Another Pair Of Eyes

Glass Holder

I saw this article and it made me ponder whether people do indeed give stuff away by their body language in such simple ways. Thing is, I’ve seen all those types if people out and about, and the description of each fits quite well. The one reservation I have is the ice queen – sure, sometimes people stand like that because they are defensive and closed off, but sometimes it’s just cold.

Also, people tend to flit between types. Depending on who I’m with and how comfortable I am around them, I’m a wallflower*, a browbeater or a fun lover, sometimes all in one night. Mixing drinks indeed.

What’re you?

*Although, I’m often holding my hand over the top of my glass to prevent unwelcome additions in the form of pennies, or rohypnol, rather than hiding my palms. Hmmm.

Macro Quiz

What’s what when you see it up close?

EDIT: Many of the answers are in the comments, so if you want to guess yourself don’t read them until you have!

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Submit your answers now!

the irony of making a quiz is not lost on me.

Knowing

Today I walked through coronary care, and glanced at a bunch of ECG screens as I passed. I identified a bunch of pathologies in the patterns. Yesterday I performed an abdominal examination on a friend of mine, and had it down perfect.  When we went through differential diagnoses for chest pain, for breathlessness, for weight loss, I knew not only what they were, but why.

It turns out I’ve taken in a lot more than I thought.

Today I sat in a lecture about congenital abnormalities, and knew none of it. Yesterday I sat through the explanation of lactation and when referred back to hormonal control of the ovary I could not recall what it was. When we went through the mechanisms behind testosterone and oestrogen production, I hadn’t even the vaguest idea what was going on, let alone why.

It turns out I don’t know as much as I’d like.

Tonight, I will start writing my little book of pregnancy revision, which will cover everything from menstruation to lactation with all the embryology that goes in the middle. In the meantime I’ll poke more fresher volunteers, friends, and housemates until all my exams are as good as the GI one.

I can do this. The satisfaction of knowing has to be enough.

Two and a half weeks.

Starsleeper

I woke up at 4:36 this morning into bright daylight, and upon opening my eyes was confronted with a sea of grass. I blinked twice, and the grass was real. Smelt like grass too. I rolled on to my back and stared into the sky. To eyes used to the dim shades of unconsciousness, every colour seemed twice as vivid as normal. The sky glowed.

Suddenly my ears followed my mind into consciousness and the entire scene was accompanied by birdsong from every direction. The wind rustled in the grass and sent waves of it past me. I blinked, and against the backs of my eyelids I saw that same sky above me studded with stars.

…

The last two paragraphs took place over a duration of about 5 seconds, but they were such a surreal few seconds, such an intense few seconds, that they deserve those paragraphs and more. I slept under the stars last night, far from the haze of Southampton, and the sky was just so stunning that every time I closed my eyes, I just had to open them again. I’ve never slept so little (12-4) and felt so refreshed by it. Outside is amazing =) and so is the whole camping malarkey. Little is more fun than the games and the banter and the sense of camarderie that you get with a trip out with friends, BBQing food and knocking a ball around and generally wandering the countryside.

Now, my legs ache with 10 miles of micro-tears. Despite the fact that at this moment it is only quarter to nine in the evening I am still abed. I don’t plan to sleep yet – a bed in a room, four walls, ceiling, floor: it seems so limiting somehow. My limbs, however, are grateful for the break in running about and are settling in happily to a ever-warmer mattress. The afterburn heat on the back of my neck marks the sun’s less-than-careful touch. My head is full of croquet, and rounders, and walking to the pub, and the ever-repeating image of a night sky studded with stars (I miss the stars when I’m in Southampton. They are so dull here…).

Addendum: I am now awake (good times) and so I thought I’d add a bit here I meant to write yesterday. I really reckon we are supposed, as humans, to rise with the sun and sleep with the dark. Not just almost, but sort of slinking away with the dusk and waking before the sun is up, but when its light. It was SO good and SO natural-feeling to wake up at 4:30am outside that I can’t help but want to sleep outside every day because it makes getting up so easy. Shame about the rain, huh.

In other news, does anyone have any ideas how to describe my blog in six words? Sum it up, lay it down? Suggestions welcome!

