Amnesia...?

So anyway, little thought for the week. A hypothetical situation to consider…

I am given a drug - a perfect amnesiac, producing 100% amnesia, but no analgesia, muscle relaxation, loss of consciousness etc. This drug is administered for 1 hour, and lasts for only 1 hour, by which time it wears off instantly. During this one hour period, I am exposed to a painful stimulus, say a capsaicin infusion that lasts only 10 minutes, before wearing off with no lasting pain.

During this 10 minute period, I can of course feel the painful stimulus, I have not been given any analgesia. However, as far as I would be aware, I would also have “woken up” one hour after the analgesic was administered. Extreme cases of amnesia result in people believing they have woken up for the first time regularly, as they have no memory of anything that has happened in the past. So, if I was effectively “asleep”, though 100% conscious during that time, and presumably able to scream at the pain, if I feel, after 1 hour that I was asleep the entire time, did I actually “feel” the pain - was my welfare compromised?

It’s a really interesting question I think!

Birthday

I haven't posted for a while - my apologies!

Last week was my birthday, and I proudly entered my 23rd year (22nd birthday) with a stylish MCR formal followed by cellar-time (i.e. Bar) with friends. 15 people came to formal in the end, including Linguists, House people, school friends and some vets, and we all had a great time (for a low-low price!). Rahul came up from London, which was exciting; it was good to see him. The linguists were in the midst of their exams, so I think they enjoyed the brief ability to escape the pains of exams.

Photos:

As you can see, I'm procrastinating quite heavily - I largely blame 'VPH' or Veterinary Public Health as it is more accurately known. It's interesting, let's not pretend otherwise, it's just a bit dry. Filled with welfare legislation, notifiable disease regulations, control methods, zoonoses, salmonella, PMs, abattoirs, salmonella and salmonella. I've got as far as HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) and just want to burn something! Apparently Cambridge was criticised a while back for not doing enough VPH, and now we seem to have bounced in the opposite direction... 39 lectures!!! It's as big as BIDDS was!

3 Exams this term, Alimentary (which is really good), Animal Breeding (also really interesting - the obs and gynae stuff is seemingly my thing, probably helped by doing developmental bio last year) and VPH.

I've just discovered that there are loads of vet student blogs out there - maybe when I've got some time I'll scout out the best of them.

Tom

Bad unis.

Seems like the people at Kingston University have been taking a leaf out of ARU's book!
click here for news link

“if Kingston comes down the bottom, then the bottom line is that nobody is going to want to employ you, because they'll think your degree is shit”

“although this is going to sound incredibly biased ... if you think something was a 4, my encouragement would be, give it a 5”

Boris is Mayor... update

So Boris is the new mayor of London then. I suppose it's evidence of how keen the people of the UK are just for a "change" of some sort.

UPDATE

So he's scrapped the mayor's free London newspaper. I can see what Ken was thinking in making it - give the people a common publication to try to create some sort of a sense of community (as close to a village newsletter as one can get in London), but it's a huge waste of paper, must have lead to hours of cleaning time on the tube (they're always rammed with them), and cost £3million! £1million going to plant 10000 trees on streets can only be a good thing - it'll make people happy, and hopefully give us all a little more oxygen!

Linkies!

Some random and exciting links for your internetty perusal.

A story about a huge cow! Enjoy!
An amazing table, named after the tasty product of the female version of the above.
The most fantasticest computer ever- I am now the proud owner of one, bought refurbished on ebay so as to lessen the insult to my bank account. I'd recommend the seller (mactuition) as he provided an excellent service!

Picture pinched from www.telegraph.com - hope they don't mind!

Thoughts

Jesus' 1st instinct when confronted with the sick was to heal. Lepers, the blind etc. So a god doesn't 'like' suffering, he hates it.
I'm sure I've lost a proportion of my readership already (however many you are). Simply using the J word evokes emotions in most people - in many, fear, confusion, anger, pity and resentment. I know for me the word still conjours up images of South American States-types preaching "Jesus Christ, praise the lord" which I find shocking. And images of CICCU hoodies and people professing to know all the answers. People telling me I am "a parachutist without a parachute" [CU in 1st year] just succeed in scaring me off and creating a stigma for themselves and religion as a whole.
In Alastair McGrath's rebuttal to Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion", "The Dawkins Delusion" he makes the observation that many eminent scientists and intelligent people are practicing Christians - surely they are not all "deluded" people with an "imaginary friend" as Dawkins would have you believe - do they know something I don't?
I've already had the shocking epiphany that a belief in God and an understanding of science are not incompatible (here) which was vitally important in seeing that 'God' is not a deluded excuse for not understanding. I suppose it is an explanation for that which cannot be explained; that which we can explain (his work???) we do - through science.
I don't want to be "Christian" or "religious", I'm almost ashamed of the stigma, but there is also no way I can be an atheist - it seems to be ignoring a huge proportion of the argument. I couldn't come to terms with, for example, the death of a loved one with a simple "that's the end" attitude. I would need to believe that there is something more, that I would one day see them again. Of course need is a well documented atheist explanation for the existence of religion, and that shouldn't be a starting point, but it's important.
One of my previous questions "Why church?" has been answered in a number of ways. One, an evangelical response was "If we believe that God exists, then it demands some sort of response rather than apathy as most of the British public choose" ,and another less evangelical one "it's like going to a dinner party where you've had an amazing time and thoroughly enjoyed yourself. You should say thank-you". Both I think, are good answers.
I realise that I'm mostly just presenting information here in an unstructured fashion - maybe I'll return to this later and make it more readable (perhaps a cogent argument would be useful), but at the moment I don't really know where I'm going with it, so it's difficult to structure. I'm writing this down to justify decisions I make. Any move from here will have to be one I find logical and one I believe to be valid.
To leap back to the start, suffering. People believe different things (or more than one). We have free will, and certain types of suffering (war etc.) are a result of a human abuse of this. Other, natural forms of suffering are harder to justify in a loved world. I suppose they simply result from the natural way the world is set up. Take cancer as an example. It is, in most cases, a normal cellular function taken to an extreme - cell growth uncontrolled, and the result of a mutation in the genetic code for either a "tumour suppressor gene" (TSG) or an "oncogene" (actually an 'after the horse has bolted nomenclature, like calling bones 'flaccidity preventors', or television aerials 'static removers'). All genes are mutable and this can result in their malfunction which can lead to cancer through the loss (TSG) or gain (oncogene) of function of these genes. However, of course mutation - the imperfection in the replication and maintenance of DNA is vital for the processes of evolution - without this imperfection, all species would be static, infact, most wouldn't exist at all. So in order to have evolution, there must be imperfections in the system which leave it open to pathology. Does this mean the world is imperfect? Not necessarily, it's just the way it is.

Cows continued...

Well indeed Mary, what about the cows? I saw them again today - whiffling grass as if nothing has had happened. And I'll tell you something else - the theodolite man was gone... I think this can only lead us to 1 conclusion. Yup, they ate him.



Actually, I saw a theodolite man in Lion's Yard today too, so I suppose they must have set him free. Cows have hearts too (bloody big ones if I remember my IA anatomy correctly).

So Boris is the new mayor of London then. I suppose it's evidence of how keen the people of the UK are just for a "change" of some sort.