St Pauls closed

You're almost certainly aware of the anti-capitalist protests around the world recently, and may be aware St Pauls Cathedral in London had to close for health and safety concerns. Normally I wouldn't care that much, there's even a great deal I disagree with the protesters about.

The reason I'm talking about this is that it's leader, the Reverend Knowles, made an annoying statement. He called the protesters "a lesser cause", and should show respect to their "more ancient institution". That's right, one of the Church of England's highest officials thinks the global economic problem, whether or not the protesters are exactly correct, is less important than their church services. Then justifies his point of view by saying it's older.

Ugh...

End of the world

Remember six months a go when Harold Camping said the world would end? And then it didn't? You might also remember he tried to justify his error by claiming it was a "silent" judgement day, and the actual reckoning would happen on the 21/10/2011. That's today!

I don't know about you, but the weather here is a bit dire. Apart from that the apocalypse seems a little pleasant so far.

I am very happy

And I have not a fucking clue as to why. I just woke up this morning feeling really positive. If i had to guess why it would be just being at Uni and really starting to study now. Right now I'm writing this in the Biomedical library, surrounded by my notes on the histology of the skin. It's unbelievably hard but I think it's making me happy.

I've always felt best when building things or solving puzzles, abstract or otherwise. Stuff like Lego when I was younger or redstone in Minecraft. For the first time I really feel academically challenged every single day, not just occasionally like in school. And I'm slowly edging my way into new social circles, it actually gives me goosebumps how weird and wonderful life is at the minute.

I'm going to force myself to post less stuff about medicine and Uni now, I wanna talk more about interests I've neglected as of late. That wraps up this post; stay tuned for regular programming!

More Uni stuff

I really need to set aside time for blogging, Uni takes up all my time now. I'm writing this in a sandwich bar between lectures, it's so nice to really sit down. Alone. Without people.

I'm just out of my first anatomy class, you know, with cadavers. I was surprisingly uneasy at first, I never thought anything of the corpses beforehand. But when you walk in and see ~20 of them lying on tables it strikes you a bit. Although once the demonstrator really got into the detail it wasn't so bad, in fact it got really interesting. I still prefer the histology though, which is good considering I want to get into oncology.

That'll have to do for now, I'm slowly getting into the swing of things. Hopefully I'll get posting interesting stuff again soon.

So little time

It has been a week and a half since my last post! I just have no time during freshers! But it's over now, time to get into actual work. And I'm really excited.

At the start of the course I was terrified of hating medicine, even after all the work and suffering to get in to the thing. You see, everyone on the course is passionate about medicine as a clinical profession. Except me. My real love is science.

After getting a little stuck in, and seeing my mum as a carer today, I think I may start to like the health profession in its more traditional sense. Until then however, I'll still clutch to my hope of academia.

Course aside, Uni is fucking brilliant. New and old friends, clubs joined, fresh starts. I really want to get stuck in!

And lastly for David, who started today: medishuuuuuuuuunnnnnn

I am finally here!

I've finally got the oppurtunity to sit down and blog! Every night since arriving here in Queens I've been so tiried i just slept, I'm in 9-5 everyday! Most people have no more than 10 hours a week!

But so far it has been fun, I'm very excited. The Med-School is awesome, the people are awesome and the accomodation is... ok. The folk on my floor are wonderfully amiable, but it's shared sanitaries. I was supposed to get en suite...

Today we did a First Aid course, it was fun if not a bit tedious. I've done it all before, it was like revision. The manager of the instructors however was wearing one of those copper bracelets. The ones that "rectify your aura" and "resonates with your natural frequency." And he's a qualified medic. Oh dear.

On the Republican candidates

The candidates for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination are abysmal... All 3 of the front runners are young-Earth creationists and anti-science. The worst two are Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, the former against vaccinations for cervical cancer, the latter publicly praying for rain to alleviate drought and both avid deniers of human caused climate change.

It's actually so bad that Nobel Prize winning Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, wrote an editorial on the issue in this week's New Scientist. This is why politics should have more room for scientific discourse, the public needs to be swayed by actual evidence on issues like climate policy and science education as opposed to rhetoric as is so often the case.