Still Ill

I really am still ill.  Or am i?

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/9bhb4 . Women get sick and men die.  Then there's "man 'flu", something i haven't currently got, and here's why.

Rather than making a helpful video about what to do about coughs and colds, which would make me a massive hypocrite, instead i've decided to do one on deciding to be ill.  This is based on something Jonathan Miller did in 'The Body In Question'.

There are four categories in  deciding to be ill:  threat, suffering, stigma and inconvenience.  Unless you have an illness into which you have no insight or makes you comatose, you will probably make some kind of subjective judgement about your disease based on these criteria.  A symptom or sign may be threatening, such as a lump in the breast or blood in the stools, without any of the other features.  It may be inconvenient as with arthritis or shortness of breath in COPD.  It may simply be painful or unpleasant like vomiting.  Or, it may carry a stigma with it like acne or hair loss.  Illnesses have various combinations of these features.  I illustrate this using "Pandora's Jug" and my cold, and decide i'm not ill, although you might think i am.

Incidentally, i know this is too long.

So there you go:  man 'flu (which should really be called "man 'flu'", but then it would look like a quote).  Not particularly man 'flu so much as an adaptation of a Jonathan Miller demo from the late '70s, but there is still a gender difference in the social construction of illness:  women get sick and men die.

Incidentally, just after i made this video, the glass labelled "THREAT" smashed when i tried to peel off the label and it fell into the breadbin.  Incredibly, i later cut my thumb on the doorknob in the next room when it turned out a shard of glass had become embedded in it, which is doubly weird because it was round the corner.  I don't understand how that happened.

One thing i missed out was the question of Sein versus Seiende and the ontic versus the ontological in this context.  Firstly, a common view of mental illness is that it often involves lack of insight, which means that the patient's personal construction of mental illness is that it doesn't exist.  Secondly, there are various illnesses which may not exist for the patient to the same extent as they exist for the people around them, such as petit mal epilepsy, stroke and coma, or for that matter halitosis.

This is just the beginning of the question of social construction of illness.  I wish i could think of a better way of summarising it though.

I am approaching another bottleneck.  Someone has requested a video on the doomsday argument and tomorrow's video will be on organic chemistry for Big Science.  Then it's Webcam Wednesday again and so on.  I don't understand how people can ever run out of videos to make right now, although there may come a time when i get it only too well.  There's also a video i want to make about the concept of a "double-dip".  In the meantime i have a patient tomorrow morning, Big Science tomorrow afternoon (in theory), another patient, this time a home visit in an outlying village the next morning and i'm seeing my ex on 7B, sod it, (13732) afternoon.

I now have seven dozen and five subscribers (thank you everyone!) and 70 236 views.  The meteorite video has been very successful so far but i expect it to go into decline.  I imagine a piece about winter illnesses would do moderately well although it's also a bit annoying.  I could also upload a proper video about winter infections i suppose!

No chance without Uranus

In 1977, i wrote a story about a holiday on Uranus, set in 2177.  In it, apart from anything else i predicted the use of the controversial terahertz radiation body scanners now used for security purposes in airports, and it was one of the first sustained stories i wrote.

There is a serious lack of stories set on Uranus.  I can only think of one other and i've forgotten its name.  It appears in 'The Science Fictional Solar System', a collection of stories linked by their use of facts refuted by the time they were collected, in the case of Uranus the rings.

The reason i think people avoid writing about the planet is the name.  It's either pronounced "your anus" or "urinous", more often the former.  Neither are conducive for a sensible reaction.  Maybe it should just be renamed.  Oddly, it was going to be called Neptune at first, but it was decided that the motives were too nationalistic because it was in celebration of great British sea victories.  Presumably it would be called that in the "Forward and Backward" timeline.

Even so, Uranus has interesting possibilities as a setting.  It's the coldest planet in the Solar System because it has little internal heat compared to Neptune, so in spite of being closer to the Sun it's not as "warm".  It's also slightly denser as water on average, and has a surface gravity close to ours but slightly lower.  It is also remarkable in being visible to nocturnal animals but not humans, making it potentially the only planet to have been discovered by other animals before us in a sense, and maybe even "discovered" by our ancestors millions of years ago and then lost again as we became diurnal.  It was also observed many times through telescopes before it was actually realised that it was in fact a planet.  The idea of a new planet was itself new at the time.  William Herschel, who is credited as discovering it, lived almost exactly one Uranian year.  It orbits on its side with one pole facing the Sun for half a Uranian year, or forty-two of our own, as do its moons, but the Sun is so weak at that distance that it doesn't make too much difference, although there are seasonal winds blowing between the hemispheres.  Uranus is also the most featureless of all the planets, and the only aquamarine one due to methane haze.

One good, human, thing about Uranus is that uniquely among the satellite systems of this Solar System, the moons are named after British characters, mainly from Shakespeare.  The large, "classic" moons are named, from the outside in, Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Ariel and Miranda.  I actually get this wrong in the video, as you will see:

(the last two are the wrong way round).

The rings were discovered on 10th March 1977 when astronomers observing the star SAO 158687 to see what would happen when Uranus passed in front of it out of interest in its atmospheric competition were surprised to find that it blinked on and off as it passed behind something else nearby on each side.  The rings are very dark and hard to see against the background of space, and in fact if you did want to see them nearby there would be no chance without Uranus being behind them.  However, the moon Mab orbits inside a lighter, bluer ring made of particles of water ice, which you probably could see.  The inner rings are made of an unknown material, possibly something organic darkened by radiation.  Uranus was the second planet to be found to have rings.

This video, incidentally, is part of a series i'm making which will eventually form a playlist taking the viewer on a tour of the Solar System.  Here's the first one:

I plan to work in from Neptune, although there will also be one on "Persephone", the non-existent Planet X and why it isn't called that or regarded as a planet.  More failure to let go of the past on my part of course.

There is a technical problem with both of these videos.  Namely, perhaps because of the codec, the orbits look awful.  I'm planning to resolve this before the next astronomical video.  Or, i could just avoid using orbits at all.