Thursday, February 17, 2005
I actually feel like I learned something today. How novel.
We studied Othello in Shakespeare today. It's all about faith: where do you put your trust and where do you get your identity? Othello's trust in Iago (who only trusts himself) whittles down his trust in Desdemona. He depends upon his observation as every empiricist does--give me the ocular proof--but he fails to interpret his observations critically. Lacking a strong sense of personal identity, he allows self-doubt to creep into his heart, chilling the trust that love should foster and leading to a monstrous jealousy.
But he wasn't jealous until he got around Iago, who speaks in animal metaphors and always asks about moneybags. Iago is earthbound, can't see past the flesh, and Othello the 'honest fool' can't even conceive of such treachery. In taking his eyes off the heavenly realm to look for truth from Iago, he learns to trust in the flesh himself and begins to smell treachery everywhere. A lost handkerchief is thus formed into evidence of lechery. Had he placed his faith in the love between him and his God and him and his wife, he would have seen the truth, and through the truth that is found in love, interpreted correctly what he saw.
In today's Cell Biology lab we took a field trip to the school's electron microscopes. The scanning EM allows you to see the surface of an object in three dimensions, the transmission EM lets you see it in cross-section. We looked through the SEM at the surface of a hypodermic needle. At 1000x it didn't seem so sharp anymore.
The special thing about electron microscopes isn't in their magnification. You can get up to 1000x with a simple light microscope; although you can get much larger than that with an EM, you usually don't need to. It's their power to resolve an image that really makes the difference. Electron beams have wavelengths of 0.05 angstroms, whereas light rays are somewhere around 5,000. The smaller the wavelength, the better the resolution--the distinction between two points. So you can make out the same image with much greater detail, distinguishing between objects at a virtually molecular level.
It helps you to interpret what you're observing.
I shadowed a radiological oncologist today named Dr. Glisson. I was somewhat horrified as I watched him painfully insert an "applicator" into a woman's uterus. But this way, he could guide the radiation directly to the tumor rather than shooting it through her skin and damaging healthy tissues along with the malignancy.
Fine-focused healing destruction.
Get it?
I am learning to see.
We studied Othello in Shakespeare today. It's all about faith: where do you put your trust and where do you get your identity? Othello's trust in Iago (who only trusts himself) whittles down his trust in Desdemona. He depends upon his observation as every empiricist does--give me the ocular proof--but he fails to interpret his observations critically. Lacking a strong sense of personal identity, he allows self-doubt to creep into his heart, chilling the trust that love should foster and leading to a monstrous jealousy.
But he wasn't jealous until he got around Iago, who speaks in animal metaphors and always asks about moneybags. Iago is earthbound, can't see past the flesh, and Othello the 'honest fool' can't even conceive of such treachery. In taking his eyes off the heavenly realm to look for truth from Iago, he learns to trust in the flesh himself and begins to smell treachery everywhere. A lost handkerchief is thus formed into evidence of lechery. Had he placed his faith in the love between him and his God and him and his wife, he would have seen the truth, and through the truth that is found in love, interpreted correctly what he saw.
In today's Cell Biology lab we took a field trip to the school's electron microscopes. The scanning EM allows you to see the surface of an object in three dimensions, the transmission EM lets you see it in cross-section. We looked through the SEM at the surface of a hypodermic needle. At 1000x it didn't seem so sharp anymore.
The special thing about electron microscopes isn't in their magnification. You can get up to 1000x with a simple light microscope; although you can get much larger than that with an EM, you usually don't need to. It's their power to resolve an image that really makes the difference. Electron beams have wavelengths of 0.05 angstroms, whereas light rays are somewhere around 5,000. The smaller the wavelength, the better the resolution--the distinction between two points. So you can make out the same image with much greater detail, distinguishing between objects at a virtually molecular level.
It helps you to interpret what you're observing.
I shadowed a radiological oncologist today named Dr. Glisson. I was somewhat horrified as I watched him painfully insert an "applicator" into a woman's uterus. But this way, he could guide the radiation directly to the tumor rather than shooting it through her skin and damaging healthy tissues along with the malignancy.
Fine-focused healing destruction.
Get it?
I am learning to see.
