Thursday, June 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
A Message from Roald Dahl about Vaccination
This is just something I stumbled across earlier today.
MEASLES: A dangerous illness
by ROALD DAHL
via childalert.co.uk
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy, ” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her.
That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it. It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is. In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk.
In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out. Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.
LET THAT SINK IN.
Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles. So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised? They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation. So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised. The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunisation should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.
Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.
MEASLES: A dangerous illness
by ROALD DAHL
via childalert.co.uk
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy, ” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her.
That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it. It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is. In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk.
In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out. Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.
LET THAT SINK IN.
Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles. So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised? They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation. So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised. The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunisation should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.
Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Hitchens v. D'Souza: The Movie
Today, out of curiosity, I searched for my own school on youtube. There, buried among all the 420 videos, was this little gem, the filmed version of the Hitchens/D'Souza debate from a few months back.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
How to use luminol
(Where have I been? Well if you watched me on twitter you'd know already. I'm trying to start some video projects to compliment this blog, but it's not going so well. I've never wanted to drop kick a video camera before...)
Let's say you wake up one morning in a closed hallway in an uninhabited building with a line of doors on one side and find a set of instructions telling you a murder has taken place in one of the adjacent ones. Apparently the murder took place three days earlier, but the killer came back this morning and tried to tidy up the place. It's your job to determine which room in which the murder occurred.
"Ah ha!" You think, because you are in that sort of mood "This is a puzzle, and I can see from the diagram that although the rooms look almost identical, one of the goldfish is lighter than the others! We all know that goldfish turn white if they are left without light, so the killer must have closed the curtains in that one room to hide his crime, and then came back this morning to disguise the scene, so he opened them again. The goldfish, left without sunlight for all that time, must have begun losing its color."
Oh you think you're so clever. Well you're not, not only are you wrong about the goldfish, but you aren't in a mind teaser at all, you're just a field investigator with short term memory loss due to smacking your head on a low ceiling, so HA! If I don't get an interesting life, than you don't either. Now get to work, you have luminol in that case there, now it's just a matter of using it appropriately.
Oh wait, short term memory loss. I guess I have to walk you through this too, don't I? Alright genius, what DO you remember? CSI? Ok, well you know that shiny blue stuff that tells the attractive people where someone got hacked to death? Well you have some of that in your box. Take it out.
Now, what you need to know first is how this stuff works. Otherwise you might do something completely stupid. In order to produce a useful (and pretty) glow, luminol requires an oxidizing agent. In the case of forensic use (that's you) this role is played by the iron in the hemoglobin in blood. Got that? When luminol encounters an oxidant, it glows, and while we may be looking for blood, other chemicals will set it off as well. As such, false positives may come from sources such as bleach, copper, certain cleaning products, and even clover and dandelions (now there's an idea, kill someone in a field of clover, you'll never get caught!). When the chemicals react, the excess energy is shed as light.
This stuff is pretty expensive, so you can't just go spraying it around. First thing you have to do is determine what you have in your kit. Now, unless you are entirely incompetent, you and your team should have already swept the rooms for evidence, as the chemical reaction needed to create that shiny glow you're looking for CAN destroy other evidence. So be careful.
Ok, have you double-checked the scene? Nothing out of the ordinary? All right, after you spray the area you have 30 seconds to observe and take photos, ok? Ready? Close the blinds, Spray spray spray, and three... two... one...
Click
AAH!!! NINJAS! Ohlook,itwasthethirdroomanyway. RUN!!!
Let's say you wake up one morning in a closed hallway in an uninhabited building with a line of doors on one side and find a set of instructions telling you a murder has taken place in one of the adjacent ones. Apparently the murder took place three days earlier, but the killer came back this morning and tried to tidy up the place. It's your job to determine which room in which the murder occurred."Ah ha!" You think, because you are in that sort of mood "This is a puzzle, and I can see from the diagram that although the rooms look almost identical, one of the goldfish is lighter than the others! We all know that goldfish turn white if they are left without light, so the killer must have closed the curtains in that one room to hide his crime, and then came back this morning to disguise the scene, so he opened them again. The goldfish, left without sunlight for all that time, must have begun losing its color."
Oh you think you're so clever. Well you're not, not only are you wrong about the goldfish, but you aren't in a mind teaser at all, you're just a field investigator with short term memory loss due to smacking your head on a low ceiling, so HA! If I don't get an interesting life, than you don't either. Now get to work, you have luminol in that case there, now it's just a matter of using it appropriately.
Oh wait, short term memory loss. I guess I have to walk you through this too, don't I? Alright genius, what DO you remember? CSI? Ok, well you know that shiny blue stuff that tells the attractive people where someone got hacked to death? Well you have some of that in your box. Take it out.
Now, what you need to know first is how this stuff works. Otherwise you might do something completely stupid. In order to produce a useful (and pretty) glow, luminol requires an oxidizing agent. In the case of forensic use (that's you) this role is played by the iron in the hemoglobin in blood. Got that? When luminol encounters an oxidant, it glows, and while we may be looking for blood, other chemicals will set it off as well. As such, false positives may come from sources such as bleach, copper, certain cleaning products, and even clover and dandelions (now there's an idea, kill someone in a field of clover, you'll never get caught!). When the chemicals react, the excess energy is shed as light.
This stuff is pretty expensive, so you can't just go spraying it around. First thing you have to do is determine what you have in your kit. Now, unless you are entirely incompetent, you and your team should have already swept the rooms for evidence, as the chemical reaction needed to create that shiny glow you're looking for CAN destroy other evidence. So be careful.
