Epiphany

Papa had TB when he was a small boy. He was sick for a long time. They gave him streptomycin but it made him deaf in one ear.

Pa's secretary Mr. Roberts has a twisted foot that stands on its toes all the time, because that leg is shorter than the other. He had polio when he was small.

I am scared. They're taking us all out of class when there isn't a different class on the timetable. I am in Standard One and still don't feel comfortable in school, in this cage of dark blue pinafore, grey cement floor and wooden desks, trapped by my lack of language.

Teacher is taking us to the hall but instead of lining up two-by-two as we do for assemblies, we're lining up single file. I can hear girls crying.

There are people in all white who look like nurses. There is a needle in my arm that brings sharp, burning pain. I am told to open my mouth and given a drop of bittersweet liquid.

The taste of the liquid triggers a revelation: I know what it is. We have a book at home that has pictures of sick people. It tells you about all kinds of diseases and how to stop them. There is a picture of a boy who has polio with a twisted leg like Mr. Roberts, and a picture of a child taking a drop of liquid in his mouth.

And I think I'm the only kid in this whole class who knows: This needle and this drop are the magic potion of freedom.

---

And that's how I became interested in vaccines at age six. It just took me 17 years to realize.

That which bends up

Saturday September 20, 2008

26 more Chikungunya cases reported in the country, says Health Ministry

KUALA LUMPUR: A total of 150 Chikungunya cases were reported in the country between Sept 7 and 13, an increase of 26 cases from the previous week.

...

So far, the cumulative number of cases reported nationwide are 1,975 with most of them in Johor (1,098), followed by Malacca (471), Perak (193), Negri Sembilan (124), 40 each in Selangor and Pahang, four each in Kelantan and Putrajaya, Sarawak (two) and one each in Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

The disease is spread through Aedes mosquito bites.

...

— Bernama

The average person reading this will think "OK, 26 people demam. Big deal."

To infectious disease researchers, this is damn bloody scary. Chikungunya is an emerging disease in SEA (originally from Africa). There were virtually no cases last year, but now there have been 1098 in Johor alone, 1975 nationwide total.

It's spread through Aedes mosquitoes, which helps (the virus, not us) since it's an animal vector that is already quite plentiful in M'sia.

I'm getting increasingly fed up with science reporting in the mainstream media. This ought to be in BIG RED LETTERS on the front page. Something like EXPLODING AFRICAN VIRUS CRIPPLES THOUSANDS OF MALAYSIANS. Then maybe there would be some decent funding and infrastructure for biotech research.

Phallocracy

I've done so many influenza microneutralization assays by now that I can do them on semi-autopilot and my mind drifts to random topics.

Today I was thinking about a course I took in college called Women in Classical Antiquity. The class was about 15% blur cases like me who were just taking it to fulfil graduation requirements, about 75% underclassmen girls with feminist pretensions, and about 10% actual Classics majors who were almost groaning in pain at the dumb things that everybody else said.

Apparently a lot of hardcore porn during ancient times was painted on these big bowls that look sort of like punch bowls for drinking wine. I don't remember what they were called. Also, back then "symposium" didn't mean an academic conference. It meant a party where guys would get massively drunk and screw girl whores, boy whores, and each other. These were depicted quite explicitly on the wine bowls.

Obviously the lay public doesn't get to see these in museums much.

One of the books we had to read was called "The Reign of the Phallus" by Eva Keuls. That is the real title. I'm not kidding. Obviously Athens wasn't a great place to live if you were a woman - if you were rich, you got married off at puberty and spent your life as someone's little housewife. If you were poor, you were likely someone's slave. There were statues and paintings of guys with huge cocks in places that modern civilization would never put them. But, this author insisted that Athens was SO pervaded by the thrusting, turgid, masculine principle that she called it a "phallocracy".

I don't like it when people make up words for no good reason. Scientists have to make up words when they discover natural phenomena. I mean, you can't go around calling genes or species or minerals by some boring serial numbers forever. But, in the humanities people seem to just make up words arbitrarily for phenomena that some individual thinks is important. There's no consensus on whether this thing actually exists or not or is worthy of its own nomenclature. Each one of them lives on the little planet of "me".

