lpotter's blog

For this draft I wanted to do some observational writing. I am going to observe my calculator. On the back it scratched, scuffed, and discolored complete with my name and phone number that my mother required I put on it in high school. The battery pack has education.ti.com enscribed on it. One of the three screw holes is filled with dust to the point in which you can’t see the screw anymore. The worn out serial number still remains 1215082533 K-0414B. Flipped over the cover has a graph etched into the plastic with the title TEXAS INSTRUMENTS above it. Once opened a blank yellow green screen is coated with dirt and scratches. Purple, black, green, yellow, and gray buttons line the face of the calculator. All the buttons serve their own unique purpose, with the purpose changing based on the previous buttons pressed. This seemingly simple machine has such incredible capabilities. This machine has and will carry me through exams plugging hundreds of commands into it. I wonder how long this took to craft, to assemble, to even conceive the idea of a handheld computing device that can calculate math problems beyond my comprehension in the blink of an eye. It really is something that is incredibly intricate but yet so simple.

My class that focuses primarily on epidemiology is using a cool ap that is run by the cdc. It essentially is an app that gives you data on an outbreak and you have to work through where the outbreak originated and how it originated. The one that I just completed was really interesting and a little tricky to figure out. It involved an anthrax outbreak, which with the facts presented looks to be a bioterror attack. The facts are very misleading though, it is a total accidental release of the anthrax bacterium into the air. A drum instructor took a trip to Africa and bought goat skins for making his drums. The drums weren’t properly cleaned off the anthrax that they had been exposed to. You later find out that he also failed to check the skins in at customs, so no one ensured that the proper cleaning process was completed in order to make sure the skins safe for travel. And just because someone didn’t register their possessions with customs no one checked to make sure there was nothing harmful on the skins. I think the point of the simulation is to show you that an outbreak can happen for any reason and outbreaks don’t know border limits. But most importantly the people working to find where an outbreak started don’t have an easy job and have to comb through thousands of pieces of data to ensure they know what pathogenic agent they are dealing with.

My friends and I were time together last friday and somehow the topic of anti vaccination came up. We were talking about it and came to the conclusion that there was zero evidence to suggest that vaccines give you autism. I knew that the movement started after a discredited doctor published a fabricated paper claiming that there was an association with autism and the MMR vaccine. What I didn’t know is that this was the paper that antivaxxers use to support their argument to this day. It has recently been discovered that the doctor who published the paper, Andrew Wakefield, had a major conflict of interest in publishing this paper. He was in the process of developing an at home test for parents to screen their children for autism and projected that he could make over 43 million dollars a year on the tests. So it appears as though he created an autism scare in order to sell his at home tests.

My friends and I were Hanging out last friday and somehow the topic of anti vaccination came up. We were talking about it and came to the conclusion that there was literally zero evidence to back up the claim that vaccines give you autism. I knew that the movement started after a discredited doctor published a fabricated paper claiming that there was an association with autism and the MMR vaccine. What I didn’t know is that this was the basically the only paper to ever attempt to link both autism and vaccines. It has recently been discovered that the doctor who published the paper, Andrew Wakefield had a major conflict of interest in publishing this paper. He was in the process of developing an at home test for parents to screen their children for autism and project that he could make over 43 million dollars a year on the tests. So it appears as though he created an autism scare in order to sell his at home tests. I was getting relatively agitated during this discussion because one of my friends who is a microbiology major said that he doesn’t believe in vaccines because they don’t always work. This is coming from someone who majored and graduated with a degree in microbiology. So I don’t think the anti vaccine movement will ever really die out especially if the people who should know vaccines are incredible are some of the people saying they don’t work.

It looks like some sort of larva. The way that the larva moves is similar to that of a worm. It doesn’t appear to have limbs anywhere on its body, therefore it moves in a fashion that resembles a wave. The larva never looks to move inward into the container, rather it circles the container always remaining on the outer perimeter. Occasionally the larva looks up towards the lid of the container making a weak attempt to escape out of the lid. Sometimes the larva stops moving as if it has lost all energy to move forward. Other times it the larva stops and changes the direction it was going as if it has forgotten the which way it was going.

It looks like a worm. It wiggles and waves it’s way around the container that it is placed in. It never looks to travel inwards in the container, just stays on the outer edge sometimes peeking it’s head up the side of the container. It has a black mouth that looks as if it is sensing it’s environment. It moves in waves, going up and down not side to side. It is see through in some places and becomes more opaque as you view from the head down the rest of the body. Sometimes the worm stops moving and reverses just for one “wave”, almost as if it has forgotten the direction it was traveling. If the container gets shaken the worm shrivels up and appears to be lifeless, I don’t know if this is a defense mechanism or the worm is so scared it doesn’t know what else to do rather than go limp. The worm seems to have a lot of complexity for such a simple organism. It is broken into segments that contract and expand as the worm moves. The way that it moves reminds me of an accordian, filling with air and then pressing it out. Sometimes the worm stops moving as though it has lost it’s life force. It seems hungry frantically looking around for food, but I would have no way of knowing that I am just assuming that.