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Another Shot

Posted in bit because, as I whined about, it won't let me do it all at once--keeps saying it's a bad request and giving me error codes. Wouldn't even let me do two at once. Phbttt!

--The Wombat

Final Packet

Paper Dilemas, round 2

I had thought to use something that looked and felt magazine-like at first, but after the newsprint debacle I wasn't going to put anything else that seemed flimsy through the printer. When I went to look at actual printed journals they largely seemed to be on nice thick, good quality white paper anyway. I bought some 67 lb. white paper and printed it on that--both side of the page, then tore the left edges to make it seem as though it had been ripped from the journal. Looks pretty good.

--The Wombat

Illustrations for "article"

Journal Titles, Text for Pt.3

The third part of my packet was meant to be an article in a medical journal. I went digging around on Academic Search Premiere (accessible through SJSU's library portal page with a password) to find a real journal title that seemed likely and discovered that medical journals are completely over my head and really quite dull. But I selected a title to use and got a feel for how my piece should be formatted (headers, titles, etc.).

Here's the text for the fake journal article. I know it's not nearly long or stuffy enough to be a real journal article, but it was the best I could come up with--reading those things was bad enough, nevermind trying to make myself sound like one....

Recent Trends in Treating Musca ridere Infection In Humans

Paul Flight, Julia Pierce, and John Xi

In the twenty years since the initial outbreak of human infection by Musca ridere, popularly known as happy bugs, there has been very little variation in treatment. The accepted protocol, developed by Dr. Steven Kowalski five weeks after the first case was reported using the information in the infamous file that Lt. Col. Donal Molloy leaked to the public revealing the origins of the inexplicable illness, has remained in place because it is effective. The dual level treatment of repeated Dilipsolol injections and controlled application of electro magnetic interference (EMI) to the brain works to attack the larvae on both the biological and the technological level. It takes six days to complete the course of treatment, which must be administered in a hospital, largely due to the infected patient’s reliance on intravenous delivery for nutrition and liquids intake, and the patient has a 95% chance of being completely healed. However, the Kowalski protocol is not without its drawbacks: the CEMII (controlled electro magnetic interference immersion) machines are complicated and costly to maintain; the Dilipsolol causes physical discomfort and has a long list of fairly rare but serious side effects, (six percent of patients, mostly occurring in those below the age of five and above the age of sixty) including permanent blindness and heart complications; the treatment requires a long hospital stay which is often prohibitively expensive for those without health insurance; and it has a 5% mortality rate.

The last three years have seen increased public awareness of the problems posed by the Kowalski protocol, and a corresponding dramatic increase in the amount of funding and research being directed toward finding an improved treatment. This article seeks to examine the three new options that the authors find to be the most promising, discussing their function, merits, and hazards.

The Kowalski protocol is administered when the infection has reached its final stages and the Musca ridere larva is fully grown (fig.1) has taken residence in the hypothalamus portion of the brain. Several of the more serious complications that occur are the result of the larva poisoning or damaging the host’s brain as it dies. Finnish doctors Hinkka and Puustelli have been working on a preventative vaccine that attacks the parasites as they enter the bloodstream as they enter the bloodstream as eggs deposited by the bite of the mature fly (fig.2 &3). The drug, called Metpratenol, works by subtly changing the blood chemistry to be inhospitable to the eggs. As it currently stands it must be repeatedly injected, wearing off after 72 hours and has only proven

Figure 1. Larvae in final stage of growth.

50% effective on the very small sample population it has been tested on, but the concept is

strong. More research is being conducted into ways to make the minor blood chemistry adjustment permanent and a wider pool of clinical trail subjects is being gathered. The Finnish government is funding the research with aid from the drug company Biotie Therapies. The long term effects of changing the make-up of human blood are also a significant concern, and must be careful studied and considered at every step of the process. There has been public opposition to the research in Finland, with detractors making the claim that to change human blood on the molecular level is tampering with what it means to be human and should not be allowed.

Figure 2. Musca ridere eggs amongst red blood cells.

