health

Zap

This week, I received a ~240V AC electric shock. I can’t recommend it.

A 10-year-old girl hangs from a scaffolding pole outside a white house. — As you may have guessed based on photos in previous posts, our house is currently wrapped in ~~a convenient climbing frame~~ scaffolding.

We’re currently having our attic converted, so we’ve had some electricians in doing the necessary electrical wiring. Shortly after they first arrived they discovered that our existing electrics were pretty catastrophic, and needed to make a few changes including a new fusebox and disconnecting the hilariously-unsafe distribution board in the garage.

Lifted floor showing central heating pipes and a tangle of electrical cables. — The owner before last of our house worked for SSEN and did all of his own wiring, and left us a rats’ nest of spaghetti wiring that our electricians described as being unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Also a literal rats’ nest under the decking, but we got rid of that already.

After connecting everything new up they began switching everything back on and testing the circuits… and we were surprised to hear arcing sounds and see all the lights flickering.

The electricians switched everything off and started switching breakers back on one at a time to try to identify the source of the fault, reasonably assuming that something was shorting somewhere, but no matter what combination of switches were enabled there always seemed to be some kind of problem.

Electricity shining a torch into a cupboard containing an fusebox with an open cover; the switches are in a mixture of on and off positions. — You know those escape room puzzles where you have to get the right permutation of switch combinations? This was a lot less fun than that.

Noticing that the oven’s clock wasn’t just blinking 00:00 (as it would after a power cut) but repeatedly resetting itself to 00:00, I pointed this out to the electricians as an indicator that the problem was occurring on their current permutation of switches, which was strange because it was completely different to the permutation that had originally exhibited flickering lights.

I reached over to point at the oven, and the tip of my finger touched the metal of its case…

Blam! I felt a jolt through my hand and up my arm and uncontrollably leapt backwards across the room, convulsing as I fell to the floor. I gestured to the cooker and shouted something about it being live, and the electricians switched off its circuit and came running with those clever EM-field sensor pens they use.

Somehow the case of the cooker was energised despite being isolated at the fusebox? How could that be?

I missed the next bits of the diagnosis of our electrical system because I was busy getting my own diagnosis: it turns out that if you get a mains electric shock – even if you’re conscious and mobile – the NHS really want you to go to A&E.

At my suggestion, Ruth delivered me to the Minor Injuries unit at our nearest hospital (I figured that what I had wasn’t that serious, and the local hospital generally has shorter wait times!)… who took one look at me and told me that I ought to be at the emergency department of the bigger hospital over the way.

Off at the “right” hospital I got another round of ECG tests, some blood tests (which can apparently be used to diagnose muscular damage: who knew?), and all the regular observations of pulse and blood pressure and whatnot that you might expect.

And then, because let’s face it I was probably in better condition than most folks being dropped off at A&E, I was left to chill in a short stay ward while the doctors waited for test results to come through.

Two electricians, one in a hard hat, look in an outdoor metering cupboard by torchlight. — Apparently our electricity meter blew itself up somewhere along the way, leaving us with even less of a chance to turn the power back on again.

Meanwhile, back at home our electricians had called-in SSEN, who look after the grid in our area. It turns out that the problem wasn’t directly related to our electrical work at all but had occurred one or two pylons “upstream” from our house. A fault on the network had, from the sounds of things, resulted in “live” being sent down not only the live wire but up the earth wire too.

That’s why appliances in the house were energised even with their circuit breakers switched-off: they were connected to an earth that was doing pretty-much the opposite of what an earth should: discharging into the house!

It seems an inconceivable coincidence to me that a network fault might happen to occur during the downtime during which we happened to have electricians working, so I find myself wondering if perhaps the network fault had occurred some time ago but only become apparent/dangerous as a result of changes to our household configuration.

I’m no expert, but I sketched a diagram showing how such a thing might happen (click to embiggen). I’ll stress that I don’t know for certain what went wrong: I’m just basing this on what I’ve been told my SSEN plus a little speculation:

By the time I was home from the hospital the following day, our driveway was overflowing with the vehicles of grid engineers to the point of partially blocking the main street outside (which at least helped ensure that people obeyed our new 20mph limit for a change).

A driveway full of vehicles spills out onto the nearby road. — We weren’t even able to get our *own* car onto our driveway when we got back from the hospital.

Two and a half days later, I’m back at work and mostly recovered. I’ve still got some discomfort in my left hand, especially if I try to grip anything tightly, but I’m definitely moving in the right direction.

It’s actually more-annoying how much my chest itches from having various patches of hair shaved-off to make it possible to hook up ECG electrodes!

Anyway, the short of it is that I recommend against getting zapped by the grid. If it had given me superpowers it might have been a different story, but I guess it just gave me sore muscles and a house with a dozen non-working sockets.

Not the Isle of Man

This week, Ruth and I didn’t go the Isle of Man.

It’s (approximately) our 0x10th anniversary¹, and, struggling to find a mutually-convenient window in our complex work schedules, we’d opted to spend a few days exploring the Isle of Man. Everything was fine, until we were aboard the ‘plane.

Once everybody was seated and ready to take off, the captain stood up at the front of the ‘plane and announced that it had been cancelled².

The Isle of Man closes, he told us (we assume he just meant the airport) and while they’d be able to get us there before it did, there wouldn’t be sufficient air traffic control crew to allow them to get back (to, presumably, the cabin crews’ homes in London).

Back at the terminal we made our way through border control (showing my passport despite having not left the airport, never mind the country) and tried to arrange a rebooking, only to be told that they could only manage to get us onto a flight that’d be leaving 48 hours later, most of the way through our mini-break, so instead we opted for a refund and gave up.³

Ruth and Dan, looking tired and frustrated, sit at a pub table. Ruth is using her tablet computer. — After dinner at the reliably-good Ye Old Six Bells in Horley, down the road from Gatwick Airport, we grumpily made our way back home.

We resolved to try to do the same kinds of things that we’d hoped to do on the Isle of Man, but closer to home: some sightseeing, some walks, some spending-time-together. You know the drill.

