How the scientists stole Hallowe'en

Here's some classic X-Files dialogue from an episode called "How the ghosts stole Christmas":

Mulder: [alarmed at a noise] Shhh! What was that?
Scully: [irritably rational] These are tricks that the mind plays. They are ingrained clichés from a thousand different horror films. When we hear a sound, we get a chill, we, we- we see a shadow and we allow ourselves to imagine something that an otherwise rational person would discount out of hand.
[Mulder just continues up the dark staircase. Frustrated, Scully pulls out her flashlight and follows him]
Scully: [continuing to rationalize nervously] The whole, Mulder- the whole idea of a benevolent entity fits perfectly with what I'm saying, that, I mean, that a spirit would materialize or return for no other purpose than to show itself is silly and ridiculous. I mean, what it really shows is how silly and ridiculous we have become in believing such things. I mean that... that we can ignore all natural laws about the corporeal body, that... that we witness these spirits clad in their own, shabby outfits, with the same old haircuts and hairstyles, never aging, never- never in search for more comfortable surroundings... it actually ends up saying more about the living than it does about the dead.
Mulder: [only half-listening] Mmm-huh.
Scully: [clearly rattling on in fear and nervousness] And Mulder, it doesn't take an advanced degree in Psychology to understand the unconscious yearnings that these imaginings satisfy. You know, the... the longing for immortality, the hope that there is something beyond this mortal coil, that we might never be long without our loved-ones... I mean, these are powerful, powerful desires. I mean, they're the very essence of what makes us human... the very essence of Christmas, actually.
[a door nearby suddenly opens on its own with a loud creak]
Mulder: [breathless; whispering] Tell me you're not afraid.
Scully: [breathless also, but stringent] All right, I'm afraid. But it's an irrational fear.

And now, just in time for Hallowe'en, a scientist has proven just how irrational that fear is*...

...or has he?

Well, the explanation satisfies me... partially.

Certain sound frequencies have been shown to induce feelings of "unexplainable dread, chills and depression". And now it's also been shown that these vibrations can be "powerful enough to resonate with the average human eyeball, causing "smeared" vision. This is a phenomenon where the eye vibrates just enough to register something static -- say, the frame of your glasses or a speck of dust -- as large, moving shapes".

After solving the problem of a "haunted" lab by removing a vibrating fan that was emitting such infrasound waves, the researcher in question "went on to test this explanation for ghostly apparitions in the cellar of a nearby "haunted" abbey. According to the locals, as soon as someone would step into the cellar they would freeze up, see strange gray ghosts and have to leave because of nausea. Vic discovered that the shape of the cellar, the hallway leading to it as well as nearby factories all contributed in making the haunted cellar a perfect resonating chamber. The vibrations created were exactly 18.9Hz and were most powerful at the threshold of the cellar, where most people became sick and terrified".

So, an explanation for "haunted" buildings where many people have independently experienced the same feelings of dread and sightings of unexplained entities. Right?

Well, like I said, I'm only partially satisfied. The most interesting and compelling ghost stories I've heard have involved people seeing things much more specific than grey blobs. And this explanation doesn't cover the famous Roman soldier ghosts from my home town of York. As I've said before, my own (extremely dubious) interpretation is that we sometimes see glimpses of things that happened in the same place at a different point in time, due to flaws in the space-time continuum or some such. But that doesn't stop me from getting spooked when someone's telling stories around a campfire...

(And while we're on the subject, the viral video of a "time traveller" using a "cell phone" in a Charlie Chaplin video from 1928 is NOT an example of this phenomenon.  Who the fuck would the person be talking to, and how the hell would they get reception without towers and satellites?! This explanation seems much more likely.

Hilarious comments from my Facebook friends when I posted the "time travel" video:

"We were looking at this last night, and think that the phone call went like this: "I did it! I went from 2002 to 1928! I can prove it - I'm in a Chaplin film *right now* and it's all over YouTube in 2010!"

and 

"1) shes not holding anything in her hand
2) The bloke has far too much time on his hands
3) all of caths points (the same ones I made above)
4) Does nobody think they had mad old women in 1928 who went around muttering to themselves? hell, I look that half the time." 

) 


Anyway, the infrasound explanation of hauntings and ghosts is perfect. It should thoroughly satisfy those who wish to remain sceptical, while leaving enough gaps for those who wish to remain entertainingly spooked at Hallowe'en.

Happy Hallowe'en from Pied Piper and the Disco Bunny! May it be as spooky (or as rational) as you were hoping!

(Better shot of my costume, with rats on my shoulder and hat. I had more running down my leg, too. I also discovered that black cherry vodka mixed with coke tastes like Dr. Pepper. Mmmmmmm).

-------

*H/T GrrlScientist, who tweeted the link

Steamjunk

"What's wrong with your whiteboard?", asked a colleague this morning.

I didn't know anything was wrong with my whiteboard, which I use to keep track of grant deadlines, grants and manuscripts currently under review, and PI travel dates. But sure enough, on closer inspection it became clear that while the bottom left corner is flush to the wall, as it should be,

straight flush

the bottom right corner is, well, not.

no force or movement of the whiteboard was involved in the taking of this photo... the corner of the board is a good 5cm or so off the wall

The culprit?

