Friday, October 30, 2009
Cure Cancer with a takeaway
We are like ducklings, imprinted with the terms and conditions for life as laid down (or not) by our families. I suppose mine was relatively decorous, given that it began in India, in a military environment, with an Edwardian father who had a keen sense of what was socially acceptable at the time. As I grew up (until college days) I was the lucky recipient of Indian curries made by my mother, from recipes she had learnt in Dehra Dun. We had to display good table manners, which included how food was put into the mouth, as well as ensuring no post-prandial escapes could be heard or smelled, as a consequence of ingesting this exotic foodstuff .
It was a bit of an eye-opener, or nostril flarer to visit friends’ homes in my teens and discover that very different rules applied. Indeed, my peers often made a virtue of the length, loudness and suffocating poison of escapee gases.
When I got to college it was to meet with an exponential increase in the competitiveness of young bucks with regard to their skills in such matters. This was particularly so when they’d been for a cheap curry and had had a few beers. It was the time of lighting the methane jet.
In general I did not join in, being imprinted as I was. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I read the latest research on anti-cancer agents. Top of the list comes turmeric, that yellow ingredient of curries. All those student emissions turn out to have been unconscious ritualistic behaviour for cleansing the body of its toxic waste, cancer cells and all.
We are like ducklings, imprinted with the terms and conditions for life as laid down (or not) by our families. I suppose mine was relatively decorous, given that it began in India, in a military environment, with an Edwardian father who had a keen sense of what was socially acceptable at the time. As I grew up (until college days) I was the lucky recipient of Indian curries made by my mother, from recipes she had learnt in Dehra Dun. We had to display good table manners, which included how food was put into the mouth, as well as ensuring no post-prandial escapes could be heard or smelled, as a consequence of ingesting this exotic foodstuff .
It was a bit of an eye-opener, or nostril flarer to visit friends’ homes in my teens and discover that very different rules applied. Indeed, my peers often made a virtue of the length, loudness and suffocating poison of escapee gases.
When I got to college it was to meet with an exponential increase in the competitiveness of young bucks with regard to their skills in such matters. This was particularly so when they’d been for a cheap curry and had had a few beers. It was the time of lighting the methane jet.
In general I did not join in, being imprinted as I was. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I read the latest research on anti-cancer agents. Top of the list comes turmeric, that yellow ingredient of curries. All those student emissions turn out to have been unconscious ritualistic behaviour for cleansing the body of its toxic waste, cancer cells and all.
Labels: Cancer. Turmeric. Indian curries
Monday, October 26, 2009
Four Countries and a Funeral
In the last six weeks I have been a good Bedouin and trekked ever on, pitching tents in the UK, France, Eire and Ghana. Now I am back in Accra where birds have idiosyncratic sets of hoops, hollers, screams and warbles, where the temperature is in the mid thirties and where the pool is the place for exercise each day because even walking two metres to the car makes you want to change your shirt. In this land of the permanent fan (we eschew air-conditioning on environmental grounds) I am settling again to running foreign affairs by email and Skype, while helping to manage a factory of fifty folks, who - I hasten to end any speculation to the contrary - earn up to six times the national average wage as dressmakers, cutters, ironers, packers etc. Certainly no sweat shop. Chanel 4 came once to try to nail the company as a typical UK-driven exploitation, only to leave with no story and a lot of expensive egg on its face. So, anyway, there is always another issue to resolve here. More work to do. Maybe I will illuminate factory life in a later email.
Given that the trip was, as always, work-oriented and the reason for going to France to my house and to a Cork hotel, was to do some deep thinking about business strategies in differing locations, for inspiration, it was a successful time away. The beach in Cork was delightful and the temperatures held up remarkably for October. But it is now an expensive location with the euro matching the pound and prices for the visitor seeming to have trebled as a consequence. It was the same story in France, though my place there is designed to be as cheap as possible. When you travel, you feel recession in palpable ways, that, when you are embedded in a society, are not so noticeable, unless you become unemployed. In London, for example, there were still big crowds on the pavements outside bars in Marylebone and Camden market was chock full, despite it being a Tuesday when I was there. I didn’t visit Seven Sisters or Croydon or Southwark where there might have been a violent contrast, but the moneyed seem still to be flashing their cash in the more genteel environs. Also in the UK, the postal strike was in full swing. My socialist leanings are torn apart these days when I see appalling management practices (why can’t they be coached by experts to handle disputes?) and an old-style labour leadership which seems equally intransigent and willing to destroy the organisation whose teats it sucks. Creative intelligence in modernising a company seems non-existent.
