jf aad7t

-Worst Moment of Your Life quote: "Scientist accidentally injects Ebola into finger"-

I should have noticed I was dreaming last night. In the dream, I was not only roaming my childhood home; I was also singing. ON KEY.

In a flagrant break from tradition, I will muse on a topic somewhat related to the quote. This is mainly because, as a shameless science nerd, I spent most of yesterday utterly distracted by the train of articles and information that branched off from the spare PopSci treatment of the news.

Essentially, an Ebola researcher accidentally pricked herself, through 3 layers of gloves, with a needle full of the biosafety level 4 pathogen. Bear in mind that biosafety level 4 means that the agent has no approved vaccine or cure, and it will probably kill you within a couple of days. In the case of Ebola, which damages blood vessels and clotting, it's a relatively gruesome death.

The scientist didn't actually depress the plunger on the needle, so she may have dodged the actual disease -- though, in a testament to just how deadly Ebola is, she requested that she be injected with an experimental Ebola vaccine that has only been tested on monkeys, just in case. The researcher is currently in a pretty severe containment unit while they watch her for sympoms.

I apologize in advance for any cheesiness, but reading this story made me appreciate what heroes these virology researchers are. They have to go to their jobs every day knowing that one slip of their hand could literally kill them -- they're working with organisms that, by their very classification, could have mortality rates from 50 to as high as 90% if some part of the elaborate containment system for these bugs should fail. And because the pathogen has no cure, that mortality rate goes down only a little with prompt hospital treatment.

Honestly, there aren't many jobs like that around anymore, not in developed countries. And most of the jobs that are like that at least get some sort of nod from the public for bravery.

Disease researchers, we just take for granted. "Scientists have developed a new vaccine for [disease]!",  "Possible cure for [disease] found!" Nobody mentions how dangerous it is for them to get there, before that vaccine or cure is developed.

Reality check. The other thing I realized when reading that article is that it is a very, very good thing that clumsy old me is NOT in that line of work.

fa a fa fs7t

-Flowchart quote: "...permitted to count one..."-

I had a dream in which I was running, this morning. Perhaps this explains why I woke up with a sore throat (which, by the way, is already feeling much better) -- I must have been panting or something.

Scene in public eatery (paraphrased & name-switched):

Me: [sniffs air] What's that smell? It smells like someone smoking.

Sugarfrost: [recoils] It smells like... burning chicken.

Me & Butterbiter: How do you know what burning chicken smells like?

Sugarfrost: My mom made a chicken soup once where she was cooking the chicken, and it burned.

Me: Oh, I thought for a second you meant your live chickens.

Sugarfrost: Actually, there was a fire in their coop once, when they were really small. All but two were too stupid to leave when that happened.

Butterbiter: How did that smell?

Sugarfrost: It was mostly just sad. They were still all fluffy and adorable.

Me: [sniffs air again] I still think it smells more like cigarette smoke than burning chickens. Unless...

The purpose of that dialogue was to give some background for the following pixel art, which I made shortly after the above conversation:

Reality check. Not that knowing the background necessarily helps.

mnq

-Pdf quote: "The triple point pressure of any pure substance is the lowest pressure that the liquid
phase is stable."-

Rather unexpectedly, I did not get many interesting dreams this week. The one interesting dream to pop onto my mental doorstep was the one in which my father was a rocket scientist (!) smuggling some sort of innocuous good to Kenya (!!). For this, the Kenyan government sentenced him to death by lethal injection (!!!). It was a very odd dream, and rather unpleasant.

But guess what? IT'S PI DAY! Happy Pi Day, readers!

Reality check. e^iz = -1

q q7t q

-url quote: "floating_hamster_balls_for_kids"-

I'm debating whether I preferred the dream with music in it or the dream in which I had a virtual pet dragon with its own smaller pet dragon. I must admit that music in my dreams is quite rare, so I suppose that can be my dream of the week.

Apparently, my social intuition is better than I thought it was. The other day, I was walking by a large building that stood in front of a small parking lot. The process was such that the parking lot came into view only gradually.

I came to a point in my walk where a young woman came into view, and for some reason I looked at her body language and remarked, almost without thinking, that she must be waiting for her boyfriend to catch up. As soon as I made this observation, I wondered where I had gotten it from -- when I actually decided to observe her behavior consciously, there was nothing unusual that she was doing.

Even more oddly, I myself have not bothered with the whole "dating" routine yet. I'm one of those people that singleness suits, so far. So if I were choosing someone specifically for this sort of intuition, I would pick myself last; how in heek would I of all people know how to recognize such a situation?

My intuition was right, of course. A few steps further: a young man came out of a nearby building, walked over to her, and they embraced heartily.

But I still can't figure out exactly WHAT it is that gave this away to me beforehand.

Reality check. Ever had any strange run-ins with intuition?