Oops.

I guess regular steam baths and tea breaks aren't as good for whiteboards as they are for the people who write on them.

Cath has misheard that the bird is the word

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His mouth can hold more than his belly can,
He can hold in his beak,
Enough food for a week.
I'm damned if I know how the hell he can!

(by Dixon Lanier Merritt, apparently. Not Ogden Nash. You learn something new every day!)

And I'm damned if I know how the hell I can have made the same ridiculous mistake twice.

It's all because of my habit of paying only partial attention to the TV. I'm usually doing something else at the same time - eating, talking, playing a game on my phone, reading a book, surfing the web, playing with a cat or two, that kind of thing. So some time last year, while I was "watching" the local news, I was startled to hear the anchor say that there'd been a pelican attack in one of Vancouver's eastern suburbs! By the time I'd looked up at the screen he'd moved on to another story, leaving me completely baffled and with some very odd mental images running through my brain.

Fortunately, the CBC website was running the same story - about a pellet gun attack.

Which made more sense.

Fast forward to last night, when Mr E Man and I were watching Survivor. I loooove Survivor (it's an extremely guilty pleasure), so I was actually watching it properly. However, during the commercial breaks I was paying attention to Saba, who was sprawled all over me and purring contentedly as I rubbed her belly. I was vaguely aware that there was some kind of cosmetics advert on the screen, but was suddenly snapped into full alertness by a rather bizarre slogan I'd just heard.

"The colour of pelicans???!!!", I blurted out before I could stop myself.

Mr E Man eventually managed to gasp out the word "elegance" in between fits of laughter.

Oops.

In my defense, it's still a ridiculous slogan. And later on in the show they actually showed some pelicans flying past the beach, which set us off laughing again. I suspect they'd already shown a similar shot before the commercial, which helped to trigger the confusion. Either that or I have a very bizarre subconscious.

Ooh! That just reminded me of something. Hang on a minute, Googling:

Ah, yes, I was right! 

To (mis)quote Douglas Adams in The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul:

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.

She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths were full of penguins pelicans, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins pelicans.

So there you go. It's not my fault, it's just the way the human brain evolved.

Weirdly, like this post just did.

Catho the Sane visits Canadian Tire

In So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth of five books in the Hitchhiker trilogy by Douglas Adams, our hero Arthur Dent travels to California to meet a man called Wonko the Sane. Wonko's house is inside-out, with brickwork and a nice garden inside (or "outside the Asylum", as he calls it), and nice wallpaper, carpeting, and outward-facing furniture against all the outside walls. Wonko explains the purpose of his inside-out house as follows:

"I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, the poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

The words that inspired this final realization are displayed "inside" the house, above the door that leads into the Asylum, to discourage Wonko from entering. They read:

"Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion".

-------------

"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

Now, I think old Wonko might be slightly off-base here. I mean, I once had to teach my Dad, an intelligent and educated man, how to use dental floss because he professed not to know how it worked. So maybe we do need instructions in our packets of toothpicks.

However, I do agree that the world has gone insane and needs to be put in an asylum of some kind.

I had my own final realization yesterday, in the camping equipment aisles of Canadian Tire. While Mr E Man perused collapsible coolers and gazed longingly at hunting knives and fishing gear, I entertained myself by looking at all the little plasticky gadgetty things.

Now, I'm a sucker for gadgets. I've bought the Scoop'N'Strain and the Grip'N'Flip off the TV - but those are actually useful things that serve a unique purpose. So I did have to restrain myself slightly in the camping equipment aisles, with my usual refrain of "that's cool, oh but I don't need it, but it might come in handy, oh right but PLASTIC IS TEH EVULS!!!".

Until I spotted my Wonko the Sane item.

At that point I abandoned all restraint and whipped out my iPhone to take a photo for your amusement:

That's right, folks - someone has seen fit to design, patent, manufacture, and market a piece of plastic that has the sole purpose of propping open your cooler lid while the inside dries. No longer must you improvise with wads of newspaper, sticks, stones, pencils, or any of that other primitive nonsense - what are you, a savage??!! Nope, you must buy this item that will outlast you, your species, and probably your planet in a landfill somewhere....

...because the world has gone stark raving bonkers.

If anyone needs me I'll be moving all my furniture outside and planting trees in my living room.

Little things that make me happy

The sun is finally shining in Vancouver!

I'm not a sun worshipper by any stretch of the imagination; I burn really quickly, and find temperatures over 30C quite unpleasant (in the city, at least). But June-uary was too much even for me - I think we got more sunshine during the Olympics - and really, I shouldn't have to wear jeans, boots, and a sweater on Canada Day. But this week has been all capris, sandals, and t-shirts, and people are in a noticeably better mood!

So here are some other little things that make me happy!

