post-colonial societies can move past historical injustices. These figures immortalised into Roman busts casts doubt in redeeming post-colonial societies as good enough; the present is a repetition of the past.

  

  I felt involved in Emma Mcnally’s installation, because torches were provided for the viewers, so I felt like I was invited to unearth her drawings and installation. The sound made me wonder whether it was simulating a cave. I had conversation with another member of staff, and she suggested that it was representing a mountain. It’s made of Mcnally’s crumpled drawings. There was a piece that Lee Bul did where it was a small scale mountain-like structure with headphones; it gave me that atmosphere, because the similarity in presentation and involving soundscape to tell a story. [Bonus: I felt like I was getting my revision done on carbon allotropes and properties of light waves]

   

  It felt like the box of nails was there deliberately even though it looks out of place; something to remind the viewer that it’s a simulation. The nails was a material the artist used as part of the artworks’ construction.

   

  

  There’s an uncanny resemblance between Jesse Darling’s flowers in vitrine’s and Marc Quinn’s exhibition at the Kew Gardens a few years ago involving the themes of preservation and nature, but Darling focuses more on decay exacerbated by the vitrines, even though the intention was to preserve. He describes his work as a bunch of visual and verbal puns together with magical thinking, so in turn, it makes me think whether the vitrines act as a small scale proxy for the ozone layer, which protects nature from the harmful UV rays of the sun, but unwittingly acts as a toxic air pollutant; stunting plant growth.

  2026.10.10

• Commercial chemistry

  I’m becoming sceptical of the experiment I did a few weeks ago, because I don’t think it works properly if the solvents are viscous. Also, I think I did it wrong by placing the indicator first, as it diluted the reading of the result.

   

  Acrylic paint is actually complicated. I found out that it’s a colloid, which are insoluble particles of one substance suspended evenly on another substance. They could be both hydrophilic and hydrophobic. Oil paint is hydrophobic, because it’s oil. Acrylic paint has both, but it depends if it’s wet or dry, because it has synthetic plastic polymer.

   

  I’m going to try this experiment again.

   

  Random memory from work

  I remembered something I did as a QA technician. I worked in a dessert factory not long ago, and we used pH strips to test the presence of Peroxyacetic acid in water used to wash the fruits (under pH7 but it had to meet a certain amount as stated on the SOP sheet approved by the QA and Technical managers.) It was to disinfect it from listeria. It was checked every so often, and if the pH reading failed, the fruits since the last successful check would be placed on hold; there would be a lot of bureaucracy behind the scenes following it, and it would be investigated by us.

   

  

  I’m trying to learn the functional groups in chemistry, but it looks like a series of unintelligible codes to someone who doesn’t work with science regularly enough.

   

   

  2026.10.03

• Displacing down to the trough

  The lecturers dropped us into the deep end this week with diffraction gratings and chemical functional groups. It’s a lot to take in, a bit like when I had the chemistry lessons about subshells and the Aufbau principle. I definitely felt the jump from when I studied GCSE triple science to A level content.

   

  

   

  I don’t learn well through timed quizzes and tests, and found it a bit unfair how our predicted grades would be generated from having a test on something we’ve been exposed to on the same lesson. It tests the rate of assimilation instead of hard work. In a psychology context, this method goes against individual agency, because it makes us attribute our successes and failures on “intelligence” rather than our own effort, and then people give up in the belief that it’s not something they can change. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

  

   

  The university format works better for me, as I need a few days to do my own research, before it all clicks. When I first got exposed to the aufbau principle diagram, I was perplexed, but I slowly assimilated to understanding it, and now I know that the x axis of the diagram is azimuthal/angular quantum number, which correlates with the orbital subshells, and the y axis is the principle quantum number which is the energy levels of the shell. The configuration order goes diagonal for electrons to fill the shells with the lowest energy levels first. I think it’ll happen again with the diffraction gratings and the functional chemical groups if I work on understanding it. I just take the lessons badly when I first get presented with new information, because I get frustrated about not understanding it straight away.

   

  

   

  Elephant in the room, but it’s kind of internalised ableism

  I read somewhere that autistic and people with ADHD have a slower processing speed. I have both, so maybe that’s why the tests and quizzes go against my way of learning new information. However, having wrote that, I feel like it’s not fair to lump myself in with those who need more support, because I managed to do a lot, when I didn’t know I had these conditions. I’ve got some kind of survivor’s guilt when I think about how I managed to get a master’s degree and learn how to drive, when someone else who has the same, aren’t able to do so. Sometimes I even think if I ought to even have extra time for the exams, because I managed to do okay without the extra time when I was at school, and I got 48/50 for the theory test and passed the practical with 2 minors. It’s awkward and it makes me suspect that I’m twice exceptional, and I just don’t know anymore. I don’t have the answers for it.

