On Sunday I went to the U2 concert in Boston with some friends. The event took place at the Gillette Stadium, located South of Boston and capable of hosting more than 68000 people. Most of the stadium was filled, and that, together with the poorly designed exit routes, made coming out of the concert a nightmare.
If I knew that before I would have thought twice about parking at the Stadium. I was kind of startled that for a stadium which costed $325 million they did not even build underground tunnels so that the crowd would not have to cross the road to get to the parking lot. I had to wait more than two hours in the parking lot before the line even started moving. I could not believe I had to pay $40 only for parking. This again, goes along the well practiced way to do business, once they get you to pay, there is no more incentive for a good service.
That said, there was a bright side in the story. Once out of the parking lot, I had in front of me a four lanes line of cars. The idea to be stuck there was as startling as the two hours waiting in the parking lot. While in line, I checked on the GPS program I bought for my phone for $35 and I noticed that there was a little road, S Walpole St, heading back south and joining the highway a couple of miles away. Moved by desperation and a sense of "if I don't try I will never know", I exited the line, and in less than five minutes I was driving 80 miles an hour on I-95, in the complete darkness of the night, since street lamps are not common in American highways. I was amazed, but the best part of it was when I-95 crossed the road where the line was. Around 2am I could see all the cars stuck on top of the flyover. The view was just beautiful.
As I would say in Italian, "un mondo di pecore!"
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Chromosome 17
I wished there was a book with fun facts about genetics. Actually, there might be. I have not even looked out of laziness. Nevertheless, this is still a good reason to talk about fun facts. Let me start from the beginning.
Since the completion of the human genome project, every once in while the Genome Reference Consortium updates what is called the human reference genome. Each one of us carries two sets of chromosomes, each made of about 3.2 billions nucleotides. Now, if you wanted to store that information, you could do so by writing down all the nucleotides. You probably know that most of the genome is the same across people, and it is mostly the same across great apes and humans. On average, one nucleotide out of 100 is different between a chimpanzee and a human being. So it is much more efficient to have a reference sequence and to store, for each one of us, the differences between our genome and a consensus reference sequence.
The consensus reference sequence was the goal of the human genome project and, even if it is mainly complete, it gets updated every now and then. In the last update, hg19, 9 regions have been marked as special, because they have what is called an alternate assembly. What happened is that, for different reasons, nine long sequences have diverged so much that they have irrevocably parted and cannot recombine with each other anymore. So, the reference genome takes into account the possibility, at this nine loci, for these alternative sequences.
One of these caught my interest today. It is a two million nucleotides long sequence on chromosome 17. It is thought that at some point, around two million years ago, an inversion event took place, that is, these two million base pairs got inverted in direction. This does not affect the functionality of the sequence, since the cells have no predilection for sequence direction. Although, it affects the ability of the sequence to recombine with the version with the inverted version. Among the genes in this sequence, the most famous is MAPT. It is known that mutations at this gene are responsible for some neurological disorders.
The interesting part of the story is that the inverted version of the sequence is present only in Europeans, with a prevalence between 20% and 30%. It is not clear why and some hypothesize that it might be the legacy of the Neanderthal people, who, before extinguishing, managed to interbreed with homo sapiens. That would explain why the two versions of the sequence are so different from each other and have a coalescence time, that is, an expected age from their most recent common ancestor, of about two million years.
Some of you might already understand why this is a touchy subject. It has all the ingredients for racial discrimination. The sequence is known to influence the brain, in some unknown way, and one version of it is present only among Europeans. I do not want to debate this aspect, although I expect that eventually scientist will perform the due experiments to unveil any possible hypothesis. In the meanwhile, be assured that the Neanderthal project will indeed unveil if the alternative sequence on chromosome 17 was contributed by Neanderthal people or not. Even if it is not, though, it will not rule out that it was instead contributed by home Erectus in Asia or some other unknown extinguished hominid for which no fossils are known.
In the meanwhile, I had to know, as a European, what do I have? It turns out that with 23andme you can check, if you look at the right SNP. In particular SNP rs1864325 is a predictor for the two sequences. A C at the SNP corresponds to the typical African haplotype, while a T at the SNP corresponds to the mysterious European haplotype. It turns out that I have a C and a T. So, whatever it means, I know that I have one of each sequences in my pair of chromosomes 17.