• Eating outside
• Coming home on hot days to a pot of ice-cold, uber-strong peppermint tea that's been brewing in the fridge all day
• Watching world cup games live, knowing that my friends and family all over the world are watching the exact same thing at the exact same time
• Calling my Dad during world cup games so we can slag off the players together
• Stripey socks
• Red sandals (not with socks)
  
• Chocolate brown trousers / capris with a white top (presence of socks depends on length of trousers)
• "Let's do X!!!1!1!!" followed by "Let's not, but say we did"
• Finding Saba lying on her back in a doorway with her back legs splayed and front paws tucked neatly under her chin, patiently waiting for the next passing hoomin to give her a belly rub
• Seeing Google's paw poking through the gap under the bedroom door in the morning, patiently waiting for us to pass her just-out-of-reach toys back
• Geeky teens with waaaaay more confidence than I ever had when I was a geeky teen
• Being Auntie Cath (and then coming home to a peaceful house afterwards)
• Finding out that the monkey hand puppet I bought Lilah on the day she was born is her absolute favourite toy
• My nephews chanting "under the bus! under the bus!" when tattled on by a sibling or cousin
• Plucking my eyebrows (hence the "freakishness" tag - I don't think this is normal)
• Re-runs of Friends
• Finding out that my husband is even geekier than I am*

What about you?


------------


*He's planning to buy me an iPhone 4G when it goes on sale in Canada, as a (very) belated birthday present, and then take my 3G for himself. I heard a squeal of excitement the other day as he was browsing the app store, and found out that he's been coveting a particular, very expensive (many hundreds of dollars) kind of calculator for years, and that there's an iPhone app for "only" $15 that has almost all of the special functions he needs from the calculator.

Dream trippin'

When we bought our house (four years ago today!), one of the best things that Mr E Man and I did was to invest in a really good bed. We'd been sleeping on a queen-size futon, and although it was a good fit for our small rented apartment, we decided that our larger space and newly-acquired grown-up status were worthy of a better place to lay our heads. So we found a beautiful cherry-wood bedroom furniture set on Craigslist, including a king-size sleigh bed frame, and bought the best mattress we could afford to go with it. Memory foam pillows and a lovely heavy duvet complete the set, and we both now (usually) sleep better than we ever have before in our adult lives. We like to cuddle up when we first go to bed, and again when we wake up, but we separate to sleep - and in our lovely lovely bed, there's plenty of space for us both to move around and get comfy without ever touching each other!

The problem comes when we go on vacation. We've spoiled ourselves rotten at home, and have a terrible time sleeping in inferior beds. Anything smaller than a king-sized bed has us tossing and turning and fighting for space in an extreeeeeemely mature way ("stop touching me!!!" "I'm not! YOU'RE touching ME!!!"), and back in November The Most Uncomfortable Bed In The World forced us to abandon our otherwise wonderful accommodation in Cienfuegos, and upset our gracious hostess in the process.

Hotel beds are usually fine, but our budget is better suited to B&Bs and friends'/relatives' spare rooms. And so it was on last week's trip. With my parents in tow, we didn't even get the best spare room in each case. We slept on a pull-out sofa bed at my sister-in-law's, an old and not terribly comfortable queen-size bed in the condo we rented in Whistler, and then foam pads on the floor of the computer room at my mother-in-law's. (The latter was actually the most comfortable bed of the three - or at least the one that offered the most space). These inferior beds meant that I got little sleep on our "vacation", typically waking two or three times during the night and waking up for good by 6:30 am at the latest. We always relish sleeping in our own bed for the first time after a trip, but last night's return to home base was particularly welcome.

There was an upside to last week's inferior sleeping arrangements, though: I got to experience two new categories of dreams!

I love dreams. I find them fascinating. Where do they come from?  What are they for? (And do my cats' dreams serve the same purpose as my own?) So whole new dream categories are extremely welcome, even if the dreams themselves suck.

Category I: The Boring Dream. 

I had Boring Dreams twice on the trip. I can't remember what they were about - because they were really, really boring - but I woke up with a huge sense of relief - "thank God that's over with". This made waking up at 6 am on a vacation day feel much more welcome than it would have done otherwise.

Category II: The PMS Dream.

I woke up (early, of course) one morning to find myself really, really mad at Mr E Man. The reason? Well, you see, he'd been put in prison for something or other, but I knew that he was innocent, and I worked my ass off for six months to prove it. When I finally got him out of jail - having lost my job and several friends in the process - he wanted to see his friends instead of just spending time with me all the time, and I turned into Super Bitch. In my dream, I knew I was hormonal and wasn't being entirely rational or reasonable in my anger, but I couldn't stop myself from escalating the situation, until I ended up screaming at him in front of all his friends - at his prison release celebration party, no less! - and storming off down the street in a dodgy neighbourhood in the middle of the night.

I'm not quite that bad in real life when I have PMS*, but the sense of "oh this is because I'm hormonal but oops I don't seem to be able to stop myself even though I've now realised that I'm overreacting" was uncannily familiar. First time in a dream, though - but not the first time I've stayed mad at someone in the morning after "they" pissed me off in a dream!

------------------------

*although I did once storm out of a restaurant in a huff because Mr E Man kept tickling my knee after I'd asked him to stop it - TWICE. I already felt silly by the time I got home, about two minutes later...

2012 LOLympics

I have had an incredibly hard time not laughing out loud at my desk today.

If you thought the London 2010 Olympic logo was bad (and it really, really is),

you should see the mascots!

ROFLMFAO!!!!!!! What the fuck were they smoking thinking??!! As if the actual design isn't bad enough, the execution is awful too - the one on the left is all lumpy, FFS!

