Several posts have got involved in the blood alcohol debate (examples being Blood alcohol, Categories of drunk and Wobbling into the road after a night at the pub….). Should NZ reduce the blood alcohol limit for driving a motor vehicle from 80 mg alc/100 ml blood to 50? The UK still has 80 in blood as the legal limit and we in NZ take a lot of what we do in our justice system from theirs.

One thing that has not so far been mentioned is that the NZ breath alcohol limit for driving a motor vehicle is 400 ug alc/L breath. This is established using a blood:breath ratio in the region of 2100:1. In the UK, this ratio is 2300:1, which means that the legal breath limit is 350 ug/L breath (there are plenty of studies that deal with this issue such as Cobb, P.; Dabbs, M., 1985: Report on the performance of the Lion Intoximeter 3000 and the Camic Breath Analyser evidential breath alcohol measuring instruments during the period 16 April 1984 to 15 October 1984. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.   Jones, A., 1993: Disappearance rate of ethanol from the blood of human subjects: implications in forensic toxicology. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 38, 104-118, as well as various Home Office data.    The online version of Clarke’s Analysis of Drugs and Poisons will also be receiving an update from one of the world’s leading minds in this area but that will be next year so I can’t say too much more about it).

50 ug alc/L breath might not sound a lot but in a country like NZ that has a severe attitude problem when it comes to drink driving, it could make a difference.

Once again, alcohol-related stories are all over the media (Drunk driver haunted by night of shame; Joyce to review drink-driving loophole; ‘Humiliated’ barrister to plead guilty to drink-driving; Car death: ‘Any other kid, you’d be in jail’).  All of these cases, and most of the alcohol-related cases that are reported in the media, contain stories about people who were drunk and were driving motor vehicles – a catastrophic state of affairs at the best of times.

However, thought should also occasionally be given to those cases where the drivers are not over the alcohol driving limit but where people still die because they’re drunk.  I have worked on many road traffic cases where drunk pedestrians strayed into the path of an oncoming vehicle, were hit and killed or seriously injured.  The trauma of the event will never leave the sober driver but in many of these cases the ‘victim’ was too drunk to know what literally hit them.

Recent research in Forensic Science International Supplement Series demonstrates what we have all known for some time – that pedestrians belong to the group of road users with the highest mortality rate.  Basically, drunk pedestrians are classed as amongst those road users most at risk.  Work completed by Slovenian scientists shows that alcohol-positive pedestrians who died in road traffic incidents between 1999 and 2006 (n = 125) were predominantly younger men, who had a higher level of risk of a road accident, greater incidence of injuries and a shorter period of survival following a road accident – 92% of them died in the six hours after a road traffic incident, usually of head trauma [source: Prijon & Ermenc, 2009. Influence of alcohol intoxication of pedestrians on injuries in fatal road accidents. Forensic Science International Supplement Series, 1, pp. 33–34].

In one case I clearly remember, the pedestrian was a woman who was so drunk she ended up in the road in front of an oncoming motor vehicle.  My job in that case was to calculate her blood alcohol concentration at the time of the incident.  The unfortunate driver had been charged with death by careless driving but he said the pedestrian had just fallen into the road in front of him.  His lawyer was sensible enough to ask an alcohol expert (me) how drunk the pedestrian had been at the time of the incident: considerably, was the answer.  Enough to have significantly impaired her ability to co-ordinate her limbs (see Categories of “drunk”) – she probably literally stepped into the road in front of the car.

It just goes to show that even if people are responsible enough not to drive themselves home, they’re still a potential hazard.  And then there are the non-traffic incidents where people are so drunk they fall into or off things – but that’s a different story.

Douglas Adams is one of my favourite authors.  I didn’t know he was also one of English actor/writer/comedian Stephen Fry‘s best friends (and I also didn’t know that Mr Fry has been an avid Apple Mac techno-chap for over 20 years).

Douglas Adams (for those who may not somehow know) wrote the inordinately fabulous Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy in six parts (the most recent offering, And Another Thing…. being penned by Eoin Colfer using notes made by Douglas Adams before his untimely, sudden death in 2001 at the age of 49).

