Alien versus Cylon versus FURBALL OF DOOM!

OK, this is the plan...

We're gonna attack from the rear.

Get ready! It's moving!

Help! It's got nasty, big, pointy teeth!

Toaster...DON'T LOOK BEHIND YOU!

Alien is by McFarlane, Cylon centurion is by via Diamond Select Toys via ThinkGeek.

Sprinkles!

I'm just gonna copy paste this from my Facebook posted items page because I don't want to spend a long time blogging tonight.

Supplefer Sprinkles; iron sprinkles reducing iron deficiency anemia worldwide
When I hear "sprinkles" I think of those awful coloured sugar bits on cupcakes. I'm on a consumer survey website, and a prominent canned vegetable company once floated the idea of single-serving-sized canned beans with sprinkles on top to attract kids. I hope that never sees the light of day.

This kind of sprinkles on the other hand...a much better idea!

• Paper by the inventor.
• Letter in PLoS Medicine objecting to the use of Sprinkles on a regular basis The writer makes a good point that this makes people reliant on a foreign source for nutritional supplementation, but...
• Paper quoted by the Sprinkles people in their reply.
  Summary: complementary foods for weaning infants/young children from local sources can provide adequate amounts of most nutrients EXCEPT calcium, iron, and zinc.

Ellen and Caprica

Cylon blondes catfight
To blend or to separate?
Battlestar haiku

Thermometer tear-down

I used to enjoy playing with gadgets as a kid, but I was never one of those baby geniuses who had enough focus to learn how to disassemble radios and fix them a la young Richard Feynman. I'd just fiddle with them for a bit and wander off to play with something else. As an adult I've developed a new interest in learning how to repair things because, you know, stuff costs money.

A few years ago when I was working in my current boss' wife's lab, one of the scientists was going to throw away a freezer thermometer because it was broken. They hung on the doors of freezers containing sensitive reagents or samples and we had to log the temperature every morning. I looked at the broken one and realized that the the insulation on the cable attached to the sensor had been broken by the door opening and closing over some years (plus -20°C temperature on the inside, so I asked her if I could take it home. All it took was a bit of tape to fix the short circuit in the cable.

It was nice to have at home because it shows you what the temperature is on the inside (sensor in the body of the instrument) and outside (sensor at the end of the cable). Of course with the freezers "OUT" was actually inside the freezer. I hung the cable out of my window so I would know how much clothing to wear in the morning - very important from about September until May in Wisconsin.

Anyway, a few days ago I knocked it onto the floor and after that all it would show was IN: -58°F, which is the lowest possible temperature it can register. I thought about throwing it away but just decided to take it apart and see if anything was loose that I could replace easily, even though I don't know anything about electronics. Like I said, stuff costs money...I'd rather spend money on stupid things like jewellery, action figures, and people I'll never meet than useful household items apparently.

So this is what it looks like when you open it: (I only know the blue thing is a thermocouple because it sits behind a little grid labelled "SENSOR" on the outside of the housing.)

You can't see it in this picture, but the exposed glass edge of the LCD sensor has faint perpendicular stripes on it. Since there are the same number of stripes as copper pads in that row near the top of the circuit board, that must be how it talks to the board... But it took me a little while longer to realize that the strip of pink spongy stuff wasn't just padding. It must be conductive, and the black strip in the middle makes contact with the PCB and the LCD. You can't see in this picture, but the black strip has many many tiny stripes on it like this:

It took a lot of fiddling to get the strip to sit in place properly so that the whole LCD was connected. When it's fully assembled, the screws holds the conductive strip in place tightly, but as you can see, when I'm only holding it with my fingers it doesn't all light up.

Anyway, it works now!

The really weird thing is, I still DON'T KNOW what had been broken. Since it was displaying "58°F" after it fell on the floor, the display was OK...and I didn't see any other broken bits to repair. Maybe something was just loose and reassembling it was enough.

I cut off the speaker and threw it away since I don't need the high/low temperature alarm function.

Wasting time surfing

I wish Malaysian politics weren't so *ahem* interesting. I'd probably have more job applications in at this point.

If you want my 2 sen on the situation: Sen #1: I support Eli Wong and think the PKR leadership should turn down her resignation. Sen #2: I think it's a golden comedy situation that not only did the Penang police break up an UMNO protest against Karpal and pick up Khir Toyo for questioning, but Karpal was in KL at the time.