More hilarious photos here

I know a lot of people didn't like the Vancouver 2010 mascots, especially when they first saw them, but I thought they were pretty good. Except for Quatchi, of course - Quatchi is AWESOME. I bet he could kickWenlock or Mandeville's ass any day of the week.

Although Quatchi loves all winter sports, he’s especially fond of hockey. He dreams of becoming a world-famous goalie. Because of his large size, he can be a little clumsy. But no one can question his passion. He knows that if he works hard and always does his best, he might one day achieve his dream. Quatchi is always encouraging his friends to join him on journeys across Canada. He is also often recruiting others to play hockey – or at least to take shots at him!

The sasquatch is a popular figure in local native legends of the Pacific West Coast. The sasquatch reminds us of the mystery and wonder that exist in the natural world, igniting our imagination about the possibility of undiscovered creatures in the great Canadian wilderness.

A hockey-playing sasquatch? Now THAT is a mascot.

Suck it, London!

(But thanks for the giggles)

"Is this normal?"

Have you ever had a conversation that began with the above words, progressed to a friend bending their elbow the wrong way or turning their nostril inside out, and ended with everyone else saying "NO! That's not normal, you freak!"?

No?

That's not normal?

Anyway...

Is this normal?

Every time I get a paper cut, nick, scrape, or other kind of boo-boo on one of my hands, it seems to multiply over the next few days, leaving me with teeny tiny cuts and scabs all over both hands. In the latest example, I sliced open the iPhone touchscreen / laptop trackpad-using part of my right index finger early last week, and looking at my hands now, I have a total of six independently-acquired boo-boos on my right hand and two on my left, all in various stages of healing. Most of them are right on a knuckle, too, for added ouchies. I can understand an accumulation of cuts on the same hand as the original injury - it hurt like a bastard and probably made me clumsier and more prone to other injuries than normal - but I have no idea why I always end up with a cluster on the other hand too.

Ah well, at least I'm no longer in the lab. Profusion of cuts + latex gloves = grossness. (This is how I first observed the phenomenon, by the way. Latex gloves are a great way to identify microscopic cuts you didn't even know you had).

Memes as mental fibre

Right after EcoGeoFemme pointed out that there haven't been many memes circulating recently, Amanda went and tagged me for one! The assignment is to write about seven things that I've never talked about in my blog.

This is a tricky one for me, because like in real life, I talk/blog too much and with too few filters. It's easy enough to find seven things I've never written about, but that aren't meaningful to me: porcupines, ravioli, WWII tank design, the history of ten pin bowling. My other initial reaction was to go too far in the other direction, into TMI territory, but luckily I decided to tone those ideas down (there still might be TMI for some people). So I present to you a mix of subjects I just haven't got around to, and subjects I've tried to blog about before as a full post but couldn't find the right angle, or that otherwise caused a severe case of writer's block.

1) I have a rather impressive scar on the inside of my left arm.

I got it in a rather embarrassingly cliched middle class way, by falling off a pony at a riding lesson when I was seven and breaking my arm just above the elbow. Contrary to everyone's first reaction, the main scar isn't from the bone breaking through the skin (although I do have a much smaller scar from that - just barely visible in the photo, slightly above and to the right of the mole). It's actually from the multiple surgeries I had to have to repair the blood vessels and nerves that the broken bone cut through at the point where they all bunch together at the elbow joint. My arm swelled up after one surgery, bursting a couple of stitches and stretching the scar tissue out, and it stretched further as I grew. I'm lucky to still have my arm at all; during one surgery that was supposed to last a couple of hours but was well into its seventh (my parents were freaking out at this point, as you can imagine), the surgeons discussed amputation as the best option. Luckily, they persevered and saved my arm. I was in traction for two weeks (apparently there's a published case study about how they set up the traction apparatus - I remember them videoing it - but I can't find it in PubMed), and it took a year or so of intensive physio before I could use my hand properly again. It still sometimes spazzes out on me and I lose my grip on whatever I'm holding with no warning: this is good in that it got me out of playing the viola in high school (the position I had to hold my wrist in seemed to aggravate the problem), but bad in that I once dropped an open 2L bottle of conc HCl while doing my undergrad research project, destroying my lab coat and a patch of the flooring. I've never held anything that scary in my left hand since, even though these incidents are much less common than they used to be.

I remember freaking out when I first saw the scar emerge from inside the cast I'd been wearing; it was hideously red and swollen and flaky and gross. I cried. A lot. However, I soon realised that I could use it to scare younger kids and chase them around the playground, and I almost always win "biggest scar" competitions. It's in such a discrete location, and it's faded and flattened so well, that people sometimes know me for years before they notice it, and it's such a normal part of me now that I barely even remember it's there. Also, the position of one of my moles makes it look like a winky smiley face.

Funnily enough, I have two friends with similar scars in the exact same place, following motorbike accidents. Motorbikes are much cooler than ponies.

OK, that one went longer than I'd intended... I'll try to be more concise in the remaining six points!

2) I sometimes have dreams about people I know that make me think about them in a completely different way. Usually just for the next day, but sometimes permanently. These dreams are sometimes the first conscious sign of something going on subconsciously, e.g. that it was time to let one friendship fizzle out, or that a formerly platonic friendship was heading in a new direction that had to be addressed. But other times they're just completely from left field and make me giggle with their weirdness.

