Placebos and Loliondo

    A panacea, a cure-all, a salvation for those with any mysterious sickness - this is a goal that has been strived for by humans for countless centuries. Western medicine can be effective, but what if I told you the closest thing to a cure-all in the world is faith?
    Don't get me wrong, it's not like some higher power is intervening and curing people. But the belief itself can trigger something in people's brains. The brain has a secret store of drugs (including such specific chemicals as opioids, which serve as painkillers), which can be unlocked by people genuinely thinking they are being cured. It normally acts to supplement an actual medicinal cure, but it can be a formidable force on its own. This is why faith healing, in some cases, works.
    One prime example of this is a Christian faith healer at Loliondo in Tanzania who has throngs of people devoted to him, all waiting to receive a single cup of a drink he makes from the roots of a specific tree. The drink (or, rather, the powerful brain manipulation caused by the drink) is purpotedly capable of curing cancer, AIDS and HIV, glaucoma, infertility, etc. I'm not sure how or indeed if it does this, especially infertility,  but it has certainly gained a reputation. The throngs of people are thousands strong and form a caravan which stretches back for 7 miles across countryside.
     Placebo healing is weaker but more versatile than traditional medicine, and it can do some things that the foremost scientific discoveries have still been unable to. That being said, the principle behind it has been discovered and (except for the patients) the medical world should not treat it as a miracle.

Racial Relationships and Children

     Often, the voice of a child can be more honest and revealing than many voices of experienced adults. A recent study conducted by CNN revealed the opinions of children on friendships between race. Often, the case was that kids have very biased opinions on who to become friends with. This is mostly because of their parents' ideals of their kid's friends. In general, black kids had more civilized opinions on diversity, thinking that people should all be together. Over 70% of white children, on the other hand, are of the opinion that relations between children of different skin color are mostly negative and that they would get in trouble for their attempts to make friends. These opinions are not the kids' own, strictly speaking - they want to have friends of many different groups - their parents' opinions are the only thing that is holding them back. Why are white parents so subtly but absolutely biased? It's likely because they are the majority, they have less experiences with people that look different from them, and they have simply not let go of the belief that there is something fundamentally different about the way black people and other minorities perceive the world. Almost all they internally rely on to tell themselves everyone is equal is hearsay. Black parents, on the other hand, have grown up in a world of mostly whites, so they have experience enough to see them as "just people". rather than "white people".

     I think that while this is a clear step up from the violent racism of the 1960s and before the Emancipation Proclamation, it is still depressing - while the racial bias is small, it is still there, and it still has enough leverage over people's better judgment that it can break up childhood friendships and other fundamental interactions. I want to keep promoting civil rights until racism and other completely unjustified prejudice is ground into the dust.

HIV

     Human Immunodeficiency Virus is a seemingly incurable disease that is almost always terminal. However, a man called Timothy Brown and known as the Berlin Patient may change this. He has been cured of HIV through a process involving bone marrow transplantation between patients. Bone marrow produces lymphocytes, white blood cells that are crucial to the immune system. In Timothy's case, the marrow was of an HIV-immune individual, so Timothy's immune system became immune as well. Aside from slight neurological damage caused by trauma during the treatment, this seems to be a relatively reliable cure (yes, cure).
     Which is, of course, great for the world.

Biomimetics

    The science of biomimetics or biomimicry is one that incorporates knowledge of the natural world, chemistry, engineering ingenuity, nanotechnology, and other diverse fields. Simply put, it is the study of tools naturally evolved into creatures bodies because they were near-optimal at their job, and their replication for use by human beings. These naturally produced materials often have interesting or profound properties, and mystified people until biomimeticists looked at their internal structure under a microscope. For instance, the toes of the gecko have extreme adhesive properties - a gecko can hang upside-down from a smooth surface like glass from a single one of their toes. This works underwater and in space, and the gecko has simply to peel its toes back to take its foot off completely clean. But how does it work?
     Unseen, at extremely small scales in the range of nanometers, small electromagnetic interactions called Van der Waals forces operate between objects that are extremely close together. A gecko's toe has strange hairy-looking rows of pads on its surface. These are actually groups of extremely fine branching appendages,  which under a powerful microscope look like a forest of fibres. This results in the normally faint Van der Waals forces between the toe and the surface becoming exponentiated, which allows the gecko to easily cling on to any surface.
     This is the experimental part of biomimetics, finding out how things work. The next part is applying it, which in this case people have been doing. A team of material scientists have replicated to some degree the gecko toe surface and are building a wall-scaling robot which, if developed correctly, could help with space-station, satellite, or ship repairs.
     Wall-climbing robots, the elasticity and strength of spider silk, the disease-inhibiting properties of shark skin; all of these and more can and will be used through biomimetics.

