Campus activities
Sep. 19th, 2007 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebAh, yes, the students are back. Which means the activities are back.
Today I went to an open house of, uh, some new office for diversity. They had a diversity of snacks: fruit, veggies, sandwiches (some were made with half whole wheat and half white bread), cookies, brownies, and punch. I didn't learn much except that most of what they put together happens elsewhere.
I stayed after work for a "science study break." This is a program put on by science librarians where they take some movie or TV show with science in it and then find an expert on that subject and have that person talk about how realistic it is.
So I got to learn that the first season of "House," which is not about a house but apparently a doctor named House, is pretty realistic, but it goes downhill from there. We had an expert on infectious diseases start with a mini lecture on the fight between disease-causing bacteria and individual humans and some of our various defenses.
Then we watched several scenes of the show where they brought someone in, took in the symptoms and started guessing, ahem, diagnosing the problem. We learned things like that inflammation is generally accompanied by fever. If you have a gigantic inflamed area, you are going to be feeling pretty bad in general.
Some drugs get stored in your fat and even if you quit doing drugs, if you later lose weight, you could notice some odd things happening as the drugs get released. And if, in this situation, the doctor wants you to exercise, freeing more of the drugs from your fat, and also sweating some of these drugs out, so that the sweat can be tested to see which drugs are in there, that's actually possible, though it would probably be easier to test your blood.
I learned you can't catch Legionnaire's disease from other people. Usually it's from breathing mist from a pool of stagnant water such as can be found in a large air conditioning system, but not like what can collect from a window AC.
However, as I would have guessed: it doesn't make sense for a doctor to deliberately give you a disease (or a number of diseases) to help diagnose something. Nor is he likely to do his own testing or have one of his interns break into your house for samples of things. Nor will having two diseases at once make it possible for the diseases to duke it out with each other instead of with you.
Refashion of the day - the last example from Refashioning Is Contagious - "he transformed one of his old yankees shirts from gary sheffield (no longer on the team, a big jerk) to shelley duncan (rookie just called up from the minors, young and really enthusiastic and hitting big home runs)" The picture is hilarious. Let's just say you don't need a before picture to know what it used to look like.
Spanish learning tool of the day - Spanish Verb Conjugation Trainer - for when you should know how to conjugate some kinds of verbs by now, but a huge amount of practice would really help. Given a Spanish pronoun, a Spanish infinitive, and the tense you have chosen, type the proper word and press enter. It tells you if you're right or not. You can have as many chances as you want and give up and see the real answer whenever you want. And for letters with accents, they have buttons you can click to include those in your words. It's wonderfully user-friendly.
Today I went to an open house of, uh, some new office for diversity. They had a diversity of snacks: fruit, veggies, sandwiches (some were made with half whole wheat and half white bread), cookies, brownies, and punch. I didn't learn much except that most of what they put together happens elsewhere.
I stayed after work for a "science study break." This is a program put on by science librarians where they take some movie or TV show with science in it and then find an expert on that subject and have that person talk about how realistic it is.
So I got to learn that the first season of "House," which is not about a house but apparently a doctor named House, is pretty realistic, but it goes downhill from there. We had an expert on infectious diseases start with a mini lecture on the fight between disease-causing bacteria and individual humans and some of our various defenses.
Then we watched several scenes of the show where they brought someone in, took in the symptoms and started guessing, ahem, diagnosing the problem. We learned things like that inflammation is generally accompanied by fever. If you have a gigantic inflamed area, you are going to be feeling pretty bad in general.
Some drugs get stored in your fat and even if you quit doing drugs, if you later lose weight, you could notice some odd things happening as the drugs get released. And if, in this situation, the doctor wants you to exercise, freeing more of the drugs from your fat, and also sweating some of these drugs out, so that the sweat can be tested to see which drugs are in there, that's actually possible, though it would probably be easier to test your blood.
I learned you can't catch Legionnaire's disease from other people. Usually it's from breathing mist from a pool of stagnant water such as can be found in a large air conditioning system, but not like what can collect from a window AC.
However, as I would have guessed: it doesn't make sense for a doctor to deliberately give you a disease (or a number of diseases) to help diagnose something. Nor is he likely to do his own testing or have one of his interns break into your house for samples of things. Nor will having two diseases at once make it possible for the diseases to duke it out with each other instead of with you.
Refashion of the day - the last example from Refashioning Is Contagious - "he transformed one of his old yankees shirts from gary sheffield (no longer on the team, a big jerk) to shelley duncan (rookie just called up from the minors, young and really enthusiastic and hitting big home runs)" The picture is hilarious. Let's just say you don't need a before picture to know what it used to look like.
Spanish learning tool of the day - Spanish Verb Conjugation Trainer - for when you should know how to conjugate some kinds of verbs by now, but a huge amount of practice would really help. Given a Spanish pronoun, a Spanish infinitive, and the tense you have chosen, type the proper word and press enter. It tells you if you're right or not. You can have as many chances as you want and give up and see the real answer whenever you want. And for letters with accents, they have buttons you can click to include those in your words. It's wonderfully user-friendly.