In a more romantic way, I can say to be one of those many million of Europeans within which the two sequences, after million of years of separation, have come together to shape me. Whatever that means. But I am confident I will not have to wait long to know.
Since the completion of the human genome project, every once in while the Genome Reference Consortium updates what is called the human reference genome. Each one of us carries two sets of chromosomes, each made of about 3.2 billions nucleotides. Now, if you wanted to store that information, you could do so by writing down all the nucleotides. You probably know that most of the genome is the same across people, and it is mostly the same across great apes and humans. On average, one nucleotide out of 100 is different between a chimpanzee and a human being. So it is much more efficient to have a reference sequence and to store, for each one of us, the differences between our genome and a consensus reference sequence.
The consensus reference sequence was the goal of the human genome project and, even if it is mainly complete, it gets updated every now and then. In the last update, hg19, 9 regions have been marked as special, because they have what is called an alternate assembly. What happened is that, for different reasons, nine long sequences have diverged so much that they have irrevocably parted and cannot recombine with each other anymore. So, the reference genome takes into account the possibility, at this nine loci, for these alternative sequences.
One of these caught my interest today. It is a two million nucleotides long sequence on chromosome 17. It is thought that at some point, around two million years ago, an inversion event took place, that is, these two million base pairs got inverted in direction. This does not affect the functionality of the sequence, since the cells have no predilection for sequence direction. Although, it affects the ability of the sequence to recombine with the version with the inverted version. Among the genes in this sequence, the most famous is MAPT. It is known that mutations at this gene are responsible for some neurological disorders.
The interesting part of the story is that the inverted version of the sequence is present only in Europeans, with a prevalence between 20% and 30%. It is not clear why and some hypothesize that it might be the legacy of the Neanderthal people, who, before extinguishing, managed to interbreed with homo sapiens. That would explain why the two versions of the sequence are so different from each other and have a coalescence time, that is, an expected age from their most recent common ancestor, of about two million years.
Some of you might already understand why this is a touchy subject. It has all the ingredients for racial discrimination. The sequence is known to influence the brain, in some unknown way, and one version of it is present only among Europeans. I do not want to debate this aspect, although I expect that eventually scientist will perform the due experiments to unveil any possible hypothesis. In the meanwhile, be assured that the Neanderthal project will indeed unveil if the alternative sequence on chromosome 17 was contributed by Neanderthal people or not. Even if it is not, though, it will not rule out that it was instead contributed by home Erectus in Asia or some other unknown extinguished hominid for which no fossils are known.
In the meanwhile, I had to know, as a European, what do I have? It turns out that with 23andme you can check, if you look at the right SNP. In particular SNP rs1864325 is a predictor for the two sequences. A C at the SNP corresponds to the typical African haplotype, while a T at the SNP corresponds to the mysterious European haplotype. It turns out that I have a C and a T. So, whatever it means, I know that I have one of each sequences in my pair of chromosomes 17.
In a more romantic way, I can say to be one of those many million of Europeans within which the two sequences, after million of years of separation, have come together to shape me. Whatever that means. But I am confident I will not have to wait long to know.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Coming back to Boston
I have finally moved, about one week ago, to my new place in Cambridge. I like it a lot, there is a big kitchen and a nice living room and I have half bathroom all for myself. Overall, it is quite a treat. There are two very sweet cats which periodically come to me asking to be scratched on the neck.
After spending the week in Montreal and Hanover, I drove back today at night, listening to radio Kiss 108. This was the first time I drove back to my new place. Driving through the city and parking right in front of my place was relaxing and stress free. Not even two months have gone by, but I think I have already adjusted.
After spending the week in Montreal and Hanover, I drove back today at night, listening to radio Kiss 108. This was the first time I drove back to my new place. Driving through the city and parking right in front of my place was relaxing and stress free. Not even two months have gone by, but I think I have already adjusted.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Collecting trash
Since I moved into Boston I started to see homeless people and beggars almost everywhere. Clearly this is the place to be in if you are desperate. Thanks god a situation I am far from, for now. But not so much to not persuade me to get interested on a couch I saw on the street.
Thursday is the day the trash gets collected at night in Cambridge. People put out their bins, their recycling boxes and the furniture they don't want anymore. Someone put out a nice couch and I could not help being attracted to it. The feel of shame was overwhelming. Who would ever go and pick up a couch abandoned on the street ready to be picked up by the trash master?