Panoramic photo showing a field containing the remains of a Roman villa in West Oxfordshire, under grey skies. The walls are barely visible in this wide shot. — There’s evidence on the Isle of Man of Roman occupation from about the 1st century BCE through the 5th century CE, so we found a local Roman villa and went for a look around.

A particular highlight of our trip to the North Leigh Roman Villa – one of those “on your doorstep so you never go” places – was when the audio tour advised us to beware of the snails when crossing what was once the villa’s central courtyard.

At first we thought this was an attempt at humour, but it turns out that the Romans brought with them to parts of Britain a variety of large edible snail – helix pomatia – which can still be found in concentration in parts of the country where they were widely farmed.⁴

Large cream-coloured snail in moderately-long grass, alongside a twenty-pence piece (for scale). The snail is around three times as long as the coin is. — Once you know you’re looking for them, these absolute unit gastropods are easy to spot.

There’s a nice little geocache near the ruin, too, which we were able to find on our way back.

Before you think that I didn’t get anything out of my pointless hours at the airport, though, it turns out I’d brought home a souvenier… a stinking cold! How about that for efficiency: I got all the airport-germs, but none of the actual air travel. By mid-afternoon on Tuesday I was feeling pretty rotten, and it only got worse from then on.

A box of tissues and a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller on the arm of a sofa. — I felt so awful on Wednesday that the most I was able to achieve was to lie on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, between sessions of *The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom*.

I’m confident that Ruth didn’t mind too much that I spent Wednesday mostly curled up in a sad little ball, because it let her get on with applying to a couple of jobs she’s interested in. Because it turns out there was a third level of disaster to this week: in addition to our ‘plane being cancelled and me getting sick, this week saw Ruth made redundant as her employer sought to dig itself out of a financial hole. A hat trick of bad luck!

Dan, sitting in bed, holding a tissue and looking unwell. — Sniffle. Ugh.

As Ruth began to show symptoms (less-awful than mine, thankfully) of whatever plague had befallen me, we bundled up in bed and made not one but two abortive attempts at watching a film together:

Spin Me Round, which looked likely to be a simple comedy that wouldn’t require much effort by my mucus-filled brain, but turned out to be… I’ve no idea what it was supposed to be. It’s not funny. It’s not dramatic. The characters are, for the most part, profoundly uncompelling. There’s the beginnings of what looks like it was supposed to be a romantic angle but it mostly comes across as a creepy abuse of power. We watched about half and gave up.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, because we figured “how bad can a trashy MCU sequel be anyway; we know what to expect!” But we couldn’t connect to it at all. Characters behave in completely unrealistic ways and the whole thing feels like it was produced by somebody who wanted to be making one of the new Star Wars films, but with more CGI. We watched about half and gave up.

As Thursday drew on and the pain in my head and throat was replaced with an unrelenting cough, I decided I needed some fresh air.

Dan, looking slightly less-unwell, stands holding Demmy, a French Bulldog, in front of a hedge. — The dog needed a walk, too, which is always a viable excuse to get out and about.

So while Ruth collected the shopping, I found my way to the 2023-07-27 51 -1 geohashpoint. And came back wheezing and in need of a lie-down.

I find myself wondering if (despite three jabs and a previous infection) I’ve managed to contract covid again, but I haven’t found the inclination to take a test. What would I do differently if I do have it, now, anyway? I feel like we might be past that point in our lives.

All in all, probably the worst anniversary celebration we’ve ever had, and hopefully the worst we’ll ever have. But a fringe benefit of a willingness to change bases is that we can celebrate our 10th⁵ anniversary next year, too. Here’s to that.

¹ Because we’re that kind of nerds, we count our anniversaries in base 16 (0x10 is 16), or – sometimes – in whatever base is mathematically-pleasing and gives us a nice round number. It could be our 20th anniversary, if you prefer octal.

² I’ve been on some disastrous aeroplane journeys before, including one just earlier this year which was supposed to take me from Athens to Heathrow, got re-arranged to go to Gatwick, got delayed, ran low on fuel, then instead had to fly to Stansted, wait on the tarmac for a couple of hours, then return to Gatwick (from which I travelled – via Heathrow – home). But this attempt to get to the Isle of Man was somehow, perhaps, even worse.

³ Those who’ve noticed that we were flying EasyJet might rightly give a knowing nod at this point.

⁴ The warning to take care not to tread on them is sound legal advice: this particular variety of snail is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981!

⁵ Next year will be our 10th anniversary… in base 17. Eww, what the hell is base 17 for and why does it both offend and intrigue me so?

Geohashing expedition 2023-07-27 51 -1

This checkin to geohash 2023-07-27 51 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Northern boundary hedge of West Witney Primary School, Witney

Participants

Dan Q

Expedition

I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be on the Isle of Man with my partner, celebrating our 0x10th anniversary. But this week’s been a week of disasters: my partner lost her job, our plane to the Isle of Man got cancelled, and then I got sick (most-likely, I got to catch airport germs from people I got to sit next to on an aircraft which was then cancelled before it had a chance to take off). So mostly this week I’ve been sat at home playing video games.

But the dog needed a walk, and my partner needed to go to the supermarket, so I had her drop me and the geopooch off in West Witney to find the hashpoint and then walk to meet them after she’d collected the shopping. I couldn’t find my GPSr, so I used my phone, and it was reporting low accuracy until I rebooted it, by which time I’d walked past the hashpoint and had to double-back, much to the doggo’s confusion.

I reached the hashpoint at 14:16 BST (and probably a few points before than, owing to my navigation failure). I needed to stand very close to the fence to get within the circle of uncertainty, but at least I didn’t have to reach through and into the school grounds.