Amputation in Sports

     Adam Bender is an inspiration to many; a sports prodigy in soccer and baseball and flag football, with  a great heart and a bright future. He also has only one leg.
     He was born with a cancerous tumor in his right leg. At a very young age, he had the leg amputated after numerous treatments failed to control it. His mother was originally depressed, but eventually it became clear to her that his spirit was not broken. He loves sports of all types, and is extremely good at scoring goals in soccer. Once, a coach discouraged him from joining the baseball team, advising him to join a league for kids with disabilities. However, he knew he was too good for that, and proved to be capable on the regular team as well.
     I think his story is one that anyone who is depressed because of a physical disability can learn from- instead of focusing on things you can't do, how about finding and pursuing something you can do.

Mind Reading

     Thoughts, plans, ambitions, opinions- we all take for granted that they are secret, alone to us when we want them to be. However, Functional MRI scans, as they're called, have been developed, which recognise the patterns of neurons firing in the brain, to recognise what object the subject is thinking of (for objects that have been tested), if you have been to a place or not, if you are familiar with something, etc. There is now a debate over the constitutionality of these machines- if your thoughts can be read, do you truly have the right to remain silent? Also, what about companies and marketers trying to use natural human psychology to extract more money out of their customers? Should they be allowed to use optimal advertisements to attract people?
    As for the genuine nature of the device, I believe the scientists and internationally acclaimed news service- their procedures for how the device operates seem sound and logical, and while I would like to think there is something special about consciousness that makes this intangible, brains and people and personalities are simply sophisticated and innovative computers.

D.J. Williams

    Many football players seem to have troubled childhoods. One among them is D.J. Williams, a star player originally from Texas, recently graduated into the NFL. He is wildly successful as a footballer, but he was not always so confident about his life and his future. His father, now residing resplendently in a maximum-security prison cell, is bipolar. He abused alcohol, cocaine, and his wife for many years, physically and verbally and in front of the kids. He was arrested for verbal abuse and served 90 days in jail, after which he started abuse again. One day he and D.J. were out fishing, and he presented the child with a gun, instructing him to shoot anyone who disturbs them. That experience almost drove him to suicide. He told his mother, who decided it was time to take the kids and leave. The next day, his father shot a man in frustration and was arrested for a longer period.
    D.J. is not sure where his future will take him. He decided to go to Little Rock, Arkansas and join the football team. He graduated and will join the NFL, for what team he is not sure.
    Wow, Texas. That's all I have to say.

Forgiveness

    Would you forgive someone who attempted to stab you in the face? What if they didn't remember doing it? What if they didn't remember it, but remember wanting to hurt someone else? The problem of forgiveness is a complicated one. Here is a story about a child who had to forgive a grievous injury.

     Deejay Hunter is a New York student with a talent for basketball. He is tall and spirited, but with a scar on his face hinting at a troubled past. Deejay's stepfather, Derick, is in prison, with a sentence of twenty years for two cases of attempted murder. He has, at Deejay's request and after a long legal battle, been allowed to contact Deejay for one day. Deejay will try to get his stepfather to realize his forgiveness, even though he must live with unsettling childhood trauma and a facial scar. When he was younger, a little younger than 10, his parents were locked in a continual feud. His mother put his alcoholic father down verbally almost every day, and his father retaliated until, one night, he had decided to kill. He grabbed a large knife from the kitchen and snuck down to her room. She immediately knew what was happening, and cried out "I love you!" to delay him. He ended up stabbing her, non-fatally, and he does not remember what happened next, being as he was in a drunken rage. Somehow, Deejay had entered the room and somehow he had gotten stabbed as well. A few years later, Deejay talked to him about what he had done. Derick admits he had intent to hurt his wife, but not Deejay.
    I think this story is a little sad, as it is a half-undeserved incarceration. It is also a heartwarming tale- if humans can forgive each other for stabbing them, what are the limits of human generosity?

Prejudice

          America is, in some cases, not living up to its reputation as a composite culture where everyone works as one. Prejudice, the unjustified assumptions we naturally make about people different from us, is still corroding away at the American dream. Historically, it has been blacks and Japanese, traces of which linger today. Once, prejudice was against the French nationality, resulting in French fries being renamed "Freedom Fries", although ironically the food actually came from Belgium. Now, with conflicts in the Middle East, the Muslim religion and people is the main target of primitive hostility.

