Anatomy Atlas Part 12 – Liver, Spleen, Stomach

Given how all these organs are important and vital, it really makes one wonder why they are only protected by a soft abdominal wall. From these only liver has meaningful ability to repair itself.

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Liver is, as you surely know, the main chemical factory of the body. Any chemical that gets absorbed into the bloodstream in your gut will go through it – thus the huge Vena cava inferior in which this nutrient rich but oxygen depleted blood is subsequently drained via hepatic veins. These veins are allegedly the reason for abdominal pain when exercising right after a big meal – there is a competition between blood flow through the liver and through the muscles and that leads to the veins having spasms. It is also the reason why I am sleepy about half an hour after a big meal – the liver stops most of the blood by expanding its veins, the blood pressure drops, I gets dizzzzzz…..

However that means not only food, but also every toxin you ingest, has an effect on your liver. That is the reason why liver has such an ability to recuperate or even regrow. It is an organ under huge pressure and essential for life.

We were told during our courses on toxicology that it was selective pressure that is possibly responsible for people of european descent having higher tolerance of alcohol than people of oriental descent – ever since the alcohol was discovered in the Mediterranean and Middle East regions, people of those and neighbouring regions were indulging in drinking a lot of wine and beer. Those who did not have the right types and ammounts of alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes in their liver to deal with it with least adverse effects died sooner, thus exerting selective pressure on the population.

I do not know whether it is true, but there is similar correlation in lactose intolerance. It does sound plausible.

Spider Catching a Beetle in its Web

During a lunch break at work I was taking a walk along a huge water cooling unit when I have seen a beetle caught in a spider web. Since I of course did not have my camera on me, I have done my best with my phone.

At first I thought the spider is nowhere near, but it only took a while to crawl out of its hiding under one of the metal covers. The spider did not approach the beetle at first, and when it did it only felt it with its front legs and then backed off because the beetle was thrashing around and it was about as big as the spider itself.

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Then a few moments later the spider has tried to drag the beetle upward, but it did not work. The beetle was evidently too big and too strong for that and it fought back valiantly.

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After that the spider crawled away from the beetle and I thought it gave up. After all the beetle was tearing the net apart. But then the spider has surprised me. It has merely changed its tactic. It crawled along the edge of the web and coordinated its collapse so as the beetle was tearing the silk threads, instead of freeing itself it got more and more constrained in movement. I did not know that spiders can do that.

When the beetle was constrained enough – destroying about 50% of the web in the process – the spider approached it again and has done its spin wrap of the prey into a cocoon.

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All that was left after that was the final blow – the spider has sunk its chelicerae into the side of the beetle, presumably between the plates of its chitinous armour. That took a few minutes and the poor beetle was still trying to move.

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I checked up on the place before I went home. At first I did see neither the spider nor the beetle. I found the spider hidden under the metal cover again, with only its front legs protruding outward, holding the packed beetle and waiting for the digestive juices do their thing.

I have observed spiders hunt before, but the tactic of collapsing the web around bigger prey was new for me.

The Daily Bird #740.

Picture from early this spring, the light was crap but the picture has an interesting story.

The buzzard flew away when I was trying to take a picture and it perched on the top of a huge cypress tree in the neighborhood. There it was harrased by a magpie until it left. Here it is shown flying circles around the magpie who did not give up its place so in the end the buzzard buggered off and the treetops were ruled by this magpie and two more, who joined it shortly.

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‘Bout the Whole Sharp, Pointy, Stabby Things Issue and Guns

I am not feeling particularly well these last few days. In addition to the usual depression that is  just an everlasting companion these last years, and the hay fever due to my neighbour not having harvested the hay yet, several joints have decided to act up so I cannot work properly. And I do not feel like discussing partisan politics this week except to say fuck all politicians and political ideologies across the spectrum left right and center – sideways.

However this is my hundredth post on Affinity and despite the number being completely arbitrary, I thought it should be about something more substantial than about strawberries misbehaving.

The whole issue of sharp and pointy objects has got me thinking more than one time throughout my life. When I was a kid I was being told that I will be allowed to handle sharp things from the age of ten years. I looked forward to it. For my tenth birthday I got a small pocket knife and my father has taught me how to sharpen it and how to properly care for it. In our household a sharp knife is really sharp and a blunted knife is what usually gets called sharp by many people I know. I had a knife somewhere around my person ever since.

I really like knives, daggers, machetes, axes and swords. I also like bows and crossbows. I am not collecting either, but I would like to make some of each and when I do make them, I will take care to make them not only functional, but beautiful too.

However there is no denying that all these objects are potential murder weapons. Some of them are indeed optimised for being a weapon, whilst others can have as a primary function being a tool.

I would like to know where this fascination with dangerous things comes from. My take on the issue is that it si far more common than people might realize at first thought. For example many of the most aesthetically appreciated animals are very finely tuned killing machines. Many people like cats and a person who does not appreciate the beauty of a tiger or a leopard would be a rare specimen indeed. Dragons and dinosaurs are very popular among kids and they are not known for being fluffy and cuddly.