There's a episode of Friends where Phoebe finally remembers why she's mad at Ross:

"Oh, come on! Yes... remember that time on the frozen lake? We were playing chess, you said I was boring, and then you took off your energy mask and you were Cameron Diaz! Okay, there's a chance this may have been a dream"

I couldn't find the clip on YouTube, but it sums up the latter category of dream perfectly.

3) Being around my friends' babies has had a complicated effect on me: it's made me feel very secure in my own decision not to have kids, but also made me less scared of an accident. We had a scare just before last summer's baby boom (my previously 100% reliable record of years of 27 day cycles suddenly disappeared with an unprecedented 42 day cycle) and I totally freaked out. We had another scare in November, and I freaked out considerably less. Although there was still some freaking, obviously.

4) I always used to say that if I won the lottery, I'd still want to work. But the older I get, the more I think I'd just want to bum about, living on a boat (summer) and in a ski cabin (winter) and maybe dabbling in a little writing. I think this is the opposite of how you're supposed to change as you get older.

5) I believe in ghosts. Well, I don't not believe in ghosts. I don't believe in the usual way; I don't think there are self-aware / conscious spirits floating around, trying to avenge their own deaths or otherwise deliberately haunting the living because of unresolved issues from their lives. I cycle through the local cemetery in the dark all the time: I aint afraid of no ghost! (Campfire stories are another matter entirely). But too many people I know and trust have told me too many, too convincing stories. There are also too many examples of multiple people seeing the same thing in the same place and/or at the same time.

The most convincing stories are where the person sees a ghost that doesn't interact with them. "This white apparition rose out of a grave and waved at me" doesn't cut it. But the other stories do. For example, my Dad has a story about a fellow student from his hall of residence who died after breaking his neck in a rugby scrum. A few weeks later my Dad was walking past this student's room (which had been emptied and locked up for the year; no-one else wanted to live there), and saw the dead guy open the door, walk out into the corridor, lock his room door behind him, and walk away without acknowledging my Dad, who was standing a few inches away with his mouth wide open. He says it was unmistakably, undeniably, definitely, the dead guy (in the dead guy's clothes). This student definitely did not have a twin or any other similar looking relatives (my Dad knew him well enough to go to the funeral and meet his family).

Now, I'm no physicist, but I do try to read the complicated physics articles in New Scientist, and I know that our understanding of time is incomplete and there are some unresolved problems with the current theories. Is it possible that we might sometimes catch a glimpse of someone or something from the past? That my Dad, and other people I know and trust who have similar stories, somehow watched a play-back of a moment from this guy's life, like watching a video?

I can almost hear Massimo (and any other physicists who read this) laughing at me right now.

Possible alternative explanations:

a) cognitive dissonance
b) my Dad is crazy
c) my Dad has repeatedly lied to me about this experience (I don't think he his. You should see his face when he tells this story).
d) lots of other people are either crazy or lying
e) I'm crazy
f) I've watched too much sci-fi

6) Um. Baby porcupines are cute?

7) The sad demise of Mad Hatter's blog had really got me thinking. I totally understand her reasons. Don't worry / celebrate, I have no intentions of shutting down my blog. But blogging really is a trigger for wasting lots of time on the internet, time that would be better spent reading, writing, playing my guitar, and hanging with Mr E Man and the kitties. I spend a lot of time reading and commenting on blog posts, and I don't want to stop completely, because I love it. You guys are my friends, and I want to know what you're up to! Also, you can't / shouldn't be a blogger without also contributing to the community by reading and commenting on other people's blogs.

I think the solution (for me) is to try and be more selective. I went through my Google Reader account yesterday and deleted some feeds. I pruned way back to the bare bones, i.e. I unsubscribed from eight blogs (and resubscribed to three of them this morning). It's so hard! There are too many good blogs out there! So I think rather than reading fewer blogs, I need to read fewer posts on each blog. Almost every blog contains a mixture of things I'm really interested in, and things I'm less interested in (speaking of which, I do apologise for the recent flood of posts about Canadian politics. Please bear with me). For example, it's now five years since I last held a pipette, and I really don't have any useful, current advice to contribute to conversations about lab work and related aspects of the grad student / postdoc experience. Similarly, not being a prof or lecturer, I have nothing useful to contribute on posts about teaching methods and such.

So, if you see fewer comments and page hits from me, please forgive me! I'm still skim-reading in Google Reader, but applying more filters to my thorough reading and commenting. And I'll always click through to celebrate your highs and commiserate with your lows.

Unless they're about breaking a pipette while teaching.

-------------

I tag: anyone willing to post their own scar photo!

On the pool

Our local swimming pool seems to have a rule that it must contain at least one creepy old man at any given time.

There's a guy who hangs out in the shallow end, goggles on, but who only ever gets wet above the chest when a female swimmer approaches in his lane, at which point he ducks under water and stares. There's another man who never even gets in the water, but just wanders around or sits in a chair, staring at people. A new guy last night was obsessing over how the instructors teach the kids to swim, and started to berate one of them in the middle of a lesson for doing it wrong. (Buddy, you don't get to talk about streamlining until you've lost at least 50 pounds and waxed your back).

