School translocates to my blog

So I'm writing this term paper about nanoparticles. These are teeny tiny particles of around a billionth of a metre long. In some ways they're really cool becuase they have wierd and wonderful properties that make them useful in industries like aerospace, computer, electrical, and of course, cosmetics. (If you use sunscreen that goes on clear, you have put nanoparticles onto your skin.)

If they get into the air, they are not-so-cool because they seem to be able to create more inflammation in your lungs than bigger air pollutants. In general they're kind of scary because they can translocate out of the lungs and into the bloodstream, thereby reaching every organ in the body. They have also been found capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and the blood-testis barrier in mice. And to top it off, they seem to be able to get into cells as well.

So theoretically, they could do a lot of damage. Or be really useful in developing drugs that targeting diseases like Alzheimers.

Most nanotech industries aren't producing huge amounts of these things yet - they're still in the R&D/preproduction phase of things. But the future is coming... and these things are also not regulated yet. At all. Anywhere.

It all feels a bit sci-fi...

Leah stole my post

Today in the Globe and Mail, Leah McLaren clearly expressed exactly what I was thinking last night while I was watching the news:

Stephen, what the heck are you wearing?

I mean, honestly dude. Look at yourself:

(photo stolen from some Mexican website)

What on earth were they thinking?!

Apparently Reebok decided a while ago that it would be a great idea to do a giveaway with some of its shoes... so they gave away this cute little charm bracelet:

What's very not cute about this is that it's 99% lead - and a four-year-old boy recently died in Minnesota after swallowing the heart piece of the charm. The bracelets are apparently "only dangerous if kids chew on them, suck on them, or swallow any part of them." Well gee, isn't that the sort of thing kids usually do?

Yeurgh. What were they thinking? Lead is a well-known neurotoxin. That's why we got rid of lead-based paints and why we've been trying to switch to unleaded gasoline, y'all!

And young children will actually absorb 50% of ingested lead whereas us adults only absorb about 10%.

Reebok has recalled the bracelet and says they're going to try and find out what happened. I'm not sure if that's good enough in the face of such obvious risk and stupidity.

I'm addicted

I think I might be developing an internet addiction. OK, maybe I'm past developing it. Maybe I have a full-fledged addiction. Is it a bad sign that I check my email before breakfast sometimes?

Or that I've posted a thread in a message board about the time I spend online and googled "Internet Addiction"?

It turns out that there are even such things as help and resource centres for online addiction - although when I read the descriptors of addiction, they seemed to relate more to people who spend endless hours searching for pron, rather than people who maximize their internet outlook screen every five minutes and click on "send/recieve"... (in case you weren't sure, I would fall in the latter category!!)

Oh, excuse me. I have to go now and check my email.

Boob-related, but not mine, by Toutatis!

Apparently a young Newfoundland girl recently died of toxic shock after having her nipple peirced. According to Marla Shapiro's article in today's Globe and Mail, fatal outcomes from bacterial infection of piercings are rare, but I was surprised to learn that nipple piercings can take up to 16 weeks to heal.

Not that I'm planning on piercing either of mine, thank you very much.

Despite the disturbing main content of this article, what caught my attention was actually the sentence, "In ancient Rome, for example, centurions used piercings through their nipples to hold their capes in place."

Um... OWW!

Okay, admittedly, my only knowledge about centurions' capes comes from Asterix comics (perhaps not a great reference book for actual facts), but weren't those capes HEAVY? They were long enough to reach the ground behind the centurions (what if they snagged on something..?). And they probably blew in the wind..!?

Good-bye, old turtle

Last week a tortoise that might have been 250 years old died.

It was in a zoo in India - they can't prove that it was actually more than 150, but have bits and pieces of information from what they term "authentic sources" indicating that it might have been around for quite a bit longer. It must have been an imporessive old creature, since these turtles often weigh in at about 265 pounds.

Before coming to the Kolkata zoo, it was the pet of Robert Clive, a famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century.

Its name was "Addwaitya" meaning the "The One and Only" in Bengali.

Headliner

This has to be one of the most ironic headlines in a while:

How 200 soldiers saved 3 pacifists

The article appears in today's Toronto Star and is about the rescue of three members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who were captured and held hostange in Iraq. They were captured on November 26, 2005 and were rescued on Thursday of this week.

The Christian Peacemakers Teams are committed to non-violence. And soliders... are usually well-trained in the art of war.

my boobs ...

So I've been checking out my boobs lately.

Apparently having asymmetrical breasts is a predictor of breast cancer. By the way, I think we're talking in terms of size here, not location

A recent study predicted that the risk of getting cancer rose by 50 per cent for each 100-millilitre increase in breast asymmetry. According to this study, pretty much every woman has asymmetrical breasts to some degree... and of course, we don't know what the baseline risk here is - which has huge importance for what this actually means at a population level.

So, back to my boobs. It's hard to picture what a 100 mL difference in volume would actually look like. But I think I'm probably okay...

A light at the end of the tunnel...

Yesterday my PhD advisor told me he thinks I've done enough analysis and can start to write up my results!

So now all I have to do is compile and make sense of the hundreds of figures and graphics I seem to have filed all over the place... and, um, wite a bunch of text to go before, in between, and after them all. It will be a big job and it will take a while, but man, oh man, I feel GOOD!

I'm awake! (and still no free TV)

I just learned that there's more caffeine in a regular cup of coffee than in an espresso! I always thought that the liquid in those cups looked so opaque that it must be absolutely loaded with the stimulant.

