enough nano already

So today, my phone is off the hook. I’ve done 2 days and 4 nights. I can not do anymore shifts. I deserve a holiday. I’m gonna finish reading my book – today it’s ‘Electric’ by Chad Taylor. To be honest, there’s a lot of stuff that you can do even if you just stay at home. Stuck on the fridge with a “prattling mal-bred miscreant” Shakespearean Insults Magnetic Poetry is the list that I made:

1. Build up my core body strength in time for snowboarding season. Lots of stretching exercises whilst visualizing snowy white pistes of Les Deux Alpes. Very important to hone muscles of stomach and back especially if you are very keen to show off your 360 flips and you fall over a lot. Oh, I can’t wait. Meanwhile, I will just pretend that I am bendable Huck Doll rearing to be opened in time for Christmas.

2. Do some baking. Test drive this simple easy malt bread recipe I got from a backpacker: Mix 8 oz self-raising flour with 2 oz sugar, 2 oz Ovaltine, a bag of mixed dried fruits. Pour mixture in lined 1lb loaf tin and chuck in oven preheated at 350 F. Bake for 45 minutes and voila, a rather tasty and rich grub. Enough calories to keep body primed for a week of peak fitness.

3. Claim the free music codes from Coke that I didn’t manage to do the other day – I have three tracks that I have yet to download from iTunes. These are the tracks I’m thinking of at the moment. I’m still open for suggestions:

a. I am thinking: ‘Under the Bridge’ version of ‘All Saints’. I’m a big fan of Red Hot Chili Peppers and I heard this girl band version played in a cool bar last week. I couldn’t convince myself that it is actually cool and would never buy an album from this group in a million years, so I’ll download this crap and see how it goes. It might grow on me.

b. Carpenter’s ‘Superstar’ – I’m not doing this for my Dad who I suspect got this bizarre obsession to get into Karen’s pants. I am actually downloading Sonic Youth’s version from the ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ various artists album. I actually used to have one. My own copy which I originally bought for my father as birthday gift who obviously hated it then eventually ended up in my christmas stocking. The novelty of it faded after a few times of listening pleasure that I finally gave it up to my demented Carpenter freak Chemistry teacher - But now I quite miss that Sonic Youth track, but will not buy the whole album just to let it go through the same humiliation in my hands.

c. The Raven: read by Christopher Walken in that Edgar Allan Poe tribute album. I thought this chap was really cool in ‘Pulp Fiction’- perhaps better than John Travolta or Samuel Jackson who were kind of over the top. I like what he did in that Fat Boy Slim video: ‘Weapon of Choice’. Imagine your own gramps dancing and flying around in a hotel lobby. And he’s not imitating Fred Astaire. He back flips and leaps over tables to a bleeding killer soundtrack. To hear him doing Poe’s most psychologically disturbing poem would be really hardcore.

I’m into ‘Arctic Monkeys’ at the moment but thought: ‘You Probably Couldn’t See For The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me’ is rather too long a title for a song to be in a nano. So perhaps, ‘M’ by ‘The Cure’ is more in keeping with the minimalist credo. Or why not ‘Sigur Ros’- strangely titled, actually untitled ‘( )’ album. Yes, just close and open parenthesis. No titles, no track titles and just a blank booklet. If they have actually etched the text in nanoscale using a nano Biro that can only be read using high resolution scanning probe microscope then that would have been a real nanotech album.

If you think about it: there is actually nothing about the ipod nano that is genuine nanotechnology. It is all a marketing strategy. To even speak of size- the ipod is not made in actual nanoscale. In terms of scale, this nano guitar fabricated by a group of geeks at Cornell, would take an atomic force microscope to pluck its strings.

Here is the point of the exercise: it is pointless to listen to - as their vibration is way beyond human hearing.

Nano @ work:
Imagine this drug that we routinely give to patient’s when we put them on a machine that replaces their kidney called “5Z,9α,11α,13E,15S” – naahh, we actually just call it Flolan – it prevents blood from clotting up whilst they are attached to the machine. The actual strength of the molecular formula in 50 milliltres of the solution is 500,000 nanograms. That’s how potent this drug is. To illustrate: your typical Paracetamol tablet is 500 milligrams. 500 milligrams is 500000 micrograms. 500000 micrograms is 500000000 nanograms. We normally give 0.2 nanograms per kilogram of patient’s weight per minute. So let’s say, a patient is 65 kg:

You give 0.2 x 65 x 60 ( 1 minute = 60 seconds )
----------------
10,000 ( 500,000 nanograms / 50 millilitres)
= 0.078 millilitres

To be administered through a properly working infusion pump - no more, no less. You miss one zero and you bleed a patient to death or instantly from shock.

A more interesting coup d'oeil of Nano - is from the novel Prey’ by Michael Crichton that I've read recently :

Story revolves around a modern couple. Wife works in a nanotech firm manufacturing nanorobots that will enter the bloodstream to take pictures of diseases or maybe zap cancer cells that eventually evolved into invisible cameras for intelligence to be used by the military. Because the scale of these devices also require nanomanufacturing- they have exploited latest developments in biotechnology and used theories of evolutionary learning and emergent behaviour. Basically, because of the futility of building nanomachines to build these nano robots, bacteria are made to produce chemicals which are then combined with engineered chemicals and attached to another bacterium called ‘assemblers’ to hatch some really fancy small microscopic flying robots with onboard computers and solar power generators and of course, fantastic artificial intelligence that then got really fucked up. So here comes the husband who appears to be an expert entomologist or geneticist of some sort to complicate / solve problems. A bit of love triangle between co –worker and wife ensues to juice up the story. But ultimately the horror began when these smart nanobots that behave like a swarm of insects but were actually bacteria since they are nano version, remember [ ? ] of say, bees or flies, whatever began to attack humans. Lots of screaming, explosions, car chases in the end which probably would be much better left to the cinema. I’m sure it’s going to be a cracking movie. How fiction just seem to be much more interesting than the reality of nanotechnology which is pretty much a part of everyday life now, amuses me.