Funny cheque

This is the best cheque I have ever received. I got $5 per draw for two 50 mL blood samples = $10 - okay so that's just a good lunch - but it says CD1d T cells on it!!!

(It was for a lab that studies natural killer T (NKT) cells and autoimmunity. The reason they need such big volumes of human blood is because NKTs are rare.)

Babyproofing

[a while ago]
L: They told me to take like eight ibuprofen and have a friend drive me there. I was like "It can't possibly be that painful!" so I didn't take enough ibuprofen. I drove home in agony.

Mama: You know in Malaysia they banned IUDs for women who haven't been pregnant before?

[some time this afternoon...]
Me: I feel okay actually. That was less painful than I was afraid it would be based on what you told me and my friend's experience.
Gynaecology CPN: Good! We like it when it's not as bad as people expect.
Me: I have one more question. I normally use a menstrual cup for my periods; can I put it back in later or should I use something else? *
CPN: You should use pads for the rest of your period. We don't want to go sticking anything else up there for a while.

Good thing I decided to get this done well ahead of me and Potatoboy's wedding then...

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* Apparently you're supposed to go for IUD/IUS insertion when you're on your period because the cervix is somewhat open. It's more difficult and occasionally impossible to install them in nulliparas. I was tempted to giggle before the cramps kicked in because the sound of the metal tools clanking reminded me of myself repairing a bicycle [insert bad joke here].

Response to "My Monkey" and "Monkey business" letters

This is a response to an article on nonhuman primate testing in the Isthmus weekly and the follow-up letters in this week's issue, all but one of which were extremely anti-animal testing.

Animal rights groups like to portray scientists as sadists torturing large numbers of animals. This is a pretty stupid accusation if you know anything about how animal testing really works, because a) the damn things are expensive. People buy pet store mice for less than a buck. If you had to pay $40 for a mouse, you would treat it very nicely, and you also wouldn't go out and buy several dozen of them unless you had a very good reason. Primates cost THOUSANDS. b) You get better data out of a group of healthy, happy animals than a group of animals where some are OK and some are sick or hurt. If - if - all of the stuff that the guy wrote in that article was true, the monkeys get worse treatment than our mice.

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Dear Editors,

“We shouldn't test drugs on monkeys because 92% of drugs that pass nonhuman primate studies fail in clinical trials" is specious because the occurrence of adverse side effects that can be allowed for a human drug is so extremely low. Human clinical trials involve dozens, hundreds, then thousands of people. If for instance 0.5% of them have heart attacks, this is unacceptable but wouldn't have been detected in a study of a dozen monkeys, even when the drug has the same effect on monkeys as humans.

The only alternative would be to take drugs only tested in vitro or in mice and put them straight into humans, which I don't think would be acceptable to anyone. Of course there are some alternative medicine fans who believe that most of modern medicine is a conspiracy, but the vast majority of people reading this will have benefited from modern drugs and other therapies at some point in their lives, and all of these have been tested in animal models.

Yes, a monkey is not the same as a human, nor is a mouse. But with our existing technology, no amount of testing in vitro can replicate the fantastic complexity of a live creature, so they're the best we've got. Scientists are not sadists out to torture the maximum number of animals. We are workers with limited budgets to keep expensive animals, and humans with hearts. "Reduce, refine, and replace" is in
everyone's interest, but replacement is not always possible.

Sincerely,

I noticed that Rick Bogle (founder of the Primate Freedom Project) used the word "vivisectors" in his letter. "Vivisection" harks back to the days when people would tie up and cut up screaming animals without anaesthesia because many people believed that animals weren't actually capable of feeling pain. Nobody believes that any more, and any good IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) will reject out of hand a protocol that includes severely painful procedures - basically, anything worse than a blood sample or an injection - without anaesthesia. Even leaving aside that many people go into biology because we like animals, putting an animal under that much suffering would give you screwy results from the stress.

I strongly recommend reading CS Lewis' essay "On Vivisection" especially if you're Christian. I think this is the full version, many of the other versions floating around the Internet been selectively chopped up and censored. He writes about the tremendous sense of awe and responsibility which a Christian researches owes to God's creatures on whom he or she is inflicting pain. (He uses "trembling awe" but I certainly don't want to be trembling when I give a little baby chick an intravenous injection.)

"Reduce, refine, replace"; scientific reasons for minimizing pain and stress; the divine mandate to take care of Creation. Because of the world we live in, we have to keep using animals, but keeping all these things in mind.

The Pain of the Problem of Pain

My Bible study group usually does "weird stuff" for the summer to mix things up a bit. Since it's a grad student Bible study, our meetings tend to be kind of like seminar classes...everybody reads the text then we chew it over. Two summers ago, we did some of the Apocrypha, and last year we did medieval Christianity. Let me tell you, Wycliffe in the original is very funny to read.

Anyway this summer we're doing CS Lewis' "The Problem of Pain" on Brian's suggestion. I've read maybe 3/4 of Lewis' books, but not this one yet.

Some people accuse Lewis of being sexist (e.g. Philip Pullman advertising his His Dark Materials trilogy as the atheist kids' alternative to the Chronicles of Narnia), but frankly they're failing to keep in mind that Lewis was writing in the '40s and '50s and is considerably less sexist than the average male from that time. I am also informed that the books that were written after he got married are better in that regard than those written when he was a crusty bachelor, like this one. Nevertheless, this is a really, REALLY bad phrasing:

...the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.