I have lived in my new home for about a month and I have left about a month in the same place. In September I will move to a nicer place which I already like a lot. People are friendly and clean there and the location is ideal to go to work by bus. But where I am now, people are dirty and careless about the house. The couch is broken and the house overall is left to rot. I cleaned the other day and I ended up thinking that the main reason the people living in this place sublet the house in the summer is that so they get some cleaning once a year. No kidding. Well, also, the subletters from last summer must have not done a god job.
So, I thought, what makes me really think that the couch in my house is worse than the one in the street? Pretty much nothing. That said, I went and picked the couch off the street with the help of a friend. This should make the living room bearable for the month of August, until I finally leave this place. I can just hope that now I will not start looking for food in the trash bin, with the excuse that it will be only until the end of August. Gulp!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Conference in Trieste
After returning to my homeland, I spent my first weekend in Trieste, attending a conference about genetic isolates. I had no expectations of any kind, but I had to present a poster and give a short talk, which is always a nice experience. It turned out I had an even better time than I expected, despite the fact that it rained the all time.
The second day I met Augustine Kong, t, he head statistician from deCODE, after he gave a very inspiring talk. The company deCODE is a research company based in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was founded in 1997 by Kari Stefansson, an Icelandic researcher working at Harvard at the time. Stefansson at the time wanted to study, through genetic and pedigree data of all people from Iceland, that is, about 320000 people, all the genetic causes of the diseases affecting the people in Iceland. More than ten years ago he had a big dream and you can still say, nowadays, that the Icelandic genetic diseases are the ones we know the most about compared to any other genetic disease around the world.
I have known about deCODE for about three years now, and I had read many papers from Kong, but I never met him before and I was expecting someone very secretive about his work since deCODE is, after all, a private company who raised money with the idea of selling part of the intellectual property developed to big pharmaceutical companies to make innovative drugs.
Kong gave an interesting talk, one of those talks that you can tell was already tried before in front of a different audience, maybe with some slight modifications. It did not take long to notice that he is the typical researcher very enthusiast about what he does and very eccentric. The part I liked the best was when he came down from the stage and he was given a microphone to answer a question. He kept the microphone all the time at the level of his waist while he was answering. After the talk I went to talk to him and I discovered this to be no easy feat. He is extremely loquacious, and if you ask him a question he would find his way out of the answer and keep talking about something else for about fifteen minutes. Although he mainly said very interesting things. Then, at the end of the day, I had the lucky chance, together with another Italian student, to sit at the table with him and after a couple of glasses of wine he started to share everything with us.
How do you decide to raise tens of million of dollars and fund a large company? Back in 1996 Kari Stefansson, the CEO of deCODE, applied for NIH grants to study genetic diseases in Iceland using STRs, the current technology for those kind of studies back in the day. His motivation was that Iceland is the perfect location for such a study since they kept perfect pedigree information up to the seventeenth century. Although his project was extremely ambitious and the grant was rejected. People with big egos do not take rejections that easily and he decided to take a different route by raising private money.
When he approached Augustine Kong, he asked him to join the scientific team on the soon to be found company and he told him that there were good chances he could have become a millionaire although the goal was to embrace this adventure for the sake of research. According to Kong, Stefansson is not the easiest person to deal with. Maybe you heard this before, but be prepared when you put yourself between a determined man and what he is after. For the project to work, special laws had to be set in Iceland to protect the privacy of the people who gave their DNA to the company. In exchange, Stefansson promised his country a business which was going to bring a lot of wealth and jobs to the country.
More than ten years later a lot has happened. The global economic recession hit Iceland worse than everywhere else in the world. All the private banks bankrupted and they were nationalized. The Icelandic currency lost more than half of its value on the market. I happen to know a young Icelandic girl who works as an au-pair in the United States and he considered staying longer in the States as a result. Even before that happened, deCODE went almost bankrupt itself and its market value is close to nothing. Kong told us that the company made it through the recession but it has more than 200 million dollars of debts and it is unclear if it will make it during the next three years. Although, since he is paid in United States dollars, he also told us that now life for him is way cheaper.
