Squid with Japanese radish

Squid is boiled with soy sauce, sake and so forth. It should be for not longer than 5 or 6 min. Or squid could become firm. In the same seasoning, Japanese radish with a bit of ginger is cooked for some 10 min. Then, both of materials are mixed on a dish. Very simple. We love it very much.

 

I could hear some friends in foreign countries claim they won't try such as squid. They won't know one of the good things in the world throughout their lives. Sorry for that.

 

 

Punishment won't solve the problem

I stayed up very late last night. I was watching a video clip which showed discussions at a committee in the congress held in the daytime yesterday. The Ministry of  Justice would enact a law to punish severer to those who give rise to traffic accidents. The authority told they would take the symptoms as the important thing, but not the diagnoses themselves. But it is related with the punishment by criminal law, so that the factors composing the crime should be clearly defined, that is, they would regard each illness as the factor.

A couple of witnesses, who represent certain academic societies related with this matter, have told clearly against the authority in this way.

There is no evidence that those with epilepsy or psychiatric illnesses cause more traffic accidents than the other normal population. Nevertheless, millions of people will be badly affected by this law.

The article that defines those with illnesses being excluded from application of this law actually requires that a ceratin driver is illness free. It contradicts itself.

There are already prejudice worsened against those with the illnesses in the society. It is clearly related with the move toward this law. If the psychiatric illnesses should be related with any traffic accident, the relationship is the same as that in the other kinds of illnesses.

It seems that the authority has hastened to enact this law by "the public opinion" . There have been a few serious traffic accident cases reported by the mass media. They attracted public attention because they had been caused by alcoholics or an epilepsy patient without medication. They should have listened to what the professional doctors would comment on that before they proposed the draft.

They should withdraw the draft and go on discussing how to prevent such accidents. Punishment won't solve the problem.

A drive up to the mountains

 

I have made a drive to a high land marsh north west of here. It is named Senjyogahara, which means a battole field in japanese. An old legend tells there have been battles among the gods in the mountains over there. It seems what the name came from. It belongs to a national park.

 

I used to drive up there a few times in the past. Years ago when I was driving to my office, I often looked up there and, leaving all the duties behind, I would go for driving over there. Of course, it has never come true. It was the chance for me to do that now. It was not, however, so exciting as I had imagined since I quit my work for now. The more duties I had those days, the more fascinated I felt by the scenery in the mountain. That may be the truth.

 

I used to come this area once a month for work. I stayed at a hospital for all day from Sunnday morning to Monday morning. My duty was to care for all the outpatients as well as the inpatients. It could be a real burden to a young pediatrician. But I didn't feel that way those days. The hospital was still there on the way to the mountain area. It used to be a private hospital and has become a municipal one for now. Early in Monday morning, I used to buy some bread at a store on the opposite side of the street and rushed to the dorm house in a med school where my wife and our elder son were waiting for me. The bakery was already closed there.

 

Travelling in woods this time in a year is called as "hunting for the colorful foliage" here in Japan. The fall has been deepened there. The colorful leaves have welcome me. Some of them have already fallen on the ground. I went up steep slopes to a lake near to the marsh.

 

 

 

There is a big lake named Chuzenjiko at almost 3000ft of altitude. It was quiet on the lake even though the traffic was still terrible around it. There were a number of souvenir shops at a shore. Being off kinda season right now, some of them were closed. In summer, there should be many people enjoying boating on this lake.

 

 

A famous hotel restaurant along the beach. I gave up taking lunch there since it was full of people. The bakery I used to buy bread on the way home from the work at the hospital belonged to the same hotel.

 

 

Finally, I arrived at Senjyogahara. It is a marsh born by the activity of a volcano stopping flow of a river. It is about 3500 ft in altitude and has 400 ha of land in it. It was covered by dead plants of low height. Again, very quiet. It was late fall there. But the breeze over the marsh was a bit warm.

 

 

There were a number of trees standing in the marsh. The marsh was surrounded by high mountains. A river was running in the center, which ended as a big fall on the south eastern corner of the marsh.

 

 

White birch trees were beautiful there. There were clusters of the other kind of trees as well. There were groups of pupils taking lunch under them. A peaceful scenery.

 

Having gone up a mountain on a winding road, I got through to village on the opposite side of the ridge. There were much less tourists. It was much more favorable. I forgot taking photos. When I asked a girl at a souvenir shop if it was always so quiet without many tourists, she answered there would be more people when it got late fall. Uttering that it has been already late enough, I bought some apples there for a souvenir to my wife. I would bring her there next time.

An outerrise type earthquake

Very early in the morning of Oct 26th, a rather big earth quake has occurred in the Pacific ocean off Fukushima. The magnitude was 7.1. The quake has waken me up with the Richter scale rated 4 here. I could not fall asleep for a while even after a long lasting quake, reminding me of the big earthquake, had gone. An alarm for tsunami was published by an authority then. It seemed there had been a small tsunami observed near to the center of the earthquake.

The news told it had been caused by a mechanism of the outerrise. The ocean plate was freed from the friction with the continental plate by the big earthquake 2 years ago, so that the former could be lacerated pretty easily with the force pulling it under the continental plate. It is not negligible that a big earthquake of this type would occur in the near future.

The problem with this type of eathquake is that it could cause tsunami. The Pacific ocean off Fukushima is believed to be a center of such an earthquake. If a big tsunami would hit the damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima, there could be a further serious damage on it. The main concern is on the used fuels pooled at the 4th reactor. It still has a enormous amount of used/not used fuels. The pool is high in the damaged building. It could be very vulnerable to such a tsunami or an earthquake.

