May Contain Groundhogs

I didn't realise that yesterday was Groundhog Day so any mention of Groundhogs was purely coinceidental, rather than down to any sensitivity to bizarre North-Eastern-North-American holiday customs. Chances 1 in 365 - not particularly difficult to achieve.

Windows Media Player has just jumped from the end of The Four Seasons to Acrid Avid Jam Shred by The Aphex Twin. This was quite disconcerting but also exciting in an oblique-strategy-type way. I have just managed at last to write an add-in for Windows Live Messenger which can respond automatically to messages sent to me. At the moment is doesn't actually reply in any intelligent way - it just sends back a random Oblique Strategy but at least it's a start. Full Turing-passing app coming soon.

I'm not sure if you noticed the link to an mp3 file a few posts back. It is an attempt at simulating a peal of eight bells using vb. As there is no proper Church Bell sound in the VB list and no sample that would work across the range, I ended up working with detuning 5 channels of other instruments playing against themselves. After a bit of playing it turned out that the standard Piano sound sufficed. I need some objective response about how close to the real thing this sounds. Everyone who has heard it so far is a philistine and a wet and a weed with no real appreciation for the nuances of resonance and timing.

Astronomy Gallery

Blood and Guts has left the pioneering days of the pillars of surgery and is now in the cutting edge zone (ho ho) of cardiac procedures. It is seemingly a procession of clunking, wheezing, whirring heart-lung machines which explode regularly and still occasionally a patient survives. Before this any number of weird solutions to keeping a patient alive while cutting into the heart were employed. Sometimes a donor would provide heart and lung function for the patient. Blood was oxygenated by sterilised monkey or dog lungs - and some of these patients also made it through.

Then there is the hilarious tale of the scientists who endeavoured to extract a chemical from hibernating groundhogs in the hope that they could lower the temperature of patients thereby reducing their oxygen requirements and giving longer to operate on the heart. They actually found something which they called hibernin and used it on live patients apparently with success, only to discover from the patent office that the substance was already registered as a plasticiser; they had extracted this from the tubes used in the experiment rather than from the groundhogs. It worked because it contained alcohol which explained why the nurses reported the patients drunk in the recovery room. Doh! And yet it works!