Quizzes

The hundreds of look-a-like facebook quizzes that are endlessly there on the news feed are driving me insane with a net weight of pages and pages of complete drivel. Which wife of Henry VIII are you?

I mean seriously. Who has all the spare time to think up these ever-more-inane wastes of bandwidth??

Wrist

I have, as they say in technical circles, buggered me wrist. I’m not sure which is the guilty party:* tennis (highly suspicious), notewriting (damn you, endocrine!), badminton (I will miss you), piano (those cursed high-speed arpeggios in Metamorphosis II) or squash (unlikely as not played in a while), but something has done some damage and me ignoring said damage for a week or so hasn’t helped.

Thus, I have purchased a wrist support, and I shall hope for the best. It’s irritating because it kind of cripples my cunning (but not actually all the cunning) plans to write huge quantities of notes and it has also caused me to miss the last badminton sessions before the halls flood with desks and the susurrations of hundreds of pens frantically recording the poorly-remembered knowledge of their masters. Grr to that, says I. Still, I’m one better than last year in that I’m not going to go anyway and cripple myself. Bonus.

This term has flown by at an unbelievable rate – it seems like only a fortnight ago that I was enjoying my easter holidays and, surely, it was only a couple of weeks before then that I had neuro burn a hole in my brain? It is insanity itself, this rush of days. Tomorrow I’m off for a camping trip. Might let me relax for a little bit, would be good! The invitation seems a little odd though. Nothing scary-strange, just kind of unexpected.

Do you ever get a feeling that someone is acting out of character towards you?

Sometimes you don’t know where something will go until you get up and do it.

*I’m guessing that gardening isn’t the reason, as there is nothing strenuous about moving seedlings from A to B.

Tubes

So I said I’d write something about extension tubes, and now I will. An extension tube is, as the name suggests, a simple tube which fits on to a camera in between the sensor and the lens. The distance is usually controlled by mixing and matching parts of the tube and combining them. In my case, I have three sections – combined they make up 65mm of extension.

What this extra distance achieves is twofold. On the good side, it means that for any given lens, the minimum focus distance is vastly reduced. Extension tubes don’t magnify anything – they’re just full of air. Leave that to the teleconverters. What they let you do is get much closer to your subject without turning it into a blurry mess of colour. However, there is a trade off to that in terms of depth of field (the range which is in focus at any given time) – the closer stuff gets, the narrower the DoF becomes.

You can attatch any lens you like – the longer it is, though, the less effect the tubes have. However, it is possible to attatch and extend as much as you can just to make your camera look ridiculous:

However, it’s a bit unwieldy, and not very good. Shorter is better. This only works up to a point as the shorter the lens is you use, the closer something has to be to focus on it. When putting the 28mm lens on the full set of tubes, I could only focus on things about 1cm in front of the lens or closer. Obviously once the maximum focus is inside the camera then you run into problems. The other issue is light – with the lens that close to whatever-it-is in the photo, there isn’t much light about to get to the sensor. As such, you need a longer shutter time, and so you need everything to be perfectly still.

The effect, though can be pretty impressive. Here is the top of an ordinary ballpoint pen:

28mm lens, shutter 1/5s, f8, ISO 400 with 65mm extension

You can see the reflection of the camera lens in the ink on the rollerball bit. Also see how unbelievably narrow the depth of field is. Also see how impossible it would be to photograph anything that was moving with that kind of level of detail! On the 50mm, things are a bit more normal, but not much…

Anyway, tubes tubes tubes. They have their disadvantages but the manual ones are DIRT CHEAP, so it doesn’t really matter. You can get fancy auto ones that let you control the lens from the camera, but you might as well buy another lens. Manual ones are cheap and simple, and although you need to set everything yourself (if you’ve got lenses without an aperture control ring you’ll be limited to minimum aperture, all the time) I’d say they are worth the investment, if only to look at things from a different perspective now and again!

Those of you with SLR cameras, go on ebay and buy some metal tubes for £6 and see what you can do. Anything is fair game if it will stay still long enough…

*goes to find more stuff to inspect at very close range*