Kong did not seem to care much about this. He really seems to be driven by the research and the fame that comes from being able to do it in a place unique in the world for it. He seems like the typical workaholic person, around 50 years old, with a plethora of papers published in Nature Genetics and Science during the past ten years. According to him he would not mind retiring from this intense job in the next three years. While in Iceland though, he lost his American green card, as it happens if you don't spend enough time in the country, and he seemed a bit worried about it. In any case, even if the company disappears, they are thinking about applying for grants to keep the research team able to analyze the data that they have collected.
During the dinner I also had some interesting scientific discussions with Kong. My research related to his work, so it was quite a lucky chance. Kong is interested in recombination events, that is, those rare events that recombine homologous chromosomes during meiosis. Without those, eggs and sperm would not be generated correctly. Recombination allows DNA to be shuffled so that favorable mutations that arose in one individual can eventually spread to the whole population and combine with other favorable mutations from other individuals. This in turn, has allowed evolution to work at a much higher pace and allow the complexity of multicellular organisms and ultimately of human people.
Not much is known about statistics of recombination events in human people. First of all these events take place only during meiosis. Second, experiments to study them are very expensive, even if recently some people managed to study recombination events in sperm. The problem is that given a person with his child, it is not possible with current technology to study which meiosis took place in the parent to generate the child. Although, the genotype information that can be analyzed nowadays can be integrated across relatives to unveil the locations of the meiosis and the database created in Iceland is the perfect place to perform this integration.
Human recombination events are a very fascinating subject and most of their mysteries will be unraveled in the next coming years. Recombination, together with random mutation, is the magic underlying force which shapes DNA of species, that allows them to evolve and adapt on the long term. If you believe that there is an invisible force shaping the events of the universe by playing with dice, then recombination is one of its dice. It is known that it happens in very specific places of the DNA, although it seems that where these places are located in the chromosomes might be person dependent to a certain degree. Females have more than males, but there is high variability in how many a person has on average across different people. It is necessary for correct segregation of chromosomes and, as you grow older, you need to have more to yield a fully working egg, which could be an explanation of why some women fail to have children after a certain age. Basically if they already have few to begin with, then these would not be enough later in life.
Nothing is known about why some people have more and some people have less, but, since it is known that it is inheritable, there are likely genetic variations for it. Where are they? My assumption is that, if Kong did not tell us and he does not know yet, then nobody does, since you need a very large dataset of relatives to carry such a statistical study and deCODE is the only place in the world where you could do that. Maybe unveiling the biology of the process might help people having kids even later in life. Or maybe knowing who in advance can and who cannot might make people take different decisions in life. Although, these are just speculations.
Are you feeling the excitement? Well, I did. Five years from now what is now a mystery might be in textbooks. It is not the knowledge per se which gives the thrills, but the process of the discovery. Knowing to be the first one to get there is what gives the excitement. As Kong said, winning the competition is his main drive, not the fact that he is doing something good for humanity and I actually respect that. Because I am bit skeptical about what is good and bad for people and I believe that research should be done, when possible, just for fun.
The second day I met Augustine Kong, t, he head statistician from deCODE, after he gave a very inspiring talk. The company deCODE is a research company based in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was founded in 1997 by Kari Stefansson, an Icelandic researcher working at Harvard at the time. Stefansson at the time wanted to study, through genetic and pedigree data of all people from Iceland, that is, about 320000 people, all the genetic causes of the diseases affecting the people in Iceland. More than ten years ago he had a big dream and you can still say, nowadays, that the Icelandic genetic diseases are the ones we know the most about compared to any other genetic disease around the world.
I have known about deCODE for about three years now, and I had read many papers from Kong, but I never met him before and I was expecting someone very secretive about his work since deCODE is, after all, a private company who raised money with the idea of selling part of the intellectual property developed to big pharmaceutical companies to make innovative drugs.
Kong gave an interesting talk, one of those talks that you can tell was already tried before in front of a different audience, maybe with some slight modifications. It did not take long to notice that he is the typical researcher very enthusiast about what he does and very eccentric. The part I liked the best was when he came down from the stage and he was given a microphone to answer a question. He kept the microphone all the time at the level of his waist while he was answering. After the talk I went to talk to him and I discovered this to be no easy feat. He is extremely loquacious, and if you ask him a question he would find his way out of the answer and keep talking about something else for about fifteen minutes. Although he mainly said very interesting things. Then, at the end of the day, I had the lucky chance, together with another Italian student, to sit at the table with him and after a couple of glasses of wine he started to share everything with us.
