Daily Archives: October 14, 2011

Friday Science Roundup, October 14, 2011

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Here it is, Friday once again, and that means it’s time for me to roll up the sleeves of my lab coat, put all my rings and watches in the nearby nonferrous receptacle of science (an old pink washing basin, as it happens), and plunge elbow deep into the big vat o’ science I keep around for just such a purpose and fish about for some salient and savour science with which to stimulate and edutain you, my adoring masses.

Yes, that was all one sentence. I am totally cool with that.

But now you know why I never use grammar checkers. They would choke with uncomprehending rage over that stellar opening paragraph. Refusing to use them, therefore, is not merely practical and easier on my nerves, it is really the only humane option.

Software has feelings too!

First a semi-addendum : there’s a story I wanted to cover last week and never got around to, so I figure I had better tag that sucker this week before it disappears over the rapidly receding horizon of science news entirely.

This year’s Nobel prizes were particularly sweet for one man, Israel chemist Daniel Shechtman, because he has had to fight for his discovery of what are called quasicrystals for almost 30 years, and now he’s gotten a Nobel prize for them.

When he discovered them back in 1982, his colleagues all laughed at him. You can’t make a regular crystalline structure based on five sided figures! Everyone knows that. You either have an amorphous non-crystalline blob, or a simple periodical crystal. No in between.

Well, quasicrystals are in between. And he definitely had observed them. But his results were so controversial that not only did he spark heated debate throughout chemistry, but his research group eventually booted him out for making them look bad.

As if that wasn’t enough, no less a personage than legendary American chemist Linus Pauling was quoted as saying “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasiscience. ”

At this point, I feel like we should all be glad that he didn’t retreat to a remote castle and invent the Quasicrystal That Ate Desmoines.

Instead, he published anyhow, and science has slowly validated him over time, till finally, this year, he gets the Nobel.

Ah, sweet, sweet vindication. I mean seriously, has anyone else ever had a biography that more closely resembles the Mad Scientist’s? They literally laughed at him at the Institute, and he literally returned to prove to them all what myopic fools they had all been and win the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

And from my comfy perch on the sidelines, here after the game is over and the winner declared without my ever having had a preference of one team over another, I can smugly say “Gee, seems obvious to me that you can tile any regular solid with a sufficiently complex pattern”, but hey, what the hell do I know?

Just goes to show that science, being performed by humans, is fraught with pitfalls, and the revolutionaries of today will be that which must be overcome tomorrow and the embarrassing historical footnote of next week.

Moving on to science that sounds weird but apparently works, Scottish doctors are using ultrasound to help broken bones heal faster.

Yes, ultrasound sort of like the kind we now associate with taking a look at your little baby as he swims in the womb, but at a different frequency and pulse rate.

They claim that the patient feels nothing, but application of this particular kind of ultrasound for twenty minutes on a regular basis to the break can speed healing by forty percent because “The ultrasonic pulses induce cell vibration, which doctors say stimulates bone regeneration and healing”.

And so far, nobody is calling bullshit. But whenever people start talking about special vibrations that aid healing, I get nervous. It smacks of psuedoscience. Smacking of things is not, of course, an actual logical argument. But still, it sends up alarms.

Oh, and lastly, a quick word on Amazon’s supposedly $80 Kindle : in real, market terms, it does not exist, because in order to get that sweet price, you have to buy, as in pay money for, a Kindle that is loaded with advertising. No competitor of theirs forces you to accept ads, ergo, this Kindle does not compete with them.

The real version, the one sans ads, is $109, which is still a decent price, but not the “oh my god, the first under-$100 e-reader!” that the hype would tell you it is.

Once more, Amazon demonstrates their complete inability to understand how the low end works, and comes across elitist.

That said, that’s all for now. Catch you next week folks!

Another of THOSE days

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You know the ones. The ones where I spend the whole day asleep and have tons of highly vivid dreams and barely stay awake long enough to eat and drink and eliminate before it is back into the velvet tomb of sleep.

Progress continues on my ability to cope with these days in the appropriately enlightened and philosophical manner. This time through, I am feeling extra mellow about the whole thing. This might be due to my eating a whack of leftovers from last night’s Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of the day.

This, of course, included some quite lovely and large pieces of marvelous turkey, and so at least some of my current mellow goodwill might be attributable to being fully in the warm embrace of the goddess triptophan and her all-natural barbiturate like caress.

Nevertheless, I am counting this as a win against my previous problems with finding these days incredibly depressing and making things worse by railing against them and the time they waste and how I wanted to be doing other things and blah blah blah.

It’s the railing and complaining that is the waste of time and life. The only productive thing I do in any day is write one of these blog entries, and so any day where I do that is equally productive. Whether I spend the rest of the day sleeping or playing video games hardly makes a bit of difference, and it’s folly to think otherwise.

Thanksgiving dinner was quite lovely. Our friends Ryan and Jenn (married couple) have made a tradition of doing a very nice dinner for us and a few of our friends at the stately home of the inimitable Garth Spencer, a heck of a fellow and the editor of BCSFAzine previous to my best friend Felicity.

The food was plentiful and excellent. The company was highly convivial, consisting of me, roomies Joe and Julian, the founders of our feast Ryan and Jenn, our host and lender of kitchen Garth, and Amos, a friend of mine and Felicity’s.

It was a full table, wacky conversation ensued, it was a lovely evening.

Or it would have bee, but I was feeling ill.

This is the sort of thing where being someone who is just plain not a healthy person starts to really take its toll. I was not feeling that well when we left, but after I ate, I felt a lot worse. My head was swimming with dizziness (probably from the Paxil reduction I have been telling you about) and I became incredibly and apparently unquenchably thirsty.

That is happening a lot lately. My blood sugar must be beyond fucked up. I will be thirsty, have a drink of water, and be dry mouthed and parched again ten minutes later. I pretty much always have to have a big glass of water on the go, or life becomes very difficult and unpleasant very quickly.

Add to that my increasingly craving for salt, and getting ridiculously hungry sometimes, the signs are there for my blood sugar being stratospheric.

You see, when your blood sugar is too high, your body produces more urea (in other words, urine) in a frantic effort to try to get rid of the more or less toxic levels of sugar, and that means you go through your supplies of both water and sodium quite rapidly.

What your body wants is for you to drink lots of water and flush the excess sugars out and hence restore normal levels. But if you are diabetic, that is just not going to cut it. Too bad your body doesn’t know that, and tries to make you run a river through your body anyhow.

And your sodium does not stand a chance. Normally, your body uses sodium in order to regulate its hydration level. varying the salinity in your blood being a great way to regulate how much water your cells retain.

But if you increase your water intake, all that useful sodium gets washed away in the flood. When you are as out of whack as me, well… shit gets crazay.

And all because, for some reason, I can’t seem to get around to making an appointment with my GP and getting my medication sorted out.

As far as he knows, I have been happily taking a new med for months now. Whereas the reality is, there was some snafu and I should have called him right away to get it fixed and yet, guess what, nope.

I seriously don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me sometimes.