A MOUSE ABOUT MY HOUSE

Finally, I'm back in the blogosphere again! It feels like forever, although it is actually less than three weeks, since we were burgled and my laptop was stolen. It has certainly highlighted to me the importance of taking regular backups, which I hadn't been doing. Fortunately, as I had only had my previous laptop for three months, the loss of data was nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

The one thing left to sort out is that our patio doors are still mostly boarded up. The burglars actually put a brick through a double-glazed, toughened glass door. They must have been really desparate. Two lights were on in the room, and we were asleep upstairs, too. Instead of a double door sized window onto our back garden, we currently have only a foot-wide gap to see through, and the rest is fibreboard.

Perhaps it is because of this, though, that a little mouse felt safe enough to run across in front of the glass in broad daylight this morning.

In fact, he came across a dozen times, pausing each time in front of the blue rubble bag into which we put all the broken glass, and then darting across to the pile of seed and nuts I left out for the birds, taking a single peanut and scurrying away again.

I watched him for about ten minutes, as he dashed in, picked up the peanut and then ran off, meticulously continuing until there were no peanuts left in the pile.

As he sped off with his loot, I looked to see where he was disappearing to, expecting that it might be our garage, only a few feet away. I was wrong, though.

To my great surprise, he was running the entire width of our garage, under our next, door neighbour's car and diagonally away farther than I could see into their garden. What an incredible, arduous shopping trip for such a tiny creature!

I don't know what made him so bold - I've never seen a wild mouse in daylight before - but on his penultimate trip he caught sight of me, and looked straight at me as he paused by the rubble bag, and I thought I might not see him back again.

Wrong again - he still came back for the last peanut. Maybe he thought cold weather was on the way, or maybe he'd just discovered what seemed like easy pickings, but he was a delight to see anyway, did no harm and is welcome to my peanuts any time.

Although I'm sure our burglars also felt desparate in their own way, I can't sympathise, and I do begrude the damage they've done and the trauma they've caused. Perhaps they think we have more than them, and so they can morally rationalise their actions, but they do not take into account how hard we've worked to get here. We love our house and the suburb we live in, but this is not a wealthy area full of big houses. It is a mass of standard 1930s semi-detached houses. It epitomises ordinariness, in many ways.

Still, we're okay, and everything is getting back to normal slowly. We're putting extra security on the house to stop it happening again, and I'm just about to replenish the mouse's nut supply.

DESIGN ICON : SPACELANDER ELECTRIC BICYCLE

I don't think that I could ever be a dedicated follower of fashion in a clothing sense, and I rarely take an interest in lifestyle advice programmes or magazines, which sometimes makes me think that I'm not much swayed by appearances. However, this is completely cast aside any time that I find an elegant, innovative industrial or mechanical design.

Some time ago, I was looking at the fascinating Gorey Details, hoping to find some unusual Christmas presents, when I came across a beautiful postcard, and just had to buy it. It was a photograph of the Spacelander electric bicycle, taken from an exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. I knew nothing about the bicycle itself, and assumed that it was probably a single model built as a prototype, never going into production.

Then, this week, an old photograph from the wonderful Modern Mechanix was reproduced on several blogs, and I felt sure that this was the same lovely bike as my postcard. Sure enough, it is. I hope my reproducing the image here counts as "fair use", as I've struggled to find out who owns the copyright. The postcard is printed by fotofolio.com.

This prompted me to find out more about the Spacelander, which I was able to do thanks to the fantastic research compiled by Leon Dixon, whose website, The National Bicycle History Archive of America, is an amazing resource that will delight all enthusiasts. Thanks to Dixon's research, I was able to find out that, far from being only a prototype, the Spacelander was manufactured and sold, although only 522 were ever produced. This figure he counted up from the manufacturer's original shipping lists, which he still owns.

The designer himself, Benjamin Bowden, was born in London in 1906, and died just a decade ago in Forth Worth, Florida. The New York Times carried his obituary. He designed for the British sports car company, Healey, and later moved to Ontario where he had a hand in improving the performance of the Ford Thunderbird. The Spacelander is the most beautiful bike I have ever seen, and I am surprised that the creator of such a perfect marriage of form and function is not more famous. If these were in production today, I would most certainly buy one, and I doubt that I'm alone in that. Like all iconic designs, it is ageless, and looks as futuristic now as it did in 1946.

ISABELLA AND THE INSECTS

I'm a long-standing fan of David Lynch, and, as I've said before, I love flies. Now, Isabella Rossellini was once married to David Lynch, and now it looks as if she's maybe taking the insect investigations a lot further, too.