Meanwhile, BA have introduced bigger, flashier jets for their Ghana flights, after years of old tin cans, occasionally rude service and, for the passengers, a distinct sense of racist scheduling. A 777 brought us into Accra and within a few days, reintegrated and acclimatised, we went along the coast for a funeral. This is how it was organised. The deceased, an active lady in her village and beyond, attracted a congregation of several hundred people in a marquee. Everyone was fed at the following feast, which comprised tilapia (fish), goat-light soup (big pieces of goat in a very hot liquid), roast chicken (always done to a deep heavy duty crisp, which puts the emphasis on extremely well preserved molars and incisors), jollof rice, yams and salads. The funeral service lasted a couple of hours and had some eulogies, lots of singing and praying, dancing (there is a tradition among the Ashanti that if you dance before all the congregation you do not need to contribute to the event). In this case, everyone danced and everyone contributed. The dress code was black and white as the deceased had had a long life. All the women, of whatever size, wore figure-hugging dresses in traditional black and white patterns. Most of the men wore black, satinised cotton shirts and black trousers or traditional cloth lengths, wrapped round their bodies and slung over their shoulders. Buckets were placed around the square, a very eccentric brass band built up steam and we all conga’d to make our offerings. These events have to be fronted with cash, which can run into thousands of pounds, and this is a way of reimbursing the backers. There are even those who make it their skill to underwrite weddings and funerals and take a return on their investment – by sharing any excess of income over expenditure. All in all it was not the most exuberant of events, compared with some that occur elsewhere in the country but it had a focus and commitment from everyone that seemed more appropriate to saying goodbye to the dead, than in many a western church or chapel. Maybe it was the way that the evangelical church had been grafted on to something older, more pantheistic and more determined to let people vent their emotions.
I should have introduced this latter section about the funeral by saying that all this took place in perfect sunshine, with views of the sea through palm trees.
In the last six weeks I have been a good Bedouin and trekked ever on, pitching tents in the UK, France, Eire and Ghana. Now I am back in Accra where birds have idiosyncratic sets of hoops, hollers, screams and warbles, where the temperature is in the mid thirties and where the pool is the place for exercise each day because even walking two metres to the car makes you want to change your shirt. In this land of the permanent fan (we eschew air-conditioning on environmental grounds) I am settling again to running foreign affairs by email and Skype, while helping to manage a factory of fifty folks, who - I hasten to end any speculation to the contrary - earn up to six times the national average wage as dressmakers, cutters, ironers, packers etc. Certainly no sweat shop. Chanel 4 came once to try to nail the company as a typical UK-driven exploitation, only to leave with no story and a lot of expensive egg on its face. So, anyway, there is always another issue to resolve here. More work to do. Maybe I will illuminate factory life in a later email.
Given that the trip was, as always, work-oriented and the reason for going to France to my house and to a Cork hotel, was to do some deep thinking about business strategies in differing locations, for inspiration, it was a successful time away. The beach in Cork was delightful and the temperatures held up remarkably for October. But it is now an expensive location with the euro matching the pound and prices for the visitor seeming to have trebled as a consequence. It was the same story in France, though my place there is designed to be as cheap as possible. When you travel, you feel recession in palpable ways, that, when you are embedded in a society, are not so noticeable, unless you become unemployed. In London, for example, there were still big crowds on the pavements outside bars in Marylebone and Camden market was chock full, despite it being a Tuesday when I was there. I didn’t visit Seven Sisters or Croydon or Southwark where there might have been a violent contrast, but the moneyed seem still to be flashing their cash in the more genteel environs. Also in the UK, the postal strike was in full swing. My socialist leanings are torn apart these days when I see appalling management practices (why can’t they be coached by experts to handle disputes?) and an old-style labour leadership which seems equally intransigent and willing to destroy the organisation whose teats it sucks. Creative intelligence in modernising a company seems non-existent.