         An experiment was conducted in which two actors were to appear inside a bakery in Texas. One of the actors was to stand behind a counter and serve goods to people. The other was a woman wearing a burqa, who was to walk into the restaurant and attempt to order something, at which point the first actor would put her down and say "We don't serve your kind here" as well as an assortment of racist epithets. The whole thing would be filmed, and the camera would catch bystanders' reactions to the situation. There were a decent number of cases where bystanders, Muslim or not, would retaliate emotionally and inspiringly. There were a few sad cases where the bystander would agree with the first actor, giving him a thumb's up for patriotism. However, the vast majority of bystanders did nothing at all, which is perhaps more disturbing than the prejudice itself. Tolerance of intolerance is indirectly intolerance itself. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Jordan Burnham's Story

      Every two hours, a person under the age of 25 dies by suicide. There are, however, some people who attempt suicide and are lucky enough to barely survive. One of these people is a young man named Jordan Burnham. As a student, he was always very good at sports--baseball, basketball, golf--but he was depressed for various reasons after failing his driving test and seeing his grades drop. He felt increasingly like he was a disappointment of a son. One day, his father uncovered the bag of alcoholic beverages he had been hiding to quell his anger. Racked with dejection and guilt, Jordan fled to his room and barricaded the door. His mother stood outside and tried to console him, but he was not consoled. That is the last thing he remembers before he woke up in a hospital ward with severe wounds to the everything. He asked his family what had happened to him, to which they responded, "It was a suicide attempt. You jumped out the apartment window."
    It took months of slow rehabilitation and physical training, counselling, a few surgeries and gradual transitions between modes of transportation, but he is finally able to walk with the assistance of a cane, talk, and even play golf. He now works as a motivational speaker at schools, telling kids about his experiences and urging them toward telling someone if they are in a similar situation.
    I feel this story shows the incredible instability of a job relying on an aspect of you independent of your personality- for example, a sports player, a child actor, etc. This allows you to be a complete jerk to everybody and still command respect and high wages because of your physical talent. It also means that if you're a person of great generosity, but a mediocre sports player, or one that used to be great but became physically incapacitated in some way, you can be spurned by your former devotees just because you can't play as well, while remaining the same at heart (so to speak). If you have prepared your whole life for a sports career and suddenly have that opportunity closed, you may find options of things to do with your life become very scarce.

Charlie Wilks

    The blind and other physically impaired people of the world face nearly insurmountable limitations in their journey to achieve their dreams. However, some are fortunate enough to have natural talent, motivation, and acceptance of others on their side, allowing them to pursue their life's ambitions to the maximum extent their bodies will allow. One of these people is the football player Charlie Wilks.

     Charlie Wilks was born with sight. However, as he got older, about the age of 5, it became apparent that his vision was getting worse and worse. As it turned out, he had a large brain tumor which was severing his optical nerve. After 3 painful surgeries, he was left safe but blind. Around this time, he realized a passion for football. He had a family history, too- his grandfather played for the Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl. He would obviously have some challenges to overcome before he could realistically play. After training, he proved himself to be a talented tackler, knowing the right direction to push at the start of a play, earning him the respectful name of  "The Beast". He can make his way easily in middle school football, but his relatives are skeptical of his ability to compete at the high school and college levels. But he has gained fame as the blind footballer, and continues to work toward his goal of being the first blind professional football player of all.

On Life's Ambitions

      Arian Foster, the NFL running back, didn't always have such a positive reputation. As a child, his teachers found it hard to encourage him toward his goal of being in the NFL. They said it was very unlikely he would be famous, that he wasn't running back material. He was not discouraged, and through hard work and perseverance, he eventually became the popular, awarded running back he had always dreamed of being. This story reminds me of the quote from the film Akeelah and the Bee: We may ask ourselves "Who am I to be famous, athletic, heroic?". Actually, who are we not to be?

      Although this story is optimistic and feel-good, I think that in most cases, if people tell you you can't do something, it means that you can't do it. If achieving your dream means disregarding the advice of many of your friends, constant hard work and frequent basic mistakes, I don't think it would be worth it. I think the much wiser thing to do is to look for a job you're already good at and pursue it to easily become a renowned expert at it. If this job happens to be your ambition anyway, then you're all set.

A Sad Story

       Carol Anne Brown was a girl who wanted above all else to race in the soap box derby, a championship in which children build motorless cars and race them around a track. She was a great racer and an inspiration to her family, her coach, and all those who saw her in the big races. However, as she got older, it was apparent to her parents (unintentional rhyme) that she had a secret double life (quite literally). She would arrive home hours after she was scheduled to do so, she would cut her arms with blades, she would seem to have different personalities when she went to bed and when she got up, etc. They tried antidepressants, but the medication didn't have any effect. As it turned out, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, characterized by rapid shifts of emotion. She took therapy and for a while she seemed her old self. However, one day she refused to get out of bed. Her mother, frustrated, left the house to walk the dog. When she came back, Carol Anne was in the closet, with a goodbye letter in her dresser. She had hanged herself.

       Her grieving family felt they should honor her somehow, and she found a legacy in her younger brother Sean, who went on to win the soap box derby, all the while carrying a photograph of his sister with him.

