| Time Spent |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|02:44 pm] |
I am well aware that not everyone has as rough of a time around the holidays as I have had in the past. For those people, I present the following:
I'll probably be partaking of the "traditional Jewish Christmas" again this year.
For those not in the know, the "traditional Jewish Christmas" is what Jewish families do in North America on Christmas day: Movie theatres and Chinese eateries don't close on Christian holidays, but they're often the only things open. Consequently, non-Christians go out to see a movie in the afternoon and have dinner at an Asian restaurant in the evening, for lack of anything else to do.
Obviously, I'm not Jewish myself, and I won't be going out with my family. However, I do have a number of great friends who are non-Christian, and I'll be spending the day with them at whatever establishments are open for business.
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| Oooooooo |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|09:39 am] |
This is pretty funky
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| Mammography guidelines |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|12:29 pm] |
Perhaps the most arrogant thing I've read this month. (Keep in mind that I work in academia.)
Dr. Kopans told Medscape Radiology that the task force spurned his offer to provide scientific data from randomized trials that would help them make informed decisions.
"I'm one of the world's experts on breast imaging and mammography screening. I'm also chair of the subcommittee of the American College of Radiology for Mammography Screening. I had heard rumors that the task force was working on new screening guidelines, so I emailed them and offered to work with them. I didn't even get a thank you. Not even a response. Clearly they didn't want input from experts."
Asked for a possible reason why the task force would ignore expert opinion, Dr. Kopans told Medscape Radiology that there is a nucleus of people who have long been opposed to mammography.
"I just got some updated information that they were involved with the task force. I hate to say it, it's an ego thing. These people are willing to let women die based on the fact that they don't think there's a benefit." More here. I was fully expecting these recommendations to become rapidly politicized, but I had neglected to take into account how rabidly some radiologists would defend their turf.
I haven't written much on this subject because, quite frankly, it depresses me. I know enough about it to know that it deserves a serious discussion - one that we're not having in favor of wankery about egos who don't care if women die and death panels. |
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| Why you should fear anything of the genus Corvus |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|09:38 am] |
Tool use and insight learning was known in rooks and crows when I were a mere biology undergrad, but just look at this and this! And as in monkeys, it's usually the girls you have to watch...
If they ever team up with octopi, we are all doomed...
In other news, I took the finished draft of Chapter 3 for review by my mentor and another professor who hasn't been involved with my work so far and got really good feedback. So big phew there! Onto the rest of Chapter 2 now. I know, I know, I'm doing it backwards. |
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| Holidays. |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|07:24 pm] |
There is a lot of focus on the physical world in our culture, and family relationships are no exception. People hosting holiday events often expend a lot of trouble, money and worry over decorations and the logistics of hosting a party with children, teens and adults all in attendance. Trouble and effort to clean and decorate their houses for hosting. Effort and money on food. Worry as a result of the ostracism they face if the party doesn't go over well; relatives who never make an effort to see each other more than once or twice a year will gossip about each other endlessly if that one time a year doesn't go off flawlessly.
The logistics of planning a trip to the home of a relative who lives more than an hour's drive away, with several children in tow, is a lot for most people to handle. Covering kilometres of ice-coated rural highways via car with restless pre-teens and toddlers in the back seats would give me post-traumatic stress disorder, so I can't blame them. Operating a vehicle with kids in it over a long distance in winter is dangerous enough without the kids becoming restless.
As a result... my earliest childhood memories of Christmas and New Years involve stressed-out adults nearly killing each other as a consequence of the holidays.
If I don't wish you Happy Holidays, keep in mind that it's not meant in an insulting fashion. I'm simply wishing for a better world, once in which humans don't judge each other by their domestic abilities and in which no one feels the need to look to keeping up appearances for validation.
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| Awesome the second |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|08:35 pm] |
Angry Cthulhu does not approve of this tomfoolery. (My girlfriend knows me well. I do that little eye twitch myself.) Awesome the third tomorrow when I can take a picture. |
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| Awesome the first |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|08:26 pm] |
Awesome the first: 
The iGEM team made me a photo collage of our summer fighting the nerd fight. Evidently when I play ping-pong, I look like an extra in The Matrix. |
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| I know sex change, and you, sir, are no sex change |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|08:17 pm] |
Gene therapy for: sickle cell treatment, beta-thalassemia, ALD, and color-blindness.