This has brought me in a roundabout way to thinking how is liking knives different from liking guns and how is that in turn different from liking squids? And my take on the thing is, that not too much, if at all.

The important thing is not what one does like, but what one does about it. A gun collector or skeet shooter is just as normal as a sword collector or a fencer, and they all are just as normal as a stamp collector. The difference is in how people are conditioned by culture about dealing with the specific issue – both from the point of the enthusiast, and from the point of of the general populace. Some hobbies are frowned on, some are viewed as harmless oddities, some are reviled, some admired. And accordingly some people are reclusive about their hobbies, whilst others engage in them publicly and proudly.

And this is what makes the american gun nuts such a big problem. The difference between a gun nut and me is not that they are someone “other”.

It is not that they like guns and like to collect them and/or tinker with them. Gun/weapons collectors and enthusiasts are in every country around the world and nowhere, regardless of how strict/lax the laws are, are they a problem of the magnitude one sees in the US.

It is not that they think about their weapons in terms of how dangerous they are and how optimised for doing harm they are. I do that too and I do not believe that anyone who has ever held a sharp knife in their hand has never thought about it.

It is not that they think about how they could use their weapons in self-defense should the need arise. Whoever has ever been on the receiving end of violence will think about what they will do next to minimise the harm to themselves and their loved ones.

It is the culture that has elevated owning murder instruments onto a right in itself, sanctifying it and worshiping it, that pushes otherwise normal people over the border of normality into the land of the dangerous. It is the culture that makes people actually wishing to use the weapons against other people, instead of dreading that it might come to that.

In a culture where carrying a sword  was similarly held in high esteem, and where dueling for the slightest offence would be considered not only normal, but positively desired a different problem might arise – instead of an epidemic of mass shootings an epidemic of dueling, where the young and hopeful would waste their lives pointlessly at the end of a sharp piece of steel.

And you know what? That scenario ain’t fictional. And it took both legislative change and a shift in culture to deal with the problem.

The Most Annoying Weed Ever

My strawberry patch looks awful. What little I planted this year has mostly dried due to way too warm and dry May. However I still have enough big strawberries – those damn plants infested the side of the vegetable patch and grow among grass and potatoes like mad. Annoying, truly, on oh so many levels.

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Making a Rondel Dagger – Interlude

The now finished blade came out really nicely, so I will not be ashamed to be associated with it. So I will definitively sign it. However I mentioned already that I do not currently have my own maker’s mark, since the one I used from 10 years age is now used as bluetooth logo. I am not sure whether continuing to use it could lead to legal trouble, but I guess it would lead to confusion. “That knife has a bluetooth? What does it do?”.

I tried to design a new logo, but all designs I came up with either do not appeal to me, or they require quite precise etching process to be made on a blade. And that would definitively not fit this blade, where I aim for as authentic medieval look as I can achieve.

An idea came to me to use my initials, but not in Latin script, but in Glagolitic. At least for this particular dagger. It has the advantage that not only is it a very simple design, it is also thematic – Glagolitic script is the official script of the Witcher 3 game from which the inspiration for the dagger originated. And I am not appropriating other people’s culture.

So today I set out to try how it looks and also to refine/remember my etching process, since I did not do it for quite a long time. For that I yesterday polished a piece of steel from my failed broken machete.

In the past I tried different materials as masking for etching and the best results I have got with material that does not look appealing in the least. But do not worry, it does not smell like what it looks like. It smells actually very nice when worked, because it has been made from equal parts of beeswax, bitumen and spruce resin, all boiled together and poured into water to solidify. I formed it in sticks and for last ten years it collected dust. But it does not spoil and it is just as usable as it was when new.

When heated with heat gun or even with hair dryer or a candle it quickly gets very sticky and adheres to the de-greased steel quite well. So I heat gently both the steel and the stick and rub them together to transfer some of the sticky material onto the blade. Then I use the air flow from the hot air gun to make an even thin layer. It is important for the layer not to be too thick, because it would be difficult to draw the design in it, but also not too thin because then it could delaminate during etching around the edges (delamination was a huge problem when I was trying to use paraffine btw.).

Next step is to draw the design. The layer remains fairly soft and plastic for long time and can be easily scratched through. For this I am using an old compass needle, but for finer design a razor blade or very sharp wood carving knife tip can also be used. It is important to keep the needle clean after every scratch, since the stuff adheres to it too. It is also necessary not only to scratch through, but more like scratch/chisel away. Minor mistakes can be repaired by pressing a piece of the mass on desired place and pressing it gently against the spot until it connects again. After just a few minutes of work under a magnifying glass I was ready to try etching.