Tracklog

My smartwatch kept a tracklog:

Photos

A concrete path running between mowed grass past a lamp post. — Looking West from the hashpoint

A concrete path running between mowed grass and trees. — Looking East from the hashpoint

Dan, wearing a grey Three Rings hoodie, carrying French Bulldog Demmy, standing on a path with trees in the background. — A pair of silly grins

Screenshot from Geohashdroid, showing 51N 1W 27 Jul 2023 hashpoint 2.571m from the user. — Proof (from the app)

Counselling and Constellations

Over the last three or four years I’ve undertaken a couple of different rounds of psychotherapy. I liken the experience to that of spotting constellations in the night sky.

That’s probably the result of the goal I stated when going in to the first round: I’d like you to help while I take myself apart, try to understand how I work, and then put myself back together again.¹ I’m trying to connect the dots between who-I-once-was and who-I-am-now and find causal influences.

As I’m sure you can imagine: with an opening statement like that I needed to contact a few different therapists before I found one who was compatible with my aims². But then, I was always taught to get three quotes before hiring a professional.

Two abstract constellations of stars drawn onto a picture of stars over the hills as the last of the sunlight begins to vanish. — Constellations are necessarily subjective. It’s always pleased me to think about how Orion the Hunter, one of the Northern hemisphere’s most-recognisable Winter visitors, was interpreted by the Lakota people to represent a bison, and some Indian traditions see it as a deer.

It’s that “connecting the dots” that feels like constellation-spotting. A lot of the counselling work (and the “homework” that came afterwards) has stemmed from ideas like:

This star represents a moment in my past.
This star represents a facet of my identity today.
If we draw a line from one to the other, what does the resulting constellation look like?

I suppose that what I’ve been doing is using the lens of retrospection to ask: “Hey, why am I like this? Is this part of it? And what impact did that have on me? Why can’t I see it?”

When you’re stargazing, sometimes you have to ask somebody to point out the shape in front of you before you can see it for yourself.

I haven’t yet finished this self-analytical journey, but I’m in an extended “homework” phase where I’m finding my own way: joining the dots for myself. Once somebody’s helped you find those constellations that mean something to you, it’s easier to pick them out when you stargaze alone.

¹ To nobody’s surprise whatsoever, I can reveal that ever since I was a child I’ve enjoyed taking things apart to understand how they work. I wasn’t always so good at putting them back together again, though. My first alarm clock died that way, as did countless small clockwork and electronic toys.

² I also used my introductory contact to lay out my counselling qualifications, in case they were a barrier for a potential therapist, but it turns out this wasn’t as much of a barrier as the fact that I arrived with a concrete mandate.

Covid Brain

I managed to dodge infection for 922 days of the Covid pandemic¹, but it caught up with me eventually.

Lateral flow test, with "DAN" written on it, showing a solid control line and a very clear solid test line: a clear positive result. — Well, shit.

Frankly, it’s surprising that it took this long. We’ve always been careful, in accordance with guidance at any given time, nd we all got our jabs and boosters as soon as we were able… but conversely: we’ve got school-age children who naturally seem to be the biggest disease vectors imaginable. Our youngest, in fact, already had Covid, but the rest of us managed to dodge it perhaps thanks to all these precautions.

Vials of Covid vaccine scattered across a red background. Photo courtesy Maksim Goncharenok. — The vaccine provide protection, but it’s not a magical force-field.

Luckily I’m not suffering too badly, probably thanks to the immunisation. It’s still not great, but I dread to think how it might have been without the benefit of the jab! A minor fever came and went, and then it’s just been a few days of coughing, exhaustion, and… the most-incredible level of brain-fog.

Dan with the dog, in the garden. — Today, for example, I completey blanked the word “toilet” and struggled for some time to express to the dog why I’d brought her into the garden, while she stared at me expectantly.

I’ve taken the week off work to recover, which was a wise choice. As well as getting rest, it’s meant that I’ve managed to avoid writing production code with my addled brain! Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time chilling in bed and watching all of the films that I’d been meaning to! This week, I’ve watched:

Peggy Sue Got Married (y’know, that other mid-1980s movie about time travel and being a teenager in the 1950s). It was okay; some bits of the direction were spectacular for its age, like the “through the mirror” filming.
Fall. I enjoyed this more than I expected to. It’s not great, but while I spent most of the time complaining about the lack of believability in the setting and the characters’ reactions, the acting was good and the tension “worked”: it was ocassionally pretty vertigo-inducing, and that’s not just because I’ve been having some Covid-related dizziness!
RRR. Oh my god this Tollywood action spectacle was an adventure. At one point it’s a bromantic buddy comedy, then later there’s a dance-off, then for a while there’s a wonderful “even language can’t divide us” romance, but then later a man picks up a motorcycle with one hand and uses it to beat up an entire army, and somehow it all feels like it belongs together. The symbolism’s so thick you can spread it (tl;dr: colonialism bad), but it’s still a riot of a film.
Cyrano, which I feel was under-rated but that could just be that I have a soft spot for the story… and a love of musical theatre.
Also, at times when I didn’t think my brain had the focus for something new, I re-watched Dude, Where’s My Car? because I figured a stoner comedy that re-replains the plot every 20 minutes or so was about as good as I could expect my brain to handle at the time, and Everything Everywhere All At Once which I’ve now seen three times and loved every single one: it’s one of my favourite films.

Dan lying in bed, giving a weak "thumbs up". — See, I’m fine! (Feel like I’ve spent a lot of time lying here, this week.)

Anyway: hopefully next week I’ll be feeling more normal and my poor Covid-struck brain can be trusted with code again. Until then: time to try to rest some more.

¹ Based on the World Health Organisation’s declaration of the outbreak being a pandemic on 11 March 2020 and my positive test on 19 September 2022, I stayed uninfected for two years, six months, one week, and one day. But who’s counting?

Staying Sane with GEMSAW

I’ve been having a tough time these last few months. Thanks to COVID, I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Times are strange, and even when you get a handle on how they’re strange they can still affect you: lockdown stress can quickly magnify anything else you’re already going through.

We’ve all come up with our own coping strategies; here’s part of mine.

JTA, Dan and Ruth shopping for a Christmas tree, wearing face masks — Only people who are highly-allergic to pine needles normally look like this when they’re shopping for a Christmas tree.