Here in the United States such research has been outlawed under the 2013 AntiGenetic Alteration Bill—ironically it is a bill created in reaction to the initial epidemic of Musca ridere infection that now hampers research into new ways of preventing it.

A second, and less controversial, promising avenue of research is being conducted in Canada by McGill University in Montreal. A group of doctors and scientists have created a stronger variation of the drug Dilipsolol. The new drug, called Trilipsolol only needs to be administered for three day to have the same effect, and the instances of reported muscular discomfort during treatment are greatly reduced.

Figure 3. Egg (enlargement)

However instances of seizures during clinical trials have kept the drug being approved for use and the team is conducting more research into the cause of the side effects.

The most startlingly simple line of research is being conducted here in the United States at Stanford University. Rather than focusing on how to fight the infection after it has already occurred, the Stanford team is focusing their funds and energies into ways to keep the infection from happening at all. Research into chemical insect repellants and devices that could electronically repel or kill the adult fly (fig.4) is underway, although so far very little progress has been made. Figure 4. Adult Mosca ridere.

Yup--messy when pasted in, but all there.

--The Wombat

Newspaper Clipping Text#2

And here's the text for the second "clip":

Local mother arrested for child endangerment

By Will Jones

wjones@mercurynews.com

San Jose Police arrested Lisa Tyler, 41, Tuesday afternoon, responding to a report from neighbors who claimed to have witnessed the mistreatment of children in the Tyler house in the 500 block of Empire.

Upon their arrival police discovered the two children, ages 4 and 6, standing unresponsive in the front yard, clearly infected with the happy bug. Tyler was not at home and the children were taken into protective custody and rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital for treatment. When Tyler returned to the house several hours later she was immediately arrested and charged with children endangerment for having allowed the children to have become grinners and leaving them without supervision.

Tyler confessed to having infected her children purposefully, with the intention of making them more tractable.

“I just wanted them to stay still,” she said, “They never stay still and they never shut up. I just wanted a break.”

Tyler claims to have purchased the adult happy bugs from a dealer on St. James St. that the police closed down two months ago, and to have locked the children in their bedroom with the flies to infect them.

“It was one of the creepier things I’ve seen,” said arresting officer Charles Blake, “I’ve seen hundreds of grinners, but you just don’t expect to see it on tiny little kids—not since the initial outbreak. They just stood there like dolls. I don’t know how a mother could do that to her own children.”

Tyler, a nurse, did feed the children intravenously while they were infected and they are expected to make a full recovery.

Again, not pretty in this format, alas. But readable and that's something....

--The Wombat

Newspaper Clipping Text#1

Here's the text for the first "clipping":

Downtown San Jose

Drug Arrests Two men were arrested Wednesday afternoon when police officers armed with warrants raided a house in the200 block of Saint James Street. James Fraser, 23, and Ray Hunnicut, 27, both residents of the raided house, were charged with drug manufacturing and trafficking. Police seized 56 vials of viable happy bug larvae, six jam jars full of adult bugs, and one gene sequencer and incubator used to grow the insects. Fraser and Hunnicut are being held without bail for the hearing scheduled for Friday morning.

it looks much prettier in a neat, wee column, but I have no idea how how to make my blog do that....

--The Wombat

"Ahhhhhhh!"

That's the sound that could be heard coming from my room after I decided to try putting actual newsprint through my printer for authenticity's sake. It started ok, then promptly made a nasty crunching noise and died. I couldn't just pull the jammed out of the printer because newsprint is fairly delicate and it kept tearing off in wee bits instead of coming out in a sheet as normal paper is wont to do when one tugs on it. So I tore my room apart to find my toolbox that had the fancy screwdriver with the right head for the really weird screws that my printer is held together with and set to work taking the blasted thing apart. I did manage, and it even still worked when I put it back together again (a minor miracle really). The moral of the story is don't put newsprint through your cheap ink jet printer.

In the end I selected (some nicely aged) sheets of off-white/yellowish construction paper instead as my closest match. It's looks pretty good.

--The Wombat

Newspapers smell funny.

