The Weekly Dose - Episode 58

The Weekly Dose...

... the latest from Dr Karan

  Here is your weekly dose...  

Hi all!Here is your weekly dose of the Sunday Six! A few things I found interesting this week. If you enjoy this please feel free to forward this to friends. families and enemies alike!If you've enjoyed any of my content over the years, I know you will enjoy my new book "This Book May Save Your Life", available to pre-order here: My First Ever Book!If you enjoy interesting conversations and podcast, check out my brand new podcast "The Referral With Dr Karan"!**You'll find more in depth analysis of some of these subjects on my social platforms in the links just below, including Dr Karan Investigates! for deep dives into interesting topics on my YouTube channel.**

The Surgeon's Cemetery...

 “Every surgeon carries within themselves a small cemetery, where from time to time they go to pray - a place of bitterness and regret, where they must look for an explanation for their failures" - Rene Leriche, a 19th century French Vascular surgeon. In 10 years of doctor life and 6 years medical school I can vividly remember the patients I saw passing away. We do our best as healthcare workers and we always remember losses. They shape our personalities, our care and our learning. Patients teach us a great deal about living life and the human body and even in death, they bless us with life long lessons. I have an abnormally skewed relationship with life and death compared to non-hospital workers so if there’s one thing you ever take away from me…it’s this: strive to do the things you love and enjoy. Spend time with loved one, visit your parents, apply for the new job, get the dog you always wanted and enjoy the small moments while you experience them not retrospectively. 

Bringing Back The Dead With AI...

  I didn't intend to lead with two morose topics but here we are.The study of death is known thanatology, named after Thanatos, the personification of death in Ancient Greek Mythology.AI programs like ChatGPT can potentially create "thanabots" based on deceased loved ones' digital communications, allowing us to talk with the departed.... ChatGPT Programmer Jason Rohrer realised that he can create chatbots that mimi specific people by training ChatGPT examples of how they would communicate. He started off with Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock to good effect then launched launched a website called Project December, which allows customers to input data and information and make their own personalized chatbots, even ones based upon deceased friends and family. This concept of thanabots could become more prevalent in the coming years as more and more people with extensive digital records of texts, emails, and social media posts pass away. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all store heaps of our digital communications, so it’s conceivable that they all could create and sell thanabots in the coming years..particularly consider that communing with the dead has been a constant obsession across human cultures for thousands of years...there will likely be plenty of demand for such a thing. Could this provide some form of closure or catharsis for those grieving? Or could it instead intensify feelings of grief and despair. We are entering a fascinating, if not slightly bizarre new era where death may not be as total as it once was.   

Can You Smell Ants?...

Every now and then something catches my eye on social media that seems improbable....perhaps even impossible.There are some people out there on Tiktok that claim they can smell ants. It's not an insignificant number of people either... 

Fortunately, some entomologists have looked into this ant odour phenomenon.A 2015 study investigating the smell of the house ant (Tapinoma sessile), one of the most widespread ant species in North America, enlisted hundreds of participants and asked them to smell a box of T. sessile and fill out a survey on what they thought the ants smelled like.

The most common answer was blue cheese. Other commonly reported descriptions cited by the study were a chemical-like cleaning spray and rotting coconuts.

The researchers identified that the responsible chemicals were methyl ketones. It turns out both odorous house ants and blue cheese both have this chemical. When coconuts go rotten, they also grow a blue mold that produces methyl ketones.

But how can some people detect the scents but others can’t? 

This may be down to genetics..similar to the reason that some people can smell asparagus in their pee after eating it, and some can't. Those who can't smell "ant smell" may lack a certain gene for detecting the smell of formic acid. However, there’s not heaps of evidence for this and is largely an educated hypothesis. much evidence to back up that claim.Can you smell ants? If so, what is the smell?

What Is The Plural Of Octopus?...

If you said octopi..some might say you're wrong but the logic is 100% accurate.Octopus does come from Latin and the plural of a lot of words ending -US are changed in -I; alumnus to alumni, cactus to cacti etcHowever this is only true of Latin words of the second declension...octopuses are of the third declension, originally coming from ancient Greek. So the technically correct plural would be octopodes...However, it gets even tastier here...we don't typically use Greek suffixes in our plurals in English. For example we say gastropods not gastropodes. We use the English suffix so octopodes would turn into octopuses.At the end of the day, language is what you make it and what the majority subscribe to...if enough people use a specific word then that will be the word in use. For example the past tense of dig used to be digged but enough people started using the term Dug, that it ended up winning out as the standard form.A similar story happened with the word sister. The plural used to be sistren but enough people started using the "newer" plural sisters and it became the go to word.   

What You Should Watch...

"100 Streets" -Disney +Don't worry..this isn't a Disney movie.It's a movie that depicts the lives of three people in a small part of London, whose lives end up somewhat overlapping with heartache, loss and struggle. It's a very "London" movie, I don't know if that makes sense.I only tuned in because it had Idris Elba but it genuinely is a decent watch! 

What You Should Read...

East Of Eden - John SteinbeckAn unput-downable read… I remember being recommended this book years ago by a friend and I bought it then consigned it to the dusty shelves of my library. A boring Sunday later – the book was finished.It tells the story of a family throughout multiple generations… between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of World War I.The main central question of this book is: do good people come from good people? and do bad people come from bad people? It handles this question so beautifully and it may be one of the best books I've read in the last few years.  

As always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which of this weeks Sunday six is your favourite? Is there something you want more, or less of? I'm open to any suggestions so please let me know! Just send a  tweet to @drkaranrajan and use the hashtag #theweeklydose at the end so I can find it!

Have a wonderful week, all.

Much love,

Karan