Autism and Genius

           Jake Barnett, a slightly autistic child prodigy, has got it made. At age 8, he was accepted into college. At age 13, he is now a paid scientific researcher and a celebrity on his campus. His capacity for memory and understanding of math and science seems to have no bounds. How is this possible, you ask? How can an eight-year-old have such remarkable brain-power that he can learn 200 digits of pi in an afternoon and the entire high-school math curriculum in two weeks? Because of autism.
          As a young child, he showed the usual symptoms of being antisocial, not making eye contact, being lost in his own world, spilling a box of Cheerios on the carpet and sorting through them (apparently). He was in a sort of social bubble, and needed help getting out. His family hired a tutor, and he has overcome his disability to an extent that he can give demonstrations and advice at his university.
          The particular type of autism he has been diagnosed with is called Asperger's Syndrome, whose symptoms include lowered empathy, specific and intense interests, and social ineptitude. It also seems to produce aptitude in math and science, and he attributes his success to it.
          I think Jake has a bright future and I aspire to be like him, an insightful expert in many fields. I sincerely hope he does the world some good.

Rennaisance Festival is Fun

        Over the weekend, I went to a Rennaisance Festival in Maryland. It's a bit like an amusement park, with the theme of Old English culture and, for some reason, smoked turkey legs for all of the thousands of people there. This is, of course, an anachronism, as turkeys are North American birds, but it somehow felt as if turkey legs were meant to be there back in 1514. The Rennaisance Festival is also one of the biggest producers of awkward moments I can think of. For example, that awkward moment when a helicopter roars over the jousting demonstration and smashes the fourth wall to pieces without even realizing it. That awkward moment when someone asks in a genuine Old English accent, "Would you fancy some roasted almonds, m'lord?" and you try to be clever and respond in the same accent, but fail miserably. That awkward moment when everyone has an authentic set of shining armor, and you have a sports jersey.

       Anachronisms and awkwardness aside, it was quite a pleasurable experience- I saw a few good shows, ate some good food, and, most importantly, had a smoked turkey leg.

SAT Fraud

          An unsettlingly complex system of cheating on SAT tests has been exposed to daylight. A student with near-perfest grades was revealed to be the center of a sophisticated fraud operation involving real money and real consequences. The student in question seemed to be a perfect example to follow- smart, athletic, and spirited. However, he was taking bribes from other students to do their SAT test for them. To accomplish this, he forged a cheap ID for each of his "clients", thus proving the lax security measures in the test. Then he would simply sit down and do the test perfectly, before recieving the money from his client, up to $2500 each. He was arrested and was relieved with the burden of community service on his shoulders. He knew by all means that what he was doing was dishonest, but he justified it to himself after hearing that there had previously been people doing this at his high school. He regrets what he did and is now trying to make up for it by teaching the kids he would previously had accepted bribes from how to do SATs well on their own.

          How do I feel about all this? Well, I think it is in some ways a noble cause- he was trying to give kids a chance to have brighter futures than they otherwise would. However, it is also foolish- it is against the point of education, as the kids are not getting any better at their subjects and the test did not gather any data about them at all. What happens to them once their false perfect score gets them into the advanced classes they would otherwise not be taking? They won't be prepared for it. Also, there is the money- if what the perfect scorer wants is to give kids a chance, why didn't he simply set up a class to teach them how SATs work?

On Indian Education

                The Indian Institute of Technology is the Indian equivalent of Harvard- except it may be better. The students graduating from it are highly coveted across the globe. From all of India’s enormous population, they are the best of the best of the best at what they do- only about 1.7% of all applicants actually make it into the school. Located in Bombay amidst bustling markets and impoverished streets, it is a well-equipped haven for those who have qualified for its services. But there is a problem: while the Institute was originally constructed to help bring India out of its long struggle to become modern, most of the graduates actually head to the United States and become major entrepreneurial leaders, with only a few working to promote Indian welfare and improve its national status.

                In spite of this, the major goal of most Indian youths is to get into the prestigious university. The level of dedication to the goal at hand is almost scary, with many boys studying 24/7 and taking additional pre-dawn classes, while being pushed and fretted over by their parents.

                I think that while the end product of brilliant, successful and benevolent engineers is a very good thing, the level of dedication is not necessary and should be more accurately determined. I also wish that more of the graduates would stay in India and help drag their homeland out of its undernourished and overpopulated current state.

1st post!

Hello, computer science class! Hello, assorted internet denizens who somehow meandered into this blog! I am, in fact, planning to forget about this blog and make another one in which I write about science and things. If you ask me about this blog in a few years, I'll probably say, "What blog? OH RIGHT, that's the blog that I started and then just kind of forgot about".