The (SETI) Allen Telescope (previously known as the 1 hectare telescope) is up and running. Now lets see if we can’t find some little green men (and do some pretty damn nifty science in the process…
Author: Dave
Respiration
At the moment I’m going through quite a bit of respiratory physiology, and I can’t help noticing that I constantly become consciously aware of my breathing. I get that thing where I suddenly notice that I’m breathing, pause mid breath, and then have to think for a tic before I remember what comes next and I start breathing normally again.
It doesn’t happen when I’m studying any other kind of physiology, which is why it’s so curious.
Terrorism and kidnapping
The other night while I was cooking dinner Ellen (who I’m sharing a flat with while we are in Dunedin both studying for the exam, and who I worked with at logan last year) looked up from her study and said something to the effect of “You know what, I’m really starting to like Last’s” (which is our (rather wordy) anatomy text book).
I found this rather amusing because I found myself wondering if this was some perverse form of Stockholm Syndrome, the situation where captives come to empathise with and form emotional attachments with their captors.
And baby makes Three
Well actually it’s four, given that Jack is such an integral part of the family.
Today Simone had her first (12 week) ultrasound of our first attempted child. Apparently all is well to date with bones being where they should be and the like. Another 2 months before we get to the good scan (with fingers and brains and heartbeats etc) but it’s still a significant milestone. According to or reckonings it should be cooked and ready on about the 20th of April next year, although for those inquisitive souls out there you may have to wait until then to find out a sex, as we think we’re going to let it be a surprise.
In other related news Simone is planning on taking next year off work, and since Cairns have offered me a non-training job doing Orthopaedics we’re going to be staying in Cairns for another year, which obviously wasn’t the initial plan when we decided to come up, but as they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
Flight of ideas
One of the things I am living about being in Dunedin is the exposure to Academic medicine, with our lecturers as often as not being dual clinicians and researchers. They really know the stuff, and keep on hinting at the bits that are still unresolved, or those tidbits that have recently arisen from exciting research breakthroughs. Having gone through the UQ Med school and worked for Queensland Health (neither of which have administrations even remotely interested in research) it’s unbelievably refreshing to be around other minds who are interested in how things work, not just the fact that they do. (and who do research that involves more that glorified counting and stamp collecting).
For the first time in what seems like years I find myself wandering along a million miles away deep in contemplation of how I could solve some of the problems in Medicine, how I could improve myself, and how I could come to take over the world (or at least become a giant in my little corner of it). I used to get it all the time when I was doing my Biochemistry undergrad degree, but haven’t felt it much since starting studying medicine, and I had forgotten how invigorated and vibrant it made me feel to know of all the big holes that exist in our knowledge just waiting for me to devote a happy life to figuring them out.
Smart
In a fit of profound cleverness (in the “who would have thought of that” department) a photocopier has been invented by Fuji that will copy a page in Japanese, translate it into English, and put the English words on the page in the place of the Japanese ones in the final printout (or English to Japanese if you desire. Unbelievable. Still, I imagine it could create some particularly humorous nonsense sentences when they machine puts the literal translation in but can’t compensate for syntax or meaning.
Also, gotta love those Estonians. Having already tried an internet based national election, they are now moving on to plans for and election where people vote using their mobile phones. Given the amount of info you need to hand over to get a mobile contract, and the fact that the SIM ID is a unique identifier it seems like a pretty clever idea (and one which appeals to both my nerdish and my politically vacal tendencies.
Quotable
Barak Obama has been quoted as saying “I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest”, in relation to the shallow habit of American politicians wearing little American flag lapel pins. He says he doesn’t wear an American flag on his lapel because it has become a substitute for “true patriotism” since Sept. 11.
Now that’s an admirable show of honesty and rationality from a politician. Everyone knows you’re an american, and the fact that you’re vying to serve your country by running for congress or president should be proof enough of your patriotism (if you know anything about how harsh those political races and the subsequent jobs can be), so why wear a badge to emphasise what should already be apparent to all but the dimmest of observers.
Kudos to him (although I’d still vote for Hillary).
Progress
The other day I ran into a question on the college’s practice question bank, which amused me:
A surgeon is planning to mobilise the stomach into the chest to form a conduit after an oesophagectomy for cancer. Which blood vessel will she preserve to maintain its vascularity?
It shouldn’t strike me as surprisingly progressive in this day in age where graduating med classes are 50-60% female, but the colleges have traditionally be quite, well, traditional, and so it was to my mind an amusing and positive indication of acceptance of the changing reality.
Living it up too-busy-to-cook style
Well it’s about time for my inconsistent weekly update from Dunedin.
Another week of heavy tutorial schedules, late nights in the libraries and computer labs, and only slowly improving test result scores.
The weather has remained largely gray, with a few days where you could get away with t-shirts, and then has descended into drizzling and raining for the last 3 days. Not that that really impacts all that much on study, except that occasionally it gives some pretty raindrops in puddles scenes to look out the window at.
With the low price of the (student oriented) restaurants here, Ellen and I have been eating out a lot. There are a lot of good places, and at $10-15 for a main it’s hardly worth going shopping, cooking, and then doing the dishes. We’ve already been to my favorite indian restaurant three times I think. Plus Cambodian, italian, and thai (and Japanese is on the cards). And the upside is that after dinner most of the places are just around the corner from the med school computer lab, so you can pop in a do a quick set of self test questions.
Depressing really when you look at it like that, and amusing when you find yourself in there at 8pm on a friday night, with the only other people there also being people doing the BSE course…
Hi, my name is Dave…
…and it’s been 4 days since my last drink.
Actually that’s something of a lie, as it’s been considerably longer than 3 days since I last drank, but the 3 days is notable because that’s how long I’ve been in Dunedin without making it to the pub (or any other kind of drinking establishment for that matter). Our lecture and tutorial schedule is pretty full on (something that Simone tried to explain to me before I left, but why would I listen to my wife??), and so I have seen the road between out motel and the Med school (which happens to take me past the front windows of the two best bookshops in town (which I also haven’t been into)) and the shops in a 1 block radius of the med school (mainly just the supermarket to be honest).
The town itself has actually changed relatively little in the 6 years I’ve been gone. Sure there are a few new buildings around, and some of the old shops have been replaced with new ones (which is sometimes an improvement, and sometimes not) but there are still students everywhere being pretty studentish (which is now actually quite funny to watch from the standpoint of my additional “maturity”), the weather is still quite pleasantly brisk during the day, but gets cold at night or if you sit still in a lecture theatre for too long (like, say, 5 hours of anatomy lectures back to back…). I also had forgotten about the singular joy of getting up in the middle of the night and having to sit down on a glacial toilet seat.
I have also made it back to my favorite Indian restaurant, which still does my favorite dish (and which I suspect will be seeing a fair bit more of me in the coming weeks – especially at $15 for a main with rice), and have scouted out a few of my other favorite haunts of old for visits at some point in the indeterminate future but for the time being I should continue rea-reading about the ankle joint, whose flexor retinaculum seems to be a personal favorite of the examination board. Really if I wasn’t having to work I could be having a lot of fun.