These last few months have occasionally seen me as emotionally low as… well, a particularly tough spell a decade ago. But this time around I’ve benefited from the self-awareness and experience to put some solid self-care into practice!

By way partly of self-accountability and partly of sharing what works for me, let me tell you about the silly mnemonic that reminds me what I need to keep track of as part of each day: GEMSAW! (With thanks to Amy Blankson for, among other things, the idea of this kind of acronym.)

Because it’s me, I’ve cited a few relevant academic sources for you in my summary, below:

Gratitude
Taking the time to stop and acknowledge the good things in your life, however small, is associated with lower stress levels (Taylor, Lyubomirsky & Stein, 2017) to a degree that can’t just be explained by the placebo effect (Cregg & Cheavens, 2020).
Frankly, the placebo effect would be fine, but it’s nice to have my practice of trying to intentionally recognise something good in each day validated by the science too!
Exercise
I don’t even need a citation; I’m sure everybody knows that aerobic exercise is associated with reduced risk and severity of depression: the biggest problem comes from the fact that it’s an exceptionally hard thing to motivate yourself to do if you’re already struggling mentally!
But it turns out you don’t need much to start to see the benefits (Josefsson, Lindwall & Archer, 2014): I try to do enough to elevate my heart rate each day, but that’s usually nothing more than elevating my desk to standing height, putting some headphones on, and dancing while I work!

Dan dancing at his desk (animated GIF) — Warming up. Things only get nuts when the bass drops, but I’ll spare you having to watch that.

Meditation/Mindfulness
Understandably a bit fuzzier as a concept and tainted by being a “hip” concept. A short meditation break or mindfulness exercise might be verifiably therapeutic, but more (non-terrible) studies are needed (Vonderlin, Biermann, Bohus & Lyssenko 2020). For me, a 2-5 minute meditation break punctuates a day and feels like it contributes towards the goal of staying-sane-in-challenging-times, so it makes it into my wellbeing plan.
Maybe it’s doing nothing. But I’m not losing much time over it so I’m not worried.
Sunlight
During my 20s I gradually began to suffer more and more from “winter blues”. Nobody’s managed to make an argument for the underlying cause of seasonal affective disorder that hasn’t been equally-well debunked by some other study. Small-scale studies often justify light therapy (e.g. Lam, Levitan & Morehouse 2006) but it’s possibly no-more-effective than a placebo at scale (SBU 2007).
Since my early 30s, I’ve always felt better to get myself 30 minutes of lightbox on winter mornings (I use one of these bad boys). I admit it’s possible that the benefits are just the result of tricking my brain into waking-up more promptly and therefore feeing like I’m being more-productive with my waking hours! But either way, getting some sunlight – whether natural or artificial – makes me feel better, so it makes it onto my daily self-care checklist.

Bright sunlight in an almost-cloudless blue sky. — 10 minutes of overhead, unoccluded sunlight is the minimum therapeutic dose. That translates to about 30 minutes of winter sun at my latitude or 10,000 lux full-spectrum sunlamp.

Acts of kindness
It’s probably not surprising that a person’s overall happiness correlates with their propensity for kindness (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener 2005). But what’s more interesting is that the causal link can be “gamed”. That is: a deliberate effort to engage in acts of kindness results in increased happiness (Buchanan & Bardi 2010)!
Beneficial acts of kindness can be as little as taking the time to acknowledge somebody’s contribution or compliment somebody’s efforts. The amount of effort it takes is far less-important for happiness than the novelty of the experience, so the type of kindness you show needs to be mixed-up a bit to get the best out of it. But demonstrating kindness helps to make the world a better place for other humans, so it pays off even if you’re coming from a fully utilitarian perspective.
Writing
I write a lot anyway, often right here, and that’s very-definitely for my own benefit first and foremost. But off the back of some valuable “writing therapy” (Baikie & Wilhelm 2005) I undertook earlier this year, I’ve been continuing with the simpler, lighter approach of trying to no more than three sentences about something that’s had an impact on me that day.
As an approach, it doesn’t help everybody (Zachariae 2015), but writing a little about your day – not even about how you feel about it, just the facts will do (Koschwanez, Robinson, Beban, MacCormick, Hill, Windsor, Booth, Jüllig & Broadbent 2017; fuck me that’s a lot of co-authors) – helps to keep you content, and I’m loving it.

Despite the catchy acronym (Do I need to come up with a GEMSAW logo? I’m pretty sure real gemcutting is actually more of a grinding process…) and stack of references, I’m not actually writing a self-help book; it just sounds like I am.

I don’t claim to be an authority on anything beyond my own head, and I’m not very confident on that subject! I just wanted to share with you something that’s been working pretty well at keeping me sane for the last month or two, just in case it’s of any use to you. These are challenging times; do what you need to find the happiness you can, and hang in there.

Look After Lorcán

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This is Lorcán. Lorcán has cystic fibrosis (CF) Lorcán is two years old. Lorcán has been fighting a potentially life shortening lung infection for the last six months and treatment isn’t working.

There is an amazing drug called Orkambi made by Vertex that is not funded on the NHS, this drug could help Lorcán and thousands of others. Over 240 people in the U.K. have died waiting for it to become available. Vertex and the U.K. government are letting people with CF die because of a disagreement over cost.

Parents have had to find an alternative way of getting these drugs for their children and the Cystic Fibrosis Buyers Club have found a generic copy of the drug that individuals can legally import, it is a fifth of the cost. This is however still beyond what we can pay.

…

Look After Lorcán

I’ve previously shared (one, two) content about my friend Jen‘s two-year-old son Lorcán, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, as well as joining in the #strawfiechallenge earlier this year. A particular aim of Jen has been to get access to a drug that could add decades to her son’s life, but which isn’t being made available on the NHS. Running out of options to get access to medicine that could dramatically improve her kid’s quality of life and prognosis, she’s now set up a GoFundMe and is soliciting donations.

If you can help, even just a little, please do.