This situation means that the pool's female users are very proficient in the art of the disgusted look, specifically of the "you filthy pervert!" variety.

And last night, one of those looks was directed at me!

I would like to state for the record that I do not have a pregnant woman fetish. It's just that two of my friends were in the dive pool with all the other expectant mothers, floats secured above and below their bumps, and doing some gentle exercises with the rest of the class. I'd chatted to one friend before the class started - she tries to arrive early so we can do a few lengths together - but we hadn't had a chance to arrange the weekend's social events. And I completely missed the other friend arriving, because she was running late and went straight to the class. So as I walked past the dive pool on my way to the showers, I mouthed "call me!" and did the thumb-pinkie finger telephone sign with my hand.

Twice.

I did this because my two friends were at opposite ends of the pool, but the effect was that I seemed to be trolling the entire class for a date. At least that's what I guessed when the woman next to my second friend gave me the familiar "you filthy pervert!" look.

I would also like to state that I am not an exhibitionist, and did not exactly plan to stage a mobile one-woman wet t-shirt competition. It's just that I forgot to bring a towel, and had to put my cycling gear back on and ride home before I'd dried off.

Honest!

Search bots

Anyone who follows the comments and posts of the week feature in the sidebar will have spotted that ScienceGirl was one of the winners this week, with a mention of "that worm-looking thingy that tried living in your friend". She was referring, of course, to the bot fly incident.

That post has been the source of some very entertaining Google search terms recently. In increasing order of "DUDE!!! WTF???!!!":

• bot fly in hands
• bot fly up your ass
• how would you change your room to care for a bot fly

Bot fly hostess extraordinaire Kyrsten responded to my email about the last query (which came from Toronto, by the way) with "Lmao! You would give it a good healthy leg for it to snack on/in!"

I just feel really, really sorry for anyone who finds that post using some variation on "ingrown hair on bikini line" and ends up freaking out about parasites. Don't worry gals, unless you've been to Central America recently, you probably just have an ingrown hair.

I also liked:

• grantsmanship limerick
• how to pick up a ukranian accent
• how to make your accent sound intelligent
• angry european cuttlefish
• what does fancy a cuppa mean
• fuck noroviruses

And I'm not going to post the search terms that are bringing people to this post. I'd rather not encourage the worryingly large number of people who are trying to figure out a way to do naughty things in their workplace and/or in front of paying audiences in performance venues.

OK, ski minus 39 hours and counting. I'm off to the pub.

Tales from the Crapt Crypt

I have all kinds of long blog posts planned in my head - but no time to write them! So instead I will share a short but disturbing tale of horror from my office. Specifically, the dreaded unisex office bathroom*.

Now, on a good day I actually like my nearest loos. Those of us on even-numbered floors get two of the single room, self-contained type, with everything including the the sink hidden safely behind a lockable door. People on the odd numbered floors get the inferior, but at least gender-segregated, multi-stall bathrooms. (They often prefer to use ours instead, causing some long waits at times). I don't really mind sharing with my male colleagues. I just wish they would remember to a) flush and b) lock the door; I've walked in on three different guys in the last year, including two different guys on one particularly memorable day.

So. My story. I entered one of the bathrooms yesterday to find that someone had lovingly draped a long piece of loo paper over the wall-mounted handrail. And I do mean long - almost touching the floor at both ends. It looked perfectly clean and dry. I can only assume that some environmentally conscious person had taken too much paper from the roll and, rather than waste it by flushing it away like a normal person, left the unused portion for the next visitor.

Am I just being squeamish and untrusting, or is this an example of horrible unisex office bathroom etiquette? Or just horrible bathroom etiquette in general? (I definitely wouldn't do this at home, even though I only share with my husband).

I obviously didn't touch the paper. But it was gone a few hours later. I don't think the cleaners had been in, because there were no new rolls of paper and the bin was still full of paper towels. I really, really hope that the person who took it was the same person who left it there in the first place...

---------------------

*I did my postdoc on a different floor of the same building. We kept trying to segregate the bathrooms by sex - a logical step, you'd think, especially as one of the two rooms on each even-numbered floor has features required only by women - but some unknown person kept ripping the "Men" and "Women" signs down and putting them in the trash. Apparently this was a building-wide phenomenon. People on all floors have now given up and accepted their unisex betoileted state.

Guest post (not for the squeamish)

My friend Kyrsten has supplied me with a couple of interesting blog post subjects in the past, and I'm going to let her tell this current story in her own words. (What this essentially means is that I'm going to copy and paste (with permission) from the emails she sent me this week). Hopefully this will be her only personal contribution to my "medicine" and "freakishness" tag counts.

When I say "not for the squeamish", I do mean it. My initial response was (and I quote): "fucking hell Kyrsten, that's disgusting". It took me several hours to get to "it is kinda cool though". Of course, by the next day I was asking if I could put it on my blog! Anyway, the photos are down at the bottom so you don't have to look if you don't want to.

Take it away, KJ:
_______________

"Hi guys,

Caution, if you aren't a medical doctor (some of you are) and thus get squeamish easily, don't read on. But you are all scientists for the most part and should find this cool like I did (now that Bob is gone!)