Perhaps this explains why I've been having trouble sleeping ever since Tim Horton's started their "roll up the rim to win" contest.

We suck

Humans Spur Worst Extinctions Since Dinosaurs

'nuff said.

Fun with words II

Ever troll the internet and wonder how some people hear the world? You know - sometimes people who write expressions that either don't use real words... or do, but they aren't actually the words that normally go into the expression?

Some examples I've seen recently and my personal interpretations:

"I had just been in to get my new hair due..."
yup, it was really time to get that haircut

"My husband has such holy underwear"
It's so venerated that it would be impossible to consider throwing it out
(ok, that one was probably on purpose)

(in support of something previously said on a message board) "here! here!"
Me!! Me!! I'm the one agreeing with you!

"The causes of low back pain have tended to be illusive"
Figure out why your back hurts and you might feel inspired

Fun with words

A friend was telling me last night that he has a list of favorite words - two of those words are "mellifluous" and "gazebo".

I have since been trying to figure out what my favorite words are... somehow it's tricky although I know there are some good ones. So here's a start to my own list:

• cavalcade
• superfluous
• kvetch
• misanthrope
• debauchery

This is mostly based on the sound of the words and how much fun it is to say them, by the way...

Any other suggestions?

Creepy new technology

I just linked through the New Scientist to this article about computers that are controlled by thought alone.

Apparently you wear a little cap and sort of "train" with the computer for a bit and it learns to recognize activity in different parts of your motor cortex (the part of the brain associated with movement). I can see that this would have amazing implications for people who are paralyzed... or who have prosthetics.

The idea of remote thought-based operation of a computer or robot, or any kind of machinery, really, is downright creepy.

(as visions from various sci-fi-robots-take-over-the-world movies danced in her head...)

Girl Power!

Apparently some Japanese researchers have collected some stem cells from menstrual blood and found that they might be useful in repairing hearts! Sounds like the stem cells come from the uterine wall but could be persuaded into being heart cells...

Wierd and crazy stuff. I love it!

BTW I'm getting this straight from inkycircus , so if you want their original take on it visit them.

Cold Feet

Nah, don't worry - I'm not backing out of anything I've committed to ;)

The ice was breaking up on lake Ontario and these two ducks seemed to be happy just hanging out in the evening sun.

(photo'd in Kingston, March 2006)

Turkmenistan's ice palace

This sounds really really odd.

The head honcho in Turkmenistan wants to plant a massive cypress forest (planned to cover 1000 square km) - claiming that it will be a way to change the country's climate. (?)

I'm normally all for actions that mitigate climate change... but this guy's also busy building an artificial lake in the middle of the desert and an ice palace somewhere near the capital city. Oh yeah, and he'd like a ski resort too.

Now I don't know much about Turkmenistan but Wikipedia indicates that there's widespread internal poverty. Seems like building stuff like ice palaces is not the most helpful use of national funds?

Beware the Ides of March - or the calender it's from, anyway

Hey, today is the Ides of March.

Which means that this is the anniversary of Julius Ceasar's death. I think a lot of people think it means that it's a day to be wary of, but that's not really true. Unless you think that Julius' karma is reaching out to you across the centuries.

Apparently calling March 15 the "Ides of March" is part of a rediculously complicated calender that might have been devised by Romulus, mythincal founder of Rome.

So see if you could ever decipher a date with this system:

• Kalends (1st day of the month)
• Nones (the 7th day in March, May, July, and October; the 5th in the other months)
• Ides (the 15th day in March, May, July, and October; the 13th in the other months)

To figure out what to call the other days is oh so straightforward - count backwards from Kalends, Nones, or Ides. And include the date you're counting from (huh??!).

So March 3 would be V Nones—5 days before the Nones.

Let's see - so Christmas would fall on - what, VIII Kalends January?

I'm so confused.

I can't even recall what I was doing this time last week...

Imagine if you could remember everything that ever happened to you. This woman can - apparently she has an encyclopedic memory of her life - and for any date that you can think of, really. And she has undergone extensive testing to make sure that she isn't cheating. That must have been fun.

I would love to be able to remember some things (when I was ten I used to concentrate very hard on what it was like being ten. I thought for sure that I would remember what it was like to be ten when I grew up - unlike all the adults I was surrounded by who, it was quite clear to me at the time, had never ever been ten. Unfortunately that's all I can remember now about being ten years old.)

I still think that my idea having it all in some kind of reference is better. Maybe not a printout though - maybe a set of searchable DVDs. Closely password-protected!

Because seriously,

I think it would be awful to have this kind of archival information about your life constantly spooling through your brain. And so distracting. How would you ever dream about the future? That poor woman.

Thanks J + C for the link!

The red planet

So, I was googling something today (we'll say it was probably for something related to my doctoral research) when I noticed that today's Google banner included some odd green creatures hanging out on what looks like an orange... and a telescope standing on a teeny earth. Unclear as to what this was in reference to, I clicked on it - and found this: a way cool elevation map of Mars.

I was thinking that I must be even more uninformed than usual: I often have some sense of what the Google pictures are about - so I checked the news. And learned that NASA has a spaceship wayyy up there getting ready to orbit around Mars.

Then I figured out that the banner had actually led me to "Google Mars" - yet another Google spinoff. Very cool stuff... but I liked it better when I thought that the Google banners were more of a light reflection of major current events rather than a venue for advertising their own stuff.