Ok, have you double-checked the scene? Nothing out of the ordinary? All right, after you spray the area you have 30 seconds to observe and take photos, ok? Ready? Close the blinds, Spray spray spray, and three... two... one...
Click
AAH!!! NINJAS! Ohlook,itwasthethirdroomanyway. RUN!!!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
A magical tour through my brother's brain
Brain stem! Brain stem! Also available in German. Nyah.
This is my little brother:
Aww, look at his grumpy little face, he thinks he's such a badass.Now unfortunately for all of us, this kid gets headaches, and for a long time we had no idea why. Many tests were conducted to find the cause, but my personal favorites, by far, were the ones that dealt with his brain directly, let's have a look inside his head, shall we?
One of the things that's always bugged me about diagrams of the brain is that most of the pictures I saw as a child had the sections all clearly labeled and colored differently, similar to what can be found on this site from the Nemours foundation. Now, I knew that the brain wasn't multicolored and clearly labeled, however, when I finally got my hands on a real brain (long story)...
Sing it, Picard.Can YOU tell the difference between the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes? Neither could I, not right away anyway. The whole cerebrum looked like one big squishy smelly mass. The rest of the brain was admittedly easier to separate, physically and conceptually. Fun with knives, yay!
As fun as it was, the one thing that was most useful in learning to differentiate the different parts of the brain, and their various functions was not playing with the thing itself. In contrast to my usual method of learning, wherein I need to touch and interact with something to understand it, the act of simply studying brain scans has been more useful than anything else.
Looking at brains in their all their living wonder, safe inside their bodies, working, the blood surging from one region to the next, it's fascinating. Even in the quiet black and white of a CT scan, this fascinating system shows itself for what it is, not a compilation of separate parts, clearly divided, but as an interconnected system.
That smells really bad when you take it out.
This is where my brother comes in, and so, we now turn our attention inwards for a quick dissection of a still-operational brain.
Ooo facinatin'.
a. Left hemisphere.b. Right hemisphere.
c. Cerebellum.
e. Brain stem.
f. Cerebrospinal fluid.
a. Thalamus b. Hypothalamus joins the nervous system to the endocrine system
c. Midbrain. Looks kinda like a hook.
d. Pons. Note how it swells forward a bit.
e. Medulla Oblongata.
f. Brain stem.
g. Pituitary gland. Notice how mushed it looks in comparison to the textbook versions, here location is more important for identification than shape.
a. and b. Lower parts of the frontal lobes.c. The eye, specifically the vitreous humour.
d. Lens.
e. Sinus cavity.
f. Lower parts of temporal and occipital lobes connected via the corpus collosum.
Bonus: One of my favorite TED Talks; Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
Thursday, April 9, 2009
What happened?
This:
Then this:
Then this:
And that's excluding the things that have to do with other people, of whom they might not want me to speak. So I apologize.
I would also like to thank all those who have sent me the original locations of a couple images I have used (the posts have been updated) and alerted me to my own errors in writing (factual errors have also been fixed.) It's embarrassing to make a mistake, as is the inability to give credit where credit is due.
So thank you.
And that's excluding the things that have to do with other people, of whom they might not want me to speak. So I apologize.
I would also like to thank all those who have sent me the original locations of a couple images I have used (the posts have been updated) and alerted me to my own errors in writing (factual errors have also been fixed.) It's embarrassing to make a mistake, as is the inability to give credit where credit is due.
So thank you.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Cuttlefish are awesome
My brain is tired, my body is tired, and after a few mini-crises I'm just pissed. This is one of the few things I actually enjoy doing and I've been unable to do it.
EY! This is BULLCRAP!
Any-way...
Today we're all going to take a break and enjoy one of the aquatic world's more interesting creatures, the cuttlefish! (Which isn't actually a fish.)
When I first heard the name of this creature, long long ago, my first thought was "what the heck is a 'cuttle'?" This is because I had not learned to swear, you see. A bit of research later, and it seems the word has its origins in the middle German term "kudel" or pouch, which is indeed what the creature resembles.
That is, unless you read any Lovecraft, then then all look like little severed Cthulhu heads swimming about.
Despite the aswesomeness of these things, one element gets me more than anything else, their ability to change color and use gestures to communicate.
Is this not awesome‽
Also:
EY! This is BULLCRAP!
Any-way...
Today we're all going to take a break and enjoy one of the aquatic world's more interesting creatures, the cuttlefish! (Which isn't actually a fish.)
When I first heard the name of this creature, long long ago, my first thought was "what the heck is a 'cuttle'?" This is because I had not learned to swear, you see. A bit of research later, and it seems the word has its origins in the middle German term "kudel" or pouch, which is indeed what the creature resembles.
That is, unless you read any Lovecraft, then then all look like little severed Cthulhu heads swimming about.These little guys are members of the order Sepiida, why "Sepiida"? Think "sepia" as in as in "Hey look! That thing makes ink! GET IT!" That right folks, we used to use these guys as inkpots, now we just use the ink for cooking.
This is pasta. I actually want to try this...
As my cuttlefish knowledge-quest progressed, I learned some facinating things:- Cuttlebones are made of porus calcium carbonate, and helo the cephlopod maintain bouyancy. Squids don't have them, and almost all of ys have seen them already.
"Where?" You ask. They're parakeet toys! The great old ones are going to be SO pissed.
- Their W-shaped eyes are incredible. Although they look superficially similar, this is actually an example of convergent evolution. They can't see in color (ironic, ain't it?), but their ability to detect the polorization of light means they can see in much higher contrast than the pathetic air-breathers.
- Vulcans! Cuttlefish blood is green because it uses hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin to carry oxygen.
Is this not awesome‽
Anime cuttlefish understands that animation costs money, and makes use of speed lines.
Also:
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