As some of you may know, I recently went to Belize for a week with three of my friends, and we stayed in the jungle for 3 nights and on the beach for 4 nights. In the jungle (which was amazing), we went on a small day hike. Being mostly prudent, I made sure to cover my body in DEET and wore a long sleeve shirt and pants. The only area i didn't cover was my rear and near the bikini line, because those would have to be some crazy mosquitos! WELL. The jungle sure is full of bugs, as the ones of you that travel tropically well know. I come back with a few mosquito bits - in the area I didn't cover with DEET (and quite a few in the area i did cover) but don't think much about it.

I get back and everything is peachy - no one has dengue, none of us are sick, and it was a great vacation. Except I have what I pass off as an ingrown hair near my bikini line. It gets larger, and it's not healing properly. I get these weird, periodic stabbing pains that I think is a staph abscess getting worse. They are rare, but when they do happen, they make me double over in pain. They kinda freak me out after three bouts of pain, a days apart each, so I slather it in polysporin, bandage it, and go to my GP. He takes a look and proclaims it as an ingrown hair that is infected, and injects the area with lidocaine and cuts it to drain it. In an abscess, you would expect to see a pocket of pus (white blood cells that have gone to fight the infection and died), but there was no pus - which he finds odd. He gives me a prescription for cloxacillin and says to keep an eye on it and see him in a week.

I take the antibiotics as prescribed, and there isn't any more change except it's not healing. On Friday after working an 11 hr day, I sit down, and notice that there is something sticking out of the hole - looks flesh coloured like a piece of skin. I touch it when the tip of my nail and IT RETRACTS into a 1-2 mm hole in the middle of the inflamed area. Immediately I start screaming, and D takes one look at my white face and wants to know if I'd like to go to Emerg (no clinic open at 8 pm on Good Friday). I see the R1, and he asks me some questions, and then takes the doctor in. At this point, i have no idea whether it's still bacterial or not - but I was pretty convinced it was parasitic - S. aureus doesn't 'wave' at you and retract into a HOLE! I was also so exhausted from being up since 5 am that morning that I wasn't sure if I hallucinated. The doctor is hesitant about doing anything to it, and says to stay on antibiotics and come back if it gets worse. I can't sleep at all because I have thoughts of chopping off my leg, and decide to google search parasites that might cause periodic pain, be from Belize, and cause a hole in the skin - and come up with Botfly! I find 100s of stories of people who go to Belize, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil and come back with Botflies - most of them from Belize though. The symptoms are all eerily similar.

After sleeping a grand total of 2 hrs, I get up and take a look. Again, there is this 1 mm diameter fleshy looking thing on the top of the wound! again, it retracts into the hole. D says he can't take 4 more days of me panicking and that it's time to go back to Emerg. I decide that it's coming out THAT DAY. I go to emerg, they admit me, and I start talking with the head nurse - she thought the previous night that I was misdiagnosed and that it was botfly, from what she's read. The doctor on hand is Dr. G and as soon as he hears 'parasite' he gets all excited - he used to do some tropical medicine (treated dengue in his early years). I had printed off info from what i found on the web, and he determines that most people do is suffocate the botfly as it needs to breathe to complete it's life cycle. So we slather on a petroleum product, cover with an airproof and waterproof bandage, and they send me home. I'm told to come back when the botfly stops moving. After about 1/2 hr, i can see the botfly's breathing tube moving around in the petroleum. Interestingly, it's also throwing other stuff out of the hole so the petroleum looks weird and clumpy. I decide that there is no way I'm letting the Botfly this one so I decide to wait as long as I can (I've named him Bob the Botfly at this point, a friend said his middle name should be Ro so he could be Bob Ro Botfly but that's just weird). I hang out, and decide to relax and try to breathe - not easy when you are pretty certain that there's something growing inside you.

This morning, I get up and we go to Emerg. Dr. G is there from yesterday, and this time he's got Z the R4 who's never heard of botfly. During my relaxation time yesterday I googled as much clinical info as I could find, and found a great paper from Kevin Kain who runs the Tropical Infectious program at U of Toronto. Print it out and brought it in with me, highlighted the info they needed. Z took a look at it, summarized it for Dr. G - they pull off the bandage, and immediately Dr. G sees the parasite - he grabs it with the forceps and pulls it out (hurt a little because the hole was only about 2 mm, whereas the parasite at its biggest was about 4 mm in diameter. Cleans me up, puts a little bandage on and I'll continue the antibiotics I'm already on to stop any infection, but things should be fine.

I've attached a few photos of the bugger. We have an old antique microscope at home, so D and I have been taking a look at it under the microscope. pretty cool! Some of the black spines have my skin cells on them :)

I'm kinda proud of my Bob the Bot Fly. I don't have any formaldehyde here so can't preserve him, but I think the pictures are more than enough.

Will this stop me from going to Belize again? hell no! The place was amazing and I know what to look for now :)"
_______________
A subsequent email reads:

"I am still alternating between "OMIGOD THAT WAS IN ME!" and "WOW! CHECK OUT THOSE SPINES! What evolutionary path led to THAT?!?""

Later:

"About the blog, you can definitely talk about me on it - i'm ok. But you have to promise to put up the story of how I found the article myself and diagnosed myself :)"

I love geeks.