Just to clarify, when I said, "I love flies", I absolutely did not mean carnally!!

MAKING MONEY ONLINE - AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK

One of the things about having narcolepsy is that it is difficult to find work. It's not really that I'm incapable, in fact I can do quite a lot of things that employers find useful. The problem is that most emplyers want these things done at particular times, and that's what isn't so easy. Although in general I'm more alert in the mornings, there are days when I start falling asleep at nine o'clock in the morning, and others when I might be reasonably alert all day. Because one of the peculiarities of narcolepsy is night-time insomnia, my most productive work hours can sometimes be at two or three o'clock in the morning.

Hence, I've been trying to see what potential there is for making money online, where I can choose to work when I am feeling most alert, and take naps whenever I need to without letting other people down. I'm going to do a series of posts on what I find out, and try to give an honest analysis of what potential I think there is for earning, and how this compares to what the sites themselves say about it.

One of the first money making opportunities I found on the web was Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's a web application by the same people who are better known as an online bookstore, and is named after a famous chess-playing automaton built by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. Kempelen convinced many people throughout Europe that he had built a machine with artificial intelligence, able through its cogs and gears to beat some of the best chess players of the day. The Turk was, however, in machine intelligent terms, a fraud, since its achievements at chess were actually being accomplished by a grand master concealed inside.

Amazon Mechanical Turk's principle alludes to that cautionary tale, some tasks are repetitive and fairly simple, yet are not accomplished well by machines or need human input. Once you register, you are able to choose from thousands of available HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks. This is perhaps the simplest possible model of crowdsourcing, and perhaps clickworking is a better description, since many HITs do not require and great deal of skill.

Examples of the kinds of things that appear on Mechanical Turk are:

• Write a short plot description for a specified movie - $0.50
• Choose you favourite photo from a given set - $0.01
• Give you opinion about a topic on a website - $0.10
• Make a list on a website - $0.25
• Guess the colour to appear on a given website on a given day - $0.01
• Write a short blog article on a specified subject - $1.00
• Answer a survey question - $0.01

Some HITs have a bonus payable for good work, and these can be very lucrative indeed, compared to the standard payment. Some can be very interesting, and can lead to new finds on the web. It isn't big money, in my opinion, but more a worthwhile recreation. Having said that, I believe that it is easily possible to make a lot more than I do, with dedication. It is quite possible that good coders might be able to write scripts to help them with some HITs, and thereby earn far more.

Mechanical Turk is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and tends to have a US bias in its HITs, and also in its payment system. Earnings are accrued in an Amazon.com account, and workers can have tis transferred to their US personal bank account, or converted into Amazon.com gift certificates. Workers in India can take payment from their accounts in the form of a cheque in Indian rupees, but in the rest of the world the gift voucher is the only payment option.

I find Mechanical Turk more a bit of fun than anything else. By playing around for about an hour, I can earn a couple of dollars, but I'm pretty slow and easily distracted by the more interesting tasks, and spend quite a while looking at the background sites to the HITs. It's definitely worth a look, though.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE...

Someone was asking on a forum the other day about the best treatment for crows' feet. I don't know, but I think it would be very difficult to catch one and try it out. I suggest that any crows having difficulty walking should consider flying instead.

Do people choose their jobs, or do their jobs choose them? I love the name of the BBC's whaling correspondent.

SCIENCE, SLEEP AND SSRIs

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have narcolepsy with cataplexy, which is a very odd condition, and becomes odder all the time. One of the recent discoveries about it involves the identification of orexin producing cells in the hypothalamus, and their depletion in narcolepsy. Hence there is a diagnostic test which involves a lumbar puncture to take a sample of cerebro-spinal fluid and analyse it for orexin concentration. In narcoleptics, the level is either abnormally low, or undetectable.

I was very worried about having the test. Notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the test itself, it has taken me more than half my life to find a sympathetic neurologist who would agree that my symptoms might be narcolepsy with cataplexy, and the diagnostic validity of this test is taken to be so strong that I was terrified the outcome. What if the orexin count was not low? It would leave me wondering if my symptoms were psychiatric all along, and perhaps my neurologist would think that too.

Photograph by MegElizabeth

Anyway, I needn't have worried. I was honest with my neurologist about my apprehension, and he said that whatever the outcome, he felt strongly that something neurological was going on, and that nothing would alter his standard of care to me. You can see why I didn't want to lose him! As it turned out, my orexin levels were, as he put it, "barn door abnormal".

