Weekend Browsing

Alun The Past No Comments

The latest edi­tion of Four Stone Hearth is live at Sort­ing Out Sci­ence. It’s another col­lec­tion of Archae­ology and Anthro­po­logy blog­ging over the past couple of weeks. In fact it’s the rela­tion­ship between Archae­ology and Anthro­po­logy which has caught my eye. Carl Lipo has a post look­ing at that rela­tion­ship in the con­text of C.P. Snow’s Two Cul­tures talk. It’s inter­est­ing to com­pare that with a post late last year by Michael E. Smith, Do cul­tural anthro­po­lo­gists con­sider archae­ology as part of “Anthro­po­logy”?. I also must admit I didn’t real­ise Neander­thals prac­ticed Tre­phana­tion.

And a brief plug for else­where. Today on Archae­opix, an example of why some­times Black and White beats Col­our in pho­to­graphy.

The elixir of youth

Alun Life No Comments

This is part of the can­cer blog­ging series, which has an intro­duc­tion.

carboplatin

Chemo­ther­apy is the one where they poison you, rather than bom­bard you with radio­ther­apy. In my case it’s car­boplatin. The way it works is that it inter­feres with the divi­sion of cells. A can­cer is a growth of cells which are divid­ing uncon­trol­lably, so it’s an excel­lent way to hit them. The down­side is that car­boplatin can hit any cells which divide. That’s not just in the can­cer, but also in the bone mar­row. That’s where your white blood cells which fit infec­tion are formed, or not if you’re under­go­ing chemotherapy.

The pro­cess itself was fairly quick. I was treated over an hour after I was sched­uled. I was told this was because of the lunch hour, but I won­der if they could have guessed there would have been a lunch hour between 12:00 and 13:30. Once I was in, it took around an hour hooked up to a bag of car­boplatin with the needle going into a vein just below the thumb. That was new.
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