Pretend scary and the real McCoy
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Where has October gone? Here's Halloween again.
People enjoy being frightened by all sorts of costumed figures, spooky displays, weird stories, as long as it's understood that they are pretend, the work of creative minds.
Someone asked me if I've ever walked in a cemetery at night. Yes, but rarely and not in search of vampires. What gave me chills when I was a little boy was lights glinting from polished granite as our car passed the cemetery at Richmond. As I grew older it occurred to me I was seeing the reflection of the headlights of our car, not will o' the wisps.
Have you followed the television series, Bones? Scientific lab work and razor-sharp minds make crime solving look simple. The sets give me the creeps. I know they are, like Halloween displays, not real but I sometimes feel like closing my eyes anyway. My police officer son assures me the real world of pathology is nowhere as simple as this series depicts it.
Scientists are bringing reality closer to the world of Bones. Two cases are reported in the November issue of Scientific American that illustrate this, and should frighten people who feel secure in law-breaking.
In one case a hospital staff reported four patients with hepatitis C with nearly identical genetics. This virus mutates very often and so the doctors were quite sure the people were infected by the same person. Investigators found 29 more cases and to make a long story short, a lab worker was found to be injecting himself with the clinic's narcotics and using the needles to treat patients.
The second case was an anesthesiologist who had infected 275 people.
The article doesn't tell whether the infectors knew of their own condition, which would make a difference in how lawyers would handle their cases.
The same issue has another frightening article. It discusses errors in digital medical records. There are many errors, and scarier is that no one is paying attention to them. This is in the United States, but we have our own horror stories in this field.
There is a scary story of science and technology in which science instead of defending against a problem is making it worse. This has to do with texting or talking while driving.
It's a no-brainer that you can't look down at the device and press buttons and see what's happening outside the vehicle. The solution has been to design hands free phones.
A recent study showed that there is very little difference between results of using either system.
Why should this be? I think it is the way our brains are wired. We can't see both phases of an optical illusion at the same time. Our brain alternates between them, figure becoming ground and vice versa. When talking on the phone our mind's eye is seeing the person on the receiving end of the call and not the scene either inside or outside the vehicle.
The scary part is that the users of hands-free phones feel secure and a little self righteous in their behaviour. Watch out for them!
There, is your hair standing on end?