#strawfiechallenge

#strawfiechallenge – 1 minute of simulated breathing difficulty in recognition of sufferers of cystis fibrosis

Today I’m attaching a clothes peg to my nose and breathing through a straw for 60 seconds. As I won’t be able to talk while I’m doing this, I’ll type an explanation why:

Like most people, I’ve spent most of my life lucky enough to not really know anything about cystic fibrosis. I first really became aware of it when my friend Jen‘s son Lorcán was diagnosed with it (you may remember I shared a video of hers previously).

It’s a lifelong disorder with no known cure.

It’s a genetic disorder, and as many as one in every 25 people carries the gene that can cause it. Inherit two genes and you’re a sufferer. Among other symptoms, it causes frequent lung infections and difficulty breathing.

I’m taking part in the #strawfiechallenge as an exercise in appreciating how difficult it can be to cope with reduced lung function. A new drug, Orkambi, is helping to extend the lives of sufferers in other countries around the world. But it’s not yet available in the UK. :-(

CF sufferers want #OrkambiNow. They need your politicians to act.

Find out how you can help: www.cfsupportgroup.org

This video is also available at:

QTube (also available for direct or torrent download)
YouTube

100 Years of Periods

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Allure (YouTube)

Bitesize introduction to the (mostly-unspoken) history of the last century of sanitary products. It wasn’t so long ago – still within living memory! – that doctors’ advice was not to exercise during your period and that sanitary products had to be packaged in plain containers so as not to embarrass buyers nor sales assistants. Humans have had a long and complicated relationship with menstruation but the largest and fastest period (no pun intended) of cultural change has been only recently, and we now live in a world divided by a huge diversity of opinion and philosophy on the subject. This video covers only a fraction of the story of the recent (Western) social change, but it’s still a strong reminder of how far we’ve come as a culture.

Alpha-Gal and the Gaia Hypothesis

Ticking Point

An increasing number of people are reportedly suffering from an allergy to the meat and other products of nonhuman mammals, reports Mosaic Science this week, and we’re increasingly confident that the cause is a sensitivity to alpha-gal (Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose), a carbohydrate produced in the bodies of virtually all mammals except for us and our cousin apes, monkeys, and simians (and one of the reasons you can’t transplant tissue from pigs to humans, for example).

Lone star tick — The lone star tick (You call that a star, tick? Looks like a blob to me!), one of several vectors for alpha-gal sensitivity.

The interesting thing is that the most-common cause of alpha-gal sensitivity appears to be the bite of one of a small number of species of tick. The most-likely hypothesis seems to be that being bitten by such a tick after it’s bitten e.g. deer or cattle may introduce that species’ alpha-gal directly to your bloodstream. This exposure triggers an immune response through all future exposure, even if it’s is more minor, e.g. consuming milk products or even skin contact with an animal.

That’s nuts, isn’t it? The Mosaic Science article describes the reaction of Tami McGraw, whose symptoms began in 2010:

[She] asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat. The test result was so strongly positive, her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.

That should have been the end of her problems. Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life. One time, she took capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.

When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister. She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen. She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.

Of course, this isn’t the only nor even the most-unusual (or most-severe) animal-induced allergy-to-a-different-animal we’re aware of. The hilariously-named but terribly-dangerous Pork-Cat syndrome is caused, though we’re not sure how, by exposure to cats and results in a severe allergy to pork. But what makes alpha-gal sensitivity really interesting is that it’s increasing in frequency at quite a dramatic rate. The culprit? Climate change. Probably.

It’s impossible to talk to physicians encountering alpha-gal cases without hearing that something has changed to make the tick that transmits it more common – even though they don’t know what that something might be.

…

“Climate change is likely playing a role in the northward expansion,” Ostfeld adds, but acknowledges that we don’t know what else could also be contributing.

Meat Me Half-Way

To take a minor diversion: another article I saw this week was the BBC‘s one on the climate footprint of the food you eat.

BBC graph showing climate impact of common foods. Beef is terrible *unshocker*. — An average serving of beef contributes almost 8kg of greenhouse gases, compared to around 1kg for chicken. Thanks, Beeb (click through for full article).

A little dated, perhaps: I’m sure that nobody needs to be told nowadays that one of the biggest things a Westerner can do to reduce their personal carbon footprint (after from breeding less or not at all, which I maintain is the biggest, or avoiding air travel, which Statto argues for) is to reduce or refrain from consumption of meat (especially pork and beef) and dairy products.

Indeed, environmental impact was the biggest factor in my vegetarianism (now weekday-vegetarianism) for the last eight years, and it’s an outlook that I’ve seen continue to grow in others over the same period.

Seeing these two stories side-by-side in my RSS reader put the Gaia hypothesis in my mind.

SMBC comic frame: "Yeah, I don't buy it. If Earth is self-regulating and alive, why hasn't it produced an immune response against humanity?" — If you want a pop-culture-grade introduction to the Gaia hypothesis in the context of climate change, this SMBC comic does the job, and does so almost with fewer words than this caption explaining that it does so.

If you’re not familiar with the Gaia hypothesis, the basic idea is this: by some mechanism, the Earth and all of the life on it act in synergy to maintain homeostasis. Organisms not only co-evolve with one another but also with the planet itself, affecting their environment in a way that in turn affects their future evolution in a perpetual symbiotic relationship of life and its habitat.

Its advocates point to negative feedback loops in nature such as plankton blooms affecting the weather in ways that inhibit plankton blooms and to simplistic theoretical models like the Daisyworld Simulation (cute video). A minority of its proponents go a step further and describe the Earth’s changes teleologically, implying a conscious Earth with an intention to protect its ecosystems (yes, these hypotheses were born out of the late 1960s, why do you ask?). Regardless, the essence is the same: life’s effect on its environment affects the environment’s hospitality to life, and vice-versa.

There’s an attractive symmetry to it, isn’t there, in light of the growth in alpha-gal allergies? Like:

Yesterday – agriculture, particularly intensive farming of mammals, causes climate change.
Today – climate change causes ticks to spread more-widely and bite more humans.
Tomorrow – tick bites cause humans to consume less products farmed from mammals?

