Funky football and fatal insomnia
Aug. 25th, 2007 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylI'm not much for football, but the Guardian's line up of idiosyncratic teams is rather wonderful. There's a team of goths from Whitby, a deaf team, a blind team, an RN team based on an aircraft carrier and so on. I was particularly taken with St Andrews philosophy department which fields two teams, one of moral philosophers and the other of logicians and metaphysicians. Stung by rude comments from the moralists — "What is logic anyway?" — the logicians struck back and won for the first time in years, amid speculation that moralists had been held back by the chain smoking existentialists on their team (does this explain why Camus used to play in goal?)
Another interesting, if grim, article features an extract from DT Max's book The Family That Couldn't Sleep. For two hundred years, middle-aged members of an Italian family have been afflicted by a horrific disease which causes chronic insomnia followed by madness and death, the causes of which had been variously attributed to pellagra, alcoholism and encephalitis. After some dedicated detective work and some equally clever science the problem was eventually been diagnosed as Fatal Familial Insomnia, a prion disease similar to CJD that attacks the thalamus. Both fascinating and horrific.
Another interesting, if grim, article features an extract from DT Max's book The Family That Couldn't Sleep. For two hundred years, middle-aged members of an Italian family have been afflicted by a horrific disease which causes chronic insomnia followed by madness and death, the causes of which had been variously attributed to pellagra, alcoholism and encephalitis. After some dedicated detective work and some equally clever science the problem was eventually been diagnosed as Fatal Familial Insomnia, a prion disease similar to CJD that attacks the thalamus. Both fascinating and horrific.
