beyond the edge

We're currently doing the reproductive system so all our lectures are about sex and parts of the anatomy involved in sex, which means...I can't play my lectures on full volume.......||||Orz

The legal hocus pocus with non-"natural" children is very...hocussy pocussy. In short you can get anything as long as you're rolling in cash and willing to fork it out. And there's a 10 year waiting list for adoption, and they apparently won't accept anyone over a certain age (at the time of adoption) so if you want to adopt you have to start applying in your 20s. If you're a homosexual couple after a child then you'll have to navigate through such a brain-bleeding maze of laws (most likely of multiple countries, depending on what pathway you want your child by) that I'm amazed by anyone who puts in the effort.

Apparently 1 in 30 kids nowadays is IVF, so that's one in every classroom. Fancy that! In NSW you do not need to have a legal father registered on your child's birth certificate. The woman who physically bears the child is automatically the legal mother, which means another round of legal hocussing pocussing to get that maternal right transferred if they were only a surrogate.

Now I just have to figure out which useless bit of information I'll need to remember for the exam.

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The point of me posting today was meant to be...I finally finished colouring the Vivant picture. Click the piccie below see/read more =0=;



Umm...yeah...I don't want to touch another picture for 2 months =0=

Last Thursday we watched an interesting 17-minute video on various types of seizures. It was probably filmed at a specialist clinic of some sort, where they had about twenty to thirty epileptic kids playing sport (probably to bring on the seizures). Every now and then one of them would have a seizure, and it's almost kind of humbling to see how underwhelmed the others are, just giving the person a few reassuring pats until they come out of their seizures.

I think the form of seizure most familiar to everyone is one called "tonic clonic seizures", where the person is usually unconscious and their limbs jerk uncontrollably.

In reality, there's a wide range of seizures, some of them practically unnoticeable and others more obvious.

The physical ones are probably the most obvious: sometimes it can manifest as a face twitch, or a limb that jerks randomly for a period of time. There are also more generalised seizures, the "tonic seizure" where the entire body tenses up and the person drops to the ground in a dead faint, or the "atonic seizures" where all the muscles suddenly lose power and the person drops to the ground. As one can imagine, this is quite dangerous for an epileptic who might seize up in the middle of a road - or, more often, land on their head as they drop.

The ones that are easiest to miss are focal seizures, where only a small part of the brain is affected. This can show up as twitches in certain parts of the body, but it can also be more insidious and so easily missed. Sometimes it can manifest as a sudden mood change, a sudden display of anxiety and paranoia and repetitive reassuring movements (like rubbing arms or hand-wringing).

The one that everyone agreed can be easily missed is the "absent" (French pronunciation) seizures, where all that appears is the person zones out for a few seconds. Unlike the rest of us who frequently zone out in lectures (LOL), they are practically unconscious for that few seconds, although their don't actually drop to the ground and pass out. After the event they have no recollection of what happens during that time. So it often happens to be the quiet kid you see in class who stares absently out the window...whose seizures might go undiagnosed for years.

This puts a new spin on espionage:

The future When you meet someone new, shaking hands won't just be an exchange of pleasantries. You'll also share data directly through your skin contact or through wireless transfer initiated by the contact.... Japanese telecommunications giant NTT DoCoMo has achieved data rates of 10 megabits a second over skin.

I remember in year 10 history, Mr Owens was telling us about spies "dumping" their info and having to pick it up (it was all very technical). Now you can swap info just by accidentally bumping into each other on the train?! O___o;;;

Genetic research is already well advanced, although ongoing ethical debates will shape how it will be implemented. Will we get embryonic gene therapy? Or is it only after birth that any genetic problems can be treated? Best-case scenarios could see us have new organs grown from our own tissue and have cancer treated with a vaccination.

*Cough* This sort of tissue cloning will no doubt have its own long, convoluted, unresolved ethical debate once it becomes a realistic option. Embryonic gene therapy? Sounds like the making of the "Coordinators" to me =/

Why the heck would you treat genetic problems after birth? Orz It's much easier to treat one cell as opposed to millions.

And "genetic research is already well advanced"? If the number of "mechanism currently unknown" I had to write in my immunology essay is any indication, genetic research is best described as...embryonic =P

Cancer treatment with vaccination has been an appealing idea for the last decade, but there are still a lot of limitations to overcome. I'd hate to call it without researching first, but the only realistic "vaccination" is by inoculating the patient with T cells or by somehow stimulating the T cell response. But T cells are highly discriminatory, while cancer cells are highly diverse (meaning, there's no magic key that'll zap all cancer cells into non-existence).

...And we have a trouble enough stimulating a good T cell response against some of our curable diseases, like tuberculosis. And non-curable diseases, like HIV =/

I think a lot of people got really excited two decades or so ago, when we first stepped into genetic-based studies, of creating some sort of disease-free utopia on Earth once we understand everything that happens in diseases.

Unfortunately, in the last decade, the more we understand, the less likely it's getting. Health is all about balance, and this balance is never fully dependent on genetics.



......Ugh. That's all I'm about to say on the future of health. The rest of the future looks much more delightful. Glowing tablecloths? I want one! XD


PS: Okay, I had to put in a word for this:

When you pull up to refuel your car the smell of petrol is no longer in the air. Now it's a real "gas" station, pumping hydrogen.

Umm. I haven't done chem since first year, so things might have changed. But. I thought the biggest problem that hydrogen, despite being a highly efficient (?) fuel, was never used as fuel because......................

It's explosive?!?!

Although apparently the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen into water produces a lot of energy......

...I'll shut up before I dig myself a bigger hole.

He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves. - H.G. Wells.

LOL.

It's pretty amazing that Louis Wain lived for so long.