Anyway, here are a couple of photos of Bob. The coin is a Canadian dime, about the same size as the US equivalent or a British 5 p coin. Judging by the series of photos on this blog post, Kyrsten was very lucky to have noticed him so early in his life cycle!




OK, I'm done grossing you out now. If you'd like to leave a comment or question for Kyrsten, I'll let her know and I'm sure she'd be happy to answer. The next post will be less disgusting, I promise!

These boots were made for, erm, walking?

According to this story on the BBC, I should maybe think about revising the upper height limit I've imposed on the heels of my elusive pair of perfect boots.

Talking of strange medicine, a gust of wind almost made me sick yesterday. I was walking around a corner, yapping away on my phone, and a huge gust blew straight into my open mouth and triggered my gag reflex. Luckily I hadn't eaten or drunk anything for a few hours, but it was almost nasty. Is this a first?

Warning...

...this link is kinda gross (nothing graphic, just the concept), possibly NSFW, and opens straight into a video.

From the same friend who sent me this, I have just learned that a company in Florida is offering to extract and store a "new kind" of stem cell from a novel source.

"The C'elle menstrual stem cell"

The what now?

From the FAQs:

"What properties has the cell shown?
Menstrual blood contains unique stem cells that express multipotent markers of both adult and embryonic stem cells. These menstrual cells multiply quickly and can differentiate into other types of cells including heart, nerve, bone, cartilage and fat, according to early research. This is the first time researchers have found an adult stem cell that is recurring and readily accessible; can multiply rapidly and has demonstrated capability to differentiate into many other cell types. The C’elle menstrual stem cell can be easily harvested in a affordable, painless and non-invasive manner, as compared to other stem cell sources such as bone marrow, fat or adult peripheral blood."

Well, that sounds promising enough. But...

"Are there any published studies about C'elle cells and their uses?
Since the discovery of the C’elle menstrual stem cell, Cryo-Cell has made major advances in the study of this unique stem cell and in the commercialization of processes associated with its procurement, processing, isolation and cryopreservation. For example, Cryo-Cell collaborated with Dr. Amit N. Patel, Director of Cardiac Stem Cell Therapies at the McGowan Institute, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, along with other independent research laboratories, to study these menstrual stem cells, which have demonstrated the capability in vitro to differentiate into neural, cardiac, bone, cartilage, and adipose cells, and possibly other cell types. Dr. Patel’s preliminary findings were presented on October 21, 2007 at TCT 2007, the annual scientific symposia of Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics, in a seminar entitled “Novel Cell Sources for Myocyte Repair and
Replacement”. There are also numerous published studies discussing stem cells with many of the same properties of C'elle cells, although these referenced stem cells are often not nearly as prolific, easy to differentiate, harvest or as non-controversial, as the C’elle menstrual stem cell."

So, not really. Some promising findings, but just one conference presentation and a whole bunch of papers about other kinds of stem cell.

"What is the first anticipated therapeutic use of C'elle?
Realistically, it may take several years before there are widely available clinical therapies using the C’elle stem cell."

Erm, several years at the very least. Couple of decades maybe. Which isn't to say that it won't work, but at $499 - $1599 for processing plus $99 - $199 in annual storage costs, I don't think I'll be trying this any time soon. I think I'll wait for the publications. And a clinical trial or two. Oh wait, that'll be too late.

Ah well, I hope my sister's bone marrow is a good match.

__________________________________________

Update, November 7th

I beat PZ to it! Yay me! He had a better post title though.

I also had an icky thought. My last employer constantly needed fresh peripheral blood for lab testing. They would take this (on a voluntary basis obviously!) from employees in return for 40 bucks and a funky cartoon character band aid. This C'elle company presumably also tests samples in their labs. Do they take samples from their employees too? It was weird enough having my colleagues stick needles in me. I hope they give them more than $40.

How to cushion a back-handed slap

I'm currently sacrificing some of my usual posting time in order to accommodate an insanely busy schedule, so today's paper is just a short medical case-study. It's no less interesting for that though – in fact I've been meaning to post about this paper since a friend (hi KJ!) brought it to my attention a couple of months ago.

Dr Timothy Flynn from the University of North Carolina reports on an ex-soldier who presented with complications from an old shrapnel injury to the back of the hand. I'm not really familiar with the medical terminology, but I gather that the soldier's skin graft (from his lower abdomen) was transferred to his hand with some of the underlying adipose (fatty) tissue still attached, and that most of the adipose base was later removed when the skin started to heal.

Adipose cells from different parts of the body have distinct characteristics, and may respond differently to environmental cues such as diet. In this ex-soldier's case, some of the abdominal adipose tissue transferred to his hand wound obviously survived the grafting procedure. As he got older and gained weight around the abdomen, the adipose tissue in his hand responded in the same way as its original site.

You've guessed it - his hand has a beer belly.

There's nothing in the paper about what happened to the patient, but Dr Flynn mentions that previous animal model work in this field has enabled the development of new cosmetic surgery procedures. Hopefully the discovery of this accidental human test subject will have similar medical benefits.

Vulcans! In Vancouver!

Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't have access to The Lancet - does anyone have a subscription? Were there photos in the original paper?

_____________________________________________

Update: no photos. How disappointing. Thanks anyway Factician for sending the paper!