Daisyworld in SimEarth — Both my appreciation and my rejection of Gaia Hypothesis can probably be traced to me playing way too much *SimEarth* as a teenager. Here’s my Daisyworld in state of equilibrium, because I haven’t yet gotten bored and spawned dinosaurs to eat all of the daisies.

That’s not to say that I buy it, mind. The Gaia hypothesis has a number of problems, and – almost as bad – it encourages a complacent “it’ll all be okay, the Earth will fix itself” mindset to climate change (which, even if it’s true, doesn’t bode well for the humans residing on it).

But it was a fun parallel to land in my news reader this morning, so I thought I’d share it with you. And, by proxy, make you just a little bit warier of ticks than you might have been already. /shudders/

Daily Physio for Cystic Fibrosis

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Jen & Lorcán (Little Fierce One)

My friend Jen‘s been blogging and vlogging about cystic fibrosis – which her young son Lorcán has – in order to raise awareness of it and of a promising new treatment, Orkambi, which would very likely dramatically improve the lifespan and health of chidren like Lorcán… were it available on the NHS. For more information, including petitions you can sign, see their blog Little Fierce One.

Into the Lair of the Bladder Monster

Warning: this blog post contains pictures of urine, invasive equipment, and the inside of a bladder. It’s probably safe for all audiences, but you might like to put your glass of apple juice down for a minute or two. The short of it all is that I’m probably healthy.

Since my hospitalisation the other month with a renal system infection, I’ve undergone a series of investigations to try to determine if there’s an underlying reason that I fell ill. As my doctor explained to me, it’s quite possible that what I’d experienced was a random opportunistic infection (perhaps aided by a course of unrelated antibiotics I’d been on earlier this year or by certain lifestyle habits), but if that wasn’t the case – if there were some deeper explanation for my health problems – it was important to find out sooner, rather than later.

A sterile pot full of Dan Q's urine. — I’ve peed in so many little pots! If you laid them end-to-end across your kitchen counter, people would think that you were some kind of pervert.

Early on I had several ultrasound scans of my bladder (at a number of different times and at a variety of levels of fullness) and one of my kidneys, the latter of which revealed some “minor scarring” of one of them which apparently isn’t something I should be worried about… although I wish they’d started the two-page letter I got with that rather than opening with, effectively, “Contrary to what we told you at the hospital, we did later see something wrong with you…” But still, good to be reassured that this is probably not an issue.

More recently, I went to the hospital to have a “flow rate test” and a cystoscopy. The flow rate test involved the most-ghetto looking piece of NHS equipment I’ve ever seen: functionally, it seemed to be little more than a funnel on top of a large measuring beaker, in turn on top of a pressure-sensitive digital scale. The scale was connected up to the only fancy-looking bit of equipment in the room, a graphing printer that output the calculated volume (based on their weight) of the same and, more-importantly, the rate of change: the “flow rate” of the stream of urine.

A stream of urine pours down into a funnel. — I’m right, aren’t I? That’s basically a kitchen funnel, isn’t it?

I suppose one advantage of using equipment like this is that it basically operates itself. Which meant that the nurse was able to give me five seconds worth of instruction and then leave the room, which saved us from our own Britishness forcing us to make small-talk while I urinated in front of her or something. Ultimately, I turned out to be within the range of normalcy here, too, although I was a little disappointed to find that the ward didn’t maintain a daily “score board” of flow rates, as sort-of a science-backed literal pissing contest.

A graphing printer describes Dan Q's urine flow. The 'flow rate' graph shows an initial peak, then a trough, then continues to a higher sustained peak. — Apparently not all men experience that ‘spurt-and-then-full-pressure’ thing you’ll see on the graph on the right, when they start to pee, but some of us do, and it’s perfectly normal. I’m learning so much!

Finally came the cystoscopy, and this was the bit that I’d been most-nervous about. This procedure involves the insertion of a long flexible tube into the urethra at the tip of the penis, under local anasthetic, and pushing it all the way down, through the sphincter, down through the prostate and then back up into the bladder. It’s then used as a channel to pump water into the bladder, filling it to capacity and stretching out the sides, after which the fibreoptic cord (and light) that runs along its length is used to look around inside the bladder to inspect for any of a plethora of different problems.

The doctor invited me to watch with him on the monitor, which I initially assumed was because I was clearly interested in everything and kept asking questions, but in hindsight I wonder if it’s just that he – quite rightly – assumed that I might have panicked if I’d have been looking in the direction of the piece of equipment he brought in and jabbed at my penis with. I only looked at it while it was on its way out, and my god its a scary-looking thing: sort of like a cross between a tyre pressure gauge and a blowtorch. The first few inches were painless – the local anasthetic had made me completely numb right up to and including the external sphincter, which is at the base of the penis. However, what I can only assume was the second sphincter complained of the discomfort, and it stung pretty sharply any time the doctor would twist the cystoscope to change the angle of the picture.

View up a urethra, from a cystoscope. — The view as you ‘travel’ up the urethra looks pretty much like I expected. With a motion simulator, it would make a pretty cool ride!

Seeing the inside of your own body is an amazing experience. I mean: it’s not amazing enough to even be worth the experience of a cystoscopy, never mind the illness that in my case preceeded it… but it’s still pretty cool. The ultrasounds were interesting, but there’s nothing quite so immersive as seeing a picture of the inside of your own bladder, gritting your teeth while the doctor points to an indentation and explains that it’s the opening to the ureter that connects to your own left kidney!

Unfortunately I neglected to take my phone into the operating room, having put it into a locker when I changed into a gown, and so I wasn’t able to (as I’d hoped) take photos of the inside of my own bladder. So you’ll have to make do with this video I found, which approximates the experience pretty well. The good news is that there’s probably nothing wrong with me, now that the infection from earlier this year has passed: nothing to suggest that there’s any deeper underlying issue that caused me to get sick, anyway!