Big Pharma is watching you

I'm pretty good at scaring myself, as you may have noticed if you've read some of my previous posts. I'm in the middle of a new book called "Our Daily Meds", which, as the title suggests, is about the massive amounts of medicines consumed by on a regular basis by Americans.

The book details how the industry that makes small-molecule drugs fell from its golden days in the 1930s - 1950s (antibiotics, corticosteroids) to the present mess. Now most "new" prescription drugs are often a) copycat "me-too" formulations of existing drugs, b) are less or only marginally more effective than generic versions, c) are "lifestyle" drugs sold to make people think that the common hiccups of a living body are diseases or d) all of the above. Real lifesavers are never discovered, or shoved in a drawer, because the markets for them are too small (rare diseases) or too poor (tropical diseases).

I kind of feel bad after reading this because I recently went to see a PA for a problem that's been bothering me all my life, but is relatively minor and doesn't affect my health which is otherwise great. She prescribed a brand-name anticholinergic. When I went to pick up the prescription, I found that it was $5 PER PILL = $150 per one-month supply. I also found out that it makes my mouth so dry that I can barely swallow when I wake up in the morning. Screw that.

I knew a guy in college who has ADD but stopped taking Ritalin because he hated what it did to him. Another guy with ADD has it bad enough that he needs his medication to function but also hates being dependent on it, as well as the insane price. In this day and age there is NO WAY synthesizing a small molecule drug should cost that much. My ex-boyfriend got antidepressants for a bout of depression that occurred when we were together (before you say anything, it wasn't my fault!), over two years ago, and I think he's still taking them.

My mum and dad are on statins to control their cholesterol levels but they are both healthy and active people, and our family has no history of heart disease. I wonder if maybe elevated cholesterol is just a function of age and doesn't really cause heart disease in people with healthy lifestyles? Or maybe it's a biomarker of some other underlying process that causes the heart disease it's associated with? And, I'm sure a lot of the middle-aged ladies I know are on hormone replacement therapy...

I'm certainly not against taking medicine - I will usually swallow a couple of paracetamol (a.k.a. acetaminophen - I had an argument with a doctor about this who insisted they were different things) on the first day of my menstrual period or antihistamines in the spring. As mentioned above, psychiatric drugs really do help a number of people too, but it's scary that there are huge numbers of people who take them for years or lifetimes.

A lot of the medicines you see in ads are expensive, brand-name versions of drugs where generics or over-the-counter drugs do basically the same thing. I'm really appalled that the US is one of only 2 countries in the world (the other is New Zealand) that allows prescription drugs to be marketed directly to laypersons, so that they're brainwashed into asking their doctors for the shiny pills they saw on TV. At the same time companies are also working on brainwashing and bribing the doctors - sometimes indirectly with souvenirs and fancy dinners, sometimes with direct cash payments for "consulting".

Maybe there should be a Foundation for Responsible Medicine (in the spirit of the UK's Sense About Science, but targeted at reducing overuse of conventional medicines) that has anti-marketing campaigns about useless or dangerous drugs that has ads like:

• Sanlu Infant Formula: Makes your children strong! have kidney failure!
• My Pikin: Soothes Kills your teething baby.
• Ritalin: Turns your children into little angels zombies.

Obviously I wouldn't be studying what I study if I didn't believe that science is an amazing tool that can save lives and help people in myriad other ways. A lot of people, seeing the hazards and corruption mentioned above, have mistakenly turned to "alternative" medicine in the belief that conventional medicine is all bad. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is not a failure of science in and of itself. It's the failure of science to be stronger than capitalism.

Oh yeah, and I recently applied for a job at a research institute that's funded by one of the "Big Pharma" companies...at least it's not in the main company but is a not-for-profit arm. Round and round I go.

The Star sucks!

(sorry Phui Yee!)

Friday February 6, 2009
Bar: Don’t challenge Sultan’s decision

KUALA LUMPUR: The Perak Sultan’s decision not to consent to the dissolution of the State Assembly is absolute and cannot be challenged in court, said Bar Council chairman Datuk Ambiga Sreenivasan.

---

Dato Ambiga's letter of clarification to The Star dated 6th Feb 2009
Contributed by Ambiga Sreenevasan
Saturday, 07 February 2009 08:12pm
ImageRe : Article at page N10 entitled “Bar : Don’t Challenge Sultan’s Decision”

I was shocked to see your headline for the story at page N10 that read “Bar: Don’t Challenge Sultan’s Decision”.

I had never spoken those words as you can see from the body of the story and it gives a totally wrong impression.