At present, they are struggling with the contaminated water and the influx of underground water into the reactors. They have not taken any measure against further tsunami to the damaged structures and/or the cooling system. If any big tsunami destroys them, the contamination of radioactivity would spreads all over Kanto plain including the metropolis of Tokyo. It is a matter of possibility. No one knows if it could happen or not. But the government should prepare for such a disaster.  They should have learned that almost impossible thing could become possible from the disaster 2 years ago.

A ray of hope for ALS patients

Amyotrophic laterel sclerosis(ALS) is one of the most miserable disease. With the degeneration of the lower motor neuron, the patient with this illness should undergo gradual loss of motor functions while the peception and intellectual functions are preserved. The patient, fully alert and conscious, should go on dying for a few years.

 

In my med student days, the cause as well as the treatment were totally unknown. Only symptomatic treatments have been given to the patients. But the recent development in gene analysis revealed the ADAR2 is the defect in this illness. This paper shows they could convey ADAR2 to the neural tissue with a vector AAV9. 

 

It should be confirmed thaty this vector is not harmful to the body. Once it is confirmed safe, this research result could be a real epoch making. Really amazing.

 

I hope this will give the patients a real hope for cure very soon.

 

I am thrilled and pleased to see the medical science is developing in this way. The human beings should spend time, money and their intelligence in such a field, but not in developing weapons etc.

 

quote;

 

EMBO Mol Med. 2013 Sep 24. doi: 10.1002/emmm.201302935. [Epub ahead of print]

Rescue of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis phenotype in a mouse model by intravenous AAV9-ADAR2 delivery to motor neurons.

Yamashita T, Chai HL, Teramoto S, Tsuji S, Shimazaki K, Muramatsu SI, Kwak S.

Source

CREST, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan; Department of Neurology, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan; Center for Disease Biology and Integrative Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan.

Abstract

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the most common adult-onset motor neuron disease, and the lack of effective therapy results in inevitable death within a few years of onset. Failure of GluA2 RNA editing resulting from downregulation of the RNA-editing enzyme adenosine deaminase acting on RNA 2 (ADAR2) occurs in the majority of ALS cases and causes the death of motor neurons via a Ca²⁺ -permeable AMPA receptor-mediated mechanism. Here, we explored the possibility of gene therapy for ALS by upregulating ADAR2 in mouse motor neurons using an adeno-associated virus serotype 9 (AAV9) vector that provides gene delivery to a wide array of central neurons after peripheral administration. A single intravenous injection of AAV9-ADAR2 in conditional ADAR2 knockout mice (AR2), which comprise a mechanistic mouse model of sporadic ALS, caused expression of exogenous ADAR2 in the central neurons and effectively prevented progressive motor dysfunction. Notably, AAV9-ADAR2 rescued the motor neurons of AR2 mice from death by normalizing TDP-43 expression. This AAV9-mediated ADAR2 gene delivery may therefore enable the development of a gene therapy for ALS.
© 2013 The Authors. Published by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd on behalf of EMBO

A nest to come back

They say the higher bands are quite hot with the sun spot number rising record high in this cycle. I still love, however, 40m in our evening. This band will gradually open to the North America before sunset here. It might open to Eu and Africa through long path at the same time. I started radio on this band at this time in a day. It was the band of wonder those days. At present, it is still the band where I could nestle myself on.

This evening, 40m sounded very quiet. I had a couple of pleasant QSOs. One was with Steve K4VK in Florida. His barefoot with a dipole was not loud at all but was still quite readable on the quiet background. He is 93 years old and used to be in Yokosuka in 1950 when he served for the Navy there. We could not converse much about his good old days so much. But I still felt, through his keying!, he had had a good memory in Yokosuka those days. He sounded excited at the key. The keying itself often expresses what the sender feels. Those who won't operate CW would never appreciate that at all, I guess.

The other guy was Don N7EF in Washington. He always watchs the band and gives me a call when no one calls me for my CQ. He said he had been just watching great ragchews going on the band. He kindly asked me about my cataract problem, which he had known through watching my QSO with another guy. He said his wife had had a surgery for her cataract, which came out to be a success. Even though, as he said, the ophthalmologist was pretty old just before retirement, he did it perfectly for her. I answered to him, with hearty thanks for his concern about my problem, that medical services should be conservative. Progressive methods could be sometimes experimental. I would have a surgery in a conservative way within a year or so. He also mentioned that the drivers' licence renewal is pretty strict especially for the seniors over there. He was nervous at it but could renew it uneventfully. I always enjoy talking to him since he is always a real critic to the ham radio or people on the radio.

I have been blessed with many friends on 40m in this way. Unfortunately, most of them have gone inactive or silent keyed by now. But, I know, there are still a number of old guys with whom I could share the same kind of interest or of concern. Even though I sometimes feel disappointed at it, I would go on operating radio. Yes, on 40m around our sunset. It is my nest to come back.

A national secrecy protection law

A national secrecy protection law is going to be legislated by our congress very soon. Even though the lawyers association as well as the mass media have protested against it very hard, the present government would do that by any means.

They say it is to protect our nation's interest by protecting the informations relevant with the national security. But there are a number of serious problems in this draft.

1)The law could cover all aspects of the administrative offices and their behaviours if the head of each office determines any information on them as a secret. No limit.

2)They don't need to publish the protected informations in certain span of time. They could cover up any informations unfavorable to them "forever". This rule may bring rise to moral hazard to the administrative officials including the cabinet.

It is definitely against our right to know and check what is going on in the administration of the nation. I am strongly against this law.