Do you ever have nightmares about parasites growing and tunnelling in your body and then erupting through your skin? I've had a couple and I'm guessing they're fairly primal, because apparently Africa is still tormented by a horrible disease that's been traced as far back as the Pharaohs-the Guinea worm or Dracunculiasis. I guarantee this is going to give me nightmares tonight, so let me share the scientific pain. You drink water infested with tiny waterfleas. (Eww.) They are dissolved by your stomach acid, setting free thousands of little larvae of the Guinea worms. The larvae tunnel through your body, grow longer and mate. The males die, and the females migrate to your feet where they are now less like microscopic worms and more like two feet long strands of engorged spaghetti. The pregnant female incites a fiery burning immune reaction that drives you to seek fresh water to stick your feet in. Once splashed the female bursts through your skin and vomits her brood into the water, starting the wonderful cycle of life again. (CDC.)
Okay, this is pretty horrible right? In the early 1980s around 3 million people suffered through this. That's like everyone in the Bronx and Manhattan having fiery pregnant worms bursting out of their skin and vomiting larvae into the water. Just meditate on that for a minute. Got it?

Now, via the BBC, here's the good news--the numbers now are more like 25,000 annual victims. Slowly but surely efforts like giving people access to clean and filtered drinking water has whittled down the problem,and soon it may be eradicated. You can thank organizations like The Carter Center and WHO's Division of Neglected Tropical Diseases for addressing such nightmares. It's kind of sad that there is even such a thing as Neglected Tropical Diseases, but I'm glad someone is un-neglecting them. Next time you have a cringe about a parasitic horror story, consider dropping the Carter Center or WHO a tip in gratitude. Liya Kebede, WHO's Good Will Ambassador for maternal and child health, has started her Mother's Day 2007 fundraising drive. It will help put those nightmares to rest.

From Seed magazine, a visualization of the relationships between 800,000 published scientific papers---a snapshot of today's scientific enterprise. An exquisitely beautiful presentation of connection. They're giving away the posters if you pay for shipping and handling. Link from Brian.

Over at my work blog I just noted that today I got to experience a demo of Emotiv's Epoc headgear, which I had previewed before they unveiled it at the Game Developers Conference. It's basically a head set with EEG-type sensors that wirelessl transmits to very sophisticated software. The idea, among many, is that you can train it to understand when you are thinking about moving an object and use it to play games. I got to level II today and learned to "push" and "lift" a block.

From Snarkmarket: a quiz on accents. They will share results and answers once 333 people take it. Take it so I can find out what the answers are, sooner! It was fun! I wish I wrote my answers down; they don't note them in any way, so you might want to write down yours before you submit them.

The band Muse is slowly growing on me, partially from the radio and partially because their Knights of Cydonia video--one of the most totally ridiculous music videos I've ever seen--indicates a band that has inhaled or injected a little too much fantasticness.

Nonsense! No such thing!
Update: Rishi found a contest to get all 15 movie references in the video here and the director's cut is linked here.

Earlier I blogged about how several of ToastyKen's Project365 photos remind me of The Fountain. I've been thinking about The Fountain again in a spate of post-Oscar film contermplation; Rachel Weisz's champagne satin gown was consistent with the aesthetic of the film (and, presumably, direct Daren Aronofsky who is her partner.) Sometimes it is best to ponder movies and books little while after you have seen or read them, when the first thrill of spectacle and suspense has worn off and you see what really sticks in your brain. TK blogged about the Fountain here and here; I have to agree that it was amazing cinematography and deserving of at least an Oscar nod, though if any film I saw last year I was going to beat it, it would have been Pan's Labyrinth. In retrospect, though, The Fountain is one of the movies from last year I might watch a few more times, because it has significant value apart from the flow of the story. The story was not as tightly woven as Pan's Labyrinth, and so precisely I must say that I feel Pan's Labyrinth's cinematography was more perfectly focused and crafted to serve the story; but in The Fountain you sense how film--moving pictures accompanies by sound--is a real art unto itself; moving image as a kind of poetry. A few years ago I read this essay, this rant, really, by director Peter Greenway in Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, and while I disagreed with much of the extended reasoning the premise struck me as fundamentally true:

The Pillow Book was a film made in 1996 to throw another stone in the pond of my anxiety that we have not seen any cinema yet. We have only seen 105 years of illustrated text. And recorded theater. And theater is primarily a matter of text. In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text