One of the other books Douglas Adams wrote was Last Chance To See, which was a non-fiction book about his travels with zoologist Mark Carwardine. From the Douglas Adams website is this description of Last Chance to See:

Some years ago Douglas Adams wrote The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a story about the world being unexpectedly demolished by hideous creatures from another planet. It was meant as a joke… Now, animal by animal, tree by tree, the world is being demolished around us [but] not by Vogons on other planets. Douglas decided it was time to think about the absurdities of life on Earth, and what we are doing to it. He teams up with zoologist and photographer Mark Carwardine, and together they set off around the world ….. in search of [some] of the rarest and most endangered animals on Earth.

The edition of Last Chance to See that I read back in the 1990s was published in 1990 and I understand from the Foreword in the Fry/Carwardine version that the original Adams/Carwardine version hasn’t been out of print since that first airing in the 1990s. That in itself gives you an idea of how interesting the book is, not only in terms of what it has to say but, possibly more importantly, in how it says it.

The premise of the first version of Last Chance to See was just that – a chance for these two people (a comedy science fiction writer and a zoologist) to roam the globe to try and find some of the world’s rarest creatures and to see how they were getting on and what efforts were being made to try to save them from extinction.  Amongst the creatures being sought was the New Zealand kakapo.  After 20 years, Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry undertook the same challenge to see what was left of the little that had been present 20 years earlier.  These two chaps, who didn’t know each other very well at all, plunged off around the world together, but wouldn’t see the Yanghtze River dolphin or the northern white rhino because they are now both officially extinct in the wild (some northern white rhino survive in zoos, but the Yanghtze River dolphin’s had it).

Now I’m sure many people will have watched at least one episode of the TV series that went with the book.  It’s the one where the kakapo tries to copulate with Mark Carwardine’s head, much to the amusement of Stephen Fry and, indeed, most of New Zealand including the Prime Minister who then announced that Sirocco the Kakapo was New Zealand’s newest spokesbird.  Now the fruity kakapo has his own Facebook page and the videoclip is available on YouTube: Shagged by a rare parrot – Last Chance to See.

So to the point of this blog: the book review.  The copy I have was printed in 2009 and is a hardback.  I have to admit to having not finished it yet but I think the biggest surprise for me was that it was not written by Stephen Fry.  He wrote the Foreword and Mark Carwardine wrote the rest of it.  I was a bit worried by this because the first version was written by Douglas Adams so I kind of assumed that the second round would also be written by a writer.  That just goes to show how little I knew about Mark Carwardine because he is clearly well used to writing and he does it very well.

I don’t intend going through the entire book because it is well-publicised and a simple Google search or click on the links I’ve added here will give you an outline.  What I always want to know about books is whether they held the reader’s interest sufficiently well that when they checked the time, two hours had gone by when it only felt like twenty minutes.  This book is one of those.  Even trying to dip into it I get sucked in and half an hour’s gone by just skipping to read about how Stephen Fry broke his leg falling off a boat on the first day of filming.

Quite often, books that accompany a TV series are written to make money and they’re just boring recounts of what happened each day and what was on each episode.  Thankfully, this book is well away from that, largely because they make it ‘real’ somehow.  It’s all in the writing and the reason for writing – the passion comes through.

Part of the reason I haven’t finished this book is because a close family member came to stay and hogged it.  She had this to say about it:

This is a well-told account that mentions not only the important ecological information but also those earthy things such as bottom trouble that are not mentioned in many travel books.

It’s a factual book (as was the first version) but not in a dry, two-dimensional way.  Many non-fiction books can be very dry by providing only facts about an area without adding personal colour.  Even when people describe a situation they can often take the colour from it just by trying too hard to describe what they’re seeing and not saying what they’re actually experiencing at the base level.  Facts in Last Chance to See are giving in small enough chunks to be digestible in between narrative about the personalities, the latter completing the 3-dimensional impression.  For example, Stephen Fry says to Mark Carwardine “Here’s that six quid I owe you” as he holds out a (not really) sick squid.

Although the loss of species from the Earth’s surface for whatever reason (though a lot of them because of the direct effects of humans) is not a joking matter, as with any other stressful or difficult situation many people find that humour is the best way to deal with it.  Personally, a bit of humour also helps me to absorb the terrifying reality of the death of animals through no particular fault of their own.

Overall, this book is depressing in its reality.  The thing that I came away with (even though I haven’t finished it yet) is that the only way to save so many other animals is a drastic reduction in the human population.  As that is not going to happen through our choice I think we have to face the fact that many species will be lost just because there are too many people on the planet, regardless of how much we try to do to prevent any further non-human species losses.  It’s not over yet though and what is being done is crucial.

