What I've Learnt Today

"I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then." ─ Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

[ilgwa]

Sign language

This week I attented the first of two three-hour sign language classes. I would like to think that my motivation was to become a better doctor thanks to overcoming a communication barrier and to do my part towards creating a more inclusive society. What actually motivated me though was a video I watched of a Disneyworld Tinkerbell fairy talking in sign language to a deaf little girl who then is totally amazed and excited. It's funny how these little things affect my actions. Anyhow, the class was aimed at medical students and thus covered expression used in clinical doctor patient interaction. We first learned basic things like the alphabet and numbers. Then we practiced a simple dialogue to introduce ourselves and lastly learned some specific medical vocabulary. Doing sign language for the first time has been extremely fun to me, and I would highly recommend to anyone. It is important to use arms, hands and facial expressions in addition to lip movements thereby making the act of communicating much more engaging and stimulating. Moreover, it is a very playful language. Many gestures are very intuitive (like for example "child" being expressed by tapping on the heads of three kids), and a lot of times I was laughing out of surprise and marvel at how words could be expressed in simple motions of the hand. I'm very much looking forward to the second class next week!

[ilgwa]

When you just wanna play some games, but your phone reminds you that you fail at life.

[ilgwa]

Starting The Easter Weekend

This morning, I took care of an elderly lady in the hospital who was diagnosed with gastrointestinal inflammations. She also suffered from acohol induced dementia, so as I am writing this she will have already forgotten that I existed. Despite being grumpy, very confused and occasionally lashing at the nurses, she was one of those cute huddled old people that unitentionally say funny things. I have no clue what I will be like in sixty years - I don’t even know if I’ll live that long - but being cute wouldn’t be too bad. I’ve already mastered the art of unintentionally saying inapproriate things, so I guess I’m already halfway there :D

In the afternoon, I participated in my medschool’s quarterly budget meeting. Supposedly, I represent the interests of the medschool’s student body, but the topics hardly ever touch upon the quality of our tuition. It’s normally a lot of talk about numbers, tables and powerpoint presentations that hardly make any sense and its always a little awkward for me to ask the people representing the faculty, doctors and accountants what those numbers mean. Learning about the finances is still fascinating, as it involves the medical teaching, the scientific research and the hospital work. And it’s also nice to see the faces of the people that run that place.

Plus, I learned that getting a proper door for my room costs me three hospital shifts’ earnings. Well, thank god I don’t have plans for the weekend. Anymore.

[ilgwa]

Mountain Moon Volcano, by Louis Graham

Never stop teaching yourself new things!

[ilgwa]

Grad School, Driving School

Phew! So today I go that presentation out of the way that I needed to give in front of my lab members. As predicted, only my boss asked a lot of questions - and 3 out of 15 other members which is actually above average. My boss seemed more or less satisfied, although he raised some good points. Basically, my project is about applying mass spectrometry to cancer diagnostics. It turned out that I have focused too much on the technical aspect how to conduct mass spectrometry and forgot to take into account, what is actually happening and most important within a cancer cell. Overall a fruitful discussion, although it left me with more to do.

My third driving school lesson took place tonight, so these days I’m not only learning about biomedicine but also how to control a car. Yay, trying to be an adult! So far it’s pretty relaxed - 17 year olds get driving licences, so it should not be too hard anyways, I guess. In today’s lesson, I learnt that truck drivers are the most proficient drivers out there, that they drive millions of kilometers during their career, and that one should not try to argue with them. In a previous lesson, we were also taught that trains always have the right of way, which seems like a clever traffic rule to reduce the number selfrightous car driver hit by trains - for example on one of Germany’s 50,000 stree/railroad intersections (fun fact!).

[currentsinbiology]

How Blood Pressure Works by Wilfred Manzano

Published on Jul 23, 2015

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-blood-p… If you lined up all the blood vessels in your body, they’d be 60 thousand miles long. And every day, they carry the equivalent of over two thousand gallons of blood to the body’s tissues. What effect does this pressure have on the walls of the blood vessels? Wilfred Manzano gives the facts on blood pressure. Lesson by Wilfred Manzano, animation by Fox Animation Domination High-Def.

