The Flood of 2011

As soon as the school canceled parent teacher conferences, my parents and I drove north to my grandmother’s house in Nong Khai—a town in northeastern Thailand. Until today, the fact that vicious torrents of floodwater were overwhelming many civilian areas felt unreal to me. The flood was but a secondhand experience that I could only witness through at TV screen; I was completely alienated from what was happening.

I find it difficult to write a blog on the current flood, because I do not feel like I am a victim in the same sense as those who lost their homes or livelihoods. I feel as though I am not qualified to speak to the suffering and destruction caused by the flood, because I do not know what it is like to go through that. Today, however, as my parents and I made our way back to Bangkok, I got a glimpse of the true nature of the flood. I saw a wheat field under murky water, with the occasional half submerged tree or lamppost. The farmers had taken to their homes, and the usually lively landscape seemed absolutely lifeless. But faded lines on the electricity poles at the side of the road indicated that water in the area had subsided, leading us to believe that the danger had passed, and the situation had calmed. Instead of taking the safer, roundabout route that we had taken on our way out of Bangkok, my parents chose to take a shortcut through Wang Noi, an area that had recently suffered from severe flooding. The traffic at Wang Noi was nearly unbearable. Every two minutes or so, our car crawled forward one meter. Frustrated and with only 600 meters left before we were to turn right and leave the town, my parents attempted to avoid the congestion by veering off the main road and onto a flooded strip of lower ground. Although the water started out quite shallow, the further we went, the higher it rose. As we sloshed sluggishly through the water, I heard an ominous gurgling coming from the trunk of our car. Water had seeped through the doors at an alarming speed, so that, within a few minutes, my shoes were bobbing up and down in flood water.

This morning, when I started my blog, I had planned to write a generic, and rather impersonal, piece about how the flood caused much hardship to the citizens of Thailand and how it could be symbolically represented by the furniture in my house—our sofa precariously balanced on the coffee table represented the people displaced from their homes, forced by nature to seek refuge in flood shelters. But now I realize that it’s more than just a severe case of inconvenience that plagues flood victims. By no means am I trying to say that I know fully the feelings of those whose houses and livelihoods were destroyed by the flood. This experience simply gave me a taste of what others had taken on at full steam. I chose this picture because the moment I took it, which was a little while before our car was half submerged in floodwater, was the first time that I had seen with my own eyes the disaster caused by the flood. It embodies, for me, the unease a flood victim faces as he chooses a limited number of belongings to bring with him, if he even has the time to bring anything at all, and the panic that consumes him as the water level rises constantly and unpredictably. Just looking at the picture, one could see that the water level is unbelievably high, and having to be stuck in the middle of that must have been absolutely terrifying for the flood victims.

I now realize just how fortunate I am that my house and those of my relatives are safe and dry. Now that I’m back in Bangkok and have a chance to help with flood relief efforts, I know that, instead of helping out of obligation, I’ll be helping with the sincere hope that I can alleviate the suffering of the flood victims, and that means a lot to me. 

Homeopathy: Science or Myth

Homeopathy is a method of curing ailments that involves solutions of chemicals that produce the same effect as the symptoms of the disease the patient is suffering from, diluted to such a degree that it is possible that no more of the chemical remains in the water. It is said to work because the “memory” of water allows it to take on the properties of the substances dissolved in it even after the substance is removed. 

Personally, I am very skeptical of homeopathy and do not believe it should work. I think that homeopathy as a medicinal cure is not scientifically valid, as it has not been proven to be distinguishable from pure water in an environment where extraneous variables were minimized and large, randomized populations were involved as participants, as was shown in Benveniste’s case. The reason homeopathy works, I believe, is that the receivers of the medicine believe they are getting a legitimate cure for their illness and are optimistic about the possible effects of the medicine that logically should not have any effect on the body at all. To disprove the idea that the positive feelings that the patient feels after receiving the homeopathic treatment are what cause the improvement in his/her condition, one would have to show that a patient who receives a placebo displays different reactions than a patient who receives the homeopathic medicine. 


