miércoles, 27 de agosto de 2014

A look into Serge Voronoff's physiological knowledge

Today I'm gonna voluntarily recommend a book to everybody at home. Health is an important topic, and we often find ourselves without any time to think and practice how to make our lives more healthy. Besides, there's little self-formation and self-education about medical theory and practice. In school, you learn basic biology, but you never learn how to make your own life better with that knowledge. Thus, I decided to present the Serge Voronoff''s book: "Testicular grafting from ape to man: Operative technique, physiological manifestations, histological evolutions, statistics", which was written in 1930. This beautiful piece of wisdom teaches you the basic surgery techniques you need to graft monkey testicle tissue onto your own testicles. If you don't have any (testicles), don't worry!, you always can ask a physician friend to surgically transplant you some balls.
The first time I read it was in autumn of 1994, I had some troubles understanding the technical jargon, but I surpassed it when I bought an English-Français dictionary.
The benefits of this procedure are many, even though it comes with some risks. Anyway, I think none of you gonna ever regret it; with the sole exception of the Castrati singers, who would probably lose their awesome singing powers (that said more technically: the causal powers of their non-testicular singing would not instantiate in the elastic waves we process as sound).
You can formalize this using the Russel and Whitehead quantifying logical language:
∀Castrato ∃ x / x<=>A;
si A(0,1) =1; x.


Or you just could look at these awesome stats, I'm not really sure what they mean, but if I have learnt something in College -and I'm not really saying that I had- it is that statistics always make your statements more trustworthy.

I hope my book recomendation can be useful to all of you. Good bye and than you for reading.

You cand find more information about logic quantifiers here:
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/basic-logic-quantifiers/

miércoles, 20 de agosto de 2014

Violently traveling


This weekend, I spontaneously wanted to write about traveling. The past few weeks I had been wondering where I would like to travel -if I'd ever like to travel to any place at all-. And after some meditation I came to the conclusion that the country I'd want to visit would be Honduras.

  Why Honduras? Actually, because it's the country with the longest  intentional homicide rate per year per 100,000 inhabitants (90.4). I could read a lot of sociological, criminological and contextualizing research and theoretical papers about it; but to truly comprehend the factors behind the numbers, i must go there. I must try to phenomenologically approach to violence, not only as a theoretical knowledge (from the grammatical third-person), but also experience it as first-person knowledge; and even practical Knowledge. In order to apprehend the phenomena with the less possible prejudices (a.k.a. theoretical categories, previous knowledge); and not only describing it, or statistically explaining it.

I would like to live there, to know what it's like to be an Hondureño, of course in the end I will never know, I come from a different social background, I have a different biography, and my beliefs are impossible to eradicate  in a clear and definite manner. But, it's the only way to understand (and not merely explain) the factors which configures the phenomena of violence. Quoting the Russian proverb:
"Ба́бушка гада́ла, на́двое сказа́ла."