Meanwhile, BA have introduced bigger, flashier jets for their Ghana flights, after years of old tin cans, occasionally rude service and, for the passengers, a distinct sense of racist scheduling. A 777 brought us into Accra and within a few days, reintegrated and acclimatised, we went along the coast for a funeral. This is how it was organised. The deceased, an active lady in her village and beyond, attracted a congregation of several hundred people in a marquee. Everyone was fed at the following feast, which comprised tilapia (fish), goat-light soup (big pieces of goat in a very hot liquid), roast chicken (always done to a deep heavy duty crisp, which puts the emphasis on extremely well preserved molars and incisors), jollof rice, yams and salads. The funeral service lasted a couple of hours and had some eulogies, lots of singing and praying, dancing (there is a tradition among the Ashanti that if you dance before all the congregation you do not need to contribute to the event). In this case, everyone danced and everyone contributed. The dress code was black and white as the deceased had had a long life. All the women, of whatever size, wore figure-hugging dresses in traditional black and white patterns. Most of the men wore black, satinised cotton shirts and black trousers or traditional cloth lengths, wrapped round their bodies and slung over their shoulders. Buckets were placed around the square, a very eccentric brass band built up steam and we all conga’d to make our offerings. These events have to be fronted with cash, which can run into thousands of pounds, and this is a way of reimbursing the backers. There are even those who make it their skill to underwrite weddings and funerals and take a return on their investment – by sharing any excess of income over expenditure. All in all it was not the most exuberant of events, compared with some that occur elsewhere in the country but it had a focus and commitment from everyone that seemed more appropriate to saying goodbye to the dead, than in many a western church or chapel. Maybe it was the way that the evangelical church had been grafted on to something older, more pantheistic and more determined to let people vent their emotions.
I should have introduced this latter section about the funeral by saying that all this took place in perfect sunshine, with views of the sea through palm trees.
Labels: France. UK, Ghana. Funeral. Eire
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Einstein, Mighty Mouse and Gold Medal Grannie
You are a mouse and one day they clamp a recording device on one of your neurons. One. Neuron. In the hippocampus. Imagine the size of the clamp. We must be talking micro-nano here. Anyway, you find yourself standing at the end of a long corridor? You run to the other end. Easy. Hm... someone gives you a piece of cheddar. Champion! So you run back again.. Gruyere. Great! But the humans are at it again. You aren't actually running. You are stationary except for your feet which are making a ball turn round.
What you don’t realise, Mickey, is that you are involved in a virtual simulation. Your head is motionless but your active neuron thinks it is memorising a maze.
This is the science of the brain these days. It reminds me of a psychology book I read a few decades ago which described how Einstein was laid on a bed and electrodes fixed to his skull. They recorded his brain pattern in this quiescent state. Then they instructed him to think of E=MC² and watched the burst of energy cross his synapses, hoping to learn more about what Woody Allen called ‘my second most favourite organ’.
Taking these two events you get some sense of the progress of life on the planet. A mouse is now doing what Einstein once did. It’s astonishing, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, a redoubtable and very happy female centenarian has just won a gold medal in the shot put. There’s video of her putting the shot to four metres plus. They created the new 100+ category just for her. No-one can doubt her Einstein moment but, before long, a mouse will emulate her, putting the shot into the middle distance, yet not actually moving. It’ll be another breakthrough in neuroscience. Worth a bit of gouda, don’t you think?