I don't usually read them these days--I've never had my own subscription and it's been years since I've had housemates who read the paper. But as two of the three pieces to my final packet were meant to be newspaper clips I went and got a few for reference and now my whole room smells like newspaper ink. Yuck.

I was particularly looking for the police blotter section of the paper--I know the Santa Cruz Sentinel has it, but I didn't come across it in the San Jose Mercury News. I ended up using the physical paper as a formatting template (what should the header look like, where does the date go, what sort of font, how many columns should a small article have, what do the article titles look like--that sort of thing) and going online and doing a google search for "police blotter" to get some content templates (what are the prime vocabulary choices for reporting a drug bust--"seized" is a good one, so was "armed with search warrants"--go figure, what sort of personal information about the criminals is provided, are there pictures, and so on).

My next step was to figure out how to print it out to look like a newpaper, but that was an adventure so it gets its own post.....

--The Wombat

Whoops.

I did the bad blogger thing. I've been keeping research notes, taking pictures, and all that good stuff but I just couldn't seem to make myself put it up online. Part of that it takes so damn long to upload anything to this site, and it seems like half of the time something goes wrong and I have to start over. Let's hope I didn't jinx myself there.....

So I'll start at the beginning with my rough draft/project idea thing (that's the picture up top--it should get bigger/readable when clicked 0n).

--The Wombat

Giant Purple Bug Worm Thing

So here's my 3D model thing. It is meant to be an enlargement (the actual thing being microscopic) of the Happy Bug Larva. My sketches were blue but I liked the purples better when I was looking around in the fabric store so I changed that. When I had sewn the whole thing up it looked like purple sausage links so it was back out to the store to get fabric paints to try to spice it up a little--now it's sort of cute.....oh well. I'm not sure bug larvae should be cute, but as it's meant to be a man-made bug maybe its designers also had art degrees or a weird sense of humor, or something like that. The whole thing took a lot longer than it should have--my sewing machine had a fit and had to be taken apart (I don't think it liked the last move very much) and then it had been a few years since I last sewed anything and I kept forgetting the simple stuff like which dials to adjust and the likes. Then stuffing a narrow tube in segments turned out to be extremely slow going if I didn't want to tear my seams. I did the body shaping by hand sewing/gathering with a fat needle and embroidery thread. I got the lights in ok, and sewed a battery pouch without too much trouble, and I managed not to get the electrical workings wet when I painted. There were originally meant to be model eggs and a fly too--a sort of life-cycle display, but I got sick and that slowed everything down this past week. I did make the eggs and the fly (and some red blood cells to for good measure) out of fimo clay but I fell asleep after I put them in the oven (my evil cold has been sapping my energy all week and I've just wanted to nap-- I never nap--it's weird). They turned black and the house smelled very bad. I got mad and threw them out--I should have taken pictures. But nothing caught fire so that's good, and I decided I'm not allowed to use the oven while under the influence of cold medication anymore......and that is the story of my purple bug larva, which looks pink in these pictures, alas, and is not quite as grand a project as I had hoped . I do like the silly thing though--it'll make a cute toy later.

--The Wombat

Ha!

I recently discovered that my computer has a paint program on it (part of Appleworks, which I've only used for word processing before). It's an Apple program and although it has a different name it works just like the old Paint program on the Mac Classic that my family had when I was 12. I used to love that program--I'd spend hours playing with it and I was actually pretty good at drawing with a mouse. I'm completely out of practice now, and my laptop has no mouse so I drew the ideas here with my trackpad--not easy! It looks like I did it with my right hand if it had been drawn on paper (I'm a southpaw). But it was a trip down memory lane and kind of fun so I'll put it up anyway.....

