It’s not a myth
I just noticed the following on a DHL delivery tracking from last week:
The parcel that remained undelivered for a day? (with swipe card for size comparison)
Ryssen
"Det är inte en fråga om, utan när ryssen kommer." - Befäl angående varför de driver de stackars värnpliktiga så hårt.
Jag satt precis och funderade på om jag har några engelska läsare överhuvudtaget på den här bloggen. Kanske borde marknadsföra den genom en gigantisk PR-kupp mot BBC-huset i Manchester.
English translation: Precisely, I've funded English lasers overhead from this blog. In return, the border-market for genome put a gigantic PR cup (of tea) in the BBC building in Manchester.
Doesn't really make sense, but I would make a lot of money as a translator 
The neighbour deserves it
I would like dedicate this post to my wonderful neighbour who actively chose to play loud music and yell imcomprehensible lyrics until 0530 this morning. I actually have two points make in this post:
- My flatmates are all awake, so I can play my music freely. However, you anonymous neighbour have indeed been quiet. Sleeping, perchance?
- My 5.1 surround sound system, designed for geek gamers can produce a lot higher volumes than your £9 stereo speakers that kept people awake yesterday night.
I performed a sound check in my bathroom, with the same thickness of walls as between our rooms. At less than half volume I could hear the lyrics of R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" clearly. I'm turning up volume a bit now, hope you're enjoying a good night's sleep! :lol:
Recipe for disaster
Partying + alcohol + little sleep + improper nutrition + filthy flatmates that use the kitchen for cultivation of harmful bacteria + slight cold + insufficient clothing + rain. Reiterate over a week; and the result is: moderate disaster.
I'm trying to self-medicate with water, paracetamol, budenoside, terbutaline sulphate, probiotic drinking yogurt, orange juice, more water, excessive sleep, staying away from the kitchen as much as possible, and healthy food.
But at least I had a good week!
In need of a zeitgeber
My sleep has been disturbed over the last few months. I stay awake all night watching films, blogging and even cooking food. Then I sleep through half of the days, waking up for no less than a full scale nuclear war (and that hasn't been tested - yet :twisted: ). Luckily though, I'm in possession of course literature in neuropsychology, and might be able to shed some light on what goes on in the brain.
Normally, people (and apparently rats) have an internal biological clock stipulating a daily sleeping pattern, referred to as circadian (circa: about, dies: day) rhythm. Research on rats has shown that a stimulus, known as zeitgeber, can reset this rhythm. A common such stimulus is light; we fall asleep when it gets dark outside, and wake up as light enters our room in the morning.
The biological clock itself is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a part of the hypothalamus. The question is how the SCN is instructed to control circadian rhythms. Something tells me the nucleus, per se, doesn't recept light as it's hidden deep inside the brain.
Freedman and a bunch of brainy (pun intended) men in lab coats investigated this in 1999. They determined that genetic manipulating of the rods and cones (the thingies providing visual information from the eyes) did not affect the rats' circadian rhythm synchronisation with light. However, removing their small rat eyes did have such an effect. Thus, there has to be another photoreceptor communicating with the SCN.
In 2000, Provenciano and another bunch of lab coats provided an explanation to this. They found a photopigment, subsequently named melanopsin, in the ganglion cells of the retina, the axons of which transmits information to the SCN and some other 'stuff' (the thalamus and the olivary pretectal nuclei - though I don't know how important those are).
It thus seems that we have photopigments in the retina, providing information to the SCN, which regulates the circadian rhythms telling me to go to sleep. Now, why doesn't it work? I've deduced three options to test my sleeping disorder:
- Remove the eyes - possibly painful experience, with no positive outcome whatsoever
- Designing a drug that controls melanopsin communication with the SCN - would tell me whether my retinal ganglion cells are dysfunctional. However, I don't really know how to design drugs.
- Buying a new set of eyes and an SCN over eBay, and have them installed by old Soviet doctors in a remote part of Russia. However, I don't really know any doctors in Russia.
This leaves me to one, extreme, final resort - I might have to reset the circadian rhythm manually by going to bed early every night and forcing myself to wake in the mornings. The utterly horrible thought makes me shiver.