[ilgwa]

These videos make it seem so easy and I always freak out when I imagine having to explain anything body related :D

[ilgwa]

Scientific Progress, Political Deterioration

Wow, what a slow Sunday. Ironically, I didn’t learn much today although I actually tried to revise as much as possible for my upcoming oral exam >.< Well, here we go:

I started the day, learning about three ways to introduce foreign DNA into cells. The first is via plasmids, circular DNA strands typically found in bacteria. They can easily pass from cell to cell, and thus after pairing them with some DNA can introduce novel sequences. The second way is via retroviruses that can transcribe RNA into DNA and then put the DNA into the host’s genome using integrases. The thirs way is a mixture between the former two. I then went on to learn about Transciption.

This ties into the scientific paper I read for tomorrow’s “journal club” in the lab. The paper described how a technique called Crispr can be used to destroy genes in vivo. This technique uses RNA complimentary to the target gene to bind to the gene and then uses Cas9 to make changes in the gene. This technique receives a lot of attention these days as it is becoming a very easy way to genetically modify living organisms. It has been used to treat degenartive eye diseases in rats and can modify human stem cells, as researchers in China have shown.

On another note, there were elections in three German federal states today. A formerly unelected right-wing party with disturbing resentment towards both the EU and Non-Europeans received double digit percentages of the votes. Quite an unpleasant surprise, especially since there are upcoming elections Berlin as well.

As a follow up to yesterday’s entry: Go world champion Lee Sedol finally managed to secure a victory in the 4th match against the computer program AlphaGo! What an amazing testament to his willpower :D

[ilgwa]

First Aid, Go, and Jennifer Lawrence

Today, I went to a first aid training course. Being a medical student, I expected a boring recap of things I already knew, and like often when I have low expectations I ended up very pleasently surprised. I learnt how to

position a unconscious person in order to prevent them from choking,

perform CPR to reanimate someone who is not breathing,

act in response to the most frequent accidents,

among many other things. It was also super useful for me, because I have an exam in three weeks (OMG is it only three weeks already?!) which will also test my first aid skills.

This morning, the Go world champion Lee Sedol was beaten by the Computer program AlphaGo. I managed to watch the last few moments of the decisive match. I was glad to witness it live and at the same time sad to watch Lee Sedol resign. As a mathematician/bioinformatician, AlphaGo’s victory makes perfect sense to me, since Go is essentially a complicated maths problems and machines are good at maths. Still, it saddened to me, because my Go teacher used to tell me that Go was too complicated for computers, but that humans were able to play it thanks to their intuition. I have only achieved the 5th kyu and yet I feel that some of Go’s magic has been taken away. My brother who is a much better Go player than me felt even stronger about it and this makes me wonder how the community as a whole will react.

Lastly, I’ve watched The Silver Linings Playbook for the third or fourth time now because it happened to be shown on TV tonight. It is a beautiful movie about two characters played by Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper dealing with their psychic illnesses. Since watching it the first time, I have started medschool and worked a lot in a psychiatric ward. So tonight I was actually able to appreciate how well both Lawrence and Cooper portray the difficulties in the perception of and connection to the people around you stemming from psychic illnesses.

Oh, and it reminded me to register for dancing classes!

[msflamingo]

Peter Freuchen and his second wife Dagmar Freuchen-Gale, in a photo taken by Irving Penn in 1947. Freuchen is a top candidate for the Most Interesting Man in the World. Standing six feet seven inches, Freuchen was an arctic explorer, journalist, author, and anthropologist. He participated in several arctic journeys (including a 1000-mile dogsled trip across Greenland), starred in an Oscar-winning film, wrote more than a dozen books (novels and nonfiction, including his Famous Book of the Eskimos), had a peg leg (he lost his leg to frostbite in 1926; he amputated his gangrenous toes himself), was involved in the Danish resistance against Germany, was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis before escaping to Sweden, studied to be a doctor at university, his first wife was Inuit and his second was a Danish margarine heiress, became friends with Jean Harlow and Mae West, once escaped from a blizzard shelter by cutting his way out of it with a knife fashioned from his own feces, and, last but certainly not least, won $64,000 on The $64,000 Question.

[neil-gaiman]

Just when you start thinking you’ve had a Real Life, you read something like this and… nope. Not even started.

[ilgwa]

Well I’m sure he also went grocery shopping sometimes which, incidentally, is something I, too, did today. So, basically, I am at least a little like him.

[ilgwa]

What keeps me going

Today, I’ve spent a few hours creating a presentation on the progress of my research. Ideally, these presentations give lab members an idea of what the presenter is working on and educate them about some research related to their field. In practice, however, my group leader is often the only member of the audience interacting with the presenting person (and also the most important member). After realizing this, I restarted my presentation from scratch, only including things of interest to my group leader (results, results, results!), which made the presentation much more concise and lucid.