Phallocracy just sounds plain silly. It conjures up a mental image of giant animated penises in Congress. Furthermore, it clouds communication. You shouldn't make up a word that nobody but you knows the meaning of when an alternative word or short phrase would do - for instance, in this case something like "male supremacy". I'm trying to think of a good one-word alternative, though.

I guess you could call it a dicktatorship.

---

By the way, another book we read for that class was Sarah Pomeroy's "Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves" which was much more sane and helpful if you want to know what life was like for women in ancient Greece.

Amazing invisible bookshelf

I walked into my room today and saw a stack of books floating in the air with no visible means of support.

The magic spell to make books float is "Boccaccio!" ^*

No lah, it's actually the Umbra Conceal bookshelf. The horizontal part goes inside the back cover of the bottom book, and you can see here that there are two small lips that hold the edge of the cover up (which is why the bottom book has to be a hardback).

It cost ten dollars on sale and was very easy to install, two screws only. I had to drill three pilot holes at the same latitude before I found a stud (wooden upright beam) though...it turned out that the slight ridge in the wall which I thought signified a stud, was probably a seam between two sheets of drywall.

Seriously, when I was younger I thought Americans were very strong because I would read in novels of a character punching a hole in a wall. Then I went on a Habitat for Humanity trip and discovered that American house walls are essentially made of half an inch of chalk between two sheets of thick paper.

I bought The Ruby Dice because I was on a Catherine Asaro kick. Another female SF author I'm trying out is Karen Traviss, second from the top. I've read a Star Wars novel by her which is about 40 years ABY (After the Battle of Yavin) and am really confused. The last thing in the Star Wars universe I've read was I, Jedi, which is only 11 ABY. Aside from my being out-of-date, Bloodlines is so-so. I'll have to see if Traviss is better with her own universes and characters.

George Lucas actually has a guy whose full-time job is managing continuity between the huge number of Star Wars films, novels, cartoons, computer games, online universes, etc. Therefore everything that's published with "Star Wars" on it is canon, unlike some other universes like Star Trek.

By the way, the Wookiepedia article on I, Jedi says Stackpole retconned some of the events in Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy. Good, I hate Anderson. He's a hack. I once tried reading StarCraft novels and there was one by a Gabriel Mesta that was really awful...I had to struggle to finish it. I only found out after finishing the book that it was a pseudonym of Anderson's.

Also, have been reading way, WAY too much Lovecraft. I'll have to track down Neil Gaiman's parodies later. But, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a masterpiece as a dream-epic. Just that one novella rivals the breadth of Gaiman's The Sandman series. It's true what Lovecraft wrote in The Silver Key though. At least for me...I've stopped dreaming as much as I've gotten older. Life swamps you.

* Actually "boccaccio" is something that Richard Merrill, alias Mairelon the Magician, mutters while searching for the latch to a secret passage behind a book-case in someone's country house. His hireling - and later, protegee - Kim, being a street child and not classically educated, develops the impression that it's a spell that opens a magic door.

Archetypal beings

All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being - son, father, grandfather, and so on - and each stage of individual being - infant, child, boy, man - is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it.

- HP Lovecraft with E. Hoffman Price, Through The Gates of the Silver Key [source]

"The idea is not that there was likely an original human model that they were copied from. The idea was that these models of Cylon were sort of developed out of their own study of us. The Cylons on some level looked at humanity and said 'You know what? There's really only twelve of you.' If these are the twelve, and sort of if you look at them they each represent different archetypes of what humanity is."

- Ronald D. Moore, producer of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series [source]

Bincangkan/discuss.

story - Death of a Heretic

Looking through my old files because I'm reading HP Lovecraft's The Silver Key...it's true, the legends of dread and glory we each carry in our hearts are precious beyond words. Anyway I found what I wanted to find, a chronicle of my old dreams that maybe no one else will ever read. But I found this story I wrote back in secondary school, which is rather less intimate, but still a reflection of some very personal feelings - in particular, extreme frustration with the boringness of science education in Malaysia.

Those idiots who write the textbooks can take the wonders of the universe and turn them into cold oatmeal. No surprise that a young person might subconsciously file it all under "bullshit".