Temptation & inhibition
This may look tempting a dull and hungry Friday afternoon -- just look at the lonely little cookies lying there 
However, when found in the experimental dungeon of a psychology department, the safe way is to leave it.
Boys and girls
I've stayed up all night and abused caffeine in order to write up a lab report about gender differences in identifying emotions in facial expressions. Thus far I've managed to:
- Watch "A View to a Kill" - the last Bond movie with Roger Moore
- Watch an episode of House MD
- Read a clinical manual for emergency physicians
- Learn that a bitter almond odour coming from a body may indicate Cyanide Toxicity
- Learn that rectal tone (as recorded with digital imaging equipment) may reveal essential details about the state of the patient.
- Read through my immense blogroll
- Read through parts of their blogrolls
- Call campus security to stop a mass psychosis from occurring (the inebriated inhabitants of a flat across the courtyard played some sort of game, which included tossing glass bottles from the kitchen to the road beneath)
- Contribute with 400 words to my lab report
Anyway, our results were in line with those of other studies, and suggested that females have an overall advantage in recognising basic emotions linked to facial expressions. There is, however, one slight aberration with males being superior at identifying male aggression. I wonder if there's an evolutionary perspective to the findings...
And to eliminate a line of enquiry from the comments section:
Q: Does this mean that I can pull an angry face on random women and get away with it?
A: No, 65% of the female sample still recognised male anger. And 80% of their boyfriends (?) will remove that angry face from the scene.
The Russian Way
The Independent reports today that an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to New York was delayed by several hours after a pilot was suspected to be drunk. Passengers were alerted as the pilot's greeting was garbled almost beyond recognition. When demanding to have a look at the man about to fly the plane, he refused to leave cockpit. An airline representative then boarded the plane, attempting to assure passengers:
"Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself," the representative allegedly said. "The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit."
Still doubtful, passengers demanded new cockpit crew, which they were given after a substantial delay. In retrospection, airline officials confirmed that the pilot had been birthday partying the night before, but fiercely rejected the notion of him being drunk. Instead, they claimed that he "may have suffered a stroke before take-off." Now that's reassuring...
Adding some perspective to the story, Aeroflot was involved in a plane crash last September, resulting in the death of all 88 passengers. Samples from the muscle tissue of the pilot Mr Medvedev (yes, same family name as the Russian president.) showed traces of alcohol, and in the flight recordings he surrendered controls to the co-pilot during the second attempt on landing stating "You see yourself that I can't."
I think I just might have a quick smell in cockpit before the next take-off.
‘Give me attention’-book
You know, the original purpose of facebook was to provide a means of networking and collaborating between university students. I signed up for an account when they had recently released it to ordinary mortals. I believe it took less than a year for the social networking site to degenerate into a dumpster of primitive people.
It began with applications like 'pirates vs peanuts', 'count the freckles on the cunt' and 'hey, look how popular I am'. Then it transcended into adding all the pictures off your shiny digital camera, however incriminating. Ok, just slightly pathetic thus far, even considering people you barely know adding you to boost their friends count, aka popularity score.
Yet when I read the umpteenth status message telling me 'I work in xxx now!', or 'I'm going to Australia, crazy time!!!!' that's fucking it.. Where on earth is the revolutionary facebook feature allowing me to block information evaporating from the predictive and utterly worthless people that somehow ended up on my mini feed?
(Please consider that I didn't bear any particular individuals in mind in the statements above. No offence.)
Money makes sad man happy
I withdrew some money from a cash machine yesterday. You know the feeling when the cash point displays your balance, and 99 times out of a 100 you feel like some evil electronic gnome is eating money from the account. Every once in a while I actually experience the opposite. This time I had an excess balance of 13 000 SEK (about £1000) - it said 'refund' on the internet banking statement, but as far as I know I haven't consumed/returned anything by that amount.
I don't know where the money came from, and I don't want to know. I will probably be contacted by a low-pitched German accent instructing me to do weird stuff like wearing suits, shooting people and wrestling semi-nude in public - always happens in the movies 