I would like you to immediately publish a clarification both on your website as well as in tomorrow’s edition of The Star in these terms:-

“It had been reported on 6 February 2009 at page 10 as follows: “Bar: Don’t Challenge Sultan’s Decision”. It has been brought to our attention that these words were never uttered by Dato’ Ambiga Sreenevasan, the President of the Malaysian Bar and the headline gives a completely wrong impression of what was in fact said. We regret the error. We have received a further clarification from the President of the Malaysian Bar as follows:-

“I write to further clarify my statement that the prerogative of the Sultan cannot be challenged in Court. I had explained that in the view of some lawyers, this is a non-justiciable issue. Thus, although our view and the view of many is that the State Assembly ought to have in these circumstances been dissolved, but because the prerogative lies entirely with the Ruler who exercised it after going through a process of ascertaining the wishes of the majority, challenging it would be difficult. However in the Pairin case in Sabah such a discretion of a Governor (not a Ruler) was held to be justiciable. I stated that we are presently in unchartered territory. Different legal interpretations are always possible. The Bar would never take the position that one should not exercise the fundamental right to seek legal redress on any issue.”

---

Saturday February 7, 2009
Bar Council clarifies

THE headline “Bar: Don’t Challenge Sultan’s Decision’’ published yesterday did not reflect what Bar president Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan had said in the article.

What she had actually said was that “the prerogative of the Sultan cannot be challenged in court”.

The error is regretted.

---

"Clarifies", your head/my ass (pick idiom depending on which country you're from). It's not the Bar Council's fault if The Star's reporters don't understand English properly right?

And it won't be flowers

I remember hearing an American biology prof who had done a lot of fieldwork in a tropical country pointing out that in the area where they worked, the locals didn't like to go into the jungle even though they lived right next to it, because it was scary and dangerous.

In Taiping, the Methodist pastor's manse is right in front of a small patch of jungle (or was, if they've cut it down by now). The next bungalow a hundred meters or so away was long abandoned and used as a crack house. At night it felt like a dense, threatening entity loomed over our house.

Think Mirkwood.

(In case the troll who accused me of "stealing" for posting a copy of Bradbury's Christus Apollo happens by again, the following poems/lyrics are all over the Internet anyway, so bugger off and find someone else to fling your incorrectly legalistic snarks at.)

Khara Matha Khara Rath Amah
Khara Rath Amah Yuddha Khara
Khara Syada Rath Amah Dai Ya
Khara Ki La Dan Ya
Niha Ki La Khara Rath Amah
Syada Ki La Khara Rath Amah
Khara Dan Ya Khara Rath Amah
Khara Dan Ya Khara Rath Amah
Niha Ki La Khara Rath Amah
Syada Ki La Khara Rath Amah
Khara
Khara Matha Khara Rath Amah
Khara Dan Ya Khara Rath Amah
Niha Ki La Khara Rath Amah
Syada Ki La Khara Rath Amah
Khara

- "Duel of the Fates" from the Star Wars soundtrack by John Williams. Lyrics are a translation of part of this Welsh poem (relevant part in bold text):

Against the Guledig of Prydain,
There passed central horses,
Fleets full of riches.
There passed an animal with wide jaws,
On it there were a hundred heads.
And a battle was contested
Under the root of his tongue;
And another battle there is
In his occiput.
A black sprawling toad,
With a hundred claws on it.
A snake speckled, crested.
A hundred souls through sin
Shall be tormented in its flesh

- from The Battle of the Trees

And, more on scary trees:

You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock
The Two
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.

Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
And the unlucky rose.

Climb up the crane, learn the sailor's words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
Come in
Tell your stories of fishing and other men's wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
In the lighted inn.

But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
At a glance
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don't make the mistake of believing us dead:
I shouldn't dance.

We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won't be flowers.

When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come and are standing round
In deadly crescent.

The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black remov-
ers van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Comes the women in dark glasses and the humpbacked surgeons
And the scissor man.

This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
Remember the Two.

- W. H. Auden, The Two

webcamXP test

Make Kenny Sia lose his hair!

Kenny Sia is going to shave his head if his readers donate RM 50k for the Sarawak Children's Cancer Society. You can read the appeal here. I guess kampung kids in east Malaysia are an underserved community when it comes to healthcare in our country.

Anyway...I donated USD 10 (RM 35.95) to make the bugger lose his hair. You can too! (If you're outside Malaysia, there's a PayPal link.)