Corporal Pollution

As I was walking past a classroom today, I overheard someone saying 'you know you have to have cholesterol....'. I suspect that they were trying to emphasize that things like cholesterol serve a purpose in the body, but that they can also cause problems. So you can't simply eliminate them from your diet and body and function. There are a lot of chemicals that are naturally found in the body that serve vital functions, but that can also cause disease. This made me think that people perhaps tend to think of these sorts of materials, not as a part of our biological systems, but more like [i]pollution[/i]. Pollution, like say in a toxic compound emited from a factory into the environment. Which would be the wrong way to think of these biological materials, they need to be there in the first place. You can perhaps fix most environmental problems by reducing or eliminating a pollutant, but you can't necessarily cure disease, fix your own internal biological environment, by doing the same.
And I think that the idea of pollution here certainly has precedent in the context of the body. Here pollution could be thought of in the hindu and jewish sense of caste and ritual pollution of the body. Maybe when most people think of modern issues, like high cholesterol, we aren't [i]really[/i] thinking of it in the rational/scientific/medical sense, but rather in that old ritual pollution sense.

Spring 09 Oceanography Classe ended

The student average was around a C, but of course that isn't too informative since the grades were curved (infact its really just a redundant statement). We had less lab work than previous times running the class, but that was to spend more time in class going over the course topics. Most students felt that they would've liked more labs. But, I tend to find that whatever work they are given they don't like and would rather do something else. I do think that next time I will include more about organisms in the ocean throughout the course, and maybe start on the final chapter or two (which focus on life in the ocean) rather than end with them. I definitely need to do more things throughout the course to capture and recapture their attention. This might mean doing pencil and paper lab /during/ the lecture. I also included a short talk on the recent blue whale sighting off of Long Island in this class, and they seemed really interested in that. Earlier we had viewed a video of an undersea volcanic eruption that was happening that week, and that also seemed to capture their interest. I will have to make sure to include more 'current events' type of things throughout the course next time (assuming I am selected to teach it in the fall)