Victory is mine!

I feel like a big kid, I bought a bottle of wine today. We did a fake wine tasting in my beer and wine in western culture class and I felt thusly inspired. I also now actually know what the hell I'm looking for when I wander through the wine section at the grocery store instead of just wandering blindly pretending like I was remotely interested in wine.

Polo and I had a bit of a throw-down yesterday about what I like to call "the pole circle of death" exercise. 4 poles forming a large circle with 4-5 canter strides between. We started off with trotting in both directions over it and to the left he thinks it'd be way easier if I just carried him with my inside leg instead of him carrying himself. I voted not. We argued. I'm not entirely sure I won. So today I requested the trainer (who is not my main trainer, she subs while my main one is at team horse shows etc) if we could do the same thing and when polo dropped his weight into my left leg over a pole I took my stick and laced him. Sorry sucker. He carried himself and moved off my spur after that. We even cantered it with two crossrails and two poles. Victory is mine. I do have the larger brain in this situation. Even though friday I tried to ride and SUCKED and discovered saturday my right stirrup was two holes too long. And I rode that way friday. The whole ride. And people think I'm smart. Ha. Lies.

Today's picture is another xkcd.com comic, because I love them so and because it's both a mockery of Valentines day which is a lame hallmark-make-your-boyfriend-buy-you-a-gift-for-no-reason-guaranteed-way-to-get-laid "holday" and because it's relevant to a class I'm in. I'm in an experimental design class which talks about performing experiments and what it means if you reject or do not reject your hypothesis and we were just talking about publishing experiments in which you got something you weren't after. Like publishing outliers. So here it is:



Chemistry fun fact of the day: While we're on the topic of outliers...let's talk about viagra! Outliers are a statistical way of saying this data doesn't match the rest of the results. Then you have to go is it a fluke should I exclude it, or should I do something with it? This is probably why many scientists have wild out of control hair from all the pulling on it we do. So if you stalk my favorite blogs at all you've read medically challenged, if not, do so, because it's fucking hilarious. And he points out ever so nicely at one point that viagra which was intended to treat hypertension and angina (I'm sorry but angina is one letter swap away from vagina and it just gets me every time) and when they tested it initially on cows he says they discovered some side effects "which were medically referred to as hilarious". So essentially the drug was intended to treat hypertension, and since it didn't do what they wanted, they almost bagged it. But someone decided to explore the outliers in their results because several outliers produced the same result: after several days of taking the drugs erections were noticed. You see there's a group of enzymes called “phosphodiesterases”(PDEs) and PDE-5 is apparently one of the douchers believed to be responsible for erectile dysfunction. They thought the inhibitor would help prevent blood clots, and while it did inhibit that enzyme...it did nothing for blood clots. But it did a lot for another part of the body! So there you have it, that's where viagra came from. So next time don't throw away your outliers unless you're sure they're useless, because you might just help old people everywhere have sex.