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the colour of the sky

October 29, 2007 by bobleckridge

the colour of the sky, originally uploaded by bobsee.

I swear the colours we see in the sky constantly change and even after days, and weeks, and months and years of skies, we still look up sometimes, and think, WOW, that’s BEAUTIFUL

Posted in from the dark room, photography, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

the colour of the forest

October 28, 2007 by bobleckridge

the colour of the forest, originally uploaded by bobsee.

I love this kind of forest. It’s a very typical, not man-made, Scottish forest. I love it when the forest floor of ferns turns this amazing coppery brown colour

Posted in from the dark room, photography, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

the colour of stone

October 27, 2007 by bobleckridge

the colour of stone, originally uploaded by bobsee.

These stones are only visible when the water level in the stream is low.
I love the greenish blues of some of them in amongst the grey ones

Posted in from the dark room, photography, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Conversations with sugarmouse

October 27, 2007 by bobleckridge

One of the great and surprising joys of blogging is the making of connections with people who you’d probably never ever have met in any other way. It’s one of the best reasons to blog in my opinion. I’ve made a good new friend with a fellow blogger who goes by the name of sugarmouseintherain. We’ve been having email discussions as well as sharing things on our respective blogs and one of his ideas was to have a conversation on the net. (the newer Web 2.0 technologies really make this possible – we used google documents – if you don’t know this tool, google it and explore it!)

Sugarmouse has posted our first conversation about health and healing on his blog today. Please follow this link to go to his blog and read it. We’d both be really keen to have your feedback which you can do by either commenting on the post on his site or by emailing us.

And why is he called sugarmouseintherain? You can find that out on his blog too!

Thankyou for taking the lead on this sugarmouse. It’s really great to make new friends this way.

Posted in from the living room, health, writing | 1 Comment »

Inspiring fictional doctors

October 26, 2007 by bobleckridge

Did you know that Mills and Boon, the publishers of romantic novels, have a whole section dedicated to medical romance stories? Well, an Irish psychiatrist, Dr Kelly, has analysed about twenty of them and come up with some interesting findings. He found

marked preponderance of brilliant, tall, muscular, male doctors with chiselled features, working in emergency medicine.

He said they were commonly of Mediterranean origin and had personal tragedies in their pasts.

Oh well, that rules me out!

A spokesperson for Mills and Boon said

the medical setting offered much potential for human drama.

“We see exactly the same on televised medical dramas. In these kinds of professions, there is the need to remain emotionally distant, which spills over into private lives – there’s nothing more thrilling than a damaged hero.”

Hey, isn’t that all of us? Aren’t we all damaged heroes?

This little piece got me thinking though about the way doctors are portrayed in fiction and what kind of influence that has. I’ve wanted to be a doctor all my life. First stated that intent at the age of three! And it wasn’t a family connection. There were no medics in my family ever. What I do remember though is watching a soap opera on TV when I was a child – “Dr Finlay’s Casebook”. Dr Finlay was a Scottish GP working in the fictional village of ‘Tannochbrae’ (actually Callander, very close to where I was born and live now – Stirling). I was hugely impressed with Dr Finlay and I have deep seated memories of wanting to be a doctor like him. There were other doctors on TV then. Dr Kildare, for example. Couldn’t stand him! Waltzing around in his white coat like God’s gift to medicine! So, I guess, fictionalised doctors made an impact on me.

How about you? Which fictionalised doctors impress, or impressed you? Did any of them inspire you to become a doctor? or a nurse? Or even put you off the idea for life? Which doctor in fiction would you most like to be your personal doctor? Go on, tell me.

Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life | 8 Comments »

Outsourcing your mind

October 26, 2007 by bobleckridge

I wrote recently about how paper extends our minds, and how that related to a book I was reading just now, Being There, by Andy Clark (review coming soon), and then along comes this article in the NY Times. OK, it’s pretty tongue-in-cheek, but funny how I should happen across it when I’m just reading about the extended mind concept. How often that kind of thing happens! Seems more than just a paying attention phenomenon. David Brooks, who wrote the opinion piece for the NY Times gives many examples of how he’s given up functions of his mind to technology – from becoming unable to navigate in his car without satnav, to being unable to remember anybody’s phone number ‘cos all his contacts numbers are in his smartphone, to following recommendations from TiVo, Amazon and iTunes for his entertainment.

He’s got a point though. We really are extending our minds by using technology this way. I heard a discussion on Radio Scotland this morning about the spread of broadband and the constant demand for faster and faster connections, and one of the interviewees said that he recently moved house and was without broadband for a couple of days and couldn’t believe just how disconnected and paralysed he felt. I’ve had that experience too. Being connected to the net is becoming an increasingly important part of the way my mind functions – from knowledge seeking, to memory stores, to inspiration and the making of new friends. I love it I must say, and Brooks’ view that we are losing function in the process is not something I share. I don’t care that I don’t know anybody’s phone numbers any more – that’s what the contact list is for! I don’t need to clutter up my brain with that! And I love how Web 2.0 tools help me find things I’m interested and and serves up so many fascinating, amusing and moving sites which stimulate my thinking and extend my networks and my mind.