The cagey perfection in this picture is amazing, but the comment he wrote on its back is disturbingly delirius O__o;;;

According to Wikipedia, many of his works were not dated, and don't linearly represent the progression of his schizophrenia. But this page is disturbing nevertheless. Especially towards the end. The technique and symmetry and detail is obsessively meticulous and intricate, but there's almost something demonic about the degree of abstraction O__o;;;;;;;

His early pictures are so cute, some of them XDDD

The appeal reached twice the target sum in a month - a sign of the public's continuing affection - and despite poverty and mental illness he retained for many years the position of President of the National Cat Club.

Awww~ There are some good hearts in the public after all.

(And in dedication, I shall use my "nyaaa" icon XD)

Yes yes this does have something to do with my study. Schizophrenia, yes.

Invisibility cloak

Sounds really cool, even if it doesn't exist yet >_>

Made a presentation for "HIV in Africa" for microbiology.

Dumbfounded and blank-faced silence is not something one likes to be met with as one finishes her speech and asks enthusiastically, "So, any questions?" (Okay, I didn't ask that, group member did, but was still depressing)

Read up on more AIDS epidemiology than I would like to in a lifetime (dislike very muchly discussing statistical assumptions and limitations).

Was interesting though:
- 5% of Sudanese women knew condoms are effective prevention against AIDS
- 25% of pregnant Sudanese women never heard of AIDS (not, mind you, meaning they're not HIV positive, because...)
- Only 10% of existing HIV patients are diagnosed
- About 25 million people are infected in Africa: compare with Australia's population of 20 million
- About 4 million worldwide die each year from AIDS: compare with malaria's global annual mortality of 3 million. Malaria endemic regions overlap with AIDS epidemic regions (particularly countries like Kenya). ...AIDS epidemic tend to overlap with a lot of diseased areas.



On the way home from Redfern saw a great shepherd dog lazing on the footpath and as I wondered what it was doing, it looked at me and raised an eyebrow O__o;;; Never had a dog raise its eyebrow at me before (do dogs have eyebrows? Well, it's that extra furry tuft of...fur, above their eyes).



Also saw recently a Chinese newspaper article lamenting the treatment of HIV patients in a hospital. One of their prime examples was a HIV-positive man who needed a bone marrow transplant, and the hospital refused to give it.

WELL DUH!!! Giving bone marrow transplant to someone with depressed immunity equates to death sentence. In order for his body not to reject (any) transplant, doctors have to give him immunosuppressive drugs...which you just can't do if they're already at risk of severe immunosuppression. Also, the more opportunistic infection one gets in the latent incubation phase of HIV, the worse the prognosis (i.e. the faster AIDS develops).

Anyway, the article goes on to say that the guy died about 7 years later (which is pretty good for someone with a bone marrow problem and HIV), and the doctor had "hastily" written "AIDS" as major cause of death. The article then gasped, "But! What if it wasn't AIDS? What if it was another disease?"

*GASP* The "S" on the end of "AIDS" is there for a reason (no, it is NOT the plural for AID >_>). Syndrome is a collection of symptoms, not necessarily a defined disease. But technicality aside: NO ONE DIES UNIQUELY FROM AIDS. AIDS predisposes you to a number of VERY nasty things - infections from practically any infectious agent as well as cancer. IT DOES NOT CAUSE DEATH DIRECTLY. Death from AIDS always results from coinfections (usually plural) or cancer (yes, AIDS increases the risk of cancer - a bit like the "just when you thought it can't get any worse" syndrome).


...==; Anyway, stoopid sensationalisation. On the other hand the issue they were trying to present does actually exist and is quite serious - discrimination in all sorts of societies against those who have HIV. More than 50% of people in a survey by Ministry of Health Uganda said that if they were diagnosed HIV+, they would hide it from their family members, which is exactly why despite being faithful, some 80% of women who are infected with HIV are married.

Stupid men who sleep around.

Mistaken usages...

( More importantly )

( No sooner when )

( One dimensional characters )

( Point in time )

( Pompom/pompon )

A mother had her child taken from the cradle by elves. In its place they laid a changeling with a thick head and staring eyes who would do nothing but eat and drink.

Sounds like infant botulism >___>;;;;;


The changeling can be easily identified by several traits due to his faerie condition :
- He always cry and complain
- He does not grow as other children
- He drinks a lot of water and is hungry all the time
- He can play the pipes with and dance with surpassing skill
- He looks like an ill-conditioned and helpless brat
- He is very precoce and makes unguarded remark as to its own age.

...Oh dear, sounds like any naughty or intelligent child. The second is any health/hormone problem, and the third sounds like diabetes.

And guess what happens if they think it's a changeling?


The changeling was converted into the stock of a tree by saying a powerful rhyme over him, or by sticking him with a knife. He could be driven away by running at him with a red-hot ploughshare; by getting between him and the bed and threatening him with a drawn sword; by leaving him out on the hillside, and paying no attention to his shrieking and screaming; by putting him sitting on a gridiron, or in a creel, with a fire below; by sprinkling him well out of the maistir tub; or by dropping him into the river.

...No wonder Kaori Yuki was so interested in this subject.


According to the popular belief of changeling, malformed and retarded children were likely not human at all, but rather the offspring of some demonic being, offspring that could be neglected, abused, and even put to death with no moral compunctions.

......


Many of the deformities in children are attributed to the Fairies. When a child is incautiously left alone by its mother, for however a short time, the Fairies may come and give its little legs such a twist as will leave it hopelessly lame ever after.

...Sounds like polio....

Certainly makes you glad you weren't born in Scotland 600 years ago. Or if you believe in reincarnation, at least you can't remember you were ever born and tortured to death in Scotland. Hmm.


Randomly: that enormous, menacing black cloud to the west is looking like a life-saver right now!!!! It's so hot!!!!! Argh!!!