I want to build the larvae moderately large. I was thinking that paper mache might be the best medium--I could link a succession on little water balloons for the bubbly body and put my paper and goo over them. I've not done paper mache in even longer than I've tried to draw anything on a computer, but I mostly recall what to do. I think. Then I'm thinking I'll put the LED light thingy into it on the body just behind the head, mostly because I made the damn thing so I may as well do something with it. I also want to make a smaller model of the fly--probably out of Fimo clay. I'll put together a couple of eggs as well, and I'll have to play around with materials to get a transparent "membrane". Then I'll want to put the three bits together for a "life cycle of" sort of display. But I don't want it to look like a third grade diorama....I'll have to fuss with it a bit.

--The Wombat

Brain Parasites!

I found this quick video clip earlier this morning--I want my insect to look mostly like this, but it need to have a bit more of a recognizable head. And since it's at least part man-made maybe it will be a more interesting color....

VIDEO!

--The Wombat

LEDs and Solder

Right--so here's last week's project, uploaded a tad late as I feel as though I've been living in my car or at work for the last five days. Blah.

But here it is--note my lovely soldering ; ) I have a feeling the lumps weren't meant to be quite so big. But hey--it works. It's like sewing. I can make clothes, just don't turn them inside-out and look at the seems and everything's fine....

More later.

--The Wombat

Fake Blog

This is my brief narrative that is due today for the first part of project four. It's meant to read like somebody else's blog entry in the not too distant future (what's a score here and there, right?).

October 26th, 2022

Howdy Readers,

So today’s the day. After weeks of media hype we’ve finally reached the 20th anniversary of the strange plague that the pundits at the time dubbed “the people who grinned themselves to death”. For those of you who have been living under a rock lately (or who are just too young to remember) I’ll provide a quick recap:

On October 23rd 2012 two local hopitals here in San Jose reported one case each brought in through the E.R. of a strange sort of catatonia. The victims were largely nonresponsive, they would not speak, showed no signs of understanding when spoken to, and would only change position when physically moved, and most disturbingly, their faces were frozen in huge, happy grins. Doctors at each hospital were stumped, but not yet alarmed, as there was no reason to believe they were looking at anything than an isolated case of mental breakdown of some sort. The following day brought no new cases and nothing more was thought about it until the morning of the 25th when 14 more cases were brought into ERs around the city by frightened family members and the medical professionals began to realize that they were looking a new sort of epidemic. The number a victims rose steadily as the day progressed, maxing out emergency services capability to care for them. The CDC was called in to help contain the situation, although by this time reports were coming in of similar occurances in other places around the country. The true horror of the situation however didn’t hit until twenty years ago today, when San Jose awoke to discover that 40% of its population had become what would soon be known as “grinners”. The unaffected few could wander the streets passing crowds of people who had just stopped going about their business whereever they happened to be and were just standing there grinnning manically at nothing. They were completely nonresponsive, they could be posed like dolls, they were breathing, their hearts were pumping, but nothing else was happening. They would not eat or drink unless fed by I.V. in the overloaded hospitals and it wasn’t long before people began to die.

At the time no one knew what was going on--it was sudden and terrifiying and a complete mystery. It would be five weeks before doctors and scientists were able to discover the cause anf the cure, and when the knowledge was given to the public the riots began. The grinners had been infected with happy bugs--the cyborg product of a secret military project meant to be used to incapacitate enemy soldiers and populations for easier conquest. The tiny little bugs were partially mechanical--tiny nanorobots married to living insect tissue in the lab. The insects, controlled by HI-MEMS technolgy, outwardly appear no diffent than your average gadfly but when they bite they leave the host infected with microscopic cyborg parasites that make their way to the victims brain, attaching themselves to the the hypothalamus where they release their chemical load directly into the pleasure center of the brain, leaving the victim tractible and helpless. Learning that it was our own goverment that had, albiet accidentally, set this horror on its citizens was the last straw and the violence that followed was almost as devatating to the population as the infestation itself.

Nearly everyone lost people they loved in that month twenty years ago, and nobody who lived through the experience can ever look at a grinning face in quite the same way.

There are programs and memorials throughout the nation tonight, and I’m planning to attend the vigil being held at City Hall to remember the dead.

The End.

That's how it stands at the moment--I may well feel compelled to fuss with it some more as the project moves along as I've never been very good at leaving well enough alone....

