Body Worlds

On Saturday I had the privilege of taking my girlfriend to see Gunther Von Hagens’ Body Worlds Exhibition – yep, that’s right we went on a date looking at real dead bodies! For those of you who don’t know, the Body Worlds Exhibition is a travelling exhibition, which has preserved donor bodies and organs using a technique called plastination, halting decay and leaving the bodies visible. It was an amazing experience and, although quite expensive, well worth a visit. Check it…

http://www.visitlondon.com/bodyworlds/

The tour began with embryos, foetuses and new borns, and progressed into old age, taking a look at individual aspects of the human body, there specific roles and qualities. Basically, the exhibition helped me recap my GCSE biology but the exhibition has promoted me to blog because you can’t help come away with a huge appreciation for how complex the human body is – even a 5 weeks in the womb. It’s literally amazing, and its right here in front of us all day and we completely take it for granted all the time!!

Being an engineer (well, nearly), I looked upon the human body as the ultimate in engineering masterpiece, with the best examples of materials, computing power, clever pumps and fluid flows, complex pulley systems, mechanical systems, control systems, damping and lubricating systems, protection systems, audio/visual systems and energy systems, and all of this confined into a relatively small and lightweight structure which has the ability to stand alone, be independent, make individual decisions, grow and reproduce itself over and over again but each time in unique and distinct ways.

I learnt loads and I’m half tempted to list off all these amazing statistics and facts I learnt about my own body, but the only thing I wrote down whilst I was there was this, written on one of the display cards, “The Brain is the most complex object in the known universe”.

And guess what, the universe is a freakin big place and you’ve just used your own personal brain to read what I’ve written with mine…

Browning on the little man

Just a quick April post…Today the 20 most influential leaders from around the world met and proposed plans worth £681 Billion to try and save the (western?) world’s economy. 4 years ago at the 31st G8 Summit progress towards ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (including such things as reducing extreme poverty and child mortality rates and fighting disease epidemics such as aids) was hindered because of budget procedures, that is funding.  In other words, it seems to me, that we are much more concerned with bailing out car manufacturers than bailing people out of unnecessary death.

(Admittedly I’m not an economist and I don’t know all about these things, and I’m sure saving the worlds economy will mean a lot of people don’t slip into lives of (relative) poverty and all that, but at the same time there still seems to be a unhealthy bias somewhere…)