Stratum Corneum

Epidermis

Dermis

Sebaceous Gland

Papilla Bulb

Subcutaneous Layer

As a friend

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Presented on March 10th, 2009 at the Second Annual Most Exceptional Escapades in Science (This Time Also Darwinian) High School Student Conference – Mr Charles Darwin as interpreted by Dr. Greg Bole of the Zoology Department, University of British Columbia.

(Originally published on April 11th, 2005)

Mondo-Genetic-Services is proud to announce its latest venture, “The Bestest, Most Kick Ass, Human Genome Project.” Hot on the tails of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and Celera Genomics, we present to you a novel approach in the elucidation of mankind’s blueprint of life. Rather than using the frequently studied yet boring human cell lines, or samples from a small group of ethnically diverse, anonymous, and likely dull individuals, we propose a completely different strategy – that is, we plan to use the genomes of individuals handpicked by the editorial staff of People magazine, a move we feel will cater to the desires of you and your friends. Currently our impressive roster of prospective subjects include the following:

People’s Choice Favourite Motion Picture Actor – Harrison Ford
How can any human genome project not have samples from the man revered as Han Solo and Indiana Jones? The man who has uttered such immortal words as “Punch it Chewie,” and “Nazi’s – I hate these guys.” In related news, Mondo-Genetic-Services has also tried to recruit his girlfriend Calista Flockhart into the project, but has recently learnt that she simply did not have enough tissue.

People’s Choice Favourite Motion Picture Actress – Sandra Bullock
Mondo-Genetic-Services feels that the inclusion of Ms. Bullock, the purveyor of such classics as Speed 2 and Miss Congeniality, into the Bestest, Most Kick Ass, Human Genome Project is practically self explanatory. Besides, the editorial staff of People magazine all agree that she “is really hot, but in a nice way.”

People’s Choice’s Favourite Performer in a Children’s Television Program – Goofy
Is he a man? Is he a dog? Is he a man-dog? Be one of the first to find out, here at the Bestest, Most Kick Ass, Human Genome Project.

People’s Choice Most Interesting Person of African Descent – Olusegun Obasanjo
Through email correspondence, the editorial staff of People Magazine have finalized an agreement to sequence the DNA of President Obasanjo, of Nigeria. In return and given their capacity to act as an overseas partner in a balance account transfer from the Central Bank of Nigeria, he will place 20% of US$21,320,000.00 (TWENTY ONE MILLION, THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND U.S DOLLARS) into their corporate accounts.

People’s Choice Most Interesting Person of Asian Descent – Michelle Kwan
Yes, the folks at People magazine are certified KWAN FANS. Michelle has agreed to participate in this project and in return, we will help start up an official Michelle Kwan fan club. More to the point, inclusion of DNA from this outstanding athlete will allow us to finally answer one of life’s most troubling questions – that is, how exactly does figure skating get judged?

People’s Choice Favourite Television Icon – Arthur Fonzarelli
“The Fonz” was a cultural icon of the 1950’s and is certainly deserving of a place in the Bestest, Most Kick Ass, Human Genome Project. Not only did he seem to have telekinetic powers, but this is one guy who must have seen a lot of sex! Since the lubricated condom wasn’t introduced until 1957, and the oral contraceptive wasn’t even invented until the 60s, Mondo-Genetic-Services wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Fonzarelli himself sired half of Middle America.

People’s Choice Favourite Television Comedy Series – Cast of “Who’s the Boss”
In an attempt to secure DNA sequences that espouse the best of American family virtues, the Bestest, Most Kick Ass, Human Genome Project will obtain tissue samples from the entire cast of “Who’s the Boss.” This will include cells taken from Tony Danza, Judith Light, Katherine Helmond, Alyssa Milano, and even the little boy whose name no one can remember.

