Professors: Raktajino

For the physiology of lactation, I rather liked the professor. He was this tall, skinny, middle-aged fellow, and he seemed pretty gay if you ask me. He definitely had some of the mannerisms and gestures. Anyway, his section was pretty challenging, but I liked him.

During his last lecture, he told us about the "tap reflex," which is where the calf bunts its mother's udder, which causes a reflex contraction and milk let-down. He mentioned that if you google tap reflex, there's a very different one that involves human males and erections, so he warned us that we would have a hard time finding information about the milk one on the internet. Now, I googled tap reflex and all I got were results for the knee-jerk reflex, so I don't know what he's talking about, but that's not important.

He was about to continue on with the lecture, when one of the outgoing members of our class says, "What do you tap?" This elicits a round of laughter, and she adds, "Just curious you know, since you brought it up..."

The professor smiles and is obviously not about to go into it, so he kind of waves off the question. Then one of the Americans (male) in the back pipes up with, "I'll show you later."

End that story, start new story.

We were given a practice test and access to the old exams, and one section was a matching question, where you match the words to the best description. He wanted to use all the letters of the alphabet I guess, because down at the bottom there were some made up answers. One of them sounded like an old god or some relation to C'thulu. The other was Raktajino.

Now, at this point I was just getting into Deep Space Nine (I am now a fan). I saw that, and I thought, "Hmmm... that's suspicious." I looked it up, and I'm pretty sure Raktajino is not a real thing, the only possible definition is a Klingon coffee. He's a Trekkie! Unfortunately, he didn't put it on our exam, so I didn't get the chance to make a comment.

One question he did put on, was "What percent lactose does human milk contain?"

• 5%
• 7%
• 9%
• 11%

Um. What? Ok, there was a table in the study guide, but it had like 30 species on it, and had values for a good handful of milk components (like percent protein or percent fat). I'd learned that human milk has a higher than average lactose concentration, but not the exact percent, jeez! How will that knowledge ever help me? Even if it were asking about sheep milk, I don't see how that's useful, but no, he's asking vet students about human milk composition. He lost all his cool points for that one.