Tikki Tikki Temboa
chain tale from Chinarecalled byD. L. Ashliman
Once upon a time in faraway China there lived two brothers, one named Sam, and one named Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako.
Now one day the two brothers were playing near the well in their garden when Sam fell into the well, and Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako ran to his mother, shouting, "Quick, Sam has fallen into the well. What shall we do?"
"What?" cried the mother, "Sam has fallen into the well? Run and tell father!"
Together they ran to the father and cried, "Quick, Sam has fallen into the well. What shall we do?"
"Sam has fallen into the well?" cried the father. "Run and tell the gardner!"
Then they all ran to the gardner and shouted, "Quick, Sam has fallen into the well. What shall we do?"
"Sam has fallen into the well?" cried the gardner, and then he quickly fetched a ladder and pulled the poor boy from the well, who was wet and cold and frightened, and ever so happy to still be alive.
Some time afterward the two brothers were again playing near the well, and this time Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako fell into the well, and Sam ran to his mother, shouting, "Quick, Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako has fallen into the well. What shall we do?"
"What?" cried the mother, "Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako has fallen into the well? Run and tell father!"Together they ran to the father and cried, "Quick, Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako has fallen into the well. What shall we do?""Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako has fallen into the well?" cried the father. "Run and tell the gardner!"Then they all ran to the gardner and shouted, "Quick, Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako has fallen into the well. What shall we do?"
"Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako has fallen into the well?" cried the gardner, and then he quickly fetched a ladder and pulled Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sarimbo Hari Kari Bushkie Perry Pem Do Hai Kai Pom Pom Nikki No Meeno Dom Barako from the well, but the poor boy had been in the water so long that he had drowned.And from that time forth, the Chinese have given their children short names.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Saturday, September 02, 2006
do you know
Surprisingly good medicine
VIDEO games are being treated as serious medicine in the battle against health woes ranging from obesity to cancer and dementia.Several hundred US game developers, medical workers and government policy makers will get together in Maryland this month at the Games for Health Project devoted to putting video games in the US medicine chest. "We think there is a huge potential for games to be used for good," said Richard Tate of HopeLab, the company that created the Re-Mission game for children being treated for cancer."It is just a matter of designing them thoughtfully and targeting what you want to achieve with the design."Re-Mission combined biological accuracy with animated heroine Roxxi, billed as "a gutsy, fully armed nanobot that seeks out and destroys cancer cells throughout the human body".Patients who played the game were more apt to take their medicine, undergo needed therapy and believe they could beat cancer, according to HopeLab, which is based in California.HopeLab had filled more than 30,000 orders for the game from 55 countries since launching Re-Mission in April, Tate said. The company is working on games to treat autism, depression, sickle cell anaemia and childhood obesity."We do think the model can be replicated," Tate said.HopeLab planned to share what it learnt researching and designing the game at the Health Games gathering at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.The third annual conference was informally referred to as "the exergames" in the spirit of meshing exercise and play.Among those expected to attend were representatives from the US National Institutes of Health and the Centres for Disease Control, organiser Ben Sawyer said.
"What is great there is that our conference is becoming a platform for federal and non-government agencies to meet and find ways to use this technology to address health and health care," Sawyer said."Part of our goal is to show that a technology as powerful as video games has a use far beyond entertainment, while on the other hand entertainment is part of a healthy lifestyle."A study is under way in public schools in the US state of West Virginia to determine whether playing the game Dance Dance Revolution made by Japan-based Konami Corporation helps children get fit.Known as Dancing Stage in Europe, DDR is a music video game played on a dance pad featuring four pressure-sensitive panels with arrows pointing up, down, left and right. To score points, players synchronise their steps to tunes by stepping on the appropriate arrows as symbols scroll along a video screen. Arcade-quality DDR games were made available in a portion of the schools in the state in recent months and should be in many more by the end of the year, said Emily Murphy, who was helping conduct the study."The students love it and the teachers love it," she said.Murphy said of the game: "It has taken on a life of its own. There is something about the game that draws you in."
While it was too early for clinical results, some students who had previously refused to even dress for gym class were eagerly hopping on DDR, Murphy said.
"That is a lot more than we were doing before," Murphy said, noting one overweight girl who took to DDR lost 14kg.
