Saint Thomas is situated in a very safe part of St. Paul—crime is low, and the safety measures in the dorms are high: keycard access and check-ins after hours. You start to take it for granted how safe it is to be on campus. In the past few years, however, we’ve had a marked increase of muggings only blocks from school. It’s usually dark, and the victim usually gets hit on the head. One guy was running with his iPod and didn’t even know what was coming because he couldn’t hear anything. Another guy was something like 6’5”, and he still got attacked.
It’s rather disturbing, especially as more and more of the people I know live off-campus *cough* Mykala *cough*. I haven’t had the opportunity to live off campus, I’ve been here in university dorms/apartments for my entire four years. And here on campus, it’s hard to imagine anyone at St. Thomas as threatening. They sure don’t have to steal to get what they want. I mean, I was sitting in biochem lab the other day, and this girl starts in about how her Dad just bought her a brand new Honda CR-V, to replace her Jeep Grand Cherokee. Yeesh. So, true, it’s not saying much for my own courage, but I can’t really be frightened with all these rich people running around. I mean, what are they going to do? Beat me with their money? Their big bags of coins with dollar signs on the side? Or maybe they’ll just dump a bunch of check pads on me to knock me out. Hard to say.
I think I’m going to see the movie Hot Fuzz this evening. I’m pretty excited, it’s from “the guys who watched every action movie ever made and brought you Shaun of the Dead,” and it looks pretty funny. Metacritic shows that most reviewers like the movie, rating it an 80, which places it right between Volver and Little Miss Sunshine. Oh, and there’s this scene where the more portly cop crashes through a fence while trying to take a shortcut. I’m a sucker for physical comedy. I’m also a sucker for cool graphic design, and the logo-type thing for the movie is fantastic.
As the human body ages, certain immune system organs actually shrink. For example, there’s the thymus: here, T cells (one of the primary components of the immune system’s ability to recognize and eliminate foreign antigen) are converted from naïve to mature. If you look at a picture of the thymus of a teen next to one of an 80 year old, the difference is striking. It’s not like the color and texture difference between a cancerous lung and a normal lung—there’s actually hardly any thymus left in the 80 year old’s picture. Why the geriatric thymus continues to function effectively is the topic of another post. But the fact remains: there’s a definite change in the immune system with the passage of time.
So, the other day we were talking about birdflu (specifically, H5N1) in Immunology. We learned an interesting point: the potency of the immune response in young’ins is normally an advantage in fighting off infection. However, it is thought that in H5N1 (birdflu) infections, this immune response is a liability, not an asset. Compounds called cytokines, commonly observed in an immune response, are released in tremendous quantities in a positive feedback loop, eventually resulting in an immune response so strong that the victim dies. So, here’s the point Dr. Manske brought up: only young people have immune systems powerful enough to generate a killer cytokine storm.
The take-home message? Current trends indicate that H5N1 has characteristics that may make it disproportionately threatening to the young and healthy. If H5N1does become an epidemic and a vaccine (and distribution method for it) aren’t found quickly, it could be extremely serious (yes, this bad). That fact got me thinking about a tremendous potential premise for novel of fiction: imagine a world where there aren’t any people between 5 and 80 years old.
If it sounds hollow at first, keep thinking. Someone who is 80 years old lived through World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War. The year they were born, Lindbergh was flying across the Atlantic … but if they were on a farm, they were probably still pulling some things with horses. 80 years takes you from electricity to the internet. Radios to HBO. Cars to the moon, and beyond. Rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Would a generation united in its old age and extended perspective on humanity’s recurring errors take the unique opportunity of their overwhelming majority to enact laws or (more importantly) societal changes that would promote a more forward-thinking, compassionate society? Would we see a coordinated effort towards projects like efficient collection of energy from the sun, a (NON-POLITICIZED) focus on preserving the planet, an effort at a global government, or even ideas like the Clock of the Long Now? Or would we simply end up with a world full of bowling alleys, nursing homes, and Lawrence Welk Show reruns?
Crises like massive, deadly flu epidemics unite people—but they can also destabilize governments and societies by creating warring factions of rebels. I think writing about this “accidental geriatric revolution” would be an interesting way to explore the great potential of sudden global changes in the absence of such barriers like violence. After all, if you’re 80 and faced with raising a generation of little ones and stabilizing a disease ravaged planet, neither you nor your hips have time for war.