--The Wombat

Still more research....

......which must be getting quite dull to read about if you're not the doing it. Sorry. I found another place that I had been compiling notes over the weekend. The Stickies program seems to work just like little scraps of paper--I put them everywhere all over the desktop and then can't read the damn things anyway. Ah well.

Here--I'll post a link to something visually interesting to combat the boredom. I'm not sure that these are actually useful, but they were fun to look at:

http://cyanatrendland.com/2009/03/03/cyborg-bugs/

Here's another cyborg bug as government project link (HI-MEMS seems to be the official keyword--should be helpful for both more research and sounding official when I start the actual writeup):

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/03/for-years-now-p/

Brain pleasure center stuff, some more useful than others:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/brain-during-orgasm2.htm

http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/rbook/drug.html

http://www.geocities.com/hhugs2001/roleofhyp.htm

Plus, ideas cont.:

I think the cyborg bug parasite would have to go through stages--the bug itself flies, stings humans to leave it's "eggs" behind, those hatch and move to the hypothalamus perhaps, stimulating the brains mood centers as they grow (what do they get in returns--anything? they are man made so I guess it's not a requirement, they could just be weapon-like...), then do they leave the host somehow? Collect information?

--The Wombat

Oops!

I forgot to put these in my last post--I got grossed out by the parasite links and it just slipped my mind....

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=368

Interesting article with parasite information in general.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17895-freeflying-cyborg-insects-steered-from-a-distance.html

Cyborg bugs!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/125107/an_army_of_cyborg_bugs.html

Military uses of cyborg bugs (and isn't it scary that when I go research the bizzare, outlandish made up idea for a storyline for class I promptly discover that somebody wants to actually try it--don't these people read science fiction? Bad idea!!!!)

There. That was all of the reading I've done so far that I remembered to save the links for.

--The Wombat

Wee Research

I've gone back to my earlier posts as a starting place. I had been researching nanotechnology, especially as it could be applied to medicine, as a possible movie topic but then my group veered off in another direction and I was left with an unused idea. I want to flesh it out here for this project.

My overall idea is a research project gone wrong (probably government or military)in which microscopic nano-cyborg bugs were designed to infiltrate human hosts and release some sort of pleasure-inducing drug/hormone into the brain on command to render the host harmless/docile/tractable/catatonic. They get out of hand (as is wont to happen in this sort of tale), there is an initial mass epidemic of "the people who grinned themselves to death" (and yes, that does come from a Housemartins song--I like British pop from the '80s, what can I say). It was controlled/comtained (how? must work out), and now is a much smaller ongoing problem--people on street corners purposely getting high by infecting themselves with the bugs, accidental infection a common hazard, so on. I need good information on nanotech, drug delivery systems, cyborg (living tissue/machine mixes), parasites that can affect the brain, and a few other weird topics.

Here's some of what I have so far:

Nanotech in medicine/drug delivery:

http://www.technologyreview.com/biztech/19784/

http://www.nsti.org/Nanotech2009/program/medical_biotech.html#TU82.5

Brain Parasites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis

http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXVI4/brainworms.html

http://animal.discovery.com/videos/monsters-inside-me-schistosomiasis-aka-snail-fever.html

And just as a side note--research brain parasites is disgusting. Really, really, disgusting. Especially the pictures...ew!!!!!

Right. That's all for now. I'm off to find less stomach turning things to read now.

--The Wombat

Next!

We got our assignment briefing for the next project (the first part anyway--it looks like we'll get more as we go along) and I'm actually quite excited about it. I get to make up stories and build a funny bug thing, play with a soldering iron (I'll most likely burn my hands--I have every other time I've used the damn thing, but somehow that's part of the fun....), and take pictures of it all. What's not to like?

This first bit is the research and early development part of the deal. I want to go back to my early interests in the class and see if I can't work out a nifty way to tie nanotechnology into this. I'm initially thinking microscopic critters that can invade a body, but I need to go do the actual research to help me nail it down a bit.

I'll back soon(ish) with more!

--The Wombat