Boston Globe’s Big Picture has posted some incredible, harrowing and heartbreaking photos from Japan in this past week. I admire the way photojournalists have been able to, in the wake of this tragedy, capture the fleeting, transient moments that make life and death.

Momoko Onodera prays at an evacuation center as she talks about her husband who died in the tsunami on March 18 in Kesennuma, Japan. A potential humanitarian crisis looms as nearly half a million people who have been displaced by the disaster continue to suffer a shortage of food and fuel as freezing weather conditions set in. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Today is the 142nd birthday of an amazing Canadian researcher and physician– Dr. Maude Abbott. It’s hard to sum up in a few words just how awesome this lady was. Briefly, she was orphaned as a child and was raised by her grandmother. After graduating high school, she joined one of the first groups of women to enroll and graduate from McGill. Although she was tremendously interested in pursuing medicine, she was not admitted to the McGill medical school which at the time was exclusive to men. So instead, she enrolled in Bishop’s where women were admitted, and later pursued her postgraduate studies in Europe.

When Abbott returned to Montreal, as I outline below, she was able to establish herself as an expert in congenital heart disease. For her work she was awarded an honourary medical degree from McGill and became a professor at the very institution that had some three decades earlier refused to consider her application on the basis of her gender. Being a woman researcher and physician, Abbott faced many challenges in a world where science and medicine were considered to be men’s territory. However, she overcame many of these barriers by the excellence in the quality of her work and her strong character, consequently paving the way for many more women to succeed.

The following is not an autobiographical sketch, but rather looks at a particular artifact of medicine that I had the pleasure of seeing at the McGill Medical Museum earlier this year and how it shaped Maude Abbott’s career.

The Holmes Heart
Rise of Pathological Anatomy in Canada

By Marzieh Ghiasi (Mar 2011)

athological anatomy, the study of altered or abnormal anatomy, is a field that in its early stages relied heavily on the collection and study of specimens. The ‘Holmes Heart’ is one of such specimens. Stored today at the McGill Medical Museum, it gave early modern physicians an understanding of the human body and its pathologies.
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… and take a joke way too seriously.

An article in Foreign Policy a couple of days ago made me chuckle and I thought I’d share. The article is about former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who was recently deposed from his position as the head of the Assembly of Experts of the Leadership in Iran.

The article’s title is “The Shark Stops Swimming”, and it isn’t supposed to be funny-funny. In fact it is a serious attempt at analyzing and anticipating the fall-out from this departure. It’s written by an Barbara Slavin, a US foreign policy expert who has in fact written a book on Iran.

I don’t know who came up with the ‘clever’ title, but the term shark is re-emphasized in the body of the article where the author says “Rafsanjani, 76, is no democrat. Nicknamed “the shark” for his shrewdness.”. I believe in coming up with title, the author or editor’s thought process went like this: Colloquially, in Iran they call this particular politician ‘kooseh’ which means shark in Persian… Shark is an aggressive creature and in North America, it is associated with shrewedness (for example in use of idioms such as ‘sharks of business’). Therefore the nickname must be a euphemism reflecting shark-like personal qualities. What a catchy title for our North American readers!

Now, I don’t dispute the shrewdness part given that Iranian politics, to the extent that I am aware of, can be described as shark-infested waters. And I don’t know the details of the event in discussion, or want to discuss them. I am simply amused by the fact that as far I am aware, the term ‘kooseh’ in Persian refers (1) the animal known as shark in English (2) someone who can’t grow facial hair. As far as I am aware, the colloquial use of the term in this case is a tongue-in-cheek nickname referring to the latter… certainly, a reflection of a personal ‘quality’ but not exactly what the article had in mind.

This isn’t a big deal… as the rest of the article appears to be more or less correct if not particularly informative in that it simply rehashed widely known facts and views. But, it did make me question the extent to which analysts that aren’t embedded in a culture can be relied on for the more subtle analysis of events and attitudes in a given culture.

Learning a general purpose non-web programming language has been on my “todo” list for a while, but it but it has fallen somewhere between “deep sea dive” and “get an eyeball tattoo” (Not for those with weak stomachs… or any kind of stomachs. And DO NOT google image it.). I’m comfortable with most of the web programming languages, though by no means as comfortable as I’d like to be. I’ve written a couple of small scripts for myself in PHP, but I’ve mostly spent time modifying larger scripts– not nearly as satisfying, or accomplished.

So this summer I’m going to be somewhat proactive and invest a little time in learning a non-web general purpose language. Given external time constraints, I don’t really want to touch either C or Java with a ten-foot pole, but after debating between Ruby and Python (and Perl I suppose), I’ve settled on Python. I thought it would be a good choice given my background in PHP, and it might help me brush up some of my skills. I’ve been using Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Python (diving + programming? double strike. hurr durr derp.) So far I really like the syntax, which I find is much more straightforward and lack of curly braces for blocks. We’ll see how this venture turns out… watch out, Python’s Benevolent Dictator For Life.