In the end, making the presentation took much longer than initially anticipated (as always). I also had some long discussions during the creation of the presentation with some lab colleagues who were kind enough to give me some feedback. Unfortunately, I ended up talking back to a senior colleague on a topic with which I was far less familiar than him.

On my way home from work, I started wondering what made me work in research where (as in any profession when you start out) there is little personal gain and external recognition. I came to the conclusion, that for me it was the mixture of learning about the nature of life and the opportunity to create something meaningful for a larger community. It also made me start this blog, because I believe that writing down what I’ve learn motivates me to keep going by remembering what I’ve achieved in the past.

[dadushin]

Got to do the cover and smaller second piece NYT Sunday Review this past weekend.  They accompanied an article written by Kate Bowler in which she addresses god, cancer, mortality, and the prosperity gospel. 

[currentsinbiology]

Looking forward to reading this.

German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

After the publication in May of Mr. Wohlleben’s book, a surprise hit titled “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World,” the German forest is back in the spotlight. Since it first topped best-seller lists last year, Mr. Wohlleben has been spending more time on the media trail and less on the forest variety, making the case for a popular reimagination of trees, which, he says, contemporary society tends to look at as “organic robots” designed to produce oxygen and wood.

PRESENTING scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and talk-show audiences alike with the news — long known to biologists — that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.

 “When I say, ‘Trees suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.” PETER WOHLLEBEN. Credit: Gordon Welters for The New York Times                    

[ryannorth]

Every Book I Read in 2015

This is inspired by Emily’s list, which you should go read too!  

My resolution in 2015 was to read 52 books in 52 weeks, which I exceeded!  These books are listed in the order I read them. Comics are only included if they’re book-length or if it ran for a year and I read every issue (Demon is the only one that meets that criteria, I think).  A * is a re-read.  

My resolution in 2016 is to read more non-fiction!

There’s a lot of Marvel history stuff at the beginning of the year because I hah hah hah there’s lots I don’t know about Marvel, WHOOOOPS

Fade In by Michael Piller - this is an unpublished book by the late Michael Piller, who did a lot of great work on Star Trek, talking about his first motion picture screenwriting credit: Star Trek Insurrection, aka Nobody’s Favourite Star Trek Movie.  It’s a really brave book, taking you from initial idea through first treatment, notes from Paramount, feedback from the actors, second drafts, shooting scripts, cuts made for budget reasons, up to release, and then a post-mortem where he talks about what, in retrospect, he would’ve liked to have changed.  It was fascinating, and made me appreciate Insurrection in a new light.  The final film has its problems, but Piller asks you what you’d do differently, and you can see pieces of the film he was trying to make left there still.  If you’re interested in both writing and Star Trek, this is an ideal book for you!  Unpublished (apparently Paramount changed their mind when they saw the manuscript), but available online if you Google it.  I devoured this book and read it in two days.

Demon by Jason Shiga - I LOVE JASON SHIGA.  The premise for this comic is great, the way it’s explored is great, everything is great.  Every time I read a Shiga book I learn something new.

Marvel Chronology - my parents got me this for Christmas: a big giant book with lots of pictures, talking about all the characters and stories Marvel did from start to finished.  Oddly, they re-typeset all the comics in it, so the old comics have great retro art and weird lifeless letters.  Still great to fill in the blanks in my Marvel knowledge though!  SQUIRREL GIRL IS BARELY IN IT AT ALL THOUGH, WTF

Weiterlesen

[neil-gaiman]

Be kind to yourself in the year ahead. Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It’s too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand. Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin. Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them. Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2014/12/new-years-wishes-and-gifts.html

This is from Last Year. It’s the one that doesn’t get passed around as much.

(via neil-gaiman)

[markrosewater]

Given the choice between new atogs and no atogs, I would take new atogs. But I would implore you to consider: is having art direction more in line with the older sets really that taboo? Why does everything have to look bland and generic?

Is the modern art “bland and generic”? I think the recent art is the best the game has ever had in its twenty-two year history.

[ilgwa]

Agreed, much more of the world building and background story is depicted in the recent art. However, me (and many others, too, I think) love the early expressionist/abstract style, which has recently sadly only been done in the art of "Voice of Resurgence".

[beatonna]

Wikipedia lady for the day

[biology-online]

Apparently baby stingrays have feet (.gif)