The bad news is that while the procedure itself was shorter and more-bearable than I’d expected, the recovery’s been a real drag. A week later, it still hurts a lot to urinate (although I’ve stopped yelping out loud when I do so) and my crotch is still too sore for me to be able to cycle. I’ve also discovered that an errection can be painful enough to wake me up, which is definitely not the most-pleasant way I’ve been roused by a penis. But it’s getting better, day by day, and at least I know for sure that I’m more-or-less “right” in the renal system, now.

The Bladder Monster

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been ill. For those who wanted the grisly details, well: here you go.

Warning: this blog post contains frank subjective descriptions of the symptoms of slightly-icky medical conditions including photographs. It’s probably safe for all audiences, but you might not want to be drinking anything while you read it.

The trouble began, I suppose, about a month and a half ago, when a contracted what seemed to be a minor urinary tract infection. If you’re a woman then, statistically-speaking, I probably don’t need to tell you what that is, but for the benefit of the men: it’s what happens when bacteria (or, sometimes, a fungus or virus) infects the renal system: the kidneys, bladder, ureters, and especially the urethra. It’s not pleasant: it gives you the feeling of needing to pee the whole time, makes it harder to pee, and – when you do – it feels a little bit like you’re piss is made of lava.

Despite it not being common for men (more on that later), I’ve had mild UTIs on a couple of occasions in my life, and I’d always found that ensuring that I got plenty of water and a full RDA of vitamin C was more than enough to make it clear up all by itself within a couple of days. So that’s what I started doing. But then things took a turn for the worse: I started getting a stabbing pain in my left kidney. Recognising this as being pyelonephritis, I went to the doctor who prescribed me a course of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. Within a couple of days I was feeling right as rain (of course I continued to finish the course of drugs, although I was interested to see that that advice is starting to become controversial).

Dan and Annabel have a picnic in the park. — Happy, healthy, and out for a picnic.

Naturally I was a little disappointed when, the week before last, I started getting UTI-like pain again, followed very swiftly this time by pain in my bladder that constantly felt a little like I was recovering from being punched. Back to the doctor I went, where (after the usual tests to work out what the most-likely best-antibiotic to use was) I was prescribed a course of nitrofurantoin. I’d never had this particular drug before, and it wasn’t initially clear which of the escalating ill-effects I was experiencing were symptoms of the infection and which were side-effects of the medication: it started with joint pain, then nausea, then diarrhoea, then a full-on fever. It was at the point that I was fully-clothed in bed, running a temperature and soaked in sweat but still feeling cold and shivering that Ruth called 111, who told her to take me to A&E.

(Which, like her care for me in general, she did fabulously well, except for a little bit where she sort-of ran me over in the car park of the hospital: thankfully some friendly paramedics were standing around and were able to drag me into the building. Anyway, I don’t have much memory of that bit and I certainly don’t have any amusing photos, so I’ll skip over it.)

A few tests later, the medical staff seemed confident that what I was experiencing was not an allergic reaction to the antibiotic (however, I see that they still made a note of it as a risk on my notes!) but was a progression of the infection, which seemed to have crossed over from the tissues of my renal system and into my bloodstream and was now generally causing havoc by attacking the rest of my body. They hooked me up to a drip of an intravenous antibiotic and kept me stocked with painkillers, then sent me up to the urology ward and set me up with a “bed” (urology mostly deals with outpatients, and so my ‘bed’ was actually a trolley, but they wanted to keep me close to the urologists in case of any complications).

The view from my hospital ward window: Oxford city is visible in the distance. — It was only the following morning, with the delirium passed, that I realised that I was on the sixth floor. Looking out of my window, I could just make out the spires of the Bodleian Library in the distance, so I dropped my coworkers an email to apologise for not being on my way there.

A consultant switched me to a week’s course of yet-another different antibiotic – co-amoxiclav – and recommended keeping me in for another night. Now, I think that co-amoxiclav is a really interesting drug, so I’m going to be a bit of a nerd and tell you about that for a bit (I promise we’ll get back to my health in a moment: if you don’t want the science bit, just scroll past the diagrams to the next photo).

Amoxicillin, with lactam ring highlighted. — This is amoxicillin. I’ve highlighted in blue the lactam ring, which is the important bit.

Co-amoxiclav is a mixture of two drugs. The first is the antibiotic amoxicillin. Amoxicillin belongs to a class of antibiotics (which includes penicillin) called β-lactams, which is the most-commonly used family of antibiotics. These antibiotics contain a four-point lactam ‘ring’ (highlighted in blue above), and the way that they work is that this part of the molecule bonds with a particular protein common to all gram-positive bacteria. Normally this protein is responsible for producing peptidoglycan, which is an essential ingredient in the cell walls of these kinds of bacteria, but when it gets locked to a β-lactam ring it stops working. As a result, when the bacterium reproduces the new child doesn’t have a proper cell wall, and can’t survive long in even the least-hostile environments.

Of course, we’re in a medical arms race right now because some of the bacteria which we’re targetting with antibiotics are becoming resistant. And here’s one what that they’re doing so: some of these bacteria have evolved to produce beta-lactamase, also bonds with beta-lactam rings, adding an OH to them and making them useless. Bummer, eh?

Clavulanic acid, with beta-lactam ring highlighted in blue. — And this is clavulanic acid. Recognise that shape on the left-hand side of the molecule (highlighted in blue)? Yup: it’s another lactam ring.

The second drug in co-amoxiclav, then, is clavulanic acid, which was discovered in the 1970s and started being added to drugs in the 1980s. Despite having a β-lactam ring (as you’ll see in blue above), clavulanic acid by itself it isn’t an effective antibiotic (for reasons I can’t quite get my head around – anyone want to help me?). But what it’s great at is bonding that lactam ring to beta-lactamase, thereby deactivating the bacterial counter-offensive and allowing the amoxicillin to carry on working, combating resistance.

So what you’ve got in co-amoxiclav is a an antibiotic and a chemical that counteracts the effects of a chemical that deactivates that antibiotic. Wow! It’s things like this that really make me wish I had a brain for biology!

