Thankfully, while suffering some shortness of breath, a lot of sweating (partly down to running away from the attack site), and a touch of the shakes after receiving about a dozen such stings today, I didn’t collapse into anaphylactic shock. I had some oral antihistamine, took a couple of drags of salbutamol inhaler and dowsed the numerous stings with vinegar (contains acetic acid) in the vain hope of neutralising the basic histamine.

It’s only August, aren’t these little b*st*rds supposed to stay calm till the autumn.

Incidentally, you can visit a chemicalized version of this page to look up histamine and any other chemicals mentioned in the post.

Aconite has long been used in the traditional medicine of Asia (India, China). In Ayurveda the herb is used to increase pitta (fire, bile) dosha and to enhance penetration in small doses. Western medicine recognises its toxicity, although it was used until the middle of the 20th Century, as pharmaceutical alternatives to its active ingredients were found.

Poisoning can occur simply by picking the leaves without wearing gloves. The aconitine toxin is absorbed easily through the skin and the sap of just eleven picked leaves will cause cardiac symptoms for a couple of hours.

Aconitine is a potent neurotoxin that blocks tetrodotoxin-sensitive sodium channels. You can check out the Chemicalize.org information on this compound here. But, much more exciting is that you can view a framed version of this (or any) page using Chemicalize simply by prefixing the URL with “http://www.chemicalize.org/?q=” i.e.

http://www.chemicalize.org/?q=http://imagingstorm.co.uk/monkshood-devils-helmet-wolfsbane.html. Clicking on aconitine displays a pop-up box with the structure that links to the Chemicalize.page.

An oast, oast house or hop kiln is a building designed for kilning (drying) hops as part of the brewing process. They can be found in most hop-growing (and former hop-growing) areas and are often good examples of vernacular architecture. Many redundant oasts have been converted into houses. Oast from Latin for summer, heat.

sun dogs fire on the horizon
meteor rain stars across the night
this moment may be brief
but it can be so bright

Anyway, a sun dog (scientific name parhelion, meaning beside the sun is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots of light in the sky, often on a luminous ring or halo on either side of the sun. This snap I took while dining in our back garden with the kids at about 18h30 on June 30, 2010. It’s not nearly so dramatic as the image from Fargo in the Wikipedia entry on sun dogs, but it’s mine, so here it is:

Basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma usually appear on areas of the body exposed to UV light (from the sun or other sources). They are usually treated surgically. Sun exposure is definitely a risk factor for these two forms of skin cancer. In contrast, the picture is not at all clear cut when it comes to the third type of skin cancer, melanoma. This condition represents a mere 3% of all skin cancers but leads to three quarters of skin cancer deaths.

Science-based medicine recently reported that there is no good evidence to demonstrate that reducing sun exposure has an effect on melanoma risk. Indeed, the site points out something about which I wrote for New Scientist back in 1990 that chronic (i.e. long-term) sun exposure actually seems to have a protective effect. Moreover, there is now reasonable evidence that safe sun exposure reduces the risk of other types of cancer, although the jury is, inevitably still out with its hat and suncream on regarding that notion). It seems that a genetic predisposition to melanoma is a major factor in its emergence.

However, before we get complacent, there is strong evidence that links sun burn and intermittent sun exposure to melanoma. Similarly, tanning lamps may also show a dose-response relationship, says SBM: “Overall, the data points to an association between intentional sun exposure and melanoma, non-intentional sun exposure with squamous cell carcinoma, and basal cell carcinoma likely related to both.”

Sun exposure risk factor
Melanoma risk
Chronic exposure protection
Intermittent exposure risk
Dose response
Sunscreens and skin cancer

A new therapy for metastatic malignant melanoma is currently in trials and showing very promising results. The drug, now known as RO5185426 (previously PLX4032 and RG7204) is an inhibitor of the protein expressed by the B-RAF cancer-causing genetic mutation. This gene was found by spin-off research as part of the human genome project and represents one of the best known examples of the gradually emerging area of pharmacogenomics. About 80 patients have been in trials so far, and between 70 and 80% of them have seen tumour regression, often by about 50%, within weeks of entering the trial.

Until pharmacogenomics offered the possibility of targeted medicine based on a patient’s genetics, there was little point in developing specific drugs of this sort. However, there is a great deal of effort going into targeting the proteins made by specific mutations in this and other conditions.

The goldfinch breeds across Europe, North Africa, and western and central Asia, in open, partially wooded lowlands. It is resident in the milder west of its range, but migrates from colder regions. It will also make local movements, even in the west, to escape bad weather. It has been introduced to many areas of the world (Snow and Perrins 1998). More to the point, they’re just such a lovely site to see on a country walk. This specimen was one of a pair and sat calling to its mate in a nearby hawthorn tree (presumably nesting).

But, it was the tools aimed at images and photography that will be of most interest to Imaging Storm readers. First demo was from INRIA scientist Ivan Laptev who showed me how to search for similar images in a 10-million image database in a split second and no machine learning was involved. (Demo’d by Ivan Laptev of INRIA). They’re also working on a trained system that can identify particular actions in video clips (people drinking, sitting, walking etc).

The second tool, which is now available as version 2009 for some people who buy a new Windows7 machine is Autocollage, which creates, as the name suggests a collage from a collection of photos, great for scrapbooking, birthday celebrations, holiday letters and (apparently) funeral services! Demo’d by MS Cambridge’s Allison Sol, who mentioned the funereal interest and also lamented the fact that Microsoft cannot simply bundle all these useful tools into the Windows OS. If you’re using Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can grab a trial of AutoCollage 2008 via that extra tools section.

The third tool was Remove Background, which is now built into Office 2010 and does something that even Photoshop experts have struggled with over the years, which is to select an object of interest and remove the background and allow you to manipulate the object (changing colour, tone, shadowing etc) very quickly and pretty much automatically. They’re even working on an extension that will “get” whispy hair, something of a mythological tool for photo-artists (Demo’d by Carsten Rother). Alpha matting evaluation site shows some of the potential.

The tutor didn’t have a scheme of work and so each session would disintegrate into nothing more than each of us messing around with our own photos and trying to ask questions while the n00bs got all the attention and the tutor repeated himself over and over trying to get them up the learning curve.

It was occasionally fun, but I’d already learned some of the very basic stuff we covered myself at home, and the tutor seemed more keen on showing those of us with any kind of photography skills just how good his own glamour photography was rather than teaching us anything solid. I did learn from him that quality glass (lenses) are much more important than megapixels. He showed us A3 prints taken with a 3Mpx camera that were superb, crisp and clear, and with no pixellated jagged edges. You certainly don’t get magazine cover quality A3 prints even with a 12Mpx compact camera.

Anyway, there are lots of free Photoshop tutorials on the web these days and a few that cost a few dollars but package everything together aimed specifically at those wanting to eradicate red-eye, smooth over wrinkles. You can download a neat Photoshop tutorial package that claims to be able to teach you all the basics here for a whole lot less than the cost of my adult ed course. (Disclosure: Imaging Storm will receive a small percentage of the cost of this package, so you’d be supporting the site if you buy the course, I hope it’s as good as its creator claims).

Far more controversial than the arguments inspired by either Scallop or Sizewell is which of Aldeburgh’s two chippies serves the finest fish & chips. I have my opinion, but scientifically there can be no debate as they are both, as far as I know owned by the same people, using the same suppliers, and the same approach to the deep-fat frying of chipped potatoes and the filleted and battered flesh of white fish.

Nevertheless, we usually opt for the chippy at the Slaughden end of town, which also tends to get the longest queue and is just the right position along the shoreline to be beyond the summer no-dog-zone.