Friday, October 09, 2009
Over par: golfing in Cork
This was a taster to see whether I still like the game. I do but there has always been a touch of the inedible being hunted by the unspeakable about it, especially in the Home Counties where pomposity, prissiness and self-inflated egos abound. However, as in so many other ways, the Irish are different. Probably the most literate society on Buddha’s earth, they imbue much of what happens on their island with their self-constructed national type. They are not obsequious which is a big plus when being served in bars and restaurants They seek to engage the visitor in the sunny side of life. In a SpaEurope (the sort of store that abounded in the UK before supermarkets, I asked how expensive the batteries were. ‘We pride ourselves in only selling the most expensive goods’, he replied urbanely. This hit at the heart of the economy here which is reeling under the unparalleled strength of the euro. A bar of chocolate costs three pounds fifty when it used to be one-fifty, for example. The cheapest plonk is six quid and is the stuff you use to keep the weeds down.
Anyway, the golf. There is a nine hole course near here boasting the emerald grass, the shallow and infrequent bunkers and the most perfectly playable fairways imaginable. A kind of Elysian field for the afterlife. The old feller in the hotel that owns it could not find change and so let me have the clubs on free hire. The groundsman found me some balls. He also explained the nature of the layout which was impossible when looking at the course layout on their map. It had all the beauty of the London tube map without any of the logic. At several holes players play across each other’s heads. Luckily this is October and I play in a blissful solitude. In the clubhouse (where you pay on trust by slipping your fifteen euros into a letter box) it is like the Marie Celeste, with all the evidence of a bustling social life and complex organisation, yet no-one around.
To cap off this rumination, I turned on the television and found three channels showing identical images of pretty painted buildings in pretty painted Cork towns. What was extraordinary was that one had a rock anthem playing over it, another had a sentimental modern Irish love song, plush with strings and the last had Irish pipes accompanying a frenzied updated folk song somewhat in the manner, if not the anarchism, of the Pogues. Why? Given the lush tourist literature everywhere extolling everytning from local cookery to surfing and the fact that everyone seems to be employed in selling the aforesaid national character, I suppose these are ads on loops, artistic installations to feed the frenzy of the gullible tourist, whatever the musical taste. But I didn't hang around to check.
Here in Eire, being literate does not necessarily mean being cultured. In Ghana the reverse can be true.
They do have golf courses in Accra. More of them as and when. I am bitten by the bug again - and I don't mean mosquitos.
This was a taster to see whether I still like the game. I do but there has always been a touch of the inedible being hunted by the unspeakable about it, especially in the Home Counties where pomposity, prissiness and self-inflated egos abound. However, as in so many other ways, the Irish are different. Probably the most literate society on Buddha’s earth, they imbue much of what happens on their island with their self-constructed national type. They are not obsequious which is a big plus when being served in bars and restaurants They seek to engage the visitor in the sunny side of life. In a SpaEurope (the sort of store that abounded in the UK before supermarkets, I asked how expensive the batteries were. ‘We pride ourselves in only selling the most expensive goods’, he replied urbanely. This hit at the heart of the economy here which is reeling under the unparalleled strength of the euro. A bar of chocolate costs three pounds fifty when it used to be one-fifty, for example. The cheapest plonk is six quid and is the stuff you use to keep the weeds down.
Anyway, the golf. There is a nine hole course near here boasting the emerald grass, the shallow and infrequent bunkers and the most perfectly playable fairways imaginable. A kind of Elysian field for the afterlife. The old feller in the hotel that owns it could not find change and so let me have the clubs on free hire. The groundsman found me some balls. He also explained the nature of the layout which was impossible when looking at the course layout on their map. It had all the beauty of the London tube map without any of the logic. At several holes players play across each other’s heads. Luckily this is October and I play in a blissful solitude. In the clubhouse (where you pay on trust by slipping your fifteen euros into a letter box) it is like the Marie Celeste, with all the evidence of a bustling social life and complex organisation, yet no-one around.
To cap off this rumination, I turned on the television and found three channels showing identical images of pretty painted buildings in pretty painted Cork towns. What was extraordinary was that one had a rock anthem playing over it, another had a sentimental modern Irish love song, plush with strings and the last had Irish pipes accompanying a frenzied updated folk song somewhat in the manner, if not the anarchism, of the Pogues. Why? Given the lush tourist literature everywhere extolling everytning from local cookery to surfing and the fact that everyone seems to be employed in selling the aforesaid national character, I suppose these are ads on loops, artistic installations to feed the frenzy of the gullible tourist, whatever the musical taste. But I didn't hang around to check.
