Author: Dave

Wierd Signage

The other day on one of the wards I saw a sign that made me do a double take because it seemed so incongruous.

It was attached to a Zip hot water system, and I’ve included a picture of it below, but owing to the poor image quality I’ll also tell you what it said:

1161
Caution: Boiling water. Do not use to wash hands.

I mean seriously!??! would anyone honestly be dumb enough to try and use water out of a zip to wash their hands???

Presumably they must have for the signs to be necessary, but I would think they would have to be a serious contender for a darwin award.

What is a lift?

One of the things I found most disconcerting after the September 11 attacks was a story I heard about an american journalist who went into Afghanistan before the american invasion, and was showing afghani villagers pictures in glossy magazines of the world trade towers collapsing, and asking them what they thought about the attacks. The interesting thing which put many things in perspective, was that there were many villagers who commented that it was sad that so many people had died, but that they had never known that buildings could be built that tall, and additionally a number of them were fascinated by the magazine, having never seen a glossy magazine before in their life.

It created a nice contrast of priorities, when we were so outraged that 5000 people had been killed, but weren’t even aware, let alone concerned, that there were many people in the world who were so poor that they had never known highrises or magazines even existed (although whether this in fact made them very lucky is a matter for debate at another time) (and lets not even begin to get into illiteracy rates).

Now the reason that I was reminded of this story is because the other day I was on the ground floor of the hospital and an old aboriginal lady asked me how to get to one of the medical wards. I told her that it was on the 4th floor, and she asked me if I could take her there. She seemed quite nervous and so I took her up in the lift to the ward, and it was only afterwards that I realised that the probable reason for the request was that prior to coming to the hospital it was quite concievable that she had never been inside or operated a lift before.

I actually remember being told about this situation in some lecture in medical school, but it wasn’t until I experieced it that it hammered home the disparity of development that exists, even over relatively small distances within a supposedly first world country.

If (as I suspect) she had been flown in for treatment from a remote aboriginal community on the Cape or in the gulf, or even from one of the torres straight islands, then she may actually not have seen a building taller than 2 or 3 storeys. I take lifts for granted. For her it may have been a completely new and (at the age of 70-odd) frightening experience.

Water water everywhere

For the last week or so it has been raining in cairns. A lot!

You may have even seen it on the news, with flooded streets and overflowing dams (oh how the residents of Brisbane must be jealous).

I have been finding it fun because I don’t recall the last time I was somewhere that it rained for 4 days straight, and being in the tropics, it has meant that I have been able to go outside in the (warm) rain and jump in puddles and generally exercise my inner child.

There has even been a bit of surface flooding on our lawn, but it’s a pretty sandy base with several drains, so it never gets beyond being a centimetre of water covering everything, and certainly doesn’t come close to flooding our house.

So all things as they are it’s been kind of fun to watch the clouds roll over the hills behind our house looking all grey and rain laden, and a few minutes later to hear the thumping of big fat raindrops on our roof.

Suburban insecurity

One of the things I have noticed in our house, parked as it is in the middle of suburbia, is the preponderance of wireless networks in our area.

Not only do we have good reception on our own wireless modem, we can see at least 4 others depending on where you are standing in the house.

This says something quite interesting about the extent to which networking hardware and fast broadband internet connections have become mainstream technologies.

The other thing that this has illustrated is that you can make technology simple and accessable, but as much as you spell it out in the installation instructions you can’t make make people take security seriously. Of those wireless networks I mentioned, only 2 had any form of security set up on them. The others were open for anyone to see/use/access/hack. I imagine that it simple constitutes ignorance on the part of the owners, but if they knew how much a person parked outside their house could access, I think they’d be pretty disturbed.

Neuroanatomy makes brain go splat

Well, I’m officially into the study for the surgical part 1 exam, and I’ve been reading all about neuroanatomy, and it makes my brain hurt.

I find myself looking forward to going to work, so I can give my brain a rest, and try and loose the feeling that there is someone standing beside me as I study slowly packing more and more cotton wool through my ears into my skull.

That said I am beginning to wonder why they weren’t more insistent that we learn this more thoroughly when we were in med school. I still feel that there’s not much point in forcing everyone to learn detailed anatomy if they’re not going to use it (similar to making everyone learn biochemical pathways they’ll never use again), but the chapter I am currently reading would have been a good thing to examine, because it lays the groundwork of general principles and basic details that everyone would probably benefit from.

I keep on having “Oh, right, that makes sense”, and “Riiight, so that’s how that works” moments, and I can only assume that I will end this year an awful lot more knowledgeable than when I started, having finally been forced to read all the text books that I was too slack to read properly while I was at med school (it also presumably helps that I have a better practical contextual framework to place the knowledge in now than I did then).

Bye bye DRM

Arguments against digital rights management (DRM) systems frequently claim that they inconvenience legitimate customers, while not offering the media owners any real protection because those who want to get around the protection will do so (usually sooner rather than later).

To reinforce this point there have been 2 interesting pieces of news recently.

Firstly someone has shown a way to bypass the content protection on both of the next generation DVD formats (HD-DVD and Blueray). These had been touted as being highly secure so that people could not backup/copy/use in an “unaurthorised manned” the movies they contained, but for all their efforts they are back to where they started, having secured nothing, and inconvenienced legitimate customers (there are frequent reports of people not being able to play HD movies they had legitimately bought, because the DVD’s DRM didn’t consider their hardware setup sufficiently secure).