Switching off the gene FoxL2 causes ovary cells in adult female mice to develop into testosterone-producing cells. (Despite what you might read in this and other articles, this is not a change of sex.)
In silico drug trials. Fascinating, and potentially groundbreaking, but - to be frank - probably not ready for prime time. |
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| HOLY SHIT. Benjamin FTW again. |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|01:37 am] |
So I'd just finished hacking away at thesis revisions for a couple of easy (ie, at no point did self-evisceration seem less trying than carrying on) hours, and I was looking for something heady but dreamy to read in bed, as I'm just a few pages away from finishing Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars" and didn't want to get up and pick out something else after I'd got snuggled in. ANYWAY: I pull the first of the recent "Selected Writings" editions of Walter Benjamin's work and start flipping about. The second page I flip to (after a cute discussion on the distinction between reviewing one's dreams before and after breakfast) is the following:
Gloves
In an aversion to animals, the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that something living within him is so akin to the disgust-arousing animal that it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching. Even when the feeling is mastered, it is only by a drastic gesture that overleaps its mark: the nauseating is violently engulfed, eaten, while the zone of finest epidermal contact remains taboo. Only in this way is the paradox of the moral demand to be met, exacting simultaneously the overcoming and the subtlest elaboration of man's sense of disgust. He may not deny his bestial relationship with the creature, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master. (p.448, SWv.1, 1925)
Did...did Walter Benjamin diagnose carnophallogocentrism sixty-six years before Derrida?
I've never come across any reference to this fragment in any of the animal studies reading I've done. In classic Benjamin fashion it's a solitary meditation that goes unplumbed and unpacked. I've no idea how, but I need to find a way to shoehorn this into my Derrida section, giving it the space and respect it deserves but without letting it completely upend everything I've written.
(Why is it that discoveries like this are always made just before bedtime?) |
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| M's site! |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|09:41 pm] |
So the talented Miz M finally has a site up! It's got a gallery and information about the show she's doing at Blim in about a month.
Madeline Smith
Yep. I get to live with this lady and watch while she creates this stuff.
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| Mutilation. |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|06:12 pm] |
Micro-pigmentation does have its benefits. Making one's ears pointy isn't even plastic surgery, it's a body mod, and it's so subtle that it can't be considered horrifying except by people suffering from trypanophobia... but the rest?
Voice Lifts? Toe Tucks? Tongue Patches? Knee Lifts? People actually spend money on these!?
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| Blarg |
[Dec. 8th, 2009|09:19 pm] |
I don't care how late my thesis is right now. I just need to stop and have a rest. I can't articulate recognisable English any more and all I see when I close my eyes are cells and Excel plots.
Goddam thesis just DIE. |
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| Dog Inspires Cat |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|09:58 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Terry Bush , "Maybe Tomorrow" | ] |
2009-11-28
An old episode from the second run of The Littlest Hobo was playing on the television set. It was amusing to see the cat, who was sitting on the couch in front of the TV at the time the show began, get absolutely mesmerised. Perhaps it was the dramatic music. Perhaps the fact that he's of similar colouration as the Tamaskan in the show has something to do with is.
My brother is considering buying the entire series on DVD for the cat as a Christmas gift. |
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| lolly |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|01:04 pm] |
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| 20 Years Later. |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|01:33 pm] |
Today marks 20 years since the École Polytechnique massacre. Fourteen women died in Montréal that day, due to one man's ignorance and insecurity.
To this day, there are still men in Canada who tightly grip their guns the way a poorly-trained dog guards its food bowl from anyone within a two-metre radius. They display the same ignorance of their fellow humans' intentions and insecurity of their manhood that Marc Lépine displayed. These men, frightened of anything they do not understand and unable to establish their "manliness" any other way, worship their firearms and rail against this country's gun registry as if it were a personal affront.
Today is a day to remember why the federal gun registries were created: not to persecute people, but to make an effort to protect them; not to suspend people's rights and freedoms, but to better defend them; not to make criminals out of people who hunt for their food, but because efforts needed to be made to keep firearms out of the hands of madmen.
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