I’ve often thought that Gangsta Rap singers have done the inner cities load of good by teaching urban punks that holding the gun sideways is “cool.” That has to have gone a long way in reducing shooting fatalities in the hood by making it impossible to aim the gun properly. Plus, it should increase the number of incapacitating but non-fatal arm/shoulder wounds and save lives.
Anyone who bought a ticket to the Laugh Factory on Sunday night ended up getting two surprises.
The first came when Dave Chappelle appeared onstage at 10:36 p.m. for an unannounced set. The second shocker: Chappelle kept telling jokes until 4:43 the next morning—making his entire set a whopping six hours and seven minutes.
That’s the longest performance by any comedian in the the 28-year history of the Laugh Factory, according to founder Jamie Masada.
And the guy wasn’t talking to an empty room.
Indeed, Masada said only about a dozen of the 150-plus original members of the audience left the club before Chappelle wrapped his set. “The audience was with him 100 percent,” he said.
I’ve been reading more and more of The New Yorker lately, so I’ve been seeing a lot of their famous one panel comics that have been in their pages for years. These cartoons are selected quite carefully, as shown in a recent article about the cartoon editor of the New Yorker; from what I can tell, the cartoons are selected to be subtle, clever, and not laugh out-loud funny. They are therefore things you can glance at more than once and find entertainment.
So, I present to you my first makeshift cartoon in the style of the New Yorker. It was conceived while brushing my teeth not long ago (please refer to Ze Frank’s Where the %$@# Do Ideas Come From?), and as a first draft idea, has absolutely no quality control applied. You have been warned. I envision two first graders on a playground, in the midst of an altercation, with one saying “A pox, a chicken pox upon both your houses!”
Hot on the heels of my extensive discussion on happiness, I must change topics a bit and point out a 2005 study by the American Chemical Society, specifically, “Senior Research Associate Janel Kasper-Wolfe of ACS’s Department of Member Research & Technology under the general guidance of the ACS Committee on Economic & Professional Affairs.” Fascinating, you say. Read on! So … what in this study could be so interesting, you ask? Well. This is an analysis of the starting salaries received by chemistry graduates in 2005. Possibly an ironic subject matter given my last post? Yes. Interesting? Without a doubt.
The C&EN News website provides the entire article summarizing the salary study (in PDF format) online, but I am interested in only one subset of the data. Above a table on the third page is the provocative heading saying, for those with bachelors degrees, “Title, certification, and grades have little impact on salary.” Grades. Grades have little impact on salary. Those with an ‘A’ GPA earned, on average, $35,700 per year. Those with a ‘C’ GPA earned, on average, $36,000 per year. This fact doesn’t surprise me, and let’s take a journey back in time to see why.
The summer after my junior year in high school, I applied at the local bike shop for my very first job. The employee discount on bikes and accessories, combined with the predominantly young, outdoorsy demographic made the job quite appealing. Attracted by what could be a fun debut in the world of work, I put my best (naive) foot forward to secure an interview by assembling a resume and crafting what I see now as the most embarrassingly formal e-mails I’ve ever read.
As a very responsible student, a fan of biking, and a quick learner, I thought I could get the job. I even referred a friend to this place, thinking we could work together. He got the job. I didn’t. Now, first realize I was happy for him and there were no hard feelings … I mean, it’s a summer job for gosh sakes. But even more importantly, by missing the job, I learned something about the real world: it is all about experience. My friend had some experience taking apart bikes—during my interview, I confessed I had some, but relatively little. This concept of experience is extremely obvious, I know, but consider the mind of a high schooler.
High school kids learn that the be-all and end-all of their existence is the grades they earn and conformity to endless rules and regulations. It is implied that when one successfully navigates these arbitrary obstacles, success in the real world will inevitably follow. This is fantastically false. The bike shop didn’t care about my class rank, or my latest National Honors Society whatever—they cared that I wasn’t on drugs, showed up to work on time, and knew bikes. High school is excellent at teaching lessons of self-discipline and delayed gratification, but it paints a picture of a meritocracy that doesn’t exist anywhere I’ve ever been.
So, somehow I’d like to impart the “think outside the box of high school” idea to future generations, except without all the negative corporate doublespeak that accompanies that particular catch phrase. Maybe it’s just a lesson one must learn own their own.
