After A Storm Comes A Calm

It's hard to believe that all this commotion had started just a few months ago, and that within these few months so much damage had been done and so many lives had been lost that it has been a tragic event for all of us.

When something this devastating happens, you begin to notice that everyone has their own way of coping. Some people will panic, others will keep relatively calm, maybe some of us went out to 7/11 and bought out as much water and Mama noodles as we could, or sat at home and watched the news all day. My mom was one of those few who didn't feel that it was necessary to stock up on any items, as she believed that we would be fine. My aunt on the other hand went as mad as a hatter preparing for the worst. Within weeks after the flood every supermarket and grocery store in Bangkok ran out of water. High raised parking lots around Bangkok were always full. After hearing about all this even my mom couldn't help but get scared at how bad things were getting, she began stocking up on supplies too. The anticipation ate us up. We live right in the middle of Bangkok, and quite a few klongs and rivers run through us. Day after day someone would tell us that Bangkok should be flooding any day now, and we waited for something to happen. We stayed in for weeks just incase if it started flooding we wouldn't be in danger. But nothing happened. I found it extremely frustrating that in times of crisis like this we couldn't get the proper guidance and information that we needed.

Everyday for the past two months now I've heard news about the floods pouring in from everywhere. It was on TV 24 hours a day, on the newspaper every morning, and whenever I turned on the radio there was a man talking about how much worse everything was getting. The strange thing was that I never found out what had really caused the floods. A lot of us blamed it on Prime Minister Yingluck and her government. Some meteorologists said it was because of the unusual monsoons and the terrible water management. Whatever had caused it brought our country a lot of greif. While school was closed organizations were accepting help from kids who's schools were closed. I went with my friends to help put together EM (Effective microorganism) balls that will help with cleansing the polluted water. Literally thousands of people were there helping out. It was nice to see that so many people cared about their country. I helped my grandmother pack and donate supplies to the people in Don Muang. The flood had caused people there to live waist deep in water for weeks. Many of them had evacuated to higher ground away from their homes and didn't have any way to get the everyday supplies that they needed. Where ever we're living in the country right now the flood has somehow affected our lives.

It'll take a lot of time and money to build back our country. I chose the picture of this monk because through all the trouble that he has been in he still manages to muster up a smile. The flood water in many parts of the country has resided now, and many people who had been affected are recovering well. We will have to put in a tremendous amount of efforts to help with flood relief to bring our country back. We can take this misfortune as a learning experience and learn to respect nature as it is.

The Effectiveness of Homeopathy

Samuel Hahnemann in the 1800s first experimented with a Peruvian tree bark, curious about how it could cure malaria. What he discovered was that this Peruvian tree bark caused symptoms that were similar to malaria, from this observation he concluded that like could cure like. He believed that by diluting substances into water or alcohol, the solvent would still contains healing abilities even when the substance itself is long gone. Hahnemann went on to experiment with all kinds of substances, from this he invented a new system of treatment called homeopathy. Water memory is the claimed ability that water has "memory" of substances that have been previous diluted in it. This theory was proposed by Jacques Benveniste, in an effort to explain how homeopathic remedies work. Homeopathic remedies are prepared by diluting solutions to a certain degree that when the final remedy is complete not a single molecule from the original substance is present. If this is so, do the remedies work at all? And if they do, how? There are many controversial arguments amongst the scientific communities about whether this healing technique is at all effective.

James Randi, a famous scientific skeptic challenges the effectiveness of homeopathy. He claims that the practice of homeopathy is all 'shi-na-ni-gans' and pharmaceutical companies simply cell these remedies at prices that are much too high to make money. Randi says that it is impossible for a substance to be diluted into water as many as twenty-five times and still have an effect on the patient taking the remedy. Contradicting Randi's skepticism, many homeopathic pateints have taken remedies and have been cured of a diseases. But this system of treatment does not work in any ordinary scientific way. Many homeopaths have conducted experiments and failed to show scientific proof that homeopathic remedies actually work, and that it is merely a placebo pill.

In the past few years, I have been prescribed a few homeopathic remedies and with all honesty I have to say that these remedies had no significant effect in treating my symptoms. But my mom, who was also prescribed homeopathic remedies, insist that these remedies have had great effects in treating the medical symptoms that she has been having. To settle the dispute going around the house, we decided to feed a few of the sleeping remedies to my dog (a very unreliable way to settle a dispute), and to my surprise he was fast asleep within minutes. One good thing about taking these remedies is that no uncomfortable side-affects can occur, no matter how many you take.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U - James Radin video on homeopathy

The Wonders of Cells

We have come a long way since Robert Hooke built his own microscope and discovered what he called "cells". Nicolaus Hartsoecker, thought that tiny humans "homunculi" were found inside of sperm cells, and for some time most people believed this to be true. Then soon the cell theory slowly began to develop as technology advanced. Today, a light microscope is merely a common object amongst classrooms and laboratories, where as during Leuuwenhoek's time his technological discoveries on the microscope was all kept in secret. In the past few decades alone we have uncovered so much information about cell, it's hard to keep up with. It's easy to imagine the vast amount of knowledge we would have about the cells only a few decades from now. We don't give much thought to the cell in everyday life and its enormous impact on us as individuals. The human gene or any organism for the matter has information readily embedded into the cell, and from there it goes on to perform its functions making us who we are. It's amazing when you think about how the cell system works. It has no one but its neighboring cells telling it what to do, and yet most of these cells can perform its function efficiently.

Individually, we understand how the cell works. They have nuclei and organelles that help them function as cells. But when we put these cells together in their environment, we understand no more than two percent of what they do and how they behave. Cells evolve, just like organisms do. From the simple unicellular bacterias, to plants, to animals, cells have been evolving since the beginning to form these organisms. Because of this, surprises about the cells turn up all the time. Nitric oxide, a toxin and a common component of air pollution was found inside human cells during the mid-1990s. Scientists were surprised to find such a toxic substance in the human cells. They later discovered that the substance was helping the cell to carry out many of its necessary functions. Cells adapt well to the functions they have to carry out. Such as the red blood cell in that it contains hemoglobin to carry the oxygen around the body, the white blood cell have the ability to phagocytose foreign materials, the sperm cells have tails to help it swim, and the neurons contain axons to pass on messages. All this development makes its seem as though our cells live in a whole different world, they make up every little bit of who we are. There is nothing that our cells don't know about us.