The basic idea of homeopathy is similar to that of injections for disease prevention. Almost everybody has been to the hospital countless times to receive chicken pox or influenza vaccinations, which contain a small amount of the virus itself in order to trigger the body to create antibodies to fight against the disease. However, the idea that water has a “memory” is too hard to believe without any scientific proof. The idea that simple thoughts and words' positive or negative connotations can affect the way water crystals form and the freshness of rice in a jar seems really far fetched. The image shows a picture of 2 jars of rice, one which has "thank you" written on it, which remains fresh, and one which has "you fool" written on it, which appears to have gone bad. If thought alone could have such large impacts on the physical state of substances, then why would we have to further the field of medicine or ever resort to drugs? 

Allergies are sometimes treated with drugs that occupy sites that the allergen would occupy, which is similar to the homeopathic idea of treating like with like. There is also the natural alternative to drugs. Some people prefer to take natural treatments made from herbs or plants which work without the side-effects of manufactured drugs. Although natural treatments like herb pills are considered outdated and sometimes ineffective in the modern world, and although homeopathy appears to be a pseudoscience, I believe that if a person feels better after receiving the treatment, whether it’s because of optimism and sheer will power or because of the treatment itself, then they should use the treatment. It never hurts to try, especially when homeopathic treatments, if there really is no such thing as the “memory” of water, are simply be pure water.


Image: http://www.meland.bz/theloveenergy.htm

Response to Bryson's Cell Article

I had always thought of cells as simple diagrams on the pages of textbooks. In biology, we learned what the different organelles and structures contained in the cell are called and what functions they perform. Yet, despite knowing that all living things are made up of cells, I never thought of cells as hectic and lively structures that vaguely resemble "vast, teeming metropolis[es]". The excerpt from Bryson's book describes cells as "hazardous place[s]" and organelles as "some [being] the size of basketballs, others the size of cars", comparing the cytoskeleton to a "complex framework of girders", and calling DNA "full-time occupants" of the cell. This view of the cell as a structure resembling a city bustling with life surprised me, and made me realize the complexity behind what all living organisms are composed of. The organelles and substances within the cell are shown to have many different "mundane" tasks, many of which are akin to jobs that humans have in a modern society, for example "getting rid of waste, warding off intruders, sending and receiving messages, [and] making repairs," and the degree of similarity between the basic units of structure that we're composed of and the interactions between us as humans is quite startling, and made me view cells in a completely different light than I had before.

In the excerpt, Bryson starts off with a description of cells' miniature sizes, and how scientists overcame many difficulties in order to gain knowledge about them. He describes how Hooke was the first to identify cells which he saw as "little chambers in plants," how Leeuwenhoek, a simple "linen draper", was able to get "magnificent magnifications" in his examinations, and how Brown was discovered nuclei in atoms. He states that, at a molecular level, even water becomes a "kind of heavy-duty gel" and "a lipid is like iron." That made me wonder: if lipids have only 'the consistency of a "light grade of machine oil"', then what prevents the cells from being sliced open or popped whenever we hold something like metal or paper, substances that are evidently more rigid than lipids? Once I was convinced of how incomprehensibly small and inconceivably complex cells are, "too small to be seen, but roomy enough to hold thousands of complicated structures," Bryson astonished me yet again with the magnitude of what cells can do: our hearts "must pump..... 657,000 gallons a year--enough to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools" just to keep our cells oxygenated. It's no wonder that red blood cells die every 120 days. They have to carry oxygen to the cells of our body when our bodies have such rigorous demands and require them to work so hard. The contrast between the microscopic size of cells and the many functions they perform to keep us alive hit me after reading this excerpt, and increased my appreciation of cells and what they do for us, changing my earlier belief that cells were simply another subject in biology instead of structures that play such monumental roles in keeping us alive.

Image: http://dbscience5.wikispaces.com/Courtney+S