   

  Here’s a destructive interference metaphor for twice exceptional:

  The trough of disability, cancels out the peak of giftedness.

   

  Others just see the equilibrium and assume there’s no displacement (even though it’s felt inward).

   

  Kafkaesque

  I had some suspicion since when I was a young child, and now I’m a fully grown adult, and even though I found out I have autism and ADHD, I feel I’m still not near to finding anything out about myself to answer: why might I feel different? Why I am like the way I am? I used to think it was because I was an ethnic minority and didn’t have any role models who represented my identity. I didn’t have any role models who were women and considered ethnic minority apart from my mum, but she was emotionally absent due to depression. I think she felt trapped in a patriarchal society (my dad’s views) at the time.

  2026.09.29

• Symbolic order & codes

  

  Art

  I made a few artworks, well strictly writing, I annotated some found images from the internet and called it ‘Enclothed incognito’, a wordplay for enclothed cognition. There’s a cartoonish annotation layered over, which playfully disrupts the seriousness of the historic photographs. I was trying to highlight the unequal power dynamics between male and female, in the context of Linda Nochlin’s Why have there been no great women artists? In the book she states it’s the social institutions and education barriers as reasons for a lack of recognition in great women painters historically. I think it’s similar in science, where men usually win Nobel prizes.

   

  Applied Science

   

  

  I’m revising on the go for Applied Science, because it’s easier than trying to consolidate the knowledge from the semester in one go at the end (which normally doesn’t work. I tried it before). I set time for Christmas to practice past papers under timed conditions. These are the formulae I’m supposed to learn, I’m trying to learn these off by heart as it just makes it safer, as the exam papers might not have it. I’ve also memorised the periodic table up to Calcium, as it makes things easier for the future, for example, if I somehow mess up my PhD, I can have a backup option of pursuing a STEM pathway.

   

  Functional groups

  My family are mainly strong in STEM or law subjects. My uncle studied chemistry at Cambridge, my cousin on my mum’s side studied law at University of Reading, and one of my cousins is currently studying mechanical engineering at University of Bath, my brother studied transport management at Aston, so I kind of feel that legacy and family pressure to do well.

   

  I believe it mirrors the power imbalances between creative art and STEM subjects in academia, because I feel inadequate about my art degrees in comparison to my family members’ STEM degrees, on top of what the government body thinks of the type of degrees.

   

  I’m a free radical who wants to conform and simultaneously rebel against it.

   

  Choice paradox

  I don’t think I’m happy with any route I choose to take, because of the choice paradox. I had this at sixth form, and chose to study art at university, because of the social pressure that ‘I’m good at art’. I still don’t really know how to choose I suppose, as all the pathways seem equally desirable, but pessimistically, equally kind of doomed. I end up unfulfilled.

   

  But generally, I want to do a PhD because I enjoy doing what I do with finding things out and researching, but it’s nice to do it legitimately, and have it recognised in education. There’s a sense of security to it.

   

  Maths

  Maths is the worst area for me, so I’m trying to do more math exercises in my free time. I was practicing algebra, such as the laws of indices and positive/negative fractional indices. It’s to help me with math formulas for applied science (so that I’m not scared by it if I see it spontaneously), but it also reduces brain fog.

  

  I think I’m overcompensating in preparation for standard deviation and statistical calculations, but I rather be over prepared than under prepared. The imposter syndrome is getting very loud. When I studied A level psychology, and we did standard deviation, I didn’t understand it, and instead of asking for help, I just avoided it and pretended it didn’t exist. It came up in the exam.

  

   

  I nearly messed up because I forgot to square root it at the end, but I thought to myself that 9 is a suspiciously big error bar. It doesn’t visually sense. I haven’t seen a graph where the error bar extends to -y [Apparently it does exist, so I don’t understand it enough. I’m just going through the motions and simulating it].

   

  Research on linguistic codes

  Back to my research on linguistic codes, I think mathematical language comes under this, or very near. I have a suspicion that these two linguistic ‘methods’ would cross path in my research into linguistics.

  2026.09.27