A cannula in the back of Dan's hand. — These things aren’t terribly comfortable when you’re trying to sleep.

I was eventually discharged from hospital and released to go home for lots of bed rest and water, along with a further week’s course of co-amoxiclav. Unfortunately it turns out that I’m one of the unlucky folks for whom amoxicillin makes me dizzy, so I spent most of that week lying down in-between wobbly vertigo-filled trips to and from the bathroom. But it worked! Within a few days I was feeling much better and by the end of last week I was able to work from home (and actually feel like I was useful again!).

Free of symptoms and off the drugs, I returned to work properly on Monday morning and everything seemed fine. Until, late in the morning, I went to the bathroom and started pissing blood.

Now apparently blood in your urine, while horrifying when it happens to you unexpectedly, isn’t actually a sign of a medical emergency. I was starting to get bladder pain again, quite intensely, so I excused myself from work and called the urology ward, who decided that I wasn’t in bad enough a condition to go and see them but sent me straight to my GP, who gave me another fortnight’s worth of co-amoxiclav. They’re monitoring my progress with urine and blood samples and if by Friday it’s not having an impact, they’re going to want to send me back to hospital (hopefully only as an outpatient) and pump me full of the intravenous stuff again. So… fingers crossed for a good result out of these drugs.

Co-amoxiclav tablet in packaging. — My co-amoxiclav tablets each come individually wrapped in a nitrogen-filled foil bag. I’ve no idea what it is that they’re concerned that they’ll react with, but I’m eating three of them a day anyway.

I was hoping that by this point I’d be writing this blog post and telling you all about how I’d fought the bladder monster and won. But it looks like I won’t be able to claim that victory for another week or two, yet. All I know is that I searched for “bladder monster” and found this. Yeah: that feels about right.

Calculating Pi (when you’re ill)

So, I’ve not been well lately. And because a few days lying on my back with insufficient mental stimulation is a quick route to insanity for me, I’ve been trying to spend my most-conscious moment doing things that keep my brain ticking over. And that’s how I ended up calculating pi.

Pi (or π) is, of course, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, for every circle. You’ll probably have learned it in school as 3.14, 3.142, or 3.14159, unless you were one of those creepy kids who tried to memorise a lot more digits. Over the years, we’ve been able to calculate it to increasing precision, and although there’s no practical or theoretical reason that we need to know it beyond the 32 digits worked out by Ludolph van Ceulen in the 16th Century, it’s still a fascinating topic that attracts research and debate.

Most of the computer-based systems we use today are hard to explain, but there’s a really fun computer-based experimental method that can be used to estimate the value of pi that I’m going to share with you. As I’ve been stuck in bed (and often asleep) for the last few days, I’ve not been able to do much productive work, but I have found myself able to implement an example of how to calculate pi. Recovery like a nerd, am I right?

A "pi pie", from a Pi Day celebration. — Pi goes on forever. Pie, sadly, comes to an end.

Remember in school, when you’ll have learned that the formula to describe a circle (of radius 1) on a cartesian coordinate system is x² + y² = 1? Well you can work this backwards, too: if you have a point on a grid, (x,y), then you can tell whether it’s inside or outside that circle. If x² + y² < 1, it’s inside, and if x² + y² > 1, it’s outside. Meanwhile, the difference between the area of a circle and the area of a square that exactly contains it is π/4.

A circle of radius 1 at the intersection of the axes of a cartesian coordinate system. — Think back to your school days. Ever draw a circle like this? Do the words “Cartesian coordinates” ring any bells?

Take those two facts together and you can develop an experimental way to determine pi, called a Monte Carlo method. Take a circle of radius 1 inside a square that exactly contains it. Then randomly choose points within the square. Statistically speaking, these random points have a π/4 chance of occurring within the circle (rather than outside it). So if we take the number of points that lie within the circle, divide that by the total number of points, and then multiply by 4, we should get something that approaches the value of pi. You could even do it by hand!

Output of Dan's demonstration of the Monte Carlo method as used to approximate the value of pi. — I wrote some software to do exactly that. Here’s what it looks like – the red points are inside the circle, and the black points are outside.

The software illustration I’ve written is raw JavaScript, HTML, and SVG, and should work in any modern web browser (though it can get a little slow once it’s drawn a few thousand points!). Give it a go, here! When you go to that page, your browser will start drawing dots at random points, colouring them red if the sum of the squares of their coordinates is less than 1, which is the radius of the circle (and the width of the square that encompasses it). As it goes along, it uses the formula I described above to approximate the value of pi. You’ll probably get as far as 3.14 before you get bored, but there’s no reason that this method couldn’t be used to go as far as you like: it’s not the best tool for the job, but it’s super-easy to understand and explain.

Oh, and it’s all completely open-source, so you’re welcome to take it and do with it what you wish. Turn off the graphical output to make it run faster, and see if you can get an accurate approximation to 5 digits of pi! Or slow it down so you can see how the appearance of each and every point affects the calculation. Or adapt it into a teaching tool and show your maths students one way that pi can be derived experimentally. It’s all yours: have fun.

And I’ll update you on my health at some other point.

Guess where I woke up this morning, MegaMasons?

This link was originally posted to /r/MegaMasonsLounge. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: http://i.imgur.com/vUxVG6Z.jpg

So yeah: that’s not entirely pleasant. A couple of days ago I was diagnosed with what was supposed to be a minor bladder infection and given antibiotics. Then yesterday I became feverish and collapsed. And now I’m in hospital.

But on the upside, they’ve spent all night pumping me full of some kind of intravaenous antibiotic that must be made from like unicorn spunk and leprechaun tears or something because it’s frankly magical: feeling so much better today than yesterday.

Just wanted to say hi. Hi, all!

Footnotes

Location

Participants

Expedition

Tracklog

Photos

Footnotes

Footnotes

#strawfiechallenge – 1 minute of simulated breathing difficulty in recognition of sufferers of cystis fibrosis

Ticking Point

Meat Me Half-Way