something inside me just moved

I've been getting interested in parasites lately. I watched a couple vids of some remarkable behavioral changes that occur in the host. for instance, whipworms, after having matured inside a grasshopper, will influence the grasshopper's brain chemistry to the extent that the grasshopper will make a suicide plunge into water. then the whipworms burst out in a sick gory display and mate, which they aren't able to do unless they're submerged in h2o. search youtube for whipworms if you're interested. the prevalence of parasites in organisms, combined with the fact that some parasites have host behavior changing abilities, leads me to wonder if parasites influence human behavior to a much larger extent than anyone believes.

napkin scribbling

a few weeks ago I had the option of going to a party but when invited declined because I had homework. this would've been fine, except that when my friends' responses were the typical "ah shucks, that sux" I reassured them that I was actually looking forward to working on it. this they didn't understand. oh, I certainly know why homework is often cast in a negative light among students, and I completely agree that much of the homework assigned throughout elementary and high school was stupid sick shite. but when it comes to avoiding upper division university assignments, there's reason to be concerned. I'll use quotations to put it another way. "wait, so you're saying you dislike doing the coursework you're required to do to get a degree in the profession of your choosing? I would take that to be a warning sign that I had chosen the wrong major." banking on the inkling that your university coursework will be nothing like the work you do when you get out of academia isn't worth the risk. don't make career decisions based on salaries. decide what kind of work you'd be most excited to get out of bed for every morning. this post is eerily close to advice giving, which I apologize for, and which makes me feel old.

one hand heavier than the other

when you're anxious, maybe let anxiousness have its time. and if it sticks around longer than is comfortable, maybe think about things that compliment each other. for instance, plants exhale the inhalations of animals and vice versa. but thinking about things that compliment each other should be done with caution, because you run the risk of encountering asymmetry, which would invite anxiety to unpack its bags again. it's probably easiest to illustrate my point using the plant/animal relationship that was initially thought of as complementary. upon closer inspection, it's clear that the gaseous exhalations of plants are only oxygen, whereas the inhalations of animals are composed mostly of nitrogen, as dictated by the composition of our atmosphere. what's worse, some of the nitrogen inhaled is dissolved and actually used by the body, so it isn't as if you can discount the inhalation of nitrogen as irrelevant on the grounds that it's all exhaled. and so an asymmetry exists between the respiration requirements of plants and animals, and this asymmetry can be unnerving. the moral of this story is that when mulling over complementary systems, you should either be very confident that the systems will remain complementary regardless of how closely you're analyzing them, or you should observe them from afar. luckily, you can often make an emergency call to a linguist for help, and they will assure you that since your name starts with 'A', you have only to stand on one side of a dividing line, with Asymmetry situated at an equal distance from the line, in order to generate symmetry and kick anxiety out.

reverse placebo

over the course of 4 months everyone in a household of 6 gets sick. the first 5 to get sick fall ill with the common cold. the 6th inhabitant to get sick contracts "sickness 1a", which has initial symptoms identical to those experienced by the other members of the household but which is actually a deadly virus. given the recent history of sickness in the household, the 6th inhabitant has every reason to believe that he/she has simply fallen ill with the same cold everyone else in the house either had or currently has. in a curious triumph of mind over body, the 6th inhabitant overcomes a virus that would've killed them if they hadn't been under the impression that they merely had the cold everyone else had had. possible? probably. likely? probably not, but it's a worthy procrastination thought. I think it's pretty established that attitude has influence on recovery from sickness and that companionship even with only a pet is beneficial.

sowing seeds on organic land

Anne Wojcicki, wife of google co-founder Sergey Brin, has been getting some publicity recently for her work as co-founder of 23andMe, a silicon valley startup that will sequence 500,000 of the 3 billion single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that make up the human genome for the price of $1000 and your spit. the idea is to determine a person's risk of developing a variety of diseases. there are a couple problems with this, which 23andMe is by no means trying to deny. first, sequencing all 3 billion SNPs is too cost prohibitive, but sequencing anything less means you're inevitably unable to screen for some things. this isn't too big of a problem. increases in computation power, as dictated by moore's law, will force the price of getting the entire human genome sequenced to be affordable. the bigger problem is that scientists haven't figured out how to link very many diseases with dna mutations. it might be nice if every disease had a unique genetic marker that consisted of only a few nucleic acids arranged in a particular order, something that was easy to identify, so a geneticist could say "yeah, sir, you're going to die of parkinson's." but if things were that easy, lots of researchers would be out of jobs. even if it has been determined that someone is predisposed to developing a certain cancer, figuring out at how much greater risk they are relative to the general population is hardly more than guesswork. this problem, like the lack of computational power, will be solved with time. as the pool of sequenced human genomes grows larger, new associations between disease and dna will surface and become clearer. maybe the biggest problem is that this research is incapable of accounting for environmental factors, unless these factors have altered the dna. the previous three paragraphs aren't the point of this post. I don't often write about news. I included them because it might have been from having read an article about 23andMe that I got to thinking about this: in the interest of longevity and health, collect sperm and egg samples from donors and coarsely monitor the donors' health until they die. the sperm and egg samples from donors who die under the age of 90 or from something other than "natural causes" are used for research or thrown out. the remaining samples are genetically healthy enough to be used for procreation. I would be a sick doctor.