People’s Choice Favourite Diety – Jesus:
In a coup d’etat for this project, Mondo-Genetic-Services has secured the sole rights to sequence and publish the Prince of Peace’s very own DNA. Furthermore, our scientists have also discovered that due to the principle of the Holy Trinity, this agreement also effectively grants us sole rights to the genetic code of the Holy Spirit and of God himself

People’s Choice Reader’s Pick – George W. Bush
Because apparently America, like the rest of the world, is wondering “what the hell is up with that?”

(Originally published April 11th, 2005)

“And your mother, how is her health?” I asked the cheerful young woman who had come in for a physical examination. She was draped in a blue paper gown under which her naked alabaster skin seemed translucent. Her branching veins coursed like roots close to the surface as they returned indigo blood to the warmth of her core.

She smiled, albeit woefully. “My mother actually died several years ago. She had a brain tumor… glioblastoma multiforme it was called.”

I stopped writing and looked up from the notes I had been scribbling in her chart. “I’m so sorry.”

The young woman nodded her head silently, blinked a few times, and looked purposively at her chart as it lay on the table before me. Her body language implored me to skip along to the next subject, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t help suspending the moment as the weight of her loss attained its proper gravity in my mind. Again I noticed the cerulean web of veins stretching throughout her skin, and it summoned in my conscience a long forgotten specter.

She was lying beneath the blue canvas bag, zipped and sealed in preservative juices. On a cold metal slab among sixty other lifeless bodies she rested. There was no smell of death in the fluorescent-lit room; rather it was ripe with never-living formalin.

As she was slowly revealed, each tick of the zipper was an audible point of reference from which there was no going back. The tuition had been paid, the commitments to medical school sealed, and before my eyes was appearing the first surreal crucible of physician training. There were a few gasps around the other tables. One student stepped out for fresh air, but for the most part a quiet determination cemented most of us to the trembling floor beneath our old sneakers.

My particular cadaver had been a portly woman in her lifetime. Her skin was a cold ivory. It stretched across her muscle and fat like the skin of any other animal with meat. I could see spider veins in her neck and belly. My partners and I took fearful turns with the scalpel that first day, neither knowing the depth of human flesh, nor intuitively able to accept that we couldn’t hurt her.

Days passed. The intensity of our respectful decorum gave way to the occasional lighthearted moment as we gained comfort being in a room full of dead people. Their supreme posthumous gifts to us as students opened worlds of splendid inner intricacy, magical design, and humbling fragility. Lobulated mammary fat gave way to glistening red pectoralis muscle. Palmaris longus tendons ran like white silken ribbons through forearms, fanning out after wrists to join seamlessly with the fascia of hands. Hearts nestled safely on beds of diaphragm between pillows of lung, resting obliquely at the final terminus of 60,000 miles of well-traveled blood vessels. Serpentine loops of bowel and intestine were like ruffles on collars, concealing hidden gullies and gutters behind which survived livers, pancreases, and spleens.

In the midst of all this revolting beauty I couldn’t help but search for what had killed her.

That moment of wicked discovery came while gently lifting off the top of her skull and revealing the adherent growth from her brain that stuck like rotten candy to the bone. Here lay the seat of her humanity, her transient brilliance marred by an invading glioblastoma multiforme as purplish and ugly as medieval battlefields. It had ended her.

When our dissection was done her remains were cremated, along with the others, but not before we each gave our own goodbye. Some wrote poetry, some spoke aloud, some reached out in prayer. It was a reverence for another being unlike any I’ll ever feel again. I wondered what she had envisioned in her final days, whether she knew four anonymous medical students would spend the better part of six months traveling along the roads of her preserved universe, with studied anatomy books serving as our poor guides to the back alleys and sudden turns of her necropolis. Did she wonder when we would discover her terrible secret, her unstoppable murderer? Did she know it would make me feel a kind of sadness stirred from the disparate emotions of sorrow, exultation, and wonder?