I take modafinil for the narcolepsy, and venlafaxine for cataplexy at the moment, although I used to take prozac for the latter. Over at Ben Goldacre's brilliant Bad Science blog, there's a discussion going on about the quality of research into the effectiveness of selective seratonin re-uptake inhibitors, SSRIs, like prozac. Most particular to the confusion as to their effectiveness seems to be the selective reporting of positive trials, and mis-reporting of some that had less favourable results. Venlafaxine is a selective seratonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), and I don't know how well its trials and their fair publication compare.

One thing that is always interesting about psychoactive drugs is that there are high variations from individual to individual in their effect, dosage and efficacy. They also seem to act differently for different conditions. For example, fluoxetine (prozac), when prescribed for depression, usually takes a couple of weeks to start taking effect. When I was prescribed it for cataplexy, the effect was within 48 hours. It seems to me that it must be acting through different channels in each case. The human nervous system is an enigmatic and complex machine, and I don't think our current understanding is adequate to explain these differences. It is interesting, for instance that Parkinson's patients can develop secondary narcolepsy, and exhibit the full range of narcolepsy and cataplexy symptoms, although the primary defect is in the dopamine system. Recent research has seemed to indicate that REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) is strongly associated with later development of Parkinson's Disease, unless it is associated with narcolepsy, in which such a progression is not expected.

It all makes me wonder whether depression is really a single illness at all, when it has many different triggers (and none) and manifests itself differently from person to person in its extent, prognosis and response to treatment. When the brain and its workings are so difficult to understand, then any medical trial has the problem that even in the patient group, we may not be comparing like with like. Faced with the difficulties in trials of comparing an active drug accurately with placebo, and the added difficulty of comparing placebo to no treatment at all, the possibility that very similar symptoms may arise from different organic mechanisms within the study group makes any inferences very tricky indeed.

I'm not arguing against trials - on the contrary, I think we need to know far more. But we also need to better understand the nature and origin of the illnesses before we can make hard pronouncements. We need well organised, well reported trials, but we also need to be willing to challenge all underlying assumptions openly and honestly, and not censor or prejudice any possible debate.

AN INTERESTING MATHEMATICS PUZZLE

Well, this is the first time I've tried to put any maths into my blog, and I can tell you for sure I'll have to learn a lot more about how to do all the typesetting and stuff before trying again!!! Hats off to the clever folks who do it all the time.

I wanted to share a puzzle that I tackled some while ago now, when I was doing my first undergraduate year in mathematics. It was satisfying in one way, but remained always rather unsatisfying in another.

The course in question was a rather gentle introduction to some topics in number theory, and the lecturer wanted to encourage us to experiment and learn for ourselves a bit, so as well as the compulsory assignments we did each week, he set a weekly "challenge problem", which was optional. Whereas the assignment tested that we had understood the course and could apply what we had learned, the "challenge" was intended to go some way beyond the course itself. The lecturer gave the added incentive that he would keep a record of the challenge problem solutions he received, and at the end of the semester there would be a prize for the best student.

Initially, about eight or so students submitted solutions, but it tailed off quickly, and by about half way through the semester, the only students still submitting solutions were myself and another student. This carried on until the final lecture, when we both waited expectantly for the winner to be announced. Instead, however, he said that he was still unable to separate us, and so he was launching a final challenge for everyone to think about over the Christmas break. He said he would wipe the slate clean, and, regardless of how many, if any at all, of the previous challenges had been completed, the person who delivered the correct answer, with proof, soonest after Christmas would win the challenge prize. Should he receive more than one correct answer, the prize would go to the student whose solution was the most elegant.

What he then handed out read as follows:

CHRISTMAS CHALLENGE

The following Christmas teaser was set by Dr J Brownowski in the New Statesman and Nation, 24th December, 1949:

Find the smallest natural number which is such that if the digit on the extreme left is transferred to the extreme right, the new number formed is one and a half times the original number

He also gave a hint, without which I am sure that I would not have been able to solve it. I had a solution by the soonest date, and so did two others. One turned out to be wrong. The other was also correct, and had been submitted by the same student with whom I had been neck-and-neck all along. Since the lecturer still could not separate us, he finally announced us as joint winners.

I said at the beginning that the process was satisfying, and this was partly of course the pleasure of winning, but also because I had in doing so undertaken some puzzles, including this one, that I would never have thought I could solve previously. The dissatifaction, though, was entirely with my solution to this last problem. My initial approach, using the hint, was fine, and led to a most general solution. However, the second half, which was in order to find the lowest possible solution has always seemed inelegant, and I've wondered whether there was a better way of finding the answer. I hope that I've eluded to the part I mean enough, since my own solution, in the graphic is, I hope, too small to read, and those who want to try it themselves can avoid enlarging it.

The hint, was, in ROT13,

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