I guess that, by being totally grossed out by this sentence, I'm leaving myself vulnerable to the medieval accusation that women are sinful creatures obsessed with sex. But seriously, eugh.

Things I want to do after tomorrow

Things I want to do after my MS defense tomorrow, in no particular order:

• Make chocolate-chip macadamia nut cookies
• Get my primary computer backed up and sent for repair
• Fix my housemate's cat tree which is about to fall down cos it was built for 4 lb kittens not 14 lb cats
• Start looking for air tickets
• Start looking for JOBS, damnit
• Go to the mall and spend half a day walking around aimlessly without spending money
• Work on my secret weapon DNA repair idea
• Run IgA ELISAs on the chicken nasal and tracheal washes to see if it worked
• Build a little table to put my fishtank on
• Finish building Paper-Replika.com's Wall*E and EVE models (fantastic quality but Wall*E has a million parts)
• Give my cat a haircut so she stops vomiting hairballs around my bedroom
• Try to grow loofahs and poppies
• Make a graph of how many people per day notice [censored for experimental purposes], if I don't say anything about it
• Watch Terminator: Salvation
• Read novels every day
• Call my parents
• Write and submit a story to the Writers of the Future contest

Lear spam

Edward Lear is my favourite nonsense writer. This piece of spam is great!

My top 15 books

Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.

1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Historical murder mystery with lots of debates about the power of reason, the Church, language, literature, etc.
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He always intended it to be one volume but the publisher made him split it. It was finally republished as one volume shortly before the Peter Jackson movies came out, but I still like the watercolours he made for the covers of the 3-volume set my parents have.
3. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Sociological and evolutionary evidence for the existence of a hardwired human nature, and why it's necessary to morality whereas the modern and postmodern view of an infinitely malleable tabula rasa is not.
4. Where Monsoons Meet by anonymous. Cartoon history of Malaysia from the Malacca Sultanate, through colonization, to independence and the Emergency. The subtitle "A People's History" should have clued me in to where the author(s) were coming from, but I first read it at about age 12. It totally ruined my education since I never believed anything we were taught in Sejarah class after that.
5. I want to put one Asimov book in this list and can't decide between Foundation's Edge and the Robot Dreams anthology.
6. Mat Som by Lat. Graphic novel about a young guy from the kampung trying to make a living in KL. I have both the original and Adibah Amin's English translation; she seems to have done a decent job.
7. Where There Is No Doctor by David Werner. The bible for rural healthcare workers. I first read it at age 7 or so and that's what got me started on infectious diseases. I have a faint memory of carrying a book as big as my torso into the kitchen to ask "Mama, how do you pronounce T-E-T-A-N-U-S?"
8. Gilbert's Developmental Biology. Best college textbook I've ever owned. Beautiful illustrations and photos.
9. Gods That Failed by Vinoth Ramachandra. An overview of the false gods of this age (including a few movements from within the church itself).
10. The Sandman - well, yes, it's either 75 comic books or 10 paperback, so not technically "a book". But it's arguably a continuous story arc, and definitely by the same author. Maybe I should just get the 4-volume Absolute Sandman eventually.
11. CRC Press' Recombinant Poxviruses. My favourite work-related book, very comprehensive. A lot of new stuff has been done in the 17 (!) years since its publication, but it's a good overview of poxvirus biology and what to do with them.
12. Kine by A.R. Lloyd. Watership Down for predators - valiant English weasels fighting an invasion of the evil American mink (note: Mink are also in the weasel family but they mass about 20 times and measure about three times the length of Least Weasels. They became an invasive species in the UK after being introduced for fur farming, which is another reason Fur Is Bad).
13. Watership Down by Richard Adams. Er...I guess you can tell I like animals.
14. Sejarah Melayu by Tun Sri Lanang ("Sejarah Melayu" means "The History of the Malays"). My Malay sucks so reading this was a struggle but worthwhile. It starts out very fairytaleish and legendary (e.g. descendant of Alexander the Great travels from India to Indonesia in a magic bubble under the ocean) and becomes more historical as you move forward in time. The part near the end that describes the Portuguese slaughter of the Malaccans who had never seen firearms, made me cry.
15. Infinity's Shore by David Brin (and the rest of his Uplift series). I think many physicists who write science fiction tend to be lacking in their understanding of human nature and write wooden, stereotyped characters (Stephen Baxter being a spectacularly bad example), but Brin does great characters of all stripes - both human and non-. Also, he does very funny aliens. One of the few exceptions to my rule that if an author feels the need to put a cast of characters and glossary up front, that means he/she did a crappy job of introducing them in the story. His Civilization of the Five Galaxies is HUGE.

OK...I disobeyed the instruction to "don't take too long" since I just spent 15 minutes writing this.

Doing Spock

"I still think Zachary Quinto did a great job. The other guy they were considering for the part was Adrien Brody."
"Who?"
"You saw The Pianist, right?"
"Oh, him. No, I don't think so."
"He's got that lean physique and serious demeanour though. I think he could have done Spock."
"These days, only Uhura's doing Spock."

"Yeah, yeah, I made a dirty joke, okay?"
"I'm laughing 'cos that's the first dirty joke I've ever heard you make. Your halo is cracking!"
"Hey! I want it back!"

"This is going on my blog."
"You know my mom reads your blog?"
"She has a right to know what her son's up to."
"Er...my mom likes dirty jokes."

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The Memory Alpha wiki has separate entries for the alternate reality characters from the new movie, which I think is a very sensible way to handle it.