Death of a Heretic

The teacher had had the microscopes moved outside for better lighting, and now there were girls darting back and forth from the shade of the lab doors to the row of stools like pigeons flying down to feed. “Hei, come and look lah,” called one of her group members. She stepped into the sun reluctantly, twitching her skirt away from sweat-damp legs. Imbeciles, she thought, a blood smear is supposed to be thin, not thick as paint. My blood some more!

“Can see not?”

“Can...I think...I only see small dots...doesn’t look like sel darah merah though.”

Grimacing, she pushed her way through the clamour and squatted in front of the stool. There certainly were small dots in the field, but they weren’t red blood cells, more likely dust on the inside of the objective.

It’s all futile, she thought. We have a Mandarin teacher for Bio, telling us quite confidently that coconuts contain cholesterol and arthritis is caused by cold. The blind leading the blind indeed. What’s the point of learning all of this anyway? Eritrosit, leukosit, eosinofil, basofil, it’ll all be forgotten in a matter of months as soon as the SPM is over. We might as well be reciting mantras or telling the rosary; it’s nonsense to them.

Maybe it really is all nonsense. Maybe air pollution is good for Earth – it makes fantastic sunsets, at least. Maybe butterflies aren’t the adult form of caterpillars but a winged parasite that devours the chrysalis from within. Maybe menstruation is caused by a dog and a cat fighting in my belly. How should we know? Everything they teach us in school is a pack of lies anyway.

When the school bell rang she still brooded. All this nonsense about cells and hormones and genes is too complicated. When you think about how easily computers crash – the more complicated a system is, the more parts to fail. The simplest living thing would be perpetually on a knife’s edge from death, never mind the trillions of cells supposedly in the human body. I think I’ll be like the ancient Greeks, she decided. Four humours – simple, commonsensical, tangible. Anyone’s seen blood and phlegm; no one’s seen a gene yet. Even traditional Chinese medicine would be better. We know what heaty and windy feel like (well, with my dad, we know what “windy” sounds like too).

Cells are optical illusions. DNA is a deus ex machina for desperate geneticists created by the international conspiracy of Watson and Crick. Maggots can be generated from rotten meat. Malaria is caused by foul vapours. I shall be a heretic! she laughed, and the other kids at the bus stop edged away nervously.

The heat was relentless. In her room, she dropped her pinafore and peeled off the white shirt, sprawling on the bed. The thrum, thrum, thrum of the ceiling fan – the higher frequency rotation modulated by the lower frequency wobble – drew her into a hypnotic state as the sweat dried. She began to feel individual hairs on her arm stand up as the skin cooled. And in the singing of the fan, to hear voices:

“...we...”

“...catch and pull...catch and pull...”

“Drink the salt down, pump it through...”

“...come...us...”

“Halt, stranger, ...not pass.”

“...enough, send no more.”

There was no one in the room. It must have been the neighbours’ voices.

“You are...us.”

“...you hear? ...yourself...”

“...body...speaking to you.”

“How dare...like that...denied us?”

“...sheer ingratitude of the...”

“...why?”

“Nothing but...we are you.”

Then her consciousness exploded with the awareness of everything that had been hidden from the shell she called a mind. Blood flowed with chemical messages like the jungle air to a wild animal. Electrical pulses blazed down neurons, each one with more connections than any computer server could handle. The nanomachines called enzymes churned in her organs, taking in food and expelling toxins. Monocytes crawled through the interstices of her flesh, sniffing, seeking prey.

Even as she realized what the voices were, the whole system that she had turned against rose in retribution. Inflammatory molecules ran through her veins, causing a burning fever and head pain. Muscles twitched, trembled, and convulsed, and she could feel every one of the myosin heads pulling against actin strands in them. She tried to get up but the little stones in her ears had come unglued, leaving her giddy.

Stop, she moaned silently. It’s too fast. It’s too much.

“How...we stop?” they whispered back “...but none...is real, you said...”

I was wrong, she cried. There are so many things... She felt her racing heart slow, beads of sweat on her skin.

“...stop?

Stop. Please.

All stop.

Creative Commons licenses:

Death of a Heretic by Shi-Hsia Hwa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Death of a Heretic by Hwa Shi-Hsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Malaysia License.