Did she hope, correctly, that each time I palpated a liver, delivered a child, interpreted an EKG, peered into an eye, injected a joint, reviewed an MRI, or tapped a spinal canal that I was unwittingly polishing my vision through a lens first ground in her anatomy? And as I shook off my moment’s delayed reflection, in a small family practice, during a routine physical examination all those years later, I still wondered at what kind of woman she must have been, and recoiled from hearing an echo of the horrific tumor that inspired her final offering – a body for our cold slab of an altar.

“I’m sorry to hear that your mother died of a brain tumor,” I said. My patient nodded once more, and then it was time for me to move on.

(Originally published on October 18th, 2005)

1. Sir Martin Rees

I don’t know if this guy’s straight or gay, and I don’t care. He’s got a certain polished appeal going on, and he’s the freaking Astronomer Royal for crying out loud. What does that mean, you ask? How does that make him any more special than any other astronomer besides the Royal part? Well, look, if I have to explain that, it would mean one of us would have to do some research. And I’m tired. I just got in from a party. But I do know that this guy’s been busy studying multi-universes and I like to just sit and think about those kinds of things every once in a while, usually every Friday or Saturday night, even if QEII probably doesn’t even know who he is when he shows up at her Christmas brunch or whatever she puts “her people” through every year. I mean, who doesn’t like to entertain the possibility that while we’re stuck in this one stupid world eating another boring salad without cheese and struggling to keep our skirt size in the single digits, somewhere in some other universe Bono is President, and I’m making a fantastic risotto for me and Brad Pitt and Richard Feynman.

* * *

2. Brad Pitt

Nice try, Bell, you’re thinking. Way to inappropriately segue the Bradmeister into the list. Well you just pipe down and leave me alone. The Bradmeister (as if I would ever, ever call him that, thank you very much, unless he wanted me to) is apprenticing as an actual architect (with some cat named Frank Gehry or whatever). How many other actors can you name over the age of 40 who go and try to learn something constructive during their downtime instead of buggering off and “nurturing” their other “dimensions” in C-grade rock bands and Krazy Kults (I’m looking at both of you misters, Crowe and Cruise). So does architecture qualify as a science or an artform? Look, why are you so bitter about Brad Pitt anyway? Jealous? Haha, thought so! Well just thank your lucky stars that crap movies leave the premises after a week or two. Crap buildings can stick around for a lifetime.

Good for all of us that Mr. Pitt is pursuing his dream of trying to beautify the planet through proper design engineering so he just doesn’t take all that money of his and mess up the landscape building kooky weird stuff like the above.

* * *

3. Dr. Gregory House

Okay, so technically this guy isn’t even real; he’s a TV character on a medical series that debuted this year. But damn, this guy is very hot in that quietly gorgeous British way. Oh yeah, the actor is a Brit. Remember Blackadder? Yes, that’s him – no not the Mr. Bean guy, the other one. No, I didn’t know it either until I was Googling the show, and then I gave myself a good smack on the forehead. (Hey, that’s two British guys on the Hot list and neither one of them is Prince William or Beckham.) Anyway, other than the quietly gorgeous and great-at-not-sounding-British thing that is Hugh Laurie, the character of Dr. Gregory House is hardly Patch Adams (thank heavens). He’s a drug addict, limps horribly (i.e. not going to be much help at the cottage), always has a smart-ass remark about everything, and by the looks of that beard, his hygiene is probably better studied at a distance. Still. We love the bad boys, don’t we, ladies? So he’s hot. Watch the show. It’s good, too.

* * *

4. Alton Brown

It’s nice how he explains things. Yes, his show, Good Eats, is unbearably goofy at times, and for such a smart guy, I find myself wincing with discomfort at the bad puns and contrived infotainment shenanigans. Alton, give it to us straight up and on the rocks, babe! It’s you who’s the twist, mister! Can it with the cornball and union-scale supporting cast of cheesy actors and just do your thing. This is one guy who knows what he’s doing. Yes, it happens to be cooking, and if you don’t think cooking involves a degree of scientific knowledge, then chances are you wind up having to eat out a lot or depend on others to feed you. How sad. But Alton will explain the magic of food preparation to you, my hungry friend. Using simple diagrams, and nicely suitable props, Alton will tell you exactly why you can’t get any yolk in your soon-to-be-whipped egg whites so that the next time you brag on and on about how you could probably make just as good an angel food cake as your brother if you had a recipe, you won’t be so darn careless and ruin somebody’s birthday party, you hapless fool. Anyway. Follow his simple rib eye steak methodology to the letter, and it will improve every quality of your life forever. Jeez, what more does anybody really want out of anybody?