"It's the gaming culture. Kids have three or four different game consoles in their homes. If they are going to be playing video games they can at least be somewhat active."
Sawyer was excited by word of Nintendo's soon-to-be-released Wii gaming console with motion-sensing controllers that allow players to move as if really playing tennis or performing surgery.
Portions of the conference will be devoted to using the inside of human bodies as game settings and making trauma centre simulators on par with flight simulators used to train jet pilots, Sawyer said.
"Maybe we can create a simulation for the nurse, the doctor, the combat medic," Sawyer said.
"Any single cell, let alone any other facet of the body, is fascinating content for a video game."
Conference sessions will delve into using video games to keep ageing brains sharp and to train young people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorders to focus their minds.
"It almost sounds like the start of a bad joke: a college professor and a doctor walk into a bar, what happens," Sawyer said of the conference playfully.
"We hope more successes like Re-Mission and DDR."
"If we can pinpoint where the emerging medium works best, why and how, it can become another tool in the toolbox."
--------------
Teens' bodies out of sync
THERE is a reason why teenagers are bad tempered – research reveals it's because they are in a permanent state of jet lag.
While adults may blame them for staying up late, it is not their fault, New Scientist reports.
The journal says teenagers' body clocks are shifted forwards so they are more alert later in the day, and this could have a profound effect on their career prospects and health.
Although experts recommend that adolescents get at least nine hours' sleep a night, only one in five gets as much as that.
The body clock has two opposing mechanisms – one that promotes wakefulness and another that enhances sleepiness, which it fine tunes to keep us in sync with the external cycle of light and dark.
From the moment we wake up, a drive for sleep begins to build. This "sleep pressure" is kept in check by wakefulness chemicals, such as orexin and hypocretin, which are secreted in response to light cues received in brain cells.
At dusk these cells send signals to a gland in the base of the brain, causing it to secrete the hormone melatonin, which encourages sleepiness.
But in teenagers this changes in two ways, says Dr Mary Carskadon at the Brown Medical School in the US. Her research shows that the build-up of sleep pressure is slower in adolescents than in pre-teens.
"This makes it far easier for adolescents to stay up later and be alert later. At the same time there is also a delay of about an hour in the timing of when melatonin production begins. It starts at the onset of puberty."
----------------
A tiny ant has the fastest jaw in the animal kingdom
-- literally quicker than the blink of an eye.
The trap-jaw ant's scientific name may be ponderous, Odontomachus bauri, but this hunter can clamp its mandibles shut at 125 to 233km/h, says a report in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That makes it faster than the mantis shrimp, former record holder for fastest strike, according to researchers led by Sheila Patek, assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Even better, it can snap those jaws against the ground with such force it can propel itself backward out of danger.
The team used high-speed videos to record the strike of the ant and calculate its speed.
The average time for a strike was 0.13 milliseconds, about 2300 times faster than the blink of en eye.
Trap-jaw ants are found in Central and South America. Those used in the study came from Costa Rica.
VIDEO games are being treated as serious medicine in the battle against health woes ranging from obesity to cancer and dementia.Several hundred US game developers, medical workers and government policy makers will get together in Maryland this month at the Games for Health Project devoted to putting video games in the US medicine chest. "We think there is a huge potential for games to be used for good," said Richard Tate of HopeLab, the company that created the Re-Mission game for children being treated for cancer."It is just a matter of designing them thoughtfully and targeting what you want to achieve with the design."Re-Mission combined biological accuracy with animated heroine Roxxi, billed as "a gutsy, fully armed nanobot that seeks out and destroys cancer cells throughout the human body".Patients who played the game were more apt to take their medicine, undergo needed therapy and believe they could beat cancer, according to HopeLab, which is based in California.HopeLab had filled more than 30,000 orders for the game from 55 countries since launching Re-Mission in April, Tate said. The company is working on games to treat autism, depression, sickle cell anaemia and childhood obesity."We do think the model can be replicated," Tate said.HopeLab planned to share what it learnt researching and designing the game at the Health Games gathering at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.The third annual conference was informally referred to as "the exergames" in the spirit of meshing exercise and play.Among those expected to attend were representatives from the US National Institutes of Health and the Centres for Disease Control, organiser Ben Sawyer said.