If you’re going to absorb messages about species loss from a book, receiving those messages in an interesting and English-humour way makes it easier to bear.

Book details:
Last Chance to See: in the footsteps of Douglas Adams
Mark Carwardine with foreword by Stephen Fry
320 pp. Text and colour photographs.
HarperCollins, 2009
ISBN: 978 000 729072 7

I was watching Top Gear the other day and James May was driving the woman who was responsible for designing all of the British roadsigns back in the 1950s.  Practically all of the signs are still used today and, as a testament to how well they were designed, they haven’t dated.  The big thing about British road signs (apart from the ones showing place names) is that they don’t use words – very important when more and more drivers are coming in from Europe.  Anyway, the longevity of the signs got me thinking about how some symbols are still used today even though the item they represent has changed wildly since the symbol was first used.

The most obvious is the telephone. If you Google “telephone”, the image that turns up is something like this: 

Now I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had a phone like that since the 1970s but when I asked a 4 year old to draw a picture of a phone, she drew a stylised version of the standard curly wire phone. If you ask a person to draw a phone box, chances are it’ll be box-shaped and red (apart from the Dr Who fans) – they were decommissioned in England in the 1980s.

Test tubes is another one. I haven’t seen a traditional glass cylindrical test tube since I left school. The ones I use now are entirely different and there are so many types from which to choose. So why does CSI still have the old tubes in old tube racks?

(Just as an aside, do schools still use Bunsen burners?  I was showing a visiting Chinese student how to do some pollen processing and when I took the Bunsen burner out of the cupboard, turned on the gas and lit it she was stunned that a naked flame was allowed inside. And she’d never heard of nor seen a Bunsen burner before.)

Drawing a television is another interesting image – children seem to draw TVs that look like those with a tube and bunny-ear antennae but there aren’t too many of those around any more.

A key is often drawn as if it fits a mortice lock, but I can’t think of anything we have that has a mortice lock on it.A rocket usually looks like something from Joe 90. A boat looks like something the Owl and the Pussycat would sail away in. Perhaps these things are drawn the way they are because they are so distinctive.

On a slightly different tack, why do the car wheels seemingly swap sides on the Slippery Road sign?

While I’m at it, I know people will know the answer to this, but why is this the symbol for radioactivity or nuclear?

Why does this mean biohazard?

Just some thoughts for a Friday afternoon….

You’re printing an URGENT document and – @#$% – “toner empty“. Annoying (politely). So you hope you’ve got a new one, otherwise it’s a dash to the supplier, hoping they have one but if it’s 4.30pm then Murphy’s Law says that they haven’t. Eventually get a new cartridge, pop it in the printer, cast the old one aside, print your urgent document. Swear NEVER to be without a spare ever again (although you’re sure there was a spare one last time you looked). Move on.

What happens to all that grot in the old toner cartridge?  Because needing a new toner cartridge doesn’t mean that all the toner powder has been used up, just that the machine can’t get any more out of the cartridge. Well, what I like to think of as a brilliant man has discovered that it can be used as the core ingredient for fingerprint powder: Recycled waste toner powder to aid police investigations.  The different colours can help in recovery of prints from dark-coloured surfaces apparently.

Now I’m no fingerprint expert but I do know that the art of fingerprint enhancement has been honed and developed for decades now and they do use different shades of powder (such as amido black, aluminium powder, emerald, ruby, fluorescent variations, etc.).

I hope this recycling approach works and is adopted because, as any research scientist or forensic technician will tell you, there is an ENORMOUS amount of waste generated by the scientific community.  I, for one, feel guilty about the polymer pipettes that I use for less than a minute before chucking them in the bin, never mind the examination gloves I have to swap after handling each sample, the water churning off down the drain because I have to leave it running during parts of the processing procedure, the constant need for polymer evidence bags that need to be robust and therefore don’t biodegrade easily, the scene suits that have to be thrown away after being used…the list goes on and on and on.

Any method or approach to help us reduce that waste has got to be a plus in my book.  I would be interested to hear from any fingerprint technicians who get to use this powder that is being made from toner cartridges – is there any difference in quality, for example?

I’d also love to know if there is anyone out there who is working on ways to reduce waste in research science and if so, how I can reduce my waste.