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5. Richard Feynman

Was this guy adorably sexy or what? How many Nobel laureates can you say that about? Well here’s a guess: zero. But you can say it about Professor Feynman. Too bad he’s dead, is another thing I say. He could juggle, play the bongos, and safecrack with the best of them. Students must have thrown panties at Dr. Feynman’s lectures. Or at least thought about it. But even if they did, you know he’d be so charming and cool about it and work those thrown panties into his discussions on nanotechnology, and the next thing you know, you would spend all the rest of the next week learning everything you possibly could about everything nanotechnological in the world, just so that maybe, just maybe, if you were drunk enough, but obviously not too much – you’re a hardworking student, remember? – you’d have the courage to raise your hand at the next class and hopefully, hopefully ask him an intelligent question. And he would respond by saying, “Well, really, that’s one of those things that’s best discussed over dinner.” And the class would laugh. But he would hold your gaze while you bit your lip, while you wondered whether or not he was really serious…sigh…

(Just don’t think about the fact that Alan Alda once portrayed this man in a play. Trust me. It strips all the hotness right out of the fantasy.)

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Bonus Item!
Marc “Sparky” Bartolomeo

Should be Bartoromeo doncha think? Oh wait. You’re still wondering “Who the hell is this guy?” Relax, I’ll tell you. He’s the electrician on TLC’s “In a Fix”. Well, you should watch it. Yes, he’s an electrician. (Electricity. That’s science, so leave me alone, will you please?) His bio says he also enjoys cooking/baking and going to garage sales. If he had said his favourite movie is “Gone With the Wind” I would have to assume he’s probably married to someone named Jeremy or Stefan, but the bio does mention a former girlfriend (who once entered him in an underwear contest) so I’m going to assume he’s straight, okay? Which means he’s pretty much the World’s Most Perfect Man. Unless you’re gay. Which means you probably think he’s gay because all the gay men I know think everybody’s gay. Well whatever. Say what you will about whomever. I love Sparky. Let’s both love Sparky.

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Did Not Make the Cut:
Bill Nye

Bill Nye – Well he is The Science Guy and all that. But the bowtie look isn’t sexy, unless you’re Brad Pitt and you’re wearing a tux. Just because you’re all science-y and stuff, you don’t have to look like you spend more money on Battlestar Gallactica trading cards than you do on hair product. Sorry, but Albert Einstein gets on this list before The Science Guy does. (And Mr. Nye’s website bugged me a LOT. Jeez. No, I don’t want to download anything, thank you. Stop making it do all that crazy stuff. Damn, that’s so annoying!)

(Originally published August 8th, 2005)

Einstein sits and thinks under the dark trees
surrounding a white cottage — where no war
came, even during the years when young men
flooded out from this campus, cold from tap
like the beer they’d drunk at the Tiger-
town Inn just before their first induction.

He stirs, but no amount of induction
can help him explain how these knotty trees
survived pen-knives, like claws of a tiger,
incising the names of loves pre-war.
A stick falls to the ground — a muffled tap
returns his thoughts from trees to absent men.

The ones who carved their names were still young men,
giddy with the thought of their induction
into eating clubs — they called that night tap.
Later, some found their food among the trees
of some island, stunning birds, stunned by war,
ready with clubs for enemy, tiger.