Here in Eire, being literate does not necessarily mean being cultured. In Ghana the reverse can be true.
They do have golf courses in Accra. More of them as and when. I am bitten by the bug again - and I don't mean mosquitos.
Labels: Cork. Eire. Golf. Tourism
Saturday, October 03, 2009
It's not life as we know it, Captain...
Imagine a long, winding set of lights on a wire. Some of the bulbs are on and some are off. The wire twists around another one. It’s the double helix. And, do you know, until I saw this mock up on the box I assumed that the lights that were on, stayed on through your life and the ones that had failed to ignite, stayed doggo. Not at all. Watching one reel of a new tv series on twins in London, en passant, I became educated in the knowledge of (I think) epigenesis. Whatever the term ( I remember Piaget using it, so I could have got it mixed up), I was assured by the very nice doctor that these lights can be switched on and off through life as the genes interact with the environment. This means that at our very core, the blueprint of life, the map of what makes me different from you, is not static. I always imagined it was. But identical twins show that it isn’t. If they live life differently, epigenesist happens and they become less and less identical. It means that change can be wrought in our DNA. It means that we will eventually be able to press back the tide of death, forever.
I have written before about the thrust of medical science taking humanity into a future wherein we are able to redesign ourselves so that we can live in any place; Mars, the Moon, interstellar space, under the sea. The great debate (originally won by Darwinists, or so they thought) that evolution was a slow battle of the survival of the fittest, via natural selection, may now have shifted in favour of the Lamarckians. Lamarck suggested that evolution was a complex mix of environment and alchemy! Essentially we evolve towards greater complexity in an orderly manner and this does not need to take generations but even sudden shifts in the environment can cause a species to change. It was a theory of its time but, symbolically, it seems closer to what science has on offer today. Stem cell surgery and bionic bits are fast becoming as much part of our bodies as new fashion on High Street rails . Now, even the atomic level is open to our alchemy. We can turn the base lead of our every day bodies into the gold of champions. We can all become super heroes.
We are Gods.
From my point of view we can’t do any worse than the Gods we have had up to now.
Imagine a long, winding set of lights on a wire. Some of the bulbs are on and some are off. The wire twists around another one. It’s the double helix. And, do you know, until I saw this mock up on the box I assumed that the lights that were on, stayed on through your life and the ones that had failed to ignite, stayed doggo. Not at all. Watching one reel of a new tv series on twins in London, en passant, I became educated in the knowledge of (I think) epigenesis. Whatever the term ( I remember Piaget using it, so I could have got it mixed up), I was assured by the very nice doctor that these lights can be switched on and off through life as the genes interact with the environment. This means that at our very core, the blueprint of life, the map of what makes me different from you, is not static. I always imagined it was. But identical twins show that it isn’t. If they live life differently, epigenesist happens and they become less and less identical. It means that change can be wrought in our DNA. It means that we will eventually be able to press back the tide of death, forever.
I have written before about the thrust of medical science taking humanity into a future wherein we are able to redesign ourselves so that we can live in any place; Mars, the Moon, interstellar space, under the sea. The great debate (originally won by Darwinists, or so they thought) that evolution was a slow battle of the survival of the fittest, via natural selection, may now have shifted in favour of the Lamarckians. Lamarck suggested that evolution was a complex mix of environment and alchemy! Essentially we evolve towards greater complexity in an orderly manner and this does not need to take generations but even sudden shifts in the environment can cause a species to change. It was a theory of its time but, symbolically, it seems closer to what science has on offer today. Stem cell surgery and bionic bits are fast becoming as much part of our bodies as new fashion on High Street rails . Now, even the atomic level is open to our alchemy. We can turn the base lead of our every day bodies into the gold of champions. We can all become super heroes.
We are Gods.
From my point of view we can’t do any worse than the Gods we have had up to now.
Labels: Gods. Epigenesis. Twins. Darwin.