How do you decide to raise tens of million of dollars and fund a large company? Back in 1996 Kari Stefansson, the CEO of deCODE, applied for NIH grants to study genetic diseases in Iceland using STRs, the current technology for those kind of studies back in the day. His motivation was that Iceland is the perfect location for such a study since they kept perfect pedigree information up to the seventeenth century. Although his project was extremely ambitious and the grant was rejected. People with big egos do not take rejections that easily and he decided to take a different route by raising private money.
When he approached Augustine Kong, he asked him to join the scientific team on the soon to be found company and he told him that there were good chances he could have become a millionaire although the goal was to embrace this adventure for the sake of research. According to Kong, Stefansson is not the easiest person to deal with. Maybe you heard this before, but be prepared when you put yourself between a determined man and what he is after. For the project to work, special laws had to be set in Iceland to protect the privacy of the people who gave their DNA to the company. In exchange, Stefansson promised his country a business which was going to bring a lot of wealth and jobs to the country.
More than ten years later a lot has happened. The global economic recession hit Iceland worse than everywhere else in the world. All the private banks bankrupted and they were nationalized. The Icelandic currency lost more than half of its value on the market. I happen to know a young Icelandic girl who works as an au-pair in the United States and he considered staying longer in the States as a result. Even before that happened, deCODE went almost bankrupt itself and its market value is close to nothing. Kong told us that the company made it through the recession but it has more than 200 million dollars of debts and it is unclear if it will make it during the next three years. Although, since he is paid in United States dollars, he also told us that now life for him is way cheaper.
Kong did not seem to care much about this. He really seems to be driven by the research and the fame that comes from being able to do it in a place unique in the world for it. He seems like the typical workaholic person, around 50 years old, with a plethora of papers published in Nature Genetics and Science during the past ten years. According to him he would not mind retiring from this intense job in the next three years. While in Iceland though, he lost his American green card, as it happens if you don't spend enough time in the country, and he seemed a bit worried about it. In any case, even if the company disappears, they are thinking about applying for grants to keep the research team able to analyze the data that they have collected.
During the dinner I also had some interesting scientific discussions with Kong. My research related to his work, so it was quite a lucky chance. Kong is interested in recombination events, that is, those rare events that recombine homologous chromosomes during meiosis. Without those, eggs and sperm would not be generated correctly. Recombination allows DNA to be shuffled so that favorable mutations that arose in one individual can eventually spread to the whole population and combine with other favorable mutations from other individuals. This in turn, has allowed evolution to work at a much higher pace and allow the complexity of multicellular organisms and ultimately of human people.
Not much is known about statistics of recombination events in human people. First of all these events take place only during meiosis. Second, experiments to study them are very expensive, even if recently some people managed to study recombination events in sperm. The problem is that given a person with his child, it is not possible with current technology to study which meiosis took place in the parent to generate the child. Although, the genotype information that can be analyzed nowadays can be integrated across relatives to unveil the locations of the meiosis and the database created in Iceland is the perfect place to perform this integration.
Human recombination events are a very fascinating subject and most of their mysteries will be unraveled in the next coming years. Recombination, together with random mutation, is the magic underlying force which shapes DNA of species, that allows them to evolve and adapt on the long term. If you believe that there is an invisible force shaping the events of the universe by playing with dice, then recombination is one of its dice. It is known that it happens in very specific places of the DNA, although it seems that where these places are located in the chromosomes might be person dependent to a certain degree. Females have more than males, but there is high variability in how many a person has on average across different people. It is necessary for correct segregation of chromosomes and, as you grow older, you need to have more to yield a fully working egg, which could be an explanation of why some women fail to have children after a certain age. Basically if they already have few to begin with, then these would not be enough later in life.
Nothing is known about why some people have more and some people have less, but, since it is known that it is inheritable, there are likely genetic variations for it. Where are they? My assumption is that, if Kong did not tell us and he does not know yet, then nobody does, since you need a very large dataset of relatives to carry such a statistical study and deCODE is the only place in the world where you could do that. Maybe unveiling the biology of the process might help people having kids even later in life. Or maybe knowing who in advance can and who cannot might make people take different decisions in life. Although, these are just speculations.