Now, in stadiums, they praise the Tiger,
shouting “Rah, Rah!” for their eleven men.
“Fair Harvard’s come? Now this is truly war,”
they say, not making the induction
from their two experiences. The trees
rustle, give Einstein’s memory a tap:

With screwdrivers, his friends had gone to tap
bits of uranium, tease the tiger
until the tail lashed out, toppling trees
with hot roaring breath. But first, other men
would wire solenoids; by induction,
the contacts would close, and with them the war.

The birds and squirrels seem to be at war,
imagining slights in an acorn’s tap,
where one party claimed a clear induction.
Einstein’s thoughts are broken off — a tiger
might make a better arbiter than men,
he thinks, dispensing peace beneath the trees.

Make an induction: both man and tiger
tap fury for their ends; yet only men
think war ends, leaving them safe among trees.

(Originally published on April 11th, 2005)

Abstract
The purpose of this analysis is to determine the evolution of gravity in the Mario video game series as video game hardware increases.

Introduction
Gravity is force which is responsible for keeping us on the ground. It is also the force that prohibits us from jumping 50 feet in the air. However, in Mario’s world, gravity does not quite work that way. Mario is able to jump 5 times his height and fall with accelerations that would be deadly to humans.

We will find Mario’s acceleration due to gravity by using the formula:

where s is the distance he falls, s₀ is his initial distance, which is 0, v₀ is his initial vertical velocity, which is also 0, a is his acceleration due to gravity, and t is the time it takes for him to fall. When we solve this formula for a, we get:

Procedure
1. Record video clips of Mario falling from a ledge in the following games:

• Super Mario Bros 1, 2 & 3, for NES
• Super Mario World for SNE
• Super Mario 64 for N64
• Super Mario Sunshine GCN
• Super Paper Mario for Wii

2. Watch the clip in Quicktime Video Player and use the frame by frame option to determine the number of frames it took Mario to fall. Also using Quicktime, the FPS, or frames per second, of each video must be found.

3. Take a screen shot of Mario standing next to the ledge. This Screen shot will be used to determine the distance of the fall.

Analysis
First, you must find the time it took Mario to fall from the edge of the ledge to the ground in each game. To do this, we opened each clip in Quicktime movie player, and using the frame by frame option, found the total number of frames it took Mario to fall. We then used the formula:

To find the time of each of Mario’s falls. Once we knew the time, we needed to figure out the distance Mario fell in each game. We used a screen shot of Mario next to the ledge he fell from in each game, and found the height of Mario and the ledge in pixels. According to Wikipedia, Mario is “a little over five feet tall.”, so we used 5 feet, or 1.524 meters, as Mario’s height. We used the formula:

Once we had the distance Mario fell in each instance, we were able to use the formula

to find Mario’s acceleration in each game. Mario was in free fall in each case, so this acceleration was equal to gravity. His initial velocity was 0, as was his initial position. Our results in m/s2 as well as in multiples of g are outlined in the table below.

(Click on the table to see full size image)

Finally, we graphed the acceleration due to gravity in each game as the bit rate of the graphics processor increased. Since Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, and 3 were from the same console, we took an average of the three values. Also, the Nintendo Wii never clearly defined its bit rate, but sources say that it is 96 Bits, which is actually less than that of the Nintendo GameCube. As for the other systems, the NES is an 8 Bit system, the SNES is 16 bit, the N64 is 64 Bit, and the GCN is 128 Bit. We set a power fit to this graph, and the result is shown below.

Conclusion
We determined that, generally speaking, the gravity in each Mario game, as game hardware has increased, is getting closer to the true value of gravity on earth of 9.8 m/s². However, gravity, even on the newest consoles, is still extreme. According to Wikipedia, a typical person can withstand 5 g before losing consciousness, and all but the very latest of Mario games have gravity greater than this. Also, with gravity that great, it is a wonder Mario can perform such feats as leaping almost 5 times his own body height!

