health

Helping the COVID-19 fight

I have almost 15,000 photos under Creative Commons license on my Flickr account. It’s always fun to see who uses them and how. So far, they’ve made their way into hundreds (if not thousands) blog posts, articles, presentation slides, and videos. Heck, they are even on more than a thousand of Wikipedia pages. The last claim to fame was with the blog post on Forbes.

A couple of days ago, a friend shared with me a link to this YouTube video, where the same (sick?) photo of myself was used (around 26th second). With more than 2.2 million views, I guess, that’s my contribution to the COVID-19/Coronavirus fight.

What kills us?

Via Col. Chris Hadfield.

Jon Richardson: A Little Bit OCD

I really enjoyed Jon Richardson’s documentary on the obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is one of those weird mental disorders where almost everyone has it to some degree. It can even be funny at times (especially during those code review or paired programming sessions). But it can get extremely serious, to the point of people actually dying from it. And it can progress real quick too.

It’s OK to have a laugh here or there, but it’s also important to remember that it’s not just a hip thing to say, and that there are people who suffer significantly from the OCD.

Very eye-opening.

How cancer was created by the evolution

BBC has a rather lengthy article on how cancer was created by the evolution. The gist of it is not very cheerful:

But a more telling reason for the rise is that humans, on average, live a lot longer than they used to. “If you live long enough you will get cancer,” says Biankin.

“If we decide that we all want to live to more than 70, then we have to accept that sooner or later we will get some sort of cancer,” says Bardelli. It is inevitable because our cells have not evolved to maintain their DNA for as long as we now live, he says.

However, there is some really amazing photography of cancer cells and the like.

CP695J Cancer cell scientific 3d illustration

National Cancer Institute on Cannabis and Cannabinoids

National Cancer Institute has an interesting update on cannabis … Basically, marijuana is not yet universally approved as a medical treatment for cancer (only in a few states for now), but quite a few large studies suggest that not only it’s not harmful, but quite helpful for both cancer treatment and post-treatment relief.

I think this is a good step in the direction of “the world is not black and white”. We’ve been tagging everything as just good or bad for way too long. It’s time to start looking at benefits and side effects in a bit more detail.