For just a small logo I did not want to prepare whole big etching bath, so I used the masking mass to glue a bottle cap with cut-out top as a barrier for the etching fluid to remain in place. As a source of electrical current I have used a DC power supply from an external hard drive that has died on me a few years ago – it has an on/off switch which comes in handy. Anode (+) is connected on the steel and cathode (-) on a piece of graphite (a pencil core works too and I used it for very fine etchings in the past). As etching fluid I have used ordinary kitchen salt solution in the past, but today I have tried ferric chloride because I reasoned (correctly) that it will work better. It is solution for etching printed circuit boards diluted approximately 1:10.

It is important to not use too concentrated solution for two main reasons:

  1. The current that can go through the solution depends on concentration. Too high concentration can mean too high current and that can burn the DC power supply (lesson learned in the past).
  2. Too concentrated solution also etches too quickly and that is not desirable because it makes uneven “burned” looking and spotty etch.

After that I turned the switch on and waited for ten minutes. It was not complete success because towards the end the bath evaporated too much, it got warm and the masking layer delaminated around the whole logo. So I repeated the process once more with only five minutes etching time. I am satisfied with the result, the etching is clear and has nice black color that I know I would not get with table salt. Now I will play with the letters a bit in Photoshop to get the proportions right.

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Anatomy Atlas Part 11 – Guts

Guts. The tubes that transform delicious food into disgusting shit. Which, in turn, is delicious food to other creatures who turn it into even smaller shit. And so on until it is all recycled back into living tissue or fossilized. In nature as a whole there is no such thing as waste and if something can be digested and turned into energy to sustain life, sooner or later there will be an organism doing just that.

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The interesting story about guts that our esteemed Professor Kos told was quite literally about shit.

Our digestive system is not particularly effective in absorbing fats, a significant portion of excrement are lipid compounds. And this, indirectly, is responsible for the oh so typical color of the final product of human digestive system.

When red blood cells die, the heme has to be broken down in order for the iron to be re-absorbed and recycled. Some of the end products of heme recycling are two chemicals: one called bilirubin (yellow), which gets later on broken down into stercobilin (brown). This is the reason why bruises go from initially red through blue to yellow and brown color as they heal.

The same process is happening also in liver and the chemicals bilirubin and stercobilin are excreted with bile. And because they are not water-soluble but are fat-soluble, they remain in the undigested fat in feces and are responsible for their distinctive color.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 10 – Sex Ed

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

This is another one of the issues where the current US divide between left and right amuses me greatly. If you ever saw the movie “Red Heat” you will probably remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role as a Soviet agent turning on TV in a cheap American hotel and upon seeing porn uttering the word “Capitalism!” with utmost sneer in his voice. That scene rings so true to me.

The regime’s attitude to sex and sex education was abysmal. You see, sex is pleasurable to the individual, and as such informing the populace about how it is supposed to work could not be easily spun into a way to advance the greater good. Pornography was illegal and erotica very strictly regulated. And sex education almost non-existent.

Well, that is not entirely true. Sex ed was compulsory. But non-existent at the same time.

In the seventh class of elementary school, the biology classes were focused on human anatomy. Towards the end of the year part of the curriculum was about sexual and reproductive organs and some sex education thrown in.

The sex education part was gender segregated. Girls were shown some educational video whose details I do not know. Some boys tried to listen at the windows and from them I know that it probably consisted mostly of information about expected changes in body chemistry and shape during puberty, and nothing more.

Boys had even less informative session, which I missed completely due to illness. All I know from highly bemused accounts from my schoolmates is that instead of the rather good diagrams in books the whole issue was explained on a picture of a tulip. Really. Bees and flowers. At school. In 1980s.

At no point whatsoever were the “technicalities” of sex mentioned. No mention of consent and how it is supposed to work, no mention about how condoms are used and what other options of contraception there are, no mention of how the body parts actually fit into each other. So all of this info had to be learned from surroundings, either from family members or from peers. Which has of course led to great variation between individuals.

Info about consent came mostly from media and from peers, with all the masculine garbage that is the stupid “yes means yes, no means try harder”.
Use of condoms had everybody to gleam from rare articles that might be written in some magazine for adults or to figure out for themselves. Oh, and the stupid “it’s woman’s responsibility to not get pregnant” was part of the package too.

How the sex itself is supposed to work everybody learned from pornographic magazines smuggled in from west. People who did not get lucky to see porn or grow up in the country  might end up completely unable to actually perform sexual act properly, as was attested in the book Lidská sexualita (Human sexuality) by sexuologist Ivo Pondělíček and his wife Jaroslava Pondělíčková-Mašlová, who bemoaned that in the 1970’s multiple adult pairs came through his office who were unable to conceive child and during the courses he learned that they did not even know that for a woman to conceive the penis must enter the vagina. At least one such pair were people with university diplomas.

All in all it is no wonder that in my relatively small social circle I knew two girls who became pregnant shortly after the age of consent (15 years) and that it was all too common that girls got pregnant and married quite young. There are no precise statistics, because the regime did not keep tabs on things that reflected on it unfavourably, but I would not be suprised if today’s Texas came out better in this regard.