Water Requirements

Most studies will tell you that the human body needs about 2-3 litres (2000-3000 ml) of water a day. Most people read that figure and forget the rest of the material. Your body is amazingly adaptable. It doesn't have to be obviously fluid water — it can be in coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, meat; overcooked or oil-fried stuff tends to have less water.

In fact, it's actually possible to not drink any 'water' water for days as long as you have a reasonable wet diet. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but just as most herbivores in arid regions can survive on plants and occasional liquid water, so can you.

Some charlatans out there are touting electrolysed water and stuff like that. It makes no difference except that the processes involved tend to filter out some less-useful components in potable water. The fact is, your body specialises in homoeostasis, and it will compensate within reason.

This all adds up to one more reason why we need to be a little bit more forgiving of our diet and lead a balanced (and more fun) lifestyle. Have a nice wet day!

Professional Specialization

When people find out what I do for a living, the next question tends to be, "So what do you teach?" It irritates me a lot. I mean, if you say you're a doctor, people are not normally so ill-mannered as to ask you, "What specialty?" and I think that's generally true for lawyers and engineers.

The answer I normally give is: "I'll teach anything that I can teach. Hopefully it's something that the student(s) will benefit from."

Come on, all teachers in Atlantis are trained to teach. Just because they are pseudo-certified in two teaching subjects doesn't mean either a) that they are sufficiently educated, or b) that they are specialists, or c) that they will know how to handle all the things they're supposed to have been taught to handle.

I mean, all doctors in Atlantis learn anatomy, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, community medicine, pathology, blah blah blah. It doesn't mean either a) that they are sufficiently educated, or b) that they are specialists, or c) that they will know how to handle all the things they're supposed to have been taught to handle.

Someone once told me that doctors specialise so that they can reduce expectations. As a specialist, you can duck your professional responsibilities by saying that you are a specialist and hence not qualified to do other stuff — a dermatologist can thus excuse the inability (or lack of desire) to handle an obstetrics case even though the requisite training was received.

Apparently, the same thing is true of teachers. If you're a Chinese teacher, nobody can ask you to teach Science. If you're a Science teacher, nobody will panic you by dumping a Lit class on you. This means that you don't have to think so much, you don't have to learn so much, you can be more confident about being a greater ignoramus than you were in school while being more learned about less.

What a life. What a profession. What nonsense.

Word of the Day: Cholecystectomy

For some reason, this particular word is very much on my mind. It must be to do with the time I've spent talking to Gnomus.

'Cholecystectomy' is one of those words that medical professionals coin from elements of classical Greek in order to perpetuate their control over the hoi polloi by jargonistic prowess. Essentially, it comes from Greek khole- + küstis + ek- + tomos.

Khole comes from khloë, the Greek word for 'spring green' that is also the root of 'chlorine'. (Anyone named Chloë will now realise that they have a vegetable adjective for a name.) It means 'that green stuff' which is actually 'bile pigment' — the stuff that makes some of the body's excrescences look yellow. It's not easy being green — the word khole also alludes to waste pipes.

Küstis means 'bladder' or 'pouch'. The modern compound word kholeküstis therefore means nothing more than 'gall bladder'.

The prefix ek- sometimes means 'not' but often means 'out', as in exodos, which means 'way out'. Tomos means 'a cutting', so anything '-ectomy' means something is being cut out.

Put it all together, as you probably have by now, and you have 'cholecystectomy' = 'gall-bladder-out-cutting'. That is, an operation in which the gall bladder is removed, most often to prevent recurrence of gallstones and the awful symptoms that come with that.

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Update: Yes, they have removed the thing, just before inflammation caused it to explode. The stone was of the size and granular demeanour of an olive; the method of removal was that of multiple portals — what is called the laparoscopic method. The object of the operation is doing well, and is in high spirits.

Them 'Phones WILL Fry Your Brain

Studies have shown that using a mobile phone close to your head for ten years will double your chances of brain tumours. This is borne out by the fact that the chance of the tumour occurring is greater on the side which you normally use the phone. So far so good. At this point, the key thing we want to know is: what is the chance of a person getting a brain tumour after using a cellphone for the NEXT ten years?

You see, there is one BIG flaw in all these studies. I am 100% certain that nobody has used the SAME phone at the SAME distance from the centre of the the tumour that was found for the SAME amount of time over the SAME ten years in the SAME environment. I am willing to concede that you can control for at least one of these conditions, perhaps two, but not three or more or anywhere near all (which would include all the other things a good scientist can imagine).

In fact, since such phones use less radiation these days (the US limit is 1.6 watts/kg, the European limit is 2.0 watts/kg) and more users are resorting to hands-free connections which move the phone some distance away from the head, the risk is dropping faster than it is increasing.

So why is the title of this post so alarmist?

Well, I was just thinking about the other kinds of radiation. Radio waves are actually very low-frequency emissions that take forever to do anything to your body. At the other end of the spectrum are things like cosmic rays and gamma rays, that are even more high-energy than x-rays, and will KILL you (I was going to say KILL you DEAD, but most people get that point quite easily). You will get literally thousands of times more deadly radiation from climbing ONE mountain at high altitude or flying ONCE from New York to Singapore, than by using a mobile phone for ten years.

Actually, I cheated there. We know that cosmic radiation is deadly, but we don't know that radio waves are. We know that humans have been exposed to radio signals for decades without suffering directly-related damage from them. We know that people have turned into green superheroes died from gamma-ray exposure, and we can even watch it happening if we want.

So those phones will fry your brain, I guess, but only if you think so hard about them that you forget to shield your head from the sun, that obvious fusion-powered source of lethal radiation.

Cough

I have learnt a lot about coughing over the last few days. Most coughs are triggered by a receptor that links to the vagus nerve. That receptor responds to hydrogen ions, capsaicin (the lovely stuff that is the main 'hot' component in peppers), and other vanilloids. You eat acidic, spicy food, you cough. Even fruit juice will trigger it. Ha.

It isn't always clear that you should suppress a cough if the cough is beneficial. Most of the time, it's just doing its job – expelling irritants at something like the speed of sound. If you try to suppress it physically (say, by keeping your mouth shut and closing your nose) the blast effect can be painful.

However, you can try to suppress it chemically if that helps your social life, or if you have some other fundamental reason for not wanting to cough. Dextromethorphan is normally the drug of choice. It's found in cough syrups and cough-suppression lozenges such as Robitussin. Codeine is often used too, but codeine is easily converted to undesirable drugs such as morphine and heroin in the lab.

Some people have mentioned 'psychological coughing', a cough which is triggered by psychological stressors or some other subconscious phenomenon. The surprising thing is that it's normally the other way round – if the cough is treated the psychological problems tend to fade thereafter.

Coughing is the most common symptom observed by doctors. It's good to know about the cough. The only problem really is figuring out why it is spelt this way. Etymological explanations such as this might explain the spelling, but not the pronunciation. Although the arcane exponents of consonantal shift theory might beg to explain it, they continue to beg in vain. *cough*