Are you feeling the excitement? Well, I did. Five years from now what is now a mystery might be in textbooks. It is not the knowledge per se which gives the thrills, but the process of the discovery. Knowing to be the first one to get there is what gives the excitement. As Kong said, winning the competition is his main drive, not the fact that he is doing something good for humanity and I actually respect that. Because I am bit skeptical about what is good and bad for people and I believe that research should be done, when possible, just for fun.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Goodbye books
I can start counting the days I have left at Dartmouth if I put together my fingers and my toes. This also means that I am about to move all of my belongings, the light ones and, alas, the heavy ones as well. This brings the blame on our best friends, the books.
Books are nice, but they are extremely heavy, especially when they come in large numbers. Furthermore, in five years at Dartmouth I collected a lot of books, some of which I probably should have never bought. Those that know me well might also know that I am not a fan of collecting and that holds true even for books, with some exceptions. Those books over which you really studied hard will always be a very good reference and you might not want to give them away.
Although there are a lot of books which you might have read once and you will probably never read again, for which it is usually just a good idea to borrow them from the library and return them, and there are a lot of books which you might just have not liked them at all. So well, a lot of books weigh more than half of my laptop. What is the best option for them? Thanks god, there are better options than throwing them away.
I finally decided to start selling them on Amazon. The process is amazingly fast and efficient. In a couple of hours I managed to post about thirty books. Now I don't know how many of these will get sold, but in the early afternoon I already sold my first one. Hopefully it is not just luck and tomorrow I will be celebrating again.
I just need to avoid being caught by the frenzy or I will start selling all the books I see around me. The fact, I believe, is that books, like tapes and cds, might eventually become something from the past. A lot of people will tell you the opposite but I think they are wrong. The technology is just not there yet, but, when it will, reading books on paper might feel ridiculous. Anyway, as long as people don't get that, it will be easy to sell. So take your chance now.
I hoped there was something similar to Amazon in Italy, my family has collected all sort of useless medias during the past three decades. When I go home I should start the frenzy again.
Human people have an irresistible instinct at collecting stuff. This probably goes back to when people used to live as hunter gatherers, in which case if you lose your woolly piece of clothes or the spear that your grandfather passed to you, then chances are that you are going to starve to death while freezing your ass. But be aware of what you collect. Cds and dvds will not last longer than thirty years, your electronic gadgets will soon be outdated and your books will eventually be yellow like the cover, if they are Springer books. My sole piece of advice is: if you don't use, you don't need it.
Carpe diem!
Books are nice, but they are extremely heavy, especially when they come in large numbers. Furthermore, in five years at Dartmouth I collected a lot of books, some of which I probably should have never bought. Those that know me well might also know that I am not a fan of collecting and that holds true even for books, with some exceptions. Those books over which you really studied hard will always be a very good reference and you might not want to give them away.
Although there are a lot of books which you might have read once and you will probably never read again, for which it is usually just a good idea to borrow them from the library and return them, and there are a lot of books which you might just have not liked them at all. So well, a lot of books weigh more than half of my laptop. What is the best option for them? Thanks god, there are better options than throwing them away.
I finally decided to start selling them on Amazon. The process is amazingly fast and efficient. In a couple of hours I managed to post about thirty books. Now I don't know how many of these will get sold, but in the early afternoon I already sold my first one. Hopefully it is not just luck and tomorrow I will be celebrating again.
I just need to avoid being caught by the frenzy or I will start selling all the books I see around me. The fact, I believe, is that books, like tapes and cds, might eventually become something from the past. A lot of people will tell you the opposite but I think they are wrong. The technology is just not there yet, but, when it will, reading books on paper might feel ridiculous. Anyway, as long as people don't get that, it will be easy to sell. So take your chance now.
I hoped there was something similar to Amazon in Italy, my family has collected all sort of useless medias during the past three decades. When I go home I should start the frenzy again.
Human people have an irresistible instinct at collecting stuff. This probably goes back to when people used to live as hunter gatherers, in which case if you lose your woolly piece of clothes or the spear that your grandfather passed to you, then chances are that you are going to starve to death while freezing your ass. But be aware of what you collect. Cds and dvds will not last longer than thirty years, your electronic gadgets will soon be outdated and your books will eventually be yellow like the cover, if they are Springer books. My sole piece of advice is: if you don't use, you don't need it.