Next is a report that almost as soon as it had been released, someone has managed to bypass the much vaunted “Protected Media Path” (PMP) within Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. As I understand it, PMP is supposed to stop other programs from listening in on and recording audio and video content between the processor and the speakers or the screen, thus eliminating another way that popular software commonly copies digital media. There are no specific details at the moment of exactly how this hack works, but you can bet that it will either be released shortly, or someone else will take up the challenge and release their method. Between this, several other reported hacks, and a number of viruses already spreading that effect Vista, Microsoft’s “Most secure OS ever” is starting to look not that secure after all.

Want Japanese Music?

Slate has an interesting piece on buying music from iTunes stores other than the one for your specific country.

It uses the example of Japanese songs that you can’t buy through iTunes America, but can buy through itunes Japan (if you live in Japan), mainly it seems because the author has a slightly unhealthy fascination with obscure Japanese pop and rock bands, but that’s neither here nor there.

It ponders why the music companies cannot come up with some arrangement so that you can buy music from overseas iTunes stores (after all, a sale is revenue for them, and denying it decreases their profit and promotes file sharing to get music), and also has some interesting comments on the various ways people routinely work around these restrictions, which is something I hadn’t read about before (apparently you can easily buy legit prepaid iTunes cards for other countries on popular auction websites, and then just buy songs using those).

Interesting read anyway.

General update

As you will probably have gathered from my previous post about Jack’s hectic life recently, we have been a bit busy.

Simone finished her six months at Nabour just before christmas with no particular desire to return there any time soon (there may or may not have been some hand based gestures in the general direction of the hospital as she packed up her car and drove off down the road).

We then spent 2 weeks over christmas in NZ visiting my family, and seeing my beloved wellington again. It ended up being quite abusy holiday and there wasn’t quite as much general relaxing as we might have liked.

My parents’ cat died late last year, and so it was a bit sad and unusual having christmas without a cat (it’s kind of a family tradition that all the wrapping paper goes in a pile on the floor that the cat can then play in).

After that we returned to Brisbane to pack up our stuff and move house. I had to return to work, but Simone had the last week off on holidays still and so she packed our house (well, read her book while the guys paid for by the hospital packed our house) and then flew up to Cairns to find a house for us to live in.

She found us a good one, and at the end of the week I too flew up to Cairns and we moved into our house.

Due to the fact that there are a number of new housing estates being built about 20 minutes out or central cairns there were a lot of 4 bedroom houses for rent at similar or cheaper prices than smaller places slightly closer to town, so we ended up getting a house which realistically is spectacularly too big for our actual needs, but it damn comfortable all the same.

It also means that if anyone is passing through Cairns and needs a place to stay we again have a spare room with a double bed and air conditioning in it.

Following that we both started work. The hospital itself seems really nice and laid back (although we have already found that the admin seems to be a bit more disorganised than previous hospitals we’ve worked at (if that’s even possible)).

We haven’t had much chance to get out and do much in Cairns or it’s surrounds yet due to house unpacking and Simone being on call last weeked, but I can already see that I’m going to have a great time here in winter exploring the surrounding rain forests etc (at the moment you’re hard pressed to get me out the door – I step outside, start immediately perspiring, mutter something along the lines of “Ooof. It’s hot” and head back to the air conditioning).

So that’s what’s up with us. I should have regular internet access again in about a week, so hopefully I will begin updating this regularly after that.

Jack’s hectic month

Jack has, over the last month or so, had to put up with some rather major impositions to his usual lazy lifestyle.

Firstly, over christmas, while Simone and I went to NZ to see my folks, Jack took his first trip to the cattery. Apparently he settled in pretty quickly, but I think he was pleased when we came to collect him.

Then he had to put up with strange people coming to his house and packing up all the stuff, leaving him with ony his mum and dad, two suitcases, and a blow up mattress to interact with. How boring!

Then shortly after that was the further indignity of being put in a carry case for a plane ride to cairns, and another stay in a cattery while Simone went looking for a house.

Finally we moved in to the house, recieved all our stuff, and picked jack up again, so that he could “help” us unpack everything. He likes the new house, because it’s big so that he can rn around and spend his time between different rooms, but dislikes it because it’s in an unfamiliar neighbourhood with a couple of little yappy dogs in the house next door, and no easy way for him to get in and out without us opening a door.

Jack tells me that all in all he’s had enough adventure for the time being, and would like a nice calm month or two, and a tall scotch (if that’s not asking too much).

Surely too good to be true

Something that I have seen popping up in a couple of places now is some research out of Canada purporting to show a cure for diabetes (albeit in an animal model).

It almost sounds too good to be true: Inject a drug into the mice and have their diabetes disappear overnight, and some of the mice remained “cured” for more than 4 months with a single injection.

Normally I would be rather skeptical about this kind of thing, given that it blatantly flies in the face of the current understanding of how diabetes works, but it looks as though they’ve done their homework, and the work is also being published in the Journal Cell, which is probably one of the most prestigious biological journals around.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see if it translates into human clinical trials…