"What is great there is that our conference is becoming a platform for federal and non-government agencies to meet and find ways to use this technology to address health and health care," Sawyer said."Part of our goal is to show that a technology as powerful as video games has a use far beyond entertainment, while on the other hand entertainment is part of a healthy lifestyle."A study is under way in public schools in the US state of West Virginia to determine whether playing the game Dance Dance Revolution made by Japan-based Konami Corporation helps children get fit.Known as Dancing Stage in Europe, DDR is a music video game played on a dance pad featuring four pressure-sensitive panels with arrows pointing up, down, left and right. To score points, players synchronise their steps to tunes by stepping on the appropriate arrows as symbols scroll along a video screen. Arcade-quality DDR games were made available in a portion of the schools in the state in recent months and should be in many more by the end of the year, said Emily Murphy, who was helping conduct the study."The students love it and the teachers love it," she said.Murphy said of the game: "It has taken on a life of its own. There is something about the game that draws you in."
While it was too early for clinical results, some students who had previously refused to even dress for gym class were eagerly hopping on DDR, Murphy said.
"That is a lot more than we were doing before," Murphy said, noting one overweight girl who took to DDR lost 14kg.
"It's the gaming culture. Kids have three or four different game consoles in their homes. If they are going to be playing video games they can at least be somewhat active."
Sawyer was excited by word of Nintendo's soon-to-be-released Wii gaming console with motion-sensing controllers that allow players to move as if really playing tennis or performing surgery.
Portions of the conference will be devoted to using the inside of human bodies as game settings and making trauma centre simulators on par with flight simulators used to train jet pilots, Sawyer said.
"Maybe we can create a simulation for the nurse, the doctor, the combat medic," Sawyer said.
"Any single cell, let alone any other facet of the body, is fascinating content for a video game."
Conference sessions will delve into using video games to keep ageing brains sharp and to train young people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorders to focus their minds.
"It almost sounds like the start of a bad joke: a college professor and a doctor walk into a bar, what happens," Sawyer said of the conference playfully.
"We hope more successes like Re-Mission and DDR."
"If we can pinpoint where the emerging medium works best, why and how, it can become another tool in the toolbox."
--------------
Teens' bodies out of sync
THERE is a reason why teenagers are bad tempered – research reveals it's because they are in a permanent state of jet lag.
While adults may blame them for staying up late, it is not their fault, New Scientist reports.
The journal says teenagers' body clocks are shifted forwards so they are more alert later in the day, and this could have a profound effect on their career prospects and health.
Although experts recommend that adolescents get at least nine hours' sleep a night, only one in five gets as much as that.
The body clock has two opposing mechanisms – one that promotes wakefulness and another that enhances sleepiness, which it fine tunes to keep us in sync with the external cycle of light and dark.
From the moment we wake up, a drive for sleep begins to build. This "sleep pressure" is kept in check by wakefulness chemicals, such as orexin and hypocretin, which are secreted in response to light cues received in brain cells.
At dusk these cells send signals to a gland in the base of the brain, causing it to secrete the hormone melatonin, which encourages sleepiness.
But in teenagers this changes in two ways, says Dr Mary Carskadon at the Brown Medical School in the US. Her research shows that the build-up of sleep pressure is slower in adolescents than in pre-teens.
"This makes it far easier for adolescents to stay up later and be alert later. At the same time there is also a delay of about an hour in the timing of when melatonin production begins. It starts at the onset of puberty."
----------------
A tiny ant has the fastest jaw in the animal kingdom
-- literally quicker than the blink of an eye.
The trap-jaw ant's scientific name may be ponderous, Odontomachus bauri, but this hunter can clamp its mandibles shut at 125 to 233km/h, says a report in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That makes it faster than the mantis shrimp, former record holder for fastest strike, according to researchers led by Sheila Patek, assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Even better, it can snap those jaws against the ground with such force it can propel itself backward out of danger.
The team used high-speed videos to record the strike of the ant and calculate its speed.
The average time for a strike was 0.13 milliseconds, about 2300 times faster than the blink of en eye.
Trap-jaw ants are found in Central and South America. Those used in the study came from Costa Rica.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