What do you think? Are you enjoying extending your mind out beyond your personal brain? I guess if you don’t like it you don’t have to do it after all!

Posted in from the reading room, psychology | Leave a Comment »

the colour of water

October 26, 2007 by bobleckridge

the colour of water, originally uploaded by bobsee.

This is a waterfall and stream (we call a small stream a “burn” in Scotland) on Skye.
Look at the colours in the water.
Aren’t they lovely?
This photo set me off checking out the colours of different natural phenomena. You’ll find the others in the coming days here under titles “the colour of……”

Posted in from the dark room, photography, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Better medicines, or money-making medicines?

October 26, 2007 by bobleckridge

The BMJ has published a report criticising the way drugs are regulated in Europe

Silvio Garattini and Vittorio Bertele of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan are critical of the dominance of pharmaceutical industry priorities in bringing drugs to market. They appeal for a more patient and doctor led priorities.

There are two common issues which doctors and patients have about prescription drugs – firstly, the drugs which are available often don’t work for individual patients, so there is always a desire for drugs which work better than the ones currently available; and secondly, drug company priorities are more market driven – they are more likely to fund research into drugs for developed countries problems than developing countries problems, even though many more people die from common diseases in those latter countries. The reason why the first problem is not addressed by the current system is summed up in the article –

New drugs have only to show they are of good quality, effective, and safe, independently of any reference or comparison to drugs already on the market. This results in overuse of trials against placebo. Even when new drugs are compared with existing treatments, the trials often seek to show equivalence or non-inferiority rather than superiority to those already available. Such trials could allow drugs into the market that are less active or safe than those in current clinical use. This is because the non-inferiority limit includes a higher incidence of adverse events. The wider the limits the smaller the sample needed and consequently the higher the chance of missing a difference and concluding for non-inferiority. Sometimes limits are so wide that what is considered non-inferior statistically may be worse clinically

They conclude

It is unethical to experiment on patients with the sole aim of obtaining a marketing authorisation. New drugs should be required to have some added value (greater efficacy or less toxicity) to current treatments or be cheaper

So true. This is a European perspective but exactly the same problems are present in the US. And what about the majority of people in the world? How could the system be improved to meet the most pressing health needs in the world, rather than just in developed countries?

Posted in from the consulting room, health, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

knot on wood

October 25, 2007 by bobleckridge

knot on wood, originally uploaded by bobsee.

This was a log I walked past on Skye.
It caught my attention.
What did? Well, the hole did actually! It looked like a keyhole, or a secret, very small doorway, or maybe a wormhole in the universe? (Hey, you’d be amazed how the imagination can be stimulated by a walk in the country!)
Anyway, after the hole caught my eye then the swirling lines of the wood entranced me.
Take a look. You can look at this for a LONG time I think. The patterns, the colours, the sense of energies straining and twisting and bending the fibres of the wood and how they all swirl around a space…..and into that space, we can dive, deeper and deeper and deeper.
What do you think you might find, if you let your mind slip down this hole, like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole?

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, photography, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

How to be a superhero – get connected!

October 25, 2007 by bobleckridge

Here’s an interesting study published in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment …..woah!! Hold on there! Bear with me! I know that sounds a desperately uninteresting journal, but what this author, Gleiser, a physicist, has done is to study the characters in Marvel comics – you know, the superheros, the villains, and the others – 6486 characters in 12942 comics! Now I know you’re probably thinking what on earth are physicists studying Marvel comics for? Well, this is where it gets really interesting. There’s an increasing amount of interest in complex networks – we find them in all walks of life – physical systems, neuropsychological, biological and social systems. Gleiser used a collaborative networks model to analyse the Marvel characters. Basically, each character is a node and then the nodes are connected with lines to represent the relationships between the characters. It’s presented graphically which makes it instantly easy to understand – you’ll need to look at the original article to see that.

Here’s what he found –

All the superhero have loads of connections to other characters. In network theory they are “hubs” – in fact they are super-connected to many other characters. On the hand, the villains are very poorly connected. You can actually pick out the superheroes and the villains really easily from the network map. The reason for the poor connected-ness of the villains is apparently the rules by which the Marvel comic stories were constrained. They weren’t allowed to make villains attractive or to make evil appealing!

I think this is such an interesting piece of work for two reasons –

Firstly, it’s a great demonstration of the applicability of network science.

Secondly, it’s shows you one of the key characteristics of superheroes – get connected!

If you’d like to read more about network science I recommend your read Linked, by Barbarsi.

Posted in from the reading room, life, science | 7 Comments »

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