Carpe diem!
Monday, May 25, 2009
Fantaboulous skydiving
Last weekend was probably, by many measures, the craziest weekend of my life. Together with a bunch of good friends I went to this small place in Maine for rafting and a few minutes of pure adrenaline by skydiving from a small plane.
Overall there was a lot of pain involved. By camping in the cold, being sleep deprived, getting completely wet in the river while the sun is hiding behind the clouds, and being repeatedly bitten in the face by flocks of mosquitoes so dense that they could cover the sun.
But the grand finale with the jumping from the plane made up for most of it. If I had to summarize the whole experience with one sentence I would definitely go for the following one: There is nothing to fear but fear itself. In fact, skydiving is a pretty safe activity. Definitely safer than rafting and by many order of magnitudes safer than riding a car with a 19 year old girl driving around 108 miles an hour, as it happened on the way to Maine.
But the really cool part about skydiving is facing your own irrational fears. I had never ridden a small plane, and yesterday I was in this little box, with no space for seats, with barely space for five people, about 3500 meters up in the air standing on a small metal plate inside a big vacuum just full of air.
You can think about it a lot, but being there will give a feeling that it is difficult to describe. Put that together with the fact that you don't know what it is going to feel like. You just know that it will feel like nothing you have experienced before.
That's exactly what I felt. As my tandem instructor put it, it was fantaboulous. I confess I was pretty tense, although not more than I would feel if I had to jump from a 20 meters cliff, or climb a 20 meters cliff. Apparently skydiving has little to do with being afraid of heights. To some extent, I would say it was even less scary because everything will keep telling you that it is safe. Truth is, there is a cap on how scary something is going to be if you rationally believe that it is safe. Emotionwise it will never equal the experience of meeting a hungry polar bear in the middle of an ice pak.
The thing I was scared the most was actually to be scared. Since I bought the video, I thought that I was going to remember everything that I did, so I better did it right. I concentrated a lot about how I was going to behave and maybe it turned out that doing so helped me concentrating on something other than my fears. I don't have the video yet, but I got a feeling that it is going to be pretty funny and kinf of stupid.
But what the hell, as soon as I get it I am going to put it on my phone, so that I will keep it with me all the time. I am so glad I did it. It was worth it every single cent.
Overall there was a lot of pain involved. By camping in the cold, being sleep deprived, getting completely wet in the river while the sun is hiding behind the clouds, and being repeatedly bitten in the face by flocks of mosquitoes so dense that they could cover the sun.
But the grand finale with the jumping from the plane made up for most of it. If I had to summarize the whole experience with one sentence I would definitely go for the following one: There is nothing to fear but fear itself. In fact, skydiving is a pretty safe activity. Definitely safer than rafting and by many order of magnitudes safer than riding a car with a 19 year old girl driving around 108 miles an hour, as it happened on the way to Maine.
But the really cool part about skydiving is facing your own irrational fears. I had never ridden a small plane, and yesterday I was in this little box, with no space for seats, with barely space for five people, about 3500 meters up in the air standing on a small metal plate inside a big vacuum just full of air.
You can think about it a lot, but being there will give a feeling that it is difficult to describe. Put that together with the fact that you don't know what it is going to feel like. You just know that it will feel like nothing you have experienced before.
That's exactly what I felt. As my tandem instructor put it, it was fantaboulous. I confess I was pretty tense, although not more than I would feel if I had to jump from a 20 meters cliff, or climb a 20 meters cliff. Apparently skydiving has little to do with being afraid of heights. To some extent, I would say it was even less scary because everything will keep telling you that it is safe. Truth is, there is a cap on how scary something is going to be if you rationally believe that it is safe. Emotionwise it will never equal the experience of meeting a hungry polar bear in the middle of an ice pak.
The thing I was scared the most was actually to be scared. Since I bought the video, I thought that I was going to remember everything that I did, so I better did it right. I concentrated a lot about how I was going to behave and maybe it turned out that doing so helped me concentrating on something other than my fears. I don't have the video yet, but I got a feeling that it is going to be pretty funny and kinf of stupid.
But what the hell, as soon as I get it I am going to put it on my phone, so that I will keep it with me all the time. I am so glad I did it. It was worth it every single cent.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)