Sources of Error
The primary source of error in this experiment would be the assumption that Mario is 5 feet tall, and that his height stays constant in each game. In most Mario games, he can become bigger by consuming mushrooms or other powerup objects, and the 5 foot height may be referring to this state. Also, in the 3D Mario games, the camera angle was always angled down, so when measuring the height of Mario and the ledge, this angle caused the measured distance to be different than the actual distance.

This poem was composed as a collective where each student was allowed to write a single sentence. The ManBearPig and daffofil topics came up during the symposia session when experiments on molecular chemistry (with specific reference to things like DNA) were performed.

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Grasping the flower gently,

He is ½ man, ½ bear, ½ pig, with flowers, from Imagination Land!

Walking down the isle with a beautiful white dress flowing behind her, the Manbearpig carries a large bouquet of daffodils.

Manbearpig lives in a cruel world of injustice.

Hairy, muddy, humany. That’s Manbearpig.

Being a Manbearpig is very very COOL with daffodils.

As I walked along the road, I picked up a daffodil and put it on my head.

A Manbearpig will huddle and cuddle a daffodil and eat it.

I am Manbearpig, I have found a flower, it is a daffodil. Tonight I will sit next to it watching the sunset, while eating cow brains with some nice salsa. Also, I will consider eating Kyle.

Gripping the flower with such force,

Causes the yellow ray of sun to wilt.

The kind Manbearpig sits next to the beautiful daffodil on a pleasant spring day.

He races through the daffodils inhaling deeply as he goes.

Limping on one foot, the confused but beautiful Manbearpig hopped through the field of daffodils wearing red high heels and white, silky cocktail dress.

He does a somersault.

The dangerous Manbearpig stares at a daffodil on a warm summer morning.

The daffodil, yellow, fluorescent, bright, beautiful, calming, graceful, blowing.

I am a lonely daffodil last of my kind, accompanied by a beautiful beast the Manbearpig, the only of his kind.

A Manbearpig lives and eats weird things.

He slips and he trips and he slides down the slope and gets up with the daffodil sticking out of his nose.

The graceful Manbearpig trots through the fields of cruelty to the daffodil of Al Gore.

He walks through the fast melting snow, finding flowers, but none like his own.

The lonely Manbearpig walked through a field of paradise with his fancy designer dress and emerald green heels, picking lovely daffodils, but he is sad and ungrateful for he has all the materials he needs but he has no one to care for him or for him to lean on.

The Manbearpig is fat like a hippo.

He runs through the garden as a daffodil lands on its head.

Angles in their long cream robes floating gently past a single golden daffodil blowing in the cool breeze headed toward the Manbearpig’s arrival.

The Manbearpig is walking through the forest picking up daffodils, skipping freely.

(From Terry talks, November 22, 2008)

How often do we connect the words “urban” and “agriculture” in our brains? The word “urban” conjures up a concrete jungle where skyscrapers dominate the grey sky. The word “agriculture” makes me see rows after rows and fields after fields of green crops and livestock dotting the landscape. These words seem to be an unlikely duo to be integrated and be able to produce surprising benefits. But they do. According to the International Development Research Centre, 15% of all food eaten in cities world-wide is grown by city dwellers. Urban agriculture actually provides many who spend more than 40% of their income on food a much needed safety net. But we should keep in mind that by 2030, 60% of the world’s total population will live in cities. The costs and challenges of importing so much food into cities to feed the burgeoning population will rise exponentially. What would happen to food security, food safety, and other concerns?

I will lead the audience through a brief story of the global food system and urban agriculture intertwined with my own discovery of the importance of food. Growing up as a normal urbanite, I never gave the question “how my food reaches my lunch box” any deep thought. What made me change? Finally, I will offer the inspiring stories of best practices and victories of urban agriculture around the world, based on research I am currently doing for the NGO International Centre for Sustainable Cities. Of course, we must not forget the incalculable value the UBC Farm, the only working farm in Vancouver, provides to us urbanites.

One of my dreams is to see most of the lawns of Vancouver turned into productive edible gardens that reconnect people to their food, enhances food security, and makes our city more sustainable.