HTH (or A Journalistically Plausible Piece of Nonsense)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this guy’s the dog’s bollocks. Ah! Sorry, gentle readers, I have jumped the proverbial gun. I shall start at the beginning. I was nosing around in Matlab forums for a piece of code and I finally found a thread with the answers, provided by this guy who signs himself as HTH. This is probably a good point in the narrative to ward off any blood-seeking gender activists by the following disclaimer: It could well have been any other gender, but to hell with that – I’m sure it’s a guy. Anyway, so this guy had the answers. I allocated him space in my crowded brain and filed him as ‘the Matlab guy’. Three days later, on a search for a solution to pesky ArcGIS problem, I find the answer being provided by, no surprise, the very same bloke (sceptical readers can find him here: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/12284/how-do-you-find-linear-mileage". Now this is something, I said to myself. ArcGIS and Matlab? I promptly enlarged his allocated space in my brain, renamed him ‘the geek’ and moved on. Now, this is where it gets interesting – a week on, I was looking at a Python forum (don’t ask me, gentle readers, why I was switching between languages like an undecided fly – the answer is disappointingly banal) when who should provide the answers, but none other than the geek, HTH. He has since occupied half my brain (3/8 right and 1/8 left, to be specific) and goes by the alias ‘God.’ Now that his omnipotence, omnipresence and omnibenevolence have been conclusively proven (gosh, proving the existence of God doesn’t get easier, does it!), I shall go on to relate to you, my readers, one of his exploits.

HTH, for he is benevolent enough to allow free use of his Christian name, went on a date once, when in the Old Blighty. He acquiesced to his partner’s demands and went to a wine and cheese night despite being particularly unfond of blue cheese, because he’s a decent chap, but mainly because the disadvantages of a strong after-taste far outweighed the disadvantages of an empty eye-socket. And of course, a few extra glasses of wine on a date never did one any harm. As expected, the after-taste got less and less sharp and more and more likeable, helped along by the increasingly companionable attitude of his partner. And, Stilton is after all, the king of blue cheeses. To cut a long story short, the cows of Leicestershire and the grape vines of Bordeaux had their existence thoroughly justified that night. Now as we all know, the unmoderated consumption of Stilton before one sleeps can result in strange mental goings-on. In fact, there is a direct link between the consumption of Stilton and dreams populated with vegetarian crocodiles. If you do not believe this claim, gentle readers, I refer you to
"http://web.archive.org/web/20060115000115/http://www.cheeseboard.co.uk/news.cfm?page_id=240" and hope that this shall, for once and all, put your natural scepticism to rest.

In fact, that night, in the throes of a Stilton-induced dream, HTH saw himself wrestling with a Greater Flamingo while trying to save the life of a vegetarian crocodile that had got lost while attempting the Annual Nile Run and ended up in the Guinean mangrove swamps of Sierra Leone. HTH sat bolt upright in his bed. His partner murmured, what’s wrong, honey, all that cheese? Do you know something absolutely startling I read the other morning? Scientists have found, and I do not speak lightly or for that matter kid you, that a proven way of losing weight is to eat less! Can you believe that? If you can’t (my gentle readers), here is incontrovertible proof: "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14882832". No, said HTH, it’s something far less startling. There is a mission I have to undertake. A vegetarian crocodile is in trouble. He seeks answers on ‘how to subdue a Greater Flamingo’ but doesn’t have access to the internet and cannot get on to the usual forums. Now you may be thinking, my dear, and be all too justified in doing so, that this is bunkum, but this lizard of the Nile is in fact a distant relative of his Indian cousin (mentioned here: "http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2512203.ece") though he doesn't share his passion for rice balls." "Hmm," said his partner. "That might be because basmati rice well-cooked is the olfactory cousin of tiger piss. It's a territory thing." "What nonsense." "No, look here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11787325." "Goodness, these are strange times we live in. Gosh, I must go now. I’m sorry, darling, don’t keep the breakfast out. I’ll be back for lunch. Goodnight." And as the partner watched, HTH vanished.

He took a few minutes to get to Sierra Leone, having stopped off en-route in a Tesco’s for a fish-wrap, a Go Outdoors for an oxygen tank and a Nalli’s in Chennai for a lungi (for the uninitiated of you, a lungi is a colourful piece of cloth wrapped around the waist, worn by males). For the place he was going to was no ordinary West African town as you shall soon see for yourself. He landed, he wore the lungi and he laughed out loud until his lungs were empty, he fixed up the oxygen tank and laughed out loud for a few hours more. And only then were his omnipresence, omnibenevolence and omnipotence re-established. For, he was in the land of Lungi-Lol. Now if you do not believe the existence of said land, my gentle readers, I refer you here: "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13688683". And he went forth, this God, to the swamp where the vegetarian crocodile had got lost, a victim of extensive landscape changes caused by profiteering land-grabbers. He gave the crocodile the fish-wrap and his I-phone, specially equipped for access to the internet regardless of where you are. The crocodile googled how to subdue a Greater Flamingo with a fish-wrap (I shall not bore you with detail for I am sure you are no longer the sceptics you once were). He found an answer signed HTH, and needless to say, all, my gentle readers, is well.

Hope That Helps.

Embrace

Inspired by a chat with a friend on embracing the unknown :)


A stream gentle yet hurried
With whirlpools, mini-falls, autumn leaves
Unsurprising, expected, yet pleasant to observe until a shadow
A shadow hints, teases,
Forces you out of an observers complacence,
There is more beneath the pleasantly surprising
An unknown waiting to be discovered, felt, embraced,
You resist,
Remaining on the bank,
After all you don’t know to swim
And there’s much joy in watching the water, the leaves,
Yet the undertow beckons,
A whisper formed, meant for you
Reaches you on the crisp breeze, special, irresistible,
And you dive in
You who don’t know to swim
Abandoning thought, embracing the unknown
A splash breaks the surface,
Ripples emerging from the darkness beneath
The stream hurries on gently,
Whirlpools, leaves and all.

Lines of Defence – The Future of Medicine and Man

Until now natural selection and personal health were key factors in determining the survival of a human being faced with a threat. Diseases would appear, decimate a society or community and move on leaving the survivors to recoup and reproduce with newly evolved methods of fighting a recurrence. While societal living had a role to play in terms of affording protection, this was still secondary to the fitness of the individual. However the increasing complexity of the medicines and societal mechanisms man has been developing for his protection are changing this. We have come to the point where there is a noticeable externalisation of our lines of defence to health threats. Our defences are no longer so much within our bodies as outside. A recent article in the BBC (‘Will we all be tweaking our own genetic code?’, Karen Weintraub, 19 Sep. 11) exemplifies this shift in a discussion of the possibility of genetically targeted medicines that will help prevent diseases at their inception. Such a shift seems a natural and probably inevitable outcome of our technological advance. Indeed parts of western society are already grappling with one direct consequence of this advance –increased, and ageing, population. However there is another, increasingly relevant, aspect that arises from this conundrum of externalisation – the question of access. In all likelihood, this question will in the long-term vanish, as the now-new externalised 'natural' defence system settles down after going through its initial upheavals. However it will be worth considering the question if we wish to mitigate the pains of transition.

The question itself is not new. Though ethics in medicine and testing have undergone radical changes in recent decades, poor and under-privileged parts of the world have long been, and remain, testing grounds for new pharmaceutical drugs. It is a not-irrelevant point that several life-giving drugs have probably emerged much faster than they would have otherwise as a result of this inhumane process. How these costs and benefits may be added up, and whether at all they can/should be added up are questions that remain unanswered. However the development of genetic medicine arguably intensifies, by a great measure, the pertinence of the issue and its societal implications. An assumption I make here is that genetic medicine will need, by its very nature, to be tailored to a specific individual. In practical terms, assuming the availability of manufacturing facilities at reasonable prices, this will mean the access of every individual to a facility (and doctor) that will use his DNA sequence to determine the type of medicine he needs and manufacture it. At one level, this is a very welcome scenario – cheap, automated facilities that will not discriminate and be accessible to all. However, in nation-states where medication is privatised and socialised healthcare not available, where will the poor go for their individually-tailored medicines? For – and this is the root of the questions being asked here, the more we externalise our defence systems, the more we will depend on them for our survival. The poor of the future will be far less internally resilient to the viruses living with us today. It is likely that with individually tailored medication, we will also have individual-specific side-effects. Even in today’s relatively simplistic times, pharmaceutical corporations have been known to suppress unpleasant facts about the drugs they develop when they are put on the market. Will it be possible to come up with a free, fair and transparent way of dealing with the possible side-effects of genetic medicine? Also, there is the other, well-known thorn – the testing of such medicine. Surely genetic medicine will need far more rigorous and extensive testing than present-day drugs. Will we find suitable platforms for such testing? And finally, systems that become tighter, more complex and more dependent on centralised protection become more vulnerable to unforeseen external threats. Will this be what homosapiens, as a society, face in future?

Ephemeral

I should get out of this rut...but until then, I shall rely on the past! Here's another short piece, written ages ago!

Mirror on the wall, still water in the sink
Show what you are, a snapshot in time;
Hand jerks uncontrolled,
A tinkle, a rush,
The moment passes, so do you;
Shards of glass scatter on the floor,
Still water swirls, ever so untrue;
Like pages torn from a book that tells its story no more
Remind you that just as they are ephemeral, so are you.

Metaphorically Speaking

End Program...

He stood alone in the penthouse. High above, away from the noise, the traffic, the people - away from everything. Everything that is except that nameless, sinking feeling that followed him everywhere, every waking moment of his life. He was done and he knew it. He looked around the hexagonal apartment - at its glass walls and fancy trimmings and as he kept looking the wall in front of him started cracking. Slowly like a cancer the crack spread throughout the fabric of the glass and then with a single tinkling crash the wall came tumbling down in pieces, the glass wall that had been painstakingly decorated with portraits of the people that had come to mean something to him in his fifty-odd years of existence. He looked at the walls to his right, the ones with the pictures of the places he had been to and the paintings of the artists he had grown to admire. The cracks spread outward slowly with a compelling inevitability and he watched in mute fascination as the places and the paintings came crashing down as well. He didn’t turn as he heard the walls behind him go down along with the shelves holding the things he had created that he valued most. Rooted, he turned to his left in time to watch the biggest of the walls go down, the one he had painted himself with his ambitions, his dreams, the places he had wanted to see, the things he had wanted to create. All around him in pieces lay his life while the sun played gently on his features caressing him, mocking him. The sinking feeling lifted. He smiled bemused at the forceful clarity with which the one thought in his head kept bouncing around. He walked to the edge lifted his arms like a diver and jumped.


Restart...

Coincidence?... I think.

You're Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try
anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